Today I wanted to drop a note about an application that I recently ran across that might have solved the ad-blocking issues for me without the need to run proxies that usually slow down the browsing process or are difficult to maintain and configure. Those who use Windows may know that you can block ads via the Windows hosts file. It’s a file that your PC uses to try to resolve domain names. If the domain name isn’t found there, the machine will then start looking to your external name server(s) (e.g. your internet provider, etc.). For years now there are people who have been using this file to block ads, and it works great most of the time. The only issues I ever had were that the file was cumbersome to keep updated, plus certain pages on the web become unusable. For example some video sites display ads before showing you the video. If the ad doesn’t not display, the video cannot be viewed.

Yesterday, though, I ran across a tool that seems to solve both of those issues, called HostsMan. It’s a tool that will help you keep your hosts file updated using online sources of ad lists. But it also supports exclusions, so that you can add in certain domains that should never be added to your file.

The only downside to using the hosts file to block ads is that you cannot white-list ads on a certain webpage, for instance. You may like a certain site but realize they are ad-supported. Unfortunately the hosts file is used separately per ‘request’ or item inside of a webpage and therefore cannot understand that you want to allow ads displayed within or alongside a certain page or domain.

But if you’re OK with that, I highly recommend this program to help speed up Chrome even more and keep your online experience (in all of your browsers) virtually ad-free.

Don’t worry, I still love you, Rhapsody…

Anyway, I just discovered via the Rhapsody forums that someone wrote a scrobbler plugin for Rhapsody that integrates with the Rhapsody player itself.  Works like a charm!  The only mixed blessing is it seems to send track info as a track starts playing, rather than waiting until it is completed.  Perhaps an annoyance to those who prefer to scrobble only after listening to a complete song, but I haven’t minded so far.

Enjoy!

That said what I’m really waiting for is to see what happens in the future, specifically their support of add-ons, or extensions.  There were rumors early on that Chrome may support Firefox add-ons natively (similar to AvantBrowser’s Orca), but recently Google said they were going to be creating their own extension system.  A system that they hope is more stable and does not impact the browser’s overall performance.

For now I’m sticking with Firefox 3 until said extension system is completed and we see what types of extensions can be and/or are built.  You can use a proxy like Privoxy to replace Adblock Plus, and there is Greasemetal to allow you to use (some) Greasemonkey scripts in Chrome.  But they really need a vibrant extension community to pull over users like myself, as the performance of Firefox is getting better with each new release and is good enough to keep me from moving away from my highly customized browser.

Related to this, something that slightly worries me is Google’s past history regarding product development.  Don’t get me wrong I love all of their tools such as Docs, Maps, etc. but things like Gmail are still in beta after over 3 years have passed.  New features that you feel would just be built in are being slowly offered via optional Labs settings.  Though Google did an excellent job with their initial releases of Gmail and Chrome, they really need to keep the new features or innovations coming to keep users interested.  This is where extensions are so important, as no one at Google (or Mozilla) could come up with all of these trinkets on their own.

Sure enough, there’s a ‘config’ file that controls which options are available in the Add/Remove window.  See the file c:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf (note that ‘inf’ is a hidden Windows folder).  Credit to this forum post.

Unfortunately not much information can be found on MozillaZine or most support forums.  Mainly because it’s kind of hard to describe or find the right search terms for.  But I did find a support post finally that pointed me to the true fix: disable the Helvetica Fractions font in Font Book.

Hope this helps save an hour of someone else’s time

Anyway, enough rhetoric, there’s plenty of information online on what Option Strict provides for you. The reason I’m here today is to share a tip on how to enable Option Strict in your code-behind files in a VB.NET web application (or web site). You can enable this option of course in each page/code file, but I recommend making it a global project setting.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft KB article that addresses this doesn’t work. Those web.config settings do not work. However, after some Google-ing I found an ASP.NET forum post addressing this issue. Here’s what you need to add to your web.config:

<system.codedom>
    <compilers>
      <compiler compilerOptions ="/optionexplicit+ /optionstrict+" language="vb;vbs;visualbasic;vbscript" extension=".vb" type="Microsoft.VisualBasic.VBCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
    </compilers>
  </system.codedom>

Once again the ‘check for update’ tool inside of the Napster client does not detect there is an upgrade. Goto Napster’s homepage and log in. It’ll start synching up with your music collection, to now make it available online, and then prompt you to download the new client.

Ooooo, I can’t wait to use…

Once again, Google is your friend, as I found Large Text File Viewer.  It opened that file and only took 2MB of RAM to do it.  Coop sweet!

I’ve been testing/switching back and forth between this beta and Google Reader. I gotta say I like love this new beta! It’s much quicker to load than Reader in every browser I’ve tried and the appearance is more appealing to me (always had an issue with Google’s choice of colors/fonts, even using Greasemonkey hacks). Plus you can now reorder your feed list via drag-drop, and it has a 3-pane view that I’ve found myself using for almost all feeds.

Only drawbacks so far: I’d like to use the Quick View for reading feed items, but unfortunately I haven’t found a way to collapse a news item once it’s opened, making for more scrolling than I like. And I’d still like to see them do pinning similar to Starred Items in Google, so they don’t clutter up my viewing of new items within a feed.

But they have been releasing new features and migrating old ones as time has gone on. In just a couple of weeks they’ve updated the default theme to use more bold fonts and added back in pinning, to name a couple. And watch what happens when you hit the ~ key on your keyboard. Who knows where that is going

So expect to see more happen as the beta progresses.

Now I’m no power RSS user, so I can’t critique much beyond that, but especially if you’re a non-power-user like me, I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

For those uninitiated, a scrobbler is used to submit song information to last.fm, where you can view my Recently Played Tracks, my top albums, trends in listening, etc. The scrobbler is a little program that I run and sits in my taskbar, monitoring my music player (in this case, Napster), submitting the information to last.fm’s servers.

last.fm offers widgets I can embed on my site so you could see what I’m listening to, which I’m trying to do on this blog, the code is actually there, but it doesn’t show up over to the right…oh well, I’ll keep plugging away…hopefully it’s not a limitation of the fact I use wordpress.com for hosting.

In the meantime, you can check my last.fm profile page.

EDIT: turns out the code wasn’t there. Apparently WordPress.com filters out certain tags, part of the last.fm widget. No biggie, added the RSS feed there instead. Sorry, you’ll have to settle for that until WordPress.com adds the (much-requested) last.fm widget.