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Apparently it’s now officially called Firefox 2 and not two-point-o (2.0), so I’ve dropped the .0 from the title. :P

I usually use the shortcut keys ALT+I, ALT+B rather frequently at a forum I visit to get highlighted text in the post box to be italicised or bolded, but in Firefox 2, this shortcut keys no longer work by default. You now have to add the SHIFT key into the mix, so it goes ALT+SHIFT+I instead. If you don’t want to use the SHIFT key, you can edit two values in about:config (like for the close tab button previously):

Change:
ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Taken from MozillaZine forum.

As for other about:config tweaks, head over to this page and for other Firefox tweaks, check this guide out. ;)

      

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I’ve finally decided to switch to Google Reader permanently. I probably have been procrastinating in doing this for a long time since I’ve been using it for quite some time and am rather fond of it. :( Unfortunately, the incessant downtimes and also irregularities in feeds being updated recently was probably the final straw.

Google Reader seems to have fixed the scrolling bug with feeds only having 1 item and also the last item not marked as read which I previously encountered the last time.

Guess it’s pretty hard to compete with Google when the point is on reliability..

      

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CK was telling me that Box.net no longer have free signups, but that wasn’t the case when I tried. And so we both took screenshots..

Accessed from Melbourne, Australia:

Accessed from KL, Malaysia:

Apparently the signup page differs if you have an IP from Malaysia! I told him to try using ATunnel to verify that, and true enough, he was able to sign up. I guess bandwidth abuse by Malaysians is pretty rife..

      

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This upgrade was released a day or 2 ago, and I thought I’ll give it a shot at upgrading using apt-get’s distupgrade. The steps I used:

1. sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
4. sudo apt-get -f install
5. sudo dpkg –configure -a
6. Reboot.

Steps taken from Debian Admin.

The first step replaces all occurrences of ‘dapper’ with ‘edgy’ in the sources.list which has the list of repositories apt-get will use (e.g. I have mine pointed to my ISP’s FTP mirror instead), the next step updates the sources.list which is then followed by the upgrade. 5th and 6th step is to check that the process completes properly and the last step is pretty self explanatory.

Only issue I had with the upgrade was VMware Server stopped working, which I’ll probably have to reconfigure/reinstall it as I think some configuration stuff probably got overwritten.

Ubuntu’s documentation wiki has probably more comprehensive explanations on the upgrade steps as well as alternative upgrade choices.

      

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Was released earlier today, and have just upgraded all spherebox hosted blogs. :) You can get the changed files zip only here.

      

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One of the more obvious user interface changes in this version of Firefox is the position of the close button for tabs. Practically all other web browsers with tabs have tab closing buttons on each tab as opposed to Firefox’s choice of having it at the extreme right of the tab row up until now. With version 2.0, the default close tab button position is now on each individual tab.

This is probably a good decision in a way, but after such a long time of using Firefox, I’ve been too accustomed to the close button being there and would rather not have that change (I use the scroll button to close tabs nowadays, but selectively closing multiple tabs with the ‘x’ at the end is pretty useful). Fortunately there’s a setting which can be easily changed to accommodate the behaviour you want.

Here are the steps to have the close button back at same position as pre-1.5 days:

1. Type ‘about:config’ in the address bar.
2. In the filter textbox that appears below, enter ‘browser.tabs.closeButtons’.
3. Double click on the browser.tabs.closeButtons preference, and a message box should appear.
4. Change the value to ‘3′ and click OK.

And you’re back with the close button at the same position as before the latest upgrade! You can easily revert to the default Firefox 2.0 behaviour by changing the value back to 1.

Default:

After change of value:

Here are some other values you could use for that preference:

• 0 - Display a close button on the active tab only
• 1 - Display close buttons on all tabs (Default)
• 2 - Don’t display any close buttons
• 3 - Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)

browser.tabs.closeButtons values and explanations taken from MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

      

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Update: Now officially out with a restyled website as well!

Although not out officially via the main Mozilla Firefox site, it’s currently publicly available on the servers for you to download and get it installed!

If you’re interested in knowing the list of new features that comes with this version, check out this page.

Download here.

The latest version should be made available via the automatic software update function relatively soon.

      

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Since googling didn’t work the last time I tried to find a fix, I went through M$’s Windows Live Messenger’s newsgroup earlier today and actually found a fix to the problem I had! Here’s the fix which worked for me (Credit to Jonathan Yaniv for the steps below):

1. Go to Start, run, then type “regedit”
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\microsoft\MSNMessenger\Policies
3. Delete the key “contacts.msn.com”
4. Then, try launching Windows Live Messenger again.

Apparently the full uninstallation I did the last time did not remove any of the messenger registry keys (I forgot to check on that either).

I guess you could say this is probably one of the very few M$ software which I would gladly choose to use over other alternative software. :P Do try out the excellent Messenger Plus! Live extension if you’re already using WLM (adds heaps of features like tabbed chats, etc). Just remember to refuse the installation of the sponsor program unless you want adware/spyware installed on your machine. ;)

      

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My apologies if you’ve come here in hope of reading something decent, haven’t got much time as I’ve been working flat out on my final year software engineering project for the past 2 weeks or so which resulted in lack of sleep, proper food and getting sick. :(

The client handover presentation was 2 days ago which would’ve supposedly spelt the end of the project cycle, but alas, some rather critical bugs surfaced on the day itself. I’ve spent most of yesterday fixing those up (and more bugs that magically cropped up) and would probably spend some time tonight reverting changes to a ‘bugfix’ which was never a ‘bug’ in the first place and preparing the patch for delivery to the client tomorrow.

Once this is over, I will just have 1 last exam before I’m done with my undergraduate degree. If all goes well, I’ll be done with uni by the end of the year. Ah..

      

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Downloaded and installed the latest security and critical updates for my Windows Server 2003, restarted, and WLM decided to not sign on. The odd thing was that it was actually connected to the .NET Messenger service, but it just won’t load up my contact list nor sign me on (the messenger icon was still swirling around for more than 20mins until I decided to shut it off). No error codes whatsoever and neither did it timeout by itself.

However, WLM seems to run fine after I installed all the updates on my Windows XP laptop which makes it even harder to pinpoint the fault. Tried GAIM but it crashed the moment I added an MSN account and tried to sign on. So I’m back to MSN 7.5.

To top it of, I’ve got a very sore throat and it’s..

.. a scorching 36 degrees now! :(

If there’s anyone with similar WLM symptoms and have solved it, do let me know..

Edit: It’s now working again, check here for the steps to fix it.

      

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