Sephy’s Platzish

Seeing that I am about one of about 10 people in the world left without a Facebook account, I’ve done a bit of investigation into the site and found out that there are some major faults with the site, and they have to do with their "recommendations" on how to keep safe.

If you want to play along, their page on safety is here - http://www.facebook.com/safety/

Anyway, they give you these "important safety tips" when using the site, 4 of them make sense, but the fifth one, in bold, makes absolutely no sense if you think about it:

• Never share your password with anyone
• Adjust your privacy settings to match your level of comfort, and review them often
• Be cautious about posting and sharing personal information, especially information that could be used to identify you or locate you offline, such as your address or telephone number
• Report users and content that violate our Terms of Use
• Block and report anyone that sends you unwanted or inappropriate communications

Yep, I can totally understand not posting your address and telephone number on the public web, but they say to be cautious about posting information that could locate you offline…so, doesn’t that include one thing that would automatically identify you offline: YOUR NAME?!?!?!?!

Seriously, I can’t think of anything that can’t identify you faster offline than your own bloody name. So, wouldn’t the logical step be to sign up using an alias. Yep, that would be a smart move, but they’ve also put a major FAIL sign on that:

Remember that…using fake names is a violation of the Facebook Terms of Use

So, you can’t use an alias then, can you? However, I guess it keeps someone busy, having to report all of those fake names out there, and deleting their accounts.

Maybe I should stick to just watching random videos of soccer fans singing:

While the computer is busy working on burning a couple more DVDs, I figured that I would take a moment and try out a new app that I had downloaded for my iPod, WordPress for iPhone/iPod touch. There are a few cool things about this app - the fact that I can easily post anywhere I can find a wifi connection among them, but there is only one minor flaw:

It lets you put the device upside down (ie with the home button at the top and the (on the phone) speaker at the bottom) this is something unique and odd. Safari lets you do this but the screen will be upside-down.

Another flaw that I have now found is that there is no save feature included in the software. Let’s hope that I can publish!
Edit to add - I found the save button, yay!

And it’s not totally for the reason of all the features

If you know me, you know that I can fall in love with things for the most bizarre reasons, and the iPhone is not an exception to that.

They had two available for playing around with at Walmart - the 3G versions, natch, but that really doesn’t matter. So, I see these phones in the electronics section, and I go up to them and start playing with them - first just browsing on the web, then some more browsing and searching, playing with the pinch zoom thingy which is awesome.

Then on the other phone, I went to check out the actual phone portion of the phone that you use for, you know, calling?

An amazing thing happened. Naturally, I didn’t just try out calling locally, I typed in international numbers. Not so much to call, but just to see what happens (because most times phones don’t understand foreign numbering schemes). I type in an Australian mobile number, which is formatted this way - +61 4xx xxx xxx. I expected something odd, but it came up this way -

+61 4xx xxx xxx

Bloody amazing, if you ask me!

Aussie landline: +61 2 xxxx xxxx  - yep!

It gets international phone numbers - for me, that is reason enough to fall in love with a phone

This is one of those long-time bugs that I’ve experienced with a piece of software that I truly love because of what it can do with your phone budget if you have folks overseas (or just if you have a curiosity about free telephone numbers over there as well), Skype.

This particular bug involves trying to send a text message to a friend who is offline at the time. For some reason, whenever they send me a message and I’m offline, the message comes to me when I get online, but when I try to do it, I get the almost dreaded "Message not sent yet" note on the screen, even after they sign in.

The really annoying thing is that when I am fairly certain that person is online and I send a message with some unsent messages still there (because they didn’t get sent when they came online in the first place), those new messages get stuck!

It’s really fucking annoying and there is no reason that my messages can’t be delivered when both the sender and receiver are online. Thankfully there is one way to solve the problem, but it is quite annoying - calling the person usually gets the messages to go through, unless they are truly offline in which case I get sent to voicemail.

To be honest, as much as I love Skype, this problem is quite infuriating and should be something quite simple to fix, if you ask me. Of course I’m not a software engineer, so there ya go.

As some of you may remember, I wasn’t too impressed with Firefox 2 when it first came out, mostly to do with a single change to the structure of the search box. However, I finally broke down and upgraded to it and I’ve liked it, especially with the addition of a few extensions like tab mix plus to make my browsing experience my own.

Strangely, though, when I went to my home page, Firefox Central, and saw the redesign of the page the other day, it was a sign to me that the new version of the browser was out. Now, you’d think that with my prior history with a new version of software and not liking it too much, I decided that I’d be back on the cutting edge of technology and download the new version. So I did, and I have to say that I’m impressed overall, but there are a few qualms that I have.

New Location Bar

The most talked about feature by far of the new version is the redesigned location bar - dubbed as the "Magic Bar". It’s not a lie - it is quite magical. For example, if I know I saw a page about something, but can’t exactly remember the address (which for me is highly unlikely, but that’s me ), I can just type in a word that was in the title, like "Gruen" and that will bring up a list of sites that I’ve visited or bookmarked that has Gruen either in the title or in the address -

Something that you don’t see is that when a site is bookmarked, it’s got a little gold star next to it, which brings me to my next feature - one-click bookmarking. I didn’t buy into it before, but in practice, it’s devilishly simple. To bookmark a site, I usually drag it to my folder called Sites on the toolbar, but now all I have to do is click on the star in the toolbar (it shows where the go arrow is in the screenshot above) and it’s saved. Then, another click brings up a menu, which lets you file the bookmark where you want it. This even works for sites you’ve already bookmarked, such as my local radar -

Other neat features

One of the things I have a lot of are links to different RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar, and from time to time they don’t work. Usually it’s because of an error, but one thing that they’ve added to the menu that comes up when you click on a "livemark" is something deadly simple - a menu item that says "Open "Site name"" - which does just that - open the main site for the livemark so that you can view that page directly.

Also, they’ve added some other useful menus, such as the Most Visited under the bookmark toolbar, where you have a list of the ten sites you’ve visited the most over the last few days, along with the option to save your session without having to tweak your homepage every time you want to use that feature. Of course, you can still just exit the browser, but this way you have the flexibility to do that if you want.

One caveat

And it’s not even Firefox’s fault. Whenever you upgrade to a new version of Firefox (or any browser for that matter), some things tend to break. It’s no different in this case where some of my most favourite add-ons have proven to be incompatible with 3.0, but I think that’s more of a simple coding change that needs to be done.

At first, Adblock (I have regular adblock, not adblock plus) was incompatible, but just as I went to check for updates, it looks like it has been updated.

However, Firebug, Fasterfox, Tab Mix Plus, and All-in-One Gestures are not compatible yet. I would suspect that it won’t be too long before that’s sorted out though.

Overall impression

Overall, I have to say that I’m glad I’ve upgraded to the new version of the browser - it adds quite a few features that are really neat (including being able to resize the search box), and it uses quite a bit less memory - I’ve had it open for quite a while now and it’s only using 117MB of Virtual Memory and 108MB of RAM. Also, and to be honest, I haven’t noticed this too much since I have relatively fast Internet, it’s apparently much faster at loading pages.

If you’re someone who waits for software to be stable before it’s released, that’s alright, but I don’t think you’d be going wrong to take a chance and upgrade to Firefox 3.