As anyone following my Twitter will know, I’m a massive fan of Google Chrome.  However, one imperative site for me doesn’t work with it – LogMeIn.

I’ve also become a massive fan of the new  Mozilla Prism beta, which basically allows you to turn webpages (such as LogMeIn) into applications. Prism is built on the same framework as Firefox 3, and theoretically add-ons should work on both.

However, two factors can stop this from happening: either the developer neglects to make the extension compatable with Prism at all, or neglected to make it compatable with the latest version of Prism. These are easily fixed.

Ingredients…

- Mozilla Firefox 3.0+
- Mozilla Prism 1.0 Beta standalone app or Firefox extension
- 7-Zip
- A text editor (I use Notepad++)

Create your App…

First, create your app with the setting ‘Show status messages and progress’ ticked.

This will allow you to see the configuration button on the bottom right of the Prism window.  Clicking on it and navigating to Tools > Add-ons… will show you where to drop your .xpi Firefox extension files.

Edit your extensions…

Now go and download the .xpi extension files that you want to work with Prism. Bear in mind, some add-ons will genuinely be incompatible, and anything not certified to work with Firefox 3 or above will almost certainly fail.

Open the .xpi file in 7 Zip – it is just a standard zip file containing other files. Inside that file will be install.rdf which you want to open in Notepad++ or your text editor of choice.  What you will see is something like this:


<RDF xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">


<Description about="urn:mozilla:install-manifest">
<em:id>LogMeInClient@logmein.com</em:id>
<em:name>LogMeIn, Inc. Remote Access Plugin</em:name>
<em:version>1.0.0.406</em:version>

<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>3.0.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

</Description>
</RDF>

Notice the <em:targetApplication> cotainer related to Firefox 1.5 to 3.0.*

We want to add another for Mozilla Prism upto, and so between </em:targetApplication> and </Description> we want to add:

<!-- Prism -->
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>prism@developer.mozilla.org</em:id>
<em:minVersion>0.9</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>1.9.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

You then save the file, 7 Zip will prompt you to update the file in the archive, which you say yes to, and you can then drag the .xpi into the Add-ons area of your Prism application, and install it as you would in Firefox.

I did this initially to get LogMeIn’s Firefox plugin to work with Prism to give me a web app of my LogMeIn console, but it could work with a multitude of add-ons.

Thanks to HushedChernobyl

Nobody knows how you work better than you.

The basis of Firefox is that you can do anything with it.

Want your bookmarks permanantly on the right of your screen? OK.  Want your downloads on a small bar a the bottom of the window? OK. Want the ability to render websites using the Internet Explorer engine inside a Firefox tab? OK.

The basis here is that the user knows best. The user knows how he or she wants things to work. Which makes sense, right?

But what if the user doesn’t know best?

I’ve spent the last few years tweaking Firefox 1, 2, 3 and then 3.5 to work how I work, using combinations of extensions and themes to give me the features I want. Some of them I now can’t live without (AdBlock, mainly) and some are just useful or cool (loving the tr.im button at the moment).

Having been completely underwhelmed with the stability, speed and responsiveness of the 3.5 beta 4 release, I seem to have started using the Google Chrome 2 beta more and more without any conscious decision to ’switch’

In it I can’t view my downloads in a little bar at the bottom of the screen. I can’t open disgusting, evil, badly built websites in Internet Explorer when I need to, and I can’t download streaming flash videos to my hard drive with one click.

Instead, I have to press Ctrl + J, copy and paste the link into a Start + R > iexplore.exe Ctrl + V combination or dig up some third party tool to download flash videos.

But I’m having a far more enjoyable browsing experience none the less.  It’s fast – I mean really fast – and it’s slick, it’s functional and it’s clever.

And that’s the reason I’m enjoying it so much – it’s clever. I don’t have to be clever to make it work, it’s already been done for me. I’ve not been given the ingredients to create my own browser, I’ve been given a fantastic browser on a plate.

Firefox’s downfall is going to be that the user doesn’t know best after all.

Firefox’s downfall is going to be that it gave it’s users enough rope to hang it’s browser.

Thanks to beckylikesben

Mr M ran a restaurant.  The restaurant had a computer, a master till and two slave tills running on a wired and wireless network. On one of the busiest days of the year, Mr M’s master till froze and, on rebooting it, came up with:

Primary master hard disk fail

Which is never something you want to see. Mr M’s master till was knackered, and along with it any slave tills were useless.

Mr M managed to get a new hard disk, and had Windows XP reinstalled along with the till software, but Mr M had no backups and so had to completely reprogram the till, which took days.  Mr M had no records of what he’d sold or taken for months, and no idea how many customers he’d even had. Mr M’s workload just quadrupled.

