As far as the new theme, I honestly tell you that I got bored of the theme that I designed and for the moment I don’t have enough time to spend developing a new one. Besides, as you all might have noticed till now, I tend to have an affinity for developing not for designing. I am also planning to import all my posts from my other blog (SoftRelated.com) by translating them into English. Cheers !

The Woork Handbook is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other topics about web design… directly from Woork!

I strongly suggest you download (it’s free !) his book and have a look. It’s a great piece of reference.

In case you don’t know, Antonio is the writer on Woork; a blog about AJAX, CSS, Mootools, Scriptaculous and many others.

This is my way of saying “Thank you Antonio !”.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that FireShot and Gmail Manager joined Alexa Sparky and StumbleUpon extensions which were already compatible with FF.

Now I must patiently wait until Colorzilla, del.icio.us bookmarks, Firebug, Greasemonkey, Live Pagerank, Smart Digg Button and TinyUrl Creator will all be fully compatible with FF 3 which is just around the corner. Many would ask why didn’t I just go for a forced install. I have one big reason for not doing that: I don’t have time for it.

Off-topic: Some asked me what happened with my blog. I feel somehow in debt and I need to answer them. Just imagine that from my average time of 5 hours allocated every day for browsing the internet, reading feeds, blogging in general I have come to a staggering 15 minutes a day just to keep myself informed with major updates without actually writing something. This unfortunately is because I only have about 3 weeks until my first exam will be here. I will give my best and hopefully after 5^th of July I will get back to serious blogging. Again, thanks a bunch for your understanding.

]]> http://softinquiry.com/my-extensions-list-update-for-firefox-3-rc1.html/feed 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ http://softinquiry.com/googles-pagerank-update-outcome.html http://softinquiry.com/googles-pagerank-update-outcome.html#comments Thu, 01 May 2008 13:17:07 +0000 Dan http://softinquiry.com/?p=163 It seems like I’m using Twitter more and more every week. I am following tibipuiu and I read his tweet yesterday about Google updating the PR. In the next few minutes I was checking my blog’s PR. Nothing has changed. However yesterday in the early afternoon I noticed that the Live PageRank Firefox addon was showing me a PR2. The next thing I know, I was on Daniel’s blog (because I knew almost for sure that he’ll mention this event) and I was reading his post about it. I decided to let things settle in their place and check them out today. This blog is online for a couple of months and it jumped from PR 0 to PR 2. I know that some of you out there state that Google’s PR, Alexa Rank or other stuff like this are not so important. You all have your share of truth in your opinions but you can’t deny the fact that especially this two are deadly important when it comes to SEO and not only.

I was very curios to find out what would happen to the other blog I was talking about in a past post (click on the link to find out more). I wasn’t surprised by the outcome though: PR0. That blog had a PR3 before the previous PR update. After that, apparently because Google thought so, it’s PR was 0 again. Now, after the update that took place yesterday it still has a PR 0. So, it looks like FeedBurner’s Buzzboost doesn’t hurt your blog (as I suspected). In all this time I browsed a lot of blogs and websites and I saw things very similar to Buzzboost and the PR of that particular blog wasn’t affected. I wonder which is the reason why Google didn’t updated (or did it?) the PR for that blog. How long does it take for Google to update the PR ? Is it over in one day ?

For example I know a couple of guys that were patiently waiting for the latest version of K2 as this was their only reason because of which they delayed the upgrade of Wordpress on their blogs.

I used this theme for quite a lot of time on my other blog and actually created a modified version of it. I must say that this is one of the greatest themes out there with hundreds of customizing possibilities available. I strongly recommend it to people who don’t like to manually edit the code when they want to modify the look of their blog.

Don’t know what K2 theme is all about ? check out my other post.

Download K2 RC6

As we all know, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is now available. I can’t wait to install the new release as I am a huge fan of Ubuntu. I still remember my first encounter with Ubuntu a few years ago. A good friend of mine handed me a copy of Ubuntu he received in his mail. I can’t remember the version but I know it had two CDs in the case: a live and an install CD. Since then I started playing with it and never got bored. Fortunately I had a little of experience with Knoppix and Red Hat. Also now I know my way pretty well in SuSe, Fedora Core and Mandriva. However Ubuntu and SuSe, both have something special that attracts me.

From the beginning i thought: “wow, they’re doing such a great thing providing everyone free CDs”. My opinion hasn’t changed. This is truly admirable and for that and a bunch of other reasons, Ubuntu gained many fans over the world and started creating awesome communities. Unlike many other distros Ubuntu knows how to “play the game” and introduce itself on-the-fly anywhere and anytime. It’s not a secret that Ubuntu targets a lot more home users than companies, corporate entities or such. I had a great time with Fedora Core in terms of server administration and I can tell you that it is definitely the best distro out there qualified for the job. Ubuntu on the other hand knows better than any other how to fulfill a home user’s demands regardless the fact that he may run on a desktop computer or a laptop; at least that’s what I noticed.

Back to Hardy Heron. This particular version promises a lot. New features since 7.10 that just wait to be tested. In the next few lines I will try to highlight some particular new things in Ubuntu 8.04

As far as new features concerning the system core, Gnome 2.22 kicks in. This version basically has several goodies such as the latest Nautils which is a file manager that interacts with the user in a more pleasant way and displays a window like the Autoplay from Windows whenever a removable media is inserted and brings a lot of other cool spices to the mix. Google Calendar support in Evolution, an internal clock applet and many other cool features are also available and ready for you to play with.

