To boldly surf where no browser has surfed before...

My phone at home is a Gigaset C475IP from Siemens. It's a VoIP phone and is normally configured using a web interface.
But whenever I accessed the web interface I encountered display errors like some images are not displayed and javascript is missing. Most of the times the received pages are not working correctly which was annoying because the best options of the phone can be set by the web interface only.
I tried Firefox (3.5.2) and Internet Explorer 8.0 (with and without compatibility mode) but the results were always the same... an unuseable web interface.


Today I tried Apples Safari browser. I downloaded Safari from thindownload where you can get a special version that needs no installation. It doesn't even change any system settings because it is wrapped in code to simulate a Windows around it (you better have a look at VMwares ThinApp webpage for the details).
But when I used Safari on the web interface I was totally surprised to see that it worked. All pages could be rendered correctly and finally I could start configuring my VoIP phone completely. Why can this browser render the pages and the "best and most used browsers of the world" cannot???

From Juice to Songbird to Yahoo Pipes to Ziepod

I've been using Juice (formerly known as iPodder) as a podcatching software for quite a while now. But it seems that the software is no longer supported. So I started looking for a new software because some of the limitations of Juice were quite annoying.
Last week I gave Songbird a chance and used it for a few days. What I don't like about it is the mediathek. I'm more the directory guy who organizes everything in folders. But the mediathek in Songbird can only be used for filtering your music by criterias and can't display the file system. Even the directory addon could not display the files correctly.
Don't get me wrong, the mediathek is perfect as it is. But I prefer the directory view which is not possible in Songbird.
But what made me really angry is the bad support for podcasts. I could not use Songbird for my favorite podcasts because it wouldn't recognize them. No episodes are displayed. It's a bug because some feeds store the url for the download in an enclosure-tag which is not recognized correctly by Songbird.
I was just about to deinstall the program when I found a link to the Songbird Podcatcher hack. It's a script (using the very cool pipe technology by Yahoo) which rewrites the feed so Songbird can understand it.
It works fine but now Songbird received only the latest episode of the podcast. So I played a little with the Yahoo pipes and created my own copy of the Podcatcher hack pipe.

It works really fine but Songbird always downloads all episodes. Even the episodes I deleted because I don't want them anymore. This behavior is really annoying and normally every podcatching client has a funtion to download only the files you want and to remember the files you don't want.
So I deinstalled and searched for a different podcatching client. After a while I found Ziepod and gave it a try. It has limited functionality of course but it really meets my requirements and I think I will stay with it for the next months (or years?).

It was quite a way to find Ziepod but this way I found a the cool Yahoo pipes along the road.

Thunderbird Addons won't update

It's quite a while now that my Thunderbird addons got updated. Every time I try to update them I get an error message. So today I tried to fix it.
First I found a description in a german forum how to enable the logging for extensions to view the logs. The following error was found: "cert issuer is not built-in".
By searching for this error message I found a thread where the same error was described. You only have to remove the certificates of GlobalSign Partners CA, GlobalSign Root CA, GlobaSign Primary Class 1 CA, GlobaSign Primary Class 2 CA & GlobaSign Primary Class 3 CA.

I had to remove more certificates which were marked as "Software Security Device" as well but in the end I could update my addons again.