Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has officially begun to blog!

He currently only has a single post in his blog at chedet.com touching the issue of the appointment of judges. It is dated today at 1.27 am. In the preface, he says, “Thank you for visiting my Weblog. This site is dedicated to publishing my writings as and when I am able to pen my thoughts and opinion.”

Let’s give Tun Dr Mahathir a warm welcome to the world of blogging!!! If you didn’t already know, his daughter Marina Mahathir also blogs at RantingsbyMM.

Tun is proof that it is never too old to start embracing the wonders of technology!

Well, they aren’t exactly new, but they have been improved from their previous versions. They are Firefox 3 Beta 4 and Safari 3.1.

I have personally downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 4 and tried it out, and it gave me a noticable speed boost. Putting Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3 browser windows side by side and comparing page loading showed that both were equally comparable in terms of rate of loading. Sometimes one browser loaded a page faster, sometimes the other browser won. The verdict is for you to determine.

Despite having Firefox 3 Beta 4, you can still start the good ‘ol Firefox 2 if you will. Please be aware that Firefox 3 Beta 4 is in development stage, and they have advocated that unless you are a developer you should not download it. (who cares anyway? it is rather stable) At this point in time, many if not all plug-ins and toolbars which work for Firefox 2 do not work on Firefox 3.

As for Safari 3.1, it is not wrong to say that this is the first workable Safari on the Windows platform. From personal experience, previous Safari versions on Windows XP have constantly crashed while surfing. This is the cheapest way to get the feel of a Mac on your Windows PC!

Internet Explorer has also launched IE8 for beta downloads, but well, IE8 fails to load many pages properly.  =S

But hey, try these 2 browsers! Anything is better than the annoying and slow Internet Explorer. To my disappointment, many government websites in Malaysia do not optimize their websites for anything other than Internet Explorer. These people are backward man… =.=

So Streamyx is actually quite reliable here in Bandar Utama (BU7). I upgraded to 1 Mbps but got 1.3 Mbps!

Well but I know of many users who are not so lucky like me here, and having worked in a Streamyx rival company, iZZi, I hear many grouches everyday about Streamyx. Guess I happen to live in a good area in terms of Streamyx’s service. XD

I want to share a browser feature called Cooliris with all you ErnSheong.com readers! Cooliris is a company founded in 2006 with the mantra “Think Beyond the Browser.” Their headquarters are in Menlo Park, California, and their team consists of seasoned developers, entrepreneurs, and Stanford computer engineers.

Enhance your browsing performance with Cooliris!
The two core products of Cooliris are (free features):

1) Cooliris

With Cooliris, you can preview images, videos and weblinks without clicking, turn on the slideshow mode for Google and Yahoo images, instantly email links, prefetch websites for faster previews, customize preview activation method and themes, as well as enable/disable previewing on custom list of sites. It works on any website, blog or forum.

2) PicLens

PicLens enables you to view photos in full screen mode, search for web images, play a slideshow of image search results and photo albums, multi-page search on Google Images and Yahoo Images, have multilingual full-screen search, as well as jump from PicLens to corresponding webpage. With a Mac, you can sit back and explore photos with the Apple® remote.

PicLens works on Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster, Image Search Engines such as Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask Images, Live Images and AOL Images, and Photo Sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, DeviantArt, and Smugmug.

Review: Cooliris can be quite annoying sometimes because when you hover over a link, a small Cooliris icon pops out. If you hover over it accidentally, a small window pops out, which is unwelcome especially when it is done unintentionally. But you can always turn the feature off by clicking the ‘tick’ at the bottom right of the page. PicLens is just plain cool. Very nice feel when searching images. A MUST TRY add-on to your web browser.

Source: cooliris.com