Archive for February, 2006
360 Conversations
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
gas station guy: Is that a Z4?
me: yeah (smiles)
gas station guy: I drove one of those last night.
me: oh yeah?
gas station guy: on my 360. (smiles)
me: what game?
gas station guy: need for speed, blows gotham out of the water. you can totally pimp your ride.
me: cool.
gas station guy: nice car, fast too.
me: yeah. 
OSX Secure?
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
My old friend Steve seems to think Windows is less secure than OSX because Windows Office applications that support scripting environments are “full of scripting holes for viruses.” While I’ll agree that in the past these application have had security vulnerabilities, the current versions which are fully up to date do not. In fact if we take a look at the security vulnerabilities for Outlook 2003 over the last three years, there have been very very few, most non critical.
Excel 2003 doesn’t even have any vulnerabilities in the Secunia database.
Excel 2002 has had very few over the last three years:
And Microsoft Word seems pretty secure to me:
What I find most humorous about Steve’s rant, is that he must have somehow missed the recent exploits that have been found in OSX, particularly the critical scripting exploit in Safari that, according to Secunia, can be “exploited automatically via the Safari browser when visiting a malicious web site”.
In general, if we take a good look at OSX security record over the last few years we find it is far from stellar -
Of course, I can’t claim XP’s record is any better (it’s not), but considering the attention Windows gets compared to OSX, one has to wonder how bad it will get for OSX users if virus, trojan and worm writers start to pay more attention.
Widgets – Cancel That
Monday, February 27th, 2006
I take back what I said about the Yahoo! Widgets Engine. It doesn’t support garbage collection on graphics objects and doesn’t seem to clean up it’s resources worth a damn leading to some pretty serious memory issues. A little program like the one below will chew through memory like it was going out of style. I should not have to delete anything, that’s rediculous. Objects should be destroyed when they fall out of scope. Yuck.
UPDATE I’ve also noticed that setting fonts on a particular object will run GDI resources up. This is horrible. If you reset a font face on a graphics object, it apparently recreates the font drawing resouces without destroying the old resources. So to keep these things from dragging a system down and ultimately crashing, you have to reuse graphics objects like Text and TextArea, and you can’t reset properties like text.font = “Arial”. Pretty sloppy system IMHO.
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<?konfabulator xml-strict='true'?>
<widget version='1.0' minimumVersion='3.0'>
<debug>on</debug>
<window title='TestCases'>
<name>MainWindow</name>
<width>200</width>
<height>600</height>
<visible>0</visible>
<shadow>1</shadow>
<frame name='MainFrame' visible='true'>
<vOffset>0</vOffset>
<hOffset>0</hOffset>
<height>200</height>
<width>600</width>
</frame>
</window>
<action trigger='onLoad'>
<![CDATA[
var g_vOffset = 0;
function timerTick()
{
if ( MainFrame.subviews != undefined )
{
delete MainFrame.subviews[0].subviews[0].removeFromSuperView(); // text area
delete MainFrame.subviews[0].removeFromSuperView(); // frame
}
var frame = new Frame();
var text = new TextArea();
text.color = '#000000';
text.size = 30;
text.editable = false;
text.scrollbar = false;
text.vOffset = g_vOffset;
text.hOffset = 0;
text.width = 200;
text.font = 'Helvetica';
text.data = 'Some Text';
g_vOffset += 1;
frame.addSubview( text );
MainFrame.addSubview( frame );
}
MainWindow.visible = true;
]]>
</action>
<timer name='mainTimer'>
<interval>.1</interval>
<ticking>true</ticking>
<onTimerFired>
<![CDATA[
timerTick();
]]>
</onTimerFired>
</timer>
</widget>
Search Roundup
Monday, February 27th, 2006
Ask.com just came out with a new interface, and heck, it’s clean. The result are good too. MSN Search also recently cleaned up their interface a bit, removing the heavy blue graphic from the home page that slowed load times. I’m just going to pick a technical subject, and lets see how well they all do. I was reading the Microsoft announcement today about the various flavors of Vista, and wanted more information on their new UNIX subsystem which allows UNIX apps to run on Vista. Here we go-
Ask.com – UNIX Subsystem Vista
Google.com – UNIX Subsystem Vista
Search.Msn.com – UNIX Subsystem Vista
Search.Yahoo.com – UNIX Subsystem Vista
A9.com – UNIX Subsystem Vista
Icerocket.com – UNIX Subsystem Vista
Results
Open them all up in tabs and take a look. Msn, Google and A9 are identical. Ask.com gets a gold star for having more real-time information, they have the Forbes article (dated 02.27.06, 12:02 AM ET ) on the Microsoft Vista press announcement in their first page. None of the other engines have this at this point (which may change by the time you do the search.) Yahoo is, well, bottom of the pack, Their relevancy just isn’t up there with the rest.
Features
Msn, Yahoo! A9, Google and Icerocket all have a cache of the pages in the results, Ask.com does not. A cache can be really useful, that’s something Ask needs to add. Google’s the only one with a Similar Pages search link baked into the results. Not sure how useful that is. Icerocket has QuickView, which I think I could use occasionally for scanning, although tabbed browsing sort of kills the usefulness of this.
Speed
Google is stil the fastest search provider out there, for this they get a gold star. Yahoo! was the slowest, by far, it took forever for their results to load. Msn was right behind Google, they sputter a little sometimes but for the most part their pages load just as fast as Google’s.
