Posted in computers, general, software on 6 Jun 2005
I’ve collected some browser statistics from the visitor tracker for the blog. IE is still in the lead, but nowhere near the 90% which was the state of affairs at the main site before november 1, 2004. A third of the visitors now use Firefox/Mozilla, which is what specialist’s and web developers’ sites usually have. I’m very satisfied with you!
The main site statistics are not as accurate — they only track the last 100 visitors — but there, the figures are 68%–18% at the moment. A little less for FF, which is expected, but still a good share.
Those of you who haven’t made the change yet, may want to read my top seven reasons not to use the thing with the blue e. (And, in case you’re concerned: you can have both browsers installed at the same time, and Firefox will ask if you want to import all your favorites from IE, so you will not lose anything.)
Here are the complete figures:
Internet Explorer (4, 5, 5.5, and 6): 15,481 (54%)
Mozilla (Firefox and the Mozilla suite): 9,450 (33%)
Netscape: 1,559
Konqueror: 963
Safari: 933
Opera: 264
——————
Total: 28650
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Posted in computers, software on 16 Mar 2005
Having tested the various file management programs a little more thoroughly, I’ve ended up with a fifth favorite: Total Commander. The main features are more or less the same as in the other programs (two panels, tabs, ftp client and archive support integrated, almost unlimited configurability, great keyboard support, etc.), but it works more smoothly, it is quicker, and doesn’t crash, which all the other programs have done on some occasion or another. But what is probably the greatest advantage is the active user community. Not only does that mean that a host of plugins for any possible task is available for TC, but when a lot of people rever a program with almost religious sentiments, that …
Posted in computers, general, software on 3 Mar 2005
Now that I’ve come up with some new tabs, I think I’ve earned the right to talk about something else again. I’ve revamped my computer lately, and found some stuff that I thought I’d pass on.
After two years of heavy use, loads of downloads, installations, ex-stallations, trial versions etc., my computer was becoming excruciatingly slow — so slow, I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided it was time to do something more drastic than just a defragmentation.
The first step was a major clean-up of registry, junk files, etc. It’s not a good idea to mess around in the registry too much on your own (and if you don’t know what/where it is, don’t worry), but there are many programs …
Posted in computers, general on 23 Feb 2005
Today, I happened to look at this page on a computer without ClearType activated. And man … I had completely forgotten how ugly text on a computer screen can look. Really, with Clear Type, what you see on the screen comes reasonably close to looking at a printed page (whereas the “old” screen view comes close to looking at a piece of paper someone has dropped on a henhouse floor).
If you have Windows XP, this is already available, but for some reason MS have decided not to turn it on by default, and furthermore they have buried the setting in some menu one would not normally look for something like this.
Here it is:
Right click on the desktop and select …
Posted in dylan, guitar, philosophy, software, tabs on 22 Feb 2005
OK, here’s the full story of the battle of Wichita, as requested.
It sounds pretty easy at first — just a run down similar to so many other songs (The Wicked Messenger, Down the Highway, and quite a few others), but when it came down to figuring out the details…
One thing was for certain: the highest string had to be tuned to the tone that is ringing throughout — there was no way in the world that that was going to be a fingered tone, the dexterity that would have been involved in that, would have been quite alien to Dylan (no offense). So there was one string…
For the rest, I worked with the different tunings that I knew Dylan …
Posted in computers, general, software on 10 Feb 2005
Firefox — Rediscover the web
You may have noticed my shameless promotion of Firefox lately. It’s a love relationship that goes a while back, to when it was still called Firebird and was just a test thing. Now — well, it certainly has grown: 25 million downloads since November, a browser share that approaches the 10% which seemed a utopian goal only a couple of months ago (that’s the general share; at some sites it already hovers around 30%), and it seems that nobody who spends some time on the net could have missed seeing it mentioned. (Or am I wrong? If you want to give some feedback on this, I would be quite curious to know how many of …
Posted in computers, general on 6 Feb 2005
“Don’t be evil!” That’s google’s slogan. Apparently, it sounded better than “Be good!”, and there’s something to it.
Today, something like 75% of all external referrals to websites come via Google.
With Gmail, which offers 1 Gb of storage space, it is hard to come up with a better alternative to a free mail provider.
They have bought Blogger, which offers one of the better blog services. Free even that.
Googlenews provides a computer-generated synthesis of the best from 4,500 news sources from all over the world.
Google recently made an arrangment with the New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan, to scan their collections of books and …