1) Opera 10.10 compatible with Snow Leopard

If you had problems with Opera and IPv6 like I did, making Opera hang while loading pages for up to minutes, the browser company just released a nightly build with the fix. Remember that nightly build is a version that developers publish even though it’s not a safe decision to use it. In the nightly build page, it will say both IPv6 is not working on Mac and Workaround for Bug DSK-263933 (Cannot access Google.com in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (IPv6 and slow DNS)), which means this is a workaround. But at least you can reactivate IPv6 on your Mac.

For one, if I hadn’t been using Opera Link, I would just have lost all my bookmarks, this is because I replaced Opera stable with a nightly build. If you’re a bit of a fearless guy like me though (and with some informatics expertise) you should just upgrade to this, instead of using the solution I used.

I’ll keep you updated on when there’s a final solution to this problem.

Opera TV announced

Comes from two days ago the news that Opera is working at a TV system that lets you have a fusion of what you have normally on TV with contents from the internet. Remco, a guy from the Opera IRC channel, mentioned the announcement that was made.

In short, this system, when released, might work in your TV’s software, your console (Wii for one, said Remco), and it has some extra nifty thing like movement recognition so you can just browse the Opera Widgets (these aren’t the old widgets tho, it’s quite refined) with the movement of a hand, or browse whole internet pages, for which even CSS3 was announced. This means then, Opera will soon be a CSS3 browser – finally.

CSS3 means easy transformations, rounded corners the official way, shadows (not sure on this), and many tricks a web developer dreams today. Between, nice accent the guy up here. Also, you can do things like tweet via your remote control.

I’m not sure what one should expect from this new Opera product, there’s been a TON of set-top-box systems to have internet on the TV, and this is back in 2000, and already back then I LAUGHED at those. What Opera must do is not pointing at delivering internet on TV, but at integrating the TV experience with internet. I am not going to tweet from my remote control, that’s for sure, I have a PC for that at home.
Maybe the sound will change with those FullHD televisions they sell now. But maybe, just maybe, maybe it would make a difference if you could tweet what show are you watching.

I really wanna tweet to the world that I’m watching Return Back to the future a 21st time while I am at the TV, seriously.

EDIT: you can find another solution for the problem here

Sources:

1. http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/52921-opera-free-snow-leopard-connexion.htm
2. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=289103
3. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=288711

The stupid solution: virtualize it.

Are you desperate just like me? Virtualize it!

Nah, this is not a serious solution. But if you want to do this, prepare your copy of Windows XP and download VMWare Fusion, then use the Unity option to make Opera for Windows show. It’s still funny enough: it’s working, even through I am under Snow Leopard.

Fake Opera vs Real Opera!

This is a nice thing to know. Keep this in mind.

What’s up with Opera?

On the update to Snow Leopard (from now SL) there’s a flaw between Opera’s DNS resolving service and SL’s. Opera uses SL’s DNS service, and for some reason, there’s some problem with this. What happens is that Opera starts trying to resolve an IPv6 address, and IPv6 just doesn’t work. This means there’s a bug in SL that makes impossible for Opera to understand the connection method, and it takes like half a minute or more to realize IPv6 is having issues, and then the fallback to IPv4 happens, and more time passes, then the page will load. It’s going to take one minute. Now, let’s go on our Web 2.0 with one minute long page refreshes. Rather not.

You can find in the first source I gave a page in french (that seems I can somehow understand thanks to ages of studies of Roman Latin) a short explanation, basically what I said in English now.

There are two threads now about this issue, the second and third source I listed on the top. The first has a series of  people having the same problem: it’s everybody using Snow Leopard AND Opera obviously. And nobody can go around it by simply disabling IPv6.

Maybe we’re getting somewhere!

What does it mean, IPv6 is disabled and Opera still is stuck at looking for IPv6? Most likely, the problem is really basical: Opera tries to resolve IPv6 anyway, completely missing the fact that IPv6 is disabled. Most likely, it’s not even hooking to IPv6 module correctly. But there has been a way to overcome this: the virtual machine with XP!

