Well, I finally upgraded to Firefox 3. I have been holding out waiting for Google to get off its duff and update the Firefox extensions. If you remember I ranted about this in an earlier post. Well, I finally said forget it. I found out one of my biggest problems with Firefox on Linux was Google's fault!! The toolbar was the problem all along. The problem? I could not open more than 2 Firefox windows without the whole app freezing up on me. I would have to completely shutdown, and restart Firefox to get anywhere else. So, I've rid myself of Google's extensions altogether.
I replaced my Book mark sync with Foxmark, and all my other extensions, except my Favorite theme, work fine with FF3. So, good riddance Google. And yes, if they want to shut me out of mail and blogging I'll go somewhere else with that too. I think its completely bogus that they can come out with a hundred and one new apps every year, and can't be bothered to keep the apps they've won people over to up to date!
On a positive note, I'm finding FF3 to be very fast compared to FF2, and not *that* much different on the appearance and features list. Meaning, if you think you're going to get lost in the new interface don't worry, this isn't MickeySoft and Office2007.
Oh, I haven't blogged in a while because I've done quite well at embarrassing myself with how I handle my bike. I have let it fall over twice now. The first time I'm still not sure it was anything I did, I think there were other factors involved. The second time was just my stupidity, I think. The problem there was by the time I tried to catch the bike (not too far over) my leg said "forget this" and just gave out on me. It has happened twice now, but the first time I wasn't really tilted enough to cause it to fall all the way over. This morning it hurt my leg. I'm not sure the bike got that far off, or whether it was too far I just couldn't believe how my leg reacted. You have to understand my legs have always been my strong point when it came to that sort of thing. I guess being 41, they just aren't going to take it anymore.
Showing posts with label Firefox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Firefox. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
New Kubuntu 8.04
There has been some controversy about the latest version of (K/X)Ubuntu. They decided not to tag the Kubuntu part as LTS (Long Term Support) because of the incoming version 4 of KDE. I think it was utterly stupid considering they'll have to take some kind of stand regarding KDE over every variation of Ubuntu if that is truly their stand. The question I have yet to get answered is "What happens if I add KDE to Ubuntu LTS?" Here's the scenario, I have an Ubuntu LTS install straight from the CD. I add all the repositories, and then decide I want to run a KDE 3.5.9 app. What now? I have installed the KDE libraries, and a KDE app, if KDE was the reason the LTS tag was withheld from the Kubuntu variant then I'm now no longer supported long term on my Ubuntu install. I'm sure a business which has set this up is going to love to hear that. If I were them, I'd go to Mandrake, or SUSE, neither of which would have a hard time supporting KDE Long term.
However, since I have no concern about how long its supported, because I'm at home, I upgraded to 8.04. It was very uneventful. Which, I guess, is a good thing. Except for the fact that it tried to force Firefox 3 beta on me. Firefox 3 is going to be a great browser, you can tell that, just like KDE 4 is going to be a great Desktop environment, but not one of my extensions works with it. Google is especially crappy because they talk big and even at times act big, about open source, but don't really seem to follow through. I think the problem is the childish mindset of the company as a whole. They need to grow up, and realize that you can't just keep jumping from this to that and forget the first part, and not support it because your running around trying to whip up the next "cool thing". Anyway, Google needs to get off its behind and get focused on Firefox extensions that equal in number and quality the windoze only extensions. And, oh yes, I haven't said lately just how much I do not like windoze.
Mom and Dad just recently bought a new Dell, and they want me to transfer every thing over from the old PC. The problem is windoze. I wonder at times just how much money and man hours they put into studying and programming user irritation features. The more exposure I have to virus vista the more I love Linux. Once you get past the pretty face it's ugly to the bone! I've got to bring the new box down to the house so I can get things working, and all patched up.
