I get my daily dose of news from Google News Canada. I go to the google news website every time (sometimes multiple times a day, depending on how much time I have).
On Aug 10, 2005, google announced the availability of newsfeeds. The feeds are available in either rss or atom format. Promptly, I added the Canadian newsfeed to My Subscription List in my BottomFeeder. Worked like a charm.
Often, I use my Firefox browser to search for some word or phrase on a web page. The keyboard shortcut is Control-F (same as IE).
Firefox opens a flat, narrow Find bar at the bottom of the browser window. This is a great improvement over IE which opens a Find window which obstructs the contents of the browser.
Clara Y in her comment on an earlier Firefox blog entry raised a good issue with Firefox: it can't search within textareas on a HTML form.
One thing I still haven't figured out from FireFox is that if I am editing a page with an editable textarea inside (eg. editing wiki page, commenting textarea on blogger), it does not allow me to perform a find (Ctrl-F) within the context inside the textarea even with focus on in the editable textarea while performing the find; on the other hand, IE has no problem with that - able to perform find on parent’s content and its context inside editable textarea.
You may try it by
It is true that Firefox has some problems with HTML form fields in general, and the Find within form fields is one example. The firefox developer community is aware of the problem, and I hope a future release will resolve this problem.
In the meantime, though, you can do this: after you do a Find, click Highlight in the Find bar. This will highlight all occurences of the keywords within the textarea in yellow.
If the textarea is long, you may have to scroll up and down, and you cannot use the Find Next or Find Previous buttons.
So, this is kind of kludgy, and may not be exactly what you want, but hopefully, it will be sufficient until they fix it.
Most security-conscious web sites provide a md5 checksum file for each downloadable file. Occasionally, you may also see a SHA1 checksum file (for the really paranoid).
SHA 1 stands for Secure Hash Algorithm 1. It is a newer, and safer hashing algorithm than md5. (For the geeks among us, md5 is 128-bit; sha1, 160-bit.)
Again, for Linux users, to compute a sha1 checksum for a file, enter
sha1sum /path/to/file
For Windows users, you need to install extra software. Luckily, digestit (the software mentioned yesterday) supports both sha1 and md5.
While md5 is secure enough, if a file you are about to download has both md5 and sha1 checksums, you may want to use the sha1.
So you finally decide to download some open-source software, say gimp2, from some web site. You now notice that the file you are about to download has a corresponding MD5 file (or MD5sum). The md5sum file contains some weird looking string of characters like 86e676934455864c42b42b342406c26b. So, what is this MD5 business?
MD5 is a Message Digest algorithm which calculates an unique checksum (the weird characters) based on the contents of a file. You use it to verify the integrity of the file you downloaded. After you download a file, you run a MD5 checker/decoder on the downloaded file to calculate its checksum. Then, you compare the 2 checksums, and if they are not equal, then the file you downloaded was somehow corrupted (not the same as the intended file).
If you are a Linux user, it is a breeze to compute the checksum of the downloaded file. Just enter:
md5sum /path/to/file.
If you are a Windows user, you need to download and install the md5sum utility. There are several Windows implementation of md5sum. I use the command line interface version as part of the
Win32 ports of GNU tools. The md5sum executable is within the Core Utilities package. Download the package here.
Alternatively, download digestit which provides a GUI frontend to md5sum. This may be a better choice for many because it is more straightforward to install, and has a graphical front-end. The Microsoft Installer for digestit is found here. Running the installer is quick and painless.
To use digestit to verify a checksum, right click the file you just downloaded, and choose digestIT 2004/Verify MD5 Hash. Then, paste in the target MD5 checksum that you obtain from the web site.
md5sum is a basic security tool that you need if you ever download anything from the net. You may find yourself with that much more peace of mind.
While I hope to avoid spilling on the philosophical or business aspects of open source in this blog (there are plenty elsewhere already), I may occasionally just point you to an excellent read.
The Cathedral and the Bazaaris a most interesting read on the open source way of doing things (culture). In this collection of essays, Eric Raymond, a reputed open source guru, contrasted what he called the cathedral model of building software (used by the proprietary commercial companies) against the bazaar model (used by the open source community).
You don't need a computer science degree to appreciate the contents, but you will go away much happier if you are at least a "power user", and possess a keen interest in technology.
You can buy the book from a bookstore, or download it straight from the author's web site.
firefox has a built-in, default download manager. It is good for
small downloads. If you download something big (like the
586MB ubuntu iso CD image), then you really need a third-party
download manager/accelerator. I don't wish anyone to
repeat the same experience I had the other day when after an overnight download, it crashed at 90% complete.
Below, I review 2 download managers. These 2 Windows-only software
are quite similar in features. Both speed up your large downloads,
and will auto-resume if something unexpected interrupts your
download. Also, both support Firefox as well as IE.
leechget is available in 2 versions: Personal Edition (free for private use but only one download at a time), and the Premium Edition (for commercial use and you can have multiple simultaneous downloads).
Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) also comes in 2 versions: a free but
ads-supported version, and a non-free, no-ads premium version.
I tried out both the leechget Personal, and the DAP personal versions.
My privacy program (Spybot-S&D) picked up the DAP ads as spyware, but it could not delete the corresponding Windows registry entries. I tried to uninstall DAP, but DAP did not seem to want to be uninstalled cleanly. Even after I finally uninstalled it, spybot still reported the same spyware entries. I finally resorted to manually
delete the DAP Window entries!
I prefer leechget personal over DAP.
If you use leechget with firefox , you need to download the
Mozilla/Netscape/Opera Plug-in, in addition to the leechget
installer itself. This plug-in automatically intercepts any file download, and hands over the job to leechget instead of the
default firefox download manager. You should install the plugin to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins.
A feature I like about leechget is that I can specify how many pieces that leechget should split the file into for simultaneous transfer. For example, in an idle system, I can specify that it uses 6 tasks (max 20) to download a file.
The bottom line is that I don't want to pay for a download manager, and I like leechget enough that I decide I can live with downloading one file at a time.
There are many download managers out there. If you want a tool that works on both Linux and Windows, and you prefer the command-line interface rather than GUI, then you want to check out
wget. Alert: wget is for geeks only.
