Binary Turf

Firefox 3.5 out

Shivanand Sharma — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:21:34 +0000

The much awaited Firefox 3.5 release is out in the tubes. Get your copy from Firefox.com. I’ll be putting up a review of new features later and explore it in detail. But if you’d like to know more about the features in a jiffy, head on to this great article by Lifehacker.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Should Indian publishers expect delays in AdSense payments this month?

Shivanand Sharma — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:14:08 +0000

Seems there should be a good reason they should. The BlueDart tracking still shown no status and it already is delayed by two days (as compared to the last month). In April 2009 the payments were delayed by more than 15 days. Seems like the transition from DHL to BlueDart isn’t being a smooth ride for Google or for the publishers. Threads in Digitalpoint Forums. Not again.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Does ColorfulTabs require a Wikipedia entry?

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:52:20 +0000

I saw the Wikipedia entry for colorful tabs a few years ago. But yesterday I tried to look it up and saw the article was gone. ColorfulTabs has been the inspiration behind Chromatabs. While other addons like Chromatabs, Tab Mix Plus, Firefox Showcase and more have a Wikipedia entry, I only find it unfortunate that Wikipedia decided to trash the article on ColorfulTabs.

The Wikipedia guidelines, policies and rules are comphrensive and the reason for deletion was cites as No claim of notability, no external sources. Strange that other addons have a Wikipedia entry whereas ColorfulTabs doesn’t. For those unfamiliar:

Chromatabs was inspired from the idea behind ColorfulTabs. Here the external and independent source (Leveraging Human Perception for Happier Tabbing)?
ColorfulTabs was featured on television on BBC World (BBC Click archives).
ColorfulTabs has been distributed and featured in the German magazine CHIP (edition 05/2009 and 09/2007) for it’s utility which has circulation of over 406,000 copies per month and over 1.63 million readers per issue.
ColorfulTabs has been distrubuted with the German PC magazine “PC-WELT”.
Circulated with COMPUTERBILD February 2005 - Europes biggest magazine.
ColorfulTabs was amongst the top 50 most downloaded addons on the release of Firefox 3.

I’m wondering if Wikipedia is on an clean-up mission for articles relating to Firefox addons. But if that were so, other addons wouldn’t have a Wikipedia entry there. Are the admins there overlooking something or is it just plain useless to have a Wikipedia entry for ColorfulTabs? What do you think?

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Mozilla Hacks

Shivanand Sharma — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:09:53 +0000

Firefox 3.5 is packed with features. Most of the times they are read about and forgotten. But now Hacks.Mozilla.Org is running a 35 day feature of articles that not only highlight the new features in the browser but also guide you on using them. Now 35 days is substantial time to keep checking for newer articles everyday. I say you subscribe.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

How to opt out of Google’s Interest Based Advertising

Shivanand Sharma — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:41:00 +0000

So Google has been observing and collecting your interests online - the kind of sites you visit and what not. And based on it you are being shown Adsense ads across the web. Want to opt out of this for some reason? Google allows you to opt out of its interest-based advertising. It even allows you to edit your interests so that you may see relevant ads. All you have to do is to visit the Google Ads preferences page and submit your choices. Comes in handy just in case you thought you didn’t have an option.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

45 Interesting Firefox Addons we never knew Existed – II

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:59:02 +0000

Here’s the second part of the article “45 Interesting Firefox Addons we never knew Existed“. We covered 15 addons in part I so if you are new here you may want to check it out first. We’ll wait.

Ok welcome back.

