Firefox - The Browser, Reloaded

We all know and love Firefox, right? Right?! Good. As you know, it is nearly the best web browser on the planet. In order to make it be the absolutely best browser on the planet, you need to add a few extensions. In order to make it be the absolutely best browser on another planet, you need some expensive transportation, but that's a project for another day.

In the mean time, here's a list of my favorite extensions. Most of these can be found on Mozilla's site. Just click Tools -> Extensions. Then click Get More Extensions.

Firesomething - Do you miss the days when Mozilla constantly changed the name of their browser? Do you want to make interesting entries in web server logs? This extension renames Firefox every time you open it.

FoxAmp - Adds WinAmp control buttons to the status bar of your browser.

SuperScroll - Customize the keyboard and mouse wheel scroll speeds.

Stumbleupon - Waste many hours finding web sites that other people think are cool. It's probably not a good idea to put this on your work computer.

Image Zoom - Custom magnification of web page images.

BugMeNot - Tired of filling out inane marketing forms to get free access to web content? This tool provides you with logins that you can use to avoid the hassle and privacy loss that come with "free registration required" web sites.

GMailCompose - Do you use Gmail? This extension makes mailto: links open Gmail compose windows. Very nice!

Adblock - How sweet it is! Easily create custom filters to keep web page ads from loading. It doesn't take long to configure it to work with your favorite sites.

Googlebar - It has many of the same features as the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

NT/6 Wood Burning Turbine



This is an actual wood-burning gas turbine engine. Throw in a few
chunks of wood, fire it up, and you get about 2KW of electricity and
lots of heat and noise. Be sure to check out the videos at the
bottom of the page.

Hanoimania!

Amit Singh became one of my heroes as soon as I saw his Hanoimania! page. He wrote 110 different programs to solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. They were written in an amazing variety of languages and for an amazing variety of platforms. Some of them are complete operating systems that simply boot and solve the puzzle. A couple of them were written as firmware for the Macintosh. He even wrote versions of the program for a couple of video game consoles and a car MP3 player.

My favorite is the ICMP (ping) implementation. When you run this program on a server and then ping the server, you get the puzzle solution encoded in the ping response packets. This is truly the most wonderfully twisted use of computer resources that I have ever seen.

Figlet Server

  _______ _     _       _                       _   
 |__   __| |   (_)     (_)                     | |  
    | |  | |__  _ ___   _ ___    ___ ___   ___ | |  
    | |  | '_ \| / __| | / __|  / __/ _ \ / _ \| |  
    | |  | | | | \__ \ | \__ \ | (_| (_) | (_) | |_ 
    |_|  |_| |_|_|___/ |_|___/  \___\___/ \___/|_(_)

Web Sniffer
This tool rocks! Feed it a URL and it shows you the HTTP request and response headers along with the returned content. It even generates the HTTP request using information from your browser, so the the targetted web server will return content appropriate for your browser type. It's great for debugging web pages. It's also great for viewing the HTML source of a page in a nice format.

The Tao of Programming
This is a true classic work of literature. Here is an excerpt:

A novice asked the master: ``In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call `Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying `Go, Hence!' or `Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity be?"

The master replied: ``You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?''

Computer Languages Timeline
This is an awesome chart. It shows the lineage of 50 programming languages. As with people, you can tell a lot about a language by looking at its relatives. For info on more languages, check out The Language List, which has descriptions of roughly 2500 languages. That's more than I would try to fit on a single chart. Although, I would pay money for such a chart if someone else made it. :-)

For more fun, check out the UNIX History.

Jaco Strauss' Tech Support Excuse Generator
If I were still doing tech support, I would have fun with this! It's instant technobabble at your fingertips.

Too much of a good thing.
Network security is a good thing, right? Microsoft's knowledgebase has an article about the following error message. "Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords" I could out do that. Makes me wish I was a network admin for a day. :-)