My average day has me logged in and working from about 6 different computers. Some are Linux, some are Windows and one is a Mac. Up until now, on all of these machines, I had separate different browser favourites\bookmarks, passwords, histories, preferences histories etcetera, and if I needed a bookmark or whatever on when computer when I was on another, I’d have to remote control or walk there to get it. Until now that is. Mozilla Weave has changed all that and now I have the same settings/history/bookmarks on all of my machine on all 3 operating systems. Best of all, it’s a free service!

What is Mozilla Weave I hear you ask? Well, think of it as an online service that stores your browser details in an encrypted state on one of Mozilla’s servers and you can access that data using the weave browser extension installed into as many different Firefox browsers as you like. In my case, my 6 different Firefox installs over Linux/Mac/Windows all have the weave extension installed and configured to use the same weave account, and as a result all of them now have the same browser details.

Case in point is this post, I’ve never posted to htmlfixit.com from this computer before, but because this computer and my home computer both have weave installed, this computer “remembered” the post address and the user-name and password to log in.

This is the way things are destined to move, all your data available all the time from anywhere. I’m a fan.

Sadly, the majority of Australians are sheep I think. (which is probably why Kiwi’s love it here).

When the Port Author massacre happened in Australia, our politicos took the public outrage as a good excuse to ban nearly all defensive or offensive weapons in Australia. People still get shot, only now the criminals are the only ones with guns and other weapons, and the police get to investigate our murders rather than justify our self defense. We’re not even allowed pepper spray for crying out loud! Retires getting beaten up in their own houses are becoming almost weekly news stories simply because there is no danger anymore to the criminals.

Now, in another show of rampant zealotry, Our current Labor government is not only planning on making ISP’s filter all of their traffic to restrict us to looking at only that which they deem suitable, but now it seems they plan to force all ISP’s to inspect all their traffic looking for possible copyright infringement so they can do the movie and music industry’s jobs for them.

Will someone please sack that idiot Stephen Conroy before we end up living in the Labor governments version of Taliban Afghanistan? I’m starting to wonder if this guy is actually being subsidised by movie and music companies. Just about every time he opens his mouth, it seems to cost us another right or freedom. Perhaps it’s time we got ourselves a constitution so the personal preferences of our transitory politions have less chance of becoming laws. More

Another example of Australian Stupidity is asking our government to push ahead with the emissions laws that just got knocked back. People, it’s sad but true that the cleanest large scale viable power generation we could have at this time is Nuclear, and Australia has backed away from that in fear. So telling our politicians to clean up our atmosphere is going to have only one real result. Low income people will suffer. Why? Well because the government doesn’t really have any new tech to roll out, they don’t have any new power generation methods or anything that could actually help the root of the problem. All they can do, is make it more expensive to process power and manufacture products.

Now what do companies do when their costs go up? Why they up their prices to consumers of course. So, your power bill goes up a thousand or so dollars a year, the power company pays the government the extra money they took from you, and business goes on as usual. Power usage won’t change much, and the government gets to look “green”, just for rooking the moronic sheep we call a populace.

People… The only net effect of these emission trading schemes is to make your life harder and take your money. There is no new technology or cheaper power options, it’s all about making it too expensive for you to use the power you do now (regardless if you already use the minimum you can already). That’s it! That’s all they government can do. Of course they can’t tell you that or you’d reject outright it so it’s shrouded in vaguarities and catch phrases to make it seem green. But wake up people, get a clue! This isn’t going to hurt the companies in question much, they will either get subsidised, or pass on the cost to us, or both. This is going to hurt our pockets and if you don’t believe that, your a fool.

So next time the government tells you how wonderful they are for pushing emission trading schemes, remember that what that actually means, is to make your life harder and much more expensive in the hope that you won’t be able to afford your current lifestyle and will therefor use less power.

According to Informationweek, IE8 has been out for only a very brief period, and yet many early adopters have already changed back to IE7. They also say that IE is now down around the 67% mark in overall popularity thanks to Firefox and Safari.

Makes for interesting reading and highlights again why you should never code your site in browser specific language.

It seems that not all of the users of Firefox 3 were previous users of Firefox 2 upgrading to the newer version. Prior to the release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla browser had roughly 48% of our browser marketshare, making it the clear leader. Post Firefox 3 release, our Mozilla Firefox usage is up to nearly 65%. It remains to be seen how this trend shows up on other sites but it’s looking good for Firefox to make up some significant ground overall. We’ll know more not long after the end of July.

