SparxNet

Help Firefox set a World Record!

May 29

Mozilla, in its ongoing bid, to increase penetration and usage of the Firefox 3 browser is asking users to come together to help set a new Guinness World Record for Most Software Downloads in 24 hours. Mozilla is trying for a record in a new category, according to a representative of the firm. That means it doesn’t have an existing mark to better. The open source browser outfit aims to secure over 1.6m downloads over 24 hours.

D-Day or Download Day ,hasn’t been fixed as yet is now set for Tuesday, 17 June 2008 due to the fact that a last-ditch release candidate version (RC2) will be due out shortly next week.

SpreadFirefox.com has a new section where you can pledge to download Firefox3 during Download Day to help create the record. Entering your email address will send a reminder to your mailbox and also make sure that you’re part of the neat statistics map of users who have pledged to help set the record.

Mozilla decided to release a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 at a meeting on Tuesday, in response to the discovery of 10 performance and stability bugs. Yet another round of testing is the best thing to do rather than have most users move on due to known bugs.

Tags: browser, firefox, mozilla, record

Opera Mini: Mobile Phone Browser

Mar 13

Posted by Sparx in Opinions, Tech | 2 Comments

First a little background:
I’m all for the usage and development of alternative web browsers. It’s not that Internet Explorer (IE) is bad per se, it’s just that security and features wise it’s simply unusable without an external shell like Maxthon. This is true even for the newest v7, although truth be told it’s a much better improvement than v6. Over the last few months, Firefox has gained worldwide recognition as being one of the most solid competitors / replacements to challenge IE’s continued domination of the browser market. The Opera desktop browser has always been on the forefront of innovation and has always been as standards-compliant as possible. Features like mouse gestures, tabbed browsing etc. were an integral part of the feature-set of Opera many many months before they were included in the more mainstream browsers.

Opera Mini Start Page

Carrying on this tradition, the Opera Mini browser is available for use on a wide variety of cell-phones. I currently use a Sony Ericsson K750i and the default WAP browser, which although usable is no match for Opera Mini. The latest version to roll off the coding line is OM v4.1.

Read the rest of this entry »

Deligio: Software Search Engine

Mar 2

Posted by Sparx in Tech | 1 Comment

Deligio: Deligi-~ Deligo ; Is the latin translation for to pick, to pluck. Search software in the Deligio tree and pick what you need…

Deligio claims to be a search engine devoted to software. The site encourages users to create accounts where they can add software that they use / like just as one adds website bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us or digg or reddit
. Software can be tagged to make it easier to find. They can also be rated – there’s a five star visual indicator although like all opinions on the Net and off, YMMV.

What I like about the site is its relatively clean interface and the fact that they include non-Windows software as well. As more and more people join the community and put in their reviews, we should see it gain popularity.

I would like to see the ability to edit each program entry’s description and tags added in the future. If someone has already added the software, there doesn’t seem to be a way for others to edit it – something that should be included to allow for new features and abilities as versions keep changing.
Ordinarily, I would perform a search at the usual suspects of sites like Google Groups’ alt.comp.freeware, tucows, sourceforge.net, CNet Download.com etc. and of course the run-of-the-mill search engines – Google / Yahoo / MSN. Let’s see how this site turns out.

New words for the New Year

Jan 3

Posted by Sparx in Reference | No Comments

It’s a new year and as we Terrans evolve, so does the most spoken language in the world. A lot of new words and phrases have been added to some of the most often used and referred to dictionaries. Here’s a quick look at some of the easy to remember ones: Read the rest of this entry »

Linux Distribution Chooser

Nov 28

Posted by Sparx in Tech | No Comments

Linux Distro Chooser
ZeGenie Studios, a Norwegian development firm have come up with a very novel and immensely useful idea to help new and struggling users of Linux. Their questionnaire based selection picker asks the user a series of questions regarding what s/he is looking for in a Linux distro and accordingly makes recommendations so the user can make an informed decision about which distro would suit their needs best.

The following Linux distributions are curently included :

Fedora Core
Mandriva
SuSE
Debian
MEPIS
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Linspire
Xandros
PCLinuxOS
Yellowdog Linux
Gentoo
Slackware
Knoppix
OpenSuSE
ArchLinux
Foresight Linux

What I like about the test is that it asks simple questions based on your skill set level and proceeds accordingly. At the end, when its recommendations are displayed to the user, you get reasons why the candidate that is displayed has been selected for you. Another good thing is that the next closest alternatives are also displayed to give you a range of choices.

Informative links leading to Wikipedia pages act as a sort of glossary so users can see the meanings of terms that they don’t currently understand. All-in-all a very useful tool for newbies who want to shift to Linux but don’t know which distro to install.