Monthly Archives: February 2005

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 2:09 pm on February 26, 2005  

Firefox 1.0.1 Released; Breaks Lektora

On Thursday the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0.1, mainly a security upgrade for its now-infamous browser. It includes another temporary fix for the IDN spoofing issue I mentioned before.

Users of the first beta version of the new RSS aggregator Lektora should note this upgrade breaks Lektora’s Firefox extension. Simply uninstall the extension and reinstall the Lektora program in Windows; or, grab the new beta version of Lektora coming out today, which you should pry do anyway since the current beta expires this Tuesday.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 10:45 am on February 24, 2005  

Fair and balanced…

Wow, has CNET news had suddenly gone nuts? IE7 is the doom of Firefox? Did you hear that?

Thankfully an interview with Salon regarding this recent claim at least shows CNET allows other points of view…

I’m sorry, Molly, but you’re just plain wrong! Just because the biggest software company releases their version of a product, doesn’t mean we should necessarily cower and use it or abandon other alternatives. Market share shouldn’t dictate what I as a free-thinking user should use…the power of choice is monumental to society….

And that’s not even getting into the real reasons why…

Whew, I feel like Will Ferrel during his debate in Old School…what happened, I blacked out?

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 10:27 am on February 24, 2005  

New Job

Normally I don’t get too personal in the blog, at least blurring out the names in the appropriate documents. To protect the innocent and not make this into a personal diary where all I do is vent and rave. Usually not appropriate in this case…

But I had to just let those who really know me and follow me only thru this blog that I just accepted a new consulting position with a ‘large’ Twin Cities company. I qualify ‘large’ as one of the premier consulting groups and larger local presences; not necessarily meaning the size of a big 5 company overall. But they get alot of excellent work in the Microsoft arena, and I couldn’t pass up a chance to work for them again (yes, I previously worked with them in a previous life (for both of us)).

But I can’t wait to start on the 28th and will share any interesting news I can related to this later…

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:24 pm on February 17, 2005  

Don’t Ask

This is kind of self-explanatory, but I’ll explain what this tool I wrote is for soon…just wanted to get it ‘public’ for people to use. Please excuse any bugs, as I know there are some tweaks I need to make it work nicely in most browsers..

UPDATE: OK, here’s the scoop on this tool…I was recently in a job search and needless to say I surfed the same sites over and over, day after day. I got the idea from another website that provided a similar service, albeit in a different format. But basically you can search for jobs by entering the search criteria once, and then it’s submitted to the different sites.

Right now it only searches in the state of MN, for computer jobs. I’m considering making it truly flexible, with different states and occupations…

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 12:43 pm on February 16, 2005  

IDN Phishing ‘Solved’

Heard of the latest ‘bug’ to hit the browser world? Well unless you know what IDN is, probably not. There’s a problem with IDN that results in a certain combination of characters ‘morphing’ themselves into what looks like a valid English site. (I’m stepping outside my realm of knowledge here, so forgive the crazy talk)…. Anyhow, it’s a way for someone to perhaps fool you into thinking you’re on Paypal’s website when you look at your browser’s address bar, but you’re actually redirected elsewhere….

The only fixes right now are to either:

  • disable IDN support, not a nice option for those who need IDN (go here for Firefox, Opera has no such capability, and only IE doesn’t support IDN natively),
  • install/configure a proxy like Proxomitron which will work for everyone and warn you of ‘questionable’ URLs, or
  • a workaround for Firefox using the AdWatch extension. Another non-ideal option for those who need IDN
Unknown's avatar illiniguy 2:31 pm on February 2, 2005  

VS 2005 Beta 1 Emulator Setup Issue

Just thought I’d drop the hint: I was installing VS.NET 2005 Beta 1 on a new PC today, and hit an error during the Device Emulator install, which occurs after VS.NET is installed (thankfully).  If you get an error essentially saying ‘…Error 1603…Fatal Error during installation…”, the following blog entry will help immensely:

http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chopra/archive/2004/07/07/175484.aspx

Their proposed ‘solution’ worked perfectly.