It's almost here. Today (17 June) you will be able to download Firefox 3 (final version) for the first time. At the writing of this post, it's not yet available, but when you read this, you might already be able to download it. As mentioned in a previous post, Mozilla is trying to set a record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. At the moment, they already have almost 1.5 million pledges to download. They are aiming for 5 million downloads on the first day, but I don't know if they will achieve it. Nonetheless they will most probably exceed their previous record, set by Firefox 2, with just under 2 million downloads on the first day. So when you read this, head over to Firefox's page, and see if Firefox 3 is available for download. And if it is, support this world record attempt by downloading it. Please note that just updating Firefox from Firefox itself won't count towards the record, since it's not a full download.

UPDATE: Firefox 3 is to be released today at 17h00 GMT.

UPDATE 2: It seems Firefox is "available" for download now, but the link on Firefox's home page still points to the latest version of Firefox 2. Is Mozilla having problems coping with the huge loads of requests? Or maybe they didn't get FF 3 ready for launch, and are now masquerading FF 2 as FF 3?

UPDATE 3: Firefox was downloaded over 8 million times in the first 24 hours! That's amazing. I honestly doubted whether they would even get to 3 or 4 million.

Another new tool for getting your blog to the people is now out there. It's called rssHugger. The site aims to help people promote their own blogs by sending them traffic. The concept seems simple enough. Once you have signed up for an account, your site is listed on rssHugger, ready to be found by poeple searching for interesting content. You also have a separate page for your blog on rssHugger, which you can promote yourself. The more people visit your page on rssHugger, the higher your "ranking" will be. And if you're lucky enough to get into the Top 100, your blog will receive some extra attention. But the Top 100 page gets reset every month, so everyone has a fair fighting chance.

I myself have just signed up for this service, and my blog's page is here. Since my account is not active yet, you won't be able to see much. But in a day or two, some content should be visible on that page. I am anxious to see what rssHugger can do. Once I have used it for a while, I will let you know about whether it has done anything for this blog. It seems like a good idea, but only time will tell. 

For a while now, I have become increasingly annoyed with the wonderful ability of Acrobat 8 to start updating itself without even asking. And as far as I could tell, there is no setting to disable this feature. Once you leave Acrobat open for a few minutes, it starts downloading automatically. You have to stop the process yourself then. Another thing I don't like, although not particularly annoying, is that Acrobat loads a program into memory that makes the loading of PDF files faster.

So today I decided to look for an alternative. And I found a very suitable one. Foxit Reader. I knew of this piece of software for a while already, but somehow never really bothered to check it out. I guess desperation can drive you to try new things. First of all, the program comes in at under 3MB, compared to Acrobat's 20+MB. Secondly, Foxit does not load any extra processes into memory. I noted that despite this fact, PDF files still loaded at least as quickly as with Acrobat. And lastly, it looks like Foxit does not automatically start downloading without checking with anyone. So far so good. The Foxit Reader is also available for Linux.

Firefox 3 is almost here, and Mozilla want to introduce it with a bang. They plan to set a world record for the most downloaded software in 24 hours. Apparently they are aiming for 5 million. Personally, I doubt that they will achieve this, since Firefox 2 only pulled around 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours. But still, I hope they achieve their goal. Much too few people use Firefox and I would love to see more people discovering how much better than IE it is.

Mozilla has set up a page where you can pledge to download Firefox 3 when it ships (exact date still unknown). If you like Firefox, or you would like to try it, head on over there, and make your mark (link below).

UPDATE: The date for download day has now been set for 17 June 2008! If you use Firefox, or you want to try it, download it on the day! Remembe to download it from their website (not through an update from the browser), so that the download will count towards the record. As I write this, just over 1.1 million pledges have been made. I hope that much more download Firefox 3 when the day comes.

Last week I installed the newest version of Ubuntu on my PC. I had just recently started using Ubuntu (7.10), and was already quite impressed. Naturally I was looking forward to the new version, and I was not disappointed. Here are some of my first impressions.

First off, the installation booted quite quick. Even faster than a fresh installation of Windows XP, if I remember correctly. Out of the box, the look and feel have a nice atmosphere, but some people will find it slightly boring. Of course, further graphics improvements are always welcome, so I went about setting up Compiz. Luckily I had figured out how to do this previously on 7.10, so it wasn't as hard this time around. Everything could be done from the package manager. After installing some nVidia drivers and the advanced Compiz configuration program, I was able to set some very funky display effects. I especially like the idea of my different desktops being represented as a cube. And the graphics look very smooth and polished. Visually there was nothing more I wanted to tweak immediately.

