Posts by EddieC - Page 5

If you’re a Ruby or Python developer building AJAX applications, you’ve got to learn JavaScript. Even if you’re converting Ruby code to client-side JavaScript with a tool like RJS, it can still be helpful to know the AJAX component for adding features and debugging.

Now Microsoft is promoting APAX and ARAX, techniques similar to AJAX that supplant JavaScript with Python and Ruby languages commonly used on the server side of the dynamic Web apps.

The news was brought to light last week at O’Reilly’s RailsConf by Microsoft’s John Lam, who was there giving a talk on his IronRuby project, and its progress toward running Rails. IronRuby is an implementation of the open source language that runs on Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR). RailsConf took place in Portland, Ore., May 29 to June 1.

Writing on his blog about the benefits of IronRuby beyond those of running Rails, Lam said “it lets you interact with the rich set of libraries provided by .NET. You’ll be able to use IronRuby to build server-based applications that run on top of ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC... to build client applications that run on top of WPF or Silverlight… and to test, build and deploy your .NET applications.” Almost in passing, he also mentions the ability to run Ruby code in a Web browser and have it talk to Ruby code on a Web server. “That’s a feature that we feel that many …

In my humble opinion, Obama's success has more to do with his soaring, populist rhetoric than his "grasp of the next-generation web." Sure, donors are drawn to his web site, and his face and theme songs are splattered all over YouTube, but it's his good looks and adeptness with a teleprompter that got them there.

People today vote based on "What's in it for me?" So the candidate that promises the most Government entitlements will most likely take the White House, regardless of how impossible and unrealistic those promises are. The sad reality is that Americans have very short memories. Maybe we need another Jimmy Carter to give us another Ronald Reagan.

Microsoft today gave advance notice of a security bulletin it will release on Tuesday to repair seven vulnerabilities in Windows and Internet Explorer, three of them critical.

The three critical warnings involve potential remote code execution, and affect Bluetooth, DirectX and IE. According to reports, the latter patch might also include fixes for the so-called “Carpet Bomb” threat to Apple’s Safari browser made known recently by Nitesh Dhanjani. Microsoft last week issued a separate security warning about the “blended threat” to Safari on Windows XP and Vista as well as Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7, which only affects those who have not changed IE’s default download location.

Of the latest threats, three are classified as important, and involve WINS and elevation of privileges, and denial of services of Active Directory and Microsoft’s PGM multicast protocol. One threat classified as moderate involved remote code execution and Kill Bit, the company’s ActiveX function control designed to stop such attacks. The threats apply variably to components of Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista and Server 2008. The bulletin contains full details of which operating systems require which patches.

To further explain the threats and field questions about the bulletin, Microsoft will host a Webcast on Wednesday, June 11, at 11:00 am Pacific time. The company also will release an update to its Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, though it did not specify a date. …

I've had the distinct pleasure of working for and with David Strom at various times since 2000. I might even say he gave me my break into tech writing; it was for Network Computing that I got my first job as a freelance writer. David was editor at the time, although I reported to technical editor (?) Fritz Nelson (he later became editor and is now a VP at CMP).

Microsoft also helped me get my tech writing career started. One of my first reviews for Network Computing was of "IP stacks" for Windows 3.1, which did not include one of its own.

This must truly be the end of days. Like Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters: “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling…human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.” Microsoft is giving advice on securing its software to Apple. It’s “laughable on stilts,” stealing a line I heard author David Limbaugh say today (in reference to something entirely different).

Is there anything behind the so-called “Carpet Bomb” threat? The warning was brought to Apple’s attention by author and blogger Nitesh Dhanjani on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

At issue is a vulnerability of Apple’s Safari for Mac OS X and Windows that stems from the browser’s inability to prohibit downloads of “resources” from rogue Websites or at least ask for user permission before doing so. Such downloads “carpet” the user’s default download directory with potentially malicious content. On Windows, the default happens to be the Desktop, a rather inconvenient place to have cluttered up. On Mac OS X it’s ~/Downloads/. At the very least it’s a nuisance. At most, it could infect machines or remotely execute code and wreak all kinds of havoc.

What strikes me as ironic is not simply that Apple’s operating systems are historically far more secure than Microsoft’s, but that Microsoft has issued a security warning about Apple’s software and Apple itself has not. The “blended threat” affects Windows XP and Vista as well …

Bill Gates opened Tech-Ed 2008 Developers, its annual developers conference in Orlando, Fla., today by saying good-bye to a group the Microsoft founder said has been the company’s most important. “The success of Microsoft really is due to our relationship with developers,” he said in his keynote this morning to a room filled with about 6,000 developers.

It will likely be Gates’ last speech as a full time Microsoft employee; on July 1 he’ll focus most of his efforts on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives away huge sums of the couple’s fortunes to help improve global healthcare and development.

In typical Gates fashion, he spoke of the future direction of application development, which includes continued focus on application modeling. Part of that strategy is project Oslo, the company’s architecture for visually modeling SOA applications and composites. Developers wanting a peek at the platform will have to wait until the Professional Developers Conference in October.

Gates also spoke of services, namely the types of hosted services it needs to play catch-up with against Amazon and archrival Google. “We’re taking everything we do at the server level and saying we have a service that mirrors that exactly. It’s getting us to think about data centers at a scale that we haven’t thought of before…[to create a mega-data center that Microsoft and only a few others will have.”

