Oh wow, who saw that coming. In 2009, it just seemed the browser I met with the same dull logo would stay with it forever. Well, lucky us, our docks and task bars will stop being poluted with the crappy red O logo starting Opera 10.

I really like the new O. It still stands out like a sore thumb my Mac’s dock crowd of icons for its rash color and lack of complexities, but alass, a bit like that new Firefox logo nobody saw (yup, they actually changed the colors and depth a bit since 3.5), it’s better, only in this case, way better.

Not withstanding the browser itself, the designers (Ian Hickson I think) at Opera Software are doing a good job with Opera 10. It’s coming out a neat browser, although the lack of native looks is truly exuberating. Mind you, Apple does a so so job at making its components follow a real standard look, but the delicious generation style is at least more thourough on OS X apps than it is for its Windows counterparts.

I don’t think I need to mention Quicktime X, Apple’s Snow Leopard design error. Whoever let that go through has my dearest wishes of culpability for his incredible lack of taste and capacity to follow norms! In all kindness of course.

Alright, so much for the cheery title, but I’m impressed. What could have been a limited pre-order price is now the official price of the OS. You know, that’s kind of amazing. While Microsoft is offering its latest OS for a couple of hundreds, mind you the Ultimate version is super expensive, no withstanding the stupid upgrade prices that should have been the standard prices, Apple is offering a complete legal non-upgrade copy for 30 bucks US (or 35 if you live in Canada like me).

I pre-ordered. I know, some people talk about “whether you’re gonna buy it or not”. But why wouldn’t you? For 30 bucks, minor upgrade or not, it’s amazing. In fact, Windows 7 is a minor upgrade too, so their exhuberant price is almost insulting.

Boo for Microsoft for this at least.

Tweet something you like, I understand.

Post an update on Facebook about something you like, I understand.

Aggregate with FriendFeed, I understand.

Post original content on your blog, I understand.

Digg something, I understand.

It all makes sense, but retweeting doesn’t. I mean, oh god, do I really want my followers to read back the things I subscribed to? No, this is like spam. Apparently some people just don’t get it. At least FriendFeed does. They show me stuff the people I follow liked. That makes sense, and it’s a “like” button, not an RT @blabla OMG SUPER SPAM IN MY INBOX WITH PLENTY OF ##### TAGS. And since Facebook bought FriendFeed, that’s going to get even better.

I’m getting sick of Twitter.

I read this article this morning: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/apple-is-evil-youre-all-fanboy.html

I agree, the Apple way of doing things isn’t the best, but in the end, nobody cares about what geeks say. What they care about is the quality of the product. Let’s take the Smart Phone market for example.

Windows Mobile sucks.
Android uses too much RAM for its first phone.
The Palm Pre has sucky hardware.
And the Blackberry Storm royally sucks, is slow, and what not.

Oh, and none of those do gapless playback of their music.

But the iPhone does, and the iPhone doesn’t suffer from any of the things mentioned. It has great apps and is popular. Google Voice? Well, I don’t care, we don’t even have that in Canada. The iPhone just works. It’s faster, it doesn’t lag while making a f****** call or trying to view emails, etc.

It’s kind of the same for Mac OS X. It’s a solid OS and the computers you buy with it actually work (unlike those crap 600$ PCs people buy everyday). Microsoft is selling its new Windows 7, the full version (Ultimate), at like 350$, with no upgrade price. And then Apple tells me they’ll give me Snow Leopard for 30$ as an upgrade! OMG, will I buy Windows 7, no! Do I care about Ultimate, YES I do, Apple gives more than Home Premium and the only way to match it is with Ultimate. Home Premium is stupid! No multi-language support? Man, it feels like 2001 Windows XP, geez…

And god knows I’m not an Apple fan-boy, I do hate a lot of things about what they do, but they make the best products, as long as you can bear with their little things (like being stuck on iTunes), end of debate.

You know the Quick Connect thing on FileZilla? Is it clogged up? Do you wish you didn’t have to start over and erase everything? Your wish has come true. Follow the instructions bellow. All you need to know is a bit of XML, but it’s so easy it’s not very complicated to figure out.

