Ed’s on Holiday
No posts for 2 weeks, I’m off on holiday in Spain!
So, see you all in two weeks, with hopefully some more posts on the way.
Entries Tagged as 'General'
Firefox 3 set a New World Record!
Its been 24 hours, Download Day is over! Firefox 3 has set a new world record! Firefox 3 has been downloaded 8.3 million times in 24 hours, beating the number of downloads of Firefox 2 by 6.7 million.
Everyone who downloaded Firefox 3 get a nice certificate for taking part in this world record.
So by now you should have tried Firefox 3. Please post your comments and tell me what you think to Firefox 3? Do you think it is faster than IE, Safari or Firefox 2? Do you love the Awsome bar? Is it now your default browser???
Firefox 3 starts Now
Its 6pm GMT, Firefox 3 is now launched. You can now download Firefox 3 at firefox.com. Servers are slow, so you may have to be patient.
You have 24 hours to download Firefox 3, Lets hope Mozilla will reach the 1.6 million downloads!
EdHewitt.co.uk now fully iPhone compatible
I have justed added a new plugin to my blog called WP-touch. It is very clever plugin which formats your blog for viewing on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Screenshot below, if you don’t have a iPhone or iPod touch.
Making OpenOffice.org Faster!
This week’s Linux Wednesday post, is all about OpenOffice.org. Most of you may know that I always aim for a fast computer. I search the internet to find ways of making my computer faster. I hate a slow computer, one reason I use Ubuntu over XP, it does not go slow after a few months.
Recently I found a HOW-To for making OpenOffice load faster. By changing a few settings in “Options”, OO.org does load up faster. This HOW-To will help Windows, Linux and Mac users.
First, load up OpenOffice.org Word Processor. Go to the “Tools” and select “Options”. Select “Memory” on the left panel, change the setting as shown below.
Reduce the number of Undo steps to a figure lower than 100. Change to 20 or 30 steps.
Under Graphics cache, set Use for OpenOffice.org to 128 MB (up from the original 6MB).
Set Memory per object to 20MB (up from the default .5MB).
Set the number of objects under Cache for inserted objects at 20.
Check OpenOffice.org Quickstarter.
Now select “Java” on the left panel, uncheck “Use a Java runtime environment”.
Click the OK button and close OpenOffice.org. If you are as RAM cautious as I am, you would be concerned that OO.org quickerstarter will use up alot of RAM, but it only uses less than 1MB. It is deferentially worth having this starting up during boot up, because this can really make OpenOffice.org load alot quicker. Start it up again to experience the change in speed!
Thanks to Zolved.com for this helpful HOW-To!
Firefox 3 Download Day
Just been catching up on last weeks news. I came across a great event Mozilla is planning. Firefox 3 is out very soon, so Mozilla has planned a Download Day. They are hoping to break a world record, to become the most downloaded piece of software in 24 hours! I have Firefox 3 already installed, so I am going to download again, to help break the record.
The idea is to first pledge that you will help Firefox 3 to break this record, then you need to spread the word (like I am doing). The main way to do this is to host download parties, like what Linux distros do. Get a brunch a friends together to download Firefox 3 on launch day.
So what you waiting for, “Spread Firefox!”
Sorry to All!
Long time to since my last post.
Sorry for no posts, I had a exam revision a few weeks ago. When I was about to post a new article, the server went down. When it came back online, I was on holiday. But I am back now, so the posts will be coming “thick & fast”
Ubuntu 8.04 Review
Sorry for the lateness of “Linux Wednesday”, been busy with school work and the release of Gfire 0.7.0 (its now out, gfire.edhewitt.co.uk). This week, I am going to do my review on the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 Hardy Heron. This release is meant to be the most substantial release of Ubuntu ever, plus it has Long Term support, of 3 years on desktop & 5 years on server.
I upgraded to 8.04 from 7.10 on Wednesday, the day before the release to “beat the crowds”. It downloaded and installed fine, until I reached the cleanup part, network manager would not shut down, so the updater crashed. I restarted my computer, and found that the install did work. I had successful install Xubuntu 8.04. I spent the next 2 hours clearing out all the old packages. So far, not a great start.
As I spent the rest of the night looking around 8.04, I noticed that for the end-user not a lot has really changed. There was really no new features, unlike 7.10. There was of course, all the latest versions of application, including FireFox 3, which runs really quick on my computer. But apart from that, for the average user there is not a lot to get excited about. Although, we have been told a bunch of new features will come with 8.10. However, I was impressed that see that my computer was slightly faster and I now get more fps when doing glxgears. Although, I think there is memory leakage. I think Ubuntu 8.04 does not utilise RAM very well, but this maybe fixed in 8.04.1.
Overall, not a lot to say about 8.04. Its good that we have another LTS release, which i will make Ubuntu very stable and secure. It is now easier for Windows users to try Ubuntu, thanks to Wubi. If you are still on 7.10, I would upgrade to 8.04 just for the newest versions of applications and the LTS support. If you are on 6.06, deferentially upgrade, you will see a huge change with your Ubuntu desktop, since you will experience all the new features which was on 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10.
Windows Vista SP1 Music Video
This video appeared on YouTube about a week ago from a Microsoft employee. It is music video from the Microsoft Sales Team, about Windows Vista SP1.
Enjoy!
Gfire!
A few weeks ago I took over an open source project with another guy called Laurent. Hes Belgium and we got on well from the start (always a good when working on a project together). The project is called Gfire. It is a plugin for the Pidgin IM client which allows you to connect to the Xfire network.The great thing about this project is that it allows Mac and Linux users to connect to the Xfire network, the Xfire client is only for Windows users.
The Gfire project had stopped since September 2006, but now the project was handed over to the new dev team. Myself and Laurent are now going to further the development of Gfire. We are planning to improve on the current Gfire version, offer support and keep the xfire games list up-to-date. Each time there is a new games list, I will format it for Gfire and post on the Gfire website for everyone to download, this was something which the previous Gfire team didn’t do.
We are currently beta testing the first Gfire version since September 2006, version 0.7.0. This new version will have many bugs fixed and have better support for working on the newer version of Pidgin. You can check out this project at edhewitt.co.uk/gfire
EDIT, I have changed the Gfire link, it now works!
