I wish all my friends and readers, a very happy and prosperous new year. I pray that all you wishes are fulfilled and may you always feel joyous. May 2008 be the year of enlightenment for all of us and we may learn lot of things this year.
Goodluck for the new year and have fun!!
If you are one of those bloggers who use Wordpress for your blogs, then this ones for you to update. Wordpress 2.3.2 was released yesterday with fixes to the ver. 2.3.1. This update is an extremely important one since it fixes some data leak bugs.
According to this ticket, your blogs posts can be exposed by a simple query fired before it is even published. The update is also useful as it suppresses some error messages that were being shown without much reason. Get the updated Wordpress 2.3.2 here. You can read about the ChangeLog here.
According to this patent filing, we can see that Apple wants something similar to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) that is part of Windows. The patent was filed by Apple on Dec 13, 2007 and has the subject, "RUN-TIME CODE INJECTION TO PERFORM CHECKS". Apple wants to have code injection into any running application and make checks if the application is valid or not and if it has necessary rights to run on the specific hardware or software platform. Thus, this is a DRM thing that Apple wants to add to OSX.
DRM or Digital Rights Management is one way to govern data/applications and has been "talk of the town" for media files and content. If memory serves me right, Steve Jobs was last seen complaining against DRM to audio companies, but somehow he thinks that adding DRM to the OS is a good thing. Yes, it can be used for good things, when users are given the rights to manage the applications or data. But looking at the abstract, "an authorizing entity (e.g., an application owner or platform manufacturer)", it doesn't seem like the owner of the computer has much of the rights.
Vista has special checks of DRM as part of WGA and Microsoft uses it to check the validity of Windows users. WGA hasn't been able to prove the genuineness of the applications running maliciously on Windows and is only a waste of CPU cycles. Also it checks for genuine copy of Windows, but has been flagging some legal copies as pirated copies for sometime now.
Apple may or may not bring those ill-effects by implementing DRM in a different way, but in its very nature DRM is a hindrance to freedom. May be some people will claim DRM to be the price for freedom, but in my humble opinion, its only a way in which powerful people can show their might. Let's hope Apple doesn't bring it to OSX anytime soon!!
Wikia just launched a search engine in Beta (actually the founder said pre-alpha) yesterday. You can write an email and get an invite to Wikia Search. The announcement was made on the mailing list. Wikia had promised a search in 2007 and technically just 5 days are left for 2007 to end. So they have just met the deadline by an inch. Wikia Search is expected to publicly launch on January 7th, 2008.
Wikia is known for Wikipedia and founder Jimmy Wales said in December 2006 that he would be launching a web search engine as a competitor to Google. He had earlier said that Google's search engine shows too many incorrect results and in his words, "spam" results. This he wants to rectify with Wikia Search which will be using the Grub! web crawler technology. The following is from the WikiaSearch website about the future of Internet Search and Goals of Wikia Search:
Our Four Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:
Active areas of focus:
I somewhat agree that PageRank and Google's current search doesn't currently work best, but the new Blog search and News search are starting to change it for the good. Infact, Google Knol seems to be a response to Wikia Search from Google which will be relevant and more related to giving users data for the query rather than plain links.
Wikia has just recently launched OpenServing, which is free webhosting for Wikis. Its a useful service and I think Wikis have got quite popular for information sharing on collaborative projects that are done online. OpenServing and Wikia Search and so much like Knol and Blogger that it seems that Wikia and Google are on a head-on collision very soon.
Although somewhat controversial, I have found wikipedia to be a very useful tool. And I hope that Jimmy will be able to bring some competition to the search market. It will surely help improve the condition of the current web searching.
Update: Ironic, but just after I hit the submit on this post, I heard about IE8 passing the ACID2 Test. May be IE is finally following the standards... Opera doesn't need to worry, if IE8 is shown to EU
Last week when Opera filed the antitrust complaint with the EU, I wondered if Opera was going the same route as Netscape. We all know Netscape couldn't do much about the unbundling of Internet Explorer (IE) from Windows and Microsoft is still very adamant that it wants IE in Windows. Then, what's new with Opera's rants on IE ??
Opera's statement speaks something different than Netscape. Opera said, "We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them". Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities. The complaint calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" strategy.
This means that Opera wants EU to tell Microsoft that they need to comply to the standards, so that everyone can see the same web. Currently, most web developers want to adhere to the standards, but due to IE having the largest market share, when something breaks due to IE, we have to care more about it than it breaking something else. Thus, Opera has rightly said that by breaking standards, IE is keeping its market share. People use IE because other browsers suck at displaying pages that are built for the only-IE.
