Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

The lastest Firefox news:

• Web apps faster with Firefox 3.1
  Firefox 3.1 will run many Web-based applications such as Gmail faster through incorporation of a feature called TraceMonkey that dramatically speeds up programs written in JavaScript, Mozilla said Friday. JavaScript has been very broadly used to add pizzazz or flexibility to Web pages over the years, but in recent years, it’s also become the plumbing for many rich Internet applications. However, because JavaScript has been hobbled by pokey performance, Web-based applications often struggled to work as responsively as “native” software running directly on PCs
• Useful Firefox 3 Configuration Tweaks
  Firefox keeps its advanced settings in a giant configuration file in your Firefox directory, and even offers an advanced interface to edit that file in the browser itself. To make these changes, type about:config in Firefox’s address bar. You’ll get a half-joking, half-serious message about voiding Firefox’s warranty if you change any settings. Press the “I’ll be careful. I promise!” button (because you will be) and you’ll be on your way.
• How to Skip the Installation Delay for Firefox Extensions
  As you may know, Firefox tries to protect you from malicious attacks by setting up a delay before allowing you to install a new extension. But if you’re confident in your browsing habits and you want to avoid the wait, just enter about:config in your address bar, then paste security.dialog_enable_delay into the filter box. Double-click that preference and change the value to 0.

Tonight I flipped away from the Olympics during the trampolene competition and caught Lenovo’s new ‘Cast Away’ commercial featuring their new IdeaPad Y Series of notebooks.  This not so original commercial was however quite eye catching.

Lenovo is advertising their Veriface technology which is basically a facial recognition program that uses their built in webcam to automatically recognize the face of an enrolled user and log him/her on to the computer.  Pretty slick.

According to Notebooks.com, Veriface is quite secure and will only enroll, in the flesh, human faces and can’t be fooled by glossy photographs.  Veriface isn’t exactly new technology as IBM was bundling it with webcams years ago.  As cool as it is, I’m not sure it’ll actually sell any laptops but I can guarantee that anyone who puchases a Lenovo with Veriface will definitely use it.

Here’s the commercial.

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• Security pros completely bypass Vista’s now “useless” security
  About all those fancy security measures Microsoft put into Windows Vista… well, they’re now pretty much useless, according to security experts from IBM and VMware presenting a new attack methodology at this week’s Black Hat security conference.
• Reporters booted from conference for hacking
  With thousands of hackers milling around the Black Hat convention here, and widespread snooping on the public Wi-Fi network, one place was supposed to be off limits: the press room.
• Moving Beyond Passwords For Security
  The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both partie

A couple days ago I wrote about the plethora of plugins needed to create a secure family style blog.  Today I’m going to tell you about the 5 most essential plugins everyone needs to have installed and activated regardless of your blog style or niche.

Wordpress.com Stats
Wordpress.com Stats is a pretty powerful “real” time stats package that was built for Wordpress.com blogs.  It’s also been ported to a plugin for Wordpress self hosted blogs as well.  The Stats info sits in your Dashboard and gives you data for number of visits (by day, week, or month), top posts of the day, top searches of the day and most active posts all time.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also a traffic stats plugin but is much more powerful than Wordpress.com Stats, however, the data only updates once per day (at night) so you can’t view real time statistics which is why you should use both.  Analytics provides the same data as Stats but also includes map location of visitors, visitor information such as browser version, OS version, screen size, ISP info, detailed referrer stats and much more.  Also included in Analytics is report functionality where you can schedule reports to be emailed daily, weekly or monthly.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
FeedSmith is Feedburner’s own plugin designed for Wordpress.

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Postalicious
Postalicious is a great, recently updated, plugin for casual bloggers (like me) who want a quick way to keep their blog activity going even when they don’t have the time to create new original content.  Postalicious takes your Delicious, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes feeds and creates a blog post.  It’s very configurable and automatic.  I have Postalicious post my links daily (when there are at least two links).  You can choose what categories to assign to the post, have it auto published or saved as a draft, etc.  Delicious has their own tool , which they still refer to as “experimental”. Don’t waste your time, Postalicious is way more powerful.

Akismet
You have to have a comment spam killer if you have a blog.  Akismet, was built by Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress’ creator.  Generally installed automatically when you install your Wordpress self-hosted site, Akismet should be a no brainer.

Akismet is a spam-fighting service that is different from others such as Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior in that it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.

Here’s a hilarious video produced by CrunchGear. If you’ve used Twitter for more than 3 days chances are you’ve seen the “Fail Whale”… Twitter’s effective blue screen of death. If Twitter users jump ship to one of it’s competitors, horrid server response will be the reason. (slight subtitle language warning)

Not sure what Twitter is? Here’s the best explanation.