• Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
• Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
• Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
• Restart Firefox

O Look! I’ve got my extensions back Enjoy!

Next, Adobe: An RSS reader for Video’s!

Adobe Systems plans to release Adobe Media Player (AMP), a free download for playing Flash-based Web videos on Macs or PCs. Written with Adobe’s AIR, AMP is a hybrid online/offline application that lets people subscribe to different video Webcasts.
The videos are either streamed from the content producer’s Web site or they can be downloaded. Adobe will host a catalog, called Adobe TV, on its site where people can find videos. Because it’s written with AIR, people can be offline or online when they watch.

I haven’t actually said anything usefull in this entry, have I? uh… I guess not…

My battery is nearly dying on me so I guess I’ll end this general ranting just about now

More here.

Take this guy for instance, an Austrian guy who has been on the road for the last 3 years!!! He owns one of these 6×6 rovers. He now is a freelance photographer during his more than extensive journey
Amazing!

I also found other “heroes” on these sites:

• A nice journey of 2 people from Germany to South Africa and back
• A Brit and a south African doing about the same route
• Sandy and Michael who have just finished their 2 years global tour
• A couple doing the South American continent: 22.000 km’s
• A dutch couple doing the whole world!

You need a car like this with as less electronic switches as possible (as these images proof )
And finally much to my surprise is that the same company offers RENTALS! So you can rent a 4×4 and starting planning your expedition

How cool is that!

But what I do not like about Facebook is:

• the design: I never understood how Facebook appeals to new users. It’s plain ugly. There aren’t any clean rounded edges. No fancy Ajax controls, no nothing
• Spam: while you cannot possibly know this when joining the site at first, Facebook is an extremely annoying spam-engine. It’s amazing how much mail you can get from Facebook daily. I, again, need to point out a lot of these mails can be disabled but you still get invitations or requests to use an application someone else in your friend circle installed. IMHO, Facebook should be much strict in their “allowed” application list.
• performance: Facebook is painfully slow!

It seems all this isn’t enough: Facebook announced a new feature: CHAT. (scream!)

The launch date for Facebook Chat is set in the nebulous area of “the coming weeks,” according to Product Manager Peter Deng. The Chat will function as an overlay, similar to GTalk in GMail that sits in a UI at the bottom of the browser screen. It can also, like GTalk, be popped out into a separate window.
So except all of you to get even more mails asking you to join a chat!

On the other side, Facebook is aware of their privacy, communication policy:
According to Matt Cohler, Facebook wants to create more ‘granular privacy tools’ and an easy to use product in the process. He also outlined some of the difficulties that Facebook has had as it has grown. When Facebook was started, he explained, it was geared towards the US college student niche.
Well I’ve got one word here: scalability!

I’m currently trying out another social networking site: PLAXO

Why?

Plaxo is using Google’s OpenSocial API!!!
Plaxo, online calendar and address book, has the honour of being the first to implement OpenSocial into a service and go live with it. It’s implemented in Plaxo Pulse, a service that lets you see social networking activities of people in your address book, like changes in their profiles, new Flickr photos they’ve added, etc.

For People not knowing anything about OpenSocial: it’s Google’s initiative to provide a single point of entrance to as much social sites as possible. This way people joining on social site1 could contact with people on social site2. Now how great is that!

And guess what: according to Plaxo using the social API is starting to deliver some results:

The social networking site war for users just got even more interesting

Meyers: “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”

Chen (co-founder): “2008. We’ll do it this year. Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year.”

They also announced a new home page with more web 2.0-like features as custom recommendations, latest feeds & friend activity. The youtube experience as they claim themselves will be “to gauge people’s interest in having a YouTube that’s tailored to the individual.”

Also news sites are following. The BBC announced the launch of their new homepage with drag-n-drop features.
As always Belgian news sites are way behind! Our local news site De Redactie

is way behind the powerful features this website offers. (I’m not the only one finding “De Redactie” a very ugly site by the way!)

This new BBC page let’s you customize content & layout. Quite handy for a news site since YOU decide what you want to read first.

