technology

Up till now I’ve never really gotten that much into social networking applications. I joined Tribe.net about 3 years ago but haven’t really checked in for 2 years. I steered clear of MySpace so far… But yesterday I went on a bit of a social networking spree and decided to sign up for a few services: Facebook, Bebo (2 former coworkers of mine are at Bebo now), and the recently launched Pownce (I don’t have any more Pownce invites, but you might find this post useful - it worked for me)....

Earlier this month, version 1.5 of the OSX Camino browser was released. Camino is based on the same Mozilla rendering engine as Firefox, but unlike Firefox, Camino behaves much more like a native OSX application, without a lot of the overhead (such as the XUL user interface) that Firefox brings with it. Ever since I started using the Mac, I’ve never been a big fan of Safari. I have used Firefox up till now, but I’ve been getting less and less excited about it....

Today, Google Maps launched the new Street View feature, and I’m very impressed (no, even though I work at Google I had not seen this until now). Street View gives you a 360 degree panoramic view of the chosen location. You can use the mouse to turn around, virtually walk up or down the street, as well as zoom in or out. The picture quality is quite good (particularly in fullscreen mode), generally detailed enough to make out signs and house numbers....

With relatively little fanfare, Firefox 2.0 was released last week. (Yes, I know, IE 7 was also released recently. Does anybody actually still use IE???) Firefox 2.0 brings some very nice improvements. My favorite feature is session recovery. Although Firefox is generally pretty stable, it nevertheless suffers the occasional crash. Thanks to session recovery, it is now possible after a restart to continue where one left off before the crash. Firefox can also be configured to always start with the previous session, which is a tremendous improvement....

Last week I added a new device to the list of hacked devices in my house, next to my hacked Tivo and Xbox: the Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. My D-Link DI-624 router had been giving me trouble for a while, and since I had heard a lot about the various open source firmware alternatives that are available for many routers, I decided to give this a try. One of the most popular router firmwares is DD-WRT, which is based on the original Linksys firmware that Linksys had to release as open source in order to comply with the GPL....