csp-mobile.com

Answer: By searching, naturally. You can’t google your personal Firefox settings–yet–but now you can natively search the Downloads, Add-ons, and Bookmarks Managers–no extra plug-in needed. Forgot the name of an image you downloaded? As long as you haven’t cleared your cache of them, type in JPG to see all downloads in that file format. Know you’re looking for a bookmark with the letter Q? That’s all it takes to parse that needle from the haystack. If you’re looking for a particular add-on, download, or bookmark but you can’t remember where you put it, the Manager for each of those categories comes with a search field. Unfortunately, they don’t support Boolean terms, but the search tools are still remarkably useful.

The plug-in you want for this is called Color Management, but it’s flagged as experimental. For the sure-fire config edit, type in “about:config” as you did in question one. Type “GFX” into the filter. For “gfx.color_management.enabled” the Value needs be set to “true”. Double-click on it to change it, and check out this example to see what a difference a little config editing can make.

Given the controversy surrounding this feature, there are sure to be more tweaks for it soon. If you’re looking to come up with one yourself, it’s not a bad idea to become a walking MozillaZine encyclopedia on the Firefox Config file.

If you have an FAQ you’d like answered or an answer you’d like to share, tell me in the comments below and I’ll compile them in a future blog.

The much-debated "awesome bar."

One of the best things it did in Firefox 2 was disable extension compatibility checking, and it continues to do that quite nicely. Be warned that not all your old extensions will work even with the compatibility feature turned off, but it went off without a hitch for TinyURL Creator–which hasn’t seen an update since 2007.

Search within your Bookmarks, Add-ons, and Downloads.

MR Tech Local Install has adopted a more descriptive name with a version upgrade for Firefox 3 compatibility. Now called MR Tech Toolkit, it’s still the power user’s all-purpose add-on. It comes with a Toolbar button for restarting Firefox, and can do just about anything–from modifying config behavior, to changing bookmark- and extension-saving locations, to disabling the throbber.

Joking aside, I actually like the new location bar. I was surprised at how fast it picked up my browsing behavior. If it’s not your thing, or you share a computer and want to avoid your browsing history revealed to all, you’ve got a few options to keep it from returning any results. Users can also replace it with a reasonable facsimile of the Firefox 2 location bar. To stop listing results, check out CNET’s Tom Merritt and his Insider Secret on one way to edit Firefox’s config file.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Use the MR Tech Toolkit add-on to enable Firefox 2 plug-ins in Firefox 3.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Barely two days old, Firefox 3 has already been downloaded more than 12.3 million times at the time of writing. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can grab it here for Windows, Mac, Linux, and a Portable Windows version.

So I’ve given you the Howitzer and the crowbar. For the concrete boots, check out the Oldbar extension, which keeps the location functioning–but as it did in Firefox 2. If the awesome bar is an obnoxious teenager, then Oldbar will de-age it back to the precocious, helpful child it used to be. Keep in mind that the algorithm running it is the standard one in Firefox 3–so you’ll get the same results list, just without all the extra drama.

Answer: Gloriously so, but caveat emptor: it might cost you in performance on huge images. However, if you’re a photographer, this is a must-use feature.

Question three: How do I find…?

Configure Firefox for color-managed images.

Question four: How do I get that incredibly cool plug-in from Firefox 2 to work in Firefox 3 if it hasn’t been updated?

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Answer: With another plug-in, of course.

The price of early adoption, even on a heavily-tested browser like
Firefox 3, is early questions. Here are four you’re likely to come across, and please add your own in the comments below. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Another config edit starts the same way, by typing “about:config” into the URL bar. No quotes, of course. Once you’ve gotten past the too-cute-for-words-so-I-won’t-even-mention-it warning, paste “browser.urlbar.maxRichResults” into the filter and hit enter. Double-click the integer and set it to 0. Wipe your cache, restart Firefox, and you’ll get to be “awesome” all on your own.

Answer: A Howitzer, a crowbar, or concrete boots should do the trick nicely.

Question two:
Safari supports color management, but can Firefox?

