The latest gaffe comes from none other than the Torries, who declared yesterday that they would pay £1m for public policy making website. WTF?! Surely the torries are better off using newspapers tabloids like the Torygraph and Daily Hate’s poll and article section comments as a barometer for public opinion? Heck, if they want to step up, they can always start using Have Your Say.

Thankfully, one gentlemen has already seen the lighter side of things and set up something that should make Cameron blush, if he’s got any sense left still. I present, The Wisdom of Cameron.

As one fellow redditor point’s out, “A tsunami that killed a quarter million people is next to guitar simulating video game. That sort of sums up the decade… catastrophic events and consumerism-fuelled apathy.”

Phillip Niemeyer | Picturing the Past 10 Years

If you’d like to do the same, just visit NASA’s Send Your Name to Mars page. Hurry, though, offer valid only for a limited time.

Download Carbide.c++ 2.0.

• Productivity
  • AutoCopy: Copies selected text to the clipboard, just like in mIRC or X-Windows. Probably the most used extension. Just highlight any text to copy it to the clipboard, without resorting to mouse or keyboard. The best bit is, you can paste the copied text to any text field or address bar using the middle mouse button, simply awesome. Don’t forget to checkout the extensive options available for AutoCopy, including an useful context menu.
  • Copy Plain Text: Sick and tired of copying a piece of text from Firefox and pasting it to your favorite word processor or email client, only to discover in utter horror that its been pasted with all its bling? Copy Plain Text gives you a simple context menu to copy selected text as plain text without any HTML formatting. Best of all, AutoCopy (see above) can be configured to take advantage of Copy Plain Text to copy the selected text as plain text always, giving you a killer combo.
  • AutoAuth: Just like any good old browser, Firefox lets you save authentication information (read username and password) for web pages and HTTP authentication dialogs. What AutoAuth does is automatically submits HTTP authentication dialogs for pages where you have chosen to save the user name and password. One less return key pressed!
• Google
  • CustomizeGoogle: With Google becoming the defacto destination for all sorts of services, whether its search, blogging, document and picture sharing and what not, its always welcome if an add-on would maximize the efficiency of interaction between the user and Google.  CustomizeGoogle does just that. It has a whole host of features that make using Google services uber simple and productive. My personal favorite is web and image search streaming. The CustomizeGoogle home page lists all the interesting features, along with a small video (available in multiple formats) introducing the add-on.
• Synchronization
  • FoxMarks Bookmark Synchronizer: After Google left millions high and dry by refusing to update Google Browser Sync for Firefox 3.x, I started using Foxmarks. FoxMarks lets you synchronize your Firefox bookmarks only between any PC and view them on-line in FoxMarks website too. If you are looking beyond to syncing bookmarks only and want Google Browser Sync Support, I highly recommend having a look at Mozilla Weave. Its still in beta and carries the usual disclaimer of any beta product, however once released, its looks like it will take the crown for the ultimate sync add-on for Firefox.
• Appearence/Themes
  • Cooliris (formerly Piclens): Undoubtedly one of the most innovative browser add-on out there. I don’t think you can find a single person who didn’t go ‘wow!’ after installing Piclens. Piclens lets you browse popular web 2.o sites like Flickr, Google Image etc. in full-screen 3D effect. Definitely worth it. The most recent version even supports sharing images and videos, view latest headlines and window shop on Amazon. Nice!
  • IE Tab: Lets face is, as much as we love Firefox, because of standards issue and lazy developers, there are some websites out there that can’t simply be used with Firefox and requires the other browser from the evil empire :-/. Well IE Tab enables browsing those sites right inside Firefox by embedding Internet Explorer inside a tab. Best of all, there’s a site filter that you can use to instruct Firefox to always open certain web pages/websites using IE all the time.
  • Fission: If you’ve used Safari (or Opera), you might have noticed that it’s got a nice way of displaying a page load status: instead of using a standard status pane based progress bar, the page load progress is displayed right in the address bar, which is more visible and pleasing. Fission brings this behavior to Firefox. Another handy feature of Fission is it can be configured to display the active link/mouse-over link in the address bar too, handy in some situations.
  • Tiny Menu: If you are fussy like I am for maximizing usable screen space, Tiny Menu is what you want. Tiny Menu simply collapses all menu items under one main menu entry as pop-up menu items. You can also choose which main menu items will be collapsed too.
  • Hide Menubar: If you don’t want the hassle of merging the icons from Navigation Toolbar to the Main Menu Toolbar so that you can get rid of the Navigation Toolbar (when using Tiny Menu, above), you can also have a look at Hide Menubar, which hides your main menu bar and displays it when the ALT button is pressed.
  • Undo Closed Tab: Firefox provides a handy mechanism to undo a closed tab. The only problem is, you have to access it by going to the History->Recently Closed Tabs menu item. Wouldn’t it be nice just to do that with a click of a button? Undo Closed Tab lets you do just that. You have a choice of context menu entry, a button in the tab bar or in any toolbar with some other handy options thrown in too. And for the keyboard junkies, undo closed tab with Ctrl+Shift+Z key shortcut too.
  • FxIF: Displays image EXIF information in the image properties dialog box. Very handy indeed since you don’t have to download the image to you hard drive before viewing the EXIF information.
  • Outlook 2003: Right, I do understand that when it comes down to themes, everyone has their own preferences, so I’m not going to insist that you use this theme or the next one. Its just something I use and like Outlook 2003 transforms Firefox to look and feel like… well Outlook 2003, widely acclaimed to be one of the most elegant UI designs to have come from M$. The themes come in  Blue, Green (which I happen to be partial to) and Silver too.
  • Chromifox: With advent of Chrome, one thing Google has managed to do is give us a nice, clean and elegant browser UI. Chromifox bring the Chrome UI to Firefox.
• Feeds/RSS
  • Sage-Too: Sage-Too is the Firefox 3.x port of the original Sage project. Its provides a simple sidebar for viewing all your RSS/Atom subscriptions. Best of all, you can even select which bookmark folder to display. So if you are like me and use the Bookmarks Toolbar for feed subscription, Sage-Too is a no brainer, specially over Wizz RSS News Reader.

