Nearly 8 Million Downloads on the counter. Those are the unofficial results so far from Mozilla as people around the world downloaded the newest release of their browser – Firefox 3.

There were a few blunders. As I pointed out yesterday and CNN later reported, the traffic to Mozilla’s download sites was so intense that it took down their servers for approximately 2 hours at the beginning of the release as 9,000 copies a minute were downloaded. After 5 hours they had delivered as many copies of Firefox 3 as Firefox 2 got in the entire first day of it’s launch – 1.6 million.

Article: Firefox fans celebrate release of new browser

When the sites did become available it was difficult to tell where to download the new release as the pages still prominently displayed Firefox 2, with a link to Firefox 3′s release candidates. So I, as well as many others, downloaded the latest release candidate – RC3.

But aside from the technical fumbles the day went brilliantly. A good show of marketing might on Mozilla’s part. Now Mozilla’s webpages are updated, proudly showcasing their newest work – Firefox 3.

For those who mistakenly downloaded RC3 before the page was updated do not fear, as apparently RC3 was re-released as Firefox 3, and hopefully Mozilla will include downloads of that as part of their numbers in the final attempt at the world record.

Article: Firefox 3 Identical to RC3

8 Million Downloads! Good job, Mozilla.

Or it would be your chance, if it didn’t appear as though Mozilla’s websites are down. I’m attempting to upgrade my browser, but have yet to get either GetFirefox.com or SpreadFirefox.com to load. Meanwhile, Mozilla.com/ appears to be working but it is slow and does not seem to be updated as of yet.

Today is Firefox Download Day, but Mozilla’s servers appear to be taking the beating of a lifetime so be forewarned it could take you a bit to get through to a download site.

Good luck, Mozilla, apparently the internet is with you!

Internet Explorer 6 was the highlight of Microsoft developement, literally. It was the number one browser used on the internet for four years and is still, depressingly, going strong.

The most probable reason I would think for this is due to Windows2000 and older machines not capable of upgrading to Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft launched an aggressive upgrade campaign to force these users to upgrade to Windows XP by phasing out older systems in this way. You simply can’t install IE7 on Windows2000.

Windows XP has come with Service Pack 2 preinstalled for several years now, and automatic updates began installing IE7 – automatically – a while ago, so anyone with IE6 on Windows XP probably isn’t running automatic updates.

But my stats don’t confirm this. The top operating system for visitors here at Foponet is Windows XP. In fact, the laptop I’m using which has Windows2000 on it is one of the few visiting this site with Windows2000.

So why the IE6? Why is it still going so strong?

I have no idea, but it is. Which brings me to my message. My message to those using Internet Explorer 6 as well as older versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari to take a few moments out of your time to upgrade your browser and Save the Developers.

The Save the Developers campaign is an online movement to get people to upgrade these browsers. If you’re on Windows2000 and can’t upgrade to IE7, then try out Firefox or Opera. Firefox I know works perfectly on Windows2000. If for some reason you just haven’t gotten out of the rut of IE6 then take a few moments to visit the Save the Developers campaign site and see how you can upgrade. Not only will you be more standards complient, but websites will look nicer and you’ll have many more features available to you.

Check it out!

For some background on that, windows uses two types of paths when referring to the files on your computer. The long version is the one typically seen when browsing your computer.

C:\Program Files\Some Program\somefilehere.exe

The short version, however, is archaic and hard to determine. It basically comes down to a capitalized part of the directory, one of those wavy dashes (~), and a number for directories. It might look like this.

C:\PROGRA~1\SOME~1\somefilehere.exe

This removes spaces and other characters that might interfere with some programs and cause them to crash. In order to get phpdev5 working, I’d probably simply have to replace the long file name in php.ini – the php configuration file – with the short one because it appears the spaces are causing errors.

This is an easy fix, but finding short path names on your computer is not. There used to be a trick I knew within windows to find this, but I’ll be honest and say if there is I can’t remember it.

I went looking for this old trick and found this instead, courtesy of DevX.

@echo off
if not exist %1 echo %1 – no such file or directory exists&goto :EOF
echo.
echo Full PathName : %1
echo.
echo Short PathName : %~s1
echo.
echo.

This is a batch file. I used to talk about batch files a lot when I wrote my column at The Nettle Magazine called Format C:\.

These days batch files are rather archaic as well. Most people do not use them, and I must admit it’s been several years since I have as well, but they can still be very useful. Just like the one above.

