It seems that the firefox download page is having some (more) troubles. Ever since I got the first link I kept seeing the Firefox 2 download version. Eventually I managed to download the file but looking back a few minutes ago, the page had again reverted to Firefox 2.
I don’t know if anyone else has the same problem, but just in case you can’t find the download link, here a direct link to the file for the English Gnu/Linux and Windows versions. Here’s the link to all the versions as well.
I just g
ot the email that it’s my time to go ahead and download firefox 3 as part of the download day and, who would have thunk it? The servers are dead of dying
Haven’t they learned anything from others?
People, when you’re going to try and break a world record of download in 24h, don’t you think it would pay to have your bandwidth boosted? And for pete’s sake, don’t send us an email sending us to download firefox 3 and find a page advertising firefox 2!
Argh!
Btw, it seems my own server is having a solidarity slowness…again.
UPDATE @ 9pm: It’s here GO!
No, this is not an advert for an online “adult” chat room but rather about my newest discovery in the internetubes two-point-zero. I discovered Get Satisfaction (GS from now on) from a PMOG mission and I immediately thought that this is a very useful tool, especially for all these places where they have message boards as the end-all of support.
The thing is, a forum is a wonderful tool but its main function is to handle discussions, instead of the whole range of features user support requires. For example, I always disliked the way most fora handled suggestion requests as I could never tell when and if my suggestion was liked, by how many people, if any developers saw it, if they liked it, worked on it etc, unless people commented or unless I started a vote.
However with the usual laziness of the internet, having to write something is generally not done very often, especially if that entails registering to yet another forum and having to say something more than “+1” or “I agree”.
Which is why I love the fact that in GS I can use the same account to report problems, ask questions and propose ideas. I can track all my conversations from the same central point and, this is this feature that I really love, you can “vote up” a topic that interests you, which gives the company behind the product a better understanding of how many people have the same issue or want the same feature.
I’ve already opened companies and products for stuff I use and I cannot find a support channel for, or that support channel is too limited (like a very simple forum). People representing those companies can at any time join and take over the channel which will give them some additional control like add new keywords to Overheard, another feature that I start to like a lot.
By subscribing to the Overheard stream of the products I like, I can now sit back and just wait until my feed reader notifies me that someone has mentioned the product name on twitter. If that twit is a question or a problem, I can jump in and provide some help if possible.
Oh, did I mention that GS has some great RSS feeds to subscribe to? Feed for new topics, feed for lifestream, feed for overheard etc. For someone like me who likes to get his information on a plate, it’s a gift, especially since almost all forums don’t support RSS topics.
So, yeah, here’s where I’ve been wasting my time lately. But of course it hasn’t been totally a waste as through GS main page (where anything new passes) I’ve managed to discover some quite cool products to try out. Specifically I’ve discovered Intense Debate which I’ve already liked enough to add to all three of my Blogs.
And before I forget, it’s a cool feature that you can check how many problems a product has at any point by visiting the GS page. Once they implement a solid feature to see how many of them have been solved as well, it would be a great way to tell how problematic a product is.
And finally, the main reason why I like it so much is because I finally have a place to vomit out my ideas for product improvements which otherwise get lost in the void 🙂
I never understand why upgrading to the newer HemingwayEx is such a hassle. This is the second time I’ve attempted it now (once more on 1.0) and I just now gave up.
What is happening is that I get the theme to work, I can change the colours just fine and switch to finally using widgets, but for some reason I can’t get the suckerfish dropdown to work and I keep running into various other problems (like my gallery losing its theme etc).
It wouldn’t be such a great problem if I knew where to start but what is happening is making me scratch my head. Specifically, even drop-downs start to work once I put the code in, they get hidden behind the background. That is, I can see the dropdown menu appearing (the top of it) but its somehow placed behind the main content and even expanding the navigation does not make it appear. Grrr
Anyway, it’s too much bother to figure out what is causing this so I’ll stay with my current version which still seems to be working fine. I will however attempt to widgetize it and perhaps upload it as a different version from HemingwayEx. I’ve aready created a sourceforge page for it (waiting approval still) and then possibly more people might be willing to help.
It only annoys me that I spent so much time on it and I still couldn’t get it to work as the current version.
Please bear with me as I perform some maintenance.
Ευτυχώς που υπάρχει και η Anath να μου θυμίσει ότι ο αρχικός σκοπός αυτού του ιστολογίου ήταν για να κρατάω αναμνήσεις από την ζωή μου πρίν επέλθει το…Αλτσχάιμερ. Έχω κολλήσει τελευταία με τα φιλοσοφικά/υπαρξιακά/αθειστικά και δεν καταγράφω καθόλου την ζωή μου.
Φυσικά και τα περισσότερα θα γραφτούν παρά κλειστών των θυρών (μη χαίρεστε παλιοτυροβρωμίκουλες) αλλά έτσι και αλλιώς, ο σκοπός τους δεν είναι τόσο πολύ η κοινή κατανάλωση.
Αντε να δούμε εαν θα το καταφέρομεν.
Τι μου έχει συμβεί τελευταία στην ζωή μου λοιπόν;
Well, είμαι πια στην πρώτη σχέση που έχει κρατήσει σχεδόν ένα χρόνο μετά απο την πρώτη μου σχέση και που πάει αρκετά καλά, μπορώ να ομολογήσω. Δεν υπάρχουν τριβές, καυγάδες κλπ αλλά δεν βαριόμαστε. Γενικά σαν σχέση έχει βοηθήσει να σταθεροποιηθώ αρκετά εν Γερμανια.
