They finally announced the winners for the Firefox 2 Extension Contest:

http://blog.mozilla....d-firefox-2-winners/

Extend Firefox 2 has wrapped up and we’re super excited to announce the winners! We received well over 100 entries, representing hundreds of hours of hard work from people around the world.

Grand Prize Winners

• Minimap Sidebar Extension by Tony Farndon (UK) - mapping sidebar
• SamePlace by Massimiliano Mirra (Italy) - instant messaging sidebar
• Shareaholic by Jay Meattle (USA) - bookmark sharing and social bookmarking tool

Runners Up

• All in One Sidebar - Ingo Wennemaring
• Boox- Nicolas Martin
• del.icio.us IncSearch - Hirokazu Onozato
• Fast Dial - Sergey Suhoruchkin
• FireGestures - Taiga Gomibuchi
• FootieFox - Boris Ruf
• qtl - Gilad Kutiel
• Shrinkify - Mark Muday
• Table2Clipboard - Davide Ficano
• TwitterFox - Kazuho Okui
• Update Scanner - Pete Burgers
• URL Fixer - Christopher Finke

Long write-up about a program for this on "Confessions of a Freeware Junkie Blog" today:

http://maximillianx....ty-and-limiting.html

"If you have kids that are on the computer and/or Internet for any length of time, you know that getting them to log off can be quite a chore. Also, knowing just what they are doing can be just as difficult, if not near impossible.

The makers of Spyware Terminator (which I LOVE) have come up with a pretty decent piece of software that can help you control just what your kids are doing on the computer. Not only does Crawler Parental Control help you keep them from getting into certain programs and folders, it can protect them as well by blocking nasty sites, and (my favorite feature) CPC can put time limits on Internet, computer, and even program usage...allowing you to shut down or log off the computer when the max time allotted is reached. The program is completely customizable in that you can add or remove sites, programs, and folders you deem inappropriate (or not)."

Do you ever click NO by accident on the dialog asking if you want to save your changes?

I once made an AHK script for a friend as he kept running into situations like this. Assuming you use Microsoft Excel, maybe you'll find it useful too.. this script monitors and disables the "No" button in the dialog box that prompts up when trying to close an unsaved file. (see pic).

P.S. in case you really need to close a file without saving, there is a hotkey (Win+p) that will turn off the monitoring for 10 seconds.

I've always been a fan of MediaMonkey (http://www.MediaMonkey.com), but with it's recent version 3 release it's become the most exciting music player out there. MM has been just another one of a half-dozen or so leading players, but the scripts that its latest version is enabling make it top-of-the-heap.

The merits of music players is a frequent topic around here, and the tastes generally run to the utilitarian. This frequently means minimalist, but I wonder if that's because so much of the feature set in today's apps is eye candy and other junk that introduce complexity and bugs. The scripts that I'd like to tell you about really have use, so I hope they escape that criticism.

What to listen to?
My collection is large, so the biggest problem I've got is deciding what to listen to. There are external services to help you put together playlists (MusicIP is a good one), but I don't know of any that's well-integrated. Some folks have written MM scripts that I'd never have though of, but do a great job in building me a list of music to listen to.

Last.FM Node
This plugin builds a "best-of" list for an artist, or find tracks having a given tack, or research related artists, all based on actual Last.FM data. For each of these tasks it submits requests, then searches your own database looking for what you've got on that list.

The most basic operation is the "best-of" for an artist. Simply add a Favorite Artist, and it will get the top tracks for that artist from Last.FM:

But you can do other things with the artist. It's in a tree structure, so you can open up its node to see a list of related artists. In this picture I've opened Dream Theater, and within that, continued to drill down into Symphony X. For each of these artists, you can click on the node to see the "best of".

You can also get lists of top tracks having a given tag. Just add a Favorite Tag node, and click on it to retrieve your list. You can also drill into this to see top musicians having that tag, and repeat the process above to see their best songs.

RocketDock is a dock program, similar to ObjectDock, YZDock, etc.  I have already used previous versions, but now i was about to try it again and thought i could take you on this trip too

Well.. Invariably, in this kind of apps, the first thing we notice is how it looks good. RocketDock makes a great impression in that field, with lots of pre-bundled themes (and possibility of downloading even more from the web).

This is really off-topic for this site, but speaking as someone who doesnt normally like this kind of thing, i was surprisingly entranced..

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=r8ekL6ptrsM