He also announced that Silverlight 2, beta …

A year ago last week, Facebook released the Facebook Platform, enabling users of the social network to create their own applications. Today, 400,000 developers and 24,000 applications later, the company introduced the Facebook Open Platform, which releases much of the Facebook Platform source code to the development community.

The so-called fbOpen is now among several Facebook open source projects. In essence, fbOpen delivers a “snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook Platform,” according to a project Web page. By downloading this snapshot, developers can launch an instance of the platform and test their applications locally, rather than uploading them to a server or sandbox for better performance, stability and control. fbOpen also includes Facebook’s API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, and implementations of the most common methods and tags.

“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology’ wrote Facebook’s Ami Vora in a blog post today. Also built into the release, she wrote, are extensibility points that permit developers to add functionality to the platform such as custom tags and API methods. “We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of. [J]ust as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets …

At one time in history, the consensus among most humans was that the Earth was flat. (Now only Thomas Freedman thinks that :). I'm also interested in getting to the facts. And in truth, there's just as much (if not more) science that global warming is NOT the result of human activity.

Here's a study and Web site with the names of 31,000 scientists (including 9,021 PhDs) that remain unconvinced that humans have any affect on climate whatsoever. They've all sworn to that effect. The science is most assuredly NOT in, and if Congress implements its "cap and trade" carbon tax (being debated this week), the costs will make Bush's deficits look like a restaurant tab.

With all this talk about cheaper laptops for the third world, it’s easy to miss how inexpensive memory has become for us members of the first. I once prophesized to a colleague that by the end of this decade, a terabyte hard drive would be available for less than US$100. I was referring, of course, to conventional magnetic hard drives.

I wasn’t really going out on a limb. We’re edging closer to that goal seemingly every day, but Best Buy circular has yet to appear with deals that good (Samsung in a May 21 announcement unveiled a one terabyte unit for $199). And while I’m not here to tell you that solid state drives will cross the finish line first, a partnership borne in 2005 between Intel and Micron gives me hope that SSDs will soon become much more affordable.

IM Flash Technologies, the company jointly owned by the two giants, announced Thursday that it will begin shipping samples later this month of a 32 GB NAND flash product built using the ultra small 32nm process. That’s about the size of a thumbnail. The 32GB flash chip, the company says, could store more than 2,000 high-resolution digital photos in a digital camera, for example, or 1,000 songs on a personal music player. A pair of 8-die stacked packages “would be enough for recording [up to] 40 hours of high-definition video in a digital camcorder.” Mass production is expected to begin in the second …

What the heck is an LNX Code 8 Mobile processor?

They haven’t let us look under the hood, but Google yesterday published a few more specs about App Engine, including how usage will be priced if an application deployed using its infrastructure exceeds the limits set for the free edition.

When it launched the service in early April, Google had set a rather generous limit of 5 million page views per month, but didn’t disclose pricing or policies about overages. Now it says that successful applications will be subject to these fees:

• CPU time - US$0.10 - $0.12 per core-hour
• Storage - $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month
• Outbound bandwidth - $0.11 - $0.13 per GB
• Inbound bandwidth - $0.09 - $0.11 per GB

Under these rates, developers might expect to pay around $40 per month, according to one estimate I came across.

Google also released more details about its new caching and image storage and manipulation APIs. The caching API will be based on the open source memcached project, a “high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load,” according to its Web site. In essence, the system figures out which pages are accessed most or drain the most resources and stores them in memory to reduce access time.

The Images API will handle uploading, storage and presentation to users of images such as photos and avatars. The …

Mac OS X is safer today than it was Tuesday, thanks to Apple. The company on Wednesday posted Security Update 2008-003, containing forty one performance and security fixes for the enhanced Active Directory, AirPort, iChat, Mail, Time Machine and several other components of the company’s operating system. It also fixes a flaw in iCal that would leave machines vulnerable to remote code execution and potential hacking or theft of data.

The update, for Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac Server OS X 10.4.11, brings Leopard users to version 10.5.3, and is strongly recommended for anyone using prior versions. Mac OS X 10.5.3 also was released this week and contains the update. The patch also fixes application-terminating bugs in AFP Server, AppKit, Apple Pixlet Video, ATS, CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, the Flash Player Plug-in and Help Viewer. Seven fixes affect the Flash Player alone, which was vulnerable to malicious code hidden inside Trojan content. Another seven repair Apple’s implementation of the Apache Web server, which was until now susceptible to certain attacks, including those from cross-site scripting.

Some of the other more severe security-breach fixes were in Apple’s Mail e-mail client and iCal scheduler. Mail had previously allowed one user to manipulate files and conduct other activities using someone else’s access privileges, and to remotely expose passwords when using single sign-on, expose Wiki Server user names and enable various other forms of remote attack. The iCal issue involves unexpected application termination, but only affects systems running Mac OS X …

Gentlemen, start your engines. Google App Engines, that is (and ladies, too). That was the word from Google tech lead Kevin Gibbs in his keynote speech at the annual Google I/O conference today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The company in April introduced App Engine to the first 10,000 developers to take it, a program offering the ability to run applications on Google’s worldwide server farms at essentially no charge. Today it removed the waiting list, which had topped 150,000 names, according to reports.

Google’s slogan for the App Engine program was and is “no assembly required, easy to scale and free to get started.” The program gives developers free access to dynamic Web services, 500MB of persistent storage via the Google File System with queries, sorting and transactions, load balancing and automatic scaling and its Python-based development environment. App Engine also includes access to BigTable, Google’s home-grown high-performance database that works atop the GFS and was designed to automatically scale to hundreds or thousands of systems as additional resources become available.

