Carbonized Blog

Google Chrome is now at version 5 despite being only four years old. Version 6 is in beta. Before I began my rant I just need to explain how the versioning of programs usually works. The first number is the major build number should only change when there have been major changes to the program. The smaller numbers are there to indicate smaller changes such as security and bug fixes. Since it’s release Chrome, as far as I can see, has only had two major changes to it and they are the addition of themes and extensions.

Firefox has been around about eight years and is only at version 3.5. Opera has been around over ten years and is only at version 10.50. With both of these browser they have only changed the major build number when they have made major changes to their browser.

So why is Google increasing Chrome’s build number more often that it has birthdays? Well others believe this is Google’s attempt at making the gullible believe that Chrome is a more mature program than it actually is. The less computer savvy are going to look at it and think, “Oh it’s on version 5 so must have been around a long time”. I tend to agree with their opinion as there is no other reason for Google to be doing this.

I just thought I would share some of the sites I have found for downloading free ebooks. That is fiction ebooks and not reference ebooks as there are hundreds of sites offering reference ebooks as PDF files. With a few of the sites below they are just hosting ebook versions of classic books that are now out of copyright. Most sites just use the books from Project Gutenberg and reformat them for better reading. Quite a few of them give you a choice of what format you want to download the ebook in be it PDF, epub or just plain old txt. If you are looking for more original and modern stories to read then I recommend the first two links, Online Novels and Feedbooks.

Online Novels – Just discovered this excellent source of free ebooks novels.
Feedbooks – Not only does this site have the classics it’s also a good place to find new and original works.
getfreeebooks – Haven’t tried this site yet but looks promising.
ManyBooks – not looked at this site much but seems to have a good mix of classics and modern works.
Project Gutenberg – The main source of classics and they have their own proof readers. Poor formatting in their ebooks though.
epubBooks – Classics from Gutenberg but formatted for better reading and all in the epub format.

MobileRead also has a forum dedicated to free ebooks.

If you are lucky your local library might support the lending of ebooks using Overdrive. Have a look at http://search.overdrive.com/ to see if your local library is part of it.

Anyway if you know of any good sites for free ebooks from new authors then please share them.

For years now I have used both SpywareBlaster and SpyBot to immunise my web browsers against hosts file. They also help to stop tracking cookies which are used to log what type of websites you visited.

Anyway I was updating them both today and I got to thinking, “How often do they check that the sites in their block lists are still active?” At present SpyBot is saying it has immunised me against 130712 sites and SpywareBlaster says 13138 sites. So I decided to test a random selection of 20 sites they have blocked. Out of the 20 all the domains had now expired and pointed to nothing (resulting in a oops message in the browser) or they were now a domain landing page. That’s one of these stupid pages you sometimes end up on when you mistype a web address which has a list of links loosely based upon the domain name.

I know both of these programs are free but would it be to hard for them to write a program that checks their list every so often to remove dead domains? The reason I say this is because Internet Explorers block list is stored in the registry and this can slow down your computers boot up time. Also the more sites are blocked the slower your web browser may become. SO come on programmers. Just write a program that runs through your list once a month and see if they are still active or not.

When Internet Explorer 8 came out Microsoft said they had seriously improved security and that it was now one of the safest web browsers to use. Apparently they were wrong. According to the Guardian newspaper here in the UK an exploit in Internet Explorer was used in the recent attack on Google’s systems in China.

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So why keep using it? There are plenty of excellent alternatives these days. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Flock and you could even use Apple’s Safari although it uses a stupid amount of memory on Windows.

Some of the software Ninite offers

Have you just installed/reinstalled Xp, Vista or Windows 7? Need to install programs but don’t want to sit there manually installing them? Then try Ninite Easy PC Setup. Ninite makes installing multiple applications simple. You just go to their site, select the applications you want to install and then click Get Installer at the bottom. It will then download a small program which you will need to run as administrator so it can install the programs. The installer then downloads the install packages for your chosen programs and silently installs them. You can even suggest other programs for them to add to their list. They promise they only install the chosen program and not any of the rubbish a lot of the program installers try to add such as toolbars.

“We install apps with default settings and say “no” to browser toolbars and other junk.”

So basically you
1 – Go to the Ninite Easy PC Setup site.
2 – Select the programs you want to install.
3 – Download their installer.
4 – Run the installr as administrator.
5 – Go do something less boring whilst their installer does all the work for you.

Just to add you will need cookies enabled to be able to download the instaler.

Facebook has won a court case against a spammer who was abusing their site to send spam to Facebook users. The spammer known as Spamford, real name Sanford Wallace, is also facing prosecution for criminal contempt of court which could result in prison time. Wallace has also previously been prosecuted by MySpace for abusing their site to send porn and MySpace was awarded $230 million.

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Fancy trying the new OS that Google is working on? Well you’re out of luck but in the meantime you can try the Chrome OS that for some bizarre reason Suse has made and released on a Google hosted site http://sites.google.com/site/chromeoslinux/ (Google has taken the site down). What’s really funny is the amount of people that have been Tweeting about how either this is Google’s new OS or the rest that are calling it a fake. It’s not a fake as it really is an OS called Chrome OS it’s just people have been fooled by the sites design and hosting in to believing it is Google’s OS.

From the site:

• GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
• Google Chrome 4.0.223 web browser
• Google Picasa 2.7 photo manager New!
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
• GIMP 2.6 image editor
• Flash Player 10.0 plugin
• and much more!

• Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
• RAM: min. 256 MB
• Hard disk: min. 1 GB
• Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

Why they would try to make people believe this was Googles forthcoming OS I don’t know.

I recently posted how Windows 7 in Europe was going to come without a browser. Apparently now it is looking like instead of having no browsers you will be asked to select a browser when you install Windows 7 and it will then install your chosen web browser. No word yet on which browsers will be offered. Personally I think nearly everyone will select to install Internet Explorer anyways as there are still a lot of sites (such as banks) that demand you use IE.

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Apparently when Windows 7 is released the European version will not have Internet Explorer included. The Windows 7 E moniker is just to indicate it is the European version and might be dropped before official release. This is apparently in response to the antitrust suit Opera filed against Microsoft for bundling IE as part of Windows. Personally I think that’s just Opera crying because they have an extremely pitiful share of the browser market. So manufacturers are now expected to add a web browser to Windows 7 when they preinstall it on the machines. Funny how all this happens just as Mozilla have added the ability for companies to brand Firefox.

Personally I can’t see many manufacturers not including Internet Explorer since it’s what most people are used to and there are still a few sites, such as some banks etc, that stil wont let you log in with anything but IE or, for some god forsaken reason, Netscape.

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Well Apple has gone and released the memory hog that is Safari 4. It does look good but given that it uses a ridiculous amount of memory I think I will pass. It has some nice features that only work on a mac. Go figure.

Also Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox 3.5. It is marked as beta 99 but is basically something between a beta and a release candidate. it has improvements to Tracemonkey, the engine used to clean up memory usage but not sure it works that good at removing things from memory it no longer requires.

Now Google Chrome has excellent memory handling it’s just a shame it’s options are sparse, it has no extension support (even IE supports extensions/plug ins) (apparently as of version 2 it does) and the rendering engine, WebKit, is far from perfect. Sites like Facebook can prove a nightmare at times when it’s divs disappear behind it’s ad bar.

I’ve personally decided to give Firefox a break and use Flock for a few weeks.