Category Archives: Software

And We Thought Java was the Same Everywhere!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Java. It’s that old language that runs code in a highly bloated virtual machine at slow speeds and terrible performance, especially on the Web. On a local PC, a Java’s just pure slow, but on the web Java can be a real headache. However, it has its benefits too — or so we thought. There are only two reasons someone would use Java in a website today: they wanted to write a complex program/script really quick and they needed it to just work regardless of browser or platform. After all, Java is Java, no matter if you’re on Windows, Linux, or Mac; or use Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer… But it’s not!

First, to clarify: this isn’t an article about Java, and it especially isn’t an attack on Java, not today. This is about Opera 9, the wonderful and highly-innovative browser that can do anything and everything with less memory than its competitors and with much less time too. But it breaks Java.

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Workaround for Akismet on SVN

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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WordPress has lost the domain that Akismet was hosted on — and SVN users are stuck. Since the domain is no longer valid, when your SVN client attempts to query it for the Akismet plugin (which is included via something know as “svn externals“), it gets a HTTP 501 error, and the entire SVN update fails. For some, that might be OK, if all you have on SVN is WordPress, your plugins just don’t get upgraded. No biggie.

Some of us however depend on SVN for a lot more than just WordPress. NeoSmart Technologies is such an example: we jumped on to this great CVS replacement the minute we heard about it — it’s that great. At NST, we have our Gallery, Blog, various small scripts, and most importantly, our download system on SVN. We don’t even use FTP anymore, just SVN the files from our side, SSH into the server, and update the repo. It’s that easy.

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Window Vista Build 5472.5 is Released

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Microsoft has just released the latest installment of the Windows Vista pre-RC1 builds, with Vista Build 5472.5 making its way to TAP and Tech Beta tester today, and for once, MSDN Subscribers too.

Build 5472.5 is a standard FRE Staged build, only available in English at the moment, though Arabic, Japanese, and German builds may follow. At this point all the builds we are seeing seem to undergoing severe stages of heavy optimization: although faster code normally comes at the expense of larger files as a rule of thumb, this build of Windows Vista packs a punch performance-wise, but is only a 100 MB larger than its predecessor, Build 5456.

The fact that this build has been distributed to a very large segment of the beta testing population (MSDN and Tech Net subscibers are normally excluded from interim builds like this one) leads us to believe this is the real deal: the build that will be RC1 with a bit more time and some more optimizations. It is probably meant to provide a testing background for the new ‘Aero Express’ theme (see below for more).

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Expression Web Designer and Internet Explorer? Think Again!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Yeah, you read that right. To re-iterate: if you want to code a site and expect it to load even semi-reasonably in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, you probably don’t want to write it or even touch it in Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer. At any rate, not this version of Expression.

Expression Web Designer is very Web 2.0 compatible. It’s the only really big HTML interface that validates directly against the W3C standards, by default checking page-display compatiblity against CSS 2.1, instead of against FF, IE6, or something. It does a very good job at that too, but unfortunately, it’s far ahead of Microsoft’s time.

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Bad Behavior Patch for Opera Users

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Bad Behavior is an excellent ‘profiling’ plug-in that deters most spam bots and attacks on web-based scripts, especially blogs, wikis, and forums. It uses a very detailed and sophisticated combination of checks and algorithms to create a ‘spammer’s profile’ and if a visitor to your site fits it, it’ll block them.

The algorithm is so good that there are almost no false positives, and together with a decent spam plug-in like Akismet or Spam Karma 2, you’re blog will be forever clean. But it has a problem with Opera. Most builds of Opera trigger a false alarm, leaving your blog reader-less, especially with the release of Opera 9, an excellent browser in all rights, but there is a solution. Continue reading →

ReactOS Reviewed: The Next Windows?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The idea is simple: Linux isn’t always the best non-Windows operating system. Windows is excellent and unbeatable for quite a few people and tasks. But neither is perfect. Almost exactly 10 years ago, a team began to search for a fix. In 1996, Linux was unusable for anyone but the most technologically ‘gifted’ and Windows 95 wasn’t anywhere near as complex as Windows today.

Originally called FreeWin95, the project had a decent idea, but terribly organized, implemented, and coded. Two years later, the dos-clone kernel was dumped, and the real project began. It was called ReactOS, and this time it was for real.

ReactOS is a 100% Open Source (mostly GPL) rewrite of the Windows Kernel. At its heart, ReactOS is an initiative to create an open-source project that is fully compatible with the all Windows NT-based drivers, applications, and services.

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Spoofed Spam from NeoSmart's Domain

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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An hour ago a spamming agency seems to have sent out thousands of messages from random @neosmart.net email adresses. NeoSmart Technologies was not involved in this spamming attempt (check the message headers!) and we’d like to assure everyone that we never have and we never will condone spam to come from our servers.

These messages were sent to random addresses, so whether or not you’re a member here doesn’t matter. Odds are, you won’t receive one of these emails, but we just wanted to make that all clear.

Some background on domain spoofing:

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Inventors of Feed Icon Scrap Design, Start Anew?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If the Mozilla has one cross-browser innovation fully licensed and acknowledged across the world, it’s their feed icon. The now infamous feed icon even has websites dedicated to it, and has successfully been adopted by Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and the much of the rest of the browser herd.

But is it about to change? Just today, the Mozilla Foundation released (on it’s official wiki) concept art for the new Firefox 2.0 theme, and something caught our eye. Is it possible that along with the new UI for tabs, buttons, and boxes, Firefox will ship with a brand-spanking-new RSS icon? It sure seems that way!

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Internet of the Future II: A Common Platform

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Following our first article in the “Future of the Internet” series earlier this week, we have another story for another era. “Blending the Browser” focused on the client-side of things, how the software developers will adapt their programs to meet the needs of corporate and home users around the world. Part two of this series covers the internet protocols themselves and the impact it will have on the web as we know it.

Judging by previous trends and publications, HTTP is here to stay. As far as server-based communications are concerned, HTTP offers a very versatile and easy-to-use universal medium of communication, at decent speeds, and with relatively few draw-backs. Even if a better protocol could be implemented, it is highly doubtful that it any from-scratch implementation will ever replace HTTP simply because of how widespread it has become, and how much everything depends on it.

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CompleteRSS: Content-Complete Feeds Raring to Go!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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NeoSmart Technologies is proud to announce the release of CompleteRSS 0.1 Beta.
CompleteRSS is the only WordPress plugin used to guarantee complete article text in RSS feeds. Some of the things it does are things that end-users can change on their own (such as selecting full-text entries), but it’s biggest feature is a work-around for the much-contested ‘upgrade’ for WordPress 2.1: RSS and Atom feeds will not show text past the <!–more–> tag!

CompleteRSS is the only way to get WordPress 2.1 to display the full article content to display in your feeds, since there are no options to disable this ‘feature’ of WordPress 2.1. CompleteRSS is also the only way to display your feeds entirely free of the heavily-abused ‘content:encoded’ tags.

CompleteRSS has been implemented here on The NeoSmart Files, and you can check it out in our proudly FeedBurner-powered Atom feed: http://neosmart.net/blog/feed/

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