The kernel version is now 2.6.24. Practically this is good news for laptop users because the new kernel brings the already available on 32bit architecture power saving features to 64bit laptops and desktops.

PolicyKit is a tremendous step ahead mainly because it offers you the chance of dynamically configure permissions. For example now you don’t need to run the entire application with root privileges because you can be given the root access only for specific tasks. Yet PolicyKit has been integrated with several native tools such as Network, Users and Groups, Services and Time & Date.

PulseAudio which is a sound server, is also available in this new version. I am very curious to find out if the issue of listening to online streams has been solved or yet it needs some advanced tunning. With this tool hopefully you can enhance your overall audio experience choosing from different advanced options such as adjusting volume level independently for different applications, assign the usage of different sound cards installed in your system for specific programs and many others.

Xorg 7.3 has been integrated as well. This time the ones who use their laptops for presentations and use a projector have the possibility of setting up different screen resolutions, refresh rates, rotation and other aspects for the second monitor in a dynamic mode.

As far as new software functions, I am pretty anxious to find out if they will still integrate the Firefox Beta 5 in the final version. I was hoping that they would synchronize their launch date with Firefox 3, but I guess that would have been too cool :)

This time they came up with something pretty neat. It’s called Brasero and it’s an awesome application designed to help you burn CDs/DVDs. This native application makes a good team with Nautils merging and completing it’s burning options.

Transmission is the new BitTorrent client included in Ubuntu 8.04. I never used this client so I can’t really tell you much about it. However after reading it’s feature list and after I viewed some screenshots it seemed OK. If you want test different BitTorrent clients check out this list.

As i was telling you about a clock applet which comes with the new Gnome environment I was looking over some screenshots and reading it’s main features. It seems like an interesting widget (if i may call it that way) which can be pretty useful if you travel a lot or just want to keep your things sorted with the help of that calendar.

Say goodbye to xvnc4viewer as it was replaced by Vinagre. I only used this one once, a few months ago and overall seems to be a good remote viewer. The good part about it is that you can be connected to several machines at the same time. A cool feature is that when you search for remote machines on your network and find any you don’t need to bother configuring the access as the process is automate. Also you can organize your connections and keep track of favorite or recently used ones.

Uncomplicated Firewall is said to be an easy to use firewall which can be configured via the command line. Again, as I was telling you, in my opinion Fedora Core is the best solution for servers. For example FC 8 features an interesting GUI for configuring it’s firewall. I believe that’s a big step ahead for Linux, in general. I think that many are afraid to work more with their keyboard than with their mouse.

Totem has a new feature. Now it can be used to search and play videos from YouTube. That’s truly an awesome feature.

Inkscape can be a solution for handling PDF files in Ubuntu as it supports text and graphics editing.

Many improvements have been made in order to provide better support. For example the first thing that might be of great importance for a wide range of potential Ubuntu users is the new Ubuntu CD Menu. This awesome menu lets you choose between running a live sample of Ubuntu (acts just like a live CD), installing Ubuntu as another OS or install it just like an ordinary application in your Windows based environment. However as expected the last method is known to have some performance issues.

Wubi for example jumps to help Windows users install Ubuntu providing them with a basic interface containing several vital options for a new installation. Wubi and the umenu might be considered ways of converting Windows users into potential Ubuntu users. At least they offer a smooth pass from Windows to Ubuntu.

I am more than convinced that the above compilation of apps and not only is the optimum software package for Ubuntu. As a final conclusion, Ubuntu 8.04 alias Hardy Heron announces itself as a pretty interesting, improved Linux distribution that worths trying.

The idea itself of doing so many things with just one button is just great ! When you click the share button you get a nice in-site pop-up (it has nothing to do with the classical pop-up browser window) which is structured on tabs giving you quick access to the things you want to do.

I will install the plugin on this blog pretty soon but until then you can check out the screenshot below or  you can view a demo on the official page. Also while you’re there you can also download the WordPress plugin or the standalone version.

Finally WordPress 2.5 is out.

This post is just a heads up so i won’t bore you with details and other stuff you can read on the official page.

Also WordPress.org has suffered a new theme-based facelift.

Download WordPress 2.5

Also they have improved the “Filter Picker” as now you can filter you songs by album, artist, composer, genre, rating and year. I don’t what’s the importance of the composer option if there is already the artist option. However i admit i don’t pay much attention regarding to who composed the song. I think the artist option would have been enough.
New background patterns have been created for your library and playlist, just to make it more easy for your eyes.
The rating user-interface (UI) has been also modified to keep things clear and simple.
Good news for Mac users. Now they can set-up some hotkeys for a fairly amount of commands.
“Always on top” is yet another new feature that has been implemented in Songbird 0.5.
Unfortunately Songbird 0.5 doesn’t support iPod connectivity. You can choose to proceed and install the addon on your own risk but there are a few problems with it. A stable addon will be released with 0.6 or with the final version which is expected in May, early June.
If you are a developer, then you should know that there are also some new features that might concern you. I noticed that, at least for the moment Songbird is very friendly with potential developers.

Download Songbird 0.5

This however shows once again that Firefox developers are working very hard to keep the public satisfied.