Monthly Archives: September 2004

F’ed in the A

I’m looking at one of my paystubs. I’ve got my 401K contribution maxed out, and yet, every month I’m putting slightly more into paying for someone elses Medicare and Social Security than I am into my own retirement. I’m all for the social safety net, but lets face it, that is messed up.

Its just going to get worse too, because right now, that federal government is spending most of our social security contributions on other programs, like failing to reconstruct Iraq, because there is currently a surplus. In 10-15 years though, as more of our aging population starts to retire, that surplus is going to become a deficit, and they are going to have to jack up tax revenues.

It’s complete bullshit.

Wired News: Attack of the Radio Clones
This is interesting. Microsoft is basically cloning the playlists of 978 radio stations and then offering streams of the music from those playlists under the names of each of the cloned stations for $30 year.

1. Given consolidation in the media industry, I wonder how different many of those streams are from eachother.

2. Appearantly, despite having less talk and more music, the copy’s are in some ways worse than the originals, repeating popular songs and artists even more often than the already repetitive commercial stations they are copying from.

New Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 Release Notes
There is also a new version of Thunderbird. Again, I reccomend it.

My favorite feature in the new version is that I can set up a number of e-mail addresses and choose which one I use for outgoing messages. I love this feature because I have a few e-mail addresses I use. I have one I give out to people I know, and then others that I give out to various entities who I worry might end up turning a torrent of spam my direction (if they do, I just kill the address). All of it gets delivered to my main e-mail box. It works well enough, but there have been plenty of times I wanted an easy way to send out a mail using one of my secondary addresses.

I tried the RSS feature and it doesn’t seem to work. Putting in a url like http://www.geekfun.com gives me an error that the site can’t be found. If I remove http:// from the front of the URL, rendering it something other than a URL, I get the message that the feed is invalid. If I add the name of the feed XML file, I get the same error. Not sure what is going on.

One thing is for sure, there is no connection to the RSS button in Firebird, which is silly. I should be able to click the RSS button in Firebird and have Thunderbird subscribe to the feed, instead of creating a “dynamic bookmark.”

On the upside, they claim full support for migrating from a variety of mail clients, including Mozilla, which is good because that’s just what I’m going to have to do for someone. I’ve been avoiding it because it was a semi-tedious manual process before, and I’m lazy.

I’ve already found some quality issues. Using the search box to find a term in the body of messages in my inbox reliably crashes the app. Also, the new searchbox and view filter, which appear above the list of e-mail messages with a bunch of empty space between them just looks stupid.

Anyway, enough of this rambling. Download the new Thunderbird and see for yourself.

New Firefox is A-Ok (so far)

Mozilla Firefox Preview Release Release Notes
I just installed the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and so far, things are looking pretty good. I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browswer for about 8-9 months, I think, and before that, I was using Mozilla.

I’d reccommend Firefox as an Internet Explorer replacement to just about everyone. Its fast, its compatable with most every site and has fewer big security holes.

Best of all, it has tabbed browsing, which allows you to open multiple pages in a single browser window and switch between them by clicking on tabs near the top. I find this very handy while working on a project, because I can have multiple pages related to the project grouped together and easily accessible. You can also bookmark groups of tabs which comes in handy if you’ve got a bunch of pages open and you need to restart your computer or something.

Now to complaing about what it doesn’t do;

Firefox and Thunderbird grew out of the original Mozilla project. The idea was to split out the features of Mozilla, which combined a browser, an e-mail client, a chat client and a web page editor, ditch the unnecessary stuff that most people will never use, and release a lightweight web browser (Firefox) and e-mail client (Thunderbird) that are as good at their core tasks as they can possibly be.

For the most part, they’ve done a great job, but along the way, I think they got rid of a few things they should have kept. For example, you used to be able to block and unblock cookies for specific sites from a menu. Now you have to dig into a preference box, find the site you are visiting in a long list, unblock the entry, and then follow an unintuitive stream of clicks to get rid of all the dialogs and back to the main browser window. This should be much easier, and with the full version Mozilla it was and is. For the most part though, I agree with their choices on what to discard.

Now, getting back to the new version. The new findbar, which appears at the bottom of the screen, is cool for searching within web pages, much easier to use than the old popup dialog that has been with us since Netcape 1.0 and always seems to be concealing the word you are looking for. In addition to finding each instance of the word you typed, it will highlight every instance of the word all at once. Its rather uncool though that it doesn’t work directly with the websearch feature. If I use the searchbox at the top of the screen to search for something using google and then want to find the term in a page I’ve pulled up, I have to enter it again in the find bar at the bottom of the page. This is dumb, especially when the google toolbar for IE has integrated these related functions into a single UI for years now.

The bookmark manager is better with the addition of a folder only view in a sidepane. I still use bookmarks a little, and now its easier to reorganize folders and sort bookmarks into them. It would be even cooler though if they would index all the pages I’ve browsed and let me do searches against the index so I can find stuff I might have saw two weeks ago but didn’t see a need for until now.

The RSS feature is kind of cool, it detects the availability of feeds on most sites and lets you create a special bookmark by clicking an RSS button that lights up in the status bar. The bookmark appears as a folder in the bookmark list with each article in the feed appearing as a link within the bookmark. This isn’t very cool for keeping up with People’s blogs. It is a very cool way to share cool bookmarks with people via linkblogs.