operajournal.com

July 29, 2003

Today's jumble

I've been playing with TypePad the whole morning. I was kindly invited for beta-testing a few weeks ago but didn't had so much time for testing yet. It's very lightweight and easy to set up your own blog in just a few minutes. The generated site is valid XHTML and CSS so no worries here. The only thing that bothers me a bit is a tiny CSS issue with the site navigation. It looks like to blame it on Opera as Dan Cederholm has also reported some quirks with another CSS navigation and Opera a few days ago. The workaround has been done so we hopefully see that in TypePad soon.

I also gave Thunderbird, a redesign of the Mozilla mail component, a try today but after playing around with it for a few minutes I kicked it off my machine again. Sorry. I was just curious what it looked like. The loading time is way too l o n g and I got so used to M2 that it won't be replaced. No, I don't say never here. An option for M2 to turn on/off HTML support would be nice for future Opera releases. I know this is a rather controversial feature but as long as you can turn it off it should be just fine. In the end it's more like you believe in aliens or not to me.

by Jenne | comment

July 27, 2003

Refuse pop-up windows

This is part two of "My beloved Opera feature". The feature is easily changing your browsing preferences while traveling through the net. While so called "Pop-Up" killers became quite popular there is no need to install one when you are browsing with Opera. By hitting the F12 key on your keyboard you get access to the Quick preferences as shown below. Now you are able to select how Opera should handle pop-ups plus you can change various security settings.

by Jenne | comment

July 23, 2003

Opera 7.20 beta 2 for Windows is available

Yesterday afternoon the second News Group Beta has been released. The previous one had been pulled back due to some serious bugs only a short while after it appeared. Beside the mentioned redo/undo function Opera also made some changes in M2, the integrated email client. "Opera now supports separate accounts and showing mail for groups of accounts. In beta 2, this will only work for mail downloaded after this version is installed. The final version will take care of this, but for now, be aware that the new functionality will only work with new mail. Old mail is still available, but only under "All" in the account dropdown in the Hotlist." It is not recommended that you install beta 2 over existing versions of Opera. Beta versions should rather be installed into a separate folder.

by Jenne | comment

July 22, 2003

Eric Meyer seeking for new challange

After the announcement of AOL to drop Netscape it looks like it's time for Eric A. Meyer, to move on. The Standards Evangelist even mentioned the idea of moving to another country, which was recently done so by Ian Hickson. It is not Opera Journal's intention to spread any unproved rumours but this leaves some space for Opera users to make own speculations. Here is what he said:

"Moving forward, I have to decide what I will do: accept the position into which I was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL, or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether. This isn't exactly an easy call, partly due to the economy, but also because the importance of standards to AOL is not, at present, clear to me."

"Personally, I've always liked Toronto as a city. Their weather isn't significantly different than what we experience here in Cleveland, plus I know a number of very cool folks who already live there. I can't comment on places in the UK, since I've never actually been there (although I hope to fix that within the next year or so). For the record, the country we had in mind was Norway. I also gave some thought to the Bahamas, but then we're back to the prospect of me resembling a lobster on a semi-continual basis."

by Jenne | comment

July 21, 2003

Browser Dream - Where do you go?

Taking up recent discussions about the latest developments of the Internet Explorer and Mozilla 'ongoing' published a much worth reading article. "Today, the human experience of the Net stands at a crossroads, paths diverging into the future, and nobody knows which one we’ll be on in a year. A lot of people who will read this have the chance to make a difference in the decision. Let’s look at the options." Read ahead: The Door Is Ajar

by Jenne | comment

The Internet electrocardiogram

As the internet already has turned into a wide ranging universe of its own there is almost no chance for control. "The global instability index (GII) is a measure of global interdomain routing activity based on BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) sessions with several different border routers. Each router has a local instability index (LII) based on the the normalized activity levels (announcements per minute + withdrawals per minute) over a sliding 15 minute window. The median value of all LII values is used to determine the GII."

"The GII is most useful in comparison to past performeance. On a typical day, the GII will fluctuate between 5 and 50 over the course of 24 hours. The "high water" mark for the GII was 240 during the Slammer worm on 1.25.03. Similar instability, though not as prolonged, was observed in the wake of a Cisco IOS vulnerability on 7.17.03 when widespread router patching led to significant instability."

by Jenne | comment

July 20, 2003

Some eye candy

Here is a screenshot of my upcoming skin called 'Striped'. There will be lots of changes under the hood, e.g. reworked skin.ini, many of the small icons have changed/improved and more.

click image to enlarge

by Jenne | comment

Opera 7.20 Beta 2 is not yet available

There was recently a Beta 2 around in the My.Opera Newsgroup which had been pulled back due to some serious bugs only a short while after it appeared. "There were some very rendering bad problems that affected *a lot* of pages and some very important keyboard shortcuts didn't work and some very obvious UI problems and... plenty of reasons to justify pulling the build." The Beta 2 is now scheduled to be released early next week. One highlight will be the possibility to redo/undo closing of browser windows. A feature that will certainly become very popular.

by Jenne | comment

July 16, 2003

Interview with Fredrik Andersson

The Opera Journal was recently able to do an interview with Fredrik Andersson, webmaster and presently taking care of the Opera and Opera community site. Fred has been creating web sites with passion since 1995. We are pleased to have him here sharing some personal thoughts and info with the readership. Now let's wait no longer and start asking questions. Read the interview here.

by Jenne | comment

Netscape is dead!