Παλέυω ακόμα με το ADD μου για να συνεχίσω με τα διάφορα projects που έχω ξεκινήσει. Αυτή τη στιγμή δουεύω στο Wesnoth campaign μου και στο ανάλογο site, αλλά η προσοχή μου τείνει να διασπάται εύκολα. Ελπίζω να το τελειώσω πριν τα τινάξω…
Η δουλειά πάει μια χαρούλα και προβλέπεται καινούργια αυξησούλα. Περισσότερες (πικάντικες) λεπτομέρεις δεν λέω για την ώρα για να μην πάρω κάνα πόδι.
Αυτά για την ώρα.
There’s a Guinness record on the line here.Git!
The godling of the internetubes awaits…
For those not in the know, Penny Arcade is one of the oldest web comics on the net (It started back in ’98) and, as most webcomics those days, is about gaming. It has evolved quite an elaborate kind of humor as well as some unique characters and it also does not shy away from profanity. In short, I like it.
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised that a new game has just been released online, that is based on this setting and follows the same kind of rules: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness.
The game is a CRPG with a Final Fantasy-esque combat system and with beautiful hand-drawn cartoonish graphics. It is novel in the sense that it is set in a weird 1920’s era and the two main heroes are versions of Gabe and Tycho from the original cartoon, as well the custom character you create for your use.
The storyline, as far as I have played it at least, seems interesting enough. Although the game, other than the narrator, does not include any speech, the dialogues are well made and, as expected, do not shy from profanity either. A welcome change for someone who is sick and tired of self-censoring games (like me)
As far as I’ve read, the game lasts around 5-10 hours but seeing as it’s the first episode, and you pay just €12 for it ($20) it does not seem a bad deal (at least for europeans).
And for the best part: It runs on GNU/Linux…natively! 😯
This was actually what made me decide to buy the game. Even though the game is still propriertary, the fact that they did not take the easy way and just use DirectX grants them my support and with the price like that, it was a pretty low token. Of course I do believe that for such a small and episodic game they might as well sell it for 5€ and double their buyers overnight. It will just not worth pirating it when you can get it online much easier.
In the end, I also think that they could just as well liberate the engine of the game and still suffer no problem. After all, the whole point of it is the artwork, music and story which are things you can keep under copyright control. However releasing the engine would make sense, as it would allow a much faster development and bug fixing process and plus, a whole lot of Positive Karma and support from the Free Software community.
And with that, this little review-of-sorts is finished and I leave you with a short trailer. If you like what you hear and see, head over to the seller and get it. Tell ’em I sent you 😛
[youtube]o_fk4WPNZq8[/youtube]
From a Christian blog, on a discussion that has ended up arguing against evolution, we get this amazing comment (Emphasis mine):
I find it a bit humorous that only 99.99% of evolutionary biologists believe in evolution. What do you do with the other .01%?
It seriously cannot get any more inane than this. I guess the part that is really humorous is lost on him.
So what do you all think? What should we do with the rather impressive 0.01% of evolutionary biologists that do not believe in evolution?
A Mission on the Nethernet about how Science is assaulted when it conflicts with Dogma
This is a post, for completeness and awareness sake, in regards to the new mission I’ve just created in PMOG
Initially the plan was just to type a short post with a link to the mission for anyone who wants to take it, but since I write pretty long descriptions, I think it would be a shame to just lose them. To this end, I’ve decided to post the whole descriptions, along with the links to the mission articles themselves, which will also serve as a notification to the blog authors that they’ve been linked to.
So, my newest mission is The War on Science.
If you have a PMOG account, you should already be taking it and if not, well…get one already 😉
However, this pure and neutral attempt of humanity to understand the world around it has been coming more and more under attack in recent years because it casts light into the shadows that people use to hold onto power
Follow me into a dangerous mission to understand why this is happening and how.
Our first stop is a more relaxed presentation of the Scientific Method (than a wikipedia article that is) and the classic problems you run into if you avoid it.
It is an unfortunate fact that human reasoning alone is not sufficient to understand the world. We are simply to error prone and this is why 2000 years of philosophy have not accomplished even a bit of what science did.
But if science has managed to provide us with so much in its short time of use, why is it creating so many negative feelings?
Short answer: It makes us look bad,
But of course, science is not at war with everyone. Indeed, it is an invaluable boon to sceptics everywhere as it provides a rock-solid base for their beliefs.
The ability to question theories which go against real knowledge without having to “re-invent the wheel” every time is a great resource that helps to debunk and refute unrealistic or dangerous beliefs
It is a common tactic of science-opponents to claim knowledge of something undiscovered or to hide in the gaps of our knowledge
But what people do not understand is that this is useless. Claiming to be able to see, feel or hear something no one else can, is of use to no one but yourself. And even that is disputable
It is common for Science to be misrepresented as an “Atheist’s religion”, especially by religious proponents.
In truth, science has no direct relation with atheism other than the fact that it is, often enough, a fortunate result.
Science is not here to assault religion but it also does not care to appease it by conforming to it.
Science is oft misunderstood for it’s lack of absolute answers. While it can occasionally give you very high probabilities, it will never give you a 100% answer.
But is this a weakness? Far from it. It is, in fact, its greatest strength.
But is religion and superstition the only enemy? No.
Every belief that is unfounded in evidence has the habit of turning against science when truth does not conform to its wishes.
Witness how the Soviet Union in its anti-capitalistic fervor ignored the scientific findings, with catastrophic results for its food production.
The most high profile wars on science at this moment happen on the fronts of Evolution – from religious opponents – and Global Warming.
You see, where religion attempts to discredit the scientific method, the vested interests behind Global Warming denial are waging a war of misinformation, attempting to slow down governments acting on what Science has discovered in order to retain profits.
It has happened before with the Tobacco industries, and it is happening yet again.
But science does not have to always be boring and difficult. As previous articles have said, there is beauty in science.
I will leave you thus with an amazing video of a purely mechanical construct that by using the laws of physics can produce a wonderful result.
