Jeremy Clark - A Tech Blog -

Firefox 3.5 RC2 available

Jeremy Clark — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:11:14 +0000

For those who don’t know Firefox is the leading alternative browser to Internet Explorer. In constant development Firefox is continually improving and version 3.5 should be released soon. For those that can’t wait or want to help find bugs the second release candidate has been publicly released. It’s available for download from Mozilla’s Blog. There are big improvements in memory management which has always haunted Firefox. According to this site it is now a non-issue, even out performing the other big free browsers. Another big feature is the inclusion of HTML 5 elements, and native support for open-source audio codec Ogg Vorbis.

Source: PCMag

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is ready for download New featur
Multi-Process Firefox Mozilla is
Fedora 8 Released Fedora 8

Google’s Chrome Released on Mac and Linux

Jeremy Clark — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:25:00 +0000

Google’s Chromium browser (open-source Chrome) has been released for Mac and select Linux Distros, but the release page warns not to download unless you like incomplete software. Keep in mind this isn’t even beta yet, for Google that’s something. Pretty soon though Mac, Linux, and Windows user will get to enjoy Chrome. Me personally I’m waiting for an extension system like Firefox before I’ll use it solely as my browser of choice.

Mozilla Moving Away From Tabs

Jeremy Clark — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:15:21 +0000

Mozilla the company behind Firefox thinks that the tabbed interface it’s so famous for is reaching the end of it’s lifespan. So they’re launching a design competition to come up with the next big thing in browsers.

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.
– Mozilla Labs

One interesting idea is already floating around from Mozilla Labs, having the tabs on the side instead of the top.

Source: PCPro

Windows 7 “XP Mode” Mistake

Jeremy Clark — Sat, 09 May 2009 11:30:27 +0000

Recently Microsoft had announced a big feature of Windows 7, “XP Mode” as most call it. This allows people to install all their favorite XP software that won’t run in Vista or 7 in a XP virtual pc. Or at least as it was supposed to work, but many people with Intel processors won’t be able to use this feature. Microsoft is requiring that the computer on which 7 is installed to have hardware virtualization support. Since VirtualPC that the XP mode uses is a software hypervisor the decision makes no sense.

AMD processors have AMD-V (hardware virtualization) on all but their Sempron line. Intel on the other hand used the feature as a way to divide their processor models and don’t have as many models with the support. Tom’s Hardware has a list of all the Intel models that support VT-x.

Source: ArsTechnica

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AMD new Phenom chip overclocks to 6Ghz AMD's new
Windows 7 to contain “XP Mode” Windows 7

Multi-Process Firefox

Jeremy Clark — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:41:30 +0000

How many time have you been browsing in Firefox and something hang or crash, not many probably but when it does it takes down the whole browser. Now it seems Mozilla is taking a hint from Google’s Chrome, by splitting tabs into multiple processes that are independent of each other. So if one tabs crashes oh well close it and continue. The development of this project is in the beginning stages and could be up to a year to see a workable release but, it should be worth the wait.

Source: Mozilla Links

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Firefox 3.5 RC2 available Firefox 3.
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Windows 7 to contain “XP Mode”

Jeremy Clark — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:59:46 +0000

Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate is stated to having an XP mode where applications that only run in XP can be installed in a virtualized XP environment and linked to the Windows 7 desktop. Microsoft is including this feature to hopefully ease businesses into upgrading with the assurance that the critical business apps will still run. This is one of the big reason Vista still hasn’t been adopted by businesses. This feature should be in the upcoming April 30th Release Candidate.

Source: The Register

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Firefox 3.5 RC2 available Firefox 3.

Ubuntu & Kubuntu 9.04 Released

Jeremy Clark — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:09:40 +0000

Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty Jackalope is now ready for download. As always the downloads will also be available in torrents are well, it’ll just take a couple of days to get it seeded. Note – an interesting feature of the Ubuntu family is called Wubi it allows anyone to install and uninstall Ubuntu from within Windows just like any other program.

Ubuntu

The biggest new features of Ubuntu are:

GNOME 2.26
X.Org server 1.6
Boot performance – Dramatically improved boot times, as low as 25 seconds on some machines.
Linux kernel 2.6.28
Ext4 filesystem support

Kubuntu

For the KDE fans Kubuntu is also available today and here are the newest features for it. Download it here.

