Microsoft unveiled yesterday (March 05, 2008) its next generation of browser franchise, Internet Explorer 8, i.e. IE8 beta version at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. Just like many others I have been playing with it. But as Microsoft noted, IE8 beta is not for general uses at this point, strictly for beta testers and developers, freezing and crashes should be expected. I have encountered couple of freezes and crashes during my tests.

So far I have seen that IE8 isn’t an upgrade that will bring bunch of shiny, earth shattering features to make you amaze, rather you can say this is a small IE7 fix. Microsoft is promising IE8 will be fully compliant with W3C standards, which they have been overlooking ever since. Even with my not so smart brain I always wonder, why world’s most popular browser is deciding to get along with standards last in a row, where it should have been super compliant all along.

Among new features Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is one of them that Microsoft was bragging a lot, is sounds very promising. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions. Would have been nicer if IE8 beta don’t crash as often as monsoon rain, though I am confident the …

Microsoft Monday launched the public beta of Office Live Workspace and added a number of features to the service that users can team with the desktop version of Office. Microsoft, back in October 2007, revealed their first step in bringing Microsoft Office online, with the free web-based Office Live Workspace. They have now announced a public beta test for the services, to anyone who wants to give it a shot as an online extension of their desktop office.

Please note that Office Live Workspace is not an online version of Office but a number of services that let users share and store documents online, so it would be much appropriate to call it the online extension of your desktop office. So do not misunderstood online office products offered by Google, Zoho and others that allow users to do word processing and use spreadsheets online for free, the new Microsoft approach simply allows users who already have purchased their MS Office software to make easier use of it online. He! He! No free ride with big brother.

Microsoft Office Live enables users to save more than 1,000 Microsoft Office documents to one place online. With the software, a user or collaborators can access the documents and make changes. As obviously guessed the entire Live Workspace service is built on the back of SharePoint Server, which Microsoft is also offering as a service to …

Spyware sucks! Even the God dam! Spyware makers hate Spyware. You should be aware of that unlike viruses and worms, Spyware does not usually self-replicate. Like many recent viruses; however, Spyware—by design—exploits infected computers for commercial gain. Typical tactics furthering this goal include delivery of unsolicited pop-up advertisements; theft of personal information (including financial information such as credit card numbers); monitoring of Web-browsing activity for marketing purposes; or routing of HTTP requests to advertising sites. Many people have a misconception about Spyware that, since it don’t infect computer and rapidly spread it merely pose threat.

Call it adware, Spyware or badware—for general user it’s always harmful, since it does invade his/her privacy none the less. So here are some weapons that you may wish to armed with in order to stay one step ahead of those filthy, slimy Spyware. CounterSpy is first in this series:

CounterSpy Current Version: 2.5.1032 OS: Windows XP/2000/2003/Vista Price: $19.95/single user Memory & CPU usage: Minimal

CounterSpy 2.x is a top notch Spyware, adware, rootkits, and other malware killer, but is light on system resources and memory. Not only the attractive interface and usability but as well thorough scan, delete, quarantine and removal of  Spyware will attract you. Class A scheduler, …

In case you are wondering what is pagination? It’s mechanism to break large quantity of data/text into pages for better usability and accessibility. For instance think you are searching for “Free blog tools” on Google, which will return around 35,500,000 results and if Goggle show you all the results in one single page-just guess how you will react? But they don’t, instead they break the results into several pages and you notice a numbered navigation link (ref: Fig. 1a) bellow each page for better navigation. Not only Google or other search engines but as well many top class web sites like New York Times, BBC so many others. Pagination is all about increasing usability where certain article turns into epic J After all when your user can navigate easily, your article/stories get more attention/affection or whatever you are after.

Fig 1.1 Now our issue is how can we bring that pagination to our WordPress blogs? There are several plug-in available on WordPress plug-in directory who do paginations together with other tasks. But for the sake of just pagination why add another plug-in, and total freedom of customization cannot be achieved if you use a plug-in. WordPress got very simple and straight forward built in template tags to take care of it, with a bit of CSS tweaks and a bit …

Google finally confirmed the rumours of turning to undersea cables and announced that, together with other five associates will start “Unity”, a trans-Pacific undersea fiber-optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The investment will cost approximately not so cheap $300 million and became necessary as the demand and the current capacity of the trans-Pacific cables tent towards an imbalance. With today’s announcement, it appears the Internet giant’s desire for infrastructure investments is growing or should we say hunger for domination :).

Google’s somewhat 20,000 leagues under the sea adventure will be shared with Bharti Airtel, India’s leading integrated telecom service provider, Global Transit, a South Asian network operator, KDDI, a Japanese information and communication company, Pacnet, leading Asian telecom service provider, SingTel, an Asian leading communications group covering areas of Europe, U.S. and Asia Pacific. 

This 10,000-kilometer linear cable system, called Unity (I am not so surprised by that name) has been designed as a five fiber pair cable system, each fiber with a 960Gbps capability, will link Chikura, near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and the West Coast and is expected to meet the new demands in data and Internet traffic.

