July 30th, 2005
So here it is, the inevitable “author plugs his new book” blog post. In the last months of 2004 and early months of 2005, I was spending a good number of my evenings after work writing what was to become (and now is) Firefox Secrets. “Writing” being a broad term used when tasked to churn out a software book - I’d say that almost 50% of the time was spent fiddling with Firefox, tracking elusive things down, verifying that things I intend to say actually work, and taking screenshots. For those of you who were regular readers, you know how I love to put up screenshots in blog posts, but I tell ya, it kinda gets old after awhile. (Thankfully, MWSnap is an amazing screen capture tool that’s freeware to boot.)
I’d like to thank SitePoint for approaching me with this offer to write a book on Firefox, considering my (non-)experience in book-writing. The content of the book was initially intended to be geared towards the non-technical Firefox user (as proposed by SitePoint), but we (SitePoint actually) decided to rebrand it as a “Secrets” book when they discovered that my submitted drafts weren’t that much of a plain old technical manual but more of a “stuff you don’t know” kinda book. Honestly, I never really warmed to the idea of writing another “blah how do I use Firefox” grimoire so the rebranding is for the best.
So, what’s in the book? Well, this table of contents should give you an idea. SitePoint also included a nice little CD-ROM with Firefox, Thunderbird, and extensions and themes that I’ve mentioned in the book material. I tried my best to include everything for both new and experienced Firefox users, so there should probably be something in there that interests you. For those of you who want a preview of the book, check out the You Don’t Know Jack About Firefox! article over at SitePoint.com, or download the sample chapters (PDF format, requires email address).
Acknowledgements
I’ve acknowledged these same people in the book, but it bears repeating here.
I owe it all to SitePoint for making the book come through, even though things weren’t all that smooth-sailing. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write about Firefox.
Asa Dotzler, for being an awesome technical reviewer for the book, thank you. Asa’s reviews relieved me of several misconceptions, and I even picked up a few secrets from him (and yes - these secrets appear in the book).
Dear blog readers, I admire you for tolerating with my absence and sticking around even when at times I seem to have died and left my blog in an owner-less limbo. Thanks for reading as always.
Last but not least, the Firefox community: developers, evangelists, users, all of you. Firefox is the success it is today (and a wonderful browser to boot) because of you guys.
Elsewhere, on Firefox Secrets
I’ll be keeping (and updating) a list of blogs, articles, and other miscellanous web stuff that talks about Firefox Secrets here.
July 28th, 2005
It’s been a while since I last blogged huh? Well, I actually was back, until a particularly unfortunate incident with my VPS where the database tables for WordPress got corrupted (likely due to overflowing backups and running out of space) threw me off track and got me real grief-stricken that I lost my blog template/theme and a couple of posts (I’ve managed to restore the template/theme since).
Excuses, all. I’m horrified that I’ve actually allowed my blog to fall into a state of disuse and disrepair. I’m back and I hope to stay back. But first I’ve to clean up all this crud that’s on my blog (comment spam, Trackback spam, etc.).
Public Service Announcement
I lost a post entitled “Ooh look at this old website I dug up”. I believe I offered something to the person who guessed correctly, but I only have Jed Brown’s comment in my email. Whoever guessed first before Jed did, please do send me an email (chuyeow at gmail dot com).
January 13th, 2005
I have a long list of blogs/websites (233 feeds at this moment) to read in my Bloglines account. I don’t have the time to read all of them nowadays (I used to), so I’m finding myself skimming through a select few blogs. Weirdly, even though bloggers like Scoble make very interesting posts, I tend to not read them because he’s just too damn prolific and I don’t have the time to read all the posts. Hmm… Interesting… I was just about to check whether there was a way to keep a post unread in Bloglines and there is (there’s a “Keep New” checkbox at the bottom of every feed item). Well, maybe this will get me reading Scoble again.
