figby.com

I know that a blog entry about Mozilla is nearly as much of a cliché as a pop song about love, but I have to say I’m very impressed with the recently renamed Mozilla Firefox browser.

Firefox is quickly becoming by default browser for routine administration tasks. Its particular advantage is that it doesn’t forget HTTP passwords randomly like Internet Explorer does, and it remembers usernames and passwords for the various sites I log into more conveniently than IE.

Also, I previously mentioned some bookmarklets that make development easier in Mozilla. The Web Developer Extensions take this idea one step further with a toolbar that can disable various features, clear visited links, outline page elements and more. The EditCSS extension adds the ability to make changes to a stylesheet and view the results instantly. This is definitely my new favorite browser for web development.

Yahoo has stopped using Google results for their searches sooner than anyone expected. Their search engine is apparently based on Inktomi, but they’ve been very quiet about how it works.

I’m not sure if they’re using old data or if their crawler doesn’t understand redirected links like Google’s does, but several outdated URLs for my pages are in Yahoo’s index. The new URLs are also listed.

Currently, 36% of referral traffic to my largest site comes from Google and 13% comes from Yahoo. I haven’t seen any changes in these numbers since Yahoo’s switchover.

Someone in one of the Digital Photography Review forums pointed out this press release in which Pentax USA proudly proclaims that its cameras are "The Official Digital Camera of the Internet." It’s brilliant, really–they would have had to pay to be "The Official Digital Camera of Major League Baseball," but since the Internet belongs to everybody and nobody, they can claim whatever they want.

This is the most ridiculous bit of dot-com silliness I’ve seen in years, and I don’t think it will take long for Pentax to become The Official Laughing-Stock of the Internet.

In other news, taking Pentax’s lead, I’m officially declaring Figby.com "The Official Weblog of the Internet." I was first, nobody else can do it.

Attention system administrators: Your well-intentioned but misguided attempt to warn me about viruses is driving me insane.

You see, the newest viruses forge the sender’s address. And when I say "newest", I mean virtually all of them in the last three years. So when you send a "Virus ALERT" message to the sender’s address, you’re not reaching the infected victim. You’re reaching an innocent party–which often turns out to be me–and creating a nuisance almost as significant as the original virus.

I use a number of very old email addresses that are all over the web, meaning I get lots of viruses and that my address is often forged as the sender. I use ClamAV on my server to eliminate the virus messages, and it’s so effective I rarely see a virus message at all. However, I get 10-20 pointless virus warnings per day. Since they’re all different and don’t contain a virus signature, these are almost impossible to filter.

So, if you’re an email administrator, or an anti-virus software company, please don’t compound the problem by sending out useless warnings. Thanks.