Mozilla Weave is starting to piss me off. Yeah it offerers you a cloud based firefox profile sync for free, but the damn thing is so annoying. I would class myself as the target “market” as it were for this product, as I have two computers that I regularly use Firefox on, and I need my settings and stuff copied between the two.

The problem is that Weave tries to sync with the server EVERY time I start Firefox, and I’m the kind of person who regularly forgets to do stuff, and I have to open Firefox again. Every time I open Firefox, I get the same turning icon in the corner of my screen and some jerky behaviour from Firefox itself. If you close Firefox while a sync is going on, a window will continue the sync while the firefox main window is closed. This is all well and good but if you then re-open Firefox again, when the sync completes in the separate window it will completely close all instances of Firefox, regardless of whether you’re using it or not.

Below is a list of completely basic things I want fixed before new features are developed.

• Stop completely closing Firefox when the sync window closes.
• Only perform sync if it has been at least 10+ mins since the last one.
• Don’t completely block off Firefox when a manual sync is initiated.

Other than that it’s good software, and for most of the time works seamlessly.

Wow they’ve changed a lot. A lot of the changes come to the UI, as Skype looks completely different. For example, the whole Skype window is set out more square, and has two parts to it: your contacts sidebar and the chat pane, and all of the call stuff goes on in the right chat pane along with some store stuff.

There are other noticeable improvements too, such as much faster starting and signing in speeds (the whole cycle is about 5 seconds for me), and the whole application seems more responsive. When you call someone Skype immediately does it, you don’t get a couple of seconds delay like with Skype 3.

The UI seems more consistent with the Skype website design, and looks much more awesome than any previous version did. I can’t see a tab for Skype Live in sight, which in my opinion is a good thing.

You can grab the beta for Windows here and try it out for yourself.

I checked out my site over on Alexa the other day, and it turns out that my blog has a traffic rank of 1,469,067. Although this doesn’t seem much, it means a lot to me as I’ve climbed up a few million since my site was moved over from “alanunleashed.com” at the start of this year, which doesn’t even have a recorded traffic rank.

My blog started out as a small site that served as an outlet for my thoughts, bust has grown into something much more than that. My blog is getting quite big, both traffic wise and content wise. A quick look at Mint tells me I get around 50 unique hits per day on my blog, and also interestingly on labs. I only hope this number will increase in the future, as I add more and more stuff to this site.

For now though, getting under the 1.5 million mark is a big achievement for me in itself.

At least the guys at Google have a sense of humour, and sure do love making easter eggs. Try clicking on the “Next »” bookmark link in Google Reader, (Settings > Goodies) and if you have no unread items a message will be displayed informing you that you have reached the end of the internet, linking to this site.

See the page here: http://www.google.com/reader/next?go=noitems

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The Apache module autoindex is installed on most shared hosting around today, and is either enabled by default or can be enabled by setting FancyIndexing on in your .htaccess file in the root of the folder.

I was looking for what the “Description” column was for while I was looking around one of my folders using the Apache directory listing, and I came across the documentation for Apache autoindex. It turns out there are some cool options you can use to customise the look of your listings. The AddDescription directive is an awesome setting that allows files and folders in a directory to have a description, using htaccess.

An example of what can be achieved using the setting is over on my download subdomain, http://download.alanedwardes.com/. I’ve given each of the directories descriptions and made the width of the “name” and “description” colums fluid, so nothing gets cut off. All this can be achieved easily using only the “AddDescription” and “IndexOptions” directives in a .htaccess file.

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Most online virtual worlds don’t let you live a virtual life with a job, mayor, prime minister and the constant threat of invasion, but one game begs to differ. Erepublik is the virtual browser game with it’s own economy and society complete with politicians, military and real towns and cities. It’s the “biggest online historical experiment”, complete with beta status.

I’ve been playing the game since April, and I have to say it is nothing like any other game i’ve played. It is more realistic, and best of all like any good game is completely free. Find a job, train for the day, or even start your own company - the possibilities with Erepublik are quite literally endless and limitless.

I’m guessing this is either a love it or hate it game, but if you’re willing to try it I would advise signing up and becoming a citizen of the eRepublik world. - Sorry, forgot it was invite only. I have a few invites left if anyone wants one - email me.

eRepublik: http://www.erepublik.com/