Firefox download Counter

Firefox is nearing 50 million downloads (thats GREAT news for firefox fans - like me). Here's a innovative download counter by infocraft that shows a realtime counter. Look at those downloads go!! Go Firefox!

What i also liked is that the author takes the time to explain how he's doing it!

New Theme logo on Google - Earth Day 2005.

Here's Google's new theme logo with theme being Earth Day. Here are earlier ones.

Google Maps Standalone Mode

Sigh! The things that people do with Google Maps. Here Google Maps Standalone Mode that lets you have a customized version of Google Maps on your own web page. Cool huh!

What i like about the page is that it takes the pains to explain to us techies, how things work. Its a great opportunity to understand whats under the hood.

While you are at it, you may also want to check out Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets.

That reminds me, Google Maps is avialable for the UK now.

Adobe buys Macromedia

In an event that promises to be interesting Adobe systems announced having acquired Macromedia today. Here's the press release. Here's macromedia's press announcement as well.

Cool Firefox Extension - Fusion

Here's this lovely (read as aesthetic) extension for Firefox. Its called Fusion that lets you double up your location bar as your progress bar.

In case you dont like the default color it uses, you can always tweak your firefox display settings file (userChrome.css) to select you own color. Here's my setting (with important part marked blue):

#urlbar-progressmeter > .progress-bar { background-color: rgb(255,222,222) !important }

For more details on how to tweak other firefox settings, see Firefox Help: Editing Configuration Files.

India is Brainbench's most certified nation!

Here are the results at Brainbench!. Yay! Congrats India.

Linkedin.com adds firefox tools - contacts and job search plugins

Looks like the Firefox browser is catching on. Recently the popular networking service Linkedin.com added the ability to search its database of contacts and jobs from within the firefox search box. Take a look here at LinkedIn Tools: Firefox Search Plugins

RSS - Universal Subscription Mechanism (USM).

Today, i cannot imagine the internet without RSS. My subscription portfolio is currently in the range of a few hundred RSS feeds. For all us techies, here a brief on USM by Randy Charles Morin, KBCafe.com.

Here's a Initial extract:

Universal Subscription Mechanism is a really simple way of allowing RSS readers to subscribe to RSS feeds. Many blogs and Websites with RSS feeds present an orange XML or RSS button, Atom button or text anchor link that points to the RSS feed. When the user clicks on the button, nothing substantial happens. This mechanism replaces that click with a subscription notification to the users default RSS handler.

The mechanism defines two requirements of the RSS feed publisher; to return the application/rss+xml Content-Type in the HTTP headers and to place one new Atom Link Construct element in the RSS channel. The mechanism then allows RSS readers to create a simple shell extension to initiate the RSS feed subscription using a small native application.

Also, here are a list of clients supporting USM.

Tools - RSS - WinRSS

Here's a nice RSS tool - WinRSS. Its a freeware. You can checkout the screenshots here.

Google Maps and Craiglist

Here's a fascinating version of Google Maps hacked to tap into craiglists to show listings of house on rent/sale in various cities in the US. Cool!

Article: Federated Network Authentication (FNA)

Here's a nice article on Federated Network Authentication by Matthew Gast on the O'Reilly Wireless Devcenter.

The article talks about

How can academic network administrators cope with the "roaming scholar" problem--that is, users having to use several guest provisioning processes to roam across wireless networks on a campus? This challenge applies outside the university setting too. Matthew Gast shows you how federated network authentication can make roaming easier for users and admins alike.

UseModWiki - The simplest way to start a Wiki.

I came across this article on NewsForge titled 'Introducing UseModWiki'. According to which, its a 63 KB tar file which consists of a primary perl script and a few other related files. The installation just consists of placing the main script in a suitable place on the server. The main advantage is that UseModWiki does not require a database. All the data is kept in flat files.

Article: Eclipse Plugins Exposed

Here's an interesting pair of articles on eclipse plugins by Emmanuel Proulx :

Part 1: A First Glimpse and Part 2: Simple GUI Elements.

XMLHttpRequest with Java

Continuing my earlier thoughts on Ajax, here are two interesting blog posts about using XMLHttpRequest with Java - XMLHttpRequest with Java #1 and # 2.

7-Zip - the free file archiver software.

7-Zip is a free file archiver with a very high compression ratio. The current release 3.13 is onlt 920 KB in file size. Some features include the new 7z format format which gives extremely high compression rates. Improved compression ratios for traditional compression formats like ZIP and GZIP, Localization for 51 languages, with usual features like windows shell integration, self-extractor creation and command line. I have just started using it - looks quite good.

Tutorial: How to create Firefox extensions

Here's a nice tutorial covering the basics of writing an extension for firefox.

Google Ride Finder

The race is still on. Here's a new offering by Google - Google Ride Finder. Find taxi's. Currently this service is offered only in some select places. Google is asking fleet operators to get in touch.

GMail to double in capacity !

Here's a news article that says so - Google takes a big step to expand offerings. While services like yahoo! believe that most users will never require that kind of space, several gmailers have been believed to hit that limit or are close to it.

According to Google, this is an indication of the times when people can store stuff like music files, documents and literally anything they want in their mailboxes and not worry about it :)

The History of Mozilla Firefox: From Phoenix, to Firebird, to Firefox

Here's an interesting article on todays's Firefox got to where it is - its features broken down version-wise.

See article - From Phoenix, to Firebird, to Firefox