Having recently upgraded to Ubuntu’s latest offering “breezy badger” from “hoary hedgehog”. (If you want to do this open your sources.list in vi and :%s/hoary/breezy/ then apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade. If you don’t follow that, ignore it) I now finally have firefox 1.0.6 so I thought I’d have a look through my extensions, removing the ones I don’t use and make sure the rest are up to date. I was left with 9 extensions that I have come to rely upon.
- Mouse Gestures. Almost indisposable for it’s one feature of being able to expand images.
- StumbleUpon. Gives you an extra toolbar for “stumbling” around the web, which is a suprisingly good way of finding content that’ll interest you.
- del.icio.us. I don’t rely on this one hugely, but it makes posting bookmarks to del.icio.us much easier.
- Bloglines toolkit. Notifies me when there are new articles that I have to read on bloglines.
- Adblock. I barely notice this one it does such a good job.
- Linkification. Turns URLs in web documents into clickable links, suprisingly useful, again you forget it’s working in the background.
- SessionSaver. When firefox crashes you don’t lose all those tabs.
- User Agent Switcher. Luckily not many sites exclude non-IE visitors any more, but if they do, a few quick clicks sorts that all out.
- BugMeNot. When you don’t want to have to sign up to use every site on-line this tool makes life much easier
I have also just come across a new extension which has a lot of potential to become my favourite extension of all time. That’s GreaseMonkey it allows you to modify the way websites work, which means you can do all sorts of things a lot of great examples can be found here. So far I’ve used only one script which allows you to modify google image search so it links directly to the image.
On Monday I started at my new job, it is for a growing telecoms company called PanTelecom. I got the job within a few days of giving my details to a programme called STEP (Shell Technology Enterprise Programme) which advertises itself as “a UK-wide programme offering undergraduates project-based work within small to medium sized businesses”.
My project is to make a new version of an existing one of their products with a web based front-end. I’m doing this using Microsoft SQL Server and IIS. I haven’t used either of these products before most of my knowledge being Linux based and as such I’m more used to Apache and MySQL. However the concepts are not vastly different and I feel it is going well already. I think tomorrow I will be starting writing some of the front-end in ASP, which I have used only briefly many years ago.
This morning I took some photos of poppies in my garden. Two struck me as being worth putting online. One where a bee is just buzzing into a shot of a poppy with the stamens fallen off and collected in a cup made by the red and dark purple petals. The other of another poppy has a bee collecting pollen climbing amongst the splayed out and ragged petals next to a larger more mature seedhead.
Today my wireless card came, which means I can now use my Ubuntu Linux computer online in my room rather than my parents Windows XP computer. I was please with the ease I managed to get it working, it’s just a generic 802.11b card with RaLink’s RT2460 chipset. The driver from http://rt2×00.serialmonkey.com/ worked fine using this guide. While it was a little harder than in windows it certainly wasn’t difficult to figure out how to do and I think Linux should be competing with windows within a couple of years provided people can get over the fear of change.
Also today I’ve been planning a photo of traffic on a roundabout at night, with a long exposure hoping to capture the trail of lights. I was encouraged to do this after seeing this photo. I currently have 2 roundabouts in the south of Lincoln in mind, and I’m also thinking about doing one from a bridge over a fairly busy road. (Google maps links: 1, 2, 3). It’s perhaps not the right time of year to do this yet as it’s light until quite late when there is less traffic. I may have to leave it until September, shortly before I go back to Aberystwyth, when the earlier darkness should give more traffic to photograph. This is fine anyway as I need to purchase a new tripod because ‘Braingrind‘ broke my old one.
I’m in the process of redoing the whole site. Things should be back to relative normality soon except for the addition of a blog.