To have a look at how broken IE actually is, look at this page from webdevout. The DOM & CSS state of IE is completely insane and I'm amazed how Microsoft has put up with it. Even with IE7 being released about 5 years after IE6, very little improved. CSS3 is rarely working and same is the condition with DOM Level3 and DOM Level 2 Styles. Here is a simplified comparison table:
| Standard | Avg Compliance for IE6 | Avg Compliance for IE7 | Avg Compliance for Firefox2 | Avg Compliance for Opera |
| HTML 4.01 | 82% | 82% | 93% | 87% |
| CSS 2.1 | 41% | 45% | 90% | 97% |
| DOM Events | 77% | 77% | 100% | 100% |
Other standards like SVG are far from being implemented in IE and requires a plugin, whereas Opera 9 shows SVG pretty nicely. You can also try another test, the ACID2 Test to check the standards compliance. Also, look here for historical screenshots on different browsers on the ACID2 Test.
Opera is truly a innovative browser company and I guess everyone agrees that its invented popular features like tabbed browsing, Speed Dial, integrated search bar etc. that have come to other browsers as well. It has also been among the first to adopt the standards. So they really have the moral capacity for complaining against IE.
Making it a rule that everyone has to follow the standards is not a righteous thing to do. It has been seen in the past that not all standards are perfect. One company can do better than what the standard has to offer, but when it hinders progress of another company or affects the majority of internet users and developers, I think it needs to be sorted out. And in this case, IE is not making any special progress over the standards with IE. I think Opera's done a good job by complaining on the standards front. Hope the bench from EU listens and helps improve the situation.
Lists are a human way to organize their lives. And so, Forbes (the guys who are known for their lists) have just put out another list for everyone to look at. And this time the list is about 25 most popular web celebrities. It is always interesting to look at lists, but this one is more interesting since it features a lot of tech guys and tech bloggers.
The Web Celeb 25
1. Perez Hilton (Mario Lavandeira)
2. Michael Arrington *
3. Mark Frauenfelder *
4. Seth Godin
5. Cory Doctorow *
6. Matt Drudge
7. Gina Trapani *
8. Mark Zuckerberg *
9. Harry Knowles
10. Robert Scoble *
11. Frank Warren
12. Om Malik *
13. Will Leitch
14. Jeff Jarvis
15. Kevin Rose *
16. Kathy Sierra *
17. Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons) *
18. Markos Moulitsas
19. Xeni Jardin *
20. Ryan Block *
21. Glenn Reynolds
22. Pete Cashmore *
23. Steve Rubel
24. Heather Armstrong
25. Darren Rowse
You can read the list and some detail about the web celebrities on Forbes.com
If you look at the list, all the guys/gals I have put a * are bloggers or tech entrepreneurs. 13 out of 25 are writing about tech or own online tech related business. Although categorizing Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose related to tech isn't absolutely correct, but they are programmers and tech guys. The list just goes to show that geeks are still the internet's largest reader base and tech news/info is the biggest content on the web.
Google seems to be concentrating quite a lot these days to improve search. All of last year and beginning of this year, Google has been doing something else other than working on its search. But now the limelight has come back to search. Video indexing using Video Sitemaps was announced yesterday and today Google is talking about how it has improved its news search.
Its more like Google Blogsearch, but it has more relevant search for news events. There is a new site operator like [site:sunnytalkstech.blogspot.com Programming], which will help you gets news from a specific site. Even if you have forgotten the exact news spouce, it can help you with an ajax'd search field, which will show you the matching terms on the incomplete keyword you have typed. All in all, the new news search is pretty well done and is pretty good for searching latest news. If you are searching news, then its better than using the normal Google homepage.
Another interesting development at Google is the new video sitemaps. Video sitemaps is an addition to the current "sitemap" protocol that is used by websites to inform search engines about the content hosted on the domain. Video sitemaps is Google's addition to the protocol and will be used by Google to index and get notified about videos. You can find the standard XML template example here. On that blog, one comment pointed out that "<video:whatever /> elements" should be used to the normal sitemap XML, which in my opinion is the right thing to do. Doesn't make much sense to create two sitemaps for people who dont have video-only content. I think this new sitemap for video is good for people who have video-only content and not for the general webmaster...
Google is "the" search engine and advanced news searching is a very good improvement along with Blogsearch, video indexing and a few new things Google is doing to give you more relevant results.
AMD will be launching the Phenom Black Edition processors just in time for Christmas and these unlocked beasts will be on the shelves for the overclockers sometime next week. After the retail success of the Athlon Black Edition processors, AMD has realized that it can sell these processors and make some bucks on these not-so-fast processors. The Phenom Black Edition Processors will have a clock speed of 2.3Ghz and it'll be interesting to see how much they can be overclocked.
