Download Firefox 4 & Give Feedback

While everyone has got into the race for ACID3, the guys from Firefox team have released Firefox 4 (aka MineField) in pre-Alpha stage of development. If you want to have a look at the future of Firefox, then download the pre-alpha from here and give your valuable feedback to the Mozilla Dev Team.

Although the site warns you:

Warning: This is NOT A FINAL OR PRE-RELEASE VERSION. This program is provided without any guarantees of stability, so please use it at your own risk. It is recommended that you back up your profile regularly, as there may be bugs that corrupt your data. If that sounds scary, you'd probably be better off with the latest version of Firefox

Trunk builds change every hour of every day. Some of the major changes in these builds that require feedback are:

• Changes to the graphics layer
• New data storage layer for bookmarks and history (using SQLite)
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
• To get a list of the most recent additions, check out the Burning Edge weblog.

I like the new Bookmark system that MineField brings. It is more easier to manage when you have a lot of bookmarks. The address bar also has a new feature where it shows a lot of links automatically from the current page. This feature does help you when you can't remember that webpage you recently visited.

With Firefox 3, still not released as a final build, it seems odd that Minefield build has been released. I guess the developers want to start making Firefox 4 complaint with ACID3 and want everyone to look at it. It does score 67% on the ACID3...

Reasons Why Intel Atom Is Getting Press Coverage

Intel Atom, earlier known by its codename Silverthorne, has got a lot of press coverage lately. And the odd thing is that people have talked so much about it although it isn't seen inside any machines, no one knows its performance and Intel hasn't told which UMPCs will end up with this processor. Also its not a killer processor in terms of design or performance. Then why all the press coverage??

According to me, following are 5 reasons why the Intel Atom is getting so much press coverage:

4.) It's CeBIT Time:

The big trade show from Germany, CeBIT is being held and it's that time of the year when all the hardware journos want to write about something. Motherboard and the CeBIT lobby/booth images are the staple from CeBIT, but there is always buzz around one or two special products. Intel got it right and told the world about Intel Atom just before CeBIT. Journalists were just waiting to write about something and a new Intel product is just what the doctor ordered. Throwing in names are enough. So you have Silverthorne as Atom; another variant with higher TDP called Centrino Atom; another chipset name Poulsbo...

3.) Super Low Power:

Although the world does not know the exact performance of Intel Atom, Intel PR told that its a super low power chip. It claims a TDP of 0.6W - 2.5W, which is commendable. Its targeted towards the small devices where battery life is extremely important. But what about performance?? and what about the chipset power?? A new design and package, completely different set of devices - Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). Its changing a lot of stuff...

2.) Intel Marketing Rocks:

Is there any tech company that can beat Intel in marketing? "Intel Inside" was the best one in the tech industry and Intel really sold many chips on the back of that campaign. Centrino is also another great one from Intel. The same has to be said about Intel Atom. Codenames on the processor started coming early and the hype was created. Then came the design goals and the target market for the chip. Then slowly info trickled on its architecture and then the logo and roadmap. Perfect information release timing and just about perfect marketing. 

1.) Who Via ??:

If Via was a slightly bigger name and had the same marketing strength, then I guess the Intel Atom story would have been played down. The VIA Isaiah is a great CPU with excellent performance and good power usage. The Centaur (a Via design-lab) guys have an out-of-order processor which is lot more powerful than the Intel Atom. They are targeted at different power usages, but Via could have waited for an Intel announcement and got back at Intel like AMD used to do at IDF. Via didn't do much to publicize and Intel Atom got the coverage.

Tata Indicom Not Allowed To Sell Blackberry

The Economic Times reports that the Home Ministry has not allowed Tata Teleservices ("TataIndicom" brand) to give Blackberry services to its customers. Tata Teleservices wanted to provide Blackberry services to its customer along with Blackberry devices and hence had sent an application to the Department of Telecom (DOT). But the Home Ministry has rejected the application with an explanation that Blackberry devices do not allow lawful interception of messages.

