I have recently noticed that Firefox would randomly go to different websites. For a while I thought it was my touchpad acting up and somehow taking text that I had copied and somehow pasting it to Firefox which would in turn search google and go to the first site that matched. The ads seemed to become more and more frequent until I decided to do something about it. I took a look at my .mozilla directory. Lots of stuff in there… I saw some strange things from Silverpop that looked like it was running JavaScripts from them. I deleted those lines but figured I didn’t want to wait until it happened again and then I just deleted the whole .mozilla directory. I have no doubt that I had adware which I installed somehow. It could have been an extension I installed or an exploit caused by JavaScript. I backed up my bookmarks and deleted the .mozilla directory. Right afterI did that I felt like I should have saved it and found out why I had this strangeness installed. After all my work to secure my system, it’s all been compromised by some stupid Firefox nonsense. I feel shafted. Any ideas?

After wrangling with this JavaScript code in IE which worked perfectly in Firefox (sound familiar?) I finally installed two things in my Windows virtual machine. First was a JS debugger and the other was a IE developer toolbar. The toolbar was pretty nifty and allowed me to examine the DOM objects that I was dynamically creating. What’s this? Why doesn’t IE see an ID and a name for this element? That’s because I capitalized them when I was adding them ‘

Today I decided to go ahead and make another Desko release since I finally got the filesystem operational. Corey did a little work on the style and has some good plans to improve the style of the windows. The cool thing about this release is that you can upload and download your files. This is just all laying the groundwork so that we can get to the fun part. On the agenda for the next release is: dragging and dropping of files into an email being composed so that it automatically attaches the file to the email, improved window styles, and if we’re lucky some type of feed reader.

I just registered MyDesko.org and MyDesko.com. I plan to have a demo of this latest release up on MyDesko.org in the next few days. I need to create a demo email address so my own doesn’t get screwed with.

Go try out Desko