Here, have a nice shot from canweshipyet.com

Firefoxers TR, a Firefox fan group in Istanbul, has celebrated the removal of the last blocker at the Taksim Square. The Firefox mascot has drawn big attention from the people around.

Like Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner stated previously, the developer tree is now closed as all bugs are fixed now. The team will release the first RC build, if the bug count stays at zero in the following triage session. We will likely see the first RC in the coming week.

However this time it’s the nags. Before the subscription ended, it began nagging, and continues to do so since the end of the subscription.

• It happens every now and then
• You don’t have a button to dismiss, you need to deal with a combo box with long text.
• You can’t control it, it’s unstoppable, unless you have enough computer knowledge to completely remove it from the system. And this is the only choice the designers left us, if you don’t wish to renew at the time.
• Besides a frequent nag, there are others like when you open a browser another nag box is displayed, and another dialog right after that, again for the web session.

This reminded me my secondary reason; the product family always had a tendency to keep reminding us we poor souls have no control on our fate systems. Too many things pop up here and there. So CPU is not the only measure for performance, but the UI and the functional design can also decrease performance on the human side by taking users’ time.

This is probably being presented as ‘for the user’s safety’, like a man beating his children saying ‘this is for your own good’. Hey I know my subscription has ended, I even dealed with the dialog, now just give me a way to end this pain, other than completely removing it. To this logic, preventing an intentional uninstall may very well work for ‘user safety’ too. But thanks god this is not the case =)

I know, I know. It’s not just a random choice made by a developer in the team. Like all professional software companies, it’s a well planned workflow optimized on many statistics to make the best value out of the software. It’s targeting people who will subscribe because of a heavy nag with an action which looks like the only option to continue using their computers, even if they wouldn’t otherwise, and just leaving out a small number of people who can’t stand being nagged. So if I’m one of those, the solution is simply not aimed at me. Anyway, I still think the company could win us too, without loosing any single customer, with an option for a neat and user friendly interface.

Have a nice day guys!

New version of the mod is available under the name ‘gembox’. It supports xhtml, doesn’t require manually including brush files, and can be run within the header. You can get it from :

http://onursafak.com/projects/gembox/

More description about the usage will be available soon.

The post below is kept for historical purpose

Anybody remember the revolution of the 16 color computer displays?

SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev is a well written client side syntax highlighter which uses javascript to colorize output from different languages on web pages, using customizable brush files for language definitions. I’ve found it’s a good alternative for my needs and switched to it. Now it’s used by Byte Hell for colorized outputs.

Before this I made a little modification on the code for some features which are asked by current users of this nice tool.

For people already know about SyntaxHighlighter :

With the modification HighlightAll function gets the same parameters. It now checks for the ‘class’ attributes of the tags to highlight. This way it supports xhtml and blogger.com, keeps the name attributes available, and allows space seperated multiple styles in the class attribute, giving us the chance to attach custom styles to containers.

With the new syntax, the tags should be formed as below :

<pre class="hl:sql">......</pre>

Like before, options can be added to the class tag like: ‘hl:sql:collapse’, where ‘hl’ is the name which is passed to the ‘HighlightAll’ command, and ‘sql’ is the language alias.

The xhtml mod can be found at :

http://www.onursafak.com/tools/shx/shCore.js

You can download the package from it’s homepage and just replace this file.

Have a colorful day.

Thinking about hiding, a few options come to mind. We can ;

• Type it like ‘darkwingduck -at- superhero.com’, giving the reader an idea about the real address ‘darkwingduck@superhero.com’
• Use an image for the ‘@’ character in html.
• Use a contact form instead of giving an email address.
• Use a script to build the address on the fly, which won’t appear in the source files.

I’ve choosen the last option for my blog pages. I usually use a single command javascript to build the address, like ;

<script language='javascript'>
  document.write('foo' + '@' + 'bar.org');
</script>

This prints the address to the page on the fly. However this doesn’t work in blogger somehow. So I’ve written a little script which will build the address after the page is completely loaded. This will work on nearly any web page including the blogger.

Please write me at
<a href="mailto:!myemail!">!myemail!</a>

<span id='myemailwrapper'>
    Please write me at
    <a href="mailto:!myemail!">!myemail!</a>
</span>

<a href="#" onClick="SendMail('john','mywebsite.com');">
 Write me!
</a>

function SendMail(User,Domain) {
 parent.location="mailto:" + User + "@" + Domain;
}

function RevealEmails() {
 DoReplace('user','domain.com','myemail');
}

function DoReplace(MailBox, MailDom, FieldName) {
 const TrySpan = true;
 var RootItem;
 if (TrySpan) RootItem = document.getElementById(FieldName + "wrapper");
 if (!RootItem) RootItem = document.body;
 RootItem.innerHTML = RootItem.innerHTML.replace(eval("/!" + FieldName + "!/gi"),MailBox + "@" + MailDom);
}

if (window.addEventListener) window.addEventListener("load", RevealEmails, false);
else if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload", RevealEmails);
else {
 if (window.onload != null) {
  var oldOnload = window.onload;
  window.onload = function ( e ) {
   oldOnload( e );
   RevealEmails();
  }
 }
 else window.onload = RevealEmails;
}

For Site Meter (www.sitemeter.com) you can wrap the given html code as follows :

<div style=“visibility:hidden;”>
-your sitemeter code-
</div>

And just bookmark the entrance page to easily jump there.

Anyway I recommend you give them some credits in your design to better support them, or perhaps keep it as is if it’s not really needed.

I checked it out but was a few days too late to catch a few very short names (a 4 letters name is a disadvantage this time), just found one for a friend.

So if you are looking for a neat free email address, your chances are still very good, jump in !

They also support moving your current e-mail address to a new one. Here is the entry from the Yahoo Mail blog.

Now XM’s agreement is over and they’ve decided to stop using winamp to demonstrate their service. Some people was unhappy with this since it was their only chance to listen to XM in the European countries. But the great news is AOL is back on Winamp with their good quality stations. That made me happy, giving me a lot of choices from the rock, electronic and the jazz stations, along with the others.

So in case you are one of those who’ve stopped checking the service for updates, check it out, blow the dust off of your winamp, and of your ears!

Just wanted to inform others after having a good feast of music (power metal this time).

Sometimes I can’t see how some wide spread, well recognized software can have some very simple and obvious implementation errors or bugs like this. And there are worse others…

No doubt Ida Pro is the best disassembler today, but it also has one of the worst interface designs I know of.

I was organizing my email accounts under Google and thought having a web log, just in case wouldn’t hurt. I don’t think this thing will be used much as I don’t have much spare time, but from time to time I may post some quick tips which may save the day for people who search for some info on the web. I know a few situations saved mine…