donate to the firefox NYT ad campaign

Head over to SpreadFirefox.com and read about their latest campaign to print a community-funded advertisment in the New York Times for the release of Firefox 1.0. Those who donate will have their name printed in the advertisment as a donor. I think it’s an excellent idea, and encourage you to donate to them too. If … Continue reading “donate to the firefox NYT ad campaign”

Head over to SpreadFirefox.com and read about their latest campaign to print a community-funded advertisment in the New York Times for the release of Firefox 1.0. Those who donate will have their name printed in the advertisment as a donor. I think it’s an excellent idea, and encourage you to donate to them too. If you decide to sign up, please do so via my link, as I’ll get some points. Students can sign up for only $10, and others for a little more.

As an aside, I wasn’t logged in when I made my donation (at the time there was no notice that you would get sfx points for donating). If it’s not too much hassle, if anyone can help me to get the points credited to my account, that would be really great. If it helps any, my Donation ID is 109, and my sfx username is aebrahim.

UPDATE: The campaign has ended, and if you try to sign up, you’ll receive an error. So please don’t try anymore. 🙂 I’ve killed the donate link so that nobody tries to sign up and wonders why it’s not working.

thoughts on undecided voters

This whole election deal in America has been going on forever. Everybody has heard so much about Kerry, Bush and others that surely at this point, nobody cares to hear any more. If only that were true. Apparently, some fickle minded people are still undecided. What’s wrong with these people? Seriously, if you’ve not heard … Continue reading “thoughts on undecided voters”

This whole election deal in America has been going on forever. Everybody has heard so much about Kerry, Bush and others that surely at this point, nobody cares to hear any more. If only that were true. Apparently, some fickle minded people are still undecided.

What’s wrong with these people? Seriously, if you’ve not heard enough about the candidates in the last year to make a decision, what in the world makes you think that by November 2nd you’ll have figured it out? Or maybe they’re waiting for some divine revalation. I wish these people would decide already, and that tomorrow was November 2nd. Campaigning in the US starts way too early, and by August, everybody is already sick of it. I want it to be over. But noooo, all these weak-minded undecided voters have to spoil it for everybody because they’re being indecisive.

In short: people who are still undecided suck. They get all the attention. Why? Because they’re fickle losers.

twenty-seven gmail invites

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.

disabled comments for gmail

I’ve disabled comments for Gmail related posts, because all I get are requests for invites that I can’t fulfil.

I’ve disabled comments for Gmail related posts, because all I get are requests for invites that I can’t fulfil.

howto: converting a 3rd level .name domain to a 2nd level .name domain

The .name TLD, run by the Global Name Registry (GNR) is somewhat abnormal in that they accept both 3rd level and 2nd level domain registrations in the same TLD. When they first opened up the .name TLD, only 3rd level registrations were available, and I registered ali.ebrahim.name. At the same time, anybody else could register … Continue reading “howto: converting a 3rd level .name domain to a 2nd level .name domain”

The .name TLD, run by the Global Name Registry (GNR) is somewhat abnormal in that they accept both 3rd level and 2nd level domain registrations in the same TLD. When they first opened up the .name TLD, only 3rd level registrations were available, and I registered ali.ebrahim.name. At the same time, anybody else could register foo.ebrahim.name. This was to make sure that the maximum number of people got domain names related to their name. Fast forward two years, and the 2nd level gets opened up on those domains that don’t have any 3rd level registrations.

At this point, I’m left with ali.ebrahim.name, and I have a hunch that nobody else has any other registrations on *.ebrahim.name. So I want to try and “convert” my 3rd level ali.ebrahim.name into the 2nd level ebrahim.name domain. I don’t know how to go about handling it, and there is no information online on this topic at all. It goes on the back burner. Fast forward another few months, and I get an email from Register.com asking for $30 to extend my ali.ebrahim.name registration for another year. As I balk at being extorted for this amount, I decide to once and for all see if I can put this matter to rest.

I email GNR at info [@] gnr.com asking what the procedure is for converting a 3rd level domain to a 2nd level domain. They reply and say that if I tell them what 3rd level domains I own on any given 2nd level, they can check if there are any other registrations on that 2nd level, and if there aren’t, they’ll let me know how to proceed. So I let them know that I only have ali.ebrahim.name. I get the following reply, which has full instructions on how the process works:

I can confirm that the only registrations on ebrahim.name are:
ALI.EBRAHIM.NAME.

This means that you can “convert” to using ebrahim.name, thought it would mean that you would be without a working domain name and email address for 5-6 days. The only way of “converting” third level registrations to a second level registration is by doing the following:

1) Issue deletion of third level registrations. The names will go into serverHold/pendingDelete status and will remain so for five days. On the sixth day they will be explicitly deleted by a batch process running at 4am UTC/GMT.

2) On the sixth day after issuing the delete commands, register the second level domain name (through the same or a different registrar).

A few comments on the above:

If someone meanwhile register another third level registration on ebrahim.name, you will unfortunately not be able to register the second level domain name ebrahim.name. Also, you have to make sure you are the first one to try and register ebrahim.name after the third levels have been explicitly deleted.

