Still As Life

Today, along with plotting to take over the world with Rhi, I rearranged me desk setup, and for that matter, most of that side of the room.

I've chucked one of my bookcases up on the back of one of my desks. I've run out of room on the ground level, so logically, start building up. Tetris style.

It turned out that the bottom shelf of the bookcase is the perfect size to fit my pair of 19" widescreens with about 3mm to spare above them and about 2cm in total to spare horizontally. Sweet.

I've migrated the main work stream applications over to Quadzilla. As a result of this, I've noticed about a 50% performance decrease in the performance of Adobe Photoshop CS3 when working with large files compared to the old XP box that is around a quarter of the power of Quadzilla. That doesn't make any sense to me and I sure hope it's just a temporary problem.

I have left the old box up and running next to the new one. I need it for access to the RAID 0 array in it. At the moment, I have it plugged in to the second input in my secondary monitor, however I am accessing it predominately via the Windows Remote Desktop Connection software as this saves the trouble of switching the inputs and the keyboard and mouse.

Since moving the bookcase, I all of a sudden seem to have so much extra space. I need it since I'm planning on getting a filing cabinet soon, all the same though, it's remarkable the amounf ot space it seems to have made. I'm also thinking about getting a fourth desk from somewhere to get myself some more desk space since I seem to keep running out.

Labels: other, software

I have Folding@Home running on all of my computers, I have run it for quite a while. I have no real reason not to. Now having it setup on the new computer, and watching the usage on the CPU, it is nothing like what I had expected.

On everyt other computer I have used it on, it consistently keeps the CPU usage up at 100% except when it is sending and receiving a new block to work on. On the quad core CPU though, even though it is set to use all of the idle CPU time, it seems to sit between 30% and 50% of the CPU time, it is also getting through pieces quicker than the old computer, despite only using such a small amount of the available CPU time.

No, this does not mean that I have gotten the new computer completely stable. It is close. I am still having a couple of problems. It seems that I cannot reboot. I have to shut it down and then manually power it back on. If I tell it to reboot it will get stuck in an infinite loop of rebooting. The only way around this is to either force it to power down and then switch it back on, or to boot into safe mode and then reboot from safe mode.

This seems to be the only problem remaining. I have a couple of times had the 200gb drive become read only, however, a shut down and then power back on has fixed that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have put a fan in the front now as well. I accidentally killed my spare 120mm fan (I accidentally put a screwdriver through it. Don't ask.), so it's got my only spare 92mm fan in now instead (which is noisier than any of the 80mm ones that I have lying around). This seems to have fixed the problem of one of the drives constantly spinning up and down for no reason. It will definitely have to be replaced by a 120mm fan though as this single 92mm fan is producing as much noise on it's own as the entire old computer did.

Labels: hardware, software

Well, as of today, the TerraMedia Email Exchange is up and running.

Using Microsoft Exchange Server, the TerraMedia Email Exchange provides email, contact and calendar synchronisation whether you are accessing your email from Outlook, via a web browser, or even via a smart phone. So you can access your mailbox wherever you are in the world.

Pricing starts at $29 a month per mailbox and includes 500mb of space and a free Outlook 2007 license. There is absolutely no setup fee, so the total cost to have your own Exchange email accounts are drastically reduced to a low $29 a month.

If you need more than 500mb, there are larger capacity options available to suit.

All of my email accounts are running off of the TerraMedia Email Exchange Server and it is proving to work very effectively.

Check out the news article on TerraMedia for more information as well as the TerraMedia Email Exchange information, key features and pricing pages.

Labels: internet, software, work

With my installation of 4gb of RAM in my new computer it became time to figure out what operating system to use. As I mentioned in my earlier blog about installing the OS on my new computer, Windows XP Professional 32 bit, Windows Vista 32 bit, and Windows Server 2003 would not see more than 3.5gb of RAM, even though I have 4gb installed.

I have been aware of this limitation in 32 bit operating systems for a while, but I had to try it out for myself, just to be sure. There is one thing though that has always had me confused about it. In everything I have read about people finding 32 bit OS's not seeing their full amount of RAM, it has seen various different amounts. Sometimes it would be 3.3gb, sometimes 3.5, 3.7, 3.8 etc.

I could not figure out why it was always different.

I've done some reading up on it though, and the reason for this is not that 32 bit operating systems can only handle 3.something gb of RAM, it is that they can address a total of 4gb of RAM.

This means that any devices that have their own RAM, such as video cards have their RAM saved first so that it can address the entirety of the video card RAM. If there are any other devices, such as some high end RAID controllers and so on, this RAM is added to the list of addressable RAM.

Then the system memory is the last lot of RAM to be added to the total amount of RAM.

So since my video card is a 512mb video card, and I don't have any other devices with their own RAM, and 4gb is the maximum RAM that can be addressed it is worked out as follows:

4gb - n = addressable system RAM

Where n = the total amount of RAM in other devices.