FoxTab: - FoxTab is a 3D tabbed browsing extension. With 5 attractive layouts to choose from, fliiping between opened tabs becomes easy and enjoyable than ever. You can use the grouping and filtering features, and start experiencing tabbed-browsing in a whole new way.
Google Calendar Quick Add: - A shortcut to add calendar entries quickly without having to open a Google Calendar… For those who don’t know, Google Calendar has some fuzzy logic so that you can quickly add events in almost plain English by typing (for e.g.) “Meeting every Thursday at 2pm”. Cool, isn’t it?
Greasemonkey: - Greasemonkey opens up a whole new world of new widgets in its own sense. It allows you to use small bits of javascript code that change the way websites behave. Its pretty popular to long time fans and has some amazing utility.
gui:config: - gui:config makes it easier to change preferences that can only be found in the “about:config”. The extension supports a comfortable way to apply changes to these options. It displays the options, included in the current version, using checkboxes, dropdownlists and textboxes.
Hide Menubar: - Supports to hide your Mainmenu Toolbar automatically, you can press the ALT key to show it temporarily.
IdentFavIcon: - Use identicons to automatically generate favicons for sites without one.
InFormEnter: - InFormEnter adds a small, clickable icon next to every input field in a web form, from where you can select the item to be inserted - no typing required. You can configure it to display your frequently used information such as name, email, address…
Inline Google Definitions: - Shows Google Definitions for the selected word (in the same tab!)… To use, select a word and right-click on it. Very handy and I use it all the time - one of my favourites.
Interclue: - Ever wanted to know what was behind the link before you clicked? Interclue tells you everything you need to know before you open yet another tab.
Locationbar²: - It’s more like the explorer address bar in Vista. Puts emphasis on the domain to reduce spoofing risk, linkifies URL segments (press Ctrl, Meta, Shift or Alt) with more URL formatting options configurable.
Long Titles: - You may have noticed that the tab tooltip is broken into “…” for sites with a long title. This one fixes it and now Firefox will show the full title in the tab tooltip for all sites.
MacOSX Theme: - This is one impressive and promising Firefox theme which provide a Firefox-on-MacOSX like look.
MR Tech Toolkit: - MR Tech Toolkit is the perfect companion and addon to the standard Firefox extension manager. At first you may not notice much but it has all the functions you’ll ever want to reach out to to manage your addons. In addition it has other small tweaks for Firefox that should have been there by default.
Netscape Windows: - A retro theme which gives the Netscape 3 look to Firefox.
Omnibar: - Integrates location bar and search bar into one, an Omnibar. Shows search and url suggestions. Choose your engine of choice as you type e.g. “@engine1 search query”. You can even search multiple engines for the same query “@e1,e2 search query”. Supports search engine suggestions and local file path completions (with simple wildcard support). Provides different styles for auto-complete popup.

So until the next time, take your time and check out some of these addons mentioned here and leave your comments here. Will continue in part III.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

Google fixes the Adsense payment envelope

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:10:47 +0000

This one is mainly for the Indian publishers. Google had experimented with alternative means of delivering payment checks to Indian publishers. And when they did settle to ship them through BlueDart, the envelope was such that it exposed the entire payment amount on the outside.

However the payments being received this month are different with only the publisher name and address details visible on the outside. Not that this would matter much but you just don’t want the amount to be so obvious and your shipment vulnerable.

© Binary Turf. Read and subscribe to our other blogs AdvancedPhotography.Net, Maverick Saint, Tech Support.

45 Interesting Firefox Addons we never knew Existed - I

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:30:46 +0000

So I took out time to go through the entire list of Firefox addons on the AMO site (there are about 3000 of them as of now). As per the title here are some addons with interesting functionality. They may not have hit the most-popular list or the most-downloaded list, nevertheless there’s something interesting about them be it the idea behind them, the functionality or just the story behind their creation. Here there are (alphabetically).