There are other limits to the free version. Developers are limited to three registered applications. Applications are limited to 5 million page views per month, 200 million megacycles of CPU processing and 10 GB of bandwidth per 24-hour period. Charges would apply after that, which according to most reports would be roughly comparable to competitive services from Amazon and Salesforce. The company also is …

SourceLabs is like the L. Ron Hubbard for the software community; it makes a living on developers in need of self-help. The company today added Eclipse projects to Self-Support Suite, its support tool and service for Java and Linux developers.

The suite now counts the copious creations of the open source Eclipse community to its own extensive listing of supported Java projects, which includes the many libraries of Apache Axis, Struts and Tomcat, Hibernate and the Spring Framework. Covered Linux projects include CUPS, DHCP, gcc, ext2/ext3 file systems and ext2 utils, the Linux kernel, MySQL, OpenLDAP, Perl, Samba and many others.

The SourceLabs tool works by scanning systems and sites, discovering all available information about a given project. It then indexes and ranks the data for quick navigation by developers when support is required. Data is matched against a repository and analyzed by “predictive analysis algorithms to automate troubleshooting,” according to a company news release published today. The tool also includes predictive analysis capabilities, the company said, which enable it to “flag potential problems before they impact systems or designs.”

“Now Eclipse developers have reliable way to instantly access the latest information and analytical tools for supporting their Eclipse-driven applications,” said SourceLabs founder and CEO Byron Sebastian. “Our Self-Support system gives users the most effective way to quickly and continually adapt to today's rapidly changing Eclipse software and their own business requirements.”

The Self-Support Suite can be …

Three words: Geeks like gadgets. N'est-ce pas?

Here’s a new twist on the open source craze. Fabless chip and system designer Via Technologies has released to the community OpenBook, a reference design for a low cost ultra portable laptop that runs Windows or Linux at up to 1.2 GHz and includes WiFi, BlueTooth and high-res 3D graphics capabilities, and could weigh just over two pounds.

Sure, the design’s based on the company’s own chipset, but a snip here and a tweak there could turn their blueprint into a world class palmtop of you own design—at absolutely no cost to you.

According to the OpenBook Web site, a GPS receiver is optional, as is a second configuration with options for WiMAX, HSDPA, and EV-DO/W-CDMA broadband connectivity. The system supports as much as 2 GB DDR memory, up to 1024 pixel x 600 pixel display resolution (on an 8.9-inch screen) and a maximum of 256MB video memory, a pair of two mega pixel cameras and four-cell battery rated at about three hours of useful life. The unit is capable of running Windows XP or Vista and “all popular Linux distributions.”

The design, delivered as a set of computer-aided design (CAD) files, is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0, which allows unlimited use and distribution, provided the design is attributed to Via; design changes must be similarly shared. Other hardware niceties include three USB 2.0 ports, a four-in-one card reader, DVD RW control logic, Realtek …

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Facebook Platform, which has had a rough childhood and now bears the pimples of adolescence. On the eve of the platform’s birthday, the company gave developers a sandbox in which to apply the Clearasil of its redesigned profile.

Before entering the sandbox, be sure to visit the Sandbox Status page for news and other known issues. At the moment, the sandbox is for developers’ eyes only.

“We believe that the new design makes profiles cleaner and simpler, gives users more control over their profiles, and emphasizes recent and relevant information,” wrote Facebook’s Pete Bratach, in a blog post yesterday.

The design adds new application integration points, which are intended mainly to help developers generate real user activity (as opposed to spam from so-called black-hat apps).

Here’s an excerpt from the documentation showing the key improvements to integration points:

1. New forms of user-to-user communication.

• o New Feed story sizes and types give you more ways to help users share content on their profiles and in News Feed.
• o Publisher integration enables users to easily post content of any type on their –- and their friends' -- profiles. This is a significant upgrade over Wall attachments.

2. Deeper profile integration.

• o Application tabs enable users to share unique content from their favorite deep applications.
• o Profile boxes enable users to express themselves in smaller …

Maybe it’s all part of a kinder, gentler Microsoft; or maybe it’s something else. In the latest example of Redmond’s increase in openness, the “Evil Empire” in an announcement last week said it backs the addition of the Open Document Format to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards list and will add native compatibility for ODF and Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). The changes will come in a service pack for the Office suite sometime in the first half of 2009.

Microsoft also has joined the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)—the group maintaining ODF—and will assist with work on subsequent releases of the open format developed by Sun Microsystems with key contributions from IBM. “We have listened to our customers, and they have told us they want choice, they want interoperability, they want innovation,” said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft. Many companies, including Adobe, CA, Google, Intel, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat, now contribute resources to ODF.

According to reports, Office Service Pack 2 will include support for saving files as PDF 1.5 and the PDF/A variant for archiving, ODF 1.1 and XPS, Microsoft’s own XML Paper Specification. Conversion from Office file formats to those specs is now supported through plug-ins. ODF and PDF/A are ISO standards, as is Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OOXML), which got fast-tracked to ISO approval by first going through Ecma International, a European standards body.

Paradoxically, Office 2007 supports …

hi jbennet- call me crazy, but after seeing Media Player 9, I've sworn off all further "improvements."

hi scru- yeah, I had seen reports of Microsoft's "cooperation," with Novell on Moonlight, but didn't give it much stock. I've found that if my default position is to distrust Monopolysoft, I'm right most of the time.

