Firefox can be called the browser of the decade and its usage has been growing steadily since version 1.0 Version 1.5 and version 2.0 were two major upgrades we saw in the browser and the current version 2.0 is arguably ahead of the competiton in features. The first reason for its success is the ability to configure it your won way and the ability to add any feature you want by the help of Add-ons or Extensions. Version 2.0 has new features like automatic prefetch, completely new visual style, ability to view tab list at the extreme right of the tab bar and not limited to but including a new position for tab close button.

Earlier tere was only one common tab close button and clicking on it would close the current tab, but now every tab has a close button which is good but when it comes to closing multiple tabs it is a pain in the ass. You have to move the pointer to the close button on every tab and click on it instead of the earlier single common button which allowed to close tabs one by one by just clicking on the single button. There was a problem with this too, when you are closing multiple tabs one after the other using the common button you may accidentally close a tab you didnt intend to close. You dont have to worry now because firefox now has a Undo Close Tab option [ Ctrl + Shift + T ], right click anywhere on the tab bar andthe drop down menu has the Undo Close Tab option for you.

So why not change the Close Tab button back to its original place, which is a single close button for all tabs – to do this you will have to open the Mozilla configuration page about:config and type browser.tabs.closeButtons you will see an option with value 1 which is the default, double click and change the value to 3 and press OK. You now have a common close button. But what if you want both the common button and the individual button on each tab? Firefox doesnot support that yet but you have a solution, move your mouse over the tab you want to close and Middle Click it, almost all new mouse configurations have the Scroll wheel instead of the middle mouse button in which case click the scroll wheel, for those of you who never did this its gonna be exciting to see the tabs disappear as you middle click on them. You can close any tab not just the current tab. And if you feel like you closed the wrong tab right click on the tab bar and Undo Close Tab to see the tabs come back.

Now if you feel a little itchy you can remove the tab close button altogether by changing the vaule of browser.tabs.closeButtons to 2 in the about:config page. Changing it to 0 will make only the current tab to have a close button.

Incase you discovered more possibilities with the tab close button please let me know in the comments

Update: Great news. The WordPress pretty URLs problem has been fixed by the guys at Netfirms. One of the employees from Netfirms has posted a comment that they have fixed the issue and one of my friends who is on Netfirms confirmed it. Good job guys.

I have been with Netfirms for the past 7 months and i never had a problem with them, but last week i upgraded my WordPress to 2.1.2 and now my blog is broken, any link on my blog brings me back to the homepage which is really frustating becasue even the comment link doenst work. I started searching for possible solutions when i found too many frustated Netfrims users complaining about the problem and many others suggesting fixes and then they reply back with no success.

The problem as some say is Netfrims has not enabled the Allow Override option for .htaccess rules to be considered so adding a /index.php before the Date and Name structure does the job, even the Netfirms support page says that you should use this

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

instead of the regular

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

for Date and Name permalink structure. So what you get won’t be exactly the date and name structure but with an extra index.php.

The problem with this is every post and every page and worse every category (every internal link to be exact) on your blog will have the index.php string added in the URL. It would be like http://mydomain.com/blog/index.php/about instead of the pretty http://mydomain.com/blog/about For me the situation was worse, Date and Name structure worked for me earlier but now it doesnt so all backlinks i got for individual posts now redirect to the homepage so the visitor doesnot see what he was expecting to see.

I went through a few WordPress support topics, some of them very old to be considered as useful anymore. I even found a frustated Netfirms user who went as far as switching to another provider, ofcourse Permalinks was not the only reason for the switch but it was one of the main reasons. She really took off her anger by writing a lot about how bad netfrims was. That was just one persons case but most of us are having a good time with Netfrims arent we?

Now getting to what i have done to get my Date and Name permalinks back, i tried the workaround provided by Joel, who is another frustated Netfrims-Wordpress user. And the result is it didnt work. But i suggest you go try Joel’s workaround and the comments, he is really quick in giving you any kind of feedback if you tried his method to fix your permalinks.

I tried a part of what Joel did and it worked. Here is exactly what i did

Changed the permission for .htaccess file in my wordpress directory or the blog directory to 666 and then applied the Date and Name permalink structure through the Admin panel and then edited my .htaccess to this

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

where blog is the directory in which i installed wordpress and finally changed the permission of .htaccess file to 444.

