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.

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.

DoD News: Secretary Rumsfeld’s Speech at the National Press Club

Saddam Hussein (sic), if he’s alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught.

Now here I was thinking that Saddam had been captured by US forces in a “spider hole” of a bunker some months back and was currently in custody awaiting trial. But what do I know, I’m just some chump who watches the TV news? Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, why, he’s the Secretary of Defense. A guy like that, he probably knows a few things that we don’t.

Or does he? The rest of the interview shows that Rumsfeld repeatedly confused Saddam Hussein with Bin Ladin. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the guy was on the verge of a breakdown. Knowing better though, I’ve got to wonder if isn’t deliberate.

About the only thing this administration has going for it right now is that most Americans think that there is a link between Iraq and 9/11. Funny that Rumsfeld, who has always struck me as very smooth and deliberate, would make so many of these mistakes just about the time the Kerry campaign finally starts calling out Bush and Cheeny for repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in their public statements.

via Slapnose.com

Today on Scripting news, Dave Winer has two posts that are very interesting if taken together.

The first gives his impression of the current state of the relationship (for want of a better word) between bloggers and the mainstream media in the wake of a 60 Minutes story on Bush’s record in the National Guard where supposedly new documents were brought to light that a huge range of bloggers have subsequently called into question with substantive critiques of the legitimacy of the documents.

The second notes that the update time on his site still reflects his long stay on the east coast and wonders whether he should update it to reflect pacific time now that he’s taken an apartment in Seattle for a few months. Taken on its own, it seems a trivial question.

I wonder though, if Dave was conscious of the connection between the two issues, the tension between old consolidated media and new, distributed media on one hand, and the time zone he chooses to file his stories.

The old consolidated media has a bi-coastal bias, with a particular focus on NYC and DC on the east coast, and LA on the west. To some, there is something sinister about this bias, and not without reason, but the underlying causes are rather mundane. It is natural for people, even professional journalists, to have some bias towards issues close to home and because the media has consolidated in NYC and LA due to a variety of forces, and in DC because its the center of all three branches of government, home for most of the media is confined to a few cities on the two coasts.

When it comes to national news though, that bias leans east. The countries unoficial “paper of record” the New York Times, is on the east coast, the TV news organizations are headquartered in NYC. Even NPR, the mainstream alternative news source comes out of DC.

Bloggers aren’t subject to the same dynamics that caused centralization in those old east coast cities, and so their is the opportunity for blogging to bring a broader perspective.

So, my answer Dave’s question. He should update his blog to show that he is “filing” his posts from the west coast and when he’s pickign what city to make an extended visit to next, he might want to consider looking for a way to file from the mountain or central time zones. Salt Lake City, perhaps? Maybe St Louis, or New Orleans? All have interesting historical significance in the building of the contry. St Louis served as the gateway for the settlers that ended up flowing into the west. SLC developed as an important provisioning point for those many settlers as they headed further west to California, Oregon and Washington, and as they spread throughout the arrid inland of the western reach of the country. New Orleans is interesting for being one of our oldest cities which grew from a different cultural tradition from the protestant northeast.

I’ve just downloaded and installed Grouper, the first P2P app I know of in a category i’m going to dub F2F.

What makes grouper an F2F app is that its intended to let small groups (like friends or families, hence the F) share files in a peer to peer fashion.

I’m waiting for my brother to install it so I can see how easy it is to use and how well it works.

I’m certainly enthusiastic about the category. I’ve been looking for an app with similar functionality without much luck.

The closest I’ve come is Groove. Groove looks pretty cool, but its targeted at business users and priced to match. They do have a pared down file-sharing edition for $69 which would do the job, but even at that price, it seems a little much to expect friends and family to spend.

There is an open source project called Mnet that can do similar things, but I haven’t tried it out yet. (I seem to recall finding related software when I found Mnet, but I’m now at a loss for what it was.)

Back to grouper though. I can already tell it’s not going to work for me. It’s built on .Net, which suggests its going to stay windows-only for quite some time. Too many of the people I’d like to create a private file-sharing network with are Macintosh only.

Interestingly, this may actually throttle Grouper’s early growth, desipite the fact that an overwhelming majority of users are on Windows. The reasons are summarized by a guy recently hired as an advisor to Grouper. The upshot is, Mac’s have long had disporportionate share among “influencers” and creative types, which is part of the reason there are so many Macs in movies and is probably why the laptop featured in the header graphic on Groove’s site is a Mac, even though Groove doesn’t run on macs. There are a variety of reasons for this, one of them being that Apple has deliberately targeted these people.
In any case, people are less likely to write enthusiastically about things they can’t experience for themselves, so, if it doesn’t work on Mac, you can kiss a lot of free press goodbye (or so the theory goes).

The other thing about Grouper is that it doesn’t let you download MP3s. You can only stream them. This is going to hinder sharing songs with my brother.

Looks like my brother got the invite and downloaded the app without hassle, I see he’s streaming one of my audio files.

More impressions as I use the app.

iPieters Blog – Home of iPodder for Windows
Continuing on the iPod theme…

iPodder is a small application which will help you automatically yank audio files mentioned or enclosed in RSS feeds and jam them onto your iPod.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I like the idea.