Apple Safari 3.0.2 , and I am loving it!!

The initial Safari release was packed with a box of bugs all over. Well, there were problems much important to me. The most important bug in my case was solved in the latest release!

2.When I try to access websites which ask for authentication through Prompt, it asks for proxy authentication and crashes after several attempts because it neither accepts proxy login nor the website's login. Some strange problem.

Yay!! This has been solved, and now I am able to access my favourite private forum!!

The safari website says following updates in the latest release:

Changes in Safari 3.0.2 for Windows beta:

• Latest security updates
• Improved stability
• Fixes for text display, non-English systems, and start-up times

The first one is not that important to me anyway. The second, is infact quite important. When I used to visit www.digg.com and look at news with huge number of comments, like greater than say 200, the safari used to just crash! Same was the case with www.perezhilton.com. But, now Safari 3.0.2 is quite stable and it doesn't crash. The third, font issue, is not important to me again anyway, because it was working fine since the initial release.

With these fixes, I am already in love with Safari. It looks sleek, awesome, beautiful. I love the Apple's style of displaying text fields and buttons in its elegant trademark style. Look, http://mail.yahoo.com to see what I am talking about. Look at the sign-in button and see the boundary of the selected text field. They are all Mac style! :) and I love them. And I am a Windows XP user :D

Though I hear reviews that Safari 3.0.2 has slowed down a bit while loading pages, I didn't see much difference. To speak the truth, yes, I am FED-UP with Firefox, it hogging on resources, losing history & bookmarks when computer crashes, add-on bugs etc! I need a change in browser and I have all of it in Apple Safari 3.0.2.

But, then there are some MOST SIMPLE user-friendly tweaks to be done in safari to be the best browser in the world. For example:

• New Tabs: To open a new tab,a double-click feature should be there. Double click on the empty tab space. Like in Firefox/opera.
• Bookmarks: There is no facility to sort bookmarks! What a douche! This should be really taken care of quick.
• Skins: Yes, custom skins facility would be great. But then I think they are going to release them as plug-ins. At least, changing the colour of the browser should be possible by default. The current one seems a little bit dark, though I love it anyway :D.
• Maximize-Minimise issue. I am not sure but, it might be Mac's style. and i don't like it.
• Proxy settings exclusively for Safari.
• Thats it for now!!

Happy Browsing webnuts! Safari Rocks. :)

favicon : An Idendity Image for your website

You see the little spider on the left of the URL bar when you visit my site? Its called a favicon. It is a simple 16x16 dimension image file in .ico format. Ofcourse it is a different issue that creating something meaningful on such small scale is quite difficult. If you are a good artist, or you picked up a fabulous art image which can represent your website, even though its a little bigger like 64x64 dimensions, there's a wonderful way to make your own favicon.

 This online utility website(click here) can convert any sized image to 16x16 ico image. Simply browse the image, give it an online name and click generate. You can download it and upload on some filehosting service. Google pages is a better, free file uploading option.(Note that, normal photo sharing websites donot accept .ico format images. Not atleast flickr, since I have tried.)

After you have the URL of your ico image, simply follow the below steps to configure the favicon to your blogger website.

• Go to the HTML editor in the layout of your blogger.
• At the beginning of the html code, look for this line.

               <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

• Below this line, paste the following code

              <link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL of your icon file"/>

where, "URL of your icon file" should be replaced by your ico image link

And voila! Your done!

It is always cool to have an identity symbol for your website :)

If you are hosting your website on your own, simply place the ico image in the index.html folder and rename it to favicon.ico. Your website will automatically pickup the favicon when someone visits. When someone bookmarks your website your favicon gets shown up in the bookmark list along with the description they chose.

Safari 3 Beta for Windows XP : Issues

Currently, there are numerous issues related to Safari 3 for windows.

Issues:
1. I am not able to change Proxy Settings for safari seperately. It seems to ask for proxy authentication by default settings(i guess from lan settings, internet explorer)
2. When I try to access websites which ask for authentication through Prompt, it asks for proxy authentication and crashes after several attempts because it neither accepts proxy login nor the website's login. Some strange problem.
3. It doesnt seem to store proxy authentication. Prompts everytime I start the browser.
4. Gmail doest load. Asks for login and all, but the mailbox doesnt load. Even, this problem seems to have corrected by itself. But the chat browser is not visible :)
5. I am posting this entry in blogger on Safari 3 browser and there is no rich text editor. (nor the html/compose tabs). Now, this problem seems to have solved by itself. Now the New Post composer seems just fine :)!
6. Fonts issues refer Amit Agarwal for more details. I havent faced any problem regarding fonts as yet.

If I am able to figure out these many issues within half an hour of installation, there's something seriously wrong with this broswer :P. Truly BETA

Plus point is: browsing DOES actually SEEM faster ;)

Skype: Error "No Proxies Found"

This is a very common problem while calling users through Skype from behind a firewall. I had a similar problem with Skype. My college firewall was a HTTP proxy with only 80 port allowed. The skype logs in(signs in) without any problem and also makes user-searches seamlessly. But, when you message a Skype user, you see that the message has not been delivered. Moreover, when you try to make a call to someone, after a while you get an error message saying "No Proxies Found" in red fonts in the calling tab.

Reasons for this could be one of the following:
1. The internet connection is slow, as in the bandwidth of the corporate connection is at its full usage.
2. Half open TCP/IP simultaneous connections are limited by default on Windows.

While, the first problem cannot be handled there is a solution for the second case.
By default, the number of half open TCP/IP connections are set to 10. When I did some searches on the internet I found a patch to fix this thing. I downloaded the file, executed the .exe file, and set the TCP/IP connections to more than 100.
Before you too imitate the same in order that your skype works, be aware that the limit on TCP/IP connections as 10 was set as a security reason by Windows. It seems that the more your TCP/IP connections open(anything more than 10), the faster you are prone to and can spread viruses and trojans. Since I was behind a safe network and also maintain my computer healthy -- I do update anti-virus and personal firewall, I had no issues in installing this patch.

For those who are sure of what they are doing, here's the link for the patch.

http://www.lvllord.de/

People who have no other way can try installing this patch and see if they are able to make calls through Skype behind a proxy firewall. There's no loss in trying. If Skype doesn't work even after installing the patch, it is recommended to uninstall the patch. The same .exe file is run to perform both install and uninstall.