Sunday, October 28, 2007

RedesignMalaysia: Glitch or Gone?

Was browsing around today and noticed that Redesign Malaysia's site was gone!

For the uninitiated, Redesign Malaysia is "an initiative to improve Malaysia’s broadband facilities" (extracted from their site as last cached by Google), which provides information and news of all broadband providers in the country as well as serves as a platform for the rakyat (Malay word for "citizens") to voice their complains and concerns on the services being provided or any development that will hinder the development of wider and faster adoption of broadband.

I'm not sure what had happened behind the scenes, but should we lose the site, it would be a great loss for Malaysia. Just hope that it's just a temporary matter that will be solved swiftly.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Meebo Firefox Extension

Meebo just recently launched its own extension, aptly named as Meebo Firefox Edition. The extension basically adds a Meebo buddy list sidebar (which can be hidden) and a couple of bells and whistles that makes it more useful than a glorified sidebar.

The major convenience that the sidebar provides is the automatic login feature, which is able to log into your IM account automatically when Firefox is started. Once you logged on to Meebo, you'll see your buddy list in the sidebar, which you can select which friend you'd like to message and set your status. The sidebar is resizeable and with the minimum allowable width, the buddylist is still usable without taking up too much screen real estate. The sidebar can be hidden as well, which you can toggle whether it is shown or hidden by clicking on the Meebo icon (see red circle on the first image).

One nifty feature they had included is the alert box feature, which is a small blue box which will pop up on the bottom-right corner of the screen to notify you when your friends were online or when they messaged you. The neat thing is that the alert box is shown even when Firefox is minimized. Not only that, in the Options dialog you can configure what Meebo Firefox Edition should alert you and when it should keep quiet.

At the time of writing it's still in its early stage of development, it still require the actual Meebo page to be loaded in a tab, which is required to contain all the conversation windows and provide other functionality that is not implemented in this extension. So at the moment, what it provides is still pretty basic but it's worth the install just for the desktop alert feature. But I'm definitely looking forward it becoming a full fledged IM extension.

Here's a feature (wish) list that I'd hope to see in future releases:

  • Theme-able skins
  • Able to configure where the sidebar should be located: either left, right or as a floating window. What I would find it nice is probably something like Google Notebook which is capable to slide out from the bottom
  • The login screen should allow a narrower width
  • Buddylist groups
  • I know this is in the works but I can't resist saying this: Make it standalone without requiring the Meebo page to be loaded ;) (that would mean one less tab :p)
  • Audio alerts/notification
  • Capability to set MSN display name

To install the extension, head to http://www.meebo.com/firefox and try it for yourself :).

UPDATE: I did forget to mention a quite annoying quirk that if you use the auto sign-in feature, it'll always open a new tab loading Meebo's site. This is quite annoying because I personally use the auto-load previous session feature in Firefox: which make it always end up with two tabs loading Meebo and I have to take the trouble to close one of them. Hopefully that get resolved soon (but then again, the "no tabs" feature is on the way :) ).

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Follow-up to Spam Blogs

It had been a few weeks after I found out the previous Blogger subdomain of my site was maliciously occupied by a spam blog which not only filled with random content, it also shown deceiving full-screen ad that claims to be anti-spyware but actually attempts to install malicious software in your computer.

So I had filed a spam complaint to Blogger, and the next day the first thing I saw is the deceiving full-screen ad was gone, doesn't automatically attempt to install malicious software, but the page still remained intact with spam. Then I sort of let the issue slide.

Then today, out of curiosity, I revisited my old real-estate and pleasantly surprised that apparently Blogger had closed down the previous site and open it up for others to occupy it. Apparently it seemed that Hayden had picked it up and posted his new blog there, which is also a computer tech blog and the content seemed very promising. Looking forward to read more from him/her. :)

Other than that, I'm glad that Blogger was fast to resolve and had actually taken steps to get rid of spam blogs. Despite the fact that I didn't follow things up on a daily basis, but the fact that they took action is commendable. Good job! :)