Category Archives: Software

5 Things Yahoo! Does Best & Why It's Not Enough

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Whenever someone at Yahoo! makes headlines for something or the other, people are always quick to start the Yahoo! bashing. Although we don’t think Yahoo! is the coolest company out there either, they’re certainly not another AOL as people love to imply. Yahoo!, like any other company/corporation/media-giant out there does some things right, some things wrong, and beats the hell out of the competition in other areas; but for some reason, people tend to forget.

Yahoo!’s biggest obstacle to success and popularity today is that despite all of it’s Web 2.0 efforts (like an extremely-hyped WordPress Blog, Web 2.0 AJAX toolkits, a re-designed email interface, etc., etc.), it remains associated with “old” in the minds of many geeks today. That’s not necessarily true, and as you will see from some of the points below, the only archaic thing left at Yahoo! is the Management.

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Windows Vista Crashes, BSODs, and System Failures on Hibernate, Resume, and Wake

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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While Windows Vista has a whole host of new features to offer, it has one major problem that just won’t go away: it’s totally FUBAR’d after you resume from sleep or hibernate. Unfortunately, many of these issues weren’t present during the beta stage, and were somehow introduced in the RTM build of Windows Vista. This exclusive NeoSmart Technologies report describes some of the symptoms in detail, and we even provide links to possible fixes by Microsoft. All issues have been duly reported and confirmed by Microsoft, so this isn’t just some figment of our imagination. A number of these patches are scheduled to be included in Windows Vista SP1 (Codename Fiji).

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Does Net-non-Neutrality Already Exist?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Net-Neutrality is without a doubt the biggest techno-political debate of the year. The entire issue has spun out of control since mid-2006, and here on the eve of 2007 it has yet to be resolved. The only question is, has net-neutrality already been destroyed and hacked-to-pieces to a greater extent than anyone thought already existed?

Earlier today, Slashdot featured a story on EarthLink’s “random” dropping of email messages. We just concluded a test of our own, and we find the results may not be as random as they seem. In fact, the results point directly to a big spider of sorts, sitting in the middle of all the tubes and picking what goes through and what doesn’t.

According to EarthLink themselves, “EarthLink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail.” But what they don’t mention is, it isn’t random. As a matter of fact, our tests lead us to believe that EarthLink is indeed prioritizing not only message delivery time but also whether the messages ever get there or not.

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National Online “Meth-Makers” Registry

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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According to an MSNBC article published earlier today, many States are considering the creation of another type of Online Offenders Registry – one for anyone involved in the “cooking” or dealing of methamphetamine. Online Offenders Registries in the United States were previously restricted to sex offenders, namely, rapists and pedophiles. The question is, “What’s the point, and why just meth?”

Tennessee, the first to implement such a system in March of 2005, has the highest rate of meth abuse. Jennifer Johnson of the PR Dept. at the Tennessee’s regional version of the FBI makes a case for an internet registry that lists meth – and meth only – makers:

“Unlike other drugs where it is really [only] harmful to you and your family, meth is hazardous to all around you. […] That’s why we don’t foresee a heroin or cocaine registry.”

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SearchMash: Google Reborn

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Move over Google, there’s a new search engine in town! What’s that? SearchMash is Google? Never mind then, scratch that…

It doesn’t make a difference really, stop going to Google.com because that’s not the place to get answers nowadays. SearchMash is, both literally and figuratively speaking, the new Google.

It’s quite a challenge really: how does the Number 1 search engine on the web rewrite its search algorithm and test its effectiveness without hurting its current results and user-experience during the testing process? Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to have figured it out: create a new search engine, and do your testing there!

SearchMash.com is the evolution of Google, [[GOOG]] and should things go right, what Google will (soon enough) become. It tests a range of new features and methods of bringing information to the users’ fingertips in more ways than immediately obvious to the eyes.

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Firefox 2.0 Recap

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Besides the ugly new theme, the convoluted “too-cool” first-run website, and the myriad of half-baked features that Firefox 2.0 brings to the scene, there’s a couple of not-so-welcome policy changes in Firefox 2.0 that make us wonder what’s going on at Mozilla. Basically, these changes go against everything that the Firefox team has been doing for the past couple of years, and make it look like Firefox wasn’t run by an open-source community so much as a big corporation with nothing but money on its mind.

When Firefox 2.0 came out, we didn’t really care to review it – after all, there were plenty of reviews already out there from the Beta and RC stages. But now, a month into the RTM release of Firefox 2.0, we find a re-cap being called for.

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Updated Comment-Entry Form

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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A long time ago NeoSmart Technologies used to have WYSIWYG editors all over the place, but things just didn’t work out. For one, it was rare for a post with even tiny bit of formatting applied to be rendered as valid XHTML (like the rest of the site), and for another, it was very incompatible with newer versions of certain web browsers and older versions of others – so we got rid of the system.

However, we’ve had quite a few complaints about WordPress’ default requirement for encoded HTML entities, and many posts were lost by including an unencoded “<” or other element. We’re glad to say we’ve found an alternative. We came across the Xinha WYSIWYG editor, a nice (and possibly minimal)-looking editor that has a new experimental HTML-creation engine that produces truly valid code no matter what you throw at it. That and the fact that it can easily be customized (as we’ve done here) and works on almost any browser made it the ideal choice for NeoSmart Technologies.

Anyway, it works fairly well and a spell checking module is also being added at the moment. For anyone not wanting to use the WYSIWYG editor (especially if you’re trying to write some code), you can press the icon of a document with “<>” superimposed on it – that’ll display the pure HTML and you can do what you like from there.

 

Vista Symlinks Revisited…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It’s not often that something we classify as a “really good” feature turns out to be a bit of a sham, but unfortunately, that’s the case with Vista’s symlinks. Just a couple of days ago, symlinks were our “big Vista feature of the week,” but now, we’re not so sure.

First, a correction. Symlinks haven’t really been added to Windows Vista. Sure, you can use the mklink command to get Vista to intercept calls made to certain paths and have them silently and invisibly replaced with whatever real paths you previously specified, just like Symlinks are supposed to be – but that’s about it. Vista’s symlinks aren’t much better than junctions in 2k/XP that don’t take up extra hard drive space, and indeed are quite a bit less compatible.

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How To: apache_response_headers() on IIS

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Along with the release of our request_uri for IIS yesterday, we have another useful tip for a second function commonly found in WordPress plugins and other PHP redistributable scripts. apache_response_headers is used to get a list of all the headers sent out by a page, in the format of an associative array.

IIS doesn’t use this function, and before PHP5, there was no way to properly emulate its behavior. But on PHP5, it’s nothing too difficult. Without further ado, here’s the code:

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100% Apache-Compliant REQUEST_URI for IIS and Windows!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Ever since moving NeoSmart Technologies to a Windows server, we’ve had one headache after the other dealing with various PHP scripts that included references to $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], and unfortunately, none of the “workarounds” or hacks provided on the internet work. Some of them are for Apache on Windows, and others work most of the time, but break the minute you introduce url rewriting or launch scripts as the default files in a directory.

REQUEST_URI for Windows is a must-install for absolutely anyone that uses IIS & PHP, no matter what software you run. It’s free, it’s one-hundred percent compatible with Apache’s own REQUEST_URI, and best of all, it’s guaranteed to work no matter what. REQUEST_URI for Windows gets whatever the user entered into the address bar – period. Nothing more, nothing less. And of course, you never have to modify a single script to make them work, this does all the work for you.

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