The Indian Home Ministry has a law where telecom operators can be asked to intercept messages from any mobile phone and the operators have to comply. The push email, data services in RIM's Blackberry devices are encrypted and secure which prevents the operator from understanding the messages (look here). But the question which Tata Teleservices has asked the DOT is that if this is the case, then how come other telecom providers (read BPL-Mobile, Airtel...) can provide Blackberry services. Obviously, the government was sleeping when they allowed those service providers and suddenly caught with its pants down, it ordered other service providers for an explanation.

The situation just goes to show the incompetence of government agencies and it is plain ridiculous to ban the Blackberry. Webmail using gmail, yahoo etc is also encrypted and the ISP has no idea what emails are being sent. Technology is moving towards a point where any data exchange needs to be encrypted. I know atleast 40-50 people around me who are using Blackberry and business email on the Blackberry is their life... The government should come to terms with technology and then make decisions!

Win A Zune, Xbox 360 or Home Server For Evaluating Products

Microsoft has just released a program called Evalu'08, where you can evaluate Microsoft Server products and win a server for your home. All you need to do is download and evaluate any of the 3 products which Microsoft launched recently. Download a free trial of any of the launch products or take a virtual lab and be entered for a chance to win great prizes.

The program is educational in some sense if you consider marketing speak to be informative. You can attend the virtual labs for a host of products and win the prizes. Alas! the rules state that its open only to legal residents of the 50 U.S. (includes D.C.) 18+ employed in an IT or software development role.

The prizes for the lucky draw is either a Zune, if you evaluate 1 product; an Xbox360 if you evaluate 2 products or Windows Home Server if you evaluate 3 products. The contest page requires you to have Silverlight installed and you need a live ID to signin.

Race to ACID3 Just Began

Just when you downloaded the latest beta of IE8 and thought the web was becoming a standard complaint world, the guys from Web Standards Project  just changed the rules of the game. The guys behind the famous ACID tests, called WaSP have just launched the latest version of their test called ACID3 and to no one's surprise, every browser out there fails the test.

Just like previous versions of the ACID2 test, with this version no browser seems to pass the test. About 3 years after the release of ACID2, Microsoft's IE8 passed the test and everyone clapped. But now to their sadness, they have to deal with ACID3 to claim they are standards compliant.

According to WaSP:

Acid3 goes beyond the CSS tests implemented by Acid2 and tests a browser’s DOM Scripting capability, as well as continuing to probe visual rendering of CSS, SVG and webfonts. Further information can be found on the Acid3 page, in the press release, or you can just go ahead and take the test.

Safari was the first web browser to pass the test, with the passing version 2.02 released on October 31, 2005. This time, the race has already begun and everyone from the browser development team wants to be the first to complete the ACID3. You can look at the current state of browser wars on ACID3 here. The latest build of Safari (Webkit) with 87% compliance is already the leader in this race. 100% compliance is really the finish point and you never know which team can suddenly use NOS and win the race.

Microsoft's Next-Gen OS Research is Open-Source Now

Microsoft has been researching on operating systems for sometime now and manufacturers the most popular operating system in the form of Windows. But most of the research that goes into Windows is unknown to the rest of the world. Most people bash Microsoft of being very secretive and people from the open-source world often criticize Microsoft for this. But today Microsoft has done what many people believe is impossible. Microsoft has released their operating system research to be used in future as an open-source project. And the project is called Singularity.

The name Singularity does sound like some path-breaking theory in physics. In the world of operating systems, Microsoft's Singularity is sort of path-breaking. Microsoft announced Singularity about 2 years back and had started thinking about it 3 years before the announcement. After 5 years of research, today Microsoft released Singularity with source-code to codeplex, which is Microsoft's open-source community repository.

Singularity in theory looks to be very promising. It uses a microkernel architecture, which means the kernel is really very small and contains only very few services/managers. There was much long debate between Minix Vs Linux on microkernel Vs monolithic kernel without result. I side with Minix and this with PCs getting faster we need more stability than performance. But I guess that is part of a different discussion altogether. The following image shows the architecture of Singularity OS.

