Mozilla Firebird offers an extension that emulates the Google Toolbar. It doesn’t have some of the newer features such as the popup-blocker (Firebird has it’s own popup-blocker that works great), but it does have the familiar options (e.g. the search bar, next/previous result buttons, highlight options, individual search term “find” buttons, etc.).

Every since I discovered the Google Toolbar, I can’t stand browsers that don’t have it installed. However, I have discovered that the features I use most often are available through Mozilla Firebird without having to clutter up my browser with an extra toolbar.

First off, I’ve already covered Firebird’s smart keywords in a previous blog entry. Since I wrote that article, I’ve added keywords for Google Images and Google News. I don’t use Google Groups, but you could set up a keyword for that just as easily.

After setting up all of these searches, I stopped using the Google Toolbar for searches. I found the only thing I used it for was to search for individual words on pages using the search term buttons. Firebird can handle that too, though. If the browser window has focus (not the address bar or search bars) and you begin typing, it will highlight the first hyperlink on the page that matches what you’ve typed. You can do the same thing to find any word on the page by first typing a forward slash (“/”). You can find the next instance using the F3 key. You could, of course, do all of this with the “Find” box (call it up with Ctrl-F), but it’s much faster to do without.

Now that we can perform searches right in the address bar and find words without the use of highlighting and finding options, the only thing that makes the Google Toolbar remotely worth keeping is the next/previous search result buttons. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used that feature, so it’s not a big deal for me to lose it. When I do a Google search, I usually click on a result using the middle mouse button to open it in a new tab. This keeps the Google window open so I can continue to go through the results.

So I’ve been without the Google bar for a few days now and I really haven’t missed it. The Mozilla team has really done a great job of keeping Firebird extremely feature rich, yet small, fast, and standards compliant.

Ever since I read Jim Daniel’s article on SitePoint regarding Bayesian spam filtering, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on it. The article concerns a product called Spamnix, which is currently only available for Qualcomm Eudora. He listed a few suggestions for Outlook (and/or Outlook Express) users, but nothing that looked too promising.

Well, yesterday I took another look at Mozilla’s [Thunderbird] mail client. Thunderbird is meant as a running mate for Firebird. Turns out, it has resident Bayesian spam filtering. These Mozilla people think of everything, don’t they?

Bayesian filtering is an adaptive form of spam filtering. This means there’s a training period of about two weeks before it starts to get really accurate. However, since everyone’s email habits are different (spam is in the eye of the beholder), it’s the best solution I’ve seen so far.

Rev. Thomas Bayes pioneered the math involved in Bayesian filters way back in the 1700’s. It has a lot to do with probabilities. Who’d have thought it would be applied to technologies this guy probably never dreamed about? You can learn more about the technique behind Bayesian filtering in an article called “A Plan for Spam“, by Paul Graham.

Anyway, I’ve been playing with Thunderbird now for a couple of days. Just downloaded it at work. It’s an alright little mail program. Every bit as good as Outlook Express, but a bit featurless when it comes to saving attachments. Specifically, it seems to lack a drag n’ drop ability, and for some odd reason you can’t reply to attached emails. So, it looks like I’m not gonna be able to use it for my work email (since my manager sends me thousands of attached support requests every day). The junk mail filter is already catching some spam after only a few hours of training it. It’s pretty dumb though, which is to be expected. I’ll let you know if it gets smarter.

So, a few weeks ago my friend Mike wrote in his blog about people using punctuation around passwords and other information that should be word-perfect.

Case in point: today I got an email at work from a lady who wanted her ContentCleanup login information changed. Here’s a direct quote from her email:

Please change my username to: minette;ihjl, and my password to:
[ommitted]

Now, she did put the password on a new line with no punctuation around it, but what about that username? Is that comma part of it, or no? Luckily, the ContentCleanup username should always be a valid email address, so this one’s bogus with or without the comma, but it’s still confusing.

I used to think I knew all of the cool reasons to use Firebird, but I just discovered one more: Firebird has an extremely intelligent address bar.

For instance, type “microsoft.com” into your Internet Explorer address bar and the URL will quickly be corrected into “http://www.microsoft.com”. As you would expect, Mozilla Firebird behaves in the same manner. But type simply “microsoft” into your IE address bar and you’ll get an MSN Search page for the term microsoft. Type “microsoft” into Firebird’s address bar and it is appropriately changed to “http://www.microsoft.com”.

This also works for multiple word phrases. For instance, type “Joey Day” into Firebird’s address bar and you’ll get “http://joeyday.com”. It also works for .net and .org addresses for which there is no corresponding .com address. In other words, it defaults to .com, but if that doesn’t exist it will try .org and .net as well (I’m not sure which order though — haven’t done enough experimenting).

Another cool thing you can do involves what are called “keywords”. You can assign a keyword to any of your Firebird bookmarks. Then, you can simply type the keyword into your address bar instead of the whole URL. For instance, if you don’t particularly like typing “joeyday.com” into your address bar, you can give it the keyword “jd”, and save yourself from getting carpal tunnel (this obviously has more of an advantage for longer URLs, but as I write this I’m having trouble coming up with a long URL that I visit often).

Even better, Firebird has a handful of smart keywords built in. For instance, type “dict sesquipedalia” into the address bar and you’ll be taken straight to the definition of sesquipedalia at dictionary.com. This works for any word you can think of. Knowing that, you should be able to figure out what typing “google george bush” might do. You guessed it, it looks up George Bush on Google. These and a few other smart keywords are located on your favorites bar under the folder “Quick Searches”.

You can create your own smart keywords fairly easily. All you do is alter the URL of your bookmark so that the special code, “%s”, is placed in the spot where you want the custom string to go. For instance, I created a smart keyword to look up Bible verses on Bible Gateway. The standard URL for a scripture verse looks something like this:

bq. @http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?passage=john+3:16@

I simply replaced the verse reference in my bookmark’s URL with the special string variable code like this:

bq. @http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?passage=%s@

Then I set the bookmark’s keyword to be “bible”. Now I can look up Ephesians 2:8-9 by typing “bible eph 2:8-9”. I’ve also set up a smart keyword that uses Bible Gateway to find specific words in the Bible. As you can imagine, smart keywords can be used for millions of things.

You can read more about Mozilla’s smart keywords (with tips and ideas) at the following sites:

# “Netscape Devedge: Bookmark Keywords”
# “How Cool Are Custom Keywords?“

I’ve never been a big fan of McDonald’s, but something I read today might be big enough to change my mind. I was bored at work so I picked up a business magazine that’s lying on a file cabinet behind me. There was an article in there about McDonald’s offering wireless Internet in all of their stores in Taiwan. The article (seeing as how it is in a business magazine) dealt mostly with the logistics of setting up the network, and didn’t say much about the U.S.

Inquisitive minds want to know, so I quickly Googled “McDonald’s Wireless Internet” and lo and behold, there are several U.S. locations that already offer wi-fi connections for laptop users with wireless capabilities. They are in major metropolitan areas (of course) such as Chicago and New York, but it is also available in Seattle (one more reason to move there). You can find more information at mcdwireless.com.

I guess I may be a little slow in realizing all this though, since according to some articles I read (like this one), Starbucks has had wi-fi in most of their U.S. stores for some time now.