I laugh inside when Microsoft loses ground, even in the slightest way. It’s particularly sweet when Redmond loses to a company like Novell, which owned the LAN market it pioneered through the 1990s, only to have it ripped from its grasp by the totally inferior Windows NT. This week Novell’s Miguel de Icaza announced the first public (pre-beta) release of Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in for media streaming and running rich Internet applications. Both products would compete in the space now dominated by Adobe’s Flash Player.

In my experience, anything having to do with media playback that Microsoft touches has turned to garbage. Take Media Player. Version 2.0 is a far better utility than anything that has come along since. Media Player 10 is slow, bloated and unintuitive. Not to mention ugly. Who in their right mind would install Silverlight over Flash as their runtime for browser-based RIAs? The same people, I suppose, that now need to use IE to get all the functionality from browser apps containing ActiveX controls. But I digress.

According to Miguel’s May 13 blog post, the Moonlight release for Firefox supports the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux x86 and x86-64. The early release support no media codecs. Developers and contributors are invited to visit the download page and submit any bugs.

Microsoft released Silverlight last September, but still has not added tooling to Visual Studio, according to a …

MySpace Tuesday announced some changes to its developer program, fine-tuning its policies about the way member applications are allowed to communicate with users. It also leaked news of enhancements to its messaging API set to be available in June.

The new guidelines were outlined in a blog post by the MySpace Developer Team. In essence, they’re looking to curb spam and other forms of unsolicited invitations and enticements.

Here’s the essence of what’s new in the Developer Guidelines:

• No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.
• It must be very clear to a member what they are sending, when they are sending communication. “Share with friends” is not sufficient messaging, the link must state “send comment,” “send bulletin,” and so on.
• The “no popups” rule we have had in place since day one applies to messaging windows. This means no more popping up a messaging window the first time someone tries to use an app. No popping up messaging windows without a user clicking on a very clearly marked link.

The new rules go into effect immediately for all applications developed after today. For those already deployed, developers have until June 3, at 8:00 pm ET to get their apps into compliance. “After that date we will review all …

The defense departments of the United States and Great Britain have long been aligned militarily. Now they’re cozying up technologically too. The two organizations this week announced the UPDM Group, a trans-Atlantic effort to create a unified version of what are now two distinct application object models.

The group, which is comprised of about a dozen ISVs and defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, is being headed by Artisan Software Tools and No Magic. According to its mission statement published in a news release Monday, “The UPDM Group is committed to creating a unified profile for MODAF and DoDAF, leveraging the capabilities of UML, SysML and other OMG standards.”

The specifications in question are the U.S. Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF1.5) and the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense Architecture Framework (MODAF1.2). Both are based on specifications published by the Object Management Group—keeper of UML and other standards—and will continue to be so.

Use of the specifications is required by government developers and software contractors. They define a consistent way to organize and view enterprise applications and systems, and are required for all major weapons, navigation and guidance systems, and complex IT architectures. A request for proposal will follow for upcoming versions of DoDAF and MODAF, both of which are “soon to be released,” according to the group.

The effort will resume the work of its predecessor group, the UML Profile for DoDAF and …

Maybe the third time’s the charm for Napster. The peer-to-peer pioneer has again emerged, and this time looks to have its sights set on Apple. The company on Tuesday launched a new Web site and music store, claiming to offer six million titles in unprotected MP3 format, as many songs as Apple’s popular iTunes store but without the DRM restrictions.

Separate attempts by Napster in 2007 to partner with AOL and Circuit City fizzled.

Napster’s new site looks remarkably like the iTunes store. But upon closer inspection, the service lacks Apple’s slick and sturdy interface, and many of the listed titles are not available as MP3s. It seems that Napster might have come out of the chute a bit too early. I tried to purchase about a dozen songs, all from different artists. All but one of my purchase attempts were rejected because “the following tracks are not available for purchase.”

I’ve been using iTunes about two years now, mostly to download music for my kids. I use the Windows version, which is agonizingly slow to launch and quit. It also eats up 80 MB of hard drive space plus another 79 MB for QuickTime. And if the hard drive crashes, you’re likely to lose any songs that didn’t yet make it to the iPod or a backup disc.

On the upside, Apple’s stand-alone application maintains my kids’ music collection, automatically syncs with their iPods and offers Internet radio …

Among the obstacles to building mobile software is gaining access to the devices for testing. Removing some of those road blocks is DeviceAnywhere, which today launched the Palm Virtual Developer Lab, adding the new Treo 755p, Centro and other units from Palm Inc. to its list of more than 1,000 supported handsets.

To promote the service, DeviceAnywhere is giving away free accounts and device time for members of the Palm Developer Network.

Despite the “virtual” name, DeviceAnywhere does not provide an emulation environment. The service offers access to real, physical devices set up in their labs across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan, for sharing by developers and software testers through a browser-based interface. It can press buttons, tap touch-screens, connect and disconnect the battery, open and close the unit and listen to ringtones and other sounds. You can even make real voice or data calls.

Screen contents of the device under test are passed through to the browser and displayed on an image of the actual device. The basic service allows for online collaboration of dispersed teams on the same device in real time, with screenshot or video capture of the device under test and keystroke audit trails. Developers find their target by entering a specific model number or by paring the supported-device list down by carrier and/or manufacturer. Applications are installed over the air (if supported by the device) or using a cable. Test results are stored in a …

Even though the guy missed, Steve Ballmer might still end up with egg on his face. If the Microsoft CEO fails again to acquire Yahoo, he might do well to open his own diner since he always seems to have a ready supply of eggs.