I'm typing this article in OpenOffice, and find the experience quite pleasant. I'm no stranger to OpenOffice, but in this particular default installation I found one thing which was not quite wrinkle-free. The spellchecker kept underlining very common words, like “experiences”, and “disappointed”. Finally I discovered that changing the language settings to “English (USA)” instead of “English (South Africa)” yielded much better results.

Next, I noticed that the font being used in this document wasn't Arial. I opened the font drop-down, but couldn't find any of the fonts I am used to on Windows. Google to the rescue. I found out there is a package called “msttcorefonts”, which you can install to make such fonts available. Much better!

Next, I played with audio and video. I had recently purchased a new CD by one of my favorite bands, and decided to rip the tracks to the hard drive. In the menu, I immediately found a program for this, Audio CD Extractor. With the exception of having to install the appropriate codec to create MP3 files, the process was dead-easy. As soon as I inserted the CD, the program immediately populated the display with the track names. After another few clicks (changing some preferences), the extraction began, and was finished within minutes. Very impressive.

My impressions of video handling were mixed. My first try was to play a DVD. No luck there. The movie player had some problem with playing the disc. Fortunately, it offered to search for the missing packages, and install them with minimal effort. Great, I thought. But after that it still didn't work. A few Google searches and about 20 minutes later (with a few additional packages installed), DVDs finally played. Except that the player skipped the menu and started with the first track immediately. When I couldn't fix that, I decided to install VLC. This yielded much better results, and everything now worked as it should have in the first place. After doing some research about DVD codecs, I now know why this process had to be so difficult. Since (most) DVDs are encoded with proprietary codecs, these can't be included with the default installation of Ubuntu. And that's why you have to install them yourself. But I did have a pleasant experience with video nonetheless. I successfully loaded several AVI files without having to install a single additional codec or package. Not bad.

With Ubuntu 7.10 I tried to install the Linux Port of .NET, Mono. That went without a hitch, but I couldn't get MonoDevelop installed. I haven't tried it with Ubuntu 8.04 yet, but I suspect that this is not an Ubuntu related issue anyway.

I must say that I am impressed with the selection of pre-installed software that comes with Ubuntu. It's a very useful collection, and for most everyday tasks you have everything you need. And finding and installing other software is quite painless. The Add/Remove program provides you with a world of software available for Linux. And if you can't find something there, chances are you will find it using the package manager. And what I love even more is that you don't need to worry about package dependencies. If a program you are installing needs another package to function correctly, Ubuntu will install that package for you. Very handy. The only downside to using Ubuntu in South Africa is that bandwidth is quite limited. I have a 3GB limit for each month, so I can't afford to install anything that looks interesting.

Overall, I'm having a wonderful time with Ubuntu. And even though I understand why some people with less technical knowledge might find Ubuntu slightly difficult to figure out at times, I love figuring out little “challenges” now and again. At the moment I can't switch to Ubuntu completely yet, because I need to develop software for Windows. But that will change soon, when I will have a separate work computer. From then on, I plan to move to Ubuntu on my home computer completely. So far I haven't found a single reason not to.

I think so far everybody agrees that Vista is not one of Microsoft's best products. Recently I've had a look at Ubuntu, and I must say that I'm quite impressed by their whole model. Here's a quick comparison.

Obviously Ubuntu has the price advantage, since it's free. The price for Windows XP was not too bad, considering that it's quite a good operating system, but paying for Vista is just beyond me. I've worked with Vista on brand new PCs with much better specs than my 2-year old XP machine, and Vista was considerably slower than XP on my machine.

Then there's the matter of release frequency. With Microsoft, you wait 2 to 6 years for a new version. With Ubuntu, you get a new version every 6 months. Maybe it doesn't have as many new features then as a new Windows version, but the incremental improvement model appeals to me so much more. And support for Ubuntu is given at least 18 months for each release. But if you upgrade every 6 months, you don't need the support for that long anyway.

I haven't installed Ubuntu on my PC yet, but from other reports it seems it's quite fast. Especially the one derivative fo Ubuntu, Xubuntu, makes old PCs seem like the newest out there. But Microsoft seems to have taken a step back. Vista really is slower than anything I've ever seen. I tried to delete a 90MB file once (moving it to the recycle bin), and it took more than 2 minutes to complete. On my XP machine this kind of operation takes at most 2 seconds.