In less than 24 hours, the latest release of Firefox has been downloaded more than 8 million (8000,000) times.

So far the reviews have all been positive, and while many themes and extensions are not yet available for 3, many have already been ported over and more are available every day. Additionally the default theme for Firefox 3 is much more eye catching than the corporate looking (read: boring) theme of Firefox 2.

Testing here at HTMLfixit.com over the release candidates and the final release show it to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox 2 to load and to render, even on sub standard computers. It also doesn’t significantly increase it’s memory use over time as Firefox 2 did. The list of new and improved features is as long as your arm and has been detailed on dozens of sites so I won’t go into it here.

Interestingly Firefox 3 already accounts for nearly 10 percent of HTMLfixIT’s traffic, which goes to show that a good many of our techie visitors already know about it.

It’s been about 5 years since I released the first advx counter, so much has happened in my life that I had a hard time making room for the next version of the counter, but I finally got there.

There is a ton of new stuff in this release candidate, the following are just a few:

– Up to date browser and OS detection.
– Significant bug fixes and improvements throughout.
– Navigation changes include first/last/next/previous links when displaying large
volumes of stats rather than displaying all in one page.
– Search engine bot detection.
– Non JavaScript browser detection.
– Much better file locking and error reporting routines.
– Display collected URL strings encoded to stop XSS problems.
– Detailed displays are in alternating colour codes to aid readability.
– Updated country of origin library.
– Aided install. The script can check all of its required files locations and permissions and report problems.

This is a release candidate, but it is a fairly stable one as it’s been running endlessly behind htmlfixit.com for over a year.
Please try the newly upgraded demo to see what’s different. (Keep in mind that the actual statistics displayed in the demo are fake and fairly old except for a couple I added to show Firefox 3 and vista/ie8.)

Those of you with the current ADVX counter, can upgrade to the new RC just by overwriting the old files with the new. This
upgrade is of no use to people without the old ADVX counter because the upgrade doesn’t come with the configuration files
required to get it working. (you use your old ones unchanged)

The new advx counter 2.00 upgrade can be downloaded here. and the instructions are included in the zip file.

Anyone wishing to report an error or bug, please use the forum listed in the menu to the left. Assuming nobody finds any show stoppers, this release candidate will become the final 2.00 version in a week or two.

Robert Scoble is a fun act to follow. He looks at things and tries them out. He pushes and pulls and isn’t afraid to look silly for trying. He recently tried a script to export his friends from facebook into a Plaxo contacts list. Facebook promptly suspended his account!

Welcome to the club Robert. I was banned as well. My reason? I didn’t use my real name. When I joined (and I must say I really don’t get facebook at all. It seems a waste of time to me) it told me I had to use my real name, so what did I do? I used “My Real Name” as my user name. They didn’t like that apparently and thus banned me.

Here is the funny part — I guess it’s funny — they didn’t bother to tell me I was banned. I found out when I went there and tried to log in. I lost all three of my friends I had gained! Terrible.

Facebook is entirely free to set the terms of service it wants. It CAN require that you use your actual name (in retrospect when it said you had to use “your real name” I guess they were speaking other than literally. They CAN prohibit you from scraping data with an automated script like Robert was doing. That does not bother me, hey they own the system.

I have two issues however with facebook:
1. I would think it prudent of them to give some advance warning. They apparently did in Robert Scoble’s case, but they did not in mine. I was simply banned and gone. Even in his case, he was presumed guilty until proven innocent I guess you might say. They banned first and didn’t investigate before doing so.
2. They need a reasonable and fast way for you to reinstate if you are interested after committing a sin. In my case, my email address is apparently still banned and several emails saying okay, release my email so that I can register under my actual name have simply gone unanswered and tries to use the address over a period of time show it still banned (I have not tried it lately).

Obviously many people apparently do get facebook. Sure I like finding people I have lost touch with via facebook (something I do now on a new account registered under an unrelated email address — geez like who doesn’t have 103 email addresses anyway), but the method of conversation, this whole write on a wall things, it all seems disjointed to me.

My other and greater concern is with this whole concept of spending great time and resources putting information, contents, thoughts, contact lists, etc. on a third party site in their complete and unfettered control. Doing so causes me pause. There is a trend this way in business and personal things, but what to do for disaster recovery? I guess Robert will find out. In my case, I just said hi to my three friends the next time I saw them. If I cannot back it up, I don’t waste much time on it.