That’s because of rather aggressive approach taken by the S60 SDK installer in terms of disabling emulator diagnostics (most annoyingly, platform security violations, which go unchecked on the emulator by default) and results in unexpected behavior from applications when run on real hardware.

If you already have the S60 SDK installed, its worth checking if the diagnostics are enabled and even if you don’t want them, at least know what options affects which bits of diagnostics.

Before we begin, its worth nothing that the settings discussed below can be enabled through both the emulator GUI (Tools -> Preferences -> C++ Debug/Platform Security) and by modifying the epoc.ini file (epoc32\data\epoc.ini).

C++ Debug Settings

• Log to Debugger – Enables logging debug output from application and emulator, i.e. RDebug::Printf/RTest to Carbide.c++ debug console window. Set LogToDebugger 1 to enable or LogToDebugger 0 to disable using epoc.ini. Personally, I leave it disabled in favor of epocwind.out logging (see below).
• Just in Time – Enables automatically invoking the debugger if a panic/assertion is hit. Set JustInTime query to enable or JustInTime 0 to disable using epoc.ini
• Enable epocwind.out Logging – Writes the debug logs (see Log to Debugger) to epocwind.out (%temp%epocwind.out). Invaluable, since likes of panic and platform security exceptions are logged if enabled. Set LogToFile 1 to enable and LogToFile 0 to disable using epoc.ini

Platform Security Settings

• Panic|Leave on Insecure API calls – Enables process isolation, which prevents invoking operations on a thread in a different process that’s deemed insecure. For example, calling RThread::Kill to terminate another arbitrary process without appropriate platform security capability. Set PlatSecProcessIsolation ON to enable or PlatSecProcessIsolation OFF to disable using epoc.ini
• Perform capability checks – Enables platform security capability checking. Set PlatSecEnforcement ON to enable and PlatSecEnforcement OFF to disable using epoc.ini. By default, this is disabled which is baffling, since platform security is one of the main features of Symbian OS 9.1 and above and its easy to fall into issues like this

Starting the Emulator Faster
The S60 emulator start-up time has always been a pain in the neck for developers. Thankfully, Nokia has addressed this with the release of S60 3.2 SDK and there’s a handy option to boot the emulator up faster. This is done by starting up a minimal set of application servers during start-up, dramatically increasing boot up. A nice side effect is the cache penalty seems to be significantly less and re-starting the emulator after the initial boot is super fast! To configure the emulator start up mode, boot up the emulator, go to Tools -> Preferences -> General Settings -> Emulator Start Up Mode -> Start minimal set of services. You can always revert back to the full set of services startup mode, if you find working with minimal boot is troublesome by choosing the Start all services option.

And Finally…
Some of the settings described above is described in detail in Where’s my console output? and the epoc.ini reference documentation in Symbian Developer Library (Symbian OS Tools And Utilities » Emulator » Emulator reference » Emulator configuration file: epoc.ini).

Happy coding!