I’ve been blogging a bit lately about how we have this unneeded fascination with the size of our technology devices. I’ve argued that for my personal preference having the smallest version of something doesn’t really matter to me, in my daily work, portable is more helpful than completely mobile.

I’m going to contradict myself a bit now with that argument. When it comes to screen real-estate, I want an effective use of space. This argument may be less of a rant on size though and more of a rant on flexibility and personal preference.
This was recently made clear to me as …read more

I upgraded my Firefox installation to the latest version, which is 3.5 if you’re counting. I got the warning saying that some of my add-ons/extensions wouldn’t work with the upgrade. I thought I’d take the chance it wasn’t any of them I was really addicted to and proceeded with the install.

The four extensions that were dead with the upgrade were the following:

coComment
Google Gears
Google Notebook
New Tab to Window

The tab function was okay to lose as moving tabs around was a specific feature added in the new version of Firefox 3.5. coComment I enjoyed using, but figured I could do without it …read more

After speaking with a friend of mine and seeing him use Chrome, I decided to give it another try. The reason I stopped using it before is because I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t work with my Google toolbar and import all my favorites to be used.

Combine the lack of Google Toolbar support, along with missing a number of my Firefox extensions I’ve become dependent on and I just couldn’t make the full switch.
My friend said he felt the same way, but forced himself to use it for awhile and see if he could be productive without the extensions. He decided …read more

I spend lots of time in front of my computer and that time expands from beginning of my work day to the majority of my free and personal time between family responsibilities and tasks. I love breakfast but I rarely ever sit down, eat breakfast and read the paper. That’s so old school right? I do somewhat of the equivalent though with my browser at every startup.

I have a collection of web pages that open in tabs automatically when I start my browser each session. This gives me a variety of launch tasks to take advantage of as I …read more

After downloading and installing Internet Explorer 8 onto the computers of various members of my family, I’ve now downloaded and installed it on my own machine. There’s not a whole lot that you’ll notice that’s different initially. I believe I have noticed that pages do seem to be loading a bit faster in IE8 than previously in IE7.

I’ve had to use the compatibility feature on a couple of sites, ones that I’ve developed for clients, so there’s so more work for me to take care of and make sure those are up to par.
I’m still using Firefox as my browser …read more

We all know that we must log off all our accounts before leaving a cybercafé. But is it necessary on our home PCs?
Turns out, you are better off logging out all accounts even at home.
I recently read somewhere that the Internet Explorer 8 is getting ready to protect users from clickjacking attacks. A little digging, and I found a lot of literature on this subtle attack called CSRF that is being dubbed “the sleeping giant” of web vulnerabilities.
Cross-site Request Forgery
Suppose Alice closed her bank page without logging out and that the session is still alive. Now she opens an apparently …read more

I’ve realized that my last Tech Channel Roundup was nearly a month ago and I’m guilty of it. So, bear with me as I overload you with a number of interesting links that I found in some of the sister blogs.
Milo discovered a product especially useful for enterprises of all sizes called Nightwatchman, a good news that Microsoft didn’t lay off anybody in the Vista team. I knew that they didn’t touch the Silverlight team, but frankly I’m surprised about this because Vista hasn’t been very profitable to Microsoft. Or has it? One bad news is the Windows 7 minimum …read more

Microsoft released its first release candidate for the Internet Explorer 8 this Monday. You may have received a notification had you installed IE8 Beta 2 on your PC. Others can download it from the official IE8 Beta page if interested. While this version is not the final release, a release candidate is considered to be a feature-complete version with a potential to be the final release unless any critical bugs are identified.
On Windows XP, the installation needs two reboots – one after uninstalling IE8 Beta 2 and another after installing IE8 RC1. On Windows Vista, a single reboot after the …read more

Various news pieces centred around the recent Internet Explorer security threat and its subsequent patch release.

We are still more than ten days from the new year, but a majority of the world has already started retrospecting the last twelve months and forecasting the next twelve.
Jayvee inspects the culture of FAIL on the Internet and finds that video advertising is going to decline. Actually, the rate of growth of online advertising has reached a saturation point even though online advertising itself is continuing to rise.
In these tough times, when the economy has been slowing down, Clair suggests that choosing Linux and open source software has become more necessary. For those who are already in that path, there …read more