If you choose to go through this process, after you notify your
registrar that you want to delete the domain name and email forwarding, please let me know. Then I can tell you exactly when the two registrations will be explicitly deleted and thus when you should be able to register the domain name ebrahim.name.

So I went through the process as stated, and lo and behold, ebrahim.name is now mine. Currently there are no domain backorder services for the .name TLD, so as long as you know when your 3rd level domains are scheduled to expire, you should be able to be the first one to grab the 2nd level. I registered ebrahim.name with Gandi for €12/year.

Finally, kudos should go to the people at GNR for always replying to emails in a timely fashion, and being a big help all around. Special thanks goes to Asbjorn Steira, who personally handled my case. I’m so glad I didn’t have to deal with Verisign to get this done.

Hope that somebody out there finds this information of some use. I figured I could write the first HOWTO on this topic. 🙂

firefox guidebook table of contents

A lot of people have been wondering what the Firefox Guidebook contains. Blake Ross, the author, has posted a Table of Contents on his site. So if you want to know what you’re getting, now at least you have a little bit of information. Still, a sample chapter would be great too. I’m probably going … Continue reading “firefox guidebook table of contents”

A lot of people have been wondering what the Firefox Guidebook contains. Blake Ross, the author, has posted a Table of Contents on his site. So if you want to know what you’re getting, now at least you have a little bit of information. Still, a sample chapter would be great too. I’m probably going to pick one of these up for posterity sake along with a Firefox 1.0 / Thunderbird 1.0 CD when their final versions are released.

where to get gmail invites

I decided a while ago that giving out Gmail invites on my blog was too much hassle to be worth it. So I had a bunch of invites (27 in total) that I had unused, lying wasted. But all is not lost if you still want to get an account. Just head over to SpreadFirefox.com, … Continue reading “where to get gmail invites”

I decided a while ago that giving out Gmail invites on my blog was too much hassle to be worth it. So I had a bunch of invites (27 in total) that I had unused, lying wasted. But all is not lost if you still want to get an account. Just head over to SpreadFirefox.com, where a huge Gmail giveaway is taking place. I’ve donated all the invites I have to that programme.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. According to this post by RobinMonks, the sfx team has decided that the Gmail invite program is no longer going to be an sfx feature:

Well, I just found out not 30 seconds ago myself that the Gmail automation process was taken down.

Here’s what I know:
1) For unknown reasons and reasons I might never know the SFX team decided not to make Gmail an official site feature.
2) The automation process while it was online was successful and worked wonderfully.
3) The greater percentage of users were happy with the system
4) The project has been handed back to me to handle by hand.

Of cource, it’s almost impossible to handle all of the invite requests by hand.

From what I gather RobinMonks has been making some important contributions to sfx. Not cool pulling the rug out from under him. Also, what about all the invites that people have already donated, and haven’t been given out yet?

In the meantime, if you haven’t yet got an invite and want one, you can try your luck over here.

AIM 5.9.3690 sucks

Don’t be duped like I was into installing it. It’s gone through about as much QA testing as Netscape 6.0, if even that. Some of the gems: a) The “Don’t show AIM.com window on startup” preference doesn’t work. b) Incoming message sounds don’t work for me 90% of the time. c) When I do complex … Continue reading “AIM 5.9.3690 sucks”

Don’t be duped like I was into installing it. It’s gone through about as much QA testing as Netscape 6.0, if even that. Some of the gems:

a) The “Don’t show AIM.com window on startup” preference doesn’t work.
b) Incoming message sounds don’t work for me 90% of the time.
c) When I do complex things like say, quit the program, it decides to crash instead.

Nice work guys! I just made the trip over to OldVersion.com to grab the latest AIM 5.5 release.

spreadfirefox server issues

Since the release of Firefox 1.0 PR, the SpreadFirefox site has taken quite a beating. yusufg, someone who deals with these kind of issues on a daily basis for sites that would put MoFo‘s relatively tiny usage to shame, writes about some ways that load problems could be alleviated. In particular, he mentions that static … Continue reading “spreadfirefox server issues”

Since the release of Firefox 1.0 PR, the SpreadFirefox site has taken quite a beating. yusufg, someone who deals with these kind of issues on a daily basis for sites that would put MoFo‘s relatively tiny usage to shame, writes about some ways that load problems could be alleviated. In particular, he mentions that static content (including images and other stuff) should be shunted off to another server or vhost that would run a lightweight, non-preforking server (that could host static content for all of MoFo’s stuff). He also talks about cache-friendly headers that could be used to help lessen the load too. For email woes, he notes that postfix is far better than sendmail.

firefox in the hong kong press

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong’s premier English language newspaper) today reported on Firefox in one of its technology columns. The reviewer had mixed feelings about Firefox: he liked the product, but had problems with its installation. I’d link to the article itself, but it requires a paid site subscription, so instead I made … Continue reading “firefox in the hong kong press”

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong’s premier English language newspaper) today reported on Firefox in one of its technology columns. The reviewer had mixed feelings about Firefox: he liked the product, but had problems with its installation. I’d link to the article itself, but it requires a paid site subscription, so instead I made a PDF and have made that available for viewing. Thanks to yusufg for the heads up.