User Interface
I’d say, in terms of ease of readability, I’d give A9 top marks. (But this is totally open to individual interpretation, tell me what you think.) Their titles are easy to spot and the relevant keywords are well highlighted within the summary text. Their page is too busy though, loaded up with all kinds of check boxes, borders, options and panels.
Google’s interface is feeling a little cluttered. Their text is too bunched up, and their links are folded over on two lines in most cases and aren’t clipped short enough. I have to say, Google is starting to look less clean than some of thier competitors to me, a visual style they pioneered. I’m surprised they haven’t continued to update their results page format over the years. It’s getting dated.
Msn has a different problem, they needs to make their results easier to scan like A9. The text on Msn’s results tends to blend together too much, it’s hard to pick out individual results while scanning the page. Bold titles and shrinking the summary text one notch would probably do it. (Yes I just criticized Msn Search, imagine that.)
Icerocket is too cluttered as well. You can turn off the page thumbnail images if you want (a totally worthless feature IMHO) but it’s still too cluttered. It does load pretty quick however.
As far as cleanliness goes, I think Ask.com gets top marks. Simple, no nonsense, easy to read, and no clutter.
Summary
I think I’m going to throw an Ask link up and give them a whirl for a week or two, I’m impressed so far. If your browser supports Open Search, you can add ask.com to your search providers here. Overall, unless your using Yahoo! as your search engine (which you probably shouldn’t be, it’s bottom of the heap on all counts), there’s absolutely nothing compelling in these results that would warrent switching from your current choosen search provider. Extra search engine features aside, search itself, is pretty much a flatland. With a level playing field, it makes it very easy for users to switch if they happen to find something they like about the other search engines. Whether it’s Msn’s information applets, or Icerocket’s QuickView option, or Ask’s clean interface, there’s nothing compelling about the results of the search engine. Which I would think has to scare the heck out of Google, if they’re even paying attention at this point.
Less on ‘Origami’
Monday, February 27th, 2006
Turns out that video I took the stills of over the weekend was “created about a year ago and shows an early prototype of Origami.” So the device in that video may or may not exist, and so the floor gets cleared and we’re back to square one wondering, what Microsoft’s Origami really is.
Feed Explorer
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
Work continues, no screenshots this week. I’ve been concentrating on the user interface. The main post listing view has been replaced with a custom composite control that uses a new data grid. The upper toolbars have been revamped to include the new global navigation buttons, and the tree view on the left now sports it’s own toolbar, which has opened up the main toolbar area completely. Some of the toolbar functions on the main preview pane will be moving to the new composite control, so that should clear up a bit too. I also did some work on rendering performance when selecting folders in the feed tree view (which was dog slow to render in the reading pane). All in all, good progress was made.
Brazillian Drivers
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
I think it goes the other way around guys.
‘Origami Project’ – Ultramobile Lifestyle PC
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
A small, portable tablet lifestyle pc that supports media center extender technology. I’ve been looking for something like this lately, but I was figuring on Portable Media Center being the base operating system. This is obviously much more powerful. It looks to be running Vista, which has built in Tablet support, and supports Media Center Extender technology. It’s also fast enough for handheld gaming, and has built in wireless and supports cellular networks. Whoa! If this thing supports 801.11a (or support for pcmcia network cards maybe?) you will be able to stream live music & television and even video to it. Wow! I wonder if it supports Hi Def? (Ok, lets not get ahead of ourselves here.) No matter where you are (in your car, on an island someplace, sitting in bed, at the beach, where ever) you’ll be sitting at your home desktop ‘doing stuff’ and accessing your content and information. Microsoft is so far out there on this front, it’s mind blowing. (They have to be, it’s the way they’re going to compete against web based software. Who needs web based software when you can just sit right down at your dekstop and enjoy a full blown dekstop user experience, anywhere?)
Now I just wonder if this is just a prototype showing what can be done, or a real product?
Also, while your checking out the video on DigitalKitchen, also check out the videos for Harmony and Unison! Whoa! Some serious digital home eye candy!
From the Unison video – check out the computer on the kitchen wall. Drool.
Yahoo! Widgets
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
UPDATE see this post.
Last week at work I was given the task of developing something kind cool and fun – a Yahoo Widget. Not exactly hard core development but really fun to work on. The Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly Konfabulator) is a slick little piece of work. It’s not incredibly robust, but it does do what it’s designed to do very well. The engine in driven by the JavaScript scripting host, which exposes an API that lets you control the user interface, fetch and parse xml data, and also gives you access to various local system characteristics. Overall, it’s a tight little package, lightweight, and most importantly works as advertised. The drawing mechanics are really nice, elements in your view window are referenced as objects which you set properties on (like object.opacity = 100 and object.vOffset = 20). I think this little environment would be perfectly suited for getting kids up and running (and interested) in programming in basic comp sci classes. With just a little bit of effort you can throw something together that does something really cool, and in doing so learn basic user interface concepts and basic programming concepts such methods, events, properties, and loops. Neat stuff. (I’ll post the widget I developed here when we release it.)
USA at the Olympics
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
The United States seems to be pretty good at Snow Boarding, but take away the 7 medals we won in that ‘sport’ and we drop from 2nd in overall medal count to 7th. Germany on the other had is kicking ass, and is doing it in a more respectable way.
