EasyBCD 1.51 Released: Dual-Boot Vista and Anything!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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After two months of crazy bug-hunting and hundreds of rounds of scenario testing, EasyBCD 1.51 is finally out. If you’re in a really big hurry, go and get it – if not, read on. EasyBCD 1.51 is a very major change from 1.5.

As a matter of fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that it would completely ruin our release schedule, this release would have been dubbed EasyBCD 2.0. It’s that big.

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What makes EasyBCD 1.51 so special is the switch in purpose and technique. In the past, EasyBCD was only a bootloader modification tool that let end-users configure the Windows Vista bootloader, and EasyBCD 1.5 added support for “profiles” that could be used to boot into Linux, BSD, & OS X. Not only does EasyBCD 1.51 add support for several other operating systems, but also it goes a step further. A very big step further. Now, if there is anything that Vista’s BCD bootloader can’t boot into, EasyBCD 1.51 comes with its own additional bootloader that can boot into it. It’s called NeoGrub, and you’re going to love it.

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20 Hours of Downtime

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

PHP really sucks. Unbelievably so. On LAMP, it’s awesome. But if you’re on a new, shiny WIMP server, PHP is the pits. PHP stability on IIS is about 1 over a million that on a LAMP server. So we’re sorry. We’re sorry we had a 20 hour outage and couldn’t do anything about because we had no idea it happened. We’re sorry we ever thought we could trust PHP on Windows/IIS for even a minute under virtually no-load without keeping our eyes on it. We’re especially sorry that NeoSmart Technologies, the blog, the forums, the downloads, the whitepapers, and all the resources were unavailable for that long.

Ever since moving to Windows, we’ve had unbelievably great results on MySQL, JSP, and ASP. But with PHP, it’s been nightmare after nightmare to no end. PHP corporation (or whatever it is) is aware of this, though they’re not confessing to any particular bugs nor are they expressing any interest in solving this. We moved to PHP 5.2 in hopes of addressing the stability – according to PHP, that was fixed. What they neglected to mention was a bunch of other bugs that still haunt PHP’s quest for stability on a Windows Server. IIS auto-restarted per our configuration, but the entire server needed a reset to get PHP working again. Ugh!

Anyway, we’re back up now, and we’re looking at some of the alternate PHP engines out there. Nothing is like PHP of course, because “there isn’t a need” for a PHP-compatible PHP replacement (then again, just by the sound of it..) but several Windows-specific “PHP compilers” exist that would take care of the issue. Then again, we could always jump down to PHP 4 – but that’s just scary. At any rate, rest assured, we’re scouring the web and working nonstop looking for a solution to this nonsense.

Whatever Happened to MSN's “AdSense” Anyway?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Back when Yahoo! first announced their plans for a pay-per-click advertising program to compete with Google’s highly-successful AdSense program, Microsoft also expressed interest in the field, and had decided to do likewise following the successful re-launch of its MSN Ads program. MSN Ads is basically AdWords – context-based pay-per-click ad campaigns directed at advertisers, not publishers. However, the adCenter re-launch was months ago (way back in May), and we were originally promised pay-per-click ads for publishers would debut some time in the Summer of ’06.

It does seem that the idea was scrapped, as a matter of fact, MSN adCenter was “looking for guinea pigs” since over a year ago. While some sporadic blog posts on the subject, the only contextual-advertising solution coming out of Microsoft’s camp any time soon is for advertisers who want in on the MSN Live Search ads. It seems that Microsoft has finally decided to stop re-inventing the wheel, and learn from the mistakes of others. Yahoo!’s own Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) isn’t doing too hot, so perhaps that’s a wise decision in the end.

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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
195

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
3

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.