I have been using the Firefox 4 versions since it release and noticed quiet a few improvement to both performance and design. The one major issue I had were few crashes where the browser disappeared completely from Windows task bar. I didn’t notice the issue in most cases and I thought that I have closed the Window with it collection of tabs accidentally. Turns out, after minimizing the window, Firefox could crash in some cases. If you are not keeping “tabs” on your open windows, you could easily miss it. Since it doesn’t happen very often and I could easily get the sites/pages I was on, it was mainly an annoyance.

Beta 7 update was the big bummer for me. The Status Bar has disappeared from the it usually location (bottom of the window), where major browsers have it, and moved to elbow the address bar, here.

There are a few problems with this approach:

- Security. There are more bobby trapped websites with malicious content or copycat of genuine website that will easily benefit from the user not knowing what links are clicking on.
- Average user will not notice the change and some of them will end up living “without” status bar, reducing the effort of security awareness many are trying to convey.
- For those who have noticed the change: on long URLs, you either don’t see the full site address where you are going, or you loose track of what page/URL you are in before moving.

There are already scores of complains regarding this specific change on Firefox feedback page.

For now, there are a few add-ons that will plug this critical visibility feature, although I try to avoid as many as possible.

Fingers crossed for Beta 8. For now, I’m going back to Firefox 3.6 – the latest stable version.

I was trying to find directions and distance from a street in Folkestone to Eurotunnel when I realized that I have to cross the channel halfway to catch it.

Click to enlarge

Based on Google Maps, it takes 50mins to get from a street to Folkestone to Eurotunnel based on the same city. First, you will need to drive to Dover (to get Eurotunnel in Folkestone?!!), then get the ferry from Eastern Docks. Once halfway through the tunnel, get off at a place called “Boulougne-sur-Mer” which means Boulougne on sea, which is not on the sea, but around 22miles south from Calais.

If one survives the strip, I reckon it will take all day to do it!

The moral of this story is; don’t always trust Google Maps or your GPS navigation device, no matter how good manufactures claims they are. Go back to good old maps from time to time.

How to Reproduce:

Go to google maps and type:
Source: St. Michaels Street, Folkestone, Kent CT20, UK
Destination: Eurotunnel, Folkestone, UK

A recent article published on BBC website reveals that researchers have discovered why the same food will probably taste differently depending on the background noise level. It does shed some light on why most people complain about the blandness of airline food.

I personally agree with the findings based on experience. Background noise such as loud music, busy street or chatty people during the meal has always influenced my ratings on how tasty my meal was.

The noise level is likely a destruction to the brain and the taste to prevent it from indulging the full extent of the various components and ingredients that the dish may hold.

The fact remains that the food itself has to be tasty to be enjoyed in quieter environment, but doesn’t explain why a increasing number people, mostly the young generation, enjoys fast food in busy and noisy streets. Maybe the hunger level plays another factor.

I know it has been a long time since I’ve posted to my blog, but I should organise some time during the week where I can post about stuff I care about or might be of use to the readers.

This is a just a note to self so I can remind myself not to dose off again…

I was meant to post on this last weekend, when I starting seeing and error on this blog, but I was busy working on a new site.

I think it was Saturday when I was able to view my blog, but every time I click on any WordPress post on this blog, I got a 404 error – page can not be displayed. I was puzzled and didn’t know what would cause this.

Further to my previous post regarding disabling Post Revisions in WordPress 2.6 or Later, this post will explain how to remove those posts that have been previously saved to your WordPress database.

As a regular reader of BBC News, I often find issues linking certain news and headlines to the wrong articles. One would imagine that such a huge and very popular website with over 25 million (estimates using various sources)

Microsoft has recently announced at Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) that it will be making it Microsoft Office 2010 available online. A lightweight verison of Word, Excel, PowerPoint ad OnNote will be released next year. This is part of Microsoft initiative to win back the web after it seemed to have lost the battle to big G a couple of times.

During the last few months, I’ve noticed that Google and Microsoft appear to be stepping on each others tows by competing on markets that was seen a few years ago as no go even for large organization. It has been clear for a long time that the two giants are also competitors, but now its show time while each one of them is trying to grab as much market share as they could from each other. I’m referring to the search and OS industry. Following the release of Bing by Microsoft in attempt to revive it share of the search engine market and addresses new webmasters claims of Google results no longer relevant as they were, Google hits back with Google Chrome OS.

A new feature that was shipped with WordPress 2.6 and later is the ability to create tracking revisions for each post. This is particularly handy if there are many authors that write on the same WordPress blog. Post revisions is intended to keep previous versions of a post after it have been modified. It helps track changes to blog post in case there is a need to revert back to an earlier version. Each time a post has been saved, a Post Revision is created. Those happens even if the same author is hitting the “Update Post” button.