Sam’s random musings

CSSVista: Tweak CSS and see it in IE and Firefox at the same time:

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously.

The software is brought to us by the authors of Litmus, a tool that tests your websites on a set of browsers.

cool tool for windows web developers, I won’t use it for a couple of reasons, I’m a mac-a-holic and too much of an engineer to worry about pixel perfection…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

/IE7/intro/:

Web developers are becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of convergence of the major browser vendors. We need a level playing field! CSS is a powerful technology. Many of its more advanced features go unused by web developers because of Explorer’s poor support of CSS standards.

don’t know how much it helps…

(Via .)

IETab—Gold!:

Hats off to Hong Jen Yee. Forget catching tigers by the tail — this clever coder and friends have put together an extension able to tame the might of Internet Explorer within a humble Firefox tab. Magic. Operation is as simple as it gets.

• Install it
• Go to a site
• Right click and scroll to ‘View this page in IETab’

And the greatest chuckle? IE now has tabbed browsing in Firefox before it has it natively.

This is really cool, I bet Lance could really use this.

(Via SitePoint’s Design Blog: Pixel Perfect.)

How to fix Mom’s computer [Scribbling.net] Went home for the holidays this week, and of course, the annual fix-Mom’s-computer event. This year things on my mother-in-law’s Windows 98 PC were especially bad; it could’ve been used as a software showcase of the latest and greatest in malware.

For future reference, here’s a laundry list of steps I took to get Mom’s computer working and secured from evil software.

Dawn of the Dead–Fresh Windows installs turned into zombies in 4 minutes.:

Since my last post about patching Windows using Knoppix before connecting it to the net, a new study has come out that finds the time until intrusion is as little as 4 minutes for a fresh Windows XP machine.

Wow 4 min. The real question is… is this better then the last update?? Why is it that this os doesn’t ship locked up with the firewall active?

(Via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O’Reilly Network Weblogs.)

Load up your USB drive before you visit your parents: - First, turn on the Windows Firewall (Double click the Network connection in the task bar > Properties > Advanced > Settings > Turn on Firewall). - Run Anti-Spyware, free from LavaSoft. - Run Anti-Virus, we like this free one from GriSoft. Run Windows Update.
- Get a new Browser, FireFox. - Get Skype.

Got other suggestions and advice? Post up in their comments. This great advice, what would their list be for Macs…

(Via Engadget.)

For Whatever Reasons:

USA Today technology columnist Kevin Maney complained last week about having been hit hard by a Windows virus on his home computer:

…

Anger about this stuff is spreading as fast as the viruses. At our end-of-summer block party, I mentioned to a group of neighbors that a virus had crashed our PC. Instantly, every one of them launched into stories about unstoppable blitzes of adware (which throws pop-up ads on your screen, or worse) and spyware (which can find stuff on your PC and send it somewhere) and computers brought down by viruses

The message I get is that people are fed up with the vulnerability of Windows. They are increasingly willing to consider other options. And, for whatever reasons, Apple Computer’s Macintosh and Linux-based computers hardly get infected or invaded at all.

“For whatever reasons” is the key point I tried to make in “Broken Windows” back in June. The reasons why are subject to argument. But you can’t argue about the net effect: Windows users, especially with their home computers, are plagued by insidious malware; everyone else is not.

Read the rest of this post and the Broken Windows from june

(Via Daring Fireball.)

How Not to Get ‘Phished’:

The FTC releases a helpful guide to avoid the lure of phishers.

(Via internetnews.com: Top News.)