Technology Tales

In 2007, I set myself a challenging goal: post something new to this blog every day. Of course, it didn't happen quite like that. Therefore, for 2008, I'll be going for a less onerous one: a post every two or three days. That should mean that I don't run out of steam; pacing yourself to ensure that quantity doesn't dilute quality is a superb idea. Welcome to 2008.

The standard phishing detection that comes with IE7 really does slow things down when it comes to navigating web pages. In contrast, the option offered as part of Norton 360 is much faster. So much so that you hardly notice that it's there at all. When I restored IE7 on my PC and ran it for the first time, Norton asked me to be its default fraud detection and I was away from there. Norton 360 offers nothing for Firefox, my preferred and default option, but there may be plug-ins that address that need.

I finally had enough of internetnews.com's intrusive CPU-eating ads and remembered that there was a Firefox add-on for the job. I have snagged Adblock Plus and can vouch that for its effectiveness. It also works with AccuWeather.com, a site about which I complained a while back. I just wonder why I didn't thin of this earlier; it certainly beats what ZoneAlarm could do. Now, I see why its functionality has raised some hackles, but if advertisers didn't overdo it in the first place, there would have been no problems. Well, that's marketing for you... And yes, we do want the right to ignore ads.

Having had a pretty fallow summer when it came to ideas for this blog, I am now lucky to enjoy a flush of them. Also, because of my now established one post per day rule, I am currently writing my posts ahead of time so that you can be assured of something new every day rather than a load of stuff one day and nothing on the next. That works for me because I am largely a proactive blogger rather than a reactive one. As a result, I am not bothered by a need to break something before everyone else; I simply couldn't do that anyway; I have learnt that there are many others who can make a much better job of it. Nevertheless, I do get inspired by what's going on in the technology world, and it's just that I take my time over things before sharing with others; the chance for some additional consideration before a post goes public is a very useful one. And then there are my own explorations that surely will turn up more ideas.

I had a recent problem with InternetNews.com: its adverts were causing Firefox to lock up my CPU. While I do put my CPU through its paces, I'd rather that others didn't decide to do the same and with things that do not add a great deal of value. So it was time to set ZoneAlarm loose by cranking up its ad blocking to the max. There are occasions where exceptions are needed, and right-clicking on a domain name in the site list in the Privacy area allows you to relax things on a site by site basis. Obviously, you need to know the website well, but I don't ever remember having this sort of control with Norton Personal Firewall when I had it on my main PC.

No sooner have we passed the CS3 circus than Adobe and Corel start bringing out new releases of their consumer digital imaging software. This autumn has brought us Paint Shop Pro X2 and Photoshop Elements 6. I'll wait for the reviews, but I can't say that very much about the new Elements strikes me as making it a compelling upgrade and I definitely have left the PSP fold, even if the latest release seems to have some interesting features on offer. In any case, I am not sure who is going to upgrade their software on an annual basis. With so many other calls on my cash, I definitely am not of that ilk.

While I don't spend too much time looking at that statistics in Google Analytics, but I do find it useful to see what people come to see. Another thing that I keep on radar is the browser technologies that visitors are using. Screen resolution is a particular interest of mine. However, browsers and their versions are watched too, and I have spotted the ascent of IE7 from where it was; there appears to be a surge in recent times. While I am unsure as to the cause for this, it's definitely happening and Vista take up seems to have noting to do with it.

After sticking with Andreas09 for so long, I have been lured into using Prosumer instead. A spot of tweaking has turned it from a fixed width layout into something a spot more fluid. While it's more edgy than its predecessor, I intend to make things appear a touch more harmonious, to my eyes anyway, over time. The level of personalisation might be even greater, too, never a bad thing when it comes to standing out from the crowd. While on WordPress.com, I did try with Andreas09, but the greyness that I added got to me in the end and I stuck with a brighter scheme after moving the blog. We'll see how it all goes on from here...

I have taken what some might consider a retrograde step: I added code to insert my blogroll directly below the widgets section of my left-hand sidebar. The reason for this is reuse of the same ID; it causes my Firefox HTML Validation add-on to issue warnings, and so can hardly be standards-compliant. Ironically, in its native state, the blogroll functions take panes to ensure that each category has its own ID, only for the widgets functions to go and disregard all of this and assign the same ID for each category. To change this in the widgets code involves ploughing through loads of arrays (and functions) and is not something for which I have time when an easier solution is very much possible.

Recently, I posted about using mod_rewrite to block access to your images from all but the websites to which you want access to be available. Following so doing, I discovered that my FAVICON had disappeared from Firefox's address. As it turned out, it was easy to fix and that is covered in another recent post.