Mozilla Fennec 1.9.2 builds for Android

Mozilla Fennec, a Gecko-based mobile browser from Mozilla is now available for Android, where you can download the latest build from the trunk from : Mozilla-Central trunk Android/.

Be careful as the code can be considered still in the alpha-stage, where memory leaks are bound to happen alongside with occasional buggy browsing experience.

It requires Android 2.0 and was only tested on Motorola Droid and Nexus One. The application must also be installed on the device’s internal memory (not on SD card).

Google Chrome for Linux and Mac Developer release

Google Chrome for GNU / Linux and Mac has finally arrived! However it is only an early version for developers and lack features that would make it usable in production environment.

Google Chrome Logo

Missing features from early release of Linux & Mac Google Chrome are :

  • Can’t view Youtube videos
  • Missing TIFF support
  • Loads of memory leaks
  • Does not have bookmark manager
  • No Java plugin support
  • No printing
  • Problem with rendering certain websites
  • Occasional crashes and freeze up
  • and many more…

So if you are just an average user, do not download this release just yet! Instead, wait for a few months for a much more (?) BETA release to be available.

The developer channel release was made in order to elicit responses and bug reports from users to prepare for a more stable BETA release.

[Google’s original announcement]

ImageMagick thumbnailer scripts for blog

Hey there, I’d like to share my dirt-easy script for creating thumbnail in blog post. The script will scale any image to the width of 456pixels which I find acceptable by most blog theme (actually the limit is around 460-465 pixel, but better be safe).

Why I wrote yet another script for scaling images? because I find blogger.com and WordPress system of uploading images and photo annoys me, and I rather upload my pictures/photos on my own private server and create thumbnails on my own.

I licensed the download under WTFPL , don’t worry its a free software license.

Download : thumbnailer.sh

Bloat alarm : We need a another “Firefox” to Mozilla Firefox

Back few years ago, there are a bunch of dude released a lightweight browser named Phoenix (way back in 2001-2002) as an alternative to the current Mozilla browser release.

This lightweight browser which contains no more than bare component (Gecko) to enable web browsing was a major attraction by itself. Then they changed the name to Firebird and finally to Mozilla Firefox because of legal issues. Its not about the naming problem though, a rose by another name is still a rose.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox gain the fame of being a lean and mean web browser, as in its original vision. But then things started to change. As the user grew, they started to add features that make the browser become more complicated. Bugs and usability problem begins to rear its ugly head. One of the things people might notice is it began to eat up much of valueable resources. CPU usage starts to shoot up, memory leaks being the norm since 1.5.x release. It does not feel like a “lean and mean” browser anymore.

What matter most is not the bell and whistle, if people want that, they would just download Seamonkey, because why else it is being offered in the first place? Fix memory and CPU resource problem because it is so damn obvious it failed to act as lightweight browser there. We dont need all the bell and whistle, a “simple lightweight” browser would suffice.

Perhaps we need another “Firefox” to Mozilla Firefox, this time for real…

Upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 supports Microsoft OpenXML (docx) out of the box

The popular Free and Open Source Office application, OpenOffice.org is going to have OpenXML (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx) support by default. Scheduled to be release on September 2008, OpenOffice.org 3.0 packs a lot of features you might find interesting :

openoffice 3.0 development release
  • Import PDF files support. PDF documents can be edited in Writer
  • Official Mac OS support, now includes native “Aqua” interface
  • Multiple page view in Writer
  • Error bars in OpenOffice.org charts
  • Supports OpenDocument 1.2 specification

The BETA is scheduled to be released on April 30th, 2008. For the time being, OpenOffice.org 2.x users can open Microsoft OpenXML files (*.docx, *.xlsx) using odf import filters

Thanks to Andrew Ziem for the original article, OpenOffice.org 3.0 new features, an early look