Question one: How do you kill the “awesome bar”?

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the music business. Imagine the kid who heard a one-hit-wonder’s single on the radio, then shelled out $18 for the full CD, only to find that the rest of the tracks are disappointing filler. Add DRM, which makes downloads unplayable on certain devices and under certain circumstances, and no wonder piracy is rampant.

A couple weeks ago, game developer Cliff Harris asked a simple question on his blog: why do you pirate my games? Then, he broke the responses down into several categories. Subtracting out the folks who view all intellectual property as theft or who admitted they’re too broke or cheap to buy games–two groups which will never be convinced to pay–he found that most respondents thought his games are too expensive and not good enough, and that the demos were too short for them to feel confident they were going to get a reasonable value for the buck. Adding DRM to games also alienated a small but very vocal portion of the gaming community.

While the industry’s taken a long time to get around to a response, it seems to be following a similar path as Harris: lowering prices (in the form of single-song downloads and big discounts on CDs through Amazon.com and other outlets), increasing the content available in free “demos” (MP3 downloads and streams), and eliminating DRM. As far as music quality goes, that’s a subjective debate, but at least there’s a larger selection than there was 10 years ago.

His response: better games, longer demos, no DRM, and (if the economics make sense) possibly lowering prices.

Did you buy this album? If so, how many times did you listen past the first song?

The whole thing is not really that far-fetched an idea. When lines started forming outside Apple Stores in New York long before the launch of the iPhone 3G, rumors circulated that it was actually a prank on behalf of culture jammers Improv Everywhere. It seemed more than plausible. Turns out the lines were real, due to rationing of the first-generation iPhones in anticipation of the still-unannounced 3G.

Regardless, it could be funny to see how an out-of-work comedian reacts to an overlong in-store activation process.

That’s what’s happened in Poland, where mobile phone operator Orange has admitted to Reuters that nearly two dozen stores in the country were manned with a line of actors in anticipation of Friday’s
iPhone launch.

But I certainly hope they got to keep the iPhones for free.

“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” the company told Reuters. The company has not said how many people were hired, how long they had to wait, or how they would be compensated.

In New York, some Apple fans were miffed that the first people waiting in line for the iPhone 3G were activists hoping to stir up publicity for a cause. But don’t you think they would’ve been even more ticked off if those first spots in the line were taken up by paid actors?

Dean Garfield, an MPAA executive, gave the following testimony, according to the court records: “We were going to get information about the location and identity of the people who were running Torrentspy, as well as information related to a general conspiracy and relationship between Torrentspy and a number of other prominent services including ThePirateBay.”

TorrentSpy’s attorney, Ira Rothken, said last August: “We believe that the MPAA, when it paid $15,000 for about 30 pages of e-mails, knew or should have known they were involved in purchasing something in a wrongful manner.”

Included in that heavily redacted legal filing was more detail about the kind of information the MPAA sought from Robert Anderson, who has acknowledged hacking into TorrentSpy’s e-mail system. According to TorrentSpy’s legal filing, when Anderson initially offered to sell information to the MPAA he promised much.

A federal judge threw out TorrentSpy’s hacker complaint last August, saying it was unclear whether federal wiretapping laws covered the interception of e-mails. On Thursday, TorrentSpy’s attorneys filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking that it reverse the trial court’s dismissal of the case.

TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent search engine that was driven out of business last March as a result of fighting a copyright suit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), is seeking another chance to argue that the MPAA wronged the company when it purchased information obtained from a hacker who had pilfered company e-mail.

Representatives from the MPAA have always said that Anderson had already obtained the information before offering it to them and told them he had obtained the TorrentSpy e-mails legally. The MPAA did not respond to interview requests.

Anderson wrote to the MPAA: “We can provide the names, address, and phone (numbers) of the owners of Torrentspy.com and Thepiratebay.org–along with evidence, including correspondence between the two companies.”

TorrentSpy may be gone but its attorneys continue to allege in court that the motion picture industry engaged in a spying campaign against the company as well as others, including the Pirate Bay.