As I have 4gb of RAM, and 4gb is the total, and I have already lost 512mb of it to the video card, that leaves 3.5gb of addressable system RAM. That is why 32 bit operating systems would only see 3.5gb of RAM in my computer.

It turns out there are hacks available for both XP and 32 bit Vista to have them show the full amount of RAM, however, they will still only address the amount as worked out above.

In some of my reading it has also indicated that the 4gb limit is only a Windows limitation and is not present in other 32 bit operating systems such as Linux and BSD variants.

I am not certain on that last point though so don't quote me on it.

Labels: hardware, software, technology

My current workspace as you can see in the photo on the left is quite crowded, with both the old and new computers, the laptop, 2 keyboards and 2 mice. Yes, I have a KVM switch, but I prefer to work with separate gear for each computer where possible.

Getting an OS to work has been quite a mission, and I'm still not entirely sure that I have succeeded.

First off I installed Windows XP Professional, the standard 32 bit version. I didn't expect this to recognise my full 4gb of RAM due to it's being only 32 bit, and I was right, but I wanted to confirm this anyway.

Next up I installed Vista Business Edition. I was not aware that it was the 32 bit version when I got it, but it turns out it is, so again, this did not recognise the full 4 gb of RAM.

As I have received Windows Server 2003 through uni, I decided to try it out and just see if it would recognise all the RAM. However, it was unsuccessful as well.

Windows XP 64 bit has had driver problems, so I got a 64 bit version of Vista. This seemed to work well. It recognized the full amount of RAM and was running fine for about a day. I got to try out Unreal Tournament 3 which was absolutely amazing. However, today I was planning on moving all of my hard drives over to the new computer since Vista seemed to be working.

I put in the first one and low and behold, Vista shows its true colours. First off it write protected the drive. Upon a reboot it was still write protected. If I move the drive back to the old computer under XP, it is perfectly fine. Back to Vista and it is write protected. I have searched for solutions to this to no avail. The only solutions I have been able to find are to reformat the drive from Vista, which I simply cannot do as there is nowhere else for me to store almost 300gb of data at this time.

I decided to shut it down and switch the drive over to a different SATA port, however, upon doing this and booting it back up, Windows Vista BSODed twice before booting again properly.

When it booted up finally, the drive was all of a sudden able to be written to and data modified. So here I was thinking this is great, it's fixed. However, as I rebooted it to confirm that it was in fact working properly, it BSODed 3 more times before it would boot into Vista, and again, the drive was write protected.

By this point, as you can imagine, I was getting extremely annoyed. I shut it down and moved it to another different SATA port. Boot it up, a continual loop of BSOD, reboot, BSOD, reboot, BSOD etc. Force power it off and switch it back to the previous SATA port and the same story.

This was becoming very old very fast so I decided to reinstall Vista with the second hard drive already in the computer.

Upon the reinstall being completed, the drive seems to be writable and it seems to have remained that way after installing all of the latest updates and various reboots.

There was a single BSOD after installing the first required Vista update, the new update installer I think it was from memory. However since then it seems to have been fine.

Hopefully it will remain this way or I will seriously start to consider other solutions.

For anyone interested, Quadzilla achieves an Experience Rating of 5.2.

Labels: hardware, software

I have been having some interesting computer problems the past few days. I have noticed that upon a fresh boot the past two times I have booted, Explorer.exe has been using 100% of the CPU time and rarely drops below 90%, thus everything else has trouble running. Of course if you change the priority to low and increase the priority of everything else, they run fine, but that's hardly suitable.

AVG has not picked up any virus or other malware problems.

As soon as I end the Explorer.exe process and restart it manually, it's fine. Everything is back to normal.

There is a process that has had to be force quit when I have rebooted because of this problem that has a very obscure name. I don't remember it and I didn't think to write it down because it consists of numbers and letters and is very long.

I can't find anything resembling this process in the Task Manager, not that that means a great deal.

While I wouldn't mind knowing the cause, I'm not overly worried about it as I am hoping to upgrade within the next week or two which means a fresh install of Windows anyway.

Though this does pose a problem, Vista or XP 64. Okay, it's not much of a problem, XP 64 is the clear winner out of the two, however I already own Vista Business (I just don't like it and thus don't use it), whereas I only own XP 32 bit versions which to my understanding do not support the amount of RAM I will be upgrading to.

Anyway, will work all that out when I get to it.

Labels: software

Earlier this month I posted some information about downloading video's from YouTube and other video sharing websites that use Flash Video's.

Now I have just come across tooble which is a program for Mac's that will download YouTube and other Flash Video's to your computer and converts them mp4 format for use with an iPod. Of course it will also play on an iPhone, Apple TV, or your computer.

There is a Windows version in the works, but at the moment it is Mac only.

Enjoy.

Labels: software, video clips

Recently, Sun Microsystems purchased MySQL for $1 billion. A little late I know, but I only just read about it.

