Or, "I'm checking it, honest!"

Hmm. A mate noticed this earlier - his Macbook is currently fried so he's temporarily working on his girlfriend's machine with Windows XP (anyone feel his pain?).

On goes the spangly new Firefox 3... sooner or later he notices the new "Scanning for viruses" message which briefly appears at the end of a download.

Hang on a mojo: he has no virus scanner. Come to think of it, I thought, I've noticed this in Firefox 3 recently and neither have I. Yes, this is on my Windows machine - I've not run a virus checker for a long time. Only stupid people get infected. OK, OK, I admit my hard drive back when I worked at Jester once got trashed by some malicious shittery or other, but that was down to my own stupidity.

Anyway, that ends the invitation to send me viruses. So what exactly is Firefox doing with our downloads?

Several months of on-going disaster must have at least some detrimental effect on a person... take a good friend of mine, names witheld, so let us call him Matt. First up, a few months ago Matt experienced hardware problems with the server(s) he maintains. The knock-on effect of this was moving several sites from one server to another, whilst simultaneously setting up the server environment on the new machine, on a new OS (well, a new flavour of Linux).

Then, his own hardware at home starts packing up. First to go is the hard drives. They crash and stick - each time losing Matt's work and forcing him to re-format and re-install. Whilst he's considering replacing it, his super-fancy graphics card (barely six months old) starts spewing out drunken polygons in the middle of Call of Duty 4...

"The purpose of the SynCE project is to provide a means of communication with a Windows Mobile device from a computer running Linux, *BSD or other unixes using USB or Bluetooth."

Although I haven't got it working just yet, this is a very promising project. With support for Gnome VFS, a KDE KIO slave (rapip://) and utils including synchronisation between Windows CE/Mobile apps and Kontact, KAddressBook and Evolution, this is useful stuff.

Digg it

The take over has begun: bye bye Macromedia, hello Adobe. The bodged reworking of the macromedia.com website has got me worried already.

As has this:

> Adobe Web Bundle CD-ROM - US $1,899.00

Whoa nelly.

One of the reasons why I decided to give Flock and del.icio.us a try was because of a very common problem: keeping my bookmarks synchronised between machines. I have a desktop and a laptop, and the desktop runs both Windows and Slackware Linux, depending on what I'm up to.

I did try a method written about on texturizer.net (which has since disappeared) outlining a solution based on keeping the bookmarks.html file in a place where both Windows and Linux can read and write to, which boils down to having it sat on a Windows FAT32 partition. With my current Windows partition being NTFS, writing from Firefox under Linux back to Windows isn't really possible.

Frist post! I've finally got Flock's blog editor working with Drupal... I think it was down to several bugs in blogapi fixed recently. I'm pleasantly surprised: it all works really nicely. The editor is good, I can view the node types I can post as well as download a list of categories on my site to post to.

Its still lacking a couple of things - I obviously can't change any Drupal related settings from Flock, such as published, sticky or new revision. I can't add attachments to posts, hence why this one hasn't got an image over on the top right.

I've been playing around with the recent developer release of Flock: the new 'social' browser. An interesting idea, its ideology shifts towards a more shared environment: sharing bookmarks via del.icio.us, integrated RSS reading (ties in with Favourites) and interface elements to allow quick blog article creation.

1. Social Bookmarking

Personally, I'm not convinced by the whole social bookmark thing, although I do like the idea of shared bookmarks for my own benefit: I regularly use both my desktop PC and my laptop, and sharing/syncing data between them is still a ball-ache at the best of times.

Its that time of year again: the good folks at Orange let me get my grubby mitts on a brand new phone, in return for all the money I give them. This year the hand-sets available to me for free seemed fewer, and less impressive. Last summer I replaced my aging monochrome Samsung A300 with the funky Motorola V300.

This one lasted OK, but the battery was cack and the connector for charging didn't seem to click or fit properly into the bottom of the phone, meaning charging often failed. Attempting to charge a dead battery overnight frequently failed, leaving it out of action the next working day. Extremely frustrating, and it got worse. Often the phone was out of action for several days.