The cable system is expected to respond to the demand in data and Internet traffic between the two continents and raise the current capacity by 20 percent, according to Google, and potentially add up to 7.68 …

Adobe took an important step in merging desktop and Internet applications upon announcing the availability of AIR 1.0, a run-time module that provides a way of running "rich Internet applications" (RIAs) on the desktop.

Since the release of the beta version of AIR, several organizations already adopted the technology; among them, NASDAQ Stock Market Inc, AOL, EBay and many others. I agree with most developers, that AIR will reduce download time due to the fact that the desktop is constantly being updated while connected to the Internet.

A free download will allow users of Macs, PCs and, later this year, Linux machines to run any Air applications. Talking about interpretability, the word will get a whole new meaning on the web now. It’s about taking existing web applications and adding extra functionality whether you want to work offline or whether you want to access data on your disk.

Adobe had and is still facing a challenging task – to spread wider in the predominantly Java/.NET enterprise world.  But they already made some serious achievement in this direction. The birth of AIR is pretty much the death of Java on the desktop, well at least some of e thinking that way :).

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system combining HTML, Ajax, Flash and Flex to bring rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. And needless …

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been full of surprises and innovations, every top notch companies were out there showing off what’s under their sleeve. Adobe systems didn’t hold back either, this week they launched two new mobile applications, Flash Home and Flash Cast 2, designed for providers that want to enhance their products with rich mobile content.

Flash Home is a mobile application for creating customizable home screens and wallpapers using live data services. The combination gives users a more personalized mobile experience, said Adobe. For example, instead of an idle home screen, users would get instant access to more elaborate content branded by specific providers. In contrast, Flash Cast is a server push solution for mobile devices; version 2 has just been released. Unlike its predecessor, client 2.0 is more streamlined and faster; it also adapts its channels to your device better.

Adobe Flash Cast is already licensed by various carriers worldwide, including US Verizon Wireless, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, and China’s Chunghwa Telecom. All three uses the application to provide rich media through their customized content portals.

Both of these top notch solutions are branched from The Adobe Mobile Platform, the new Flash platform for mobile devices. The Mobile Platform, which consists of a client and a server, is flexible and extensible and is designed to help deploy and manage compelling mobile data services, not to mention the underlying technology …

Next week United Kingdom legislators are proposing a new law under which surfers who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the Internet. This proposed Green Paper, which the Government is due to disclose, sometime next week, will require ISP’s to take action against the estimated six million users a year who access pirated material. The law is expected to propose a ‘three-strike’ system, similar to that already in place in the US and France.

Users suspected of illegally downloading films or music (Shouldn’t this be All copyrighted material) will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their Internet contract if caught a third time.

So the picture we can draw from here is—“Suspected illegal music and video content sharing” will be penalized. Question is who will decide whether the suspect is in fact did commit the crime? I am sure the legislators are not suggesting handing down badges to ISP’s to become cyber police. On the other hand in order to ISPs to know that you are downloading illegal files to your computer would require them to have access to personnel information on your computer, wouldn’t that violate privacy act/Data protection act? And even the top Govt. Agencies and financial institutions have history of data breach, giving ISP’s access to personal information wills just another hole in privacy protection, don’t …

While Sony Ericsson closing a partnership with Microsoft to run Windows mobile on their phones, some of the biggest mobile brand decided to follow Google’s path to open source the Mobile OS. The world’s second largest mobile phone maker Samsung and LG Electronics showed new phones using free Linux software from Mobile Linux foundation, which said in total 18 phones from seven vendors, would use its software. This isn’t first time for Samsung using Linux. They used Linux in its phones in 2006, launched new SGH-i800 phone model running on LiMo software at the Mobile World Congress trade show, while LG Electronics showed a prototype phone LG LiMo.

The Linux operating system has so far had little success on mobile but its presence is increasing with LiMo rolling out its software platform, boosting the speed of new models reaching the market. You guys already know by now that Google is also using Linux to build its Android platform on. In case if you are wondering, Linux is the most popular type open source operating system these days. Linux suppliers earn money selling improvements and technical services, and Linux competes directly with Microsoft, which isn’t free at all. Well off course we are not here to start the OS wars, which was always on and will last for eternity

According to LiMo foundation they managed to signed up some other heavy weight mobile brands as …

Mobile giant Nokia has begun its second phase on handheld gaming dominance, with the launch of the N-Gage platform dedicated for gaming only. The company has shifted its approach, from focusing on a dedicated games system to titles which can be played on a range of Nokia devices. The N-Gage “First Access” process has been kick-started with N81 owners getting a preview of the download.

This N-Gage First Access lets N81 owners download the pre-release version of the N-Gage application tryout and buy selected N-Gage games. Other N-Gage compatible devices will be added to the service in near future. N-Gage has the support of developers such as EA, Gameloft and Vivendi, who are making titles for the platform.

Nokia’s first launched of N-Gage handset in 2003 was criticized for its design and poor sales led to the phone being quickly overhauled with new versions, including the QD. The primary target of the N-Gage device was to compete with the highly-successful Nintendo GameBoy, which off course didn’t even come closer.

This alpha release of “First Access” could be the sign that Nokia is considering to evolve the N-Gage as a gaming platform rather than a device, which could be the turning point.

This is the portal application that allows access to the games and community features. This is a pre-release version and the features of the service are still evolving. Do not try to install …