I’ve had some trouble accessing http://support.microsoft.com lately and thought it had to do with me using Firefox, since it worked just fine when using Internet Explorer.  I got an uninformative ASP.NET runtime error.

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

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Runtime Error

But after reading this thread at channel9 I cleared all cookies from the microsoft.com domain and now I can access http://support.microsoft.com again.

I think I’m going to switch from FeedDemon/Newsgator to Google Reader. I’ve been trying it now for about a week and even if there are some bugs the experience has been pretty good. It feels responsive and fits the way I read feeds. Not sure if it’s any better than FeedDemon/Newsgator, but so far I haven’t found it to be any worse either.

Some things that would make Google Reader even better.

• Streamline folder and tag concepts. It’s just too confusing right now.
• Make it possible to rename folders and tags.
• Add an option to only show new items for a folder/tag/feed since I last read it.
• Filter and group items that are about the same topic, like Google News and Gmail.
• Feed recommendations based on what I read.

I have a few months left on my current Newsgator subscription and right now it looks like I wont be renewing it. But maybe some killer feature will be added in the next FeedDemon release that will change that. Who knows?

You’d think someone would at least test the ads that go out all Live Messenger users. Usually I don’t mind the ads in Live Messenger since they’re usually very unobtrusive, and I’ve never seen anything remotely interesting being advertised. But getting a script error dialog every time I restore Live Messenger is beyond annoying.

That was pretty quick. Version 1.6.1 of uTorrent has been released with a fix for the malformed .torrent exploit. So now we can all feel save while pirating sharing again.

Found a neat applet for making sure that I have the latest and most secure versions of my software created by Secunia. It’s called the Secunia Software Inspector and when I ran it on my computer I found that both my Java JRE and Adobe Flash were out of date. Keeping up with security fixes is a pain.

Also, the latest version of uTorrent apparently has a vulnerability [secunia.com]. I wonder why this isn’t made really obvious on uTorrent’s homepage?

And I’ve changed the look of my site. Found a neat theme for wordpress. I’ve also added plugins for flickr and last.fm. Lots of fun

Wonder if I ever will manage to write anything more often than once every one or two months..

Raymond Chen recently linked to an old post about a death threat he’s received. One should probably not laugh at death threats, but this one is just too funny. Hopefully I’m not the only one who’s missed it.

Link

While browsing the extensions on Firefox Add-ons I found an extension called Second Search. It adds a shortcut menu to the search box with the different search engines. It allows you to search using any of the installed search engines without having to change the default engine using just a few key presses.

A much needed usability improvement to the search box if you ask me.

Since I last wrote about synchronizing my phone with Google calendar I’ve given up on the gcalsync j2me application. It simply was too cumbersome to manually start it up once in a while in order to get my calendars in sync.

As a replacement I’ve started using ScheduleWorld instead. It is a calendar service that in addition to supporting synchronization with google calendar sports a SyncML server. This allows me to use my phone’s built-in SyncML client and so far it has been working great except for some downtime a few days ago.

I’ve set it up so that my phone will synchronize ScheduleWorld once per day, and since ScheduleWorld can sync with Google calendar whenever a SyncML session is started it should keep all my stuff up to date.

I’d still prefer it if Google calendar would expose a SyncML service directly but you can’t get everything I guess.

Currently there is only one extension that I find really useful, and that is Download Statusbar. Are there any other useful extensions out there worth having installed?

At the moment I’m toying with a few additional extensions together with Firefox 2.0.

• ChromaTabs – Colors the each tab with a different color depending on the domain
• del.icio.us – Adds “My del.icio.us” and tag buttons
  
• Tab Catalog – Shows thumbnails of the pages for each tab similar to the new IE7 feature

I think the Tab Catalog one will the first to go since I can’t really come up with any good uses for it. But the other two I might keep. Having two small buttons for del.icio.us instead of an entire Bookmarks toolbar visible is nice. The only thing that could cause issues is if it starts crashing the browser as some previous version did when I tried it with Firefox 1.5. And the colored tabs looks really nice and adds a very easy way to distinguish between different sites when I browse forums and so on.