There are articles about it on both the Sun and MySQL websites.

With a gigantic customer base, MySQL is a very successful open source endeavour, so purchasing something like this, potentially brings millions of customers, including clients like Facebook and even Google.

Along with such a large client base, comes the potential to really screw up. There are plenty of other database systems out there, both open and closed source with similar features and performance to MySQL, in particular, PostgreSQL. This means that if Sun were to mess it up, there are systems waiting with arms open. For example, on the TerraMedia server, we have both MySQL and PostgreSQL running. Of course, for many larger clients, transferring to a different system would be a lot of work and for many, it probably would not be worth it. However, for smaller clients, or transitioning systems, there is a much bigger possibility.

Added to that, at the Queensland University of Technology students are introduced to databases and taught using PostgreSQL in the introductory database subjects, no doubt this occurs at other universities as well. This means other systems are in a prime position to take a piece of the market from MySQL if things go sour.

Having used both systems though, I can see there are many similarities, so even someone who has only used MySQL could pick up PostgreSQL with very few problems.

However, I can't point out the possible pitfalls without mentioning the benefits.

Sun is a giant in the I.T. industry with a large amount of finances available to back MySQL. Not to mention, Sun has been extremely successful in releasing the Solaris source code in 2005, and the Java programming language in 2006. Thinking along similar lines, you can hardly talk about Sun's support of open source software without mentioning projects like NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. Both of these have thrived under Sun as well.

Additionally, work conditions are not expected to change, including being able to work from home, and Sun have invited the current staff to continue work on the system, including the current leadership and executives.

It is clear to me that Sun understands the value of open source technology and the communities surrounding it and I don't doubt at all, that in adding MySQL to their arsenal, Sun won't screw things up and MySQL will continue to thrive from the added support.

For anyone reading that has heard my theories on the future of the I.T. industry, involving companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and so on, this move by Sun supports my expectations completely.

I will write up my theories one of these days, or copy a chat log about them, or something.

Labels: code, internet, software, technology

As you may recall from the 18th, I made a post about a Microsoft Excel security issue that had been brought up in the Sydney Morning Herald. At the time I could not seem to find anything on the Microsoft website about it. Evidently I was looking in the wrong place or searching for the wrong thing, as Tim over at Spy Journal has found the official Microsoft Security Advisory information under Microsoft Security Advisory (947563).

According to the official Microsoft release:

"Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000, and Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac. At this time, our initial investigation indicates that customers who are using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, or who have installed Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 3 are not affected by this vulnerability."

So basically, the latest version's, Excel 2003 SP3, 2007, and 2008 are all in the clear. Everything else is potentially vulnerable.

Common sense should apply, as with anything received over the internet, if it looks suspicious, it probably is, unless it's me.

Labels: internet, software

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Microsoft says hackers have found a way to use some older versions of its Excel spreadsheet program to take over control of people's computers."

They then later go on to say:

"Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Excel Viewer 2003, Excel 2002, Excel 2000 and Excel 2004 for Mac all contain the security hole."

And finally end with:

"The most recent versions of the spreadsheet program, Excel 2007, Excel 2007 SP 1 and Excel 2008 for Mac, were not thought to be affected, Microsoft said."

Now, I have had a look on the Microsoft Excel Developers Blog, and there is no indication of this on there.

Nor is there anything on the Microsoft Press website, in general, or in the Security section.

This leaves me thinking two things.

1. This is either shocking reporting, or they somehow have inside news that Microsoft hasn't released on their website yet.
2. This is a marketing ploy in the wake of the amount of people that find the so called "innovative" ribbon system in Office 2007 painful and confusing to use and find Office 2003 much better in general.

If it is option 2, it would make sense. Office 2007 is quite pitiful really, yes, it does have useful things over 2003, but in general, 2003 is much simpler to use, and I know a great many of your "everyday users" that 2007 is meant to benefit, who spend hours trying to figure out how to do things they could do in 2003 in seconds.

This is a large part of their market that is choosing to either not upgrade at all, or revert back to 2003. So there needs to be some reason for them to spend money to upgrade to 2007. A security flaw that has all of a sudden been discovered in previous versions and not making any comment as to whether it will be fixed or not, that sounds like a pretty good way to motivate your everyday user.

Note that this is purely speculation on my part.

However, I do not think that option 2 is all that likely, if it were, there should be something obvious on the Microsoft website about it.

If anyone knows of anywhere on the Microsoft website about this, that would be great.

In the meantime, I will just assume that this is some very bad reporting on the part of the un-named journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald.

Labels: rants, software

Here is another Unreal Tournament 3 trailer, because I can.



Also because I noticed a couple of comments on this particular trailer which is an old one from back when it was called Unreal Tournament 2007. The comments though are only recent.

