Technology

I use a lot of firefox extensions. You might call me a power user. Yeah, that’s right, powerful.

Here is the list of my favorites. They are broken down into extensions that make Firefox better, those that make my general life better, things for “geeky stuff” and things for my life as a web developer/sysadmin/competitve webmaster. Yeah, I’m competitive. My stable of sites is better than yours!

Enhanced Firefox

• Cute Menus - humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
• Download Statusbar - I want the information compact, in an overview, and readily visible. I hate new windows.
• Flashblock - I hate flash. It’s amazing how much better the internet is without flash.
• Google Gears - Since I’m in places without internet pretty regularly, it’s nice to be able to get my Google feeds in an offline mode.
• PageStyle2Tab - again, humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
• Image Zoom - Firefox lets me zoom text, image zoom lets me zoom images. Duh.
• Locationbar2 - Prettify the URL bar. Also happens to make it safer by clearly identifying the domain and downplaying the importance of subdomains (i.e. the phisher phavorite ebay.com.shadysitestealpasswords.com/enter-username is clearly visible as “www.ebay.com” as a subdomain of “shadysitestealpasswords.com”. Whoohoo!

Enhanced Life

Recently the folks from the Democract Convention Committee were looking to hire a Web/Drupal savvy person in the Denver area. They posted to Craigslist, I added it to Groups.Drupal.org but what else can you do?

There are several good places in Denver to find tech-savvy employees (likewise, if you are looking for work, pay attention to these places that advertise jobs):

• Craigslist Denver Web Jobs is of course the 800 pound gorilla, massive listings and traffic, and free. Always a good place to post your ad.
• RMIUG (Rocky Mountain Internet User Group has probably the best email based job board via the rmiug-jobs Yahoo Group. Be sure to read the FAQ before posting.
• Groups.Drupal.org’s job postings get a really targeted (Denver + Drupal) audience of folks.
• Colorado Startups Job Board which is pretty thinly trafficked, but I have hope for this one.
• Denver Webdesign Meetup Group has a message board that is pretty job friendly
• Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup Group has a job announcements section at the beginning of the meetings.

And if emailing and posting on all of these fail, you might want to actually go to one or two of the meetings and get to know folks and mention your needs. That seems to work even better than just posting emails.

Did I miss any? What do you use?

This is awesome. The Democratic National Convention Committee has announced a credentialing process for bloggers so that bloggers can cover the event with permission and access that will help them get a scoop not unlike the old-school media. That blog post makes it clear that it will be in a separate “pool” which is a slight bummer, but giving bloggers the same access as old-school media is probably just forward leaning enough to make the old-school people pout. This is a great step for citizen media and freedom of speech.

Are You Cool Enough to Blog the Denver Democratic Convention?

The requirements they have for applying seem interesting.

WebWorkerDaily (which I read and love for the inspiration it gives to tech nomads) has an article today about how Zoho is offering an offline mode for document editing and how this is great and how it’s lame that Google docs doesn’t have this feature.

I started to leave a comment for them but 1) their comment system ate my comment and 2) I wanted to make a picture to explain my point which I can’t insert into their comments.

Complexity of Medium and Value in Editing On The Web

This feels pretty intuitive to me, but apparently it’s not that intuitive since Zoho didn’t figure it out (and they’re smart).

One of the problems I have with a lot of “green” building ideas is that the products are so specialized you have to get them from across the country. At which point it’s not so green anymore…

From elephant magazine I found Sutherlands Lumber which sells all sorts of building products in Boulder and Fort Collins. Not exactly convenient to Denver, but not bad.

They also had some tips for running a “green” business like commercial composting and products made from renewable sources like potatos available from Eco Products.

I’m doing some research into how electronic options markets work - and specifically those used primarily for prediction purposes. I’m familiar with them (previously wrote about prediction markets and political contracts).

Back in April I upgraded my Dell Inspiron E1705 (which is also known as a 9400) from MSWindowsXP to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04). It was not the easiest installation I’ve done, but with the help of linux on laptops directory and in particular this guide I was able to get it done. With the recent release of Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon I was excited to upgrade.

Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) Upgrade

I was expecting the worst, but got the best. I first made two backups of everything, just in case, and then followed the steps listed on the Ubuntu upgrade guide and it was a piece of cake. The only questions that seemed weird were about my Apache configuration file since I modified that. Otherwise, it worked flawlessly and was easy to understand.