KDE 4.2
Quassel IRC client
Amarok 2.0.2 for your music needs
KTorrent 3.2
Digikam 0.10.0
Qt 4.5
Intel Atom Support for netbook support

Happy Earth Day

Jeremy Clark — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:12:57 +0000

Today is Earth day. There are many things that can be done today and everyday to help our future generations enjoy our Earth as we have. Visit the Earth Day Network to find out what you can do to help.

VMware Launches It’s Cloud OS – vSphere 4

Jeremy Clark — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:09:21 +0000

VMware announced it’s newest product dubbed vSphere 4. What does vSphere do you ask well, it allows a small business to tap seamlessly into much more processing power via commercial cloud computing service such as Amazon’s EC2. Or it allows large business with multiple data centers to consolidate resources together seamlessly. vSphere is a collection of some of VMware previous tools such as ESX and HA and some new ones like vStorage VMFS a clustered file system and vNetwork Distributed Switch for virutalized networks. These and other products make up the vSphere suite and available in different versions with more or less features depending on the business’ needs.

Sources:: eWeek; VMware vSphere

Review of VMware Virtual Center Techworld
Vmware’s New Enterprise Product Vmware
Vmware Workstation 6 (Vista Compatible) Vmware ann

Expandable Comment Replies – Plugin Review

Jeremy Clark — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:52:28 +0000

Expandable Comment Replies
As you may have noticed in the comments section I now have a nice link that shows and hides the replies to a comment. I think this helps keep a discussion on track while still letting those that are curious to explore. I can really see it helping on my theme support page as it has the most comments and it will now separate each issue nicely into it’s own meta-discussion I guess you could call it. You can see the author of this plugin and I discussing some of the functionality here. Drop by and give her plugin a try.

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Conficker Worm Signatures to be Released

Jeremy Clark — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:33:18 +0000

According to The Register the conficker worm will have a signature that admins will be able to use to find which machines might have the worm. Up til now the only way was to monitor traffic and with Conficker C that was impossible as it didn’t send any traffic on the network but was waiting for instructions on a certain day.

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Ubuntu 9.04 beta available

Jeremy Clark — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:01:54 +0000

The beta includes the new Gnome 2.26 desktop and a new CD burning suite called brasero. Improvements made to boot performance, uses the 2.6.28 kernel, as well as turn key mail servers. Other visual improvements have been made as well as X.org 1.6 is included.

Windows 7 Beta Quick revi
Windows 7 may allow IE8 to be disabled Some specu
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IE 8 users downgrading to IE 7

Jeremy Clark — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:33:23 +0000

According to InfoWorld IE 8 users aren’t for very long.

As of 8:00 am Monday, IE8 — released Thursday — held 1.86% of the browser market, down from a high of 2.59% on Sunday, according to market watcher Net Applications. The most likely reason for the decline is that early adopters of IE8 are switching back to the more familiar, and –at this point — reliable Explorer 7 browser.

I was never even able to download IE 8 when I tried Thursday, server timeouts, I guess it’s all as well, because I’d probably be in that .73% downgrading. I’ve actually tried IE 8 on Windows 7 beta and I wasn’t all that impressed, just looked like IE with a couple of new buttons. The whole web slice thing drove me crazy too. Every time you would highlight the little button would pop up and be overall annoying.

Windows 7 may allow IE8 to be disabled Some specu
Google Chrome 1.0 Google Chr
Microsoft’s Browser Slipping Market Share IE has bee

Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 3

Jeremy Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:00:05 +0000

This is the 3rd and final post about SEO for your WordPress theme. Meta keywords used to be what all search results where based on but over time webmaster began abusing this to gain rank, today some say that they are ignored all together when calculating search results but if they’re not then having your posts tags and categories added couldn’t hurt. This is the code goes between the tags. This also includes the meta description code from yesterday’s post.

Line 5 thru 7 are the ones that deal with the keywords.