A user called thekillersfan01 makes the comment:

"this looks good but a rip off from gears of war"

Following in his idiotic footsteps very soon after, glenny112 makes the comment:

"rofl u nubs this is a re run of halo 2 and 1 and also a re write of gears of war!"

I propose three things, one being the following:

Thekillersfan01, you should read the below.

Two being:

Glenny112, you are the "nub." If you knew anything about gaming history, you would be well aware that Halo 2 was released on November 9, 2004. Now, following your illogical structure of referencing Halo 2 first, I will now point out that logically, Halo 1 was released prior to Halo 2. Halo 1 was released on November 15, 2001. Next, is Gears of War. Gears of War was released most recently on, you guessed it, November 7, 2006. Now, taking this into account, let us consider the following. The first Unreal was released when exactly? Let me see. Oh yes, May 22, 1998. The next in the series, Unreal Tournament was released when now? November 26, 1999. That is two games released prior to the first Halo which is the earliest released game of your claims. As for Gears of War, well, not only are there those two games, but Unreal Tournament 2003 released near the end of 2002, Unreal 2, released in February 2003, and then of course, Unreal Tournament 2004, released in March of 2004.

Now, you tell me which one is a "re write" of which.

Sure, I looked up the dates to get the exact day and month, and also to back up what I am saying, but I could have told you the year's those games were released off the top of my head give or take a year.

The final thing I propose is:

Glenny112, didn't you ever go to school? Do you know what spelling and grammar are? It's hard enough to take you seriously when you don't have any idea what you are talking about, let alone when you cannot even manage to type properly.

Now, after seeing the video here, I can understand thekillersfan01 making a simple mistake like that since his YouTube profile indicates he is from the USA. Glenny112 though, according to his profile is an Australian. Now that's just embarrassing.

Labels: games, rants, software, video clips

Well, I just had my first go of Unreal Tournament 3. Let's just say, I am quite the disappointed, in my computer. You may recognize the screen shot to the left as being from Duke Nukem 3D from over a decade ago.

Well, this is better quality than what my computer will run Unreal Tournament 3 at. I tried to get a screen shot of it, but my computer is in one of those "I don't feel like taking a screen shot" kind of mood's at the moment, so I guess I will get one later, if I can be bothered trying to play it again. I suppose I should, even if it is just to get a screen shot of the amazing failure of my system.

For anyone that doesn't know, my computer is as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+
• 1gb of 400mhz DDR RAM
• ATI Radeon x800 GTO 256mb/256bit (PCI-E)
  
• And the rest is mostly irrelevant.

Now the minimum requirements to run it on Windows are:

• Windows XP/Vista
• 2.0+ GHz Single Core Processor
• 512 MB of System RAM
• NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
• 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

So logically, I should be fine. Logically, my old computer should also have been fine.

However, when I open it up, it tells me that my computer doesn't even meet the minimum requirements.

Odd.

A friend of mine has an almost identical setup to mine and he could play it at higher quality settings than I can.

I think I shall have to have a bit more of a tweak and play around with my background processes and game settings.

Alternatively, I could just upgrade sooner.

For anyone interested, the recommended system requirements for Unreal Tournament 3 are:

• 2.4GHz Dual-Core Processor
• 1GB of RAM
• NVIDIA 7800GTX OR ATI x1300 GFX-card
• 8 GB of free HDD space

Yeah, my rig completely fails there.

Unreal Tournament 3 is going to be available for OS X (Yay), however, to my knowledge, it isn't out yet, please correct me if I'm wrong as I would love to get my hands on it and try it out on my Macbook Pro as I expect it will have a much better chance at doing it justice than my current desktop.

Previously, with most game sequels, take for example Unreal Tournament's 2003 and 2004, you could play 2003 at say medium quality on a computer and then the same computer would only run 2004 at low quality, this is logical right, but low quality on 2004 would be similar to medium quality on 2003. I don't remember exactly how close they are as I haven't played 2003 in some time now, this is just an example. Yet with Unreal Tournament 3, the settings I'm running it on, which I might add, are not the lowest, it is still poorer quality than a game that is over a decade old, and much poorer than it's predecessors.

This really amazes me, and yet, it doesn't surprise me all that much. In the 3-4 years since Unreal Tournament 2004, there have been some major increases in performance in virtually everything.

• Increased processing power as well as dual and quad core CPU's
• Faster and increased quantities of RAM
• Higher powered graphics processors
• Lets not forget, dedicated physics processors.

Unreal Tournament 3 does not require a dedicated physics processor, but similarly to many of the latest games, it incorporates a great deal of physics calculations that its predecessor did not.

I'm looking forward to playing this game on a new computer so I can see first hand the difference that these jumps forward have made in the Unreal Engine 3, rather than just watching video clips and trailers and drooling.

And here is a trailer, just in case you haven't already seen it:

Labels: games, software, video clips

I've been asked on a few occasions if it is possible to save YouTube video's to a local computer in a usable format.