This time they came his way in Hungary. While giving a speech Monday at Corvinus University in Budapest, an audience member, reportedly angered over a pending deal between Microsoft and the Hungarian government, began hurling Halloweenian huevos. Monkey Boy’s apish skills were in full swing as he ducked and dodged the foul projectiles. Would it surprise you that the whole
egg-tossing incident was caught on video?

Ballmer’s latest monkey business was all part of TITAN, a project initiated by Microsoft to train highly skilled IT professionals and create an electronic information society among tens of thousands of workers across Europe. According to reports, the egg-man had “Microsoft = Corruption” written on the back of his shirt, and was alleging (in Hungarian) that the company was stealing millions from the country’s taxpayers. The plan is estimated to cost around 40 million euros, but is being funded mostly by the European Union. Kick-off is scheduled for January, 2009.

Ballmer was forced to hide behind the lectern, and was clearly shaken by the bombardment. Once the shelling stopped, he quickly regained his composure. “It was a friendly disruption,” he said after the man was escorted from the room, which drew laughs …

Virtualization of operating systems is all the rage these days; the benefits to software developers and testers are clear. What if you could virtualize applications? According to Xenocode, you can. The company today released Virtual Application Studio, a US$40-per-seat environment that turns an application into a self-contained executable, able to be e-mailed or transported on a USB drive and run on any modern Windows PC.

“The big problem is that [developers] have to install the .NET framework on the client machine,” to enable someone without the framework to run their application said Xenocode CEO Kenji Obata in a phone interview. “If you built an app for .NET 1.0 and you ran it on .NET 2.0, it was broken.”

One of the company’s early products was a virtualization engine for.NET. “We assured that you had a known-good environment to execute your application,” he said. With today's release of Virtual Application Studio, the company adds Java, browser and native Windows apps to the mix. “We virtualize the registry, file system, kernel and core operating system MDIs,” passing along all of the application’s dependencies to the underlying Windows XP, 2003 or Vista operating system, he said. “You’re not at the mercy of what’s installed on the user’s device—what version of Java, Windows. We make apps available anywhere, instantly and reliably. You double-click a file and it runs immediately. There are no intermediate steps or other dependencies.”

The company offers free, full-featured 14-day bombware, at

Wow- that WOULD be a fast processor. Thanks for pointing it out.

You have to admire a guy who would walk away from a successful project of global proportions purely on principle. Walter Bender, co-founder of One Laptop Per Child, has reemerged and launched SugarLabs, a not-for-profit foundation that will continue the work of developing the Sugar open-source UI that runs on the low-cost XO laptop.

Bender left OLPC in April, after the organization had agreed to work with Microsoft on a version of Windows for the laptops, a move contrary to his original vision of an open learning platform for the children of developing nations. Part of the stated purpose of SugarLabs is to let children “use their laptops on their own terms” and that “children—and their teachers—have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, and content.” Sugar is based on Fedora Linux.

SugarLabs also develops applications for Sugar, which it calls Activities. Those installed by default include an object and activity browser called Journal, a Web browser based on Firefox, a PDF and book reader, word processing, a news reader, a paint program, a music composition and synthesis program called TamTam, and the ability to record audio as well as still and motion video. There are scores of other apps—for everything from programming to play, math and science to chat—that can be downloaded from the Activities Page, and they’re all free. A developer page offers documentation, roadmap, module project repositories and mailing lists and other project infrastructure.

…

The Mozilla team says its latest browser is stable, and has posted Firefox 3 RC 1 on Saturday. Apart from more than 900 enhancements the team claimed were delivered in beta 4, Firefox 3 RC1 also includes the so-called AwesomeBar, a beefed-up location bar that anticipates destinations as you type based on your browsing history.

Replacing URL-only auto-completion, the forward-thinking new capability searches URLs and Web-page titles, bookmarks and tags as you type an address, and lists the most relevant in a scrolling drop-down window based on how often and recently they were visited.

As with any major change, the AwesomeBar is not without controversy. Detractors of the feature, which has been around since beta 2, mostly say that searching anything more than recent URLs is a waste of time and are angry the feature can’t be disabled. (I might have to agree on the second point). However, the overwhelming majority of opinions I’ve seen out there are in favor of AwesomeBar.

There are dozens of other new features in RC1, including better security and malware protection, version control for plug-ins and UI tweaks for Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X and Linux versions. According to the release announcement, all the interface enhancements were based on user feedback. There also were “dramatic improvements” to performance, memory usage and speed, as well as optimizations for Google Mail and Zoho Office thanks to JavaScript engine revs.

You can download …

On the issue of throttling, I couldn't agree more. Network hosts belong to the ISPs, and are not the province of government. However, I'd venture to say that P2P is not always used for piracy.

what's the point of pointing to your blog here? I saw nothing that relates to this article and it's bad etiquette (and I'm pretty sure it's contrary to DaniWeb guidelines).

Call it a kind of bigotry for the new millennium. The packets of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent have become the target of throttling—even complete blockage—by Internet service providers on their networks. Do they have the right?

The revelation comes from study results published yesterday by Germany’s Max Plunk Institute of Software Systems computer research group, which identified 13 ISPs engaged in the practices, including Comcast, Cox and seven others in the U.S.

