Mozilla Firefox updates

Ben Goodger has checked in changes to the trunk and branch for using 7-zip compression instead of zip. This along with the other code cleanup and packaging work that has been done has reduced the download size of the windows builds of Firefox to 4.6 MB!

The new extension manager is partially functional now in branch builds. Ben posted a message on the mozillazine forums about this. Cheah Chu Yeow has posted on his blog,redemption in a blog, screenshots of the new extension manager.

So those interested in experiencing the latest in Mozilla Firefox, get the builds from the Mozilla Firefox nightly FTP site. The branch builds are the ones whose dates end with "-0.9".

alternate stylesheets

I have changed the default stylesheet of the blog. But for those who preferred the older Scribe theme, no need to despair. The Scribe theme is still available as an alternate stylesheet. All you need is a browser capable of letting you to switch between them. In case your browser doesn't have this capablity, then you seriously need to consider getthing yourself a real browser.

Who wrote Linux?

Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has authored an as yet unpublished book about the history of UNIX. In that he has made a lot of claims one of which is that Linus did not write Linux. Andrew S. Tanenbaum who was one of the people Ken Brown interviewed for his book, refutes the claims made in the book and has posted detailed information about the same on his site. The article gives a nice in-sight into the development of UNIX and its clones. In addition, Tanenbaum has posted a followup to the same. If Operating Systems interest you, go give both the articles a read.

Mozilla updates

There have been a host of mozilla related updates over the weekend. Though most of the news items are more than a day old, I have not posted them on my blog, bcoz my net connection was down for the past one day. In addition to that I was plain lazy to post anything :-)

• New Milestone Schedule Announced Asa Dotzler has posted a message on n.p.m.seamonkey about the new milestone plan. The main changes to the plan is the now longer periods prior to a final release, with two longer alpha periods, and a longer beta period.
• Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 1 Released In line with the new milestone release plan, mozilla.org released the latest milestone of the Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey), 1.8 Alpha 1. To learn more about the changes in this release, check the release notes and in case you have something to say about the release, head over to mozillazine.org and post your comments.
• 1.0 Branch Created for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird A new branch has been created for the mozilla standalone browser and mail client. The branch has been forked form the existing 1.7 branch. Read the full article for more details and build instructions.

India update

Little late on the updates here. My net connection was down for the last 24 hrs. So could not post the news yesterday.

For those who still don't know, Dr. Manmohan Singh was sworn in as the prime minister of India. He is heading a 68-member Congress-led United Progressive Alliance coalition government. Of the total of 67 ministers, 42 belong to Congress, 8 to RJD, 7 to DMK, 3 to NCP, 2 each to PMK and TRS, 1 each to LJP, JMM and Indian Union Muslim League.

For a detailed report check the article on rediff.com.

Position Paper for the W3C Workshop

Via Glazblog:
The Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software have together released a Position Paper for the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. The document outlines the opinion of both in the context of standards for Web Applications. Both Mozilla and Opera underline the fact that existing technologies are inadequate in addressing this space. In addition to this, the paper outlines the seven critical requirements of the necessary standards to make it a success. Must read document.

gecko updates

Camino 0.8 Beta and Seamonkey 1.7 RC2 were released today.

So go give them a try.

stock markets, more on

Finally senior Congress leader Manmohan Singh, attempted to assure the investors that the Congress led government would bring in investor friendly policies. He appealed to investors not to panic over the stock market crash. Following this, the stock market resumed trading at about 1:20 pm and managed to recover about 400 points.

While on one hand Manmohan Singh was reassuring the investors, the CPI and CPI-M were playing blame games, with the CPI saying that the BJP had a hand in the crash, and the CPI-M claiming that this crash was the result of letting in FIIs into the trading system. In addition to this, FIIs are reported to have begun pulling out of the market.

To read more, follow these links:
Market crash due to FII influence: CPI-M
BJP had hand in market crash : CPI
Don't panic, Manmohan tells investors
FIIs begin to pull funds out of India

Update: how the BSE index fluctuated today....

Free Fall!

On friday I mentioned that friday's stock market crash seemed to be the forebearer of worse things to come.

Today the stock market crashed 822 points before trading was halted. To quote Rediff.com

The stock market crash continued unabated on Monday forcing the authorities to freeze trading for the second time as the BSE index plummeted by 822 points, hurting millions of investors who lost upto an estimated Rs 200,000 crore (Rs 2 trillion) this morning.

Market authorities first halted trading for one hour at 1015 hours as the market fell by over 550 points but the freeze was imposed again within minutes of recommencement as the downhill march continued.

After recommencing trading at 1115 hours, it was closed within three minutes as the BSE fell further by 272 points to reach 4247.59.

More updates on this later.

More gloom ahead!

Today the markets saw all red. The next government is not yet formed, but the Left Front is already upto its usual games. It has demanded that all disinvestments by the central governmnet be stopped. Consequently the markets crashed by more about 330 points. That is down by more than 8%, which is a record fall in the last 4 years.

Definitely not a good sign. Hopefully, all this is not an indication of the times to come.

Elections 2004 update

The results are in! Contrary to everyone expectation, the BJP lead National Demographic Alliance got trounced in the elections. The final results were BJP+ at 186, INC+ at 217 and others at 136 out of a total of 539 declared results.

So that means that the Indian National Congress Party is all set to form the next government, which means that Sonia Gandhi maybe the next Prime Minister of India. :-(

More on Opera 7.5

Asa's blog entry on Opera 7.5 usability infuriated some Opera fans which led to a war of words in the comments section. While it was clear from the blog entry that Asa was only referring to the default Opera UI being highly cluttered, Opera fans felt that the screenshot that Asa had posted was not the default one and that Asa had deliberately modified the UI to look like that. However, as someone in the comments pointed out, the screenshot which Asa had posted was indeed the default view if one chose graphic ads instead of google ads when installing Opera.

Asa has posted an update to his blog entry. So go give it a read. Hope some of the Opera fans out there, will take the suggestions in the entry and make the developers aware of it.

Blog Updates

Asa's has posted his first impressions of Opera 7.5. His main compliant is the clunky UI of Opera. To quote him, he says "Opera makes Sea Monkey look lean". Some of the commenters strongly rubbish Asa's analysis, claiming it is biased. I, however, tend to agree with Asa's view.

Elections 2004

Counting of votes for the just concluded Lok Sabha elections beagn today. Contrary to BJP's belief and hope, NDA doesn't seem to be doing well. Given the trends as of 3:30 pm IST, BJP+ is leading in 187, INC+ in 223 and Others in 125 out of 535 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. Seems like that a hung parliament is almost sure. By evening the situation will become clear. Lets wait and watch.

CSS/DOM-based Draggable Magnifiers

Via adot's notblog*, found a nice implementation of a magnifier using JS and CSS. Read about it here.

Inside Firefox: Theme Manager

Development in Firefox has been coming pretty steadily for sometime now. The latest in this string of changes is the Theme Manager that Ben has been working on. He has posted a preview of it on his blog. Go check it out!

New Template

Blogger have made a lot of changes to their site. So I too went ahead and updated my Blogger template to use Todd Dominey's Scribe template.

It's Hot!

Thunderbird 0.6 has been released. Scott MacGregor, mentions some of the new and more promiment features include a new Windows installer, Pinstripe theme for Mac OS X, new artwork, improved junk mail controls, new mail notification in the system dock for Mac OS X, server-wide news filters and a slew of other new features. So go and download it while it is still hot.