Windows XP

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\your_user_name

Once there, click in the address bar and append the following to what’s already there: \Application Data
Which should result in this: C:\Documents and Settings\ETLEVESQ\Application Data

Double-click on the folder named FileZilla.

Open recentservers.xml with your favorite XML editor (that could be as simple as Notepad which is located in Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad)

And there you have it, the whole list of your servers. To add or remove servers, simply edit the XML by adding and removing entire “sets” of . XML is case sensitive.

Example, how to add a server:

Before:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<FileZilla3>
    <RecentServers>
        <Server>
            <Host>your_ftp_host.com</Host>
            <Port>21</Port>
            <Protocol>0</Protocol>
            <Type>0</Type>
            <User>your_user_name</User>
            <Pass>xxxxxxx</Pass>
            <Logontype>1</Logontype>
            <TimezoneOffset>0</TimezoneOffset>
            <PasvMode>MODE_DEFAULT</PasvMode>
            <MaximumMultipleConnections>0</MaximumMultipleConnections>
            <EncodingType>Auto</EncodingType>
            <BypassProxy>0</BypassProxy>
        </Server>
    </RecentServers>
</FileZilla3>

After:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<FileZilla3>
    <RecentServers>
        <Server>
            <Host>your_ftp_host.com</Host>
            <Port>21</Port>
            <Protocol>0</Protocol>
            <Type>0</Type>
            <User>your_user_name</User>
            <Pass>xxxxxxx</Pass>
            <Logontype>1</Logontype>
            <TimezoneOffset>0</TimezoneOffset>
            <PasvMode>MODE_DEFAULT</PasvMode>
            <MaximumMultipleConnections>0</MaximumMultipleConnections>
            <EncodingType>Auto</EncodingType>
            <BypassProxy>0</BypassProxy>
        </Server>
        <Server>
            <Host>your_2nd_ftp_host.com</Host>
            <Port>21</Port>
            <Protocol>0</Protocol>
            <Type>0</Type>
            <User>your_user_name</User>
            <Pass>xxxxxxx</Pass>
            <Logontype>1</Logontype>
            <TimezoneOffset>0</TimezoneOffset>
            <PasvMode>MODE_DEFAULT</PasvMode>
            <MaximumMultipleConnections>0</MaximumMultipleConnections>
            <EncodingType>Auto</EncodingType>
            <BypassProxy>0</BypassProxy>
        </Server>
    </RecentServers>
</FileZilla3>

Windows Vista, 7, Mac OS X and Linux coming soon!

I had the very stupid idea of trying a registry cleaner yesterday. It’s a new product from Comodo, the makers of a lot of free security tools for your computer, and very crappy ones at that, as well as a provider of SSL certificates.

First of all, never use a Registry Cleaner. It’s stupid, won’t really give you any performance boost, and may crash your computer. But some are worse than others, for instance, Comodo. Their security cleaner claims to be “100% safe”. Well, it certainly isn’t. First off, it makes wild guesses at removing stuff from the registry and backs it up so you can revert. Once it’s done, it restarts your system and then asks you if everything is working OK. If not, you can revert. If yes, it DELETES THE BACKUP. WTF!? What is wrong with them. Oh right, as if your system was right just after rebooting. What if the system doesn’t even boot anymore already?

Well, how stupid I am for having clicked yes. In any cases, the computer ran fine, and not an ounce faster, even thought Comodo had supposedly deleted, and not fixed, thousands of bad registry entries (an important aspect of registry cleaners yes, the delete, they don’t fix… well, most of them), mostly from software I had uninstalled in the past. But this morning, my computer refused to log in and just hanged there.

Oh well, so long for registry cleaning on this retched old Windows XP machine at work.

Luckily, Safe Mode and System Restore exist. Just reboot and press F12 at BIOS and it should bring you in the window where you can choose to boot in safe mode. Once booted, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Restore and voila! You can restore it to an earlier date when it still worked. You don’t lose work, just software you have installed/uninstalled and settings you may have changed (can’t say specifically, it varies a lot but usually it’s just enough to fix things).