Primary master hard disk fail

Which is never something you want to see. Mr M’s master till was knackered, and along with it any slave tills were useless.

Mr M managed to get a new hard disk, and had Windows XP reinstalled along with the till software,and Mr M’s till had been backing up to his computer every day, and his computer backing up to a hard drive that came home with him every night. Mr M reloaded the database, records, configuration and software from the backup and was back where he’d left off in just a few hours.

There are three things that are certain in life; death, taxes, and a platter of small metalic discs spinning 7,000 times a minute 24 hours a day less than the width of a human hair from magnetised needles will one day fail.

You need a genie in a bottle to avoid the first two, but DG Computers can make your life painless when the third happens. Contact us to talk about it.

I made a startling discovery today.  A client was fed up with Talk Talk’s lack of customer service (everyone is in the end) and was looking at moving back to BT.

I did the maths and discovered the following:

TalkTalk

BT with O2 Broadband

BT with Zen Internet Broadband

Thanks to drowning-slowly

Everyone’s aware of the importance of registering your company name as a domain – many people will decide on a company name based on what domains are available.

Unless you can prove you owned the copyright to a domain when it was registered by the low-life thieving scum that registered it first, there’s no recourse, as Richard X Thripp the creator of the brilliant Wordpress plugin Tweet This found when someone beat him to tweetthis.net, tweetthis.org, tweet-this.com, and tweet-this.net!

And now there’s hundreds of other web services that require an unique ID – a mini-domain if you like. Twitter and MySpace are the obvious ones (Facebook uses a random unique ID), but what’s next on the conveyor belt of Web 2.0 successes?  Tweba? Ning? Hi5? And these are going to be even harder to claim your company name back on.

So get on the ball now. Get your Twitter name as a start, and then check out namechk.com to see what else there is out there.

Microsoft has a proven track record in building it’s Windows and Office software platforms and a proven track record in extracting all it can from a monopolised market.

Microsoft has a proven track record in building very bad consumer hardware; the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death is legendary (it even has its own MSKB article!), and the unit’s failure rate is as high as 68%, and the Zune has officially be designated a failure.

Microsoft has a proven track record in producing sub-standard, buggy mobile phone operating systems and even when given the ingredients by Apple can’t get a touch interface working.

Apple has a track record of producing the most beautiful, well built consumer hardware, and continually redefines the operating systems which we use.

Microsoft’s making an iPhone rival? Sell your Microsoft shares now.

It annoys me THIS much when I Google an error code, problem or question and do my usual open-the-first-ten-pages and end up with tab after tab of Experts Exchange pestering me for money. I was sure that a company that originally registered themselves as ExpertSexChange.com without realising couldn’t be that clever, so today I decided to beat them.

Option 1: Make them invisible…

If you just want to make it so you don’t see their results in Google, then you need the following:

• Mozilla Firefox (which you’re using anyway, right?)
• Customize Google extension

Add the latter to the former, in Firefox click Tools > Customize Google Options > Filter and add:

htt*://*.expertsexchange.*/*
htt*://*.experts-exchange.*/*

A browser restart and – voila! – no more Experts Exchange results.

Option 2: Get the answers for free…

Even more fun is beating them at their own game and making their website give you the answers every time.   For this you’ll need:

• Mozilla Firefox
• User Agent Switcher extension
• AdBlock Plus extension
• AdBlock Plus Element Hiding Helper extension

Experts Exchange use three methods to stop you from getting at the answers:

1. They put the answers right at the bottom of the page so you have to scroll through pages and pages of dross
2. They put a cookie onto your computer so you can’t view multiple answers
3. They monitor your referer (the website you came from) so you can view the answer if you come from a Google search, but not if you go there directly

The weak point here is that to appear in Google searches, they have to provide the answers to the Googlebot (the machine that trawls the web for Google). So, if we can pretend to be the Googlebot, they’ll give us the answers.

Be a bot…

After installing the User Agent Switcher into Firefox and downloading this xml file*, you can then go to:

Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options > User Agents > Import

and import the XML file.   Now, under:

Tools > User Agent Switcher

There is Googlebot 2.1.

Block their cookies…

The next stage is to stop them putting cookies on your computer to track repeat visits.  This is easy to do in Firefox:

• Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies > Exceptions
• Enter experts-exchange.com and click Block
• Enter expertsexchange.com and click Block

Clear the dross…

Now if you set your User Agent to Googlebot and visit their site, you will see the solution, but it’s still at the bottom of the page. Using AdBlock we can clear the stuff in between to make the page look like this:

To do this, download this file, then go to AdBlock Plus’ Preferences, click Filters > Import Custom Filters, select the file you downloaded, click Append and then OK.