With AMD already struggling to get enough speeds on the Phenom processors, it'll be interesting to see if they can be overclocked to great extent. And if these processors are overclocked, it'll be a good indication of how AMD's next-year Phenoms will perform. AMD already has talked a lot to its investors and people at the Wall Street and has promised it'll be doing good in 2008. All those promises will be on display if we can overclock and determine the performance of upcoming faster clocked Phenoms
Lets see how it goes with these Black Phenoms... and will they be an indicator of when AMD gets back from red to black!!
Today, Google has talked about a new way for people to share knowledge. Google will release a product shortly called "Knol" that will allow people with knowledge about a thing to share it with other people. The product is kind-of like wikipedia where people write pages and google will display it in the search results, so that this knowledge is shared through its search engine.
You would ask, what's new about it... if you wanted to share knowledge then there was always wikipedia or your own blog. But what Google wants to do with this new product is to highlight the authors. They want to bring the people who share the knowledge into the limelight and this would be an incentive for people to share knowledge.
Google also adds that, the author can display ads on the content and make some money. But it will be left upto the author as to what he/she wishes to do. Google will also not edit the articles and all the editorial authority will be with the author only.
I kind-of like this idea of Knol and should be pretty useful in getting relevant searches, which is rarely found these days. Google will rate the different articles on a topic and it'll be displayed in the search result higher than all the junk that's not related to the topic. I think Knol should be a very good product since it will help recognize authors as well as the searchers will be able to get better search content.
You can read the entire announcement at the Google Blog.
Update: Microsoft has just put the lid on the program saying that the program is full... This makes me wonder how many people want Vista/Office!!... Or is it just saving the privacy scare??
Some wise man once said, "No pain...No Gain". How about the pain of losing your privacy and gaining a free copy of Windows Vista ?? Yes, your privacy is worth only $350 in the market according to Microsoft. That's what Kevin from notebookreviews says is the offer from Microsoft.
You can go to the link: http://wfp.microsoft.com and signup for the Windows Feedback Program:
You can use this website to sign up for one or both parts of the program, but note the following restrictions:
The Windows Feedback Program will monitor the different things that you do and will report back to Microsoft about the stuff you do. In all goodness, Microsoft says that they will use your computer to monitor your behavior and that feedback will be useful to improve the software experience. Its kind-of spyware, but you agree to it before installing and get gifts for it in return. There will also be a periodic survey that you will be asked to do and the results of those will be used by I guess a few people in the market. comScore is going to be involved in this and we all know that they seem to do some user tracking and website data analysis for the paycheck.
You have to decide is your privacy worth selling... and if it is... is it worth of what, Microsoft's giving you??
In another story, theInq reports that Microsoft also filed 52 lawsuits in 22 countries against software companies who have sold pirated copies of Windows. Is there a relationship between the two ??
Like I previously mentioned here, the Office 2007 SP1 was released yesterday and came up on the Windows Update for Vista or Microsoft Update for XP today morning. Windows Update or Microsoft Update is the recommended way to get the update, but for those who want to deploy the Service Pack 1 across a lot of different computers, can download the executable file here. The file size is 218.3 MB and the MD5 Hash is: d4e2c2678f0a2b839cf4a317b80f2d1c
In the meantime, Microsoft also has released a public version of Service Pack 1 Release Candidate (SP1 RC) for Windows Vista. It is still not the final build and I advise people to try it on their own risk. There seem to be a few problems with the build and I've been testing it for sometime now, when Microsoft released it last month for the beta testers. But for the strong-hearted, you can download and crash from here.
Microsoft has just revamped its Download Center and it looks sleek and gorgeous. It is still in beta and you'll have to go through a signup page. But the interesting thing about the website is that its powered with Microsoft's upcoming technology called SilverLight. So, when you go visit the site, you are first asked to install SilverLight (See below)
SilverLight is touted as Microsoft's replacement for Flash, but still requires a lot of effort on Microsoft's part to make it cross-platform. Its speciality is video and animation and that is very well showcased on the new download center. The top banner on the page shows some nice animations and so does the search and menus for downloads. You can look below for the screenshot or experience after you get into the beta!!
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG or 'wizywig') is probably the best thing to happen to desktop publishing or web authoring. WYSIWYG enables you to view your output while you are making the stuff. A nice paradigm to put your creative ideas to paper. Thanks to the GUI Builder in RAD tools like Visual Basic or WinForms or netBeans Matisse, this WYSIWYG paradigm is brought to the developer as well. But these GUI Builders only cover the part where you are designing the GUI. What about the part where you are designing the business logic, the real things that get done in the background ?