The virtual machine gives a normally working hook for the Opera connection, and the virtual machine connects through the internet through Snow leopard with its own working hooks. In other words, we’re emulating a working IPv6 for Opera.

Solution?

OpenDNS. From the third source link I gave.

It actually works flawlessly. Here’s the guide to set it up, it’s just simple copy and paste, no need to do the registration in “Part2″ and “Part 3″ is not needed either: https://www.opendns.com/start/device/apple-osx-leopard/ (there’s a misleading image here, you have to add the DNS settings to the network card you’re using, not to a disabled one).

With this, you cut out the problem of resolving IPv6 problems. But of course this shouldn’t be a permanent solution, and I hope Opera releases a bug-fix version to make this little community of 3% users worldwide happier. Just don’t forget to disable OpenDNS when Opera works again.

Last note: 5% of computers are Mac, 3% people in the world use Opera, and maybe 3% of people upgraded to Snow Leopard now. I feel like we’re actually just 5 people out here with this problem.

What’s Alexa? It’s the most recognized website analytics founded by Amazon, that collects data through a toolbar installed by the users. The website gives how many visitors approximately visit certain websites. The truth: Alexa is not reliable at all. There’s no real use for having Alexa toolbar, beside a few tools to get to know the fame of a website from unreliable data. The most of the users of Alexa toolbar are developers, which makes the public using it a niche. What’s more, Alexa is available only on IE and Firefox, that together cover 87% of the users, but still leaving out the people using more exotic software – that usually are the most experienced users.

Now, FoOlRulez has always been in rank 160.000 and 230.000. It’s pretty unreasonable for my point of view, because there’s lots of websites with less visitors than us being in top 50.000. So, I decided to use Firefox on FoOlRulez.org, and see how big of a difference it makes.

They say Alexa is just that fragile. Then, I want to break it.

Little premise: don’t think Firefox is better becase it has AdBlock, I can ensure every browser has adblock plugins.

So I am going to tell you about my nightmare: I am building a complete restyling for FoOlRulez. Want to see it? Try it: http://foolrulez.org/woxxy/blog/, even though I am not yet decided on fonts to use, nor it’s completed (for example, if you view the page). It works great on Opera, since it’s the primary browser I use, and it works pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari as well, beside some more problems with the fonts. Now, count the fact that the font is wrong, it will simply look a bit misplaced: since I have to make it compatible for both Windows and Machintosh (I work on a MacBook Pro), the font will need a lot of retouching, but that’s fine, I am just unexperienced and have no real idea which font are conformed in HTML.

That’s right though, I fully learned CSS (it’s for the design), HTML (the text of the page) and quite a bit of PHP (the active content) in order to make possible for FoOlRulez to have a completely original website design, that can make simpler browsing the website through wide use of images and big titles, while making the page smaller. Also, for how thankful I am to Justin Tadlock for the theme we used for a year even though it’s modified to the point of not being recognizable, I don’t want to credit anyone anymore.

It shouldn’t take more than few days of hard work – and I am good at working hard –  but I was suddendly stopped from going further with the developing because I checked the situation with other browsers to see how it looked. At the beginning it looked fine just under Opera, but easily I made so it could look fine also on other browsers. Yet, there was no way for IE8 to show the page correctly. I am still stuck honestly, maybe the website was ambitious, but this is beyond myself for now.

No Google Chrome: the version for Mac is still being devloped.

In other words, there’s a 20,34% of the users using still Internet Explorer, so I am just going to try over and over again till I make that website I am creating work for IE users too, because the number of people using it is still far too big to just go and ignore them.

That’s why you should take more care when you decide using a browser, not only for the features it can give you, but also thinking about the developers like us, that must trick your broswers in order to display correctly our Web 2.0 websites.