Ahem, back to the Kubuntu saga. Well, I have tried KDE 4 and it lacks so many of the things I really like about KDE that I am steering clear of it for as long as I can. If they were to force me to upgrade or go to Gnome, I'd get used to Gnome. If I'm going to have to work in a way I don't like them I'm going to snub my nose at those who try to force me to do it, and go somewhere else. Kind of like the Bike Dealer who wouldn't sell me a Bandit. I think KDE 4 was released WAY TOO early, and with WAY too many things not even at that level. Good grief your PIM suite isn't even at 4 yet. I understand that they think they've come up with a "better" way to work, but I like the way my desktop is now, and if they can't accept that, I'll find another environment that will. Not to mention that lately all my appointments created on Google calendar are showing up in Kontact an hour OR MORE, off! Evolution doesn't have a problem, my Nokia N810 doesn't have a problem, and even my virus outlook at work doesn't have a problem, and they are all synced. So, I've been looking at Evolution anyway, 'cause I despise the way Thunderbird handles folders that house lists (it doesn't at all without an extension).
So, I'm now on 8.04 and it looks just like 7.10 although I'm sure something under the covers got changed / improved. Oh, I have noticed now that my WiFi light doesn't light up any more. Oh, my wireless is working fine (using it now) but for some reason the WiFi light on my Dell E1705 no longer shines when connected. Oh, well, as long as it works I don't care. Everything else seems to work / not work just as it did before. I'm about to try the VOIP software and see if any of the sound driver's capabilities have improved. (I doubt it).
Well, talk to ya' later.
However, since I have no concern about how long its supported, because I'm at home, I upgraded to 8.04. It was very uneventful. Which, I guess, is a good thing. Except for the fact that it tried to force Firefox 3 beta on me. Firefox 3 is going to be a great browser, you can tell that, just like KDE 4 is going to be a great Desktop environment, but not one of my extensions works with it. Google is especially crappy because they talk big and even at times act big, about open source, but don't really seem to follow through. I think the problem is the childish mindset of the company as a whole. They need to grow up, and realize that you can't just keep jumping from this to that and forget the first part, and not support it because your running around trying to whip up the next "cool thing". Anyway, Google needs to get off its behind and get focused on Firefox extensions that equal in number and quality the windoze only extensions. And, oh yes, I haven't said lately just how much I do not like windoze.
Mom and Dad just recently bought a new Dell, and they want me to transfer every thing over from the old PC. The problem is windoze. I wonder at times just how much money and man hours they put into studying and programming user irritation features. The more exposure I have to virus vista the more I love Linux. Once you get past the pretty face it's ugly to the bone! I've got to bring the new box down to the house so I can get things working, and all patched up.
Ahem, back to the Kubuntu saga. Well, I have tried KDE 4 and it lacks so many of the things I really like about KDE that I am steering clear of it for as long as I can. If they were to force me to upgrade or go to Gnome, I'd get used to Gnome. If I'm going to have to work in a way I don't like them I'm going to snub my nose at those who try to force me to do it, and go somewhere else. Kind of like the Bike Dealer who wouldn't sell me a Bandit. I think KDE 4 was released WAY TOO early, and with WAY too many things not even at that level. Good grief your PIM suite isn't even at 4 yet. I understand that they think they've come up with a "better" way to work, but I like the way my desktop is now, and if they can't accept that, I'll find another environment that will. Not to mention that lately all my appointments created on Google calendar are showing up in Kontact an hour OR MORE, off! Evolution doesn't have a problem, my Nokia N810 doesn't have a problem, and even my virus outlook at work doesn't have a problem, and they are all synced. So, I've been looking at Evolution anyway, 'cause I despise the way Thunderbird handles folders that house lists (it doesn't at all without an extension).
So, I'm now on 8.04 and it looks just like 7.10 although I'm sure something under the covers got changed / improved. Oh, I have noticed now that my WiFi light doesn't light up any more. Oh, my wireless is working fine (using it now) but for some reason the WiFi light on my Dell E1705 no longer shines when connected. Oh, well, as long as it works I don't care. Everything else seems to work / not work just as it did before. I'm about to try the VOIP software and see if any of the sound driver's capabilities have improved. (I doubt it).
