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I was searching for a better news reader a couple of days ago since my current (now previous) one wasn’t living up to my expectations. During my search I came across a unique solution called Bloglines.

This service is a web site that you join and it aggregates all of your news feeds for you. You just simply go to www.bloglines.com/myblogs to get a list of your feeds and how many unread posts you have. And, because Bloglines constantly checks your feeds for you, you will never miss a posting.

Bloglines includes many other features you can’t get in a software based new reader. You can see how many people have subscribed to your feeds and what they have subscribed to. You can search or browse massive directories of blogs other people have joined. You can get lists of the top blogs. You can share your blog list with other people, for example mine is at: http://www.bloglines.com/public/caladd You can even have Bloglines create your own blog, but I haven’t personally tried this feature.

Overall, this service is absolutely amazing. I usually don’t care for web based services like this but Bloglines has simply done a great job. Best of all, it is FREE. So, don’t wait, sign up right now at: http://www.bloglines.com/

I came across some great tips to make the Firefox web browser load web pages even faster. Do the following steps:

1. In the address bar type “about:config”

2. Scroll down and change the following entries by double-clicking on them:

“network.http.max-connections” to “100″
“network.http.max-connections-per-server” to “100″
“network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy” to “100″
“network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server” to “100″
“network.http.pipelining” to “true”
“network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to “100″
“network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

3. Right click anywhere on in the config screen and select “new->Integer” from the popup menu. Enter “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” as the name and “0″ as the value.

Firefox 1.0 has been released today! Congratulations to the whole Firefox team and to everyone on Spread Firefox who has helped spread Firefox to the computer users across the world. It seems that thousands of people are downloading their copy right now because the Mozilla site has been brought to a screeching halt. But, don’t worry, I am sure the Mozilla guys will get more machine muscle soon to help serve out the Firefox product pages. In the mean time, you can download Firefox 1.0 straight from their ftp servers. Here are some quick links to the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions.

I entered an entry into the latest Spread Firefox contest. I did this by posting some fliers by the mailboxes at my apartment complex and then submitted a photo of my work. Then, I woke up today and checked my rss feeds and found out that I had won the ‘Image Gallery Picture Of The Day’ contest on Spread Firefox! I get 100 bonus points and all the glory that comes with being a winner

I have received several inquires from Spread Firefox members on where I got the fliers for my postings. The first flier, featuring a very fed up user, was created by Firefox member CyberArmy. The second flier, the first page of a data sheet about Firefox, was created by the Firefox sfx team. I slightly altered the data sheet flier to make the web address bigger. Thank you both for the great work on the fliers. Below are thumbnails of the two fliers that link to high resolution tiff images.

In the last 6 days over 1.5 million people have downloaded the Firefox web browser, so why haven’t you? This browser is the most recent in the line of Mozilla (Netscape) based web browsers and it is simply the greatest web browser in the history of the Internet. It is a wonderful replacement to the crappy Internet Explorer web browser most Windows users browse with. Firefox is much more secure, much faster at rendering pages, and includes modern features such as pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and spyware protection.

But don’t just take my word for it. Look at what others are saying:

“Beware of spyware. If you can, use the Firefox browser.” – USA Today

“…a breath of fresh air… Microsoft should be worried.” – Forbes

“I suggest dumping Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser…” – Wall Street Journal

So, don’t wait! Install Firefox now… it is easy, fast, and 100% free. Get Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

I have wasted the better part of yesterday and today upgrading my main computer to Fedora Core 2 from Fedora Core 1. My system is heavily customized so I undertook this upgrade with dread. I hoped that the upgrade wouldn’t break my system too much, which it didn’t. Fedora Core 2 is actually well worth the upgrade. It feels 3 times faster than the last release and I absolutely love the new Gnome 2.6 desktop. I only have one real complaint about the software itself, which is they changed around the menu system, causing me to loose my custom main menu. An automated upgrade path for the menus would have been nice. Gnome still seems to also lack a way to easily get the main menu the way I like it.

The actual installer for Fedora Core 2 was the cause of my wasted time. I had to restart the install process 3 times because the install process would freeze while downloading the packages. The mirrors I was pulling the packages from were under a lot of stress, being that Fedora Core 2 was just released a couple of days ago, but the install process didn’t seem to detect when a package got stuck. It just sat there forever, hoping the server would send the package eventually. I have always preferred web based installs, where you only download the needed packages, instead of having to download and burn entire cd images. The Debian distribution has done web based installs correctly since I started using Linux 7 years ago. I would like to think that the Redhat lineage could have learned a thing or two by now from them but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The other 2 complaints I have about the installer are minor in both their effects and the work needed to correct them. The remaining time estimate for the install process is horribly inaccurate. Somehow, using magic numbers and ancient voodoo I imagine, at the start of the download and install process it conjures up a large number, such as 600 minutes. Then, as individual packages are installed, it subtracts 5 minutes off the remaining time. It always subtracts 5 minutes and doesn’t seem to care if the package is 200 megs or 1 meg. The Fedora group also seems to have missed replacing the term “Redhat” with the new term “Fedora” in several package names and descriptions. I can’t imagine it being very hard to do a simple grep for Redhat and replace it with Fedora, but maybe they had more important things to do.

The last problem I have with Fedora Core 2 isn’t really Fedora’s fault. My binary only video driver from NVidia does not work with Fedora Core 2. NVidia knows of this problem and is hopefully working on a fix for their driver. This is a great example of why drivers really should be open source. There are plenty of developers, such as me, who would make the fixes necessary to the driver to make it work, but can’t because we can’t get access to the tightly guarded code. So, we will have to wait patiently until NVidia gets around to updating the driver. Until then, I can rely on the standard, non-3d accelerated, open source driver and kiss my frame rates goodbye. I don’t have time to be playing Unreal Tournament anyways.