See One, Do One, Teach One

My buddy Jared and I are experimenting with various screencasting/podcast setups. We decided to do an unrehearsed run, had a good time, and Teh Show v0.1 was born.

We discuss random tech stuff like the semantic web, greasemonkey, and the brief-lived starbucks free-wifi hack. Plenty of screw-ups exist. For some reason I was shocked that Jared liked firefox but hated Vista (which really makes perfect sense). Jared could not get his screencasting software to keep running.

Mainly, however, it is just us being ourselves–blathering idiots. Comments, questions, and snide remarks are always appreciated.

This probably will not last long, but it is fun for now. Much like our hacking the wii servers with firefox post, user agents are providing fun once again.

Starbucks and AT&T wifi recently opened up free access to the iPhone. By changing the user agent the browser, anybody can make their browser look like the iPhone to the servers. A couple of easy switches away and it is access for everybody.

Here is how to do it in Safari. Switching user agents in firefox is almost as easy. This documents the iPhone user agent information.

1. Open Safari while connected to a AT&T wifi
2. Enter the Preferences, select the Advanced tab, and then select Show the Develop menu in the menu bar
3. From the Develop menu select User Agent
4. Select the iPhone User-Agent
5. The page will reload and ask for a geniune iPhone number. Everybody has a friend with an iPhone, right?
6. Welcome to free internet from Starbucks

I did a quick demonstration of this at my local Starbucks. Forgive the stammering but I didn’t want to take a bunch of cuts sitting outside the coffee house. Screenflow is adding some pauses and slurring too… Nice, but buggish program.

High resolution pod cast available here. YouTube video available below.

This is a quick screencast describing how to remove toolbars in Firefox 3.

The add-recipe function at tech-recipes does not work perfectly when using the FF browser under Leopard.  According to the release notes of Firefox 2.0.0.9, some drop down boxes may continue not to work correctly. Other problems are noted as well…

On OS X 10.5 (Leopard), drop-down selection widgets on some websites may not function.
On OS X 10.5 (Leopard), there are known problems with some media plugins as well as Add-ons that contain binary components.

Because of the bug, I have been forced to use Safari.  I have been pretty surprised how snappy Safari is in Leopard.

The IE blog has reported that IE7 is the second most commonly used browser behind IE6.  Really?

Now, I use IE7 more routinely than firefox; however, it’s hard for me to swallow those numbers.  They do not display their hard numbers but they may be comparing IE against all the individual build numbers of firefox.

Across our network, here is the breakdown if you lump the relative build numbers of firefox together.

IE
6.0 37.1%
7.0 21.4%

FireFox
2.0.x 25.0%
1.0.x 16.5%

Being a technology site, we do probably have more FF users than other sites.  It is also interesting that firefox users are quicker to upgrade than IE users.

Either way, the competition is good.  FF2 and IE7 are leaps and bounds ahead of their earlier counterparts. 

Both IE7 and FF have icons that appear highlighted when a web site has a web feed. Hopefully, this “in your face” display will encourage more users to learn about and use RSS and ATOM feeds.

Interestingly enough, many webmasters have not updated their web pages to take advantage of this new autodiscovery feature. The code is certainly easy enough. Here is the recipe that describes how to do it:

IE7 / Firefox: Enable Live Bookmarks or Web Feeds for Your Web Sites

Command line arguments for Firefox.

Appreciation goes out to MickeyMouse for posting a recipe about using the firefox and/or IE web developer toolbars.

So I stumbled onto Flock The front page reads…

Flock has landed.
We’re introducing the world’s most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.

What is Flock? It’s firefox + a social bookmarking service. If you don’t think they are influenced by Digg, check out this screenie:

The pull of Flock is this integration between browser and web 2.0. Blogging, bookmarking, sharing — all while never leaving your browser. That’s the promise. Supposedly it will also be open source. If so, it will likely be quickly modified to post to digg and other social bookmarking services as well.

Reviews: New Scientist and Will Pate’s Blog

Although the browser can not be downloaded yet, I have found a way to log into the system and kick the tires a bit. As long as you have a valid email address for validation, you can enjoy looking around the web aspects of flock.

When you are in flock, join the “flockless group” and see if you get a flock browser invite.

Different browsers handle some aspects of CSS differently.  To make sure the formatting is the same across different browsers, developers use CSS hacks to hide code from one browser or another.  CSS-Hack is a great wiki referencing this practice.