I have finally gone past the point of 10,000 downloads in MATLAB Central. Also by coincidence, I have gone past 10,000 Google AdSense page impressions since I joined the program in September.

As some of you may know, MÂ¥cro$o£t store mail in DBX files. This may seem like a benign format, but it can cause great trouble if you intend to keep a maintainable mail archive (one of my pet peeves). I decided to try the highly recommended Thunderbird which is expected to replace the Outlook family just as Firefox begins to nudge Internet Explorer out of the game. I was amazed by the ease of this migration. I now have:

• A mail archive that is open format.
• Spellchecker that does not require Office.
• A whole new set of features which I have never conceived (and neither have MÂ¥cro$o£t).

The bottom line is that if you do not download Thunderbird now, you’ll be missing out…

My game/program Othello Master has just been moved to its independent new domain. You can now find it at othellomaster.com.

For a while I have been struggling to find a Mozilla theme that I am comfortable with. Today I found my perfect match. It’s called Noia and you can download (or directly install) it from deviantART.

Noia under Firefox 1.0 on SuSE 8.2

Did you know?

On my way to work today I decided it would be nice if switching between tabs in Firefox was possible using ALT + tab_number. Guess what? This was already thought of. CTRL + tab_number (for example, CTRL + 1) will set focus on the tab that you requested. Use it. I strongly recommend that. – Roy

I enquired about the potential of Web-based Palm Desktop in UseNet. The main advantage is portability — either geographical portability or system portability, i.e. access to data from any operating system. Here is one response I received:

WeSync created a prototype web interface for their multi-user DateBook/AddressBook freeware, before Palm decided they didn’t like the idea. The code probably went to the purchasers of WeSync, Tanner Research, who are moving ahead with improvements. A discussion with them could be fruitful.

To be honest, I gave up on this entire idea. I want to see Palm surviving the PPC wave first.

Yesterday I hit the 9,000 mark for number of downloads at MATLAB Central. What makes it a greater achievement is that I have programmed in MATLAB for only 13 months and started publishing code no earlier than May this year. See my MATLAB page for more details.