In an apparent policy reversal, Microsoft has said that it will release a beta of IE 7 this summer (Microsoft previously said that IE updates would only be available with Windows upgrades). Details seem to be scarce at the moment, but a Q&A with Mike Nash, their Corporate VP of Security, revealed this much:

“We’re very excited to announce at the RSA Conference today that this summer we’ll release a beta of Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, which will have even more enhancements to security and privacy protections. These enhancements align very closely with the three core tenets of Microsoft’s security approach that I mentioned earlier. Internet Explorer 7.0 will be the most secure browser we’ve ever released, building on and surpassing the success of the SP2-enhanced Internet Explorer 6.0. We don�t plan to ship it until it meets our quality bar, which we�ve set pretty high. […]”

So, while it looks like they’re primarily focusing on securing their browser (which isn't a bad thing), I’m hoping that they’ll improve IE’s standards compliance as well — oh, what I wouldn’t give to be able to use adjacent sibling or attribute selectors.

Matthew Mullenweg, one of the lead WordPress developers, announced a WordPress 1.5 upgrade party in San Francisco on Tuesday (with the note that he “had originally planned for it to be Monday”).

Tuesday, Feburary 15th, from 6-11PM, I will be hosting an upgrade party for people interesting in moving their blogs to 1.5. There will be food, drink, and wi-fi, so bring a laptop or your account details and get your blog on the most advanced blogging software in the world. You can upgrade from any previous version of WordPress or any other platform we have an import script for. […]

Of course, this prompted many to ask in the comments whether that meant WordPress 1.5 was being released on Tuesday (or Monday). And Matt just played it coy, saying that “1.5 will be released when it’s ready, no sooner and no later. :)” Well, it’s commonly known that WordPress 1.5 is just about done, so maybe it’s coming out after all.

And I, for one, welcome our new open source blogging software overlords.

I may be revealing my un-l33tness here, but I still stick with the stock AIM client. I have nothing against Trillian and the like but I’ve heard some anecdotes in the past about incompatibility with chat sessions and file transfers. (And, if all those issues are resolved the current version then, by all means, please let me know.)

But, to make things easier as/while I stick with AIM, I’ve found AIM Ad Hack which cleanly kills off all the ad windows in AIM. And unlike an amateur hack-and-slash job, this utility kills off the spyware / questionable software included with AIM and can also remove many of the extraneous interface buttons from the interface.

AIM Ad Hack has just hit v4.0 which would normally be quite a milestone for software (being a point-oh and all). And, I still recommend the download for anyone using the stock AIM client, but I’m not sure what major features warranted a “4.0” version :-/.

Update 2005-01-07: AIM Ad Hack has now been updated to v4.02.

(Preface: Gallery is an open source tool for hosting photos on your website.)

So, suppose you upgrade your copy of Gallery to the latest version (1.4.4-pl4 as of this writing), you follow the upgrade instructions, re-run the configuration wizard and then you get a goofy error such as this:

Warning: fopen(/home/abischof/httpdocs/albums/2003/photos.dat.lock): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/abischof/httpdocs/gallery/platform/fs_unix.php on line 55

Error: Could not open lock file (/home/abischof/httpdocs/albums/2003/photos.dat.lock)!

Yeah, that happened to me. Fortunately, there’s a known workaround. As it turns out, it’s not Gallery’s fault if this occurs — it generally only happens if your web host mucks up your permissions while upgrading your PHP setup. The solution? Just set the permissions on every file in your “albums” directory to 777.

As noted in the workaround, this is fairly straightforward if you have shell access to your web host (just run “chmod -R 777 albums” from the parent directory). But, if you only have ftp access, then you’ll need to set each set “albums” to 777 manually; and, if your ftp client can’t recurse through directories, then you’ll need to manually hop through each directory within “albums” and manually set every file to 777. That should do it :).

Leia recently pointed out a deal at the Macromedia store — until November 15th, they’re offering Fireworks MX 2004 for $199 (whereas it’d normally be $299). This seemed like a good deal and it was rather tempting.

