TragicallyNull » Gripe

Firefox 3 Beta 4: LOL Wut?

John — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:02:22 +0000

So I just downloaded a copy of Firefox 3 Beta 4 SG-1 Sigma 9 Gamma, and pretty much the gist of what I’m going to say is that I really hope they polish it before it goes live, because right now this son of a bitch is rough. Most noticeably are the new navigation icons, both in small and full icon modes, the full version looks like a direct rip of IE7 panel which I guess is part of the “Vista Specific UI” but damn, the RSS icon is just hideous with it’s unnecessary 1px shadow and beveledness and the unrefined bookmark star that looks like someone used the shape from Photoshop to make. Not only that, but they removed the sub-back arrow, now I have to right click to see as list of the pages I’ve been to, but not only that but in full icon mode the remaining forward sub-arrow doesn’t even give you feedback when you click it, very sloppy in my book.

On the upside I do like Smart Bookmarks which allow you to view your most visited websites as well as your most recently bookmarked, the star, for it’s uglyness is a very nice way to quickly bookmark sites and the new notification system, while a little hard to get used to, is much more functional than the show stopping popup. There are also a mirriad of other features and behind the scenes stuff I’m sure, but that’s what has jumped out at me thus far.

All in all Firefox 3 is a needed and feature rich update that takes what works and does it’s best to make it better. It would be nice to see a little more polish before it ships but I’m not complaining, it’s the best browser available and it’s free.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 4

Share This

SanDisk sues everyone, kills Woot

John — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:14:55 +0000

SanDisk is suing 25 companies with products ranging from flash media card to mp3 players, refusing to cite the actual patents violated in their press release. They’re also attempting to use the ITC loophole, a loophole that allows patent holders to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling that companies who’s product as a whole does not violate a patent, but may include some patent infringing components may still be imported. A loophole that needs very much to be fixed A.S.A.P.

SanDisk also killed the Wootoff for nearly 5 hours today with their Sansa e260 media player, it’s unclear if it was the nearly 18,000 of these that Woot purchased from SanDisk, people outraged over these patent law suits or the fact that it was a crappy, crappy player, that can be blamed for the actual Wootpocalypse.

Share This

Anyone else want to sue Vonage while AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, god are at it?

John — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:33:29 +0000

Not only does Vonage have to deal with Verizon suing them over claims that their over-broad patents that shouldn’t have been granted in the first place were violated, they have to deal with the Death Star, AT&T, suing over even more obvious (read: invalid) patents related to “Packet based telephony”, because apparently using the internet to transfer data is new. AT&T goes on to claim that they had attempted to enter into a mutually amicable (read: Vonage gives them a lot of money because AT&T had lawyers file over-broad and obvious patents a long time to snuff out any competition) agreement.

Just another case of the Patent Office being radically behind the times and issuing patents for things they don’t understand.

Share This

Kinset launches 3D store - people keep not caring

John — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:31:41 +0000

In a move we’ve seen a thousands times and will see a thousand times again, some company thinks putting their website or their storefront in 3D will make them unique, that for some reason people desire the “Shelf” display of items over an organized list in a web page and they will continue to be wrong. The web is it’s own kind of media, you don’t need to make it look like “the real thing”, you need to design for what it’s capable of in and of itself.

The company claims one of the benefits of the idea is that people not familiar with ordering online will be familiar with the shelf setup, but perhaps in the real world teaching Grandma how to search with Amazon might be easier than teaching her to “walk” though a virtual store looking for what she wants, especially seeing as how there is only one Kinset and many stores like Amazon. Give a Grandma a fish and she shops for a day, teach a Grandma to use Amazon and she’ll shop until your inheritance is gone.

Share This

Bypass Comcast bittorrent throttling

John — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:13:53 +0000

TorrentFreak has outlined what works and what doesn’t when trying to bypass Comcast’s deep packet inspection and throttling. On the list is forcing header encryption, seeding via encrypted SSH tunnel and lowering your download speed to less than your upload.

Comcast prevents seeding torrents by sending RTS, or close connection packets to both you and the person you’re trying to connect to, killing the connection before it even starts. A technology that could be illegal due to the fact they’re, in effect, spoofing packets from you. This method is also used by China to keep people from accessing the outside internet.

Read the full guide on TorrentFreak

Share This

RIAA sues… Usenet?

John — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:54:14 +0000

As funny as it would be if there were actually trying to sue “The Usenet”, which would be similar to suing “The internet”, which actually I’m sure they’d also like to do, they’re really suing Usenet.com, a provider of newsgroup/usenet access. Usenet was part of the original internet, along with BBSes and many other antiquated technologies. Originally intended for use as a threaded communications system, now is commonly used to host large file downloads.

