Ian Winter

Been using FF3 now and all seems to be fine and dandy. It's got some nice little additions and new features in which in my mind make it much better than IE.

Some of the more comedy items you may or may not have seen.

Type in the address bar "about:robots" to be find our some information about robots visiting us in goodwill and "about:config" to to be warned "Here be dragons!" and confirmation buttons of "I'll be careful, I promise!".

It's comedy touches like that which just make it good. Though, I could just be sad or geeky. Ah well :)

After much speculation and comparison to the VHS Betamax wars of old a winner has emerged in the High Def. movie market. Toshiba have officially announced (via) that they are no longer going to produce HD DVD's. Considering that at least 5 of the major studios have gone with the Sony backed Blueray it's hardly surprising. Hopefully this will mean that consuming units start coming down in price.

Noticed this a few places now including the Netscape Blog and I'm not surprised that Netscape has announced development will no longer continue on the Netscape browser. To be honest I'm surprised it's taken this long to EOL it.

If you haven't seen it yet Google have added coloured labels to Gmail. It's a small thing, but, very cool.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html

Logged into to Gmail this morning, as you do, to be greeted by a nice big red message flash at the top of my window:

Firebug is known to make Google Mail slow unless it is configured correctly. Fix this Hide

Clicking on the "Fix this" link takes you to a support page detailing how to make some changes aimed to improve performance.

I have to say I've not really noticed any performance issues and I have had Firebug running for some time!

[Edit]

Interestingly I've just disabled Firebug on the mail.google.com domain and reloaded my inbox and it's noticeably quicker. When I click on a conversation it loads instantly whereas with Firebug on I used to get a "loading" delay. Based on what I know Firebug does and how Gmail works it's not surprising but, it's interesting that Google are telling user's to disable it.

Having rebuilt my PC I downloaded and installed the Sony Ericsson update service. I'd installed Flash in Firefox but not in IE. Turns out if you don't install it via IE as well you're going to get a "Incompatible Macromedia Version" error. Damn IE.

Now for a program that deals with calculations this is pretty, well, rubbish!

In Excel 2007 when you multiple 77.1*850 you'd expect 65535, but, due to Microsoft's genius calculating ability the result of =SUM(77.1*850) in a cell is 100000.

Here's the official spiel from the MSDN Blogs site.

Hmm.

So Zimki announced themselves at FOWA 07 earlier in the year and their pre shaved yaks drew much attention however it seems they are no more!

We regret to inform you that the Zimki service is to be withdrawn and therefore will no longer be available from 24 December 2007. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

One of the first things that will be disabled is the token usage section so unfortunately you will be unable to view your realms' usage (code, bandwidth, storage etc.). You will still be able to create and manage your realms, and realms will not be suspended for exceeding usage restrictions during the close down period.

As of 24 December 2007 all applications and data remaining on the Zimki service will be deleted and the servers decommissioned. Users are advised to move their applications along with any associated data before the closure date. There are no plans to opensource Zimki.

We hope that Zimki has helped to increase your knowledge and understanding of the possibilities that utility computing and an online application framework can bring. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest and support with beta testing the Zimki service.

The Fotango Team

last.fm have launched an audio fingerprinting tool to allow them to clean up meta data. Pretty good idea I think. If you're a last.fm'r go help 'em out.

Via