This first tip comes courtesy of TheInquirer and is about a new scam involving Google’s new Gmail service. Basically you get an e-mail from someone purporting to be a Gmail admin asking you to log into your account, and providing a link. The link is not Gmail and if you follow the prompt, you end up giving them your user details.

Next, also from TheInquirer is the news that Sun and Microsoft have a deal going whereby Sun has agreed to help Microsoft start legal action over the Open Source OpenOffice.org office application suite in exchange for some cash and a promise from Microsoft that Sun is exempt from legal action themselves. Goes to show, you can’t believe anything Sun says about supporting Open Source software. Microsoft-watch have also covered this, and you can find their take here.

Yet again from TheInquirer, in short 90 percent of Chinese computers are infected by worms/trojans/virus’s. Perhaps the government should spend more time fixing that instead of finding new and inventive ways to block their people from seeing anything useful on the net.

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As Firefox is fast approaching the version 1.0 status, (a preview release of 1.0 is available now), the guys at Mozilla have created a new site to “spread the word” . Apparently Firefox 0.9 was downloaded nearly 5 million times and it wasn’t even classed as a final release.

The purpose of the new site is to encourage as many users as possible to test the 1.0 preview so that it can be as “clean” as possible before release.

Firefox is a fantastic browser, I’ve been using and following it since it was first released, and it has been my main browser for most of that time. I’ve found it to be faster, more secure, better looking and far more feature filled then any other browser on the market, and best of all, it’s totally free. Support these guys, they are doing their best to help you.

I’ ve written about the upsides to using Firefox, and the downsides of using Internet Explorer many times this year, and you can find many of those stories here, so this isn’t a ball I’ve just picked up to run with.

Note, I just clicked the “spread the word” link above and it directed straight to the Firefox download page (which makes sense I suppose), so for anyone wanting to see the SpreadFirefox site itself, the link is here, but I’d appreciate people clicking on the link or the image above as well, because it gives me brownie points when people do. (I’m not sure what that actually means, but it sounds good, so I’m giving it a go.)

Regards

Franki

When I am approached to design and write a new site, the hardest part of the process for me is to choose a colour scheme, my meagre talent lies in coding, not the artistic aspects.

A recent discovery of mine has alleviated this problem somewhat. This simple Javascript online tool allows you to choose a colour from a palette, and it will show you a heap of compatible colours in a mini page type display so you can see how they go together. This is not the first such tool I have seen, but it is definitely one of the best ones.

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The Incredibles — The Official Movie Website is up and running counting down the days til the movies release. If there is one thing I like better than Google, it is probably Pixar. I really enjoy so much of what they do, the hidden humor, the attention to detail, even in the early “films” they did, some of which I have as trailers/extras on dvd’s such as Monster’s Inc.

We have been tracking hits to our site using the best statistical hit counter we know of … ours … and we keep getting this unusual hit to this to one of our tutorials:
(hold your mouse over the link to see the url popup.)
HTMLfixIT box model hack tute. (via Google)

It appears that adding the ?sa=D&q= before an address, will transport on from a page at google to the specified page. So why are we getting these hits? I did find that the google blog uses this method for links contained in it. I presume it then counts the hit as an outgoing follow.

I wonder how long the googleblog will survive with publicly traded stock … and by the way, I am looking to buy exactly one share of google. I have yet to find out how.

First it was the US government telling people that it is a good idea to ditch Internet Explorer in favour of a more secure alternative, then Microsoft’s security boss accidently revealed that he had Mozilla Firefox on his PC, and now those responsible for German government online security are also recommending users change away from Internet Explorer for their own security.

Wow, at this rate even newbie’s will get the message soon. It is slowly happening though, checking the browser stats at W3schools shows that Mozilla usage has risen from 8 to nearly 18 percent since the start of the year. The same stats reveal that in that same period, Internet Explorer 6 usage has dropped 3 percentage points and Internet Explorer 5 has dropped by over 6 percentage points. Internet Explorer still has a pretty good lead, but it is eroding as the word gets out.

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It seems that Paypal is about to start fining people caught using their services for tasks that are against the Paypal usage policy. Basically, if you use Paypal to collect payment for adult content, gambling or the selling of uncertified pharmaceuticals, you can expect fines of up to five hundred (500) dollars.

News.com has the full story here.

Regards

Franki