And then there's the software issue. On Windows, most good software is commercial, and you need to pay. More good free software is constantly emerging, but for Linux there's so much more! You have thousands of software packages to choose from. Because almost all Linux software is open source, the competition is much greater, and that's why you have more choice. Granted, you won't get open source software with the complexity of something like Photoshop, but that's just a little price to pay.

And then my favourite issue: it seems to me that you can install Vista on your machine only once. Or twice, at the most. This is totally contradictory to anything I would expect for a consumer product like that. It's like buying a book, and being told you're only allowed to read it once. Of course, with Ubuntu, you don't have this problem. If you buy a new machine, or you just want to re-install, you can do this without thinking twice.

Considering the fact that XP will soon not be sold anymore, and that Microsoft is increasingly trying to force Vista onto everyone, I think I might convert to Ubuntu sometime in the near future. I've been looking at compatability with the software I now use, and surprisingly there are some good options. From what I've seen, I think I can safely switch to Ubuntu without having to sacrifice any type of software that I'm using on Windows now. I do a lot of .NET development, and have found that I can do that on Linux too (with the Mono Project). And that even allows me to write software that's compatible across Operating Systems. That's quite inspiring.

What do you think about this topic? Feel free to give us your thoughts.

Remember Remember The Milk? I spotted this little site a while back. It lets you keep a list of things to do or remember. It seemed like a good idea. Only one thing bothered me. To use this, I had to do one of two things.

1. Keep the website open the whole day, and check it now and again to remind myself of what I have to do. Somehow I find it impractical to keep extra websites open, and then I need to be reminded to check it throughout the day.

2. Open the website every time I want to check my to-do list. Then I need something to remind me to do this every so often.

Both of these methods didn't appeal to me, so I stuck to my previous methods of task management, which didn't always work that well anyway.

Until I found a Remember The Milk add-on for Gmail in Firefox. The add-on displays your to-do items right next to your e-mail inbox. And since I have Gmail open all day anyway, and I'm already used to checking my e-mail every 10-15 minutes, this is ideal. The list of tasks is nicely sorted by due date, and details of each task are displayed when your mouse hovers over it. You can even integrate RTM to the extent that when you star an e-mail, or tag it with a specific tag, a task gets automatically created. This task is also linked to the e-mail in question. This is great for reminders to follow up on a particular e-mail. Adding tasks manually is also a breeze. Instead of typing a title, then selecting a due date, and possibly filling out a whole bunch of other fields, you just type something like “Call John tomorrow”. The task is created with the title “Call John”, it's assigned the due date of tomorrow, and if you have John listed in your Gmail contacts, the task is even linked to him. So when tomorrow comes, and you want to call John, you can easily bring up John's phone number by clicking on a link within that task. And notes can be added to tasks as well. For this you are taken to RTM's site, but this doesn't bother me so much. It's quite easy and quick to do.

This add-on is for Firefox, and is only visible when you have Gmail open. Please note, that it will only work with the new Gmail UI. If you're still using the old one, it will not appear. You can download the add-on here.

I've always wanted to use FeedBurner. And now that we have our blog up and running, I had this possibility. I signed up with FeedBurner, expecting only very basic functionality; a new RSS link, and some stats about how many people are using the feed. But it turned out to be so much more. I'll give you a run-down of some of the features that I've found cool sofar. I haven't worked with it very long, but some features have already proved very handy.

Firstly FeedBurner gives you the ability to very easily "advertise" your blog on any of your other sites. I before I started using FeedBurner, I was thinking about adding a section on our company website that would display the latest entries from our blog. I was getting ready to do some coding for this, but now I didn't have to. FeedBurner has a feature called "Headline Animator". It allows you to generate some code for a banner that automatically displays some of your latest blog posts. And this banner links directly to your feed. Very handy.

Then, you get to customize the appearance of feed items when people view them in their RSS readers. For example, you get to add links like "E-mail this", "Digg this", etc.

Further, there is a Chicklet Chooser that generates a nice subscription link for you to put onto your blog. This is more visible than the little icon up in the address bar of Firefox, and reminds users that they can subscribe to this blog.

Then there are more features, which I haven't tried yet, but which sound really great. For example, you can let users subscribe to an e-mail of your latest posts, or you can integrate Adsense Ads into your feed items.

So if you have a blog, and it's not on steroids yet, head to FeedBurner, and sign up now.

Welcome to the official blog of Devign Innovation! Through this blog we hope to keep you up-to-date of what interesting new services and products we offer. Now and again you will also find some interesting news stories or technology articles.

Enjoy!