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.

On June 20th Windows XP has done it again — updated with service pack three (SP3) as commonly called. One of the things I dislike about it is that it doesn’t clearly state what it is. For example, many people I know refuse to download the Malicious Software Tool (link) from Microsoft as they feel it phones home too much information. You need to study a long time and ultimately assume that this update doesn’t somehow include that tool.

I find it annoying that if you hit decline on download Malicious Software Tool, it goes away only for the current version and the next time they update it … well you need to decline it again.

So if you were smart enough to downgrade from Windows Vista or if you were really smart and never updated in the first place, I guess it’s time for an update.

We apologize for our recent absence from the web. Our old server had a rather catastrophic failure and I had to setup a new one to replace it. Luckily our backups are up to date so everything should be here, but a heap of stuff won’t be working till I get the details sorted out. We have just moved from CENTOS 4.5 to 5.2 so it’s more than a restoration.

Bear with us, we’ll get there eventually.

UPDATE: Everything should now be as it was before the old server took a dive except that now everything is newer.
The W3c validator is up to version 8.2 and several other packages as well.

When you use Data Validation (Data/Validation/List, then =RangeName), I find it very helpful to be able to specify a dynamic range for the drop down because you may later add additional items to the list. It is fairly “easy” to do I guess.

I found this site most helpful on this topic. You simply need to specify a range using the explanation made there. Is it cryptic and hard to type? Yes.

Insert/name/define, type in a name, then use this:
=OFFSET(Data!$B$2,0,0,COUNTA(Data!$B:$B),1)

That would start in column B2 (very common place to start if column a contains labels and top row contains labels. There are basically three things you need to change as you go over a column at at time, the three $B’s.

Hope that is helpful to someone else because I find it confusing every time I use it for the first time in a while.