Big Brother

Posted on October 13, 2007 at 9:43 am | 13 Comments
Filed under Internet Insanity • Random Realities • School Sabotage

Once you have entered any Big Brother house, I’m sure, your wouldn’t have any privacy and confidentiality, or if there is, only a little of the two. It’s sad isn’t? You can’t do things without the others knowing it, or should I say the whole world. It’s a breach to everyone’s right: the right to privacy. But then, to relinquish one’s privacy and confidentiality is a prerequisite or a mechanic or whatever you want to call it of the reality show. Besides, the housemates have consented to relinquish their privacy and confidentiality by joining the game.

Tomorrow, the gates, doors and windows of the Pinoy Big Brother house will open once again, and the cameras will start to roll and monitor every move of the housemates. And I don’t care. You know perfectly that I loathe the show. And let me state here that this post is not about the reality game show.

I used to abuse the unlimited Internet surfing my school offers for an exchange of a price of around Php 500.00 even though the only browser installed in the computers in school is the freaking IE and they don’t even have the latest version. Now, I’m wondering if their Windows are of legitimate copies. After surfing the Internet (in school), I clear the cache, browser history, cookies, and other whatnots for my privacy. I don’t want other students know what sites I visit. The last time I surfed the Internet in school, I’ve learned that they disabled access to the “Internet Options” unless you’re an administrator. And this really sucks.

This is another reason why Firefox is better than IE, in Firefox, you don’t need to be an administrator to delete all of those private data. When I’m on an Internet Cafe (which is very rare) — the Internet Cafes I have been to have Firefox installed — I just click Clear Private Data, and presto, no unwanted private data left.

Behind all of this, it’s really better browsing the Internet at home. No people shouting foul words at each other. No rude looking people reading whatever you are typing. No hassles of clearing your private data.

And this reminded me that if our phone line won’t get fixed anytime soon1, I have to buy a wireless router so I can browse the Internet in my room.

  1. We have a temporary line in our dinning room. [↩]

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Safari on Windows

Posted on June 12, 2007 at 6:41 pm | 16 Comments
Filed under Digging Delicious • Internet Insanity

Before anything else, I just want to greet every Filipino out there a happy Independence Day. Seriously, I can’t feel the vibe. I haven’t received any text messages greeting me “a happy Independence Day” or read a blog entry about this very special day. Don’t tell me I got the wrong date.

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When I started surfing the internet today, the last day of my last summer vacation I came across with this headline on digg.com: Safari on Windows. I thought that Safari — the default web browser that comes along with every new Mac — was available for Windows before today. Obviously, I was wrong. But now, you can run it on your PC. Now we can tell if our blogs do break or not on Safari without buying a very expensive Mac. I tried mine and my site doesn’t look awkward or whatever. Safari renders my site almost like Firefox.

Pros:

  • Cool UI. I’ve read somewhere that it gives you the feel of how Safari looks like on a Mac. Sleek!
  • In my experience, almost all embedded Quicktime movies would make Firefox and IE7 crash on Windows Vista. Since Quicktime and Safari’s creator are just one, they blend smoothly.
  • I really like the Private Browsing1 feature of Safari. Best used for viewing porn sites. Haha.
  • Firefox greatest feature was also copied by Safari: tabbed browsing. But what’s original is that you can make an existing tab to open into a new window by just dragging it out and if you want to put all of your opened windows into just only one, you can merge them.
  • There’s also a built-in pop-up blocker. That’s self explanatory.
  • Text fields are resizable. No more unnecessary scrolling for text fields!
  • The built-in RSS is astounding, but that does not mean I’m leaving Google Reader.
  • The “Find” feature of Safari is better than Firefox. The highlighted text is easier to locate.

Cons:

  • Safari for Windows is still in beta, so it’s buggish.
  • You can only resize the window with the bottom-right corner of the window.
  • I think this one is only a bug, whenever you minimize a maximized window and you want to restore it, it wouldn’t go back to the maximized state, but to the restored down one.
  • There is no button on the toolbar that’ll open a new tab. The “New Tab” is buried under the “File” menu, so it would take you two clicks to open a new tab, alternatively, you can use Ctrl+T (the same shortcut for opening a new tab with the other browsers that support tabbed browsing). Moreover, the “+” button on the toolbar is misleading especially if you use have used Firefox for a while, because it only creates a new bookmark. Firefox, on the other hand, would create a new tab when you click the “+” button.
  • Other features in Firefox are also available (copied?) in Safari
  • If Firefox loves memory hogging, Safari loves it even more. It uses most of my memory. But since I’ve got 1GB of RAM2, it’s not really a big problem.
  • Only basic plugins (e.g:Java, Flash) are available.

Bottom Line

I’m sticking wtih Firefox, it is still the best browser in my opinion no matter what Mac says (that Safari is 1.6 times faster than Firefox in rendering HTML and executing JavaScript). With Firefox, you can do more things aside from visiting websites. But I’m not removing Safari from Snidget. I’m going to use it the layouts that I create are compatible with it and watching Quicktime movies. You can download Safari 3 Public Beta at the Apple website (that just got a new makeover).

Opera isn’t installed on Snidget yet, I might try it the next time I got a free time.

So I end this post with screen shots on how my site looks like on IE7, Safari and Firefox:

IE7
Internet Explorer 7.0

Safari
Safari

Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox

PS: I just want to say thanks to digg, without it, I wouldn’t see these kind of stuffs, or if I would even without digg, at a later time. Visit it and subscribe to make your vote count! Digg on!

Hey! Why am I blogging about an Apple product when my notebook is running in Windows Vista? Haha!

  1. Firefox 3 will have this feature. [↩]
  2. I haven’t blogged that I got a free 512 MB RAM. It was added on Snidget a week after we bought my notebook. [↩]

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My Site and Miss Universe 2007

Posted on May 29, 2007 at 3:25 pm | 24 Comments
Filed under Random Realities • Site Stuff

Asteeg.Net

According to the statistics Google Analytics has complied for me since the 10th of May last year, 50.22% of my visitors are using Mozilla Firefox as their browser and 45.29% are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I expect that in the next couple of years, more Internet Explorer users are going to switch to Firefox. It is more secure than Internet Explorer and there are so many things that you can do with it. As for traffic sources, I was shocked to see that only 24.04% of my visitors visited my site directly, the remaining 75.96% were able to go here from referring sites and search engines.

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asteeg

That’s how will be my site would look like when I’ve already fixed the CSS. Um, anybody out there who would want to help me finish it? I’m lazy to fix it. Whenever I start to fix it, I always get frustrated and end up doing other things.

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If you’re using Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 7.0, you can now search my site without even visiting it. I created my own add-on. If you want to install and try it, click the button that’ll display your installed search engines on your browser and choose “Add Asteeg.Net”.

Miss Universe 2007

Congratulations to Ms. Japan for winning the crown. There was no suspense at all when they proclaimed Ms. Japan as the winner. That really sucks.

Ms. Philippines, Ana Theresa Licaros bagged the Miss Photogenic award. Okay, how many times did the Philippines got this award? Lol. Congratulations Ms. Licaros!

Oh, the candidate from Korea was beautiful, and did you see Ms. USA slipped?

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