As I was saying, I don’t read every feed I subscribe to nowadays. (By the way, Bloglines only keeps 200 entries per feed before it stops keeping track of new ones.) What I do now is go through the list from top to bottom and check out the ones that I seem to be more interested in. It’s interesting to see a pattern. I tend to give feeds with too many unread items a miss, resulting in a vicious cycle of them never getting read. Feeds with 30 new items a day, these I also tend to not read. I also read too many Mozilla-related blogs. Here’s my list of “To Read” blogs (arranged in no particular order) whenever I’m short on time or just too plain lazy to read everything:
-
Jon Hicks’ hicksdesign
One of my favorite designers who also happens to be a mean programmer (at least from what I can tell from Jon’s hacking of Textpattern, which powers his blog and portfolio).
-
Bernie Zimmermann
Mozilla blogger and Firefox GrayModern Theme author
-
Chris Pederick
Chris Pederick is the author of the Web Developer Tools Firefox extension, among other cool projects.
-
Forever Geek
Which I contribute to, but I’m on hiatus now.
-
Gadgetopia
Lots of neat posts and links on technology
-
Gentoo Linux News
Not a blog, but I love Gentoo!
-
Gravatar blog
I think Gravatars are pretty sweet, this keeps me in the loop of what Tom Werner’s up to.
-
Life At Ngee Ann
This is a fellow Singaporean’s blog, quite humorous. “Ngee Ann” refers to Ngee Ann polytechnic, a local academic institution.
-
life in mono
Fellow Singaporean Adrianna’s a cool techie Mac evangelist.
-
adot’s notblog*
Asa Dotzler’s blog. Mozilla stuff is always interesting.
-
cheeaunblog
Author of the famous Phoenity theme, who happens to live in Penang where I some relatives stay. Maybe we can meet up when I go there, huh, Chee Aun?
-
Neil’s World
Neil Turner blogs stuff that I would blog myself if I could. Well, mostly. Mozilla and tech blog.
-
Photo Matt
Matthew Mullenweg’s the lead developer of WordPress, and turned 21 not long ago.
-
philwilson.org
Phil Wilson blogs mostly on Firefox and the Semantic Web.
-
vantan.org: The Daily Weblog
Fellow Singaporean Vanessa Tan is a “devoted Netizen” who works in an environment unfriendly to Firefox.
-
The Burning Edge
Used to follow this religiously, but a little less now because of more infrequent posts and also because much of the work now is bug fixing since the Aviary branch landing.
Not too many A-list bloggers in that list, but that’s probably because people like Simon Willison and Doug Bowman have been posting less of late. Give these blogs/sites a visit or two and let me know if you know of any related blog that I can add to my feed aggregator (yes, I’m still interested in more despite an unread list of hundreds).
January 2nd, 2005
How fun, starting a new year with a bland post on Web statistics.
December 2004 was a record month for this blog, with record highs in visits, pages and bandwidth. I exceeded my monthly transfer limit of 20GB by just a little bit as well.
Getting an average of 4.7K visits per day, or 10K pages per day.
Thanks to the “Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing” post, transfer spiked to almost 3GB on Dec 15.
Top referrers included SpreadFirefox.com and Bloglines. There was a referrer spammer (brushed out in the screenshot) which made it to the top 10 before I caught it and blocked it.
Here’s how referrers are blocked (with .htaccess), for those who are still looking for a solution. What these 2 rewrite rules do is to, respectively, rewrite the listed IP addresses, and rewrite the referrers with the following strings in them, back to the client’s IP. This works extremely well, and I know because I’ve had my server (a VPS) brought to its knees from constant referrer spamming. The hit rates from these spammers were so high that it practically became a DOS attack. Since I’ve implemented these rewrite rules, all has been peaceful and I can finally see uptimes of more than 3 days (believe it or not, the VPS did go down that often).
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.26 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.24
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} texasholdem [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example2\.com
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]
The referrer spammers are still going at it (though they don’t appear in AWStats) - I can see them hitting me when I check my server-status page (see the mod_status module).
