To commemerate the 100,000,000th download of firefox a LUG has launced a weather balloon to 100,000 feet! Yes the Oregon State Linux Users Group has gone all out and launched the balloon satellite, while having a BBQ and a bit of a shindig.
Loading up the balloon
Launching Firefox one
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Work are sending me to Frankfurt tomorrow evening for a three day training course. Should be good fun.
I will be staying at the Intercontinental, Frankfurt pictured below.
I’m not sure if the room will have high-speed internet access. The “superior” rooms do, but i’m not sure if work splashed for that. I will try to get on and post to my three loyal readers (including myself in that figure).
I must take lots of photos and bring them back.
I am not the greatest lover of flash in the world, but I will say that this flash advert by IKEA is stunning.
Be sure to use the little arrows to click around the page.
Probably not suitable for anyone on dialup.
Congratulations to firefox on 100,000,000 downloads!
It’s a great day for firefox have officially released 1.0 less then a year ago. It’s also interesting to point out that the figure does not included updates downloaded through the update management system.
It also doesn’t take into account the single downloads that have been pushed out to thousands of clients through internal sysadmin systems!
Now only about 5 billion more downloads to go and we can say goodbye to IE.
There are some great(funny) photos of people celebrating the 100 million downloads of firefox. 
Current download number
As I hailed the demo in my original post. The New demo is out now and in true Microsoft style includes lots of bug fixes :p
Thanks to the guys at AOE3 Planet for informing me about the second demo.
Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is
I was reading the always excellent “Joel on Software” and came across this reference to Life hacking scroll down to “Multitasking in the Workplace”. Joel is an advocate of private offices for all employees, simply by removing distractions you increase productivity.
[an employee] would take an average of 25 minutes to return to what they were doing [after being interupted].
Joels article points to this excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine[free subscription required] the article by Clive Thompson is about how we have so much information coming at us in a regular day that we are constantly interrupted, wether by Instant Message, E-Mail, Collegue, telephone, etc. So we spend our days looking at these distractions and very little time doing any work.
Fascinating stuff thoroughly worth a read.
The 43 folders website is all about Life hacking and has some amazing tips on how to clear your time for the things that matter.
Traditional methods to help you concentrate (still very valid and helpful) I particularly like the “be here now” approach. I’m going to try it over the next few days and see how that comes out.
mozillaZine announced that the long awaited Firefox 1.5 Release candidate will be available October 28th!
For those of you that do not know what a relsease candidate is I shall explain, A release candidate is simply the last pre-release version of a piece of software to go for testing (usually more common in the Open Source Community) and by testing that means just simply to make sure that all the bugs have been fixed an the software is stable. Before a Pre-release a beta (or 2) is released, these are usually largely stable(i.e don’t crash every minute) but need the bugs Ironed out.
The Release notes state that the biggest additions to the new version are
- Improvements to automated update system.
- Improvements to Web site rendering and performance.
- Several security fixes.
- Bug Fixes
The automated update system is a huge feature, which will allow patches to be much smaller so the entire firefox binary doesn’t have to be downloaded everytime.
I will try and get a full list of the new features and post it later.
edit:
additional features
- SVG
- Fastback - which is memory caching of previously visited pages i.e your back/forward button
- Ability to group tabs and drag tabs(which I always wanted
- One click removal of cookies, history and temporary internet files
SVG graphics are cool. They will basically be an XML based W3C compliant version of macromedia flash.
Internal training courses for work are sometimes a bit of a bore! You have to take the rough with the smooth I suppose. But this particular (online) course I have completed today was taking boredom to a whole new level! It was a six hour course that was nothing but pages and pages of text(100’s). It was split into 7 modules, each one with a test at the end, then after you completed all the modules there was a big test, that you had to get a minimum of 70% in. Well I tell you that course may have caused me brain damage (or maybe that was all the beer at the weekend, hmmm). I need to go browse the internet now to regain some sanity.
Having been away from the Head Office on a different site for a few weeks, I came back to hear that one of our two lifts has had a sex change!! We formally had two female’s but now one has gone all butch. I have to admit it’s a little strange, maybe the other lift will get a testosterone shot soon too? Watch this space!
Behold!!
Brian L. Fisher, Associate Curator of Entomology, California Academy of Sciences has named this ant after google. Mr. Fisher was so impressed with the help google gave him in setting up a “bio-map” of ants around the world using google earth that he named an ant after them!
We tried to get NASA’s help to develop such a system for years with their mapping expertise and data, but Google Earth answered the call first. I am so impressed with Google that I have named an ant I recently discovered in Madagascar Proceratium google. Its bizarrely-shaped abdomen is an adaptation for hunting down obscure prey: spider eggs.
Google have allowed antweb (run by Mr. Fisher and the California Academy of Science) to create an interface to google earth. So now using google earth and linking it to the antwebs mappings you can see where different species of ants around the world have habitats! It’s pretty cool.
