My Firefox Status
Blogged on May 31st, 2007 at 10:38pm
So as most of you will know, the latest Firefox came out today (ver 2.0.0.4). Over the past few days I’ve also got a couple of handy extensions to add to my extension arsenal.
First of all, I got Firefox Showcase. What this does is very similar to IE7’s feature that previews all the tabs open. It comes up in a seperate window with a tab grid. Very nice looking, but I haven’t come across a dire need for it yet.
I also got the “All In One Gestures” add on. Once again, it’s one of those useful things that you’ll never.. well.. use. I’ll probably dig it out and start using it soon though. It mimics the same functionality that Opera’s gestures feature has, as well as letting you draw an ugly line across your browser window. Not sure if this one’s a keeper IMO.
One thing that I do like and that I do use is the Chromatabs extension. What this one does is colour codes your open tabs, apparently to aid visual identification. In my opinion it works best when you set it to take the colours out of the website’s favicon to identify it, otherwise having a purple tab for a website like AvengeX isn’t such a good idea. Funnily enough it does help one hell of a lot, though it takes a few hours of getting used to.
With 2.0.0.4’s release the only thing I’ve noticed is the ability to flick between tabs with your mouse wheel when you’re on the tab bar. It’s a nice touch, and sort of beats the CTRL+TAB commands when you’ve got your hands handy.
I’ve organized my bookmarks a lot lately, into folders on the bookmarks toolbar. I also changed my homepage from AvengeX to Netvibes, as inspired from Alec’s set up. It seems that guy has a lot of stuff you can learn simply by using his computer!
Battlefield 2142
Blogged on May 31st, 2007 at 1:23am
Wow, what a stunner of a game. I got addicted to it while at Alec’s house the other day, and so far after forking out £30 for it, it’s had me amazed. Another thing that amazed me is the fact that my puny 128MB entry level graphics card still manages to support it! Well, I guess with 2GB of RAM and a B-grade processor I’ll be fine anyhow.
FPS with my ATI Radeon x1050 is decent, no freezing whatsoever. However, the quality leaves much to be desired. I’m not sure whether I want to upgrade it again in light of the fact it’s less than a month old, but it gets the job done and I reckon there’s plenty of better things to spend my money on (like SitePoint books, for example).
If anybody wants to come on board with me and play a few rounds, my Xfire username is exswitch and my user on the actual game is [Gunryu] Aveng3X. It’s definitely worth the money!
Will Morgan’s Extreme Tour of the South
Blogged on May 29th, 2007 at 10:00pmOH YES WHAT AN AMAZING 5 DAY BREAK! The best thing about it is that in all that time I had unlimited funds (as far as £250 means to me), plenty of friends with me, trains, music and my phone with 300 free texts.
Infact no, the best thing about it was definitely Friday night. 0.85 bottles of wine, cigarettes, Joe*, Meg, Sarah*, Rachel*, Alex*, some other girl*, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, trolleys and 01:30 in the morning. Those people definitely know how to show someone a good time ;>
On Friday I left for Eastbourne to meet Joe and Meg, went to the gig in the evening I’ve just mentioned, went back, slept on an inflatable bed, (Saturday) woke up, had the nicest egg sandwich, went into town, bought some new shoes, went back, got a curry, went back to bed on the inflatable thing, (Sunday) woke up, went to town, bought more new clothes, went home.
On Monday I left for Southampton at 7am, got cancelled on by Claire (thanks a lot Claire. :/), got rained on, got the slowest ever ferry to the Isle of Wight, met Alec, had the nicest panini, went to his house, played BF2142 (just bought), got tipsy on Irish Cream (nice stuff!), played one of those “cool” games, went to the beach, looked at the damn nice moon, went home, slept in a non-inflatable bed, woke up, read a book, played BF2142, met some new people, went to the beach, came back, played SHIT, got out, saw a penis, got on the fastest ever ferry to Southampton Quay, had the weirdest conversation with some chavs on the way to the train station, got the train home and then had the nicest noodles in the world.
Damn it’s good to be home. I’m so pissed off I never got any photos though! Next thing to buy: a decent camera.
