Author: Jason Dunn

Feedback to the Mozilla (Firefox) Folks

Here’s some feedback I just submitted to the people who work on Firefox. I decided to put my 2 cents in after reading this article, which links to this site. I’m certainly not going to block all Firefox users from my sites – I think Firefox is an excellent browser and I think more people should be using it – but if I could I’d display a polite message to any Firefox user who’s also using an ad-blocking extension and ask them to white-list my site. Firefox not offering publishers a way to detect the use of a certain plug-in makes them complicit in the loss if income that occurs.

“I’m a happy Firefox user, but as a publisher who relies on advertising on my Web sites to make a living, it’s disheartening to see the way Firefox has embraced and even endorsed the AdBlock plugin, allowing people to use my server resources and deny me the income I need to continue to offer that content.

The issue here isn’t that the extensible Firefox design has allowed for someone to develop a plugin that someone else doesn’t like – the issue is that Firefox offers no way for me as a publisher to DETECT the use of that plugin on my site. If I could, I’d display a polite request to the people using it for them to white-list my site and allow the ads to show. I’ve found most people don’t understand how Internet advertising works, and they don’t realize that by just allowing the ads to load they’re helping the Web site. Many people think that if they don’t click on the ads, they might as well block them.

Please, do something to help the people who create the majority of the content on the ‘Net, giving it away for free, with the only request being allowing a few banner ads to load.

Sincerely,
Jason Dunn”

Xbox 360 HD-DVD Lock-Up Playing “Heroes” Disc

A few days ago the wife and I bought season one of Heroes on HD-DVD. Yeah, we’re late to the party – but when season one started last year, my TV tuner didn’t record the first few episodes properly, so I gave up on the series and figured I’d pick it up on DVD before season two started. I have to say, it’s a great TV series – Ashley and I are really enjoying it.

The first night we started watching it, we watched four episodes, putting us on disc two with one episode left on that disc. When we loaded it up last night, we immediately saw a black and red screen that said “LOADING”. We stared at that for about 30 seconds, then a cancel button appeared below the word “LOADING”. We continued to wait – over a minute later, it still wasn’t loading the DVD menu, so I hit cancel. Nothing happened. I waited a bit longer, then gave up and turned off the Xbox 360. I thought for sure a reboot would fix the problem (hey, it works with most other Microsoft products), but after a reboot and re-loading of the disc from scratch, the same problem was happening. The Xbox was fine – it loaded up ok, logged me into Xbox Live, etc. As a long shot, I went into the Xbox 360 control panel and purged the system storage of all video resume points – that didn’t help. I tried unplugging the power from both the Xbox 360 and the HD-DVD drive, then reconnecting them in sequence. Still nothing – we sat there staring at the “LOADING” message. I ejected the disc, checked it for damage, then put it back in and got the same message again.

At this point I was getting frustrated, especially since this is the one and only way I can play HD-DVDs. If something doesn’t play a regular DVD, I have at least six other devices that could come through in a pinch. Not so with HD-DVD. I left it on the “LOADING” screen and flipped over to the regular DVD player to watch a Star Trek: Enterprise episode. 45 minutes later, I flipped back to the Xbox 360…and it was on the screen saver! One flick of a button later and I was staring at the Heroes menu. I don’t know what happened, or why it happened, but I’ll say this much: I’ve never had a problem like that with a regular DVD player, so if HD-DVD (or Blu-ray for that matter) are going to succeed then they need to be every bit as stable as the format they’re trying to replace.

TV Worth Watching: Heroes

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I’m probably the only self-confessed comic-book geek on the planet that missed a big, mainstream super-hero show like Heroes. When season one started last year, the TV tuner in my Windows Media Center PC didn’t record the first few episodes properly, so I gave up on the series and figured I’d pick it up on DVD before season two started. I have to say, it’s a great TV series – Ashley and I are really enjoying it. As I tell anyone who’s sceptical about watching Battle Gallactica, good drama is good drama, regardless of the setting. Great characters and a gripping storyline can exist anywhere, whether it’s in space or in Las Vegas. Heroes is a highly-serialized show where almost every episode is tightly strung together in a “To Be Continued” fashion. Like 24, once you start watching it’s hard to stop. And the HD-DVD version looks pretty damn good – though my digital-noise-sensitive eyes have noticed a few screwy things here and there.

If you haven’t watched Heroes season one, you should rent it before season two starts in a few weeks. 😉

You Know What’s Arrogant?

Here’s pure arrogance for you: having an auto-responder on your email account that responds back to every single person that emails you with a message that says “Thanks for your email, but I’m so busy that I only check email twice a day so I’ll get back to you later”. What kind of self-important person thinks that they’re so vital to the world that they need to inform me that they can’t get to my email right away? What kind of a person thinks it’s ok to clog up my inbox with a message telling me how much email they get?

What kind of a person rants on a blog about other people late at night? Wait, don’t answer that…

Quechup: The New Internet Plague

If you get an email in your inbox that looks anything like this, delete it and don’t respond:

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It seems they have an extremely aggressive way of going after people to get them to join – when someone signs up and the user says “Check for Friends” and selects their address book, rather than scanning the address book and seeing if there’s a match for any of the email addresses, it sends out an invite to every single email address it can find! That’s absolutely ridiculous and ranks right up there with the worst social engineering spyware I’ve seen – the intention of the user is to see which of his friends are already on Quechup, not invite them all. If the option said “Invite all my friends”, which is what it’s really doing, you can be sure most people wouldn’t be selecting that option. Facebook is more than enough for me to try and keep up with, thank you very much…

Looking for a Good HTML Editor

After watching Microsoft’s new Expression Web software completely MANGLE and DESTROY a perfectly good PHP file (it was trying to be “helpful” by re-mapping the CSS code), I’m not going to touch it again. Ever. I really thought Microsoft had learned their lesson after the FrontPage debacle, but it seems they haven’t. I’m looking for a good HTML editor: I prefer something with a visual preview, but at this point it’s not necessary. It should be Vista-compatible, fast, light, and while free is great, I’m willing to pay a few bucks for something good. No one say Dreamweaver, I don’t edit enough HTML pages to warrant a tool like that. Any suggestions?

