Tired of javascript resizing your browser windows without so much as a please? Well I was and I happen to run Firefox (the greatest browser on the planet). A quick google turned up this article which happens to mention a feature of firefox I didn’t know about, stopping any javascript that tries to resize your browser window. Combine this with Tabmix plus and you can force any javascript that opens pop-ups to open them in new tabs rather than new windows. I’ve always found Firefox extremely slow opening new windows in comparison to tabs.
In other news, the iphone rumour mill is kicking up a notch. Now the phone is no longer vapourware, every single blog and his dog is speculating about Apples new phone. Somewhere it was even referred to as the Jesus Phone which deeply amuses me.
One of the things that seems to be worrying geeks the most is that Jobs has said the phone will be locked down so that you can’t develop third party applications for it. His reasoning is that the iphone is just that, a phone not a computer. He suggests that if people do develop third party apps then a situation could arise where people start phoning Apple when something goes wrong with their phone because they loaded a third party app.
I personally don’t buy this explanation because for years now there have been smart phones which people have developed a variety of applications for. I also personally think that it won’t be long before people are hacking their iphone so they can make their own widgets and third party apps. Also, as others have pointed out flash works on the iphone (as it uses safari) so with that in mind you can develop a whole host of interesting flash apps you can access via a browser.
Miranda IM is a great instant messenging client but it’s one s o b to learn to use. The learning curve is in part due to the lack of documentation, but the worst part has to got to be the extremely fragmented plugin community. Only today I learnt about AvatarService.dll. For months my buddy avatars haven’t been updating theirselves except if I manually refresh them. Avatar Service actually does this job automatically in Miranda.
Like I said, Miranda can be a bugger but I still love above all else. It’s certainly heads above Trillian, which I still think is a marvellous client. I found an excellent site recently for Miranda users. Miranda-Vi (links to my profile) allows you to upload your version info for your miranda client. As you can see from my profile it tells you what version of Miranda you’re running, what plugins and what versions they are. More than this though it lets you compare your profile to others. This becomes useful when it shows you that your particular version of a plugin is old, compares to Joe Bloggs. It will also usually give you a link to the latest version of that plugin. As I’ve said before the Miranda plugins community is very fragmented, but this helps bring everything to a central place and keeps you up to date. Don’t forget though you will need to have the Version Info plugin installed to output your Miranda stats.
In site news, you might notice a new thing on the sidebar, my most recently listened to tunes. Due the magic of Ajax it will refresh them even without you having to refresh the page itself. How utterly exciting. I need to clean up the formatting though, as it’s bleeding through onto the border.
After having struggled through installing Horde I finally sorted out all the kinks. Pity it wasn’t worth the effort. It’s frankly clunky and badly designed, although I can see that some aspects of it could be quite powerful. Really I am looking for a Calendar I guess. Obviously gcal is wonderful, but google haven’t got back to me about running a local version on my PC so I will have to find another solution.
I find it deeply disappointing though that the mozilla foundation haven’t made more of an effort developing a decent PIM to go with Firefox. Firefox might be their flagship product but they really need to give us Thunderbird users some love. They released Lightning, a calendaring app for Thunderbird but compared to iCal or gCal it’s taking baby steps at version 0.3.
In other news, The Pirate Bay is trying to buy Sealand. It’s unlikely to happen as it’s dependent on donations and Sealand is big bucks but it’s good to dream. They’ve also said that if they can’t get it they’ll get an Island instead, and anyone who donates will become an honorary citizen. I’d certainly park my pirate ship there if it ever happened. However I would probably chase people around with a big machete in a Lost stylee. I think it only appropriate.
I happened to watch Casino Royale last night. Daniel Craig makes a fantastic Bond, possibly the best I’ve ever seen. His character is almost an animal as he tears through the rest of the cast. As a representation of a younger Bond we see someone with an monster-like ego and ferocity which comes through so strongly that it becomes hard to find him attractive the way we find the older Bonds from earlier films (isn’t that a mouthful).
However as the film progresses we see Bond soften for the obligatory girl, but this girl’s special. Just as we learn how 007 gets those Double Ohs we also find out about the girl who would make Bond in the future so cold and distant from the possibility of falling in love again.
Casino Royale is the best Bond film in a long time, paring itself back to the bone to leave the grit and little else. My only disappointment is that I didn’t get to see it at a cinema.
