Archive for June, 2004
Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities
I’m not sure how many times it has to be said, but I will say it again. Stop using Internet Explorer. Download a different browser, increase your security, and browse more peacefully.
Here are a few warnings. There have been tons before, there will be tons after. It will take thousands of people’s identities stolen, credit card numbers taken, and the complete distrust of Microsoft before people will actually switch web browsers.
- Internet Explorer Is Just Too Risky
- Net Attack Aimed at Banking Data (free registration required)
- The U.S. government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is warning Web surfers to stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser.
If you want more security as well as a better product… for free, download Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox Theme Changing
Why keep the default look in your web browser? Though you may not have known, you do have a choice to browse in style! Within the last 5 years or so, programs have adopted a technology called “skinning” or “theme changing.” Mozilla Firefox 0.9 supports this, and has a vibrant community of people making the web browser look fantastic.
Keep reading for a mini tutorial on how to change the look of your copy of Firefox 0.9.
(1) The First thing you will want to do is close any other websites before changing themes and save any info you have going on in your browser. Theme changing has more than once messed up my browsing session until I restarted my browser. Next you will want to browse to a site that contains themes. The first one is the easiest to find as it can be browsed to straight from the Firefox menus. To locate it, click on Tools > Themes > Get More Themes.
This should take you to the Mozilla Update site for Firefox Themes.
The other method would be to browse directly to another site that contains Firefox compatible themes. One such site is the Texturizer site. This used to be where Firefox users would go for themes and extensions. Why it changed, I don’t know… but they have some themes and extensions here that you can’t find on the Mozilla update site.
(2) Which ever site you go to, you will want to click on the theme that you want, and then locate an “Install” or “Install Now” link. Once you click this, you should get a dialog box similar to this:
(3) If you are okay with installing the theme, click the OK button. Otherwise, click the Cancel button. If you select the OK button, you should get a dialog similar to what you see below. The theme you have selected will appear and the progress bar will, well… progress… assuming everything is going okay.
(4) Once the download is complete, the “Use Theme” button should be clickable. Select the theme you want to use and then select this button. The theme should change and you should restart your browser… if you menus go funny or your close tabs button doesn’t work… don’t worry, just close the browser, restart it, and it should be all back to normal.
Below I show the default theme for Firefox:
And after trying out the PlastikFox theme:
Hopefully this tutorial has helped and by now you should be enjoying your browser’s new look.
Mozilla Firefox 0.9
With Mozilla.org’s latest web browser, Firefox 0.9, comes loads of enhancements.
The upgrade from 0.8 seems minor but the changes couldn’t be stressed enough. Besides the default theme being changed, the browser acts more stable, extensions are easier to manage, and best of all… Windows’ download size has decreased by nearly a half!
Firefox users of the past will be delighted to see things are still relatively the same, and new users will come to enjoy the benefits this “alternative” web browser will have on there “browsing experience.”
One of the most influential features Firefox has on new users is it’s tabbed browsing interface. With tabs, you can have several web pages loaded into one window. This eliminates the extremely cluttered desktops that I have seen on other people’s computer screens. Navigating the seemingly impossible stack of windows is no longer necessary. With tabbed browsing, they are neatly organized for you right at the top of the window, ready and waiting to be clicked on… or conveniently closed by the [x] button on the right.
Besides tabbed browsing, Firefox revolutiones the browsing scene with it’s customizability. Click the extensions you want, find and click its install link, click the install button that pops up, restart your browser, and begin customizing. I suggest installing only one at a time and restarting after each extension is downloaded as I have found it easier on the browser (this seems to no longer hold true for 0.9.1). I tried installing 5 extensions at once, restarting, and the browser told me it was initializing all of the extensions and to wait a minute… the minute was more like —forever—. So I uninstalled the whole browser, reinstalled the whole browser, followed my advice above, (one extension at a time, restart, install another) and it worked great!
Here are two sites with LOADS of extensions you can add to Firefox:
(1) Mozilla Update
And Below are six extensions that I have installed on my browser that make my web experience that much more enjoyable. They are ordered by which I use most starting with RSS Reader Panel.
(1) Sage RSS Reader - Have a side panel in your browser with latest articles from websites that utilize the RSS format.
(2) Tab Browser Extensions - Extends the tabbed browsing interface, for example tabs can be reorderable by drag and drop, or right click and undo the last close tab.
(3) DictionarySearch 0.6 - Select text, right click on it, and perform a dictionary search on that text.
(4) Web Search Plus 0.1 - Similar to the dictionary search, except this takes you on a web search at Google rather than on a word definition search.
(5) Web Developer 0.8 - Allows you to resize your browser to a specified width, display information about pages, debug your websites.
(6) User Agent Switcher - If a website won’t allow you in because you don’t have a certain browser, with this, you can make Firefox look like another browser! How sneaky huh?
Terraserver Photography
I often times like going to http://www.terraserver-usa.com and looking at all the pictures from above.
What I don’t like is how the largest sized picture you can download is so small. What Terraserver does is it puts small tiles of images together to make a larger whole. The largest you can get is made up of twelve tiles. Four across and three down, resulting in an image 800×600.
I decided to see if I could do something about it. I ended up creating a php script that downloads as many tiles as I want and puts them back together as a whole.
I put in the top left tile that I want, while noting the bottom right tile of the final image I want. Then I subtract the x and y coordinates that Terraserver uses… giving me the width and height in tiles.
Plug in the info, and the script goes to work. It grabs all of the tiles in the first row, and puts them together using ImageMagick’s convert program. After all of the horizontal rows are formed… I make it put all of the rows together to form the final.
I made a picture the other day of Mason, MI… the size… 6000×4200.