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Firefox 3.5 Release

James Moey — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:08:21 +0000

For those who have been hiding under a stone. Firefox 3.5 was release this week. I was happy there was already upgrade for Firebug, Web Developer plugin. I remember the last upgrade 2.x to 3. The plugins were lagging behind the browser release.

So far, Firefox is running very well. on my machine. On average, I have 20 tabs open at one time. The only complain I have is sometime the browser freeze for 10-15 seconds or so. Not sure if it is the Windows 7 problem or the browser itself.

What are your experience with Firefox 3.5?

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5

James Moey — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:13:47 +0000

There are ton of good review on the Internet regarding to Firefox 3 performance and stability. Version 2 was a bit disappointing, specially when it is use on Laptop where RAM is always a precious resource. I have try Beta 3 and 4 before, but there is always the issue of lacking plugin compatibility, making me putting it off from upgrading from version 2. I do a lot of web development, therefore Firebug and Web Developer plugin is a must. Public release is not due until June, 2008, 2 months away. I have been waiting since December last year. A long long wait.

Today, I try my luck again. After download and install Firefox 3, I try to find Firebug plugin. The Firebug on the Mozilla Plugin Site is not compatible with Firefox 3, but there is a link to the plugin homepage. I follow the link and landed on here. To my surprise, there is a working version of the plugin that is compatible with Firefox 3. Even though it is a beta version, I straight away download and install it. I am very happy and excited that it work. Now I can move to Firefox 3. I also find Web Developer plugin and it is compatible with version 3. Double strike today, not too bad for a day. Other plugin like adblock and del.icio.us bookmark does not work, those are not as essential for me. I can wait on those plugin. I found an excellent plugin, ScribeFire. It is a plugin that allow you write your blog and publish it to your blog. All blogger should try the plugin, I believe you will enjoy it too.

So far, I have let Firefox 3 run for 4 hours plus. The first thing I notice, memory use by Firefox actually goes up and down. Not just up and up like in Firefox 2. Currently, it is using 76MB. If I was running Firefox 2, the memory usage after 4 hours will be 100++MB. The performance of the browser is fast. Changing between tab is very responsive and swift. The only downside that I experience, is when I click on a link sometime the Firefox freeze and not responsive. That could be my machine acting up, I will need to monitor that. Other than that, I recommend Firefox 3 to anyone who use a browser. For less IT illiterate, maybe wait till Public Release, if you are IT know-how, I recommend that you give it a try.

Protect your email address from Spammer and Forgery

James Moey — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:05:39 +0000

Domain Name is one of the most precious asset in online business. We should spent some time and effort in protecting it from being misused and get blacklisted. Today I am going introduce is SPF stand for Sender Policy Framework. It is an effective method to protect your domain from being used by spammer to send out spam email with your domain name. The framework is a technical method in preventing sender email address forgery.

How does SPF work?

SPF is a framework that need to be implement by both side of the email system, the sender and the receiver.

The sender need add a TXT entry in their DNS entry. This entry allow the sender to specify what host is authorized to send email using it’s domain name. For example,
```
sitek.com.au.     TXT     "v=spf1 mx -all"
```
This entry in the sitek DNS entry would mean that all sitek.com.au MX host are authorized host to use sitek.com.au domain name to send out email. They are allow to send out sitek.com.au email address’s email. More information on syntax can be found in www.openspf.org.
When receiver end, receive an email, it will need to check the sender email address DNS entry. If DNS contain SPF entry, check are perform to make sure that the sending host is one of the machine listed in the SPF entry. This prevent spammer from using your domain name to spam email.

We should encourage ourselves and other to implement SPF framework on their domain and mail server to help fight against SPAM. List of SPF implementation on the receiver end from here.