 

I have just finished downloading the Singularity RDK (Research Development Kit) from here, and will be installing it on Virtual PC.

Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2008, Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Mumbai

Microsoft has been running a campaign called "Heroes happen here" as part of the launch of 3 major products from the 27th February all over the world. The launch of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 is supposed to be the largest software product launch from Microsoft ever and covers  the most important tools which Microsoft sells to developers and businesses. The campaign reached Indian shores yesterday at Bangalore and today the launch party reached Mumbai. The Mumbai launch about which I had blogged earlier was held today at Regal Theatre from 10am.

Microsoft's odd selection of a movie theatre for the launch of its product was explained VJ Gaurav Kapoor, who played the host to today's Microsoft party. Microsoft explains that developers who use Microsoft products create technology that can help change lives and play heroes in today's world of technology. "Like film heroes, this party is to celebrate their success story and what better place than a movie theatre to showcase heroes", said Gaurav Kapoor.

Microsoft has also created a song for the event, which was quite peppy I may add and definitely better than the "Vista Wow Song"!! A group of young dancers came up to the stage and performed on the song...

S.Somasegar, Senior VP at Microsoft started the keynote and mentioned all the new things that Microsoft brings with these new products. He talked about the upcoming Dynamic IT (read here) and how these products launched today are going to help reach that goal. He also talked about Virtualization being one of the primary goals and future technology in the IT world. A small demo on virtualization was also shown. I would have loved to ask why Hyper-V is still in beta (won't be out-of-the-box feature) and why understanding that the market needed virtualization took so much time for Microsoft. Alas! they didn't have a Q&A session.

 

Then there was a presentation on new features of SQL Server 2008. With SQL Server 2008, Microsoft brings a lot features that it lacked in previous versions. New Large User DataTypes, Data/Time Datatype, Spatial Data are some new things for SQL Server 2008, but have existed in other database systems like Oracle for sometime now. SQL Server 2008 didn't seem to me as a revolutionary product compared to the competition, but adds much needed features to this product line. A few SQL Server 2008 benchmarks do tell us that performance has improved considerably. SQL Server 2008 is actually not going to be released now. Microsoft is still testing it and adding last few touches. It will RC sometime in Q2 '08 and will be released in Q3 '08

Visual Studio 2008 was the next product that Microsoft talked about. Microsoft has done some hard work with Visual Studio 2008 and from the audience reaction at the product demo and technical presentations, it seems they have a winner. A lot of new features from ASP.NET were shown and out-of-the-box AJAX controls were shown. Time was running out and everyone was waiting for lunch... but I added to everyone's pain by requesting Harish (the speaker) to demo how to create an app with Silverlight. He obliged by explaining to the audience about Silverlight and its CLR and demo'd a small button animation. The audience loved it and everyone clapped. Silverlight seems to be an interesting proposition and Expression Blend 2 is turning out to be a good product so early in the game. Flash tools still are better, but Silverlight v2.0 with C# is more powerful compared to ActionScript or Flex.

Windows Server 2008 was the last to be introduced. It has a host of new features and IIS 7.0 was the main part which Microsoft highlighted. A few other things like WMS, failsafe clustering, Sharepoint services were also mentioned. Large part of the demo featured on how easy it was to manage the different services and talked about the small "core" of services that were enabled by default. Improved Security was also discussed to some extent and Microsoft said it was one of the main priorities in Windows Server 2008.

After lunch Microsoft showed the movie, "Transformers" to the audience and everyone attending the event left smiling with some goodies in a bag. The goodie bag contained lots of PR material and partner information. A 90-day evaluation DVD for Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Windows Server 2008 RC were part of the goodies. Having already played with Windows Server 2008 during the beta testing, these weren't exactly goodies for me. But all in all the event was fun, but I didn't wait to watch the movie!!