It gives households points based on the total weight of what they recycle rather than throw away. Those points can be redeemed to purchase more consumer goods, like food and coffee.

The company has developed a novel business model to incentivize consumers to recycle more.

“I truly believe that while most people are focusing on biofuels and solar, recycling is on the cutting edge of clean technology–and RecycleBank is the future of recycling,” Steve Westly, managing partner of The Westly Group, said in a statement.

The series B round came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, RRE Ventures, Sigma Partners, and The Westly Group.

RecycleBank on Tuesday said that it has raised $30 million to increase its operations in the U.S. and expand into Europe.

So far, RecycleBank has gotten 40 municipalities in the northeastern United States to sign on, resulting in the diversion of 36 million tons of waste that would have gone to landfills or incinerated.

(Credit:
Apple)

Snow Leopard is expected next year, and 64GB flash memory drives like those found in the MacBook Air will be still very expensive at that point. And flash drives north of 100GB, as most hard drives are these days, are out of reach for just about everyone.

Key applications in the next version of Mac OS X could be smaller than they are in Leopard, according to one report.

Roughly Drafted reports, in a long list of features expected to appear in Snow Leopard, that Apple is working on reducing the footprint required by many of its key applications, such as iCal, Mail, and Preview. The report also says the size of the Utilities applications could be dramatically reduced, from 468MB to 111.6MB.

This could also make Mac OS more mobile-friendly. Apple’s operating system development is headed down two paths at the moment, for the Mac and the
iPhone. However, we know OS X iPhone and OS X Leopard have an awful lot in common, and if Snow Leopard has a smaller footprint it could extend battery life in a mobile device.

Apple discussed Snow Leopard in front of its developers two weeks ago at the Worldwide Developers Conference, but hasn’t said all that much about the next operating system in public. The company has said it plans to focus on improving the internal structure of the operating system rather than focusing on new features, specifically revealing plans to improve support for multicore processors and graphics chips.

One of the “under the hood” improvements that Apple might be planning for
Mac OS X Snow Leopard might involve a crash diet for key Mac applications.

Smaller applications could make Snow Leopard more snappy and more stable, as Apple prunes out unnecessary code and features. This would also make Snow Leopard more friendly for computers with solid-state drives, like the one found in the MacBook Air, Roughly Drafted suggests.

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Shorttext.com)

Webware reader Amy wrote in to let us know one of her favorite
Firefox plug-ins shortText just got updated with a handy new feature. It will now automatically go through any page you’re on and seek out any TinyURLs, converting them to the actual URL so you can see where the page links to.

If you want to accomplish a similar feat, there’s also a bookmarklet called Embiggen, which will do the same thing without you having to install anything. The key difference between the two is that shortText packs in a bundle of other features like letting you write Twitter tweets that are well over the 140 character limit and link all your posts up to a centralized page where you can keep track of replies more easily than on Twitter.

Any TinyURLs on a Twitter post or elsewhere on the Web will automatically be converted with shortText.

Further out into the future, Papadopoulos expects that the technology infrastructure industry will be similar to the energy industry. In past presentations, he has called this transition the Red Shift.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability.

Papadopoulos also laid out a map (see below) of the current universe of cloud computing in terms of increasing virtualization and consolidation across various categories: processor, operating system, language, and application services. Over time, the categories will fill out more especially as more languages and applications services or platforms rise up. Papadopoulos pointed to two Sun projects, Dark Star and Project Caroline. Dark Star is about software infrastructure designed to simplify the creation massively scalable online games, virtual worlds and social networking applications. Project Caroline is a hosting platform for developing and delivering Internet-based services. It’s not clear why the Sun research projects are positioned at the far right on the chart, and players such as Google, Joyent, and Rackable are missing.

Papadopoulos acknowledged that the nirvana of every customer or user in charge of their own data that lives in the cloud has challenges. Today, users cede control of their data to service providers like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. It’s not as easy for users to manage and move their data as it should be, which means users are generally stuck with the user experience and monetization schemes of the host sites. “It’s proprietary systems all over again,” Papadopoulos said. Over the last several years Sun has differentiated itself proprietary vendors, focusing on free open-source software and open standards.

