RyuKent on Life

After the German government issued a warning that there was an immediate threat to the use of Firefox 3.6 allowing poisoned sites to compromise users’ machines, Mozilla have issued an emergency update to correct the problem. This comes as yet another example of how bugs in the browser put users at risk. Increasingly viruses and malware are being spread not by downloading infected software, but simply by visiting websites.

The question then must become, should we switch browsers if we consider this a problem. Of course it’s a problem but with users hopping backwards and forwards, do they really gain more protection and is it likely to cause more confusion ultimately leading to lack of security? In the long run it will be the browsers that successfully issue patches quickly and can be relied upon. If you’re going to stick with one, you want the software that will be updated automatically and you won’t have to switch from. By issuing a quick fix, Mozilla are no doubt proving they are tackling the issues head on.

The update was originally planned for the end of the month but considering the danger and bad press generated by such an official organisation in Germany urging users not to use the software, the patch was rushed through.

To make sure you have the most recent version, within Firefox, click on ‘Help’, then ‘Check for updates’. As of today, you should be running 3.6.2. This can be checked by selecting ‘Help’, then ‘About’.

Despite the fact that there is an official Delicious extension for Google Chrome in the pipeline and available in Alpha here, I am still looking for a decent plugin that actually works.

Recently I’ve tried a number and it seems they are all missing the ability to search through your existing bookmarks easily, like you can do in Firefox with the official plug in there. Some of the worse ones don’t even allow you to use keyboard shortcuts to bookmark. This is a real turn off for me as I hate having to use time consuming mouse movements which slow me down and are fiddly on a track pad.

At the moment, Chromium Delicious Plugin seems to be the best option. It allows quick bookmarking with CTRL+M and is very lightweight. For searching through your bookmarks, it’s possible to use Chrome itself.

Right click on the address bar, then select “Edit search engines”. Click on add and use this following string as the URL

http://delicious.com/search?p=%s&chk=&fr=del_icio_us&lc=1&atags=&rtags=&context=userposts|@@@@|

Note that the @@@@ will need to be replaced by your username. Call the entry Delicious and use the keyword “d”. This way if you want to search through your bookmarks, just hit CTRL+L then type “D ?????” where ????? is your search string. This is quite a nice integrated approach.

Lets hope there’s a decent official one coming out soon.

Something that has always annoyed me is that there are so many video standards out there and that they are nearly all proprietary systems owned and pushed by one company or another and inevitably restricted in one way or another. Or worse, expensively licenced.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!

As a long time user of google bookmarks to store my bookmarks online, I resisted the urge to join one of what I considered pointless social bookmarking services. Finally the limitations of google became too much, as did the popularity of these sites I was avoiding.

I’ve tried a few out and have settled for Delicious. It seems to be the most in tune with what I need. I’ve written a summary of the top three though.

Delicious

In my opinion this is the best site. It allows you to bookmark your site using tags instead of folders (folders were so last century). The great thing about Delicious is that when you have multiple tags on an item, you can filter your results by multiple tags too, so for example, I may have a large number of items tagged with iphone and also application, but I can select iphone, then application to get down to exactly what I am looking for. Application and download will bring me a different selection etc.

Another great reason for using Delicious is its really good Firefox plugin. It makes tagging (adding) a breeze and has a nice advanced search facility. There are a nice selection of shortcut keys and it integrates well with the bookmarks menu.

Pros include a really well designed interface and clean website. Cons include the limited ability to make comments that others can read about sites in a way that say Digg does. Delicious is run by Yahoo and I suspect it’s size will allow future development to continue well.

Digg

Digg is the second most popular social bookmarking site on the net at the moment. Instead of a well organised selection of tagged pages, Digg concentrates on other user’s comments. There is a nice javascript toolbar that can be used on any site by attaching the http://digg.com/yoursitehere style URL usage. Digg will nicely create a short style URL for you to which is good for sending to people. Digg is just great if you want to find out what other people thought about a site you are visiting.

But the cons include very limited tags that are pre-set. There’s no multiple tagging. There’s no slick lookup facility in firefox like Delicious. In my opinion, Digg is limited to just a system for comments on sites. I need something more.

StumbleUpon

Stumble is based around a thoery that you will want to find quality websites based on what you already like but that you don’t know exactly what you want. You program in your keyword likes and hit the ‘Stumble’ button and it will take you to a suggested site. On all sited you can rate them with a yes/no good/bad style judgement. This goes back in the system and helps rank sites for others to stumble upon.

I like the design and I like the idea. The quality of sites is generally gquite good, but I simply am not sure about the idea of being given stuff at random, even if it is based on my taste. Again the bookmarking faccilities seem quite limited.

Conclusion

If you want to find something cool and random in your spare  time, stumble upon is quite cool. Digg also offers a similar random service. Both sites are quite good for commenting too. They have javascript toolbars that don’t need to be installed and can run through the url only which is handy. No installation needed. But the real pro will want Delicious. It has a far more advanced system for managing your bookmarks and is supported by a superior interface that can be added to Firefox. All three offer RSS feeds, the ability to add friends links and a personal profile. If only Delicious offered better commenting tools, it would be ultimate.