Although I haven’t seen any system more unstable than Windows, I haven’t seen any system more fixable than Windows since XP got out. Things have changed though, and I’d be ready to say Windows 7 is as stable, if not more, than some of the UNIX systems I use. NT 6.1 is awesome.

This is a major hindrance in the English language amongst people who don’t quite master it. Amazingly it’s my second language… Anyway, a lot of people wonder when to write “a” and “an”.

First off, they are both the same thing. There’s absolutely no difference in meaning between “a” and “an”. It’s simply a pronunciation-related particularity of the language.

Just pronounce it out loud and you’ll know it looks weird:
- A flower
or
- An flower

I don’t know how more obvious it could be, pronouncing the N and then the F is simply awkward. So just remember this simple rule, there can never be two consonants or vowels in a row.

An flower and a alligator don’t work because there’s N and F following each other (2 consonants in a row) and A and A following each other (2 vowels in a row).

There’s also the plural trick. Look at the following:
1. “The flowers like the Sun.”
2. “The flower likes the Sun.”

That’s correct, however the following isn’t:
3. “The flower like the Sun.”
4. “The flowers likes the Sun.”

Case 3 is actually particular in that it is an incomplete sentence, however not an incorrect form. If the intent was to say the the flower likes (as in loving) the Sun light, then the form is wrong, however, by completing the sentence as follows it could be right: “The flower, like the Sun, has a nice yellow color.”

See how without the S at the end of like, the verb takes a comparative form. That’s why the S is there.

Case 4 is a major mistake, and an easy one to make because it doesn’t sound entirely wrong. However, don’t use it, it makes absolute non-sense. However, the following is correct: “The flowers, like the Sun, have a nice yellow color.”
The whole meaning is changed just by the comma in this instance.

If you have to have a trick to remember, think that there’s always only one S if it’s a verb. Here’s another example:
“He makes this happen all the time.”
“They make this happen all the time.”

This one might be a bit more obvious, as “they makes” sounds more incorrect than “the flowers likes”.

Google Docs, Google’s own online suit of document editing tools that competes with Microsoft Office, has seen tremendous success. Well… tremendous success amongst techies maybe, Microsoft still has 95% of the Office market. But in any cases, a lot of people in the tech industry seem to think that Google Docs signs the end for Microsoft Office. I know, I did too.

However, with Microsoft’s soon-to-be free online Office, Google Docs isn’t so great anymore. Docs also has a major flaw, it doesn’t have a format. A docs document is essentially a jumble of non-compliant HTML, and there’s no way to export a Google Docs file accurately. In fact, the closest thing you can get is the HTML export format, but since HTML is so… especially jumbled like that… unstable, it often doesn’t keep its original format (something breaks).

For a lot of Docs users, this isn’t a problem. Arguably, why would you want to export your document, can’t you just share it? Sure, but what if you want to distribute your document for anyone to use? You won’t “globally share” your document. What if you want an offline copy? Google’s offline feature is dependent on Gears’ syncing, not an actual offline file. Yes, you could use PDFs, but PDFs can’t be edited.

Is this a major problem really? If sharing is available, does saving to a file really matter? Arguably it does not, but the whole file format thing brings up this: How does Google’s HTML-based Docs compete against a complete format such as OOXML (Microsoft Office’s ISO standard document format introduced in 2007). Microsoft promises accurate representation of its documents no matter where they are on Office 2010. That means a Word .docx for example, will be just a like a PDF, but editable, and it will display exactly the same Online, on the desktop and on your mobile. That’s really powerful.

And even if Google was to bring its own format, they’re not there yet. In  just a few months, Microsoft will release an Office suite that spans Online, Desktop and Mobile environments, with an ECMA and ISO compliant file format that is accurately represented across platforms. Not to mention Office’s superior editing capabilities (it’s like comparing 1990 software with 2010 software), if anything, Google Docs is going to be playing catch-up in a short while.

