Finally back online. I denied access to my blog after reading about a worm infecting WordPress blogs. Seeing strange new users registered I shut down, and finally completed the upgrade. Now to turn the command history into a BASH upgrade script.

While I was overly enthusiastic about Safari 4 Beta, Chromium for Mac has better looking tabs.

First webpage loaded in Mac Chromium

Tabs in Safari 4, and even Firefox depending on the theme, don’t clearly show which is on top.  Tabs on Safari look alien, where Chromium’s tabs fit in nicely, and makes very clear which is active.

Alien tabs in Safari 4 beta

Wired’s article on the current state of Chromium for Mac OS X.

Try this in IE: Chrome Experiments (News.com)

I have to remember to allow the JavaScript.  Firefox has capable JavaScript, but I disable it with NoScript.  Richer stuff without Flash is great, but sites should still be functional without JavaScript.  Weather.com is just broken without JavaScript.

The nice thing about an economic downturn is low prices. Bestbuy is offering, advertising even, $400 laptop computers. On recent trips through BestBuy, I notice many laptops for $400. Not until recently have such been so readily found. Previously, the record low price laptop was around $450, but only with discounts, usually mail-in rebates.

RadioShack is offering a $349 netbook. The specifications are pretty fantastic. It is plenty adequate for running Windows XP and most software most people would run. Biggest drawback is the shrunken keyboard. Dell offers a Mini 12. most exciting about Dell’s Minu 12 is it’s like, 12 inches, and runs Linux. The important things about Linux are:

• the free software
• customiziation: striping the software to the essentials of email, web and xterm.
• the lightweight XFCE desktop environment.

The Dell Mini 12 seems great, but Dell’s chat support tells me the keyboard is the same size the as the Mini 10. Now, they are offering a 9 inch for $200. Typing is just horrible on such small keybaords. That is why Apple uses a full size keyboard and 13 inch screen in the MacBook Air.

I’m still waiting for the 12 inch $300 laptop. At this price I don’t expect much: email, web browser X and xterm. Battery life can be great with suffiently low performance. The RadioShack netbook mentioned above boasts a six-hour battery! How many hours do you get from your laptop?

Looking for the Midori browser, Google turned up

• Midori a classical violinist
• Midori liqueur US world Wiki

Other intriguing stuff on the Internet.

• Truck Vs Macbook Pro
• space station named Colbert. At least it’s not Coltrane.
• Sad. LoJack for Toddlers

I haven’t even tried Sarafi 4 Beta, but I think I could convert to it. Reading the description on CNN, it’s like Google Chrome but so much cooler, like the iPhone is so much cooler than Google Andriod. And AT&T Pogo. It pick up tab and popular sites features from Google. More importanly, it has Windows Native Look! I wonder if the keybinds will be like Windows or like Mac. Safari 3 was so alien on Windows.

Zoom features, both, text or whole page.

I wonder how it’s graphics intense tasks will perform on Windows. I’m sure coverflow history browser is stress the video cards on my Macs.

This excited, maybe I should just try it.

Washington Post quotes the White House comparing its technology to an Atari in contrast to the Xbox.

“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

The Atari is a thing of nostalgia and isn’t known for the ”Red Ring of Death.”  That same WikiPedia article lists many more technical problems with the Xbox.  A reader counters, but must not be familiar with the modern Mac OS X.

While updating software is one way of maintaining security, it can introduce new problems.  When you have a know, working quantity, it’s sensible to stick with it.  At least the White House was using Windows 2000 instead of versions of Windows 95 or 98.

A lot can happen with a web browser.  Information week details and closes with this imaginative scenario:

“It doesn’t take much to elevate this kind of thing out of privacy and into security,” he said. “For example, if you want to know where an army battalion is about to be sent, one can get a good indication by looking at the queries to Google Maps from browsers that are linkable to solders and their families. The bits and pieces of all of this are, in themselves, tiny and often pretty innocent looking. But they aggregate quickly.”

This adds argument for changing to a browser that will let you control what it does.  Firefox offers plug-ins that will block Adobe Flash (Flashblock) and scripts (NoScript).  Some websites such as Weather.com are just unusable without JavaScript.  Browsing is faster and simpler with scripts blocked.  No more mouse-over popup thumbnails on WordPress and Flash hogging the CPU.  Both add-ons allow me to allow stuff when necessary.

Weather.com without JavaScript

I haven’t installed add-ons for Safari, but the Preferences will let you disable plug-ins, Java and JavaScript.  It’s not as convenient to re-able a script for plug-in in Safari, but that functionality is there.

The web browser can be configured to lie about which it is and what version it is.  Comcast.net considered Google Chrome unsupported.  At least Comcast offered a link to continue.  They consider unknown browsers, the else clause in their code, unsupported.  Changing the user string can give access to other parts of a website.

Changing browser user agent strings:

• IE
• Safari – In the Advanced Preferences, enable “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”  Then click through the Develop menu to change the agent string.
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Opera – click through the menus
• Masquerading Your Browser (WikiPedia)

The web server divulges information too.  The following are HTTP headers from the White House website show they are using a Microsoft web server (WikiPedia):

mini:~ lyndell$ curl -I http://www.whitehouse.gov/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
P3P: CP="NON DSP COR ADM DEV IVA OTPi OUR LEG"
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: private, max-age=358
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:22:52 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

mini:~ lyndell$ Note to self: editing in WordPress needs JavaScript enabled.

Bonus reading from the web:

• 8 Retirement Tips for 20-Somethings
• 7 Mistaken Beliefs That Prevent Weight Loss
• 10 Things the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

4. More processing means more profits, but typically makes the food less healthy. 5. Less-processed foods are generally more satiating than their highly processed counterparts. 6. Many supposedly healthy replacement foods are hardly healthier than the foods they replace.

The bottom line, says Nestle, is quite simple: Kids need to eat less, include more fruits and vegetables, and limit the junk food.

Rakkav’s recent frustration with MS IE8 beta finally got me to comment online about Google’s web browser Chrome.  

I presently prefer Firefox. It’ll zoom a page while maintaining the formating, which Chrome and Safari don’t. IE7 introduced zooming, but it screws up highlighting text. I’ve left IE at 6 for now and don’t use it, except for the singles site. Some’em funny about logging in with Firefox and Safari on that site. I might upgrade to IE7 just for tabs to catchup on the singles site.

One thing I really like about FireFox is plug-ins like NoScript that block JavaScripts and Flash. Chrome is great for it’s simplicity. It’s anti-MS jab is polite, only beeping when you use MS-only Alt+D shortcut to select the address bar. I keep FireFox as my default, but I use Chrome often.

Safari’s UI is too alien on Windows for me. BTW: Chrome uses the same rendering engine, WebKit, as Safari. mobileSafari on the iPhone is just awesome. Wish that zooming feature would come to the desktop. Naturally, Safari is better on the Mac.

IE8 compatability is MS aknowledging guilt. Many sites create work arounds such as the Box Model Hack for the oddities of IE. IE8 defaults to more correct behavior which could break those work arounds.

Browser wars

Don’t visit http://www.crashIE.com/ with IE. If you don’t have enough browsers, there’s Opera.

Mathematica 7 is released, today.