William Computer Blog

I’m going away on holiday until January 7, 2005. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you, have a safe holiday.

In 2006, there will be some really cool technologies waiting to be released in 2006. In 2006, Apple will start using Intel processor on Macintosh computers.

I cannot wait for a new PowerBook with Intel processor. Intel Napa/Yonah has been widely expected to be used by Apple in Intel Macs. The Napa platform is using the dual-core processor Yonah, which according to Intel will outperform current laptop by 68% and reduce power consumption by 30%.

During the Macworld SF (Jan 2007) or Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, we might see a preview of the next Mac OS X (10.5, “Leopard”). It is expected to be released at the end of 2006, or beginning of 2007. It will support both Intel and PowerPC Macintosh computers.

Sony Playstation 3, the next generation gaming console from SONY will also be released in 2006 to compete with Microsoft’s XBOX 360. I wonder how cool this device would be?

Microsoft Windows Vista is coming out in July 2006 and hopefully without anymore delays. Windows Vista includes a lot of features that will not run on my old wintel PC.

Once again, happy holiday and looking forward to 2006. It’s going to be a great year.

Performancing for Firefox is a blog editor extension for Mozilla Firefox web browser. Using this extension, you can post an entry easily to your Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and Movable Type blog.

Once you install this extension, you can hit F8 or click on the little pencil icon on the bottom right to open the WYSIWYG blog editor (see screenshot).

Before you can start posting, you need to add your blog account information so the extension can “talk” to your blogging system. You can add your blog information into by using the Performancing Account Wizard (see screenshot).

Once the wizard is open, you can specify what kind of blog system you are using. Unless you are hosting Wordpress and Movable Type yourself, you will be asked to enter your account username and password. If you are hosting Movable Type or Wordpress yourself, you will need to enter the server API address. The file is named mt-xmlrpc.cgi for Movable Type and xmlrpc.php for Wordpress.

The blog editor include a formatting toolbar with commonly used buttons such as bold, italic, underline, quote, increase font size, decrease font size, insert link, insert image, color, ordered list, unordered list, justify left, justify right, and justify.

Just like most WYSIWYG editor, performancing for firefox allows you to preview both the source code and the final preview of the entry you are writing.

This is a very nice and easy to use extension for bloggers. If you are looking forward for the Flock web browser because of it’s built-in weblog editor, you might wanna give Performancing for Firefox a try.

On December 6, 2005, I received an invitation to become a tester of Windows Live Mail (formerly code-named Kahuna). Windows Live Mail is a web-based email service by Microsoft. Windows Live Mail is rewritten from scratch with a new user interface and a lot of AJAX goodies.

Just like Microsoft Outlook 2003, Windows Live Mail Beta feature a new three-pane display. With three-pane display the email folders, list of emails (inboxes), and email content (reading pane) is stacked vertically.

The use of AJAX in Windows Mail Beta is to create a desktop-like email application. You can now drag and drop email in Windows Live Mail. For example, you can create a new folder called important emails and you’d like to move emails that are important to that folder, all you have to do is select the email and then drag it into the important emails folder on the left. The ability to select more than one email is also implemented. So it is possible if you want to drag and drop more than one emails.

The AJAX is also use for the search feature of Windows Live Mail. When you search, a new search folder is also created on the left pane with messages matched with the search result. Unfortunately, you cannot save the search folder. It would be a very nice feature to allow users to save the search result into a folder that is automatically updated with matched search results.

You can also right-click an email to reply, reply all, forward, mark as read, mark as unread, delete, print, and view source an email.

There is a new Calendar service, which I cannot write because it gives me the “Page cannot be displayed” error.

Sending an e-mail with Windows Live Mail also featured address auto-complete. You can start typing a name and a list of names will pop-up. But this is an old feature, gmail already featured those.

Now, I’m still waiting for an invitation to Yahoo! Mail beta. I heard it’s really cool.

On June 13, 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer for Mac would undergo no further development. Microsoft announced that official support for IE/Mac will cease on December 31, 2005.

When Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, Internet Explorer for Mac is no longer included. However, you can still download a copy of the IE software from Mactopia.

I don’t use Internet Explorer as my browser, and I don’t recommend people to use it. Unfortunately, there are some sites that required me to use IE in order to access them.

I found out from digg that Microsoft will drop IE for Mac completely. That means, as of January 31st, 2006, IE for Mac will no longer be available from Mactopia.

Today, I’m going to send an e-mail to the web developer team of the company that required me to use Internet Explorer to login into their site the importance of designing web with web standards.

Hopefully they will listen so I can use Safari or Mozilla Firefox to login into the webpage.

The open source web application framework, Ruby on Rails has finally reached version 1.0. Along with version 1.0, the RoR project also have a new site designed. Read the announcement

Feedburner introduced a new feature called FeedFlare. FeedFlare allows publishers to give their subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content of their feed by integrating web services such as del.icio.us, technorati, creative commonts, email into the feed.

When you choose to enable one or more services, FeedFlare will include a footer at the bottom of each content item on your feed. Services offered are:

• Email this - Send a link to your item to someone via email.
• Email author - Allow subscribers to email you directly. (If there is no email address in your feed, this will be hidden.)
• Technorati Cosmos - Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this will be hidden.)
• Del.icio.us tags - Lists del.icio.us tags for an item. (If there are no tags, this will be hidden.)
• Save to del.icio.us - Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us.
• Count comments - Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only).
• Creative Commons - Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed (or to individual content items).

To activate this new service, log into feedburner, and the FeedFlare service is located under the “Optimize” tab. Soon, Feedburner will also provide an API where publishers could tie FeedFlare into the originating web site content.

I enabled FeedFlare on my feed.

A few weeks ago Apple released an update to the FrontRow software, which you can download. You cannot install Front Row unless you have an iMac G5, fortunately, Andrew Escobar wrote a HOWTO on installing front row on other mac hardware.

You can now install them on other macintosh hardware. Once you got Front Row installed, you can use your bluetooth phone as a remote with Salling Clicker.

Exposé is one of the best and most useful feature of the Mac OS X. Exposé was introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). With Exposé you can access any open window with a single keystroke.

Viamatic software created a very cool Firefox extension called foXpose. This extension enables a small button on the left side of the firefox browser which, when clicked, will create thumbnails of your open tabs in the browser window.

The extension works on Firefox both on Mac OS X and Windows, I haven’t tested the extension on Linux version.

Same feature is also offered by Shiira, the WebKit based browser.

Apple Broadband Tuner allows you to take full advantage of very high speed FiOS based Internet connections that have a high latency. The installer tweaks some system parameters.

What the Broadband tuner does is change the parameter in the operating system kernel through sysctl. The system parameters are sysctl variables that are set as follows:

net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000

I don’t know why changing such configuration should require an installer. You can actually change the system parameter manually using the sysctl command and copy and paste the following to /etc/sysctl.conf

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=512000
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=131072
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=358400

I did install it, but it showed no change in speed on my broadband connection.