Nokia To Ship Silverlight on Mobiles

Nokia announced today that it will be installing Silverlight on S60, S40 and Nokia internet tablets. Silverlight is Microsoft's technology to create rich internet applications (RIA) similar to Adobe's Flash. By adding Silverlight to its phones, Nokia thinks that it can get a lot of developers to start off on its S60 & S40 platforms. Nokia already ships Flashlite with its mobile phones which is used to run applications made in Flash and Silverlight will be a direct competition to Flashlite.

Microsoft is pushing Silverlight as the next generation platform for developing rich internet applications and has promised it to be completely cross-platform and available on a host of different platforms including Linux and Mac. Today's announcement from Nokia proves that Microsoft is truly committed to make Silverlight applications usable from a host of devices.

Earlier, when Microsoft created the .NET framework it had mentioned platform-independence as one of its feature. Although this was true from a programming language point of view, Microsoft does not release the full .NET Framework Runtime on all platforms. Other projects like Mono help run .NET apps on Linux. On the other hand, although Silverlight is based on .NET it uses a different CLR (Common Runtime Environment). Silverlight CLR is like a browser plugin and is showing progress on becoming true cross-platform technology.

Silverlight is based on C#, which makes it easy for developers with knowledge of C# to move to programming mobile RIAs. Also, Microsoft is ready with Silverlight v2.0. All of this just goes to show that Microsoft is moving really fast to capture the mobile phone market. It still has a lot to do with Silverlight and one of its current missions would be to get other handset manufacturers on the Silverlight bandwagon.

The mobile internet world is really hotting up with Google also bringing Gears to mobile phones. I'm sure Adobe will add new features to Flashlite in the coming months. If you are a web developer and want to get your apps into mobile phones, this is your time!!

The Scrapkut Worm Running Loose on Orkut

I'm sure a lot of Orkut users have seen the image shown below in their scrapbooks or their friend's scrap book. If you have seen it, then hold your temptation. Do not click on it because although it may seem to you like a YouTube video, its actually link that downloads a worm. The worm now known as the W32.Scrapkut by Symantec has created that scrap and wants to spread itself through your friendly orkut network.

Symantec's website dug deeper into the worm and explains on how the worm intends to spread itself.

When a victim clicks on the link, they are redirected to an external site which prompts them to download the file “flashx_player_9.8.0.exe”. When executed, flashx_player_9.8.0.exe retrieves the files windosremote.exe, logservicess.exe and win32chekupdate.exe from http://[REMOVED].ifastnet.com. These files download additional files that perform a variety of malicious actions, but logservicess.exe is the main executable for further propagation. Logservicess.exe first copies itself as maindwxp.exe to four different locations on the system to ensure it is executed on startup.... [read more]

Hopefully you have not yet succumbed to the temptation and clicked the image. The problem is not just for you, but for all your friends on the orkut network. And if you have already experienced the worm, pass on the info to your friends so that they don't get infected. Social networks is going to be the next big target for hackers and worm writers. Tread with caution is the best advice at the moment!!

List of Programs That Don't Work With Vista SP1

Microsoft has done a lot of work with Vista SP1, so much so that a lot of security programs don't work properly with SP1 although they used to work with Vista RTM. Kernel changes and some networking tweaks are basically the reasons why these programs aren't working. The list may not be completely exhaustive, but Microsoft's Support Center lists these programs.

Programs that are blocked from starting after you install Windows Vista SP1

• BitDefender AV or Internet Security 10
• Fujitsu Shock Sensor 2.1.0.0
• Jiangmin KV Antivirus 2008 or v10
• Zone Alarm Security Suite 7.1.078

Programs that do not run after you install Windows Vista SP1

• Iron Speed Designer 5.0.1
• Xheo Licensing 3.1
• Free Allegiance 2.1

Programs that have a loss of functionality after you install Windows Vista SP1

• NYT Reader v1
• Rising Personal Firewall 2007
• Novell ZCM Agent 10.01

There may be other programs that Microsoft has not identified and still have problems with Vista SP1. A few programs may also not display the incompatibility dialogs, but may contain potential issues with Vista SP1. If you are using any of the above products and have problems then, Microsoft's list with explanation and solutions can be found here.