"It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they've even pulled the logos off the buildings). Some will remain working on Mozilla during the transition, and will move to other jobs within AOL." Read ahead on mozillaZine and The Daily Report.

by Jenne | comment

July 15, 2003

Opera Greetings

Last week could have been called '/dev/null/ -week'. Sending something to the null device means to erase data. Speaking in geek terms this means that last week quite some things went wrong technically at work. I also switched back to manual blogging as the service I used unfortunatly went down for more than a day. BUT: It's summer time in the northeren hemisphere and so just for your personal pleasure you may want to send your loved ones a greeting card. This is the first of a small series of OPERA related greeting cards. Click the image to enlarge the card. You may then save it to your hard drive and add some text and have some fun.

by Jenne | comment

Know CSS? Want an iPod?

Ben Hammersley offers an iPod for a redesign of his website. Here are the conditions: "it has to work on Movable Type, be XHTML Strict, and have a look that works across three sites (this one, LazyWeb and Book of Blog). It also has to deal nicely with images inside the entry, and I’m a biiiig fan of nice typography. Despite what Cory says, curly quotes are sweet. Anyhow, I’m looking for a global look’n’feel that I can extend across all three sites and any more I think of in the next year or so." So grab your editor and earn yourself the most beautiful MP3 player around.

by Jenne | comment

July 9, 2003

Web Site Defacement Winner Announced

A well-known Brazilian crew won this past weekend's Web site defacement contest, amassing more than twice as many points as the second-place team. Crackers from the Perfect.br team racked up 152 points in winning the contest, which put them 90 points ahead of the runners-up, the Hackbsd Crew. For their efforts, the Brazilians won a Web hosting package. The contest challenged crackers to deface as many Web sites as possible within a given amount of time. Points were awarded based on the operating system of the box that was hosting the defaced site. The less common the OS, the more points the defacement was worth. Via eWeek

by Jenne | comment

July 7, 2003

How to become a bidi tester

As already reported here Ian Hickson has joined the OPERA team in the beautiful capital of Norway. Being part of the W3C CSS Working Group and participating actively in the Mozilla project Ian is now spending his man power and sharing his knowledge to improve Opera even more. Taste the fruits of his recent engagement by doing the bidi test found on his regular updated journal. There you will also find interesting stories about his new job at OPERA giving us the opportunity to sneak a little behind the scenes.

As an ironic coincidence it appears that mozdev is downed by a DoS attack since last Friday mostly concentrating on the sites CGI scripts. So far there is no detailed backrgound info about the attack available but some sources allege a so called Website Defacement Challenge to be responsible for the attack. Winner of the Defacement Challenge should be the first who manipulates 6000 websites by changing the start page - adding a picture of the hacker group for example. Mozillazine writes: "Pete Collins of mozdev wrote in to tell us why the site has been unavailable since yesterday. It appears that mozdev was hit with a massive denial of service attack targetting the Bugzilla and CVSweb CGI scripts. Pete and the mozdev team are working hard to bring the site back up and they plan to report this incident to the FBI."

by Jenne | comment

July 4, 2003

Screenshot of the day

Just for old time sake enjoy a screenshot of Opera 2.12 released in February 1997 browsing the current Opera website. No CSS and PNG support but still easily readable. In computers that's decades. It was the time when Netscape 3, Mosaic 3 and Internet Explorer 3 where around. Find a Browser Timeline here. For those interested there is also a good overview at Wikipedia which is worth checking out.

click image to enlarge

by Jenne | comment

Opera 7.2 limited forum/newsgroup beta available

Smart and clever Opera users have already noticed yesterday that there is a new Opera 7.2 beta for Windows and Linux around. This is what Johan of Opera said: "It's a very early release and it may take several weeks from this beta to the next one. Please discuss any bugs and problems here and on myopera.com. Please don't report *too* obvious bugs to the bug system, but please scream out about it here ;> Highlights: Lots of bugfixes, some small feature enhancements here and there and speed optimizations, both in download and javascript performance. Bidi support requires feedback from external testers." Find the beta somewhere -> here.

by Jenne | comment

July 2, 2003

Something going on

Alright, I know I owe you all the long promised overhaul of my skins. This is what had started during the past days and will continue for some time. There are quite a lot small issues in my skins and I'm sorry for any disturbance in your browsing experience. My aim is to keep it all simple. Therefor I'm rewriting many parts of the skin.ini file trying to sum up unnecessary stuff. I also try to reduce the amount of icons used to decrease the skin file size. Also the folder structure is targeted to make things a little easier. The result of that overhaul will also end up with a new skin! So be patient while waiting. Also I think I have an issue with the word also.

by Jenne | comment

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