I got tired of the slow and feature-lacking KMail as an email client and decided to switch to Thunderbird.  While I found it a very nice client, it was lacking a system tray icon for notifying of new email.

So I searched the Mozilla addon’s site and found New Mail Icon for Thunderbird (also known as “MozTrayBiff”).  This seemed to be exactly what I needed.  However, after installing the XPI and then restarting Thunderbird I found that it did not work.  No system tray icon, even after enabling one to always be there, and no notification on the receipt of a new email.

I had a look around for a similar piece of software but could not find any.  I thought about switching my window manager from KDE to XFCE (where it is known to work) but I quite like KDE.  So I decided to recompile the XPI.

Once I had the relevant RPMS installed (such as MozillaThunderbird-devel), I managed to get it compiled, although I did have to modify a few paths to libraries and include files manually.

The end result was that it works.  The package can be downloaded from the link below.

New Mail Icon/MozTrayBiff - XPI of New Mail Icon compiled against OpenSUSE 10.3 with the latest KDE3 and Thunderbird 2 provided through OpenSUSE's download repository.

The BBC has reported that ICANN has voted to relax the rules on top level domains (e.g. .uk, .net, etc).  What does this mean in simple English?  Soon, instead of visiting coca-cola.com, you may find yourself visiting visit.coca-cola as companies will be able to purchase a top level domain to reflect their brand.  In theory, this is a great idea, however will this really make an Internet more accessible for everyone or will it mean the company with the most money will win?

Frighteningly, what will it mean for terms such as news, sport, football, etc, which are every day words?  Will the company offering the most be able to claim this for its own?  ICANN may “not setting this up for profit” but it is sure seeming like a good way to make money, from my point of view.

On a more positive note, there will soon be the possibility to have domains in scripts other than Roman (e.g. Cyrillic, Arabic, Persian, etc) and this will make the Internet more accessible.

Only time will tell whether all this is good or bad; 2009 is when this is expected to take off.

Can anyone understand what this guy is going on about/selling that is worth the proposed BIN?  There seem to be many bold claims of great earnings ($900 per month) but nothing in the way in the way of proof.  Checking the site on archive.org does not really help confidence for the owner’s claims (it was once a landing package for clickbank).  The site is nothing but a blog with a web directory added on; $2300 BIN?  More like $23.00.

Personally, not a site or seller I would I would “touch with a barge pole”, as the saying goes.

If “Konrad  Braun” really did spend $2800 in total on SEO so far, he should check out Blogstorm and learn how to generate links for your site and not pay a penny.

17 June 2008 was an historic day for Wine: it has taken 15 years, but finally Wine 1.0 has been released.  It’s the first stable release and hopefully not the last (contrary to The Register’s opinion, it still has a use) as it does indeed serve a purpose for Linux/UNIX who need to use Windows-based applications which are not available for their chosen Operating System.

So, what is Wine other than a drink?  Well, Wine stands for “Wine is not an emulator” and it is an implementation of the Windows API for Linux/UNIX (in conjunction with X Windows).  So, this allows Internet Explorer 6, for example, to be run in Linux.  This is very useful when developing websites and is one of my main uses of Wine.

Of course, it also allows Windows games to be run in Linux and their is a (paid) version of Wine developed by Transgaming, called Cedega, which is specifically developed for gaming compatibility.  There is also the possibility to vote on which games the company will work on compatibility with next.  For gamers wanting to switch to Linux this is a worthwhile investment in order to be able to play Windows-based games.

If I was to sum up Firefox 3 in a single word it would be “awesome”.  That is not an overstatement either, only perhaps an understatement.  Although I consider Firefox to be the best web browser, I can also be critical of it - especially in terms of performance.  It has truly been worth the wait as in this release thare are some much needed improvements.

The speed of Firefox has been improved vastly.  Page rendering times, switch between tabs, open menus, improved speed of javascript and the general application speed - especially after it has been open for a few hours.

Dealing with addons has been improved: it is now possible to search for extensions from within Firefox addons dialogue without the need visit the main site and search.

The zoom functionhas also been improved when zooming a page now the images increase in size as well as text.  This is useful for when viewing websites where text and images are both ridiculously small.  It’s still possible to zoom on text only too though.

It’s now possible to choose Yahoo! Mail as the default email client.  It’s a shame that Gmail is not a choice but this can be easily changed through the use of greasemonky scripts.

Overall, it’s a vast improvement and I can now say goodbye to Opera!

It’s not long now until the release of Firefox 3 and Firefox Download Day, which is supposed to be 17 June 2008, although it’s currently not know when this “day” will start. As Mozilla Corp/Foundation is located in Mountain View, California, which is PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) then it’s possible the day will start at 00:00 for that time zone.

I guess what is more likely though is that day means 24 hours and the “download day” will be the 24 hour period from when Firefox is released on 17 June, e.g. if it is released at 17:00 PDT then the 24 hour download period will start from then. Well, at least that makes the most sense to me.