Usable really depends on the definition of the person. There are a lot of free services out there such as www.downloadyoutubevideos.com or at Tech Crunch, where you paste the link to the YouTube video into the page, and it provides you with a link to download it. Then you have to rename it to a .flv file and play it in a player such as VLC that supports Flash Video files.

This method is all well and good except, a lot of people don't want to download a video player just to watch .flv files, and it really is a fair bit of work to get them this way. There are programs floating around to convert .flv files to .avi or other formats, but I haven't come across any that I particularly like, and again this is a lot of work for a single video file.

There is an alternative though. There is a website called vixy.net that that works similarly to the others in that you paste in a link to the YouTube video and it then provides a download link. This is the only similarity though.

When you put in the link you want, it gives you an option to choose what format you would like from a list:

• AVI for Windows (DivX + MP3)
• MOV for Mac (MPEG4 + MP3)
• MP4 for iPOD/PSP (MPEG4 + AAC)
• 3GP for mobile (MPEG4 + AAC)
• MP3 (audio only)

So you can pick what format you want based on what you plan on using it on. Then hit start and off you go. It is downloaded to their server and converted from a .flv to whatever format you chose and a download link is provided. This cuts out all of the other troublesome steps of the other websites that provide YouTube download links. In particular, it saves you the trouble of converting a .flv to an .avi or .mov or any of the other formats.

Of course because the DivX codec is used for the Windows option, you will need to have DivX installed on your computer, but then, you can play the video in Windows Media Player or whatever other player you prefer instead of being restricted just to VLC. Besides that, many people already have DivX installed so it's not a very big deal. DivX have both paid and free versions. The free version can be downloaded and provides everything you need to run the files from vixy.net.

There is also a free (with ads) download available from vixy.net of a PC based .flv converter if you already have the .flv files you want. I haven't tried this as of yet, but I gather it is based on the same software the website uses. It is currently only available for Windows but there is a Mac version on the way. Keep in mind that it is still only in beta so it isn't going to be perfect yet.

Alternatively, if you have access to a server you can upload the .flv files to, or if you have seen some on a website where the video url is easy to find, vixy.net will accept these links as well as YouTube ones, so it has a solution for a lot of .flv conversion possibilities.

I hope this helps someone with converting .flv files and downloading YouTube video's.

Labels: internet, software, technology, video clips

This is pretty cool, it's been up for a while now, but GM are using Wordpress for their GMNext website. I've seen some criticism of how it has been implemented, but I think it has been done really nicely.

For more information on Wordpress and Wordpress websites, have a look at the news post on TerraMedia or visit the Wordpress website.

Wordpress is a great alternative to Blogger if you wish to host it yourself as it gives you much more control and functionality. If you don't, Wordpress have a free service similar to Blogger's Blogspot which is also quite a nice alternative to Blogger.

Labels: design, software

I'm a little bit late with this as it was announced over a week ago now, that Netscape Navigator support will end from February 1st and there will be no future development on Netscape Navigator by AOL.

It is interesting to read some of the things in the blog and in the comments about this. For one, I was totally unaware there was still much of a following of the Netscape browser. If you are like me and remember the days where Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the two most common browsers, then you have seen things change, many of you probably remember further back than that as well. Since the beginning of the Mozilla Foundation and the open sourcing of the Netscape core, Netscape has gradually fallen further and further behind in its user base.

Given that Netscape came to be based on Mozilla and later, Firefox, it seemed to me that the continued development work on Netscape was somewhat pointless as it, in my eyes duplicated the browser for no apparent reason.

Something I found interesting were, in the blog, and also reflected in many of the comments, was this:

"While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer."

Why is it that Internet Explorer is the only browser recognized as controlling market share? Once upon a time this was true, but a lot has changed. There are other browsers such as Opera and Firefox that claim their own portions of the market, as well as Safari, Seamonkey, Konqueror and so on. Why is Internet Explorer the only target? If anything, Firefox and Seamonkey should have been the primary competitors as they are based on the same core as Netscape.

In my opinion, Netscape shouldn't have been competing with Internet Explorer so much, but focusing on Firefox and determining what Firefox didn't offer, and building on that. Netscape was once a very useful program, but it has been years since I have even considered it. I haven't used it to test websites in a long time as if it runs in Firefox, it should also be fine in Netscape. Perhaps this has been a bit lax on my part, but if I'm not mistaken, they use the same core code, so they should render the same.

In one comment the following question is raised:

"Netscape's rise and fall symbolizes why it is important for all companies to constantly innovate and litigate when others use unethical tactics to hasten their demise.

Both Internet Explorer and Firefox can after Netscape. Why are they still around?

How did they manage to get popular debuting after one of the most important additions to the beginnings of the World Wide Web? We all know about Microsoft's controversial tactics - but how does one explain FireFox?!

Why did Netscape not compete successfully? Was there internal politics?

We should all learn from this!"

