Echo Binary

Fresh from oven, a new service from Switzerland called CoComment allows you to track your blog comments in one place. It’s going to be popular with bloggers. It makes tracking comments so much easier because you only have to look in one centralized place.

You have to get an invite in order to test it right now. I’m lucky to be invited soon after I have read about CoComment in TechCrunch. I’m not sure if you’ll easily get an invite right now. More and more bloggers want to get an invitation.

CoComment requires a bookmarklet in your browser to fetch the comment you are about to post in a blog. I doubt that you can track your comments no matter where you make them because not all blog softwares are supported yet. Here are the supported blogs at the moment: Blogger.com, MSN Spaces, MySpaces, TypePad, Wordpress and Xanga. More blog softwares will be eventually supported by CoComment. Click here if you you don’t know what bookmarklet is. CoComment supports Firefox 1.x, Safari 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6.0.

Using the bookmarklet, a copy of your comment is addded to “Your Conversations” page on CoComment. You’ll now be able to review the comments made by all CoComment user in other blogs you have commented. Currently only CoComment users’ comments will appearr in “Your Conversations”. Comments made by people not user CoComment will not be recorded by CoComment. In the future, there will be advance blog integration tool that will enable all comments from your blog to be crawled and indexed by CoComment even if the commenters are not using CoComment.

If you find this intesting you shoould read the concept behind CoComment written by Laurent Haug.

This is going to be one of my favorite blog tool!

Links:
CoComment
TechCrunch.com: CoComment: Tracking Your Blog Comments
Scobleizer: Track your comments, no matter where you make them
Technorati Tags: CoComment, comment, blog, blogger

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview yesterday. I have tested IE7 Beta 1 in my laptop but I uninstalled it after several weeks. I’m testing Beta 2 Preview in my laptop again and based on my previous experience with IE7 Beta 1, I would say that Beta 2 Preview has a feel of Firefox and Opera combined. This is not the true Beta 2 yet hence Beta 2 PREVIEW. I’m looking forward to what IE 7 Beta 2 will be.

I’m fond of IE 7 tabs. It’s cool because every tab has its own close button but you can only access the close button of the active tab if you hover on the right tab corner long enough. Since the active tab only has a close button you can’t close the inactive tab by accident. It’s very clever. I wish Opera had done their tab close button this way. The quick tab feature is also neatly done, and very innovative IMHO. It was not ripped off from Opera or Firefox. The adopted RSS icon from Mozilla is also included in this Beta 2 Preview.

When you download IE 7 Beta 2 Preview and installed in your PC it will validate for a genuine copy of Windows (aka Windows Genuine Advantage). It will replace IE 6 so this Beta is not for the faint of heart. Fortunately you can uninstall this Beta if you want IE 6 back. Also, you should close your antivirus and anti-spyware softwares before installing IE 7 Beta 2 Preview. Most of them will interfere in the installation process which will prevent proper installation of IE 7.

There is a work around on using IE 7 without installing it though. Check out the comments in this Digg story about IE 7 work around. To keep it simple just download IE 7 Beta 2 preview, decompress and extract the .exe file in a folder, delete shlwap.dll and create a new text file IEXPLORE.exe.local in the same directory. Run iexplorer.exe and you should be able to run IE 7 without replacing IE 6. A final caveat: the advanced options won’t work and if you have firewall or anti-spyware softwares installed you’ll get wierd error messages and warnings. In fact it’s not recommended that you run IE 7 without a proper install.

For more information about Internet Explorer 7 take a tour in the official website of Internet Explorer 7.

Links:
Download IE 7 Beta 2 Preview [ via Digg ]
MSDN IE Blog: IE7 Beta 2 Preview Available
Technorati Tags: Internet+Explorer, IE7, browser, beta

Firefox 1.5.0.1 was officially released today and if you haven’t upgraded yet, check for Firefox updates now. Firefox 1.5.0.1 is a stability and security update, and it is recommended that you upgrade to latest version soon.