Other sites announced updates. Facebook has added a few translations. You can now add German & Spanish as default languages. I myself am starting to skip all posts concerning Facebook.
Why? Because it’s starting to bother me extremely. We all know and must admit that Facebook is a SPAM-generator in your mailbox. I’m getting tons of unwanted e-mails. I’m even considering making a new e-mail account only for Facebook and other social website’s… (-> If I want to be social, I’ll be social I don’t want my mailbox to be socialized )

I was glad to find another blogger thinking what I’ve said since the beginning: Facebook is annoying & ugly. It only has one handy feature: nearly everyone I know is a registered user…!

more updates soon I guess

I think some people would say that Anyway I was going to start a new blog entry about something useful but I guess I’m too tired to write something useful.
I’m just gabbling around here instead…

Need… to… move … away…from…screen….

over and out

Anyway I don’t want to criticize this offer so… Enough said

The website mentions the following:

DreamSpark is simple, it’s all about giving students Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools at no charge so you can chase your dreams and create the next big breakthrough in technology – or just get a head start on your career. 
Who can get this right now? 
We are kicking this off in 11 countries/regions, giving DreamSpark to millions of students in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium. If you are not residing in one of the countries listed keep checking back, we will be adding more countries throughout the year. 
Does that mean that I might not get in? 
Possibly, if you are not residing in one of the countries listed, not attending an accredited university or not a member of one of the student organizations that we’re connected with. But keep checking back, as we’re working on adding more ways to verify your student status all the time. 
What do I have to do to get this software? Not much really, just select a product and follow the steps below.

 
• Sign In with your Windows Live ID. If you don’t have one, go get one here. Pretty basic stuff.

 

• Get verified as a student. The system is linked to schools and organizations around the world that can confirm student status. Simply choose your country and school, enter your info and hit submit.

 

• Download your products. Now remember these are professional tools. This means they are pretty big files so make sure you have the bandwidth and space to bring them to your machine. We support the latest versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox for your download

I was about to post a message that the redesign of my site is looking good… I guess I’ll have to wait and find why IE isn’t showing the site right.
It’s not my design (I’m too lazy) but I ported it from a WordPress theme to Expression Engine. (my blog engine).

Now this is supposed how the site is to be rendered:

The open-source group shipped Firefox 3 Beta 3, an update that features approximately 1,300 individual changes from the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.

1. Improved securityThe latest beta is heavy on security improvements, including an enhancement to the Google-powered Malware Protection feature that puts up a warning sign when users visit sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, Trojans or other malware.Here’s a picture of what the malware protection warning looks like:

   It also comes with improvements to the security-themed One-click site info feature that lets Firefox users click on the favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if the connection is protected from eavesdropping.

   The feature prominently displays identity verification that makes it easier for the non-technical user to understand. For example, when a site uses Extended Validation SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company the browser is connected to.

   Also new in Firefox 3 Beta 3:

   Web Forgery Protection page: The content of pages suspected as Web forgeries is no longer shown. See this demo.

   SSL error pages: Clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate.

   Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.

   

   Secure add-on updates: To improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.

   Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software on the desktop when executables are being downloaded.

   Windows Vista Parental Controls: Firefox will respect the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

   Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service: Better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.

   Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.

   Here’s a complete list of the Firefox 3 Beta 3 changes.

2. Fresh GUI ?One of the drawbacks of Firefox 2 was the GUI. Was it fresh? was it new ? No it was plain UGLY! (compared to Internet Explorer 7 & the new Opera)
   Although contextual improvements have been implemented I really doubt firefox will have a fresh new GUI. Do we need it? Well tastes differ, I like good looking applications!
3. Alternatives?We all know the alternatives. Internet Explorer 7, Opera (to mention just the 2 most important ones). Some even say Microsoft had to patch much less security leaks in 2007 than Firefox! So IE7 really looks like a good alternative.
   But I still find IE7 painfully slow! And a new threat is emerging for IE7: ActiveX controls. This article warns about the dangers involved in using too much ActiveX controls.

As an ending note, I guess I’ll probably end up using Firefox3 as my default browser simply because I’ve got some add-ons’ that improve my browsing experience. I also find IE7 too slow although I’ve had more memory leaks with Firefox2 as I did with Firefox 1. CSS rendering in IE7 is still not as I wanted it to be… (but that’s another discussion)
I’ll guess we’ll have to watch out for IE8 which just recently passed the ACID2 test!!