I don't know what the level of knowledge this person has is like, or what experience they have had with web browsers. To me though, why Netscape did not compete successfully comes down to the fact that it was no longer needed. It was no longer a mainstream web browser and competitor to Internet Explorer. Opera and Firefox had filled that place. They both came after Netscape yes, but Netscape didn't compete successfully, because it was competing with itself under a different name, Firefox. I expect that if Netscape had not been open sourced when it was, it would have continued to lose market share to Internet Explorer, and when Opera came around it would have added to the mix, just as it did anyway, and take away more of Netscape's user base.

The open sourcing of Netscape gave it an avenue to thrive and evolve into Firefox through the effort and contributions of the global community.

There is no doubt in my mind that Netscape played a significant role in the evolution of the Internet and web browsing, but in the end it's time was up as an entity. AOL made the right choice to "hand the reins fully to Mozilla", after all, they are essentially the same browser.

If you are one of the Netscape fans, AOL have, as their final development salute, created a Netscape Firefox theme with Netscape extensions to go with. So you can have Firefox appear as close to Netscape as it will get.

It is sad to see Netscape drop out of the game, but since Opera joined the game and the Mozilla Foundation produced Firefox, it's days have been numbered.

A salute to those who kept it going for so long is well deserved, and everyone that has worked on it over the years should be proud to know they helped forge the internet as we see it today, by navigating rather than exploring.

Labels: internet, software, technology

If you remember my blog from when I was looking for MSN for Mac, then you will recall that I mentioned Adium as a solution, however it did not have webcam support, so I kept looking for a different solution.

Adium 1.2 was released yesterday, and while it does not yet have webcam support, it sounds like it is well under way. The update has a lot of bug fixes, and adds a lot more usability to the system including adding more usability to the menu items and account management features.

There is much more than that and for full information have a look at the blog and the 1.2 release post.

It sounds like it will only be a matter of months before webcam support is available for Adium. In the meantime though, I discovered a temporary solution, if you want to use Adium. It's called MeBeam and uses Flash to integrate audio and video support. It does however do this through a web browser rather than directly through the Adium application which may not be suitable for a lot of people.

The audio and video quality is quite good, though there do seem to be a few other minor issues at this stage.

So if you like Adium, perhaps this is a solution for you. I will still be sticking with Mercury Messenger though as the webcam support is more to my preference than what MeBeam offers. Adium does sound like it will be very promising though in the near future with the release of Adium 2 which will include audio and video support.

I also came across a plugin for Adium called XBlaze that adds Xfire support to Adium, and as far as I know is the only Xfire client available on Mac. It still has a few minor bugs, but it appears to be updated relatively frequently. This is as good a reason as any for me to keep Adium on my Mac and up to date, so hopefully we'll see Adium 2 soon with full support for audio and video so I don't need another client.

Labels: software, technology

Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch has some really great advice in his top 10 recommendations for 2008. It's just a pity that chances are, Microsoft won't take much of it on board.

I particularly like number 2, and I think this is something that would be really beneficial. There is nowhere that properly showcases Microsoft products, and while I'm not a big Microsoft supporter myself, I can see how this is a big problem. Look at any of the Apple stores, or even Myers and David Jones, they all have big Apple showcases, with Apple products setup so that customers can try them out.

Sure, at say Harvey Norman, there are heaps of Windows computers setup and on display, but often times the sales people don't really know that much about the computers. If Microsoft could properly showcase all of their products together and show off how well they work together when they are setup properly, as Apple does, it would no doubt benefit their sales, as well as customer satisfaction, as they would actually be able to see how things should work together and setup their own purchases the same way.

There is a lot of operating system functionality and software functionality in Windows and other Microsoft products that people don't know exists or just don't understand, so it never gets used, or when it does, it doesn't get used properly.

In addition, the Microsoft website can sometimes be difficult to navigate when you are looking for help on specific things unless you know where to look. For many people this is discouraging and so they give up on things because they don't understand them.

If Microsoft were to open some retail outlets and improve help and support through their website and other retail stores, it would really help out their customer satisfaction and overall sales. If people are happy with a product or service, they will recommend it, and often a recommendation from a trusted person will be worth much more than any advertising campaign will be.

Perhaps I'm completely wrong here, but I don't believe I am. Go to Myers or David Jones, and the Apple section always has far more people around trying out the Mac's than the Windows section that has everything locked in display cases.

Last time I was at Myers, I counted over 20 people surrounding 3 iMac's, 2 MacBook's and 2 MacBook Pro's, the Windows section was completely empty. That's a big difference.

As Joe says, "Think simple. Be social."

Labels: rants, software, technology

One of the things I have found the most difficult getting used to on my MacBook Pro is the lack of a Notepad alternative on OS X. Sure you have TextEdit, and VIM, but neither of them are really what I'm after.