I was recently working on a project that would enable a client to publish his magazines based on what data is stored in the database. It was kind of a report generation software, but with lots of automated formatting based on the database content. Like if the article was about a horse, it had to be taken from the database and formatted in a specific way whereas if it was about the jockey, then it would have a different formatting. The client had fully imagined how the magazine would look like and how the pages would be formatted. But we as developers had to meet the challenge of trying to sketch what the client was imagining. We were trying to give the client what he was thinking... We were supposed to say, "What You Think Is What You Get" (WYTIWYG) !!
I'm sure as creative minds we have always faced this challenge of taking someone's imagination and putting it to life. When it's your own imagination its easy to execute but when you have to understand and convey someone else's imagination it really gets complicated. And software development is all about meeting this challenge.
UML 2.0 has 13 diagrams and each of them are used to covey that imagination, but how many times have you come to new project and even after looking at all the diagrams, never figured out how to go about it from there?? And when you have a quick deadline to meet, it gets even tougher.
But during the above mentioned project, I realized that WYTIWYG is more about marketing than it is about true development. The reason I say this is because quite a lot of times, if you have good convincing skills you can change the way your client is thinking. This implies that you can always make someone else think what you want them to think. I guess some intellectual said, "You can take the horse to water, but you can't make it drink"... I would dare to disagree and say that if you have the skills you can make the horse drink as well...
May be some day we'll have AI so strong that the computer will be partially able to understand what we are thinking. May be after it's understood our thinking, it can create what we are thinking. But until that's done, improve your convincing skills... most probably, it'll be more useful that all your programming skills...
If the developers of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) need to look for lessons on timely releases then they don't need to look far away from their desks. The developers of the Office 2007 team need to be lauded for their effort in releasing the SP1 ahead of schedule. And SP1 for Office 2007 will be released on 11th Dec, 2007.
Office 2007 was a completely revamped product and has a lot of new features including a complete change in the User-Interface (Ribbon) as well as the file formats (docx, pptx, xlsx...). Thus, it was expected that there would be a few bugs in the release. But like previous Office releases, this version was well received by the industry and the Office Suite is one product from Microsoft that has maintained its reputation of good releases.
The Office 2007 SP1 is an update based the user feedback and hence has lots of small hotfixes for compatibility. SP1 also brings a lot of improvements to the compatibility between the Office 2003 and Office 2007 file formats i.e. doc with docx. Few other improvements in SP1 include support for .Net Framework 3.5 and easy development with Visual Studio 2008. Some fixes to animated text in Powerpoint have also been added. Changes to DirectX overlay is another useful enhancement to make the Powerpoint slideshows a little slicker!!
When Yahoo Messenger 9 was released last month, I was a little disappointed. I had seen the previous videos about the special yahoo messenger for vista. Since another "normal" version of Yahoo Messenger was released before the Vista one, I thought Yahoo has forgotten about the Vista-special version of its messenger. But Yahoo today released a preview version of its Yahoo Messenger for Vista.
The Yahoo Messenger for Vista does not have all the features that are part of the normal yahoo messenger since its only a preview. The highly anticipated voice chat, video sharing and file sharing (using Microsoft's Silverlight) seems to be missing from this version, which was demo'd at the CES. Also, its taken Yahoo way too long to release even this half-baked version.
The Yahoo Messenger for Vista is actually meant to showcase the bling-bling using the Vista specific graphic capabilities as well as other Vista components like Sidebar. A lot of people have been complaining about the slow performance of his version. Long Zheng says that Vista SP1 might improve the performance of the WPF that this version uses.
You can read more about it at the Yahoo Messenger Blog.
Found this really interesting website, thanks to the complimentary LINQ from the Inq. You can go the MyHeritage Face Recognition website and upload a closeup photo of yours. It'll run some complex face recognition program and match your face to the faces of celebrities that are present in their database. After the search is complete, it creates a collage of celebrity faces that are your look-alikes!!
Its a flash based interface that they have built and it looks pretty slick. But you can't say the same about the accuracy of the face recognition. We all know that face recognition is a complex thing to do, but how about me looking like Winona Ryder or Halle Berry for accuracy!! :)) Even the 66% match with Jesse Bradford was flattering that anything else!
To test the accuracy I tried an image of I also tried an image of Salma Hayek and Elisha Cuthbert. The Salma Hayek face detection said, that Salma Hayek looks like Amisha Patel, the Indian actress - a fact I've been saying for sometime now!! And the Elisha Cuthbert detection is an awesome one... The picture I upload didn't quite look like Elish Cuthbert to me (but actually the photo is of hers) and the app found her!!
