GeekScribes

EDIT: (starts here)

More lies and debunking them! You really have to see those two links.

Among the most interesting ones:

“Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.”

Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s test cases than any other browser.

Can’t Microsoft be prosecuted for spreading lies like that? It’s almost offensive to web-developers!
(ends here)

I recently mentioned that Internet Explorer and Microsoft were afraid of other browsers. Remember that 10k competition thing?

Well, Microsoft has done it yet again! Only this time, it’s a lot more funny and weird. And the amount of lolz just got way higher! See for yourself! And the Digg source.

Line by line comments follow after the shot:

Now the comments:

1. Yeah right. IE is more secured than both Chrome and Firefox. I wonder where all those vulnerabilities come from. All those ActiveX nasty stuff. Yeah. IE is indeed secured.
2. In-Private browsing? Ever heard of Chrome’s Incognito mode? Firefox’s new Privacy mode? Or what we call “the porn mode”? Another set of ticks missing here!
3. IE is easy to use? Since when? Accelerators? Try SmarterFox. Chrome is fast enough as is!
4. At least they got some humility to say that Firefox 3 is better. But still, I doubt IE8 is better at standards. Remember that ACID3 test?
5. Developer Tools? I dunno. Can’t comment. But I know nothing beats Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar combined!
6. Reliability. Firefox will soon have tab/process management, don’t worry IE. Chrome already has it.
7. Customizability: Many of the things I want? Right out of the box? Gimme the features of a fully-featured RSS reader directly in IE (Brief?). Or coloured tabs (Colourful Tabs). Or a powerful download manager (DownThemAll). I can even write my own, or customize existing ones! Stop hating Firefox, MS! Give some love to the Fox!
8. Compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser? For real? And that ACID3 test again? And the non-respect of standards?? Don’t make me laugh! Opera is the best in compatibility imho!
9. Manageability: What do they mean here? I can’t understand.
10. Performance: Why isn’t Safari here? I heard it’s the fastest of them all.

Overall, IE is bluffing. But hey, more lolz for us! Who are we to complain? I’d so like to see Firefox 3.5 soon. Hey, why not Firefox 4? Let’s see IE fight that!

Seems TechCrunch is poking some fun at IE8 too!

So long!

I am currently using Firefox, latest version that is 3.0.11 at the time of writing, and I encountered a strange problem on some sites, one of which is the famous Smashing Magazine. The headings were displayed using weird characters, or what it would seem, special characters. You can see a screenshot below.

At first, I thought it was a problem with character encoding. Changing to UTF-8 did not solve the problem, nor did switching off Auto-Detect from View menu – Character Encoding solve anything. Well, basically, after a lot of trying out solutions, it was not a problem with charset or encoding.

I tried other solutions but none seemed to work. One of them gave me a clue as to what the problem is. It was going to Tools – Options – Content – (Fonts & Colors) Advanced – (uncheck) “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”. This rendered all pages without custom fonts, except my default of Times New Roman. The problem was solved.

The workaround indicated that the problem resided with my fonts. I thus went and checked out the website source and the stylesheet and found out that Smashing Magazine uses Helvetica font as primary font for h2 tags. This line was found in the source and stylesheet respectively (I shortened the code with …’s):

<ul class="topic-list">
<li>
<h2><a...> ... </a></h2>

ul.topic-list h2{font:44px Helvetica,Arial, ...}

If you don’t know, Helvetica is a proprietary font and doesn’t come with installs of Windows by default. It didn’t come with mine, on both my XP and Vista installs, so I’m assuming it doesn’t come by default.

The Solution:

So what can you do? Apparently, nothing. You cannot acquire the Helvetica font for free and install it. Unless you are willing to pay for it, you are stuck.

Now, if you are crafty enough, you can use some Google powers and try to find the font by… let’s just say, alternative means. I am not posting links here, because I do not encourage piracy. I managed to find a copy of Helvetica somewhere, installed it and problem was solved. You can see the results below.

If you do want to do what I did, you just need to find a copy of Helvetica from somewhere, install it, restart Firefox and the problem should be solved.