I don’t think I’ll need to upgrade my hosting plan yet, since the bandwidth spike was a one time thing caused by the crazy Homer Simpson entry.
And here’s the top 10 browsers as requested. Unsurprising that Firefox tops the list.
Well, here’s to a better year ahead for everyone. For myself, I look forward to having a good time at my new job, (finally) getting published, finding religion, and finally getting a move on in life. I’m not one for “Happy New Year”s and new year resolutions though. So blah, have fun.
Look me up in the Cenarius server if any of you are playing World of Warcraft - my main character’s Lucita (gnome rogue).
December 26th, 2004
I like music. Well, I like the music that I like, not all genres. OK, honestly, I’m fairly picky about the songs I listen to. I only listen to alternative, alternative rock, punk rock, punk pop, and rap (mostly Eminem) music (I’m not even sure if the genres are correct). Music keeps me sane on commutes of more than an hour long to and from work, and shuts out noise at work whenever necessary (not that it happens often). As a result, I probably have a rather unhealthy dependence on my iPod mini - I can’t go anywhere without it.
Argh, I realize that recently, my thoughts don’t flow in a coherent manner when blogging. I think it has to do with a combination of factors: World of Warcraft addiction (anyone interested in a Firefox guild?), book writing, and not getting enough sleep. Anyway, let’s get back on track shall we?
Now, since almost everyone is doing it (posting their top 10 albums of 2004 and the like), I thought I’d share a little on what I have been listening to over the past year. These are not songs that were released in 2004 though, just the songs I’ve listened to the most often in 2004.
-
Slow Motion (Dirty Version) by Third Eye Blind
I love Third Eye Blind. I probably played this song more than a thousand times over the year. This has such a catchy instrumental background - at first I wasn’t aware of the “dirty version” (drug themes) and only heard the clean instrumental version that had minimal lyrics. I liked that a lot and after I was made aware of the version with lyrics, I liked it even more for its quirky lyrics.
-
Hands Down by Dashboard Confessional
With lyrics like this: “My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me. So won’t you kill me, so I die happy”, what’s not to like? I had this song set to repeat over and over again on my iPod quite a few times.
-
Rough Draft by Yellowcard
This is actually a sappy love song if you follow the lyrics, but I kinda like the way it flows off your tongue. Same for this, I had this set to single repeat as well for a period of time.
-
Friends O’ Mine by Bowling For Soup
Damn catchy and nice to sing along to. Well, I sing along (very, very quietly and discreetly) to almost every song here in this list.
-
Vindicated by Dashboard Confessional
This was popular because it was in the Spiderman 2 OST. I didn’t catch it on radio (I don’t listen to radio anymore actually) and didn’t know that it was that popular until I heard it on the radio.
-
Inside Out by Yellowcard
“Here. A little sympathy. For you to waste on me.” Yellowcard seems to like writing songs that are self-pitying. And I seem to like those songs. Self-pitying bastard.
-
World at Large by Modest Mouse
I didn’t actually like Modest Mouse at first when introduced to them by a good friend. They’re one of my favorites now.
-
Map Of Your Head by Muse
This song is just good. I mean, listen to it. The guitars sound great, the Muse lead singer is at his best.
-
El Scorcho by Weezer
“I’m a lot like you, so please, hello, I’m here, I’m waiting.”
-
Undone - The Sweater Song by Weezer
This is a weird semi-song. “If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away.”
-
Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind
This makes number 11. I can’t leave out this one - this introduced me to look away from mainstream pop songs that I was somewhat into at the time. Granted, Semi-Charmed Life is almost a pop song, but it did spur me to check out Third Eye Blind and that led to other similar artistes.
So, what have you guys been listening to this past year? Anyone have similar tastes? More importantly, do you have any songs or artistes to recommend?
Plugging Firefox Secrets
Comments and TrackBacks (11) | Category: Mozilla, Personal 
