I was surfing around the web this evening while watching the Sox (who FINALLY have a lead here at 10:14pm). While surfing, I accidentally discovered something fantastic built into the ‘Safari’ web browser.

What I found was that if you highlight and ‘ctrl’ click on text you have the option to automatically run a google search. WOW! I thought that was pretty cool. Especially if you’re reading a website and you come across a word that you don’t know, you can just highlight and click and get the defination from several different sources!

I guess something that would make it a little better is if the google site would open up in a new window or tab. That way I wouldn’t lose the original site while checking out Google.

So, to wrap up: I think that Google feature in Safari is cool. If you don’t use a Mac or use something inferior to Safari for browsing the web, you have my sympathies.

A few interesting tidbits for the day:

Unearthing the origins of Firefox — how Mozilla emerged from Netscape’s closed source world, and how we got to where we are with Firefox.

Virgin Electronics’ “iPod-killer” — functional but uuuuuugly.

Earlier today, Jay Allen, creator of the MT-Blacklist plugin, posted on his blog that Six Apart had just pulled in an additional $10 million of venture capital funding. He wondered in his blog entry, “Geez, what they’re going to spend that money on?”.

A little while later, Mena Trott posted on Mena’s Corner that Jay would be moving back to California from Hungary and joining Six Apart as a product manager.

Hmm, I suppose that explains where at least some of that new venture capital could be going. 😉 Methinks Jay knew just a tad more than he was letting on in his post… if not, then it’s certainly an amazing coincidence!

Anyway, congrats Jay! Your plugin is great, and though I’ll probably never upgrade past Movable Type 2.661, I do appreciate all of the work you have done. The MT-Blacklist plugin helps protect all of the blogs here at prwdot.org from comment spammers, and Jay’s genius will surely come in handy at Six Apart.

Update: Jay just got around to posting about it.

So this morning I was importing some older CD’s into iTunes so that I could sync them with my iPod. I have iTunes configured so that when a CD is inserted, it automatically grabs the song titles from the ‘net, extracts all of the audio content from the CD, and then ejects the CD when finished. It plays a little sound when it’s done so that I don’t have to keep checking to see how far along it is.

Well, this morning I kept coming back in to find iTunes showing a message “Some of the songs on this CD have already been imported. Do you want to replace them?” I wasn’t quite sure why that would happen, so I chose “Yes,” then left and came back later. Each time, it repeated the same message for the same CD over and over.

Not until the fourth time I was prompted did I realize why this was happening. I have an external CD-ROM/CD-RW sitting on my desktop behind my keyboard. I happened to have pushed my keyboard back far enough so that it was right in front of the door of the CD-ROM drive. So, every time the CD was ejected, it popped out, hit the keyboard, and was automatically pushed back in. iTunes thought it was another CD to be imported, so it tried to re-import all of the tracks, and that’s how I got the message.

Gahh. Time to wake up and get to work!

Firefox, the cross-platform web browser, has registered over 1,000,000 downloads in the ten days since its 1.0 Preview Release! I’m glad to see that the world has come to the realization that there is a choice other than Internet Explorer, and that they’re downloading a very well-made browser to replace it.

You can do the same – if you’re viewing our website (that is, you’re not reading this by way of an RSS newsreader), just scroll down the page until you see the ridiculously huge Firefox banner ad on the left. Give it a click, and follow the links to download Firefox! The link on that banner helps track just how many people have downloaded Firefox by way of the ad on my website. So far, that number is two… a small number, but when added together with the thousands of other promoters, it means a lot!

If you’re a Mac user, feel free to experiment with Firefox. It’s pretty good, but I would still recommend Safari as the best browser on the Mac. Either one is certainly preferable to IE.

Of course, don’t let me stop you from switching to Mac OS X so that you can use Safari… now that would be excellent.

So the other day I was thinking, “Self, this blog thing you post to is just a front-end to a ***MySQL|http://www.mysql.com/*** database. You know MySQL, and you know how to massage data in MySQL. So why not do something fun with it?”

So I wrote a ***dynamic reporting app|http://prwdot.org/blog_report.php*** using PHP and MySQL, which shows up-to-the minute statistics on how many total posts exist for different months, days, and hours. It’s kind of fun to look back at the stats. For example, in March 2003, we had the most posts ever – 42! Why was that? Part of it may have been the short-lived “Picture of the Day’ feature we were doing at that point. Our lowest posting month was July of 2003. That month was full of travels, visits from friends and relatives, and other such things… so less posting there. Mondays and Tuesdays are our most popular days for posting, probably since we’ve just finished off the weekend. And 10 am is the most popular hour for posting… not sure why, though. 🙂

Some of these stats are already available on our ***archives|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives*** page, but others can only be had through custom coded queries. There’s more I could do – for example, break down the statistics based on who was doing the posting, or see if there is a correlation between the length of the post and the time or date.

I’ve also set up the script so that you can see the stats for other blogs on the prwdot.org domain. Enjoy!

Check out the new ***Mozilla.org|http://www.mozilla.org/*** website! Featuring EZ-Download of their awesome web browser, ***Firefox|http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/***. Though ***Safari|http://www.apple.com/safari/*** is still my personal choice on the Mac platform, I think Firefox is the best choice on any other platform. Especially on Windows. And especially instead of Internet Explorer.

I must say, I am very excited to see that only 52.9% of our site visitors are using IE! The rest of our visitors are split fairly evenly between Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari.

And for the other 52.9% of you – ***Browse Happy!|http://browsehappy.com/***

Well, I haven’t been much of a fan of ***Friendster|http://www.friendster.com/*** since I first started using it, but now I have a good cause for which to ditch them.

***Jeremy Zawodny|http://jeremy.zawodny.com/*** ***writes that Joyce Park was fired from Friendster|http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002498.html*** because of certain details she posted in her blog. She has made a concerted effort not to blog about anything that isn’t public record, but apparently some of the technical details she posted in her blog were disagreeable to her employer.

Anyway, you can ***read her side of the story|http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/46_Shitcanned.html***, and then ***delete your Friendster account|http://www.friendster.com/cancelaccount.php***, as I have already done.

If you’re looking for another social networking site, might I suggest ***Orkut|http://www.orkut.com/***? If you would like to be an Orkut member, just let me know – I’ll send you an invite. Orkut’s a more featureful service anyway – that is, when they aren’t overloaded. 🙂

At the Apple Expo in Paris, Apple has just announced the all-new iMac G5!

ppp|
Sweet.|ppp

That is a darn good machine for only $1299. Though I would definitely bump up the RAM from the default 256 (???) to at least 512 – a 512 meg stick at OWC costs only $89.

Farnham-san has a much longer writeup with his impressions of the iMac.

Go Apple!

So it looks like just about everybody who wants one has a Gmail account now.

I now have six Gmail invitations to give out! If you currently use something like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or some other free email provider, why not give it a try? You might like it. Just let me know if you want one.