Michael’s Techbox

Roboform is a utility that you use for quick and easy form filling, but its best feature is true one click login to any password protected website. If you’ve ever used Roboform, you’ll know why its so popular, because it works! A lot of people who use Roboform simply cannot do without it. I personally have a Roboform pro license, money well spent, until I switched to Chrome. I had a choice to go with Chrome or continue using FF with Roboform support, I decided I would switch to Chrome, simply because Chrome is really quick. But I really do miss the functionality of Roboform.

Roboform don’t really have much to say about NOT supporting Chrome, except the following short statement.

Browsers Currently Under Development

Google Chrome

We are nearing completion of early development. An alpha release will be ready by Q4 2009.

There are also some fan sites that have sprung up like : http://www.roboformchrome.com/ a site completely dedicated to ranting about Roboform NOT supporting Chrome.

Not sure exactly why Roboform have waited this long to begin development on Chrome support. This company under estimates the value of sharing news with its customers.

My last point is… Google have released a great browser, but there are a few things I’ve noticed about it that I really don’t like…

1. The download manager (if you can call it a download manager) – lets just call it – the way Google handles downloads

2. No XML formatting in the browser, IE and FireFox actually both do this nicely.

3. The Google password manager is perhaps the worst implementation of a password manager I have ever seen. They should have rather not included it at all, because unless its just me, a lot of the time it just doesn’t work.

4. And this is where Roboform comes in – lack of good plugin support. But DAP doesn’t work, neither does Freedownload Manager, yes they say it does, but its quirky and unreliable.

I am kind of in a dilemma at the moment with browsers. FireFox is exactly the browser I like, except Chrome. So right now I’m wondering if I should just compromise on start up speed and try to tweak Firefox, and just uninstall Chrome.

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.

So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don’t you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila. Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage? Why don’t you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you’ve been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

YES, it seems they do. If they didn’t why else would they put these statements in their EULA.

From the actual iTunes End User License Agreement.

It seems Apple are not exempt from employing plonkers! more reading here : http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

For all of you wondering what Microsoft are talking about when they state : This product is pre-pidded, here is your answer!

What Microsoft are trying to say is: The product key is included with this product.

Hope this helps! If you know of anymore Texan farm slang that Microsoft use on their MSDN site, please include it in the comments.

This week I have to tell you about a site thats absolutely cooking – http://stackoverflow.com

If you’re looking for quick and informative answers about anything relating to programming then Stackoverflow might just become your new favorite site.

I am really impressed at the speed in which the questions you post get answered, forget about waiting hours, a Stackoverflow question usually gets answered in minutes, in my experience.

I would recommend you only ask programming related questions, or else your question will get automatically closed by a sys admin, try ask questions that can be answered.

This site is especially great when you have real deadlines, and forum support just aint cutting it.

MediaMonkey, while the gold edition may not be free, they do offer a free but slightly limited version. If you have a lot of music in your collection then MediaMonkey might be the tool you’re looking for, its a great organiser.

MediaMonkey is a suberb quality MP3 player, it also looks great, it sort of resembles iTunes, but it doesn’t come with all the bloat you’ll find in iTunes. The interface is also fully skinable.

I could only find one major annoyance with MediaMonkey, just like iTunes there is no way to copy music from iPod to PC Library. I am a bit amazed at how software designers can simply forget to code in this much needed functionality.

other than that MediaMonkey is a great tool and can be downloaded here http://www.mediamonkey.com/

Free web hosting is not as easy to come by as you might expect, sure a lot of companies offer free services, but when it comes down to it, most of these offers are too restricted to be of any real use.

The main limitation with 90% of the free services out there is a restriction which prevents you from uploading certain file types and files bigger than the given file size.

Some hosts offer you unlimited hosting space – yet restrict you to html, htm files, and hard code a 300kb file size limit.

FreeUnlimitedWeb offers perhaps not a perfect solution, but at least a solution that has no file size or data transfer limits. While it might not provide a .Net / SQL environment, it does give you the Linux/PHP/MYSql bundle, all free of charge.

