(This is shamelessly cross-posted from my personal blog. But I think it’s worth spreading the news even more.)

I’m not sure how I stumbled onto it — I think I was reading something at Ars Technica and saw a link for this article about Mozilla Weave.  I never heard of it before — it sounded interesting.  After a month of heavy use, let me just say that it’s not just interesting — it’s downright, wicked cool.

Let me tell you my pattern — I use FireFox in two places: Work and at Home.  Many times I wish I stumble onto a site I want to read at home.  Usually I just save it to Diigo. But sometimes I forget.  The biggest annoyance is passwords. Yes, I save a ton of website passwords in FireFox.  But it stinks when I save it on the home machine but want to get into my account at work, and I can’t remember what password I used there.

Weave solves all these problems.  And ones that I didn’t know I even had.

So now when am I work, I don’t worry about saving an address to Diigo just so I can read it at home. Instead, I do nothing special.  When I go home, I start FireFox, I wait about 15 seconds and I see that it starts to sync. After that, I have all my history from my last session.  Yes, you read that.  All my history from my work browsing session.  Oh, and if I setup a web account during the day at work and save the passwords, that is synced too.  Preferences?  Check, but in a smart way. Like my proxy server config from the office is not moved to home.  That’s a good thing.  Bookmarks? Check. Yes, I still use bookmarks and I probably use them more now because they are synced between my machines.

A neat feature is tabs.  Yes, tabs are saved across browsing sessions on different machines.  So if I want to quickly see what I was looking at last night at home, I can go to History-> Tabs from other computers while at work.

Many of you may be thinking. “How is this different than FoxyMarks/XMarks that installs spyware and publishes your web history?”  Well, not only does Mozilla not publish or track your history but they also encrypt all data with a passphrase of your choosing. So, yeah, they thought of that too.  If you are truly paranoid you can setup your own Weave server.

So I think it’s worth a go, especially if you are still using FireFox instead of Chrome (which I still am on the fence about, but that’s another discussion.)

My mother-in-law alerted to me  something Symantec was offering in the latest version of the Norton Security Suite — Download Insurance. What?  Huh?  Yes,  Download Insurance.  For $9.95 Symantec will give you the opportunity to download the software that you originally bought from them for up to one year.  Without the insurance, they will only let you download the software that you paid for only 60 days.

Note that you don’t pay $9.95 when you need to download it — you pay $9.95 up front and maybe you will need it. Or maybe you won’t.

What a rip-off!  Symantec should let you download it as long as that version is current — not just 60 days.  It really costs them little money to store a file on a server these days.

So I’ll tell you how you can keep your software available for a year — or longer — for a lot less money than $9.95.  Just burn it onto a well-labeled CD and put it in a safe place.  If you think you will lose it, then setup a free account at DropBox and upload your file there.

Please, don’t let Symantec still your money!

I’ve been thinking about cleaning up my own ZShell config and putting it out in the wild, but that just didn’t seem to happen. I was looking for something in ZShell — I think it was getting version control information at the prompt and I stumbled upon a mention of Oh My ZSH which is a bunch of powerful ZShell configs arranged in a nice way.

I tried it and I liked it. But it didn’t have everything that I used. But, heck it’s on github — easy forking.  So I did. My changes are:

• Change the xiong-chiamiov-plus theme to use vcs_info instead of being git-specific.  Gave the new theme the original name of mikeh.
• Option to configure a terminal with strange settings (labor intensive on the first run, perfectly wonderful after that.)
• Will automatically rehash the path, so new commands will be found immediately
• Added realias to quickly make a new shell alias/function (EDITOR env variable required)
• Removed upgrade checker (I don’t expect you to trust me)
• Share history with your zsh’s on the same host

More changes coming as time permits.  Enjoy!