Well, talk to ya' later.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
New Ramblings Laptops and Taxes
Wow, that title says alot. Well I have quite a bit I haven't said anything about lately.
I found a donor for a new Laptop! The US Govt., well the IRS to be precise. I don't know about you, but I like tax time. Always have. I struggle through the year, and pay a little bit too much, so that I get a nice refund each spring. I know, I know, you should set your taxes up so you don't have to pay, or get paid so the Govt. doesn't use the interest for free. Well, I have a theory on that. I believe that there's nothing wrong with letting the Government use my money for free for a year! Sorry about all you greedy, bitter people who are more worried about Government waste than you are your own waist. (Both are expanding! HA!) Anyway, I don't mind them getting to use what little extra I pay in a years time, for the ability to have a nice bonus to start each year off with, do you? I've discovered through looking at various interest rates that money would have earned me, and I found out that I have lost no more than 2 dollars a year. That's right, the MOST, I could be giving up is 2 dollars. BIG WHOOPEE! So, for 2 dollars the Govt. holds my money, and processes my paper work, and gives me a nice Check each year. Not a bad deal I don't think. Anyway, I'm getting enough back, along with what I've saved here, there and yonder, to buy a nice laptop. Now if HP would just ship it. :-D. I'll tell ya' about it when it gets here.
The nice thing about the modern age is HTML and XML, and SSL, and all the other L's that make doing your taxes online possible. I tried Turbo tax, and I tried TaxCut. Taxcut will let you run in Linux, if you setup the browser ID to fake being in Windoze. Turbo Tax will allow you to try to get in, but evidently they do something that's very Windows specific this year. Taxcut was very much a pain, very many things changed since last year, and I could never convince it to allow me to remove them. It was trying to get me to file a Schedule C and all that business stuff. However, we never made any money off of any of the business stuff (and didn't spend any in 2006 to make it worth fooling with on taxes) so I just shut the stuff down. Well, Taxcut never asked me if those things were still valid, never asked me how much I made off of them, or anything. However, considering they were in last years TurboTax file, it was determined to error out on it.
So, I go to Turbotax.com (after booting into Windoze YUK) and it works perfectly neting me an extra 500.00 dollars! It allowed me to clear out all the stuff from last year that I didn't want to repeat this year. Needless to say, as soon as the IRS will let me, I'll be e-filing my return and awaiting a direct deposited refund! Gotta love it.
Now, after ordering the New Laptop from HP ( a very nice one at that with [hint] the AMD Dual core TL-60 64 bit proc) I have the misfortune of having to wait. I know, boo hoo. I can hear you now, "you poor slob", "I'm reaching for ya' I just can't get there.", or "I feel your pain". However, I'm not alone in my misery (it does love company you know) my wife is waiting for the hand-me-down crapshiba I'm using now. She's still got full reign over the AMD 3000+ Desktop, with a 19" flat monitor, but now she'll also have this laptop. I don't know how much of a blessing that will be, but if she avoids using firefox 2.0 on Edgy Kubuntu she'll be fine.
By-The-Way: I found out that Firefox 2 is responsible for all the lockups I've had since converting to Edgy and FF2. I've been running Seamonkey for sometime now, and its running without a hitch. (SeaMonkey is Mozilla's latest Browser suite that replaced "Mozilla" proper, and Netscape). The problem is you can't get the Google toolbar to work, or the Forecastfox add-on to work. I really liked both of them. There is some suggestion on the Kubuntu user list that Forecastfox is actually to blame for the lockups which are caused by run away processes. I don't know, 'cause my browser / KDE session would lockup so fast I could never diag the problem. Another problem was that it would lockup so fast that it would never right any error info to any of my logs. That makes it difficult to figure out. Well, everything is fine now. I may try removing forecastfox to see if that helps any. I think forecastfox is a victim of Firefox's poor add-on handling.
Well, anyway that's most of the rambling. I have also found a fairly cool website for IMing in a web browser: Meebo the IM client. Check it out. Its like GAIM for Linux only in a browser.