Here’s what’s new in Firefox 1.5.0.1:

• Improved stability.
• Improved support for Mac OS X.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled.
• Fixes for several memory leaks.
• Several security enhancements.

Thanks to Mozilla Firefox team, there are less memoy leaks in this release. I really hope that they continue working on the memory leak in Firefox because that’s the only thing that turns me off in this wonderful web browser.

Moving on to SeaMonkey, The SeaMonkey Council released SeaMonkey 1.0, the first end-user release of their internet suite. SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as “Mozilla Application Suite”. It’s essentially Firefox and Thunderbird combined despite the old Mozilla interface design.

SeaMonkey features a state-of-the-art web browser, a powerful email client, a WYSIWYG web page composer and a feature-rich IRC chat client all-in-one. You have an option not to install all components in case you really don’t need all these features. There’s a long list of features added in this first end-user release if you are interested to read it.

Links:
Firefox - Rediscover the Web
The SeaMonkey Project
MozillaZine
Technorati Tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Browser, SeaMonkey

Thanks goodness Wordpress 2.0.1 is here. It’s a small maintenance release and it addresses several problems that was introduced in WP 2.0. I’ve upgraded my clunky install of Wordpress 2.0 to version 2.0.1 and I’m pleased that it didn’t take too long until my blog was upgraded to version 2.0.1. Since I have installed WP 2.0 I have disabled several default features that annoyed me in WP 2.0 such as the visual editor, and I’m very pleased to disable it even if I have upgraded to 2.0.1. I wonder why it turns itself on after I upgraded. It should have been left disabled. Anyway, I tried testing the visual editor again and for some reason I still don’t like it. I still prefer the old school text editor where I can see all open and close tags. It’s just me so please don’t ask what’s wrong with the visual editor. I think it’s just fine. The visual editor had several fixes and cleanups so it should have improved quite a bit.

I noticed that after upgrading to WP 2.0.1 the caching improved too. I felt that the generation of pages on first visit didn’t take quite long caching compared to WP 2.0. As noted in the release notes, caching had been fixed under certain PHP enviroments. Sounds great. Also in this release, you can specify an upload folder and optionally disable the date-based storage. It should have been in the feature list since day one but it’s better late than never. I’m still cluelesss why there’s no option for removing automatic thumbnail generation. Who needs thumbnails when I resize all my images before uploading? Not everyone is fond of hosting big images linked from thumbnails as they can be leeched easily. Seriously, why this small option to disable thumbnail was left out? I don’t get it.

Overall this small update should fix the bugs in Wordpres 2.0. Congratulations to those who have waited long for this release. I recommend to upgrade your blog to Wordpress 2.0.1 if you are still running Wordpress 1.5. This time you won’t regret it. Perhaps you may want to wait for another minor or maintenance release but upgrading to WP 2.0.1 is already a good choice at this time. To all bloggers running Wordpress 2.0 I urge you to upgrade now!

Links:
Wordpress
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, blog, blogging

George Ou of ZDNet blogs wrote about µTorrent and how its author Ludvig Strigeus work on it on his spare time. It’s one of most popular BT client right now in Windows even though it’s relatively new. He also discussed the impressive performance of µTorrent compared to other Bit Torrent clients out there. It’s a good read about tight code programming. I must say that it really takes good practice and discipline to code slim yet powerful application. That’s a challenge to every programmer out there; however, it’s not necessarily what the market demands anyway.

I think it’s debatable whether you should value “tight coding”. I just find it disturbing. It’s scary how colleges all over the world produce “computer scientists” who simply knows how to glue together codes but can’t produce their own or even don’t know the theories behind their own codes! Now, read this and this comment. I guess it’s time to think about your progamming habits and practices.

Links:
µTorrent
ZDNet Blogs: Can great software live in 130 kilobytes?