Opera, Redirection, Security, and You

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I like Opera. Opera 9 is a great piece of software that demonstrates high levels of innovation and understanding for the audience… but there is one thing in Opera that can at once be seen as the beginning of a new form of innovation, or the beginning of a new type of battle for online rights and privacy.

A browser runs on the end-users’ computers obviously, and it may be argued that end users have the right to choose how they want to be able to view web pages, what they see, how they see it, and where they go from there. To that end, Opera (like several other cool browsers) offers an “Author Mode” and “User Mode” CSS display styles: basically a place where users can locally overwrite CSS selectors defined on the website in question. That is, after all, what the web is all about, isn’t it? Information at the fingertips, in an internationally recognized format that can be twisted at will to make things show up the way the user wants them to.

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Windows Vista Build 5456 Released

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20

Microsoft has just released a new build of Windows Vista for technical beta testers. Windows Vista Build 5456 offers many security, functionality, and performance advantages over the previous build (Beta 2 – build 5384.4). Vista Build 5456 is quite a large leap number-wise, and according to Microsoft, in features and performance as well.

Some of the new features include a revamped Aero/DWM subsystem, and a completely overhauled and siginficantly less obtrusive UAP for all those that couldn’t stand the previous one. From what we have been told by Microsoft, the Time Zone bug that plagued all most all previous builds of Windows Vista has been fixed and works great now, and quite a few fixes in the Regional Settings and IME are now implemented. And for the first time since Windows 3.0 Microsoft has finally announced that new mouse cursors will be made available for Windows – something they promised to do in XP with “Watercolors” but failed to deliver for internal reasons!

The build details and autochk values for the x86 and x64 builds respectively are as follows:
vista_5456.5.060620-1700_winmain_idx03_x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso
Size: 2,572.91 MB - autochk: 0x80E3B54D
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vista_5456.5.060620-1700_winmain_x64fre_client-LB2CxFRE_EN_DVD.iso
Size: 3,356.9 MB - autochk: 0x0D680F43

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Massive Internal Changes at NeoSmart Technologies

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NeoSmart Executive Announcement!

We’d like to take this opportunity to announce something we’ve been planning for the longest time, but never got around to executing.

NeoSmart Technologies is different from most other organizations out there. Our lax and friendly/informal style has served us well for the past year-and-a-half of our existence, but we feel that the world unfortunately isn’t ready to accept an organization under these terms.

This is more of a “self-imposed audit” than it is a restructuring of NeoSmart Technologies, meaning that our focus will be the same, you’ll see the same friendly faces you used to, but there are going to be quite a few changes beneath the surface in the way things work, where each thing is distributed, and the medium of conveying our services to our members and the general public.

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The Ancient Typewriter..

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Does anyone remember those machines we used to call typewriters? They’re those really loud boxes with daisy-wheels, clickity-click keys, and frustrating tape-ink rolls.

There’s something special about typewriters that a computer can never replace. I’m normally the last person to get nostalgic all over dead technology, but if there are two things that a computer can never (not yet..) truly replace it’s reading from a real live book in your hand and writing a story or novel on a typewriter.

Yesterday I dug an old Smith-Corona out of the attic while cleaning things up…

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Is digitalfive Closing up Shop for Good?

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Take a look at digitalfive’s homepage… it doesn’t look out of the ordinary, but underneath the surface something is definitely rumbling – loud too.

For the past couple of days under cover of IRC chatrooms and furtive Instant Messaging conversations, people have been talking. NeoSmart Technologies never publishes rumors as a rule of thumb, but this time it’s digitalfive, our lifetime affiliate and long-time friend in the front ranks of technology reviews and analysis – so we make an exception.

The rumor is that many of the big names in technology have in the past week or so taken a keen interest in digitalfive, and we hear that several of these well-established sites have recently sought to offer digitalfive’s founder and owner Kristan M. Kenney a position in their ranks, but it seems no one really knows.

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JavaScript “Protection:” Don't Fall for it!

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Every once in a while it comes up again. JavaScript – used totally wrong. This times it’s Hivelogic’s “Enkoder” script reborn for Wordpress. What people just don’t get is: JavaScript was never meant to be used as a heavy cavalry, a knight in shining armor, or else a bit of code that can may be used to do anything – because it’s not.

JavaScript can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean it should be used that way. But that’s not the problem – not this time. The problem is that people are still insisting on believing that using JavaScript to hide text means that the bad guys won’t ever see it. But that’s just not true.

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Multiple Wireless Networks with one Wi-Fi Card!

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You’ve experienced it before. You’re at work, you need to copy files from one file server to the other, but your misconfigured network infrastructure means you need to connect to one wireless network, copy the files to your hard drive, disconnect, connect to the second network, and then transfer. Or maybe you’re at home, and you want to erm.. “borrow” some files off your neighbor’s unprotected wireless network and upload them through your internet connection. Either way, you had to spend a lot of time connecting and disconnecting, associating your card with first one network access point then another. But you don’t have to, because there is another way.

Microsoft Research‘s “VirtualWiFi” utility could do with a better name and could definitely use a lot better marketing, because this amazing utility let’s you connect with one wireless card to as many separate wireless networks as your bandwidth can support – yet no one knows about it! Continue reading →

Beta 2: Stable, But Scary

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How do you define an OS as stable?

XP was stable in that you could do an honest day’s work without having to save it every couple of seconds in fear of a BSOD. Windows 2000 was stable: it gave the users what they expected, and once they got it working (driver issues mostly), it remained stable.

One can’t honestly call Vista stable in that way however. It’s largely a hit-or-miss process, and Vista either works or doesn’t. Once it works, it might just stop working, you never know. But Vista is stable – very stable.

In Windows XP (x86) if XP went up to over 26-27 thousand memory handles open at once, it would just fail. The entire operating system bogs down, and even after you get the handles down to a more manageable size, it remained slow and unresponsive unless a reboot was performed. Windows XP x64 used 64-bit technology to raise the bar to an amazing 35-38 thousand handles limit – from experience.

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Windows: Microsoft Beating on a Dead Horse

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Windows Vista is going to be really cool. It has all these nifty utilities and awesome animations, with a lot of hard work at the core too.

But Vista is the end of line. I’m not saying Microsoft won’t make another Windows, they probably will, but it’ll be a mistake. Even Vista was a mistake. Technology just doesn’t work that way, and it can be a treacherous beast to tame and fatal to maim.

Microsoft has two things going against it; two things that make Windows dead; and two things that could mean the end of line for everything Microsoft: Microsoft’s insistence on backwards compatibility, and ultimately, their failure to recognize change and move on ahead.

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NeoSmart's New Focus

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Vista is wrapping up.

Like it or not, Microsoft’s latest Operating System is reaching the beginning of the end: the code is complete, the bugs are on their way out, and for better or for worse, Vista is (finally) about to go Gold.

NeoSmart Technologies has enjoyed a front-row seat, and even some stage-time of our own in this big and wonderful show, but it’s time to move on some more. Microsoft’s longest beta to date has taken a lot of our time and effort, but we’re glad for the minor role we’ve played to date. It all came at a cost however: NeoSmart Technologies has always been short on staff and money, and it just meant that there wasn’t enough of either for us to focus on both Vista and other projects and techno-news at once – that’s about to change.

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