I found a donor for a new Laptop! The US Govt., well the IRS to be precise. I don't know about you, but I like tax time. Always have. I struggle through the year, and pay a little bit too much, so that I get a nice refund each spring. I know, I know, you should set your taxes up so you don't have to pay, or get paid so the Govt. doesn't use the interest for free. Well, I have a theory on that. I believe that there's nothing wrong with letting the Government use my money for free for a year! Sorry about all you greedy, bitter people who are more worried about Government waste than you are your own waist. (Both are expanding! HA!) Anyway, I don't mind them getting to use what little extra I pay in a years time, for the ability to have a nice bonus to start each year off with, do you? I've discovered through looking at various interest rates that money would have earned me, and I found out that I have lost no more than 2 dollars a year. That's right, the MOST, I could be giving up is 2 dollars. BIG WHOOPEE! So, for 2 dollars the Govt. holds my money, and processes my paper work, and gives me a nice Check each year. Not a bad deal I don't think. Anyway, I'm getting enough back, along with what I've saved here, there and yonder, to buy a nice laptop. Now if HP would just ship it. :-D. I'll tell ya' about it when it gets here.
The nice thing about the modern age is HTML and XML, and SSL, and all the other L's that make doing your taxes online possible. I tried Turbo tax, and I tried TaxCut. Taxcut will let you run in Linux, if you setup the browser ID to fake being in Windoze. Turbo Tax will allow you to try to get in, but evidently they do something that's very Windows specific this year. Taxcut was very much a pain, very many things changed since last year, and I could never convince it to allow me to remove them. It was trying to get me to file a Schedule C and all that business stuff. However, we never made any money off of any of the business stuff (and didn't spend any in 2006 to make it worth fooling with on taxes) so I just shut the stuff down. Well, Taxcut never asked me if those things were still valid, never asked me how much I made off of them, or anything. However, considering they were in last years TurboTax file, it was determined to error out on it.
So, I go to Turbotax.com (after booting into Windoze YUK) and it works perfectly neting me an extra 500.00 dollars! It allowed me to clear out all the stuff from last year that I didn't want to repeat this year. Needless to say, as soon as the IRS will let me, I'll be e-filing my return and awaiting a direct deposited refund! Gotta love it.
Now, after ordering the New Laptop from HP ( a very nice one at that with [hint] the AMD Dual core TL-60 64 bit proc) I have the misfortune of having to wait. I know, boo hoo. I can hear you now, "you poor slob", "I'm reaching for ya' I just can't get there.", or "I feel your pain". However, I'm not alone in my misery (it does love company you know) my wife is waiting for the hand-me-down crapshiba I'm using now. She's still got full reign over the AMD 3000+ Desktop, with a 19" flat monitor, but now she'll also have this laptop. I don't know how much of a blessing that will be, but if she avoids using firefox 2.0 on Edgy Kubuntu she'll be fine.
By-The-Way: I found out that Firefox 2 is responsible for all the lockups I've had since converting to Edgy and FF2. I've been running Seamonkey for sometime now, and its running without a hitch. (SeaMonkey is Mozilla's latest Browser suite that replaced "Mozilla" proper, and Netscape). The problem is you can't get the Google toolbar to work, or the Forecastfox add-on to work. I really liked both of them. There is some suggestion on the Kubuntu user list that Forecastfox is actually to blame for the lockups which are caused by run away processes. I don't know, 'cause my browser / KDE session would lockup so fast I could never diag the problem. Another problem was that it would lockup so fast that it would never right any error info to any of my logs. That makes it difficult to figure out. Well, everything is fine now. I may try removing forecastfox to see if that helps any. I think forecastfox is a victim of Firefox's poor add-on handling.
Well, anyway that's most of the rambling. I have also found a fairly cool website for IMing in a web browser: Meebo the IM client. Check it out. Its like GAIM for Linux only in a browser.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Swapped Back
Well, crow isn't so bad if you put a little ketchup and salt on it.
