heavyclouds

Found this great little article written by a Canadian named Ian Welsh. It’s amazing what a turn this nation has made in the last 10 years. What are our next steps? How do we get back to those ideals?

I’m not American. I’m Canadian.

So it’s odd then that I write so much about America and I care so much about what happens in America. Part of it is practicality - Canada is a US client state and American politics affect Canadians. When you throw away your freedoms, ours will soon follow (our government just launched its own “no-fly list”, for example and after you put out the Patriot Act we put out our own version.)

But part of it is just that I care about America and the American experiment.

Those of us who didn’t grow up in America, but under the sway of America’s media, imbibed a very pure form of the American mythos and civic religion. The American Civil Religion, with its secular saints such as Jefferson, Hamilton and Washington and its written Constitutional scripture is also a source of wonderment. Canada has no equivalent, no deep sense of history, no touchstone that is written back to to justify the present. Those words of your founders, those words that resound through history are words that inspire men and women who have never seen America and never will.

The Declaration of Independence spoke to all humans, with its assertion that all men are created equal and have unalienable rights. The US system of government, with its checks and balances, seemed unique and able to take shocks that might topple other democratic forms of government.

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Somebody wasn’t paying attention when they released this…

Those few of you who visit daily must be sick of no updates in the past few months. You may have noticed some visual changes as I’ve been struggling with a look I like. I think I’ve got something I like here. I’m considering changing the theme of this blog. I own a couple other domain names and am thinking about moving my personal blog to nicklarsen.com and turning this one into a jazz music review site. Thoughts or ideas?

Still no official fix out, but one of the complaints with my hacked version is that the search engine functionality no longer works. After some research, it looks like Firefox 2.0 uses their own brand of OpenSearch called MozSearch. Bookmarkshome looks for search engines written in OpenSearch when it creates the search form and option controls. Luckily, I still have a box running Firefox 1.5 and grabbed the appropriate OpenSource search engine files out of there. With no warranty implied (Matt), place these files in your C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins directory. You’ll notice the MozSearch XML files in there already that the embedded search bar uses in 2.0. Restart FF and you’re good.

One of the comments on a previous post questioned the need for using a proxy. A valid question deserving a detailed answer so I want to dedicate a post to it for others to find (google).

For most people who surf the web at home, a proxy is not needed (unless you’re a super geek and want to brag to your geek friends about using a proxy at home). Large companies often use a proxy system for users accessing the internet while on their domain. Simplified, this provides anonymity for their users and the ability to track/block user access to internet sites. Therein lies the problem. As a consultant, I need the ability to:

• Quickly switch proxy configuration from client to client. One client may have a PAC system where another is manually configured, but my office and home use no proxy.
• Bypass client proxy all together. Some clients block all web mail sites, but I need to access my company’s Outlook Web Access.

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I stumbled across a really great concept today called AGLOCO. I wouldn’t normally get involved with anything resembling a pyramid scheme, but this is not that - just the reverse in fact. Sure, you refer people and they refer people, growing your network and earnings potential, but there is no cost to anyone (except advertisers). If I refer no one, I know I’ll be online at least 5 hours a month so I’ll pocket a couple dollars. Go check it out and if you decide to sign up on my recommendation be sure to use my referral ID (BBBD3619). If my network grows I vow to post my earnings here for you all to follow.

A few weeks ago I posted on a hacked extension for bookmarkshome that would allow you to install the extension on Firefox 2.0. I’ve been using another extension called SwitchProxy that allows me to easily switch proxy configurations on the fly. This extension is also out of date for Firefox 2.0. I don’t want to hack each extension that won’t install because it isn’t “compatible” so I went on a search for a better solution. Enter MR Tech’s Local Install which gives you:

…the tools needed to install and manage extensions and themes locally. To do this the extension provides multi-extension installation support, hacking capabilities to the Extension/Theme manager windows, features to find and troubleshoot Extensions/Themes Build, GUID and Profile information.

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this extension’s powers but I was able to disable the compatibility check install ProxySwitch.

It was a good run, but my “free” hosting with 1&1 has run out. They were a great host and I’ve set up countless of my personal clients with them and would recommend them to anyone. I’ll still probably leave my domains (heavyclouds.com and bluetrane.net) with them since they’re only $5.99 per year. I’ll also still remain an affiliate so clicky if you’re ready to host with them.

So where to host then? With my ever increasing curiosity in new technologies, I decided to load up my Ubuntu box with the appropriate software - Apache, MySQL, and PHP5. I setup some domain forwarding and got everything setup only to figure out that Verizon FiOS blocks incoming port 80 on residential accounts. Luckily, my good friend over at devblog offered to host me on his server. So if you’re reading this and are a geek, go check out his site, or if you’re not a geek, go check out this site.

After months of looking around for something to “pop”, Jenn and I finally found a replacement for her 2002 Eclipse. On a whim, we stopped by the Honda dealership on Saturday. The new CR-V really caught our eye. Exterior seemed much more aggressive and it lost that ugly tire on the back. Without comparing to the IS350, the interior is sleek and clean. As fate would have it, they had a black on black EX-L just off the truck with 2 miles on it. We took delivery on Monday.

I’m quite releived that this will be our last vehicle purchase for a long time. I’ll post some real pictures soon.

I’m quite pleased with Firefox 2.0, but I’ve been patiently waiting for a compatibility update to my favorite extension - bookmarkshome. This add on allows me to set my homepage to about:bookmarkshome and then gracefully displays all my bookmarks. I decided to take matters into my own hands and make this work. I call this version 1.5.2.2. It is unsigned and not guaranteed to work. All I did was modify the max version tag in install.rdf.

Download

edit: New post fixing the search engines missing from bookmarkshome.