Other than the celeb face recognition there is also a genealogy on their website which is also pretty interesting.
Tell me who you look like and how accurately it seems to find you?? and which celeb do you look like??
Technorati, the popular blogger's tool for indexing and ranking blogs has just launched a new service called "Blogger Central". Blogger Central is kind of an aggregrator service and talks about top tags, rising links of the day and some popular posts in the blogosphere.
Blogger Central is Technorati's attempt to focus back on its target audience of bloggers. Technorati has been slowly loosing its limelight due to other services which are doing better work than it. For example, Google's BlogSearch indexed faster than Technorati a few weeks back and people began searching for blogs on Google's page rather than Technorati. Even the wordpress guys changed the Dashboard, to get links from Google's BlogSearch and not Technorati. This might have been a big blow to Technorati as Wordpress is the most popular blogging tool.
Blogger Central is also in some ways similar to Techmeme's Web 2.0 discussion. The rising links for the day can allow a user to read those posts and then look at the reactions to that blog post from technorati's index. Blogger Central also displays "Blog Posts About Blogging", another popular and interesting thing that bloggers seem to read these days. Other things like "Top Blogs" and "Top Favourited Blogs" which were already there with Technorati have been brought to this page as well.
We will see in the coming days if Technorati can get back to the limelight, that it once had. Technorati lost its way sometime back due to slow indexing, incomplete indexing and incorrect search results. Those problems seem to have been corrected in the last month and now Technorati works a lot better and accurately. Goodluck to Technorati on this one...
The much awaited and anticipated netBeans 6.0 has been released and can be downloaded from here. You may also want to look at the revamped website which seems to be having all the details about the changes, documentation and plugins updated to point to the release of the final netbeans 6.0 build.
If you have been following my coverage, about the different changes made through the different builds of netbeans 6.0, then you already know how much has improved and this final build is of excellent quality.
netBeans 6.0 is a huge released with an integration of host of products that have been brought together as part of the netBeans package. Below is the screenshot of the download page which has different builds for different needs.
Will test and write a few tutorials about the new tools in netBeans 6.0 later. So please check back and enjoy the tutorials!
This is actually an old piece of code. But since there is this big fuss about Google entering the Online File Storage market, I thought I'd remind a few people that you can already get your files on Google's servers (if that makes you happy).
There are already a lot of websites for online file sharing. Rapidshare, and a few others come to the mind, but people want to store files on Google's servers. Google has also said that it'll provide a GDrive service for online file storage pretty soon. For people who don't like to wait, there's been a software that's been storing files and whatever on your gmail account. With Gmail giving you more than 5GB space and anyone is allowed to signup for an account, Gmail can be used as a very useful tool for filesharing.
The original idea was given by Richard Jones, and has been available for 2 years now. Its called the Gmail Drive or GmailFS. Gmail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.
From the software's website:
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google Gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.
There is a warning though that Google may change their code in the back-end and make this software somewhat useless. But until it works, you can have a free and fast online server to store your files. Download the software here and have your files on Google's servers!!
Everyone knows AT&T exclusively sold the iPhone and bet quite a lot of money on the iPhone. Infact, AT&T shares quite a large percentage of revenue earned from the iPhone users with Apple. So, you must come to think of Apple & AT&T being best friends...??
That's not quite the inside story. When AT&T sold the first iPhone bundled with its service exclusively, it meant that iPhone could be used only on AT&T networks. But you know, the hackers didn't want that to happen. They unlocked the iPhone and we know what happened after that. But one thing not many people understood is why Apple sold the iPhone from it's stores as well, when it was only meant to be running on AT&T's network. It should have been available only at AT&T's shops and not the iTunes activation. Atleast some gaurantee that you have taken the AT&T's plans!! Forget it though since that's history...
Apple releases the firmware slowly after everyone in the world has unlocked the iPhone and newer firmware is cracked even before Apple puts its on its servers. AT&T must be totally pissed off at these leaks and so, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson leaked the info that consumers could expect a new iPhone next year that offered HSDPA wireless broadband support. This means the 3G missing from iPhone currently would be available early next year... After this information leaked, obviously people wanting to buy iPhones will hold their horses and wait for the 3G one. That's how you take revenge on Apple!!
AT&T obviously has plans and other phones for its revenue, but for Apple the iPhone sales will surely slow down. PBS's Bob Cringely, also agrees to this view, but seems to suggest that Apple will bid on the 700Mhz spectrum that Google, Intel, Verizon and others are fighting for. We'll know that on Monday, but I'm quite certain Apple will stay away from the fight which has already got quite noisy!!