I finally had to come back and try Debian SID again. I ran Kubuntu for almost a year, which is a record for me I think. There are things I stand by as far as what I've said about a lot of Debian developers being cry babies. The problem is they make the best darned overall distro out there hands down. Especially if you like KDE. With Novell climbing into bed with Micro$oft, I wasn't about to run anything with "SUSE" in the name. The problem is right when I needed to be paying attention the most, Ardent's mail server decided to go all foobar on the SAN drives. I wound up setting on the phone till about 4 in the morning. Not only that, but due to my lack of pay attention, the whole upgrade I was doing to fiesty fawn went so far south I had to format and start over anyway. So, I decided to download the latest etch netinstall CD and try it out again. I'm going to have to do away with this STUPID "iceweasal" rebranded Firefox browser though, because its just getting on my nerves. There are a lot of places you can't do what you want because they only support "Firefox 2.0.x". The problem is that is EXCACTLY what you're running, but they don't know that. So, I installed a Firefox extension called, "User Agent Switcher". What it does is respond to Web Site Queries about what browser you're running. I had to setup my own "User Agent" because who would have ever thought that you'd run firefox and have to fake out a website so that it would know you were running Firefox? Anyway, here's the settings:
Other than that things are going well. I have Debian up and running, and mighty fine so far. I used dar to restore the greater part of my home directory, along with unison, which I use to keep my home directory synced up to the main PC here at the house. Now that I've gotten weaned off of kdar (a cool graphical utility that the maintainer gave up on) I'm able to do just what I want via command line. I'll script it all out sooner or latter.
Anyway, looking forward to the weekend, even though I have to go to an Executive Board Meeting at 8:30 am tomorrow. YUCK. I hate getting up early on a Saturday.
May God bless your weekend.
I finally had to come back and try Debian SID again. I ran Kubuntu for almost a year, which is a record for me I think. There are things I stand by as far as what I've said about a lot of Debian developers being cry babies. The problem is they make the best darned overall distro out there hands down. Especially if you like KDE. With Novell climbing into bed with Micro$oft, I wasn't about to run anything with "SUSE" in the name. The problem is right when I needed to be paying attention the most, Ardent's mail server decided to go all foobar on the SAN drives. I wound up setting on the phone till about 4 in the morning. Not only that, but due to my lack of pay attention, the whole upgrade I was doing to fiesty fawn went so far south I had to format and start over anyway. So, I decided to download the latest etch netinstall CD and try it out again. I'm going to have to do away with this STUPID "iceweasal" rebranded Firefox browser though, because its just getting on my nerves. There are a lot of places you can't do what you want because they only support "Firefox 2.0.x". The problem is that is EXCACTLY what you're running, but they don't know that. So, I installed a Firefox extension called, "User Agent Switcher". What it does is respond to Web Site Queries about what browser you're running. I had to setup my own "User Agent" because who would have ever thought that you'd run firefox and have to fake out a website so that it would know you were running Firefox? Anyway, here's the settings:
description="Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1"The last two I just left blank. I thought about adding "Debian" for vender just to mess with folks. :-D But, I decided not to. Anyway, if you add a custom Agent and fill in the parameters with the above, the sites you go to will think you're running Firefox 2.0.0.1 (which you are).
useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061205 Firefox/2.0.0.1 (Debian-2.0.0.1+dfsg-2)"
appname="Firefox" appversion="2.0.0.1 (X11; en-US)"
platform="Linux i686"
vendor=""
vendorsub=""
Other than that things are going well. I have Debian up and running, and mighty fine so far. I used dar to restore the greater part of my home directory, along with unison, which I use to keep my home directory synced up to the main PC here at the house. Now that I've gotten weaned off of kdar (a cool graphical utility that the maintainer gave up on) I'm able to do just what I want via command line. I'll script it all out sooner or latter.
Anyway, looking forward to the weekend, even though I have to go to an Executive Board Meeting at 8:30 am tomorrow. YUCK. I hate getting up early on a Saturday.
May God bless your weekend.
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