I currently use Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro for my digital photography editing. And, it’s basically fine — I can do color correction, contract correction and the usual adjustments. However, it doesn’t have as much documentation and books as its competitors. And, that's one reason why I’m considering investing in another app such as Photoshop or Fireworks.

I’ve previously talked with several of the other members of the Dallas Camera Club and Photoshop generally seems to be their editor of choice. And, with that kind of endorsement, Photoshop might otherwise be a shoo-in; unfortunately, it also costs at least twice as much as any of its competitors (Fireworks and Paint Shop Pro).

Given that a lack of specialized books is one of my primary reasons for considering a switch from Paint Shop Pro, I decided to check on how many books on digital photography were available for Fireworks. I loaded Best Web Buys — an online price comparison site with an excellent section on book prices — and I searched for the keywords “Fireworks digital” and “Photoshop digital”. The results: 50 books for the former and 2 books for the latter (one of which was only a curriculum guide).

Leia has told me about how much she enjoys using Fireworks for general image slicing and optimization; and, she assures me that it can be used for photo correction as well. But, with this November 15th deadline looming, I’m still unsure about going ahead with the purchase. I'm open to any photography nuts’ opinions on this, either way.

Via Joystiq, I discovered that GoGamer is offering Doom 3 for $30 as part of a 48-Hour Madness Sale. That sounded like a good price, especially since most other stores are selling it for $60 or so. But, before ordering, I first checked ResllerRatings to see whether it was worth buying from them.

As it turns out, GoGamer has a 6-month rating of 7.50/10 along with a “Gold” Elite Customer Excellence Award. That was good enough for me, so I placed an order. And, shipping was only $5.99 for FedEx 2-Day (bringing the total to about $36). If you’re thinking about ordering one for yourself, just keep in mind that there are about 12 hours left in the sale (as I write this).

OS X users are fortunate enough to have Preview for browsing PDFs, but Windows users still have to rely on Acrobat Reader. And, by many accounts, the latest version of Acrobat Reader wasn’t much improvement on the last one. In particular, it tends to load much more slowly.

In an effort to reverse that trend, Darrell Norton figured out that much of the slow-down is due to all the plug-ins that Acrobat Reader loads at startup. And he discovered that by moving a few files around, Acrobat Reader loads faster since it only load the plug-ins when it needs them:

1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader (replace C if you installed on another drive, like D or E).
2. Move all files [and subdirectories] from the “plug_ins” folder to the “Optional” folder.
3. You’re done.

You can always leave a few plugins in the “plug_ins” folder if you still want them to load at startup (maybe you use search often, for instance). In any case, I tried this on my box and Acrobat Reader does seem to load a little more quickly. And I’m guessing that speedups may be even more noticable on other systems — with 768 MB RAM in this box, just about all my apps are cached after I load them the first time.

Though I’m thoroughly enjoying my PowerBook, I’m not yet as productive on it as on my Windows box. It’s just a few niggling apps for which I haven’t yet found equivalents. And, at the top of the list is an editor.

I don’t need much in an editor — one with a tabbed interface along with syntax highlighting for HTML/CSS would be fine. Multiple undo/redo would be even better. But, I can’t find such an editor for OS X. Sure, on Windows, there would be several from which to choose — TextPad is probably the benchmark editor in this category and Crimson Editor (what I use) is freeware but just as good.

I’ve used tabbed editors on Windows for years and I’ve found them very handy. I often have four or five documents open at once — a couple CSS files, perhaps a JavaScript file or two, and a few HTML documents — and having a separate window for each document just feels clumsy to me. They invariably overlap and the filenames in their titlebars end up underneath each other. With tabs, I can see each filename easily and switch between files quickly.

When I first started looking for software for my PowerBook (before it even arrived, even), I penciled-in SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra) as an interim editor. SubEthaEdit is a freeware editor with syntax highlighting and (as a bonus) Rendezvous support. But, it still didn’t have tabs for multiple documents.

