Rayey.Com

One of the most important features of Mozilla FireFox is the large number of useful extensions available for it. In this article I will talk about some of the extensions I use ..

Need an Answer?

Since English is not my first language, while browsing I often come across words that I don’t have any idea what they mean ..  In stead of rushing for a dictionary or opening an online translate tool I use Answers.Com FireFox Extension . It enables me to view the meaning of any word on a layer on the same page  just by holding the ALT key and clicking on it.  It’s perfect because it gives you a lot of information about any word and fully explains it without ever leaving the page and opening a new application which will make you loose your focus on what you are reading.

 456315.651 EUR , How Much is it in KDs ?!

When you browsing for products and you need a way of converting between currencies that is both accurate and current using Exch side bar is the best way. This extension will fetch the current conversion rate from Yahoo Finance and allow you to convert currencies in the sidebar while your browsing.

Video Downloader

The Video Downloader extension is a must have for people who visit video social networks sites like YouTube and Metacafe and a lot of other video sites .. installing this extension will show an icon on the status bar , if your in the video page .. you just click this icon and a pop up window containing a link to the video’s download link will show up to you.

( you might need to download an FLV player because not all the files are available in avi format )

 Book Marking

My favorite way of bookmarking is using del.icio.us  it’s particularly handy for people who browse on more than one computers (Work, home desktop, laptop .. )  and want immediate access to their bookmarks .. it also enables you to share your bookmarks with others and has a fast and handy way of bookmarking and tagging pages.

This article ( 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them )  is an excellent article that talks about the different kinds of Web design clients out there .. It’s a good read for designers and developers and explains the highs, the  lows and  how to work with each type ..

Web 2.0 Summit Videos This is a page from the web 2.0 Summit .. A summit that was helt back in November 2006 ..

On this page they have the complete coverage of all the summits seminars, discussion and presentations. They include some really great an inspiring discussion from people who are changing the face of the web. The videos feature speakers from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, GoDaddy ..

Those videos are very inspiring and informative and I thought I’d share them with you ..

I came across this page  “How I Work: Bill Gates” where bill gates tells  in details how he does his daily work, an thought I’d share it with my blog reader(s) ..   (I don’t think that I need the ’s’ yet :P)

P.S.

and I think that Bill Gates is copying from me

I’ve recently got a new LCD screen and added it to the existing one to create a dual screen setting ..

The advantages are endless.. and the main one is increasing the productivity,

To mention only one way of increasing productivity .. now I can easily have dreamweavor on one screen and the web project I’m programming in the browser on the other screen and view the changes as I change the code in stead of using ALT+TAB a million time and loosing the focus every time the windows are switched ..

I definitely recommend using it ..

Multiple screens or a BIG one

I’ve done a part of the math for you and compared the use of a 40” LCD screen against using multiple smaller screens based on Screens prices in Kuwait  ..

When it comes to displays the main factor is not how large the windows will look on the screen , it’s how many windows or how many applications can you view on your screen and this is determined by the resolution .. the other factor of course is the size of your wallet $$

A brand new 40” SONY LCD will give you a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 ( 2.073 million pixels ) and it’s priced at around 1000 KD !!

while a low priced ACER 17” Screen will give a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 ( 1.310 million pixels ) and it’s only 51 KD ..

But if you use two of these screens in extended mode you’ll get a total of 2.621 million pixels of desktop space which is way better for you and your wallet

of course there are higher resolution (30” - 40”) LCD screens for a single screen setting ..

but you can also use larger screens for the multiple screens setting and even better you can use more of them !

Software

This is a great software called Ultramon will make you utilise and manage your screens more efficiently.

Links

Here’s a more detailed article about multiple screens from a site called TECHARP .

and for those of you who already have multiple screens this free dual monitor backgrounds website dmb might be useful ..

A discussion about this on Slashdot

ISPs in Kuwait usualy ban websites, but today it was the opposite thing that happened!

Starting from today (and I don’t know when will it end) If you’re a fasttelco subscriber when you try to access Slashdot.org you’ll get a weired error page saying “Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot”. Of course at the begining I thought that for some reason only  my IP has been banned but when I called Fasttelco’s support and told them to check the website they got the same message. It turns out that the ip they banned is the ip of the gateway and all the subscribers will not be able to access it.  The technical support guy promised that they will contact them and  it might  be solved by “tomorrow” .

Now what could possibly be the reason for that ban ?!

Do you think that there’s someone in Kuwait performing a DoS attack on slashdot ?

or is there someone who’s trying to crawl their website using a crude robot?