[Thu Jun 28 14:07:10 CEST 2007]

Now, this could be an interesting development. PC Pro claims that Firefox 3 will team up with Google for offline apps. Ever since the mid-1990's I've always thought that the Web had the potential to unseat Microsoft from its throne (yeah, it's obvious that Bill Gates thought so too!), but for whatever reason the final moment has been delayed over and over again. It's a pity, because I think most users would benefit from a true open field. It's not the disappeareance of Microsoft that anybody is after, but rather a more enticing picture of the computer world. By the way, according to the same article, the next release of Firefox witll also make it easier for third-party extensions developers to synchronize bookmarks and history across different systems. Here is a good description published on Linux Weekly News:

The biggest new feature for users has not yet appeared in the browser. Places is a feature meant to unify bookmarks, history and RSS feeds, while providing a means to tag them to help organize them. In order to do that, FF3 is storing the Places information in an SQLite database. This database will also be available to Firefox Add-ons which can then offer other ways to view and organize them.

Using SQLite for bookmarks has been enabled for Alpha 5, with numerous warnings about making a backup of your bookmarks file before running it. Tagging, history and RSS feeds are still awaiting a UI before their storage in the SQLite database is enabled.

Yet another feature we've needed for a long time, although I find the security improvements even more interesting:

Security is another area where the developers are putting in significant effort. Providing users with feedback, about the security of a site, without overwhelming them with warnings and popups, is a difficult problem, but some interesting ideas are emerging. With fairly simple UI changes, user confusion can be reduced. Modifying the location bar to remove the "favicon" (which some malicious sites set to the lock icon) and to highlight just the domain portion of the URL can go a long way towards helping users determine what sites they are visiting. Mozilla is also working with Google to generate a list of sites delivering malicious content and FF3 will block access to those sites.

{link to this story}

[Thu Jun 28 12:05:07 CEST 2007]

Until now, I had never heard of VirtualBox, but it looks like a decent alternative to VMWare, and it's GPL'ed and totally free. The only problem (you knew there had to be one, right?) is that it doesn't seem to support so many guest OSes. It does work with the main ones (different versions of Windows and Linux, mainly), but its support for other OSes such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris is quite spotty. Even more interesting is the fact that Red Hat Linux 7, for example, isn't fully supported. Not sure what could cause it not to run on an environment where Red Hat Linux 9, for example, runs just fine. {link to this story}

[Wed Jun 27 16:08:15 CEST 2007]

I just came across an interesting MuttWiki that may prove useful to many other people out there. After several years using it, I've learnt to like mutt, especially for its versatility. However, as it tends to be the case, power comes at a price: let's just say that it's not the most user-friendly email client, which many people will definitely find to be an obvious understatement. Thanks to this Wiki I've found the answer to a couple of issues that have been nagging me for some time now: how to configure the program not to automatically jump to the next message when one has reached the bottom of the current message and pages down (use set pager_stop in the configuration file) and how to use a trash folder (well, this one I still have to try). {link to this story}