Subzero Blue

Write Your Name In Firefox Code

To commemorate the three-year anniversary of the creation of the Mozilla Foundation on July 15, the open-source group announced that if a Firefox user persuades a friend to download the browser, both the user and the friend’s names will be added to the source code of the next version of the browser, Firefox 2.0.

To nominate a friend, you have to go to the Firefox Day website and choose one friend who doesn’t have Firefox, and who you’ll be sure will go ahead and download it.

Firefox has a global usage share of 12.93 percent, and this could boost that percentage even more. I think it’s a really cool idea.

Personally, with or without this, I recommend Firefox as a browser.

BillQ: Track Your Bills Online

I just came across a neat new web2.0 app called billQ that enables you to track your bills online, through a cool ajax based interface.

I took it for a small spin, and I like it’s simplicity and it’s user friendly interface, pretty straight forward and to the point, as most new web apps are becoming, which is great.

The way it works is that you basically add bills to your account, can organize them by group, and then receive notification of upcoming payments you have to make by email or sms.
It also handles bills involving multiple people, by assigning a payment amount for a number of persons of a group, who get logins of their own, so they can check that they have paid their part.

Ideas, suggestions or stuff that I think could be added include:

– The bill repeat date only offers the options: daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. But the thing is that we sometimes have bills on other schedules like quarterly, or every “x” months. It would be cool if those would be taken into consideration.

– An amount for the bill has to be entered. But the thing is that sometimes you know you have a certain bill that comes every quarter or so, but you don’t know how much each bill’s value will be, but still you’d like to be reminded it’s coming.

– This would probably take it a bit into the money management software turf, but a few reports on how much a person is spending on bills, by payee and by group, could be very interesting.

– I know I’m being a bit picky with this one, but it’d be nice to be able to change the currency from the settings.

Anyway, overall, it’s a really nice and useful tool, worth checking out.

Bachelor’s Degree In Computer Hacking

Abertay University in Dundee, England, is offering the country’s first degree in computer hacking.

Classes in the major will teach students how to find out passwords and log-in information, and how to shut down computer systems; the aim is to produce hackers that could work for the government against computer criminals.

However, even teachers in the discipline say teaching criminal activities could produce more criminals.

Well, personally, I think it’s a good idea, but well they should make the name of the degree friendlier by maybe calling it “Computer Security” or something like that.

As for the idea that maybe teaching it could result in more criminals, I think it’s pretty much nonsense.

[Via: Thysdrus]

Google News in Arabic

Google have finally rolled out an Arabic version of Google News. I checked the list of languages the service is available in this morning, as I always do when reading the news there, and found it was added.

The Arabic version pulls articles from 150 Arabic news sources, which is relatively very good, even though it’s a humble number compared to the 4500 sources for the English version.

I think it’s great to see Google’s evident push into Arabic recently with it launching an Arabic version of Gmail, English-Arabic / Arabic-English translation and now Google News.

I read a lot of my news from Google News, and now with this version, I’ll be able to keep up with what’s being written in Arabic news sources.

Hopefully more and more services will follow from Google and others, helping to give Arabic web presence a push.

Google Spreadsheets

In what can only be described as another act of war against Microsoft, Google is now beta testing a new online application called Google Spreadsheets.
And yes you guessed right, it’ll be going head to head against Microsoft’s Excel.

Google Spreadsheets will be able to do all the basic stuff you got used to doing with Excel in a simpler way through a familiar desktop-like interface.

Import and export of your spreadsheets is possible. And with your spreadsheets also being saved online, you can access and work on them from anywhere you wish.

Google Spreadsheets also adds a layer of web sharing and cooperation on top of what Excel can do, allowing you to invite the people you want to work on the spreadsheet with and edit it with them in real time.

It’s still in limited beta, but the screenshots looks promising.

What should we expect next from Google? A presentation web application PowerPoint killer?

Microsoft Windows Vista Hardware Requirements

Microsoft has revealed the minimum requirements a PC will need to run its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system, and to be branded ‘Vista Capable’ and ‘Vista Premium Ready’.

A ‘Vista Capable’ PC will require at least an 800MHz processor, 512MB of system memory, a DirectX 9 capable graphics card, a 40GB hard drive with at least 15GB of free space, a DVD drive, and audio and internet capabilities.

