STG's

XUL Apps > Tabbrowser Extensions - outsider reflex If you use Firefox (or Mozilla), go get this now ! Yes, it's that good. There is an absurd amount of options. Some of my favorites are undoing close of tabs and launching new windows in tabs (plenty of options on that too).

Stories of your Life , by Ted Chiang. An excellent collection of short stories. Very creative. Ground Zero , by Bonnie Ramthun. Pretty good sci-fi thriller, about a murder in a group of Missile Defense developers.

There were quite a few Rudy Rucker's books I enjoyed over the years. Hacker and the Ants, the Software/Freeware/Wetware trilogy, White Light... All were fun, quirky, and incorporated some math aspects. Spaceland is certainly no exception. The action revolves around the 4th dimension (no, not time, a physical extra dimension). There is a plot involving the 4th dimensional beings and the spaceland - a semi-3 dimensional slice (a few nanometers "thick") in the 4th dimension that happens to be our universe. There are a lot of cool insights into dimensions in the book, mostly about how a 2 dimensional universal would look to its inhabitants (since this is easiest one for readers to understand) and 4 dimensional space and objects to 3 dimensional eyes (since it's how we'd see it). Other dimensions make brief apparences as well (0-d and 1-d too, around the end of the book). Pretty cool. I really recommend it, but if "thought experiments" aren't you...

A couple of months ago, I started switching to Mozilla from IE. There are a few reasons for that, the biggest being how wonderful middle-clicking to open new tabs are (I tend to browse quite a few at the same time...), as well as how poorly IE reacts sometimes, also slowing the rest of the Windows Interface (apparently the worse side of browser/OS integration ). The numerous (and serious) security issues were also a factor. AFAIK, there is still an open Javascript program that allows anyone to install spyware. Last week I tried Firefox, and it's even better than Mozilla. The interface is superior, and it feels a bit faster, too. The extensions available are great! I installed a lot of them. For example: 1) Adblock : Blocks ads using Regular Expressions. Some ad heavy pages, such as Yahoo, look so clean they seem weird 2) Googlebar (although the cute Google/etc search on the right of the toolbar cover most of my use). It does have a keyboard shortcut for showing up or not...

Read it last week. It's not fantastic, but it's pretty good. I was very surprised when I saw it was out (on Fictionwise's newsletter) - the delay between the other books was several years! Of course, I bought it right away and was reading it a few minutes after that (oh, the joy of e-books instant delivery). If you didn't read the rest of the series, of course, it won't make any sense. Otherwise you'll probably like it. The end of the series (volume 7) should be available on September 21, according to Amazon...

Annoyances.org - Change the icon for Internet Shortcuts Today I decided to switch my default browser to Mozilla, in particular because of "the middle-click opens the link in a tab, on the background" option, which I use a lot . There are a couple of other neat things too, like easily blocking images from a server with just a context-menu option. Anyway, the Mozilla icon is just awful, and suddenly all the URL shortcuts I dropped in my desktop were an annoying Mozilla red instead of the much nicer IE icon. Took me a while to figure it out (by using the linked page) since the normal way won't work without a registry hack, but it's ok now. I was just about switching the default back to IE... Yes, it was easily that annoying...

E-mail Confidential - Who's afraid of Time Inc.'s legal disclaimer? Interesting article about e-mail disclaimers.