/Find Bar/: What’s in a name? Slashes; and that makes this figure at the top of our alphabetically sorted list. The slashes in the name are representative of the functionality of this addon which adds support for searching text on a page using regular expressions.
About:IceCream: What has icecream got to do with Firefox? I guess everyone needs a little ice cream. Once installed, your firefox will have a page at about:icecream to remind you how easy it is to make someone’s life a little better. It was the love, affection and attachment of a kid with Mozilla Firefox that materialized into an extension. (Backstory part 1, Backstory part 2).
Adsense Preview: Preview the Google ads that may show on any web page… Interesting? Well noticeable I’d say.
AnyColor: Change Firefox to Any Color and create your own personalized theme.
Attention Recorder: Everything we do online — what we browse, what feeds we read, what we search for — increasingly represents who we are. This “Attention Data” has real value and needs to be protected…
AutoBrowse: The most creative screensaver in the world. It will Google for a keyword that you input and then browse the sites in the result list one by one. You sit back and enjoy the internet.
Base64 Encoder: This guy lets you turn an image into base54 encoded text. You can embed this text into a website to turn it into an image.
Better GReader: Preview web pages inline in Google Reader, collapse the header and sidebar for more reading area, add favicons to feed subscriptions and more with Better GReader. This addon is from Gina Trapani - the founding editor of Life Hacker.
Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures: Gmail web interface has lacked html signatures. Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail messages based on which address you are sending from. Supports up to four signatures for each address you have set up. Works for Compose Message and Reply/Forward.
Camifox: Elegant, crisp, and colorful Camifox is a thoughtful, sophisticated reimagination and realization of a better “default” theme for Firefox, in living color on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
cobrowse: This extension turns Firefox into a simple collaborative web browser. With cobrowse installed, one user starts a “server” that will accept incoming connections (currently fixed to port 5000) from folks that have chosen to connect via “client mode”. The server browser then sends every web page navigation change to every client. It even works when changing tabs! Good for showing people the way around the internet.
Confuscator!: Confuses your text message a tad, by randomizing the letters in the selected words, so that only the first and last letters are kept in place. There’s a scientific study behind it which basically proves that human eyes can read words with jumbled up letters correctly and perfectly fine as long as the first and the last letters are in place. Confused?
Edit Middle 2: Show AwesomeBar results when editing in the middle (not just at the end). This makes it easier to correct typos or change search terms and immediately see new results.
Event Spy: Event Spy adds a context menu item to nodes in DOM Inspector’s tree view that allows you to watch events that pass by the selected node. You never be left clueless about javascript events on Firefox DOM nodes.
FishEyeTabs: Turn your Tab-strip into a Mac OS X like magnifiable dock. Makes tab selection easier by replacing scrolling with fisheye - zooming when many tabs are open and they become too small. User can zoom tab labels by simply moving the mouse cursor over them.

That’s for part 1 of this post. Read the second part.

Tivoization: On a quick short note

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:49:25 +0000

What good is a blog withour a tinge of personal touch? I’ve been occupied with my work on music. But while releasing ColorfulTabs today, I had AMO force me to provide a license. Well Creative Commons it was but I did take a look at GPL and came across a word “Tivoization” which means “… is the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license, but uses hardware to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware”. Discovery of the day…

Finally…Google ships Adsense checks to Indian Publishers

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:59:45 +0000

Google has finally shipped the AdSense payment checks to Indian publishers via Blue Dart. To track your check, use the AdSense payment number (without the leading zero) on Blue Dart’s website, select reference number and hit “Go”.

The payments have been shipped on 12th May and are expected to be delivered on 15th.

Update: The Blue Dart tracking numbers just appeared under the AdSense account > Payment History.

Binary Turf

Firefox 3.5 out

Related Posts

Should Indian publishers expect delays in AdSense payments this month?

Related Posts

Does ColorfulTabs require a Wikipedia entry?

Related Posts

Mozilla Hacks

Related Posts

How to opt out of Google’s Interest Based Advertising

Related Posts

45 Interesting Firefox Addons we never knew Existed – II

Related Posts

Google fixes the Adsense payment envelope

Related Posts

45 Interesting Firefox Addons we never knew Existed - I

Related Posts

Tivoization: On a quick short note

Related Posts

Finally…Google ships Adsense checks to Indian Publishers

Related Posts