Will the safe harbor provision, which protects organizations that allow open access to their system, shield Usenet.com from the RIAA’s legal hammer? Possibly not as Usenet.com has refused requests remove or deny access to groups that provide copyright file downloads. If this case is ruled in favor of the RIAA many other Usenet services could be threatened and their legitimate uses quashed under the foot of the RIAA’s raging lawsuit Goliath.

Share This

AOL: Everyone who works here GTFO, everyone else can stay

John — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:37:21 +0000

In a not-so-shocking decision, AOL has reduced it’s workforce of 10,000 to 8,000, laying off (read: canning (read: firing)) 2,000 employees, 1,200 in the U.S. This cut comes as the transition from ISP to amorphous Google-meets-Yahoo content/search thing begins. Perhaps they could have kept some of their staff if they hadn’t sent me trial CDs every week for 6 years, but perhaps we will never know. I don’t want to give my 2008 predictions away just yet, but I have a feeling AOL could be pulling a Sony.

Share This

TiVo: Transfer your lifetime service - Bend over

John — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:45:17 +0000

TiVo is allowing you the privilege of transferring your $200 lifetime service over to a new TiVo HD (=>$300) for the low low price of… another $200. Way to stick it to your customers, TiVo. Stop providing one of the best selling points for your product and then double charge people who got in on it if they want to keep it (and not be left sitting with their semi-limp SD in their hand).

Share This

Sony still evil, shock is had by all

John — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:22:27 +0000

Sony remains the evil black company everyone loves to hate with their newest round of important people saying stuff they shouldn’t. This time, Sony BMG’s head lawyer, Jennifer Pariser, was quoted saying that ripping a CD was “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy.’” When will Sony and the rest of the major music labels realize that trying to charge multiple times for media serves only to alienate your fans and that fair use is still a part of the American legal system. Hopefully EMI and Universal going DRM free will pave the way for more significant and positive change in the music industry.

Share This

KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR when adding/playing/transferring video (.mov .mp4) or photos in iTunes 7 and QuickTime 7 in Windows Vista

John — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:26:01 +0000

I’ve had this problem since the release of Vista and it seems pretty isolated so I wasn’t able to find a solution on the internet, but though a series of events and random chance I seem to have found a solution.

Symptom(s)

When you try to add, play (Video will play for about 6 seconds) or transfer .mov or .mp4 (mpeg-4) video files (even from the iTunes Music Store) one of three things will happen.

iTunes gracefully crashes and Windows Vista continues to function
Windows Vista completely hangs and ceases to function forcing a hard power-down.
Windows Vista will crash resulting in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with the error KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR.

The same outcome can occur when trying to transfer a large amount of photos to an iPod using iTunes.

I am using an HP A1510N with the A8N-LA Nagami2 (nForce 430 (MCP51)) mother board. I also have an additional SATA and USB HardDrive, an additional 512MB RAM and a PCIe ATI Radeon x1950PRO, I believe this error may be hardware specific as this error doesn’t occur on my Dell notebook.

The Solution

I reformatted and reinstalled Windows Vista, without installing anything else, even Windows Updates, I installed iTunes, but the video problems (above) persisted. I then installed all of the Windows Updates (Including optional drivers except for a Realtek sound driver) and the latest driver for my graphics card, restarted my computer and iTunes could play, transfer and add video perfectly, except for a slight problem with audio sync. Reformatting may not be necessary, check to see if you have an update in Windows Update named NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller and install if it’s not already, restart and test your video files.

The key to the solution seems to be the NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller which seems to have been released yesterday. It would make sense if iTunes was trying to access a harddrive function that the driver/ couldn’t handle resulting in Windows Vista crashing because it suspected a damage Page File. Of course, I can be SURE that this was the fix. I will update this post if anything breaks later on because of a program incompatibility.

Share This

iPod touch Browser Limitations

John — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:36:58 +0000

I’ve been playing with the iPod touch pretty heavily for a couple of days now and I’ve noticed that the browser has some slight and understandable limitations on the way webpages are run in parallel, the limitation being that they aren’t. Or at least not when one of the pages has a lot of images on it, in that case it closes the heavy webpage out and lets you view your other page and then reloads it when you switch back. The iPod touch also only allows you to have a maximum of 8 sites open at a time regardless of their “weight”. The browser is also missing flash and java, the latter I couldn’t care less about, but the former would have been really awesome for mobile games on the touch. Hopefully they’ll add support for this later on, but knowing Apple, later on will be the next generation of the product.

Share This