If opening the Downloads window in Firefox or downloading files are freezing the program, try deleting your download history. If this still causes a hang, try this fix from the MozillaZine Knowledge Base:
Firefox should work fine now.
It’s my rather pompous term for the way that email, SMS and, in particular, the SlackBerry [sic] reduce the quality of our replies. Nowadays, it seems, a prompt one-line answer to an email is considered somehow more productive, efficient, effective and “smart” than actually contemplating for a moment the subject and the best response. However trite, irrelevant or misinformed the response is, it seems the act of responding is more important than the nature of the reponse itself.
Another solution, of course, is just to forward the message to others with a brief one line at the top suggesting they read it. This is how poor communication breeds.
The reality is that the recipient probably hasn’t read it himself. Or read it properly, top to bottom. Out there are millions of people only half listening — their emails only half read, slackly responded to (hence my term for the BlackBerry): an industry riddled with the incompetence of the superficially efficient.
My most recent experience of this (boring technical aside follows, feel free to stop reading here) was from my hosting company, which only ever half-read my emails to them requesting help. Here’s our most recent exchange (of many):
Thanks for this, and www.loosewireblog.com is now working. But loosewireblog.com continues to FORWARD to the typepad address; this is not domain mapping. Is there no FAQ that hostway has on this much demanded feature? If not, can you give me specific instructions as to how to map the ROOT domain to the typepad address I’m seeking? Best, Jeremy
Their response, more than 12 hours later (from a 24–hour support service:
Hello,
We have updated your DNS records to the ones that you previously specified. Please test your site in a few hours and contact us if you still have problems.
Thank you.
In the intervening 12 hours I had figured out how to solve the problem I hoped they might be able to solve for me. So of course their fix — which wasn’t a response to my question, even though I had carefully put the key words in CAPS — actually broke the website. This might explain why those of you trying to access the blog via loosewireblog.com haven’t been fortunate the past few hours. Hopefully it is now fixed.
If only the Demise of the Considered Response was as easily reversible.
Loose Wire Blog has finally moved to loosewireblog.com. This won’t affect anyone that much, especially if they’ve never heard of or visited the blog before, but for those of you who do read it, first off, many thanks, and second off (that doesn’t sound quite right), this is, I hope, the first step in a redesign that will make the site easier to use, and with more stuff in it.
Technically speaking, accessing loosewireblog.com would take you to the Typepad site via domain forwarding; now the site is actually mapped to the domain, so while the content can be seen at both addresses, it would be best if you use loosewireblog.com as your bookmark from now on. Thanks again for reading, and remember that emails and comments are always very welcome.
It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo, new owner of social bookmarking and tagging pioneer del.icio.us, tries to bring the whole tagging shebang to the wider marketplace. Here’s an early example of how it might work. PR Newswire, a news release service, has announced a partnership with del.icio.us, to allow visitors to PR Newswire’s public website to tag individual news releases issued by PR Newswire members and post them into their personal profiles on del.icio.us.
The feature appears as a button alongside existing RSS, email and print button above each press release:
Click on the link and it takes you to your del.icio.us account (if you have one) and prepares a new entry. Nothing that revolutionary here, you may say, but I’d suggest that this is one of the first examples of del.icio.us breaking out of the usual blogosphere world. PR Newswire is, after all, for journalists, who are not known for their passion for things nerdy.
Of course, it’s a great way for PR Newswire to spread their news releases around, as the press release itself admits:
Once posted in a personal Del.icio.us profile, the news release is accessible to the thousands of users who search Del.icio.us for information regularly.
Indeed, this is one of the great strengths and weaknesses of del.icio.us. On the one hand it’s great to see what other people are tagging, and to get access to a live list of the latest exciting websites. On the other hand, how soon is this list going to be polluted — if it’s not already — by people promoting their own stuff or just by people tagging stuff that’s not very interesting? The irony of del.icio.us, in my view, is that it was wonderful while it was being used by people in the know, but it becomes less useful the more popular it gets and everyone starts tagging American Idol and Britney Spears websites.
That said, the popular feed of del.icio.us remains as nerdy as ever.
Microsoft have launched a new version of their Antispyware application, now rebuilt and renamed Windows Defender. Initial reports are favorable, including Paul Thurrott, who is good on these kind of things:
Windows Defender Beta 2 combines the best-of-breed spyware detection and removal functionality from the old Giant Antispyware product and turns it into a stellar application that all Windows users should immediately download and install. Lightweight, effective, and unobtrusive, Windows Defender is anti-spyware done right, and I still consider this to be the best anti-spyware solution on the market. Highly recommended.
Expect this program to become part of the next Windows operating system, meaning that spyware is going to be kept out of most computers by default. This is a good thing. What is less good is that it lets Microsoft decide what is and what isn’t spyware, giving them one more gate to control. Also, spare a thought for all the companies that have been selling antispyware software for the past few years; I can’t see many of them surviving past Windows Vista.