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Recently I’ve created three add-ons for Firefox. Two of them were submitted for preliminary review and they’ve passed it without problems. One was submitted for full review from the beginning. I was quite surprised when my add-on MovieSearch haven’t passed full review, because (let me quote Mozilla reviewer here):
It is unclear to us at this time if your add-on will be useful for a general audience so that it warrants public listing. We’re granting you preliminary review only, but encourage you to promote your listing so that it garners more active users and user reviews. You may re-nominate your add-on once there is more proof of its usefulness.

Lets call it a week of Firefox add-ons:) I’ve created new one, this time it’s working with my own site (Facebook Text Hoster). Usage is very simple. Select the text you want to post on Facebook, right click and select “Post on Facebook” from context menu. You’ll be navigated to Facebook Text Hoster site where you only need to click Share button. It’s as simple as my previous two add-ons, the only difference is that this time I’m passing the text through encodeURIComponent function. It encodes your text before sending, so even if you want to post special characters they would be properly displayed.

Since December I was planning to write my own add-on for Firefox. I’m often reading a site where people post movie titles with dots between words instead of space, it was quite annoying to me, however it’s not a big issue. But I also wanted to be able to search for a movie title on my favorite site (filmweb.pl) quicker. Previously I’ve needed to copy the title, navigate to site, paste title in search bar then hit enter. Uff, a lot things to do. Of course there is a search add-on to add FilmWeb to Firefox search bar, but then I must switch it when I want to find something in Google instead. That’s why my add-on has been developed. It works pretty simple, you select the text you want to search for, right click on it and click either “Find on filmweb.pl” or “Find on imdb.com” (yes, imdb.com is also supported:)). As it’s my first creation for Firefox, hopefully not last one, I’m pretty excited. Yeah, I’ve called it MovieSearch, very originally.

I’m following Rainn Wilson (more known as Dwight Schrute) on Twitter and today I’ve read this post:

I wonder what type of boss he would be (as I live on earth for some time already, I know that not always the one who is funny man is also funny as a boss, sometimes it’s quite opposite). Would you like to work for Dwight? Well, maybe you’ll be able to see some of his crazy actions IRL:)

I’ve always loved Pandora radio, but now Pandora is available only to US citizens. However there is a solution, if you happen to own a VPS located in States (and your provider allows proxy service) then you can setup your own proxy server and enjoy listening to Pandora (and not only that) from any location. It could be also useful for Americans who gone abroad. With proxy you can also bypass your company’s firewall, so if admins are blocking some websites you’ll just access them via your proxy. OK, lets do it then. Login to your server as root and follow below steps (installation of packages as described below would work on Debian and Ubuntu, if you happen to have different distro then you must install packages following rules for your OS):

I’ve wanted to see episode of my favorite show Family Guy, so I’ve navigated to Hulu and launched it. I was presented with a message saying that if I would fill out short survey I can watch my show without ads. Nice deal, so I’ve filled all info, submitted it and started watching. But after a while I was presented with another message “There is connection problem we’re unable to stream your video”, or something like that. So I’ve restarted the show and I was able to watch it entirely, but this time with ads:( Not cool Hulu, not cool.

I’ve downloaded Internet Explorer 9 beta lately and must say that it’s quite improvement from version 8, but still not the browser for me. What do I like about it?

1. It’s visibly faster than previous version, especially with aspx apps. We have proprietary application for time tracking at work and performance have risen significantly.
2. Add-ons are finally here! Well, I haven’t seen any however;) But at least there is mechanism to install and manage them, may be a step in the right direction as add-ons are main power of FF.
3. You can check load time of your add-ons (and level of usage). Quite useful, you can now check how much Google Toolbar is slowing start of your browser and if you’re really using it so often, then decide if you really need it.
   
4. Menu has been shrunk to three small icons.
   
   It’s far more aesthetic than menu from IE8 and takes less space on screen, so you can use it for tabs.
   
5. Generally entire IE9 is now more minimalistic (probably because new Firefox will be as well). So for people who like their tools heavy with buttons (like on the picture below) it’ll be disappointment:)
   

But there are also things I don’t like:

I’ve seen Buried the other day, pretty nice movie, I really recommend it. It’s about the guy who is driver in Iraq (not a soldier). One day his convoy gets attacked, all his colleagues (well almost all) get killed, but he ends up buried alive in coffin. Quite good drama, as he is struggling with time to get himself out of the grave. He has a cell phone so he is in contact with tormentors and people who can help him. As usually it’s about the money, kidnappers want five million dollars, but quickly get down to one. Still US government doesn’t want to pay as they’re not negotiating with terrorist.

I love Amazon Kindle. This device is almost perfect. However I’ve found one “flaw” recently. We’ve bought additional Kindle (3G) for my wife’s sister and as it was a gift I’ve de-registered it from my Amazon account. Unfortunately it appears that if Kindle is not registered you can’t use 3G (it’s quite logical, Amazon protects their business), but the fact that it can’t be used even for registration is a little strange. I’ve worked for main telecom in Poland and even their ADSL (very poor service) had feature which enabled you to connect to registration page without being registered (as you must be able to create user in order to access the service). With Kindle you must use Wifi, and as I was at my mother’s who has no wireless it wasn’t possible to do so. It for sure isn’t big disadvantage, if you’ll not de-register Kindle when buying it you’ll not face the problem. But if you bought the device on Internet auction (popular way of buying Kindle in Poland) keep in mind that you’ll need Wifi before you’ll be able to use 3G. I find it very strange and irrational.