This code depends on the loop code on line 1 to be able to pull the posts category and tags. This code basically pulls each category out and prints it out follow by a comma and then does the same with the tags. The comma is important because that is what separates the keywords. Even if this has marginal benefit it’s not that hard to implement and the cost as far as page load time should be minimal.
You see the whole series here. Be sure and rate each post, thanks.

Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 2 2nd in the
Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 1 1st in the
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Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Released

Jeremy Clark — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:34:10 +0000

IE 8 is set to be released today, it can be downloaded from here. Here are some of the new features of IE 8.

Smart Address Bar.
Tab Groups.
Redesigned “New Tab” Page.
Reopen Last Browsing Session.
Enhanced Find On Page.

Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 1 1st in the
Kubuntu 8.10 Released The latest

Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 2

Jeremy Clark — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:00:30 +0000

Today I’m showing how to add your meta descripition to your blog. Google will use this as the description that shows up in it’s search results which can help with click through if you write good excerpts about your posts. If you don’t have a specific excerpt written then wordpress automatically grabs the first 55 words which may or may not be very descriptive of your post. It’s always a good practice to manually write your excerpt to give a summary of a post.

First I’ll post the code that needs to go into your header.php file between the then I’ll explain the pieces and what the do

The if (is_single() || is_page() ) determines if the current page is a single post or a single page. Next is this if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); this is mini loop to pull in the excerpt for the current post or page. Next this code pulls the excerpt and strips any html tags from it to display a clean excerpt $excerpt = strip_tags(get_the_excerpt()); echo $excerpt;. After that is the comment page code again to elimanate duplicate meta tags with google if ( $cpage < 1 ) {} else { echo (' - comment page '); echo ($cpage);}. The last bit of code is if it's just the home page then the tagline from the blog is displayed. That's it for section. Tomorrow I'll go over how to add your tags and categories to the meta keywords, some say search engines don't pay much attention to these but it doesn't hurt to have them. You can follow the whole series here. Be sure and rate each post, thanks.

Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 3 This is th
Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 1 1st in the
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Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 1

Jeremy Clark — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:08:10 +0000

Recently I was updating my themes, and I got to thinking about SEO a little and about how to apply it to a theme to help out the blog author. One of the biggest complaints with WordPress 2.7 is the comment pagination and duplicate content. Google detects the comment pages as duplicate even when the comments are different. The easiest thing is to append comment page N to the title and meta description. To do this you need to edit the header.php of your theme and add this between the tags.

<?php if ( is_single() ) { wp_title(''); if ( $cpage < 1 ) {}
else { echo (' - comment page '); echo ($cpage);} ?> | <?php } ?><?php bloginfo('name'); $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; if ($paged > 1) { echo " - Page $paged"; } ?>

I’ll explain the code now. The first if finds if it is a single post or page then it prints the title of the post or page first then the second if finds if its a comment page then it appends – comment page 1 and so on to the title. Next is the | which serves as a separator for the title of the post and title of the blog. Next the name of the blog is printed then next comes some code to find if the current page is a older posts page and if it is then it prints Page 2 and so on. This is also to eliminate duplicate title tags. Tomorrow I’ll go over how to pull an excerpt and make it the meta description which is also helpful for your search rank. You can follow the whole series here.

Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 2 2nd in the
Optimize your WordPress theme for Search Engines – Part 3 This is th
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Windows 7 may allow IE8 to be disabled

Jeremy Clark — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:46:02 +0000

Don’t like IE then you might be able to ditch it in Windows 7, a leaked beta has the feature to turn off IE8. Some speculated it because of the whole EU thing. The 7048 build of the beta has this feature, although not available in the public beta it’s easy enough to find on your favorite torrent site.
Source: CNet News – Microsoft may let Windows 7 users turn browser off

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Windows 7 to contain “XP Mode” Windows 7
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I’ve moved again

Jeremy Clark — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:01:46 +0000

Hopefully this will be the last time for awhile. I’ve got a new domain name without the no-ip attached. All links should still work, if not let me know.

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Slightly Updated Look

Jeremy Clark — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:25:45 +0000

As you can tell I’ve updated a few parts of my blog, namely the nice tabbed interface for the sidebar, and going with one sidebar split into two columns at the bottom. Tell me what you think of it, I always appreciate feedback.