Adverts everywhere sure, but I guess they need to earn money somehow. Its still not a bad solution for uploading podcasts, screencasts and flash presentations.

I know Windows Live SkyDrive is a Microsoft service, so I’ll ask a lot of you very nicely to put aside your immediate contempt for a minute, and ask just for one moment forget that its a Microsoft offering.

This FREE online storage offering by Microsoft can be found here : http://skydrive.live.com/

Its not entirely bad either, it gives you a whopping 5GBs of free online storage, you decide exactly what you want to store. There are no restrictions as to what you can store, but there is a restriction on the size of file you can store – currently only files smaller than 50MB can be hosted. Not sure on exactly why they enforced this restriction, since they are after all giving you the full 25GBs, surely you should be able to store files of any size, shape or form, but yeah – thats Microsoft for you, gotta love em.

You also have to respect this healthy competition between Microsoft and Google, clearly MS, not wanting to feel outdone by Googles GMail offering, have at least provided something more useful than simple email storage, your files stored in your SkyDrive can be accessed indiviually on their own HTTP address. This means you can upload files like podCasts or video recordings and link them to your blog, or website.

The service is not available in every country yet, this is another limitation I fail to understand, this seems to me like internet sanctions for the user, but if you are lucky enough to live in a country where MS offer this service and you would like 25GBs of free online space, by all means sign up for it, or sign in using your Windows Live Passport.

In my last post about Opera I mentioned why it is a good browser, when I first installed it, I realised it had some built in torrent support, but I was not expecting it to be so good.

My main torrent app is uTorrent, its pretty lightweight compared to other apps out there, but all torrent applications I have used suffer from the flaw of reserving almost all of your available bandwidth pipe, even if the torrent transfer rate is a fraction of your total bandwidth.

Well along comes Opera’s built in torrent handling capabilities, and changes that. with Opera you can now download torrents and browse the web at the same time, it won’t totally bring your connection to its knees.

Without a doubt the best part about the built in torrent handling by Opera, is its aggresive nature, torrents fly down, I’ve never had torrents coming down at the full speed of my connection consistently, so obviously Opera are doing something right.

There is only one downside, I’ve noticed that overall speed for larger (1GB or bigger) torrents seem to take longer than in traditional torrent clients, such as uTorrent.

The same Opera that challenged IE way back in the days is now back to challenge a more tougher rival, yes you guessed it Firefox.

Firefox might be the leading IE alternative to web browsing, but I have a feeling that this is soon going to change, as more and more people realise the superiority of Opera.

In the Windows world – 4 main browsers are in use, IE, FireFox, Safari and Opera, there are some IE clones out there like Maxwell, but these are the favorites. Worth noting Google’s Chrome is up and coming, but too new on the market to have gained any substantial support.

IEs main problem is that its the least secure browser on the market, IE also does not fully support the W3C compliancy standards, this means that pages lazily slapped together do not render correctly in other W3C compliant browsers. Unfortunately because pages like this do render in IE, and not in other browsers, its usually the other browsers that take the blame. The much anticipated IE 8, is a display of good faith that Microsoft are finally starting to take the W3C serious. A little late, I would say, but rather late than never.

FireFox is a really good alternative to IE, but its by no means perfect, FireFox takes a long time to start up, and it has become quite a resource hog, but it usually renders pages pretty well, and has some great plugins. Usually 3rd party vendors of plugins provide FireFox versions of their plugins, for example DAP (Download Accelerator Plus) and RoboForms.

Safari works great on a Mac, but before you think it works great on Windows, remember its developed by the same company that brought you iTunes and Quicktime, and both these products are notoriously bad. Quicktime causes more problems alone than any other media product, and iTunes runs many services and processes that consume your systems resources. I have not tested PC Safari, because I simply do not trust Apple PC software.

Then there is Opera, a mean lean cat, designed for speed. Its fast sure, but it also has a decent looking interface, and more features than IE, Safari or FireFox. Opera is not perfect and you might find a few of your favorite forum sites not working with Opera, but this does not happen often, usually Opera renders pages very well.

If you haven’t already tried it go ahead – http://www.opera.com