I’d like to see Microsoft doing the same kind of turn-around with Internet Explorer.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/081309-microsoft-ie8-browser-security.html?page=1

Hit the link and find out that amazingly, IE 8 comes out on top in phishing protection, not surprisingly Firefox is 2nd just barely tailing behind IE and even less surprising is Safari’s 2% catch rate… it’s almost a given. Maybe you have to be more intelligent to browse the Internet with Safari.

In any cases, I’d like to believe IE 8 was really that good, but that research was sponsored by Microsoft. Every research sponsored by Microsoft has given results favorable towards IE. Anyone remember the IE-8-is-as-fast-as-other-browsers research sponsored by Microsoft, well no, done by Microsoft in fact I think? That was loads of crap. Apparently the fact that IE 8 is NOTICEABLY slower, that means you can SEE it, was unexplainable and proven wrong by this test, I disagree.

So, is this whole phishing filter thing loads of crap? Actually, it isn’t. It makes a lot of sense. Safari has just had a phishing filter installed, almost as an excuse, because it didn’t have one at all before. Apparently Apple thinks you’re secure because you’re on a Mac so it doesn’t need a phishing filter, but no, really, they didn’t say that. IE 7 was the first browser, if not the second, with a phishing filter integrated and Microsoft has been very aggressive on this front. Firefox, well, you know the drill, community power. Opera, not really impressive, but still amazing considering the minimalistic amount of statistics they must be able to gather.

The only thing is Chrome got only 26% of successful catch rate. That’s pretty disappointing and very surprising in fact for a browser coming from a company that scans the whole web.

However, the real question is, does it matter? I found it doesn’t, it never really did.

No matter what the browser, every new phishing site in my spam mail is never blocked. Takes a while to have it blocked, so the whole anti-phishing attempt is useless. The risk is there, but the real problem is user education, not the browser. I’d worry more about exploitable security holes too. If you go on a schetchy web site and get infected while on IE because of a security flaw while Firefox could have saved you, phishing has nothing to do with it.

But back on track with the User Education thing. IE 8 does one thing better than every other browser; that is URL highlighting.

Example!

Regular URL: http://paypal.xbx22.com/php?id=38
IE 8 URL: http://paypal.xbx22.com/php?id=38
Chrome URL: http://paypal.xbx22.com/php?id=38

So, if you’re like me you don’t have to look twice to know it’s a fake URL (just an example btw). However, take a look at what IE does, it highlights only the main domain name. How brilliant! It now becomes super obvious for any user that the site they are on isn’t really the site they should be on. Chapeau to the IE team.

However, take a look at what Chrome does. I’m surprised they didn’t fix this yet. How stupid can you be. They highlight the URL, but the complete URL with the subdomain too. That’s like saying “look, in fact you’re on PayPal too!”. It was one of my biggest complaint about Chrome when it came out and they didn’t fix that trivial thing. It’s stupid, it’s just f****** stupid and IMO even worse than not highlighting the URL at all.

Another big complaint I have to make about Chrome is the fact that when you type the address, it stays grayed out. How stupid, I want to see the address while I type it. At least IE 8 acts the right way on that => removes the highlight when you type.

Great! We’ve once again determined Chrome is faster but more stupid. Welcome to the story of Microsoft vs Google, Better & Slower vs Stupid & Faster.

Admittedly you’ve seen this: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/i-can-now-make-friendfeed-as-ugly-as-i-want/

But turns out I haven’t. Why? Because I pay for Dictionary.com and don’t get to see the crappy ads. However crappy the ads are, the service is great (reminds me of Facebook). I’m not against doing a vendetta against people who think bigger-than-life advertising is a good idea, but  I’m wondering, where else to go for a good Online English Dictionary?

It’s only 20$ per year over at Dictionary.com and with that they’ve even got audio pronunciation of each word and everything, not to mention how functional the site is without the ads.

On the other hand, IGN.com is pure crap with their subscription thing. Having opened almost every of their exclusive section to non-paying people, I don’t know why I’m still paying for them. HD videos I can get on GameTrailers.com? I don’t know… but paying and enabling “disable ad” with it having no real effect what-so-ever is a pretty downer.