Since finding SubEthaEdit, I’ve searched for other suitable editors, but I couldn’t find even one freeware editor with a tabbed interface. So, for a lack of other options, I figured that I may need to consider shareware/commercial editors as well. In that vein, I went to VersionTracker to peruse their HTML Tools section. I checked every app — shareware or otherwise — I couldn’t find even one with a tabbed interface :-/.

Some may claim that tabs are against Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, but even Safari supports tabs (however, Apple does frown upon MDI interfaces). So, are tabbed interfaces a new thing to the Mac world or is there some mystical tabbed-editor that’s just been eluding me?

Adam Keeney wanted to annoy spammers and he figured that he could do so by filling out the forms on their websites with junk data. He soon realized that, if it was just him, the spammers would notice and then just block his ip address. So, he wrote Unsolicited Commando, a distributed Java app to automatcally fill out the forms:

Unsolicited Commando is specifically designed to fight spams that advertise sites that are trying to gather information about you. These often include sites that offer to refinance/eliminate your debt or sign you up with some sort of get rich quick scheme. These UCEs are rather lucrative, generating about $20 per valid lead from loan companies. If the good data is burried under the mounds of believeable BS that Unsolicited Commando provides then the mass-mailer must work harder to validate the data by placing thousands of phone call to false numbers. If the data is sold without verification then the mass-mailer’s reputation is ruined. Either way, Unsolicited Commando generates casualties. […]

This way, the spammers get junk data from a wide range of ip addresses and there’s no easy way to filter it. Of course, the more people participate, the more diverse the ip pool and the the more junk they get. I’m tempted to try this one ;).

When computing, I like a consistent user interface. When on Windows, I want Windows-widgets and when on Mac I want Mac-widgets :). And, for the most part, I haven’t had problems of that nature. But, Mozilla Firebird on Mac OS has always bugged me a little bit. It’s a great browser, of course, but it has its own widget set. For example, select pulldowns (as you might find for a State on a form) have a pull-down arrow and scrollbars — just as you’d find on Windows.

So, at a New Years get-together last night, Ru whipped out his 12" PowerBook to show us one of his favorite Flash movies (Cow Bondage, FWIW) and I noticed that his browser had all the native Mac widgets! After a quick glance to the menubar, I noticed that he was running Camino. I had heard of Camino before — a browser with the Gecko rendering engine along with a Mac-tastic interface — but I had assumed that development dwindled once Firebird came about.

As it turns out, the Camino project is alive and well. So, I downloaded the latest Camino nightly and gave it a try just now. I loaded it up and it was like putting on an old pair of shoes that fit in all the right places. I had all my familiar widgets and I was ready to make the browser transition from Firebird. But, trouble soon began to seep in…

I first checked the Windows menu for the DOM Inspector but I couldn’t find it. Not that regular web surfers have much need for such a tool, but I find it an indespensible resource for web development. So, I can perhaps understand why the Camino team omitted it from their project, but I was still a bit bummed about that.

I checked for tabbed-browsing and, sure enough, it has there (Apple-T opened a new tab, just like Firebird). And, all the familiar keyboard shortcuts worked as well (such as Apple-L to load the URL bar). But, Camino didn’t react to the right mouse button as I expected. I right-cliked on the Back button and only got a context menu for configuring the toolbar (not a list of sites that I could go back to).

I really wanted to like Camino, but it just didn’t feel right to me. Sure, maybe I could find some work-around to the Back-button right-click bit, but there’d still be the DOM Inspector issue. And, now that Firebird has DOM Inspector built-in, there’s not much of an incentive for anyone to create a DOM Inspector browser extension either.

My best bet may be a matter of getting native widgets into Firebird instead of trying to get all of Firebird’s functionality into Camino :-/. But, I don’t have my hopes up about that either; a quick search of Bugzilla for “widget” bugs on Mac OS didn't come up with anything useful. Perhaps there’re no plans to make use of native Mac widgets on Firebird — maybe the Firebird developers perceive that Camino has filled that role.