Yessssss, It Finally Arrived: my Dell XPS M1330

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I’ve been playing with my new Dell XPS M1330 quite a bit over the past couple of days – after waiting forever for it, it’s great to finally have it in my hands. My first impressions, stream of consciousness style? Here we go…

It’s impressive. Incredibly fast. Great fit and finish. Love the red satin cover, love the aluminum on the inside. Slot load DVD drive is cool – but the eject button doesn’t always work. 802.11n is fast (I’ve connected up to 117 mbps), but seems inconsistent and I’m not seeing transfers speeds as fast as I’d expect. Only two USB ports – pity. No CompactFlash slot (darn). Came pre-loaded with Norton AntiVirus, Google Desktop Search, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Sidebar – none of which I want, so I’ll have to reformat the whole thing and re-build it from scratch (grumble). Did I mention it’s fast? So damn fast – I installed City of Heroes and the video card (128 MB NVIDIA 8400M GS) handled it without a problem, smooth like butta’. The screen is gorgeous, very bright at max brightness, but so very dull at anything less than about 70% brightness. The 1280 x 800 resolution isn’t bad, but higher would have been better – why not 1440 x 900? If the Dell 14.1″ screen notebooks have an option for 1440 x 900, why not this high-priced beast?

Gonna’ see about getting 4 GB of RAM put in there, I’ll only get access to 3.5 GB, but hey that’s better than 2 GB. Lightroom runs great on this, the CPU is very fast (I got the 2.2 Ghz model). Overall the unit is very quiet, and you can only just barely hear the fan under heavy load. Seems to be some quirks with suspend/resume – it just takes way too long, screen flashes off and on, seems sloppy. My old XP-based Fujitsu upgraded to Vista is faster at suspend/resume, so this is just unacceptable. The fingerprint reader is a neat gimmick, but the software is sloppy and dysfunctional, I don’t know if I’ll use it. So far, I’d give this an 8 out of 10 rating as a laptop. Dell did quite good here, but my expectations were a touch higher for an XPS laptop that’s eight months into Vista’s cycle.

Firefox Memory Leaks

I really like using Firefox and think it’s a superb browser, but how has it gotten to the 2.x release state while still having incredibly sloppy memory management? Here’s how much memory it was taking at the end of a day with only four tabs open:

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176 MB!? Closing it and re-opening it, with those same four tabs displayed, gave me 40 MB. So that’s 136 MB of RAM being used for no good reason. Come on Firefox guys, work on memory management and stability before adding any new gee-whiz features.

Learning to Use the Comma

This video is pure gold; I wish I could inject the knowledge in this video directly into the brains of people around the world. There are also videos on using semi-colons, capital letters and more. And no, please don’t point out any grammatical mistakes in this post. 😉


VideoJug: How To Use Commas

Donating Blood: That Felt Good

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Hats off to the people at the local Canadian Blood Services in Calgary – Ashley and I went down there this past Saturday to be first-time blood donors, and it was a really great experience. Donating blood is something I’ve “wanted” to do for years. I put wanted in quotes because it seems for most people, and I’m sadly often in this group, they’ll “want” to do things but always find excuses to not do it. Every year I get old I try to push myself to higher levels of integrity – where when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.

This time around I had a one-two punch to the jaw: last week my friend Crystal (she’s the one I’ve been taking a lot of pictures for lately) went into the hospital with an extremely low hemoglobin count. She needed an immediate blood transfusion – it saved her life. That was punch number one. A day later, I received an email from Canadian Blood Services (using an email address I used for a one-time online contest) saying that they were in desperate need of blood donors – they had only a three-day supply of blood available. Punch number two. Some days I’m a bit slow, but I’m not that dense, so I told Ashley we should really get down there and donate blood.

We went in on Saturday at noon, and it was a great experience – yes, even though we got poked in the arm with a needle. The process was fairly quick – the worst part was the paperwork…well, that and the finger-pick to test my blood for iron levels. That little clicker thing hurt more than the horse-needle they put in my arm! After answering the questions about where I’ve been in the past three years, and the ones that might make some people blush (“Have you ever been paid money or drugs for sex?”) and them checking my arms for needle tracks, it was off to the comfy chairs. Ashley and I brought paperback books because we thought the drawing blood process took 30 minutes – it didn’t. The very skilled nurse put the needle in my arm with almost no pain, and my heart slammed out 0.5 litres (1 pint) of the red juicy stuff in 6 minutes 8 seconds. Ashley took a bit over 8 minutes – apparently women are typically slower. Maybe men were made to bleed faster because we’re the ones usually starting the wars.

After the donation I spent a few minutes sipping Apple juice and eating cookies, then we left. We’ve already booked our appointment for October – you can only donate every 56 days – and we both felt great about having donated blood. My only regret? That it took me this long to get around to doing it. If you can donate blood, you should – they need it. Besides, what else are you going to do with it?