Another plausible solution would be for sites with such problems to substitute their fonts for those people do have on their machines. But we cannot require this from site designers. Another way would be to be able to find an addon or similar for Firefox that would allow for font substitution. If you know of such a solution, you are free to share it with us.

A bit of strangeness here is that, since Firefox did not find Helvetica on my machine, it should have used Arial. I cannot understand why it did not.

If you do install the Helvetica font and still get the problem, maybe it’s another font being used and that you don’t have.In this case: check the website source, find which element it is, search the stylesheet for that element, find which font it is and install the font. Restart Firefox, and the problem should be solved.

Hope my solution helps. That’s it! Kinda easy, wasn’t it?

Note: I uninstalled Helvetica after I tested the solution, for those of you who were interested!

EDIT: They changed it! Ahhh they finally found some reason! Note the different tone of language. Note the less number of points! Good good!

Hey readers, check out what I found in my feeds today! It’s a competition hosted by Microsoft! 10K prize money offered. The catch? You need to have Internet Explorer 8. The ad in itself is really funny, almost laughable. It seems Microsoft is really scared about losing market share to Firefox especially, and other browsers considering the tone of the ad. I’ve included a copy below, and for your viewing pleasure, here’s the original link.

A small comment: Since the page can only be opened in IE8 which got a lousy score in ACID3 test, it the page where the money is hidden must be so quirky that Firefox refuses to even find it! Also, note point #2! “Microsoft’s best ever browser” but not simply “best ever browser”. Does Microsoft itself know that its browser is not the best out there?

Enjoy your lulz, and comment! Seriously, I lol’d hard! Couldn’t resist blogging this as soon as I saw it!

Click the image for the larger version

Original Source

Did I spell wrong or is it everything is wrong? For a very long period of time, the SysOp and maintainers of thembb has not been active. Of all the day, today I decided to looks for some inspiration from fellow bloggers to write an article and boom. What did I saw?

1. thembb.com



2. thembb.blogspot.com



This definitely make me hint at account takeover. Anyone else noticed this?

I tried a whois on the domain name and got the nameservers:

NS1.SEOBUMMER.COM

NS2.SEOBUMMER.COM

Must be a weak password or what?

The lesson, don’t use weak password and  change your password frequently

Many times you need to format your PC and start anew. What about your so loved Hamachi configs and your so long “had”, ip address? Backing it up need only a minor copy-and-paste. (In a safe location).

The easy way

1. Launch Hamachi
2. Click on the “pulley” looking icon on the bottom left corner of Hamachi – “Configure Hamachi”
3. From the pop-up menu choose “Preferences“
4. On the left pane of  the opened window entitled “Status and Configuration“, select “System“  (again presented with a pulley icon)
5. Now, you would be presented with 3 buttons. Click on the one with caption, “Open Configuration folder”
6. Hamachi configuration folder will be opened. Go up one level
7. Finally you will see a folder named “Hamachi”.
8. Copy it in a safe location and you would be safe.

The “not so lengthy” way

C:\Users\Guru\AppData\Roaming\

Replace “Guru” by your username, open location and finally copy and paste folder “Hamachi”

You can open the location by navigating one level at a time to the required directory or simply press Windows Button + R to open the “Run” dialog box, paste the location in the text box and hit Enter to go to the “Roaming” directory.

Easy?

Yes, you read correctly. I said, desktop RSS reader. I’m old style. I’m classic. Whatever, I still want my feeds on my desktop. For one single reason: it’s so much simpler. Click the icon in the notification area, and voila! I got my news at a click. No need to load Firefox, point to some random URL to a web-based feed reader or whatever. There’s also another reason. I like my data on my computer, not on some server on the Internet. What if tomorrow, the company that manages the web-feed-reader goes out of scene? What happens to my feeds? And if ever they decide to keep usage info on my feeds so as to create spam “targetted advertising”? No thanks. I want full control over what I keep, what I share and what I want others to access. Ok, enough side-tracking. Back to the article, which by the way, is the 100th post on GeekScribes! Click below:

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