Brian Fitzgerald

I have tried to use thunderbird for spans of days and weeks in the past to see if it could make me a convert and each time I have gone back to OS X’s Mail.app after getting frustrated mostly with Thunderbird’s sluggishness on the mac. In the past week, Mail.app has been starting to choke on me quite a bit and with a universal version of Thunderbird available I have decided to give it a go again. The universal version takes care of my speed complaints, leaving me with my other complaint – It’s Ugly. Thunderbird doesn’t look too bad on windows or linux, but on the mac, it is a gnatsy looking program. I wish that the folks at flock would consider creating a version of it.

Opera Software today announced the first public Beta of Opera 9. This version includes Widgets, small Web programs running in their own windows that are fun, easy-to-use and live on users' desktops. The Opera 9 Beta also features support for BitTorrent, a popular file downloading technology, in addition to an easy-to-use content blocker and thumbnail previews of tabbed sites.

Widgets, BitTorrent, content blocking: Introducing Opera 9 Beta

Firefox went universal binary with the 1.5.0.2 release and now Flock, in their continuous updates has started offering universals. I had drifted towards Firefox since it was working so much faster than Flock, but now I can return to what has become my favorite browser! WooHoo.

This is a long time after-the-fact but here is a pdf of the presentation that I gave at NDE a couple of weeks ago for those that wish to have it.

The Web Standards Project has been redesigned.

There are starting to be a LOT of sites focused on sharing videos. Here is a guide to many of them from publish.com.

Google has launched their new calendar service. I haven’t had time to mess with it yet, but it has a nice look to it and appears to be an easy place to create a calendar and subscribe to other calendars. There is a tour available right on the front page.

Toread is a new service that will let you easily email pages to yourself for later reading and easy searching. Set up a mail filter looing for the address that the pages come from and you have a fantastic page archive!

CSS Stylesheet on one of Microsoft’s sites contains styles such as “StupidIEWidthHack”, “StupidIEMarginHack” and “fix for the IE 1px-ooff margin error”.

Here’s a photo an astronaut on the space station took of this morning’s total solar eclipse.

Ruby on Rails 1.1 is out and getting great reviews with it's built in AJAX support and much-improved active record feature. Got to get back on track with learning it.

Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on Rocket Fuel (web2.wsj2.com)

That's right! 64 GB!! Only $5,000. Consider an entire bootable  drive that would fit in your pocket. Backup your drive to it. Put your tunes on it. 'Course you can get a couple times that amount memory for one to two hundred dollars.

BUSlink's 64GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive PRO 2 Series - Engadget

Adobe under construction | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

 World of Warcraft down all day, Blizzard has no ETA

A beautifully rendered 3d movie of Optimus Prime transforming.

Wired takes a walk down the memory lane of Apple’s 30 years of Operating System glory. Ah, Multifinder…

This is awesome. Somebody took the time to go through the cloud of web 2.0 sites available, categorize them and then rank and award them. If you are looking for inspiration for a site you are working on, look no further.

This looks like a good tutorial on writing it right.

Goowy provides an email and IM interface along with online storage. Great interface.

Interviewer: "Do you have an iPod?"

Balmer: "No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod."

 The Sleeping Giant Goes on the Offensive - April 3, 2006

Gearlog : Mac Os X 10.5 Likely To Have Virtualization, Windows Support

Flock keeps getting better and better. Besides already having one of the best browser interfaces, the latest builds of Flock have added a choice when ‘starring’ a site of sharing with everyone (via the social bookmarker of your selection) or only between your computers. In addition, in just creating this post, I see that they are starting to do some heavy refacing of the blogging window. If you aren’t on Flock, you’re missing out!!

A new video player that looks like a good competitor for the iPod should be here next month.

The RIAA said that ripping CD’s on to digital media devices was fair use. Now it seems they are changing their minds.

Mandolux has awesome desktop pictures.  Great images of beer and baseball. What else do you need?