The only extra requirements for a ‘Vista Premium Ready’ PC are a 1GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor, 1GB of Ram and a graphics card with 128MB of onboard memory capable of supporting Windows Aero2.

An Aero2 compatible card is a DirectX 9-class graphics processor that supports WDDM, Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware, 32 bits per pixel, and with enough memory to support the desired screen resolution.

This comes as a surprise to a lot of people who have been talking about how Vista will need a bunch of new hardware, especially to companies like Intel and AMD who were counting on it to boost sales.
Basically people with a pc just a few years old might only need to change their graphics card and maybe throw in some more memory.

Still, I wonder why the hell this version of Windows needs 15GB of hard disk space? That’s incredibly huge for an operating system.
I wonder if those one live cd operating system fanatics will be able to get anywhere near this one.

And why isn’t there a version that is stripped down from the extra fancy graphical user interface, like with Windows XP? So that people can choose to upgrade their graphic card at their own time.
Update: “If you arent lucky enough to have a WDDM-capable video card, your experience with Windows Vista will be at least as good, if not better than, your experience with Windows XP.” — Barb Bowman, Microsoft.
I stand corrected. Microsoft did think about people with older graphics cards. Thank you Swifty.

But then again, it wouldn’t be Microsoft if it did that, would it now?

Mecanbe, Life & Self Improvement

Mecanbe is an Australian start-up founded by Adam Korbl that will enable you to track your goals in life. It still is in development but will be launching a beta soon.

Mecanbe is a service for self-coaching and self-improvement. You’ll be able to easily create a list of goals (eg. loose weight, write a good blog, run faster) rate them and publish them on your blog and if you don

New Stuff From Google

Google introduced four new services/products, which are the following:

Google Co-Op: This new product lets users improve search results by syndicating their knowledge. Individuals or organizations can now label or categorize Web pages and make those labels available as a subscription. For subscribers, these labels and associated links get added to search queries when relevant.

Google Desktop 4: This version has added Google Gadgets, small applications that can live on users’ desktops or inside the Google Desktop environment. Google’s answer to Apple’s Dashboard widgets and Yahoo’s Konfabulator.

Google Trends: This gives users access to compare the popularity of certain topics and search terms on Google. The user can enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently these topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

Google Notebook: This should be available next week. It is a scratchpad application that lets users store and share URLs and other data copied from Web pages.
Google describes it as “a simple way for users to save and organize their thoughts when conducting research online.” It’s really more of a reimagining of how browser bookmarks should work.

Now, let me go give these babies a spin…

Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition for Africa

Microsoft will be releasing a lower-priced version of their Windows XP operating system for Africa, this July. The system will work on cheaper machines and is designed for entry-level PC users in Africa. It will also have Africa-themed screensavers and background wallpaper among its features.

This is something I’ve been convinced software companies like Microsoft should’ve done a long time ago. Having one price for software worldwide is stupid, because what a person in a poor “third world” country can afford to pay for a piece of software is nowhere near what someone in the US or Western Europe can pay.

And I think that is one of the main reasons it’s almost impossible to apply copyright laws on software in these poorer countries, because people would rather go through the risk of buying pirated software than having to pay the expensive price of original software.
And who loses in the end? The software company.

I’m not too sure if this move isn’t already too late, but well, better late than never, I guess.

Still, the whole world is waiting for Windows Vista and what they are offering Africa is a stripped down version of old Windows XP. Not really the right approach. But well, for an entry level user, who can only afford cheaper, older, hardware, this should be good enough.
But the software companies should also think about the people who just a bit better off financially, and who want to buy the latest version of the software at a price that is reasonable for them.

Google Does English <-> Arabic Translation

So Google have added “English to Arabic” and “Arabic to English” translation to their Language Tools page.

It’s still in beta of course, although alpha is a bit more like it.
The results are quite amusing, if not straight out funny, but then again, nobody ever said Arabic was an easy and simple language.
I’m sure it’ll get better with time, faster than Chinese at least.

It’s really good to see Google venturing into Arabic though. Hopefully the next step will be an Arabic Google News. After all there are more Arabic speakers in this world than Hebrew speakers, and they already got a Hebrew version of Google News.

[Via: 360east]