Here is the trick. Simply create a new text document in the C:\ folder on your computer, copy the above code and paste it in. Save this file as pathname.bat. The article on DevX says to run this using Visual Basic, but it can also be run through the command prompt in Windows.

Go to Start->Run, type cmd, and press enter to bring up the command prompt. Now, if you want to know the path to a file all you have to do is type the following.

C:\pathname.bat C:\Program Files\Some Program\program.exe

Naturally, you would replace the path to the file with your own pathname and file you’d like to find, and you will then be treated with both the long and short filepaths and names.

I hope this is as helpful to you as it was to me.

Unfortunately these days most computers don’t come with the standard DOS boot disk, yet alone a 3.5′ floppy drive to put it in.

We’re left with CDs, which generally hold a lot more data – about 486 times as much – but are much more difficult to make a boot disk for. Or so the story goes.

The truth is it’s easy to make a bootable CD. You just need an image file (.ISO). And therein lies the problem. Most people don’t know how to make a bootable ISO file, and the tutorials I’ve found online aren’t easy to follow. Getting them to work – that’s the trick.

The thing is you don’t need to make an ISO file. You don’t need to struggle with getting the right files and burning hundreds of CDs testing it to see if it works. You don’t need to do any of this because there are plenty of people online who have already done this for you. And they keep doing it. Moreover I can guarantee their ISO files are better than yours.

I had upgraded to XP for a couple of months when I screwed up my boot files. Try as I might, I couldn’t fix the problem, and I realized that though I had upgraded my operating system many of the old problems remained. Namely that I still made stupid mistakes now and then that cost me a lot of time and data to fix. In the end I had to reinstall windows completely and came to the sudden realization that I needed a boot disk.

So I went to bootdisk.org to see if they had an ISO of DOS. And wouldn’t you know it, they did. Unfortunately the bootdisk I made couldn’t detect the hard drive. I had an utterly useless boot disk. What good is it if I can get on DOS but can’t access the files I need to fix?

I’ll tell you, it’s no good. But there is another alternative. A better alternative. Technology has come a long way since the days of Windows 9x and quite frankly DOS is rather dated. It was my knight in shining armor, but that armor was getting pretty rusty. I had found the new hotness.

So without further ado may I introduce you to the ultimate boot disk. Linux!

You’ve heard of that, you say? Of course you have, and where DOS was the knight in shining armor, Linux is an unbeatable fortress of saving your (and my) butt. It is a sysadmin’s dream. Corrupted boot files? Not a problem. Need to recover data? Ok!

All you need is a Linux Live CD. It is an entire operating system that boots from CD. Just pop it in and it’ll work, regardless of what went wrong in Windows. If it doesn’t then you have a hardware problem.

I have tried GoblinX and Knoppix and they both look nice and work well, but by far my favorite is Kubuntu. Get the Live CD image, burn it to a CD, and you will have a boot disk that puts DOS to all sorts of shame.

Kubuntu comes with a browser (Konquerer) so you can get info on your problem, as well as a media player, text editor, graphics software and just about everything else you could possibly want. The downside is that like my old DOS boot disk you can’t access the hard drive. At least, not right away, and this is the catch that got me at first.

I kept thinking it was useless if I couldn’t fix the problem, although at least I could still get online. But the catch is you have to mount the hard drive. Don’t worry, it won’t do anything to the files, and in future releases of Live CDs this should be completely automatic.

For now though, you have to do it manually through the terminal. In Kubuntu it is a program called Konsole, which resembles DOS quite a bit. In fact it is a shell terminal (SSH) and if you’re familiar with SSH or Telnet on a linux server then this should be a piece of cake, but I’ll tell you how to do this anyway. In SSH many of the commands are the same as DOS.

To mount your drive in Kubuntu open up Konsole and type:

ls /media/windows

If you get a response that no such directory exists then you can go ahead as follows, but if it exists you may have to use a different directory (one that doesn’t exist yet) because we’re about to make it. To make this directory type:

sudo mkdir /media/windows

This will make the directory /media/windows. It will be created within the RAM of your computer where Kubuntu is running and not on your hard drive. Now you need to mount your hard drive.

Normally the hard drive can be found at /dev/hda1 on Linux, but you can’t access that. It’s off limits because it needs to be mounted. But before you can mount it you have to know what type of file system it is. Mine is NTFS so I typed the following:

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222

For a VAT32 system you would type something like this:

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000

And poof, it’s done. You can now go into Konquerer and type /media/windows to view your Windows partition.

For more information on working with Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) visit the guide.
Manual: Ubuntu:Feisty