Papadopoulos has predicted a “neutron star collapse of data centers,” meaning at some juncture it won’t make sense for businesses to build their own data centers. Instead they will contract for computing resources from hosting providers who bring “brutal efficiency” for utilization, power, security, service levels, and idea-to-deploy time.

There will be a grid of a half dozen very large cloud infrastructure providers and a hundred or so regional providers, Papadopoulos said. It will also look more like the banking world, he continued, with customers willing to trust the service providers with their private data as they do banks with their money. It’s a question of when, not if, this scenario will occur.

Higher up in stack developers have more targets and more freedom to innovate below it, Papadopoulos said.

(Credit:
Sun)

Click here for more from GigaOM on Structure 08.

SAN FRANCISCO–Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. “We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way,” he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Unfortunately, Microsoft updates the browser only once a month, and even then not all known holes in the browser will be plugged, as Michael Horowitz pointed out in his Defensive Computing blog last week (scroll down to read the updates).

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Click "View available updates" under the Install Updates button in Vista's Windows Update applet.

Check the updates you want to install. Look specifically for security patches for Internet Explorer. Once you’ve made your selections, click Install.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Check the Windows (and IE) updates you want to add and click the Install button.

Yet IE remains the preferred browser of nearly four out of five people surfing the Web. If you’re one of the Web majority, there’s one thing you can do to enhance your online security: Update to the latest IE release.

As with all Windows updates, you may want to wait a day or two after an IE patch is released before installing it. Then keep an eye on the tech-news sites for reports of update-related glitches. If all appears to be well with the update, add it to your system. Remember what they say about the pioneers being the ones with the arrows in their backs.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser in the world. This despite report after report calling the program less secure than Mozilla
Firefox, Opera, and other free competitors.

Even with Microsoft’s spotty update record, it pays to upgrade to IE 7, and to download and install all available security patches for that version of the browser. If you set Windows to download updates automatically but prompt you to install them, or to alert you when updates are ready to download (as I described in a previous post), click the update-alert icon when it appears in your system tray to open the Windows Update Control Panel applet. In Vista, choose “View available updates” in the right pane under the Install Updates button.

According to Net Applications, IE 6 accounted for more than 26 percent of the browser market in June 2008, while IE 7 was used by over 46 percent of all people on the Web. If your PC runs Windows 2000 or an earlier version of the OS, you can’t upgrade to version 7 of IE. Unless your boss insists that you use the older version of the browser on XP or Vista, you’ve got no excuse for not upgrading to the safer IE 7.

He added that in coming months, Microsoft will publish implementation notes for Open XML with the same kind of information.

For years, IT has struggled with how best to maintain the flow of data across heterogeneous environments without incurring data loss. Monoculture or no, customers often want to save documents in a variety of formats. This has not always worked to Microsoft’s advantage. In fact, last year, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency filed a complaint with the European Commission in which it alleged that Office 2007 would impede educational initiatives because it failed to natively support open standards, in particular, ODF.

Tuesday’s announcement concludes a pledge Microsoft originally made last spring to boost support for rival formats in Office.

Microsoft plans to open Office to other file formats, a move the company hopes will placate government and business concerns about document interoperability.

Rightly or not, the perception was that
Microsoft Office did not treat ODF as first class citizen.

Describing this as a step to foster greater transparency, Microsoft intends to document how it incorporated Open Document Format support into Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which is still in beta. That product is expected to ship sometime in the first half of 2009.

“That kind of feedback is why we built ODF support into SP 2,” Mahugh said.

Doug Mahugh, a project manager at Microsoft who deals with interoperability issues connected with the Office software suite, described the steps taken today within the broader context of disclosure, transparency, and format support.

(You can read the notes on how each element of the specification was implemented at the Document Interoperability Initiative Web site.)

“To get there, we found that it was not just sufficient to conform to a standard. We needed transparency about all the design decisions involved in getting to that standard…it was a way of pulling together lot of the things we were doing in interoperability.”