Ah, yesterday it was time once again for the fun, fun roadtrip I like to call “ten hours plus of misery sitting in a car by myself so I can go home and see my mom for her birthday before I start work.” Yep, that about sums it up. At least this is a good week to visit, since my dad and brother both have birthdays this week too.

On my way through Oklahoma at 75 mph, I saw my two favorite road signs. The first sign proudly proclaims: “Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates.” Now, I would think that is fairly important information, however Oklahoma obviously does not agree, since the sign is small and easy to miss. The other, much larger, sign states: “Do not drive into smoke.” I’ve driven through that particular region of Oklahoma many, many times and I still have no clue what “smoke” they are talking about. Of course I haven’t seen any hitchhikers in orange jumpsuits either.

Last night while I was in bed waiting for sleep to oh-so-slowly sneak up on me, I had a brilliant idea how to fix Firefox. Why I was thinking about Firefox and its broken extensions and themes, I’ll never know. However, the point is that I was thinking about it and I vaguely remembered a check box somewhere that said “Allow web sites to install software.” Being the paranoid person that I am, I unchecked it as soon as I installed Firefox and didn’t give it another thought. Until last night. Today, I rechecked the box and voilà! themes and extensions work. So, if you are having the same problem, look for that check box in Options under Advanced.

There are still some bugs with Themes and Extensions, especially those that have not been updated for 0.9, but at least they install now.

If you’re into tech then you’ve probably already heard about Internet Explorer’s glaring security hole. The flaw allows code to run on your machine just by visiting a malicious page. Ad companies are using the flaw to install spyware and adware on your machine. This is a very Bad Thing. Normally I would just ignore this advisory and wait until Microsoft decided to fix the problem. Well, that didn’t work this time. After some strangeness when I visited a perfectly normal site, I decided it was time to find a new browser, at least for a while. Since I’d been hearing good things about Firefox, I thought I’d give it a try. I went to mozilla.org and downloaded version 0.9RC. Keep in mind this is beta software, and although it is a release candidate, it could still have bugs.

The Good

Installation is a snap. Really. The best thing about the installation is that it grabs everything from IE. When I fired it up for the first time it had all my bookmarks, history, cookies, options, and even all of my “auto complete” things (where it remembers stuff you’ve typed into the form before and will drop down possible matches to what you are typing now). It was awesome. The idea of not having all of those on a new browser is one of the things that has kept me from switching in the past.

Firefox supports tabbed browsing. I actually was not a fan of tabbed browsing until I started using it in Safari. Now I use it all the time. Tabbed browsing in Firefox takes some getting used to, mostly because I’m so used to IE where everything is in a new window, that I don’t remember to just close the tab. However, then a nice little box pops up to ask if I really meant to close the whole window (you can turn it off, but I don’t recommend it unless you are used to tabbed browsing on Windows already).

Popup blocking is built in. So far it has caught every popup, which is pretty good since the Google toolbar has recently been letting some through.

Finally, there is a built in Search bar, which by default searches Google, although you can change it to whatever engine you prefer. You can also add eBay, Amazon, dictionary.com and a lot more.

The Bad

I really haven’t had too many problems with Firefox. The main issue is that plugins for previous versions don’t work with 0.9RC. In fact, I haven’t found a single plugin that works, I’m not sure if it’s because they haven’t been updated or because plugins were for some reason disabled.

Internet Explorer only stuff doesn’t work with Firefox. Makes sense. However, I’m typing this in IE because FreeTextBox (kind of like super Notepad for the web) is IE only. Also the Google toolbar is IE only, which wouldn’t be a big deal if plugins were working, but I really miss being able to click “Autofill” and all the form fields are magically filled in, no typing required.

The Ugly

Themes don’t work in 0.9RC. Or, like plugins, they haven’t been updated yet. The default theme is ok, but there are much nicer looking themes available for 0.8. In fact, I went back to 0.8 for the themes, but then all of the other cool features of 0.9RC didn’t work anymore so I switched again. I’m sure once the actual 0.9 release is made, themes and plugins will work.

If you’re interested in downloading Firefox, go to mozilla.org or directly to the official Firefox page.

Edit: If you’re having trouble getting themes and extensions to work, you may be having the same problem I had.

After a year of fruitlessly sending my resume into the void, I have finally been offered a job with National Instruments. Finally. Sheesh, who would’ve thought finding a job would be so hard in high tech Austin. Pretty much every company on this side of the city is into some sort of high tech industry, whether it be hardware, software, or engineering. The problem is not that there are no jobs, because there are plenty–if you have 5+ years experience. In order to get a job you need experience and in order to get experience you need a job. It’s a vicious circle, and one that I’m more than happy to be done with.

AnimeForever just released Samurai Champloo episode two. Right now their irc bots are pretty swamped but the torrent is ok. Head over to their new site at animeforever.org and hit their downloads page to find the torrent. If you are watching the Anime-Kraze version, it should probably be out sometime soon as well and a couple of other sites have picked up the show if you don’t like either of those versions. :) Head to downloadanime.org and do a search to find who’s subbing it.

If you aren’t watching Samurai Champloo and you think you might like it, there is an official site at SamuraiChamploo.com. The site is in Japanese, but the main section names are in English, so navigating isn’t too hard. If you have the evil RealPlayer installed, then you can watch a trailer. Otherwise, you can check out the gallery to see the animation style. If you really want to know what the site says, you can always use babelfish to translate it, just beware that it does a pretty terrible job.