internet

I was once told a story by a Wizened and Learned Colleague. He spoke
of a time past, but not so long ago, when he worked for a firm of
Learned Gentlemen of the Law. Being a Lawful Firm, as it were, a
Universal Policy had been established for the Conduct of Employees,
and the Reading of the Web. Certain Materials and Content were
disallowed under said Policy, and were not to be seen within the
Hallowed Halls of Learned Law.

One fateful Friday evening, soon after the Completion of Work but
before the Closing of the Doors, over a pint of the Keeper's Finest,
my Learned Colleague and his Brothers in Computer Operations sat and
examined the Log of Web Activity, and did scry within the Logs access
to Pornography of the Most Manly kind. Quickly the Sites of
Pornography were added to the List of Blocking, but more and more
Sites were seen to appear. One after another the Sites were Blocked,
but one after another a new Site would appear. Suddenly the Logs
quieted, and no further Sites were to be seen. My Learned Colleague
and his Brothers rested, sure of a job well done.

No sooner was a New Pint opened, than their door was burst asunder,

Have you ever tried to use a Google Apps account from a mobile phone with no Java? I've been fighting this over the past few days. The problem is that when you access the normal apps URL you get the fat Javascript interface - now this interface works, but is slow and uses up all my bandwidth. You do have the option of changing this to the HTML interface, but it still doesn't fit on a screen very well.

With the standard (non-apps) gmail account I can go to http://m.gmail.com/ and get a very lean interface designed for small screens. So I tried going to http://m.gmail.com/a/evil.geek.nz. Nope.

The answer, as it turns out, is http://mail.google.com/a/evil.geek.nz/x/

Yay!

Over the past few days I've come across two very cool browsers; Flock and Swiftfox.

Swiftfox describes itself as "an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox." I installed the AMD64 optimised (32 bit) build on Ubuntu Dapper x86 and I have to say it really is fast. If you like Firefox go get it. You won't regret it.

Flock is something new - it's based on Mozilla code but is something of a new browser concept. It integrates with blogs, online photo Flickry services, favourites tagging whatsits like del.icio.us and all sorts of social stuff like that. I'm using it to type this blog entry!