In response, Comcast said it monitors peek traffic times and slows peer-to-peer packets to give other services access. Data in the study contradicts that claim, showing that both Comcast and Cox throttle P2P packets “independent of time of day.”

Still, compared with the 1,224 ISPs in the survey, the number found to be limiting traffic was relatively small. And who’s to say they don’t have a right? Virtually all the coverage I’ve read portrays the ISPs as the bad guys, and perhaps the providers are biased. But should government play a role?

Packets from peer-to-peer applications reportedly account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of all traffic moving through measured hosts. And if all that traffic is slowing people’s phone calls or video streams, doesn’t the service provider have an obligation to adequately serve those consumers?

The Open Internet Coalition, Free Press and other advocacy groups are calling for the U.S. Congress to enact legislation to stop companies from deciding which traffic is allowed, how much …

Google on Monday launched Friend Connect, APIs for accessing data from Facebook and other social networks. By Thursday, Facebook banned the access, saying the tools don’t let its users know their data is being scanned.

A post by Facebook’s Charlie Cheever on the Facebook Developers blog Thursday morning explained the position. “We’ve found that [Friend Connect] redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.” It will suspend Friend Connect access to Facebook user information but work with Web search giant company until “it comes into compliance.”

MySpace last week launched Data Availability, which performs a similar function to Friend Connect, but received no such rebuff.

MySpace is one of more than a dozen companies that has signed onto OpenSocial, a project led by Google to develop a set of common APIs for social networks. To date, Facebook has resisted participation in OpenSocial, fueling speculation that Google could pose a threat to Facebook and its developer participation.

According to a piece on TechCrunch, the issue centers on the way Friend Connect positions itself in regard to Facebook and third-party sites that wish to extract Facebook’s social data. Google becomes a sort of go-between, brokering data from one site to the other. Once permission is given by …

Sorry about the messed up link. You can find the video here:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080315/microsoft-future-personal-health-video/

Before I tell you about Bill Gates’ speech at CEO Summit 2008 today, I’d like to share one more story from my trip to Orlando for STAR EAST last week. And then I’ll tie the two together.

In my May 10 post from the conference, I mentioned “Testing Dialogues—In the Executive Suite,” an extremely entertaining keynote speech by James Whittaker, a software architect at Microsoft. In part of his presentation was a Microsoft video shown at one of its employee meetings. It opens with a female runner that’s using a device to monitor her vitals as she jogs along a baron landscape.

At the same time, a man—presumably the woman’s doctor—is receiving the same health data on a screen in his office. He taps on a futuristic-looking wireless keyboard, and as the woman gets home her device alerts her to a message. She points the device toward a wall, which suddenly displays a live image of her doctor; he’s telling her something about the data he received during her jog. A full-wall display accompanies his consultation, plotting her health data in colorful, animated charts.

As video continues, it chronicles her visit to the doctor and the software’s complexity escalates. The medical building senses her presence, guiding her movements with floor arrows and wall signs. The rest of the story is not important. The point, Whittaker said, was the reaction of the audience of Microsoft employees as they took in the fantastic fairy tale. “When it ended, …

Microsoft continues to reach out and touch mobile device makers and their carriers. The company today announced a deal with Research in Motion that will enhance integration between Microsoft’s Windows Live services and Blackberry 7000 and 8000 series devices as well as the BlackBerry Bold, a brand-new model unveiled today that’s also known as the 9000. Microsoft last year struck a similar deal with Nokia for its popular Series 60 devices and is now in talks to also include the Series 40.

Developers of applications for BlackBerry devices will be able to enable apps to send and receive instant messages from Microsoft’s Live Messenger servers, join chat groups, set presence information, see presence status of others, save transcripts from conversations and send and receive files.

The companies also will work together to allow BlackBerry push technology to automatically send Live Hotmail messages and keep devices in sync with their online account and choose between a dedicated Hotmail inbox or a unified inbox for multiple e-mail accounts. People with an existing account on a Windows Live server would be able to gain access from a BlackBerry using their existing address and password. E-mail messages delivered to the BlackBerry will be able to display HTML with graphics, photos and hyperlinks.

But making all these capabilities a reality for devices hinges on gaining approval from carriers. Microsoft reportedly has relationships with more than 140 carriers that involve its Windows Live services, including recent deals with Latin America’s Telefonica …

I already have enough spam, thank you.

Research in Motion has thrown its BlackBerry hat into the iPhone ring with BlackBerry Bold, the latest version of the company’s line of sleek, multimedia savvy smartphones.

According to a RIM press release, the new unit is “crafted from premium materials inside and out, that radiate elegance with a dramatic presence.” Yeah, whatever. What you’ll want to know is this: The Bold supports Mbit-speed networking with tri-band HSDPA (the first BlackBerry to do this), and also has integrated GPS and WiFi capabilities.

Obviously taking aim at Apple’s iPhone, the Bold’s “lustrous black exterior, satin chrome finish and stylish leather-like backplate” add to a “stunning display [and] sophisticated user interface.” RIM clearly had its thesaurus out for this press release, positioning the BlackBerry Bold as a “symbol of accomplishment and aspiration.” I guess RIM expects some heavy breathing to go with this unit.

Getting back to the hardware, the new phone is built around a 624 MHz mobile processor with 1GB memory, 128MB Flash and a microSD/SDHD memory card slot (which currently supports as much as 8GB, but is expected to go to 16GB soon). Its half-VGA display delivers 480x320 pixels, a built-in 2-megapixel camera includes a flash and 5x digital zoom. Also packed into the phone is Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, two speakers with speakerphone, quad-band EDGE, a QWERTY keyboard and dedicated send, end and mute buttons.