Now if you go to the same page, all you see is the Question and the Solution

Improvements

This would be perfect if there was a way of setting the user-agent based on the domain you’re visiting, but I don’t know of one.  If anyone else does, do let me know and I’ll update this guide.

Thanks to bisiobisio

During a migration of domains, websites, databases and emails from one server to another, most things went as planned.

Once of those domains was this one, dgcomputers.co.uk, and one of these e-mail addresses was mine, and it did not go as planned.

I had moved the domain to 123 Reg, using their name servers, and set up the new dgcomputers.co.uk domain on the new server, and let the changes propagate.

24 hours later, my e-mail address seemed to be a black hole for many mail senders (Hotmail, NTL) and others threw back this error:

<drew@dgcomputers.co.uk>:
[my new server's IP] does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1
Giving up on [my new server's IP].

Having experience with 5.7.1 SMTP errors, and with my new mail server throwing them up, I thought it might be trying to relay to another domain, and so wasted a good few hours looking into that.

Then I thought that maybe the changes hadn’t propagated yet, and so used Network Tools’ Email Verification tool where I could see the process of picking NS, MX records and SMTP output, and it was picking the MX from my new NS and still throwing the same error, so no propagation issue.

My knowledgeable web developer suggested I may need to complete 1&1’s internal DNS settings even though I was using external name servers, which kind of made sense knowing how 1&1 try and rail road you into using them for everything, but even that didn’t work.

Then I started clutching at straws.  Spam blacklisted? No. Maybe my missing SPF record? No. I was at a dead end.

Fiddling away in Plesk I turn off the mail services for my domain, and then turned them on again, and bingo – e-mails started again.

I post this in the hope that someday someone will come across it in the same situation and I’ll save them 48 hours they’ll never see again.

However, their interface is awful.  Not conducive to getting anything done, so I’ve designed (I use ‘designed’ loosely) my own interface, which at least has a menu system.

Any 123 Reg user is free to give it a whirl. It’s at www.dgcomputers.co.uk/123/

Thanks to -kol

Imagine you’re sat in London.  Imagine you have a selection of large files to get to differing parts of the world.  A 50MB file to get to Aberdeen, a 250MB file to get to Los Angeles and a 1GB file to get to Melbourne. How do you go about it?

First let’s rule out some things:

• E-mail wasn’t designed for files of these sizes, and even if it does go through, it’s just rude to clog up someone’s inbox with something that big.
• E-mail is free (kind of), and so any solution should be free (kind of), so bye-bye YouSendIT and the ilk.

PipeBytes

First up is a free service called PipeBytes.  This allows you to send a file through the website at a maximum of 512Kbps (unless you pay them for a 3Mbps service).

The beauty is that, because you can download quicker than you can upload on most broadband internet connections, you end up sending the file directly to the recipient.

The downside is a dropped or interrupted connection means starting all over again, and at 3.75MB per minute a 250MB file would take over an hour.  Services like this generally have a short shelf life before they fold / become paid-only / diversify, so I don’t know how much longer it will be around for.

Dropbox

A more permanent solution between two people is to use Dropbox.  Dropbox needs to be installed on each computer that wants access to a ‘box’, but once it is the files are available in what looks like a normal folder. Dropbox is primarily a file syncing service (keeping the same version of a file on multiple computers) rather than a file sending service, but can be used as the latter.

You can even set up ‘collaborators’ to give other Dropbox users access to your files, or make files available to people without a Dropbox account by making them public, but this has a 350MB limit as they have to be downloaded using the web interface.

Whilst there’s currently no limit on how big the files can be, the free service has a 2GB storage limit.

FTP

FTP (basically putting a file on a website) is still quite a geeks-only domain. But in Windows XP and Vista, it can be quite simple to use.  Obviously, you need a web server to FTP onto, and many free or cheap website hosts have a file size limit, so this solution isn’t for everyone.

First off you need to create an FTP account on the server.  If you already have one – and it is your root account  (i.e. gives you access to everything) – then be sure you know the path to the directory you want to access (i.e. /public_html/forsharing/).

You can then follow my instructions for Windows XP, or these instructions for Windows Vista.

There’s two last stages before it’s user friendly – enablind indexing on the direcrory you’ve uploaded to (so users don’t get 403 errors) and, optionally, to use htaccess to password protect the directory.  Your web host will be able to help you better than I can with these.

Then, if you go to http://yourdomain.com/forsharing the files are available there.

Post It

Thanks to Diffusionist

It’s ridiculous that in the age of being able to put robots on distant planets there’s no other way, but if you have a humongous file to get to somewhere far away, one of the best ways is to burn it to a DVD / CD and pop it in the post.