I basically use Notepad on Windows as a form of post-it note taking. If I have to copy a few things from various places, they all go into Notepad temporarily and so on. It's quick to open, quick to save, and takes up almost no RAM.

TextEdit, while it is fairly quick, it just feels too bulky for my liking, maybe I'm just too picky. It does a lot more than Notepad though, perhaps that has something to do with it, I'm not sure.

VIM is hardly worth mentioning since you have to access the command line to run it and it's slightly painful to use the way I want to use it.

However, I have found the most useful invention since post-it notes and computers. Post-it notes on my OS X desktop!

I have no idea how I overlooked them so many times as they are quite obvious in the applications folder. They are widgets labeled as "Stickies" and their icon is clearly yellow post-it notes.

This is an awesome idea, there is probably something similar available for Windows, though I have never had reason to look so I couldn't say for certain. On OS X though, they greatly complement the "Spaces", based on the multiple desktops idea in X11. I can have as many post-it notes as I want on my desktop and they take up virtually no RAM and thus having a virtually negligible effect on system performance, they don't get in the way, and they can contain code without it affecting anything or attempting to render it.

Or, as I mentioned, they complement the Spaces in OS X, so I can have a second desktop screen and use it entirely for post-it notes. How awesome is that? If I feel the need, I can change the formatting of the text and so on, but there are no bulky controls like in some other things.

I love it.

Labels: software

Yay a step forward for Internet Explorer finally. According to the Internet Explorer development blog, IE8 now correctly renders the Acid 2 face!

This is great to see! For anyone that doesn't know what the Acid 2 test is, it is a web standards test that was designed by the Web Standards Project that is intended to pick up rendering flaws in browsers.

It uses HTML and CSS to test certain features and how they are displayed by the browser. Any browser that correctly supports the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications should render the test correctly. If a browser doesn't completely/correctly support the features that Acid 2 uses won't render the page properly.

Interestingly, the test itself doesn't actually use valid CSS. This is because it was also designed to test how a browser will deal with faulty code.

Labels: code, internet, software

I came across this nifty open-source piece of web-based software last night that is really quite an interesting and useful idea.

Created by Johann C. Rocholl, Browsershots allows you to submit a website for any of the available browsers on any of the available operating systems. You can also specify things such as with or without Flash, Java, JavaScript, screen resolutions and colour depths.

The website is then added to the job queue and allocated to a particular factory. The factory (computer) then takes the web address and loads it up in your specified browser with your specified settings. A screenshot is taken of the browser window with your loaded website and it is then uploaded onto the central Browsershots server for you to view.

I've used it to test a couple of websites now in various scenario's and it works great, it's helped me pick up a few things I would've completely missed otherwise.

Of course since it is all automated, you don't see things such as any mouse over effects, so you still need to test them manually, however for everything else, this is an excellent idea!

The factories used for it are all voluntary and anyone is able to add a factory to the ones used for work. As factories are provided voluntarily though, often there are some unavailable. Such as when I was doing some testing last night, only one of the Linux factories was online, so I was not able to test all of the different Linux browsers.

This is a bit of a downside, but I think, the more widely known it becomes the more factories people will volunteer. After all, if people want to continue using a free service like this, people have to be willing to help out.

There is a paid priority system. So if you pay 10 Euros, you will receive a month of priority processing which effectively means you don't wait in the standard queue to have your screenshots processed, you are put at the front of the queue.

Alternatively, if you don't want to pay for priority processing, if you have a factory or factories setup to help out with the load, when all your factories combined are uploading 1000 screenshots in the 24 hours before the time you are submitting a screenshot, you will get priority processing as well.

On their wiki they have all the setup instructions you need to get a factory up and running on Windows, Linux or Mac. It's all very straight forward and easy to follow. So if you are interested in helping out with the processing load, or anything at all, it will no doubt be greatly appreciated.

Apparently the bandwidth load for uploading these shots can range up to around 20gb a month. Downloads would be much the same as browsing to all of the sites. So there is quite a lot of bandwidth involved, but if you can spare it and have a spare computer lying around, I really think this is a worthwhile idea. After all, anyone that regularly has to check browser compatibility will know how much time it can take to test websites in a wide variety of browsers and this really speeds up that time and let's you test in even more browsers than most people would.

I don't doubt that you will find it as useful as I am continuing to find it.

Labels: internet, software, technology

I've just been visiting the Feng-GUI website after reading about it briefly in SitePoint's Design View Newsletter #40.

This is really quite an interesting tool. The idea behind it is that using the algorithm they have developed, it can work out what points of the website are the main points that would draw a user's vision towards them. It then works creates a salience heat map to determine which parts of the page are effectively the "hottest" areas. Or as described on their webpage it:

"...is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap."

How cool is that? As you can see in the little image above showing this blog, the hottest points are not even on the content. While I don't think this is 100% accurate as of yet, I would say it is actually getting reasonably close and is definitely still a very useful tool for a web and/or graphic designer.

