Web Dev Ireland

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!!

The Proceratium google

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.

Well I have been tagged by Janine to complete this and since I’m only blogging a very short time this is my first Meme (thanks Janaine :p)

The instructions are:

* Search your blog archive
* Find your 23rd post
* Find the fifth sentence - this is meant to say something about you
* Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions
* Tag five people to do the same

Well my 23rd post on 15th September 2005 and it was about a security vunerability in Firefox 1.0.x (oh dear god i’m such a geek!!!)

Sentence number 5 reads:

“Meaning, Firefox appends 0 to approxLen and then appends the long string of dashes to the buffer instead.”

So we are all in agreement that I am a big geek with a liking for Open Source software and an interest in all things internet(the shame of it all).

So i’m not a big fan of tagging others but what the hell, lets see their results :

• danger This man posts more then anoyone else I have ever seen! so this will no doubt just add to his huge list.
• Cliph A blogging pioneer.
• Michele Interesting to see what michele’s 23rd post was
• David just because!
• Piaras Kelly A man who actually has something to say!

Picked this up on The Register a couple of days ago. Amazing satellite photos of military installations around the world. Become a spy.

The aircraft grave yard is cool here.

Finally they have me doing some real work. Thats why I have not being posting so much recently. I will make a dedicated effort to post more I promise :p .

So anyway this is what I’m doing:

Unit testing and Regression testing a very large website. It’s interesting to see how much effort goes into a large enterprise web portal with a huge backend!

I’m doing all this using HTTPUnit and JUnit. Which are based on Java, which I don’t know too well. I’m having to learn very quickly.