In a deal with Microsoft, also announced today, BlackBerry 7000, 8000 …

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. According to Web reports over the weekend, Google today is expected to launch Friend Connect, a set of APIs for pulling personal data from social networks that comply with the OpenSocial common interface specifications it published in October.

The move would follow news from Facebook and MySpace, which made similar announcements last week.

New from Facebook is Facebook Connect, which builds on the Facebook Platform it launched in May 2007. The release adds trusted authentication between Web sites; portability of real identity, including names, profiles, friends and photos; friends access for adding social context; and dynamic privacy, which permits a user’s privacy rules to propagate to external sites.

The release of MySpace’s Data Availability was accompanied by built-in partnerships with EBay and Yahoo, along with Twitter and its Photobucket. The project makes available MySpace user profiles, photos, videos and friend networks via RESTful API with authentication provided by OAuth.

The new MySpace API embraces specifications of the DataPortability Group, a small band founded in November, 2007, by Chris Saad. I couldn’t find a Web site for Data Availability, but MySpace’s developer documentation page might prove helpful. Also, tech portal TechCrunch posted a pretty good article and sample application showing how Data Availability might look with Twitter’s “What are you doing?” Web site.
MySpace in …

ORLANDO, Florida—Thousands of software developers and testers converged here this week for the Software Testing Analysis and Review conference, better known as STAREAST. It’s one of just a few must-attend learning events for people in our field, and if you haven’t been to one of these events, you’re truly missing out.

Dozens of the testing industry’s top thinkers were here. Names like Jon Bach, Michael Bolton, Hans Buwalda, Paul Gerrard, Jonathan Kohl, Rob Sabourin, James Whittaker and many other “silver-tongued speaking pros,” as chair Lee Copeland put it, delivered full- and half-day pre-conference tutorials on Monday and Tuesday.

The rest of the week was filled with concurrent sessions of about an hour each (taught by many of the same folks) as well as by numerous testing practitioners like you. These are people who submitted papers describing their experiences solving their testing problems and challenges. “I like hearing people’s war stories,” Copeland told me at “Meet the Speakers” on Thursday, at which speakers make themselves available for casual conversation over a buffet lunch.

The further availability of speakers at book signings, open spaces and Lightning Talks, is part of what made STAREAST valuable and memorable. Another fun and unusual networking event was Casino Night. Following a catered expo reception, attendees were invited to play at Vegas-style gaming tables staffed by professional dealers and croupiers. Winnings are cashed in for chances to win from an impressive array of entertainment electronics (a la Sony Wii, iPod Touch, etc.) …

It was the belle of the ball stumbling as she made her grand entrance. Sun Microsystems on Tuesday, hoping to make a big splash at JavaOne with the launch of its shiny new platform for rich internet application development, saw demos of JavaFX repeatedly crash.

Like blaming it on the red carpet, Sun’s senior VP of software Rich Green said it was “the size of the pipes in the Moscone Center” that were the culprits of the embarrassing brain-freeze. He was trying to drag a JavaFX app from a browser to the desktop; a pretty neat trick, when you think about it. I wasn’t there to see it, but I hear he was later able to pull it off.

JavaFX introduces JavaFX Script, a declarative, statically typed scripting language that like Java uses packages, classes, inheritance and separate compilation and deployment units. JavaFX code compiles into bytecode and runs in any JVM that Java code can, including handheld devices. JavaFX “provides a presentation layer for the Java ecosystem,” according to Sun’s JavaFX introduction page. JavaFX Scripts can call Java APIs directly.

For Java developers, check out part one of Sun’s introduction to JavaFX Script for Java developers, a step-by-step . You’ll find links to parts two and three there too.

The demo’s failure brought to mind another bit of techie history trivia: the Windows 98 demo crash by Bill Gates at Comdex on April 20, 1998. JavaFX …

Sun Microsystems on Monday was giving away packaged copies of OpenSolaris in an effort to seed the development community with a Linux alternative and boost the number of available applications for the platform.

The news came at CommunityOne, Sun’s free developer conference collocated with JavaOne this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“Sun's goal is to get the technology into as many developer hands as possible,” said Ian Murdock, head of Sun’s operating system platform strategy in his keynote speech at the conference. Murdock—founder of Debian Linux and former CTO of the Linux Foundation—was hired by Sun last year to run Project Indiana, an endeavor to “to make OpenSolaris (and, by extension, Solaris) more familiar to Linux users,” according to his blog entry from that time.

OpenSolaris was then little more than a kernel. While its enterprise credentials were beyond question, kernels alone don’t do much for developers seeking a platform. On Monday, the project announced OpenSolaris 2008.05, which encompasses a desktop environment packaged on a live CD that can be booted and experienced without the need to install it on a system. It also launched OpenSolaris.com, where images of the live CD can be downloaded.

The release also reportedly introduces the Image Packaging System, a repository-based software delivery system that can install from a network. OpenSolaris uses ZFS as its root file system, which offers snapshots and rollback capabilities among its …

I guess my enthusiasm for anything that makes Outlook better was in evidence here. I have no skin in this game, other than to let others using Outlook of a really helpful tool.

And if you really want to know what's wrong with Outlook, I'd be happy to send you a list.

