According Forrester reseach ".. the Web will fade. It will be replaced by a new software paradigm". Nobody knows what this new paradigm will be, but these guys are saying that it will be their platform. I found this link from this very interesting two part article Changing Climates for Microsoft and Google, Desktops and Webs making interesting analogy between Google and AOL business model, browser as a platform and possible return of thick client ("smart client" in Microsoft terms), why Google might want to buy Adobe and many other interesting observations. Worth reading.
I have switched away from using Outlook once again for variety of reasons - as part of my latest attempts to reduce complexity and increase security (more on that later) and went back to Thunderbird/Web based email systems on all Windows machines. Conversion of address books was piece of cake this time, thanks to Plaxo which I use to synchronize Mac and Windows based systems. Nonetheless, I got curious what format does Thunderbird use for address book and this way I have discovered the awkward Mork file format.
Today's extension is from the area of - surprise surprise - security and privacy. I guess I am getting slightly paranoid from all the security related stuff I am listening to. But I promise I will switch back to "standard" TWIT, MacBreak and Windows Weekly to compensate the security heavy topics. But it certainly true that the more you are aware of what is technically possible, the more hostile Internet you will see ...
I have worked through my listening to the Security Now! podcasts up to middle October now (more specifically up to here) and one remark from Steve Gibson forced me to think very hard: how today's hard drives encounter hundreds of read errors a day (actually Leo said "hundreds a minute"), but thanks to ECC process and dynamic reallocation of sectors, this is invisible to the user, because:
" .... if a file is damaged because of a bad sector, it can recover that data by recovering the data, either moving it or kind of reformatting the sector underneath it to make it readable again ... "
It is now about 1 year since official release of C# 2.0 and .NET framework 2.0. The next version of C# language - the C# 3.0 seems to get more and more attention - in blogs, official channels and MSDN. There is lot of excitement and big expectations - but I have nagging feeling that the general direction of the C# development is not necessary an improvement.
The main new features of the C# 3.0 language are implicitly typed variables and anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions, and LINQ - possibility of using SQL-ish dialect inside the C#. With exception of the last, all of them must sound very familiar to every Python programmer. All variables in Python are implicitly typed, we can extend classes to much larger degree than extension methods and lambda expressions were always integral part of Python (inherited from Lisp and Scheme).
It's been almost 5 months now since I started to use Mac OS-X. During these months, I became very comfortable in the new environment and albeit I do not consider being a power user, I can do all I need with my Macbook and use it daily.
Today I found out that yet another from my friends got a Mac. Great news, Thomas - hope you will enjoy your Macbook Pro as much as myself, Gabo and many others. Welcome in the club.
After listening for over week to Security Now! podcast (thanks, Steve, thanks Leo and happy birthday), I've decided to actually do something about the security on computers around. I started to scanning my home network using "Shields Up" and was happy to found that the only open port was SSH, exactly as I thought I configured it.
As next step, I followed the advice from this podcast and used my hosts file to block out ads servers and other internet vermins. You may also want to look at the podcast notes, read full transcript or listen to it.
Today's extension is yet another one that somehow works with URL's aka links. If you now have strange feeling that all extensions in last few days *were* about links, you are right. But realize that links are the most crucial feature of the Web, and therefore extensions dealing with links are really useful.
After you download Linky (the download is very small - only 32 kB), it adds few entries into your context menu. How many new menu entries are added can be configured in plugin option. On activation, Linky shows you number of links and image links (URL pointing to picture) on currently page displayed page and allows you to open links in new tabs or new windows or open image links in new tabs or windows. In both cases, Linky displays dialog window with all links and allows individual selection of which links will be included.
I have read somewhere that quotation is safe way how to say something potentially dangerous or controversial without being legally exposed :-). So today I am going to quote an authority in computer security - Steve Gibson on some very interesting Vista related security information.
Steve is doing (together with Leo Laporte) excellent weekly podcast "Security Now!". It is so great that I have decided to download as many back episodes as I could find on their site and started to listen to them in the chronological order, back from June 2006. It was worth of every minute. I am now somewhere in August 2006 and Steve Gibson (== SG) covered interesting tricks what to do with you hosts file, very nicely explained the usefulness of netstat program and started multi-episode sequence on virtualization and virtaul machines. Thanks to many years of experience, Steve always gives a historical perspective on every topic he covers.