June 18, 2004
The Browser Upgrade Campaign heats up
Its the latest salvo fired against Internet Explorer. Security Focus has joined the widespread campaign exhorting people to move away from the buggy, insecure, dangerous piece of software, and the source of many of the headaches that security pros have to endure. Before them, it was LockerGnome, an MCSE who has been frustrated with IE's security track record, their I-don't-care attitude towards major bug fixes and worst Web Standards support among browsers. Before that was the interview of Scott Collins of mozilla.org on Ars Technica. And then you have the whole Internet community.
Then there are the two discussion threads(one, two) on channel9.msdn.com where everybody is shouting about whether MS cares about web developers and the lack of features in IE. There are ample indications that Microsoft is feeling the heat. You can see Tony Chor answering questions and clarifying in the threads. To summarise the happenings in the forums, after the launch of IE 6.0 in the second half of 2001, MS moved developers from the IE group to the MSN Explorer group. So there was no one in IE to listen to customers' problems. There hasn't been a feature update since then. To believe them, the whole IE group managed only to release security fixes for bugs (and they were quite bad at that too). Now they say, the group is back to work on a newer version of IE including a couple of feature updates in XPSP2. Still the attitude is being non-committal on including complete CSS2 support and PNG alpha transparency. They have managed to put up a wiki for feature requests. I don't know how that is going to help them.
So what is the benchmark? What is everyone recommending to move to? Which browser is high up in terms of security and is standards-complaint better than any other browser? You don't have to take a second guess.
June 07, 2004
The Fox and the open bag
The Firefox visual identity team has decided on changing the default theme of Firefox in preparation of the impending 1.0 release. As often in the open source community, this has caused some furor in the mozilla dev community with people taking sides with the earlier theme author who is equally furious. The fault was his own. He was hesitant in releasing his Qute theme with the same license as MPL. So the team thought of porting the hugely popular Pinstripe OSX Firefox and Thunderbird themes to Windows. They call it Winstripe. Although its only Work In Progress and is basically a mish-mash of the Qute, Pinstripe & XP Luna themes, I am liking it™.
April 07, 2003
Multi Bootable CDs
A step further to the service-pack-slipstreamed CDs of WinXP one has always made, an interesting thing would be to create a bootable CD containing multiple versions of WindowsXP on it. This guy here shows us how using an innocuous utility, one can have a single installation CD containing multiple versions of Windows. It works great with the volume licensed versions of Windows a company generally owns.
November 27, 2002
Project Aladdin & Hotmail
'Towards Self-Managing, Dependable Home Networking' as Microsoft puts it. One does not know how dependable he would become on it. Read this leaked document from Microsoft Research. It's the next big thing that MS is planning, after the Tablet PC. It is a toolkit for creating a home network consisting of wireless devices talking to each other using, as you might have guessed, proprietory protocols. Well, if you liked reading that, try this - Converting Hotmail BSD Servers to Windows. Notice how they try to ape each and every feature that a Unix server provides, ending up with a heavily patched Windows server.
November 04, 2002
MS Vacancy
M$ Phillipines has a vacancy for a developer evangelist. One of the responsibilities is to 'Demolish competition by knowing everything they do and thwarting their every move in the relevant spaces'. Here's the Register article which talks about this 'special requirement'. Hello, competition, are you listening?
October 07, 2002
1.0 to XP
They have it all! Screenshots of all Windows versions right from Windows 1.01 right upto the latest Windows XP. Looking at them, I feel Windows 1.01 would have been really more stable than Win98. Atleast it would not give me the BSOD, only a DOS prompt. :-). I also intend to put up my entire screenshot collection of the various OSes I have tinkered with. I'll let you know when I do this.
August 10, 2002
Switch off the Lights...
...and go to the command line. The power lies in the CLI. So what if you are using Windows. You dont need windows to run Windows. Learn here how - Windows NT Lights Out Operation Guide. A bit old, nevertheless useful. Feels better when you need not leave your CLI style of working even on Windows.
July 24, 2002
Real men dont click
I do believe the above line. Smart admins should not take the support of the mouse for doing system tasks. They should use Perl scripts. Like these Real Men. These guys have managed to do a fully automated Windows 2000 setup including ADS deployment, simply by using Perl scripts.
Read More (99 words) »»
June 20, 2002
Typography
Although I wouldnt normally expect a good rivetting article on microsoft.com, this one is really interesting. Its all about rasterisation of fonts and their distortion at tiny point sizes. I am not into typography but this article really got me engrossed - The raster tragedy at low resolution . It is a technically sound and informative article.
June 02, 2002
Win2k Tips
Wayne Maples has a whole website dedicated for Windows 2000 tips. Just happened to reach his site in search of this question - How to create a script in Win2000 to change my machine's ip address ? There are two different ways of tackling this problem: » Wayne's way » Microsoft's way .
March 19, 2002
Win2k Boot Screens
I always get bored looking at the standard startup screen for windows 2000. So I went to LittleWhiteDog and got some help on boot-up logos. A little peep into their boot-up logo collection left me awe-struck! Not that i haven't tried out a startup logo on Linux. I have, I have. But unfortunately, I am used to the dmesg output at boot-up.
