Topic: Introducing Microsoft Silverlight
Date: Saturday, July 28th, 2007
Location: STIC (Queen Rania Technology Center, Rabiah)
Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Speaker: Bander ALSHARFI [MVP]

Bander is a Technical Consultant and has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for 2 years now. He is also the President of JorDev. So make sure not to miss out on next week’s Community Night, which promises to be a learning experience to remember!

For more information or directions to STIC please contact:
Ayman Farouk @ 0795727344

Well believe or not, I’m running Safari on Windows [v3 Public Beta]. You can download it from here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
Apple claims that Safari is “the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world” and that it loads pages two times faster than Internet Explorer.

I noticed that this version is not very stable, so you it may crash (it is a beta version after all), but the most important thing is that web developers can test their sites in Safari without buying a Mac.. Overall I’m not switching away from Firefox2.

One last thing, it appears that Silverlight doesn’t work on Safari for Windows although it seems to recognize the plug-in, I guess Microsoft will fix this in the next release of Silverlight (or may be not!!).

Many of Firefox’s settings aren’t exposed through the Tools > Options menu; the only way to change them is to edit them manually by typing about:config in the adress bar.

You will get a list of all firefox settings and extensions. I found a couple of interesting ones, but remember to keep a log of everything you change, or make backups.

Select just a word
The Boolean preference layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word governs one of Firefox’s tiny, but for me incredibly annoying, little behaviors. When you double-click on a word in a Web page to select it, Firefox automatically includes the space after the word. Most of the time I don’t want that; I just want the selection to stop at the end of the word. Setting this to false will defeat that behavior.

Swap out to disk memory when minimized (Windows only)
A little-known feature in Firefox allows the Windows memory manager to swap out some of Firefox’s physical memory space to disk when Firefox is minimized but not closed. This allows other programs to use the physical memory that Firefox was previously monopolizing.
By default, this feature is turned off, for two reasons:
1) PC memory is generally more plentiful than it used to be, so it makes sense to use it if it’s available
2) swapping Firefox’s memory out to disk will slow the program down when it’s restored.
That said, if you run Firefox side by side with other memory-hungry applications, it might help keep them from competing with each other. To enable this feature, create a new Boolean preference called config.trim_on_minimize and set its value to true.