I’d like to say thanks to Joe for having me at his place, feeling that it was fine for him to have sex with his girlfriend in the same room as me (he must have trusted me a lot not to get involved), his mother for making the nicest scones. I’d also like to say thank you to Meg for not feeling violated. I’d like to say thanks to Alec for putting me on the wrong ferry and for the hospitality.
Well, so far that’s been the most eventful 5 days that I’ve ever had in my life. I loved every single hour, whether it was on the train looking out of the window, sweating about the fact my ticket probably wasn’t valid, weathering my shoes with clay, lying on the floor slightly stoned and thinking “holy moly I love my life”, or just sitting there thinking “wow”
But seriously, I do.
Two Days Left..
Blogged on May 22nd, 2007 at 5:01pmThis morning I almost forecast today as a wake-up call to start revising - fast. Unfortunately a wake-up call was not needed, since today’s English Literature exam contained some pretty easy questions that I think I managed to work around quite nicely indeed, especially for someone like me who hasn’t even read the book we’ve been studying for the past year or so.
Why is the fact that the novel is set in Maycomb County important? (27 marks)
Excellent.. what a gift? I answered the question by talking about the civil war and the oppression of the blacks, forming a solid foundation on which to base the story’s main plot. I think that’s got me a pass.. score!
The second half wasn’t so bad either, thanks to Mrs Branson’s crash course lesson on “how-to-answer-a-literature-question-and-not-fail-miserably” paying off. And just to think, I went into the exam telling her in a sarcastic tone “I’ll do you proud, miss.”
Anywho, the rest of today has been a bit of a doss. My music teacher for the last time forgot to bring in her violin which she owes a solo played to my music class on. The usual antics happened in my music class - people sung along to acoustic songs that I’ve never heard of and 9 Crimes by Damien Rice was covered at least twice. We then had PE which was also quite doss like due to the fact that we weren’t allowed to play football.
The rest was pretty boring I guess.
Tonight I’m supposed to be going out to town with some people in my form group, but I’ve decided not to. I guess going to Nandos with a bunch of people who you have regarded over a period of five years as the most uncouth and simple people you have ever met just doesn’t cut it anymore. It was going to be a flop anyway - all the people on “my side” of the form aren’t going, leaving me with the potentially cringe-ridden task of pulling fake smiles and making subtle insults against those simple and uncouth people. I can’t do this on my own, and quite frankly I have better things to spend my money on, like getting my hair re-dyed and some new clothes.
Talking of money, my head of year is leaving to Australia to get married after managing Year 11 this year. Somebody, probably her, has requested a fund whereby people are asked to donate money to her. Hell knows what for, but I sincerely hope she didn’t have plans for myself and my peers to pay for her flight ticket or for her wedding dress. For all the times she broke up the fights I was in and excluded me, for all the stupid policies she enforced onto my year, I’m not bloody well paying for her visa card.
Tonight is going to be relatively uneventful and stress-free since I’m going to get my mouth sorted out tomorrow at the orthodontist, hopefully for the penultimate time, and rest assured I have no intention of coming into school after that.
A stampede has been planned for Thursday. I will be participating in it, hopefully ramsacking the school’s “pill bins” (image coming soon) and causing minor criminal damage to the school grounds. Personally, after going to Hinchley Wood School ever since I was eleven somewhat reminds me of a Communist five year plan, with a hint of Nazi in there somewhere too.
Well, that’s all for now. I’m going to get changed from these sweat ridden clothes and into something a little more respiratory friendly.
HashMash
Blogged on May 21st, 2007 at 8:05pmA project started almost accidentally by me the other week, HashMash is a hybrid rainbow table and hash-key database which enabled anybody to go about encrypting or decrypting MD5 hashes.
The layout is another Web 2.0 attempt from me and in my opinion, looks quite good though I’ll be improving it in the future. I’m also going to take a look at coding a rainbow table algorithm in PHP to add to the database in the future. But, for now, it grows automatically when a user requests an encryption, and then passes a few times over the string prefixing and suffixing numbers, alternating cases etc to it, adding a row each time.
I’ve submitted it to Digg anticipating it to be the most buried story of the day due to the fact there are already plenty of MD5 encryptors/decryptors out there, but hey - it’s just for the fun of it really.