Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

I had a really bad experience installing Firefox on my Mac so I decided to pen down the detailed instructions along with my experience installing it as a first time Mac user.

Installing Firefox on Mac OS X

Goto Firefox.com, click on the download link and the file should download to your Downloads folder

Open the Downloads folder using Finder and locate the Firefox.2.x.x.x file, double click on it ad you should see this screen

Click accept and in a few moments, the image will be mounted and you will see this window

Now open the Applications folder in another Finder window and drag the Firefox icon from the above screen into the Applications folder

You will see a progress screen for a few moments and you are done installing Firefox

Right click on the Firefox disc image icon on your desktop and Eject

To launch Firefox, double click on the Firefox icon in the Applications folder

For future use, you could drag the Firefox icon from the Applications window onto the dock to create a shortcut

My experience

Installing applications is supposedly a trivial task on a Mac but when I tried to install Firefox (my first non-Apple application) I was clue less about how to install it.

It was my Day 1 with the Mac and I already got the hang of Safari so I decided to try the mighty Firefox for a few reasons -

• First its a damn good browser
• Second I was used to it as a windows user
• Third and most important, Firefox maintains a consistent UI across all platforms

Just like everyone else I downloaded the DMG, double clicked on the DMG and it showed me this screen.

What the heck??? What am I supposed to do with this little window?? What does it mean? I was really frustrated, why can’t they include instructions to install the app? I initially thought it was actually a splash screen. Then after playing with the window for a while, I discovered that the Firefox logo is an icon and by the signs I thought I should drag this icon into the white Applications icon in the window. Didn’t work. Tried some googling with no luck then realized that I could drag the icon into a new Applications finder window. And finally there I had it, Firefox on my Mac.

This was in the past and when I was a Mac noob. Now that I know how to install applications (apps), when I think about my first install experience I feel embarrassed. And I wish Firefox developers designed it in such a way that the Firefox icon could be dragged into the Applications icon in the same disk image window rather than the user opening a new Applications window and then dragging the icon into it.

It was actually my mistake, they had install instructions on the download page which I did not notice and closed.

I actually don’t know how they chose the old 7 wonders of the World but each of the wonders was pretty worth the title it was given. How and when did this need or may be desire to choose new 7 wonders arise? Nobody knows. At least I don’t and I also don’t think most of you even knew that there was a process underway to choose new 7 wonders until the pre-final and final voting started. Most people who voted may still not know what the final 7 wonders are, what they cared for is if the wonder they voted for made it to the top 7.

History of the 7 wonders

The very old 7 wonders (2nd Century BC) known as

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient world

Pyramids of Egypt at Giza*
Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Statue of Zeus
Temple of Artemis
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
Colossus of Rhodes
Pharos of Alexandria

*The only Ancient wonder that still exists

The new 7 wonders

Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Colosseum in Rome
Taj Mahal in India
The Great Wall of China
Jordan’s ancient city of Petra
The Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru
The ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico

The new 7 wonders website says

More than 100 million votes had been cast by citizens around the world using modern communications technology in this unprecedented global dialogue

What? Did that text have the number 100 million in it? Lets do some math here, the world population is 6 billion+ and they chose new 7 wonders of the world by considering the votes of 100 million which is a mere 0.01% most of whom were people trying to get their national monument into the list. Forget about the wonders people are  far less interested in electing their political leaders even though every democratic country declares the  election day a national holiday. They want to use the day to relax and get some relief from daily chores. Think of a farmer working on his fields, would he be worried about electing new 7 wonders of the world. So such small turnout can be justified but what about modern communication technology? Leaving alone the developed countries, how many in the world have access to modern communication technology.

The only thing cool about this new 7 thing seems to be the choice of date to announce the new 7 wonders, 07.07.07 (7th of July 2007) at Lisbon which again has 7 letters in it. Strictly speaking it was not really a tuff choice. They at least had to have something interesting to draw the attention of the rich who can donate more and more funds for …. guess what monument conservation and documentation worldwide. Ok monuments are important and they are symbols of various cultures but aren’t there other things like hunger deaths and AIDS which are more important than monument conservation?

The website goes on to say that they have used part of the funds raised to create a 3D model of the statue of Bamiyan Buddha which was destroyed by the Taliban and if the Afghan people are ready to rebuild they are ready to fund that project too. Doesn’t this seem like they are way away from moral thinking? Afghanistan is a country ripped apart by terrorism and war since the time of the cold war when the super powers used it as  a pawn in their strategic moves. Rebuilding some monument would be their last choice.

Well that’s what I think of the new 7 wonders but different people think in different ways, what do you think?

There are just so many people and they can have so many needs depending on the so many things they keep doing, its difficult to address everyone’s needs.

While Some people are unaware of the procedure to change filename extensions in Windows XP because they never bothered about it, there are others who work on making great web sites using different technologies and combinations built with technologies of which Ruby on Rails is one, some find it easy to follow tutorials but some need a guide to install it on Windows which can be considered as one of the easiest on noobs and user friendly OS.

There are people immediately when they find a need fot it while others wait for opinions and try to see how essential it is in the mean time. Some are satisfied while some are very frustrated like the Netfirms customers who were unable to setup wordpress permalinks on their blogs.

Ok all this is to make my blog more efficient by deep linking, sorry if you had to read through this, its not that bad isn’t it?

Its a well established and widely observed fact that when a blogger doesn’t post for a while then the next time he starts with one of the following messages

• I was very very very busy with my dog the whole time
• I had been out for a while touring the beautiful deserts of Iraq
• I really couldn’t manage so many things I had to go for a surgery to add an extra pair of limbs

and so on…..

Well everyone knows that you didn’t post because you couldn’t. Why bug people with your reasons? Just say I was lazy. Well I said it, I was lazy and busy and been out and so couldn’t manage to post.

Coming to the next part, its time to assure the readers so that they don’t run away from this part of the Internet

• I will keep posting regularly, from now on!
• I will make it a point to update now and then
• Now that I’m free I can keep you informed

Ok thanks for the assurance, we don’t want assurances but we want posts to feed this thing called the brain.

All this bragging is to make you feel that this blog is not dead! Yes its alive!

Good news: Blogger released a new version of their hosted blogging software and named it blogger beta, now called the New Blogger.

Bad News: It broke the wordpress import feature, its now impossible to import Blogger blogs which hav wordpree been switched to beta into wordpress

Then there were many solutions some of them had so much labor involved  they could be used by only the desperate importers. Even I found a solution for this and its comparatively simpler than the rest but there was a problem for blogs with large number (100+) of posts.

But all this is now a matter of the past because the guys at WordPress have worked a solution and fixed the inbuilt import feature but its presently available only for those who have a blog on the wordpress.com hosted platform, the rest of us should wait for them to integrate this new import feature into the next version of wordpress. They wrote about this in a blog post

So for now until it is released the easiest method is to create a blog at wordpress.com, import your New Blogger (Blogger Beta) blog and then again import the wordpress.com blog to your own hosted custom wordpress blog. Done.