Some more WordPress specific rules i leant during this operation are

• What ever may be the permalink structure you use, .htaccess content doenot change
• Prepending /index.php to your structure should work irrespective of the contenets of .htaccess
• Change your .htaccess after you apply a new permalink structure because when ever you choose a new structure, wordpress replaces the #WordPress section of the .htaccess file with the default content which is

# BEGIN WordPress<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

• Incase you edit the WordPress part of the .htaccess file, you should lock it down with 444 permission so that wordpress doesnot replace it with the default contents. (Thanks Joel)

Now finally what exactly my settings look like

Permalink structure set to Date and Name

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Contenets of .htaccess

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

PHP 4

WordPress 2.1.2

.htaccess Enabled in NetFirms Control Panel

Alright Google has been playing prank with us every April 1st since April 2000 when they said they were going to introduce the Google Mentalplex, a new search technology. Its April 1st again and we now have a new feature on GMail, GMail Paper, sounds really really prank like.

You Click, We stack, You Get. Ok so the site says you can order any number of prints 1 or thousand or ten thousand, but what about the cost of printing and mailing them? They have and anser for this too

The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations

What if your e-mail has music files as attachments?

MP3 and WAV files will not be printed

Ok now doesnt that sound funny enough? Who prints ads in 36pt. Helvetica except when its APril 1st and we obviously know that MP3 and WAV files cannot be printed, do they have to answer question? And just image the privacy concerns, anyone on the way could possibly read the e-mail, people were just uneasy when bots were reading their email so that targeted advertising could be possible but now when your email goes to print someone has to put it in the envelope and there is a very good chance that they may get curious sometime or the other.]

Even if it is really true that Google will send us our email via regular mail on request, just image the amount of abuse the service is going to face, there are very few good people in the world who use free services only when it is necessary and apparently you and me are not one of them. The world would be just so curious to see if the mail will really reach them and will end up seding unnecessary requests. And image the amount of paper required to print all this, even if they use recyclabla paper what about the envelopes and stamps? Going by the size of the pacage the woman in the picture is receiving this is just another April fool’s prank from Google.

This April there is more for us, we have another new service from Google, Google Teaspoon (Google TiSP)

Apparently Google TiSP is a high speed internet service which works through your toilet !

Take a look at this diagram and you will know

You should actually go read this one on the Google website, its just hilarious, there is a comparsion chart too so that you can easily choose the plan. This is how the final setup will look like

Haha this was a good one Google, it was really fun to read through the service and its Press Release !

Links

GMail Paper

GMail TiSP

And if you feel like you didnt get enough, you can go have a look at the list of Google pranks at Wikipedia

2000: Google MentalPlex
2002: Pigeon Rank
2004: Google Lunar/Copernicus Center
2005: Google Gulp
2006: Google Romance
2007: Gmail Paper
2007: Google TiSP

Update: Here is the Official announcement that GMail Paper is not a real service but just an April fools’ joke.

There are some things you clearly know when to replace, because they wear off or are rendered useless by time. Somethings can’t be recognised as useless anymore because they have a fixed lifetime or any expiry date.

So when to replace these things? What is the best duration after which they should be replaced? The answers are available on this MSN Money article and as per the article the best duration to replace a

Tooth Brush – 3 months

Mattress – 7 years. I never knew that mettressed need to be replaced too!

Pillow – 2 years

Computer – 4 years. I would like to cut one year from this, because every 3 years the technology would have advanced to an extent where the latest software version no longer work on your computer and the parts already in your computer are obsolete and are no longer available which is a very sad feeling. And the fact that the same amount you invested on the computer 3 years ago will buy you a much more powerful machine now, which makes you weep silently. You may try upgrading the computer if you are a little tech savvy but for those of you who never opened the box dont try that at home, you better go buy a new one. Those with a laptop don’t have much smaller chance for upgrades. Glad that i don’t have a laptop

If you use a Windows XP machine then there is very little chance that you have never seen the phrase “Restore Active Desktop” inplace of your wallpaper. This usually happens due to improper shutdowns (like power failure or some device failure that may cause the computer to shutdown) or when some application or windows itself gets confused and triggers the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

Many a times when this happens it is most likely that the instructions given dont answer your current situation, like Your answer to all these is no i never did any of these

Did you recently change your background to a web page?

Did you recently add a new item to your Active Desktop?

Do you want to turn off your Active Desktop?

but you might have done this

Did your browser stop working, or did you restart your computer without shutting it down first?

There are situations where none of the cases match and worse the Restore my Active Desktop button doesnot work!! It just tells you that a script error has occured. How do you loose this ugly instruction screen and get back your wallpaper now??

One way is to open some image and set it as a wallpaper or if you dont want to spend time looking for a new picture as a wallpaper and want your previous wallpaper to comeback follow the setps below:

1. Right-click anywhere on the Desktop and click Properties
2. In Display Properties change to the Desktop tab, where you will see a monitor image with your wallpaper and the list of images below it
3. Choose any other image in the list than the one currently selected and then select the original image used as wallpaper and click Ok, your wallpaper is back! ( To make this step simpler just selct the image above or below the currently selected one and then select the original image then click Ok )

You are done. You should now see your wallpaper instead of the Restore my Desktop instructions.