If you use the tool found on their home page, you can upload any image that is a max of 5mb and it will run the algorithm over it and produce a heat map for you. Alternatively, you can use bookmarklets or there is a Firefox extension available. These two options produce a larger image than the tool on their home page and so these might be more useful for some people, however I did notice that their is a slightly different result using these options. I don't know if it is because they are larger images or if it is something else.

Personally I think the heat maps produced by the home page tool are a bit more accurate, however the larger images are definitely more useful, especially in area's that have a lot of detail. I noticed that the Firefox extension and bookmarklets seemed to time out less than trying to create a heat map through the main page as well.

The Feng-GUI Firefox extension is very simple to use and is my favourite of the options. Once it is installed, it just ads a little flame icon to the bottom right of the Firefox status bar. Simply browse to the page you wish to see a heat map of and then click the flame. You will then be taken to the Feng-GUI website with a completed heat map in front of you. Easy as that.

The bookmarklet code can be found on the tools page of the Feng-GUI website and I have setup a little example below so you can see how it works:

Make a heat map of www.stillaslife.com.

I know I've already found this useful, so hopefully you will too.

Enjoy.

Labels: design, internet, software, special interest, technology

The new development blog for TerraMedia, dev.terramedia is now online. Of course it is only new and is something I've only been working on for the past few days so it doesn't have a great deal on it yet, and nowhere near as much as I would ideally like, but it will get there. It may still have a few bugs here and there that need to be ironed out, but as it stands, it is ready to be live, after all, it is about development in regards to TerraMedia and so on.

As I have been using WordPress.org for some of my newer content managed websites, I have decided to use it for dev.terramedia as well. The reason for this is based on a couple of things.

1. First and foremost, I love the latest version of WordPress.
   
2. In my opinion it rivals systems like Joomla! as far as simple content management goes. Of course more complicated things may need the functionality Joomla! has over WordPress, but when that's not needed, I think WordPress is great!
3. It is only logical that I provide a working showcase of one of the system's I recommend using and demonstrate it in one of my own websites.
4. I didn't want the Blogger brand on my development blog. As great as Blogger is, you have to keep the Blogger button on it somewhere.
5. I wanted the extra control I have over the source in WordPress, not that I have any intention of modifying the source at this stage, but I like the extra control I have.
6. I am considering transferring the main TerraMedia website over to WordPress instead of Joomla! and would like to use dev.terramedia as a way to facilitate that change.
   

That's about it really. Nothing high and mighty about it, I just feel that for what it is and for what I need it for, it surpasses everything else.

Labels: code, design, internet, software

Sitting in the Microsoft MiX On Campus presentation, it's currently about three quarters through and Nick Hodge, Professional Geek, is giving a presentation on Microsoft's new web based Popfly software based around their new Silverlight software. We have just received free Red Bull, and this is proving to be quite the interesting look into what's happening at Microsoft at the moment.

Now I have to say, while the entire day so far has been quite the interesting and I will be going over it in it's entirety this evening, this Popfly is looking like one of the most interesting and useful things to come from Microsoft of late.

It creates mash ups of various web based programs to create new things without needing to know the code behind it.

Nick has given a few examples thus far and it is really quite interesting. It takes one block, such as a Flickr block feeding information into a Virtual Earth block. This mashes them together effectively so that if you search for a particular keyword, such as sunset's, it will display all photo's that have that keyword, and the location that it was taken, based on the location entered in the Flickr details. This is quite cool and is very simple to use and then implement into a website.

Apparently raw HTML can be put into the mash ups as well, however it has to be written with Microsofts Visual Studio Express. This could be annoying, but as the Express version is free to download, this is not so bad.

Nick went on and also showed a few cool examples on his own website, such as how he has incorporated his Flickr galleries into his website and so on. There is also a web based Live Messenger front end incorporated into his site that is pretty cool. Effectively, when the user is signed on, anyone can message them from the website. While some people could find this quite annoying, I think it could really be quite beneficial, and so far, all of these things, including Popfly, run great on a Mac as well.

It's still in it's beta stages, but it's starting to look like Google's free software push is really starting to push Microsoft to work on free software as well which is great!

Labels: code, internet, software, technology

Today I discovered, that MSN for Mac does not have webcam support. At all. Surely Microsoft have to realise that despite the fact that OS X is a competitor, not writing a compatible version for Mac that works completely is a very big downer for their reputation that already struggles anyway.

I did some searching though and came across a little program called Mercury. It has a few glitches every now and again, but I think they may in part have been due to the battery running low

I also uncovered aMSN, or Alvaro's MSN, which is virtually a clone of the Windows version of MSN and seems to have all of the features as well. Like Mercury, it has a few minor glitches now and then, but it mostly seems to be fine. It has its own set of emoticons which are slightly different to the original (Mercury uses the original MSN emoticons), but I don't think this is much of an issue. Just don't try and change the font colou