There’s a better-than-even chance that you’re using Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. And if you’re like me, you’re not too happy about it. But there’s a free plug-in available today that brings some much needed relief from some of what ails the world’s most popular e-mail client. I tried it today and it’s great.

The New York Times reported today that a company called Xobni (pronounced ZOB-nee) had begun beta-testing a like-named plug-in that was supposed to solve one of the main problems I’ve been complaining about for years: slow performance.

I downloaded and installed the plug-in within a few minutes. A restart of Outlook was required, after which a colorful new pane appeared at the right of my inbox. A message proclaimed that it was indexing my mail. After about 15 minutes, it was done. A search box at the top of the pane reacts instantly as you type, much like Firefox searches a Web page. Search terms are highlighted in yellow below, first in a list of contact names, and below that in context of the e-mail.

That kind of quick searching alone would be improvement enough; I get a lot of e-mail (and delete very little). But there’s so much more. When an e-mail message is selected, the Xobni pane displays information about the sender, including subjects of recent e-mail threads, called “conversations,” a list of files you’ve exchanged with the person, and a list of people the sender frequently exchanges e-mail with, referred to as …

Thanks for the comment, WolfPack. In my experience, stock prices generally rise when an acquisition bid offers a premium over the stock price at the time, which was certainly the case here. IMHO, Yahoo is under no pressure to sell (as evidenced by its holding out for a few dollars more), and Yang is firmly in the drivers seat.

To jbennet- I'm no huge fan of Gates, but I respect and admire him a lot more than I do Ballmer. However, I believe that to fix Windows Microsoft would have to bring on someone more like Steve Jobs. :)

I’ve never liked Steve Ballmer very much as president of Microsoft. I don’t know the man personally, of course, and I could never quite put my finger on my reasons for disliking him. Until today, that is, when I read an Associated Press story that included allegations that the Microsoft CEO once said he wants to “kill Google.”

If I heard about the quote—from which I’ve removed an obscenity—in Sept., 2005, when he supposedly said it, I must have forgotten, because it came as news to me. And it seemed to epitomize my disdain for the man who in some circles has come to be known as Monkey Boy for a ridiculous-looking dance he once did on stage at a Microsoft employee meeting.

Competitive zeal is one thing, but to publicly vilify a competitor is simply unprofessional. And for it to come from the president and CEO of a company that has behaved as badly as Microsoft is laughable. As Microsoft’s marketer-in-chief, Ballmer certainly doesn’t put himself or Microsoft in a very good light with this kind of bravado.

And now Monkey Boy is engaged in more chest-beating with the latest wrinkle in his ruthless fervor to acquire Yahoo. Having his US$42 billion cash and stock offer rebuffed, Ballmer is now faced with the decision of walking away (and losing face) or mounting a hostile takeover.

My guess would be the latter, and my hope would be for it to fail. Because in …

Watch out Java; Adobe wants a bigger bite of your mobile-device market share pie. The company yesterday said it will drop its licensing fee for including its Flash Player on handhelds and unveiled alliances with some of world’s largest telecom carriers, content providers and chip and handset makers.

It’s all part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe’s grand plan to provide a consistent platform and runtime for development across PCs, phones, mobile internet devices, televisions, set-top boxes and other platforms, according to a company news release published yesterday. Companies already on board include ARM, the BBC, Intel, Motorola, MTV, Nokia, NTT Docomo, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm and Verizon Wireless. Absent from the list are Apple, Microsoft and Sun.

As part of Open Screen, Adobe says it will:

• Remove restrictions on use of SWF and FLV/F4V file format specifications
• Publish the device porting-layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publish its Flash Cast media delivery and AMF data services protocols

Adobe for the first time will remove licensing fees from what it says is the “next major release of Adobe Flash Player.” The project will build on Flash Lite, which Adobe says is already on millions of phones; it gave no indication of when a free release might be available. Zero cost of software is a critical factor for device makers, for which every fraction of a penny saved during design helps build advantage in the ultra-competitive device market.

The company …

khess: good post on tech.blorge.com. I agree totally with your position (and have done my share of repetitive buying on subsequent formats). I'm confident that digital will be it for a while.

Thanks Jwenting- That's how I understand the facts, and what made this story interesting. What constitutes infringement is NOT converting music to MP3 format, for example, but WILLFULLY sharing those MP3s with others. And in this case, it could not be proved that anyone had done it willfully.

A federal court today ruled in favor of people using file-sharing applications such as Napster and Kazaa, notorious for illegal distribution of music files.

The ruling was a blow to the Recording Industry Association of America, which has been combating users and developers of this software because of its potential to illegally distribute copyrighted material.

In essence, the ruling states that merely making music files available for sharing does not constitute copyright infringement. The case, Atlantic v. Howell, centers on Jeffrey and Pamela Howell, a husband and wife that had Kazaa installed on their system. Mr. Howell asserted that the software itself had sought music files stored on his system and put them into Kazaa’s shared files folder.

Indeed, it was unclear to the court which Howell (if any) had designated the files for sharing. On those grounds the court rejected the RIAA’s position that having such software on a system constitutes infringement. Similar rulings have come down this year in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and last September in California.

But in Electra v. Barker, a New York court on March 31 ruled that having such files “might” constitute infringement, even if no one has copied the files. The court stated that “an offer to distribute” could be enough to constitute distribution and violation of the copyright holder’s rights. I suppose it could be thought of as akin to “possession with intent to distribute.” Apparently the courts are grappling with differences between the terms “distribution” …