Bye bye Firefox?

Well… I just wrote a post about how IE 7 had finally caught up with firefox. It's stable , fast (except for the tab creation part) and is having a dedicated add on site. Having been using it for the past week and not encountering any problem and almost enjoying it. Unfortunately, it seems there are still compatibility issues with some sites as the post i just published was actually … blank! Where did the text go in the process? Is this a security "feature"? no idea…Thank god it was only a few lines or i would have just.

It may have its fair share of problems (memory leak and processor misuse) but at least for the sake of compatibility, don't ditch firefox just yet…

Microsoft and Trust

Reobert Scole has a very nice post regarding microsoft trust and how to improve microsoft image and inspire its employees. I do think that the "trust" issue for microsoft online ("live") services is overstatedJust look at the crowd (of "seconf life" generation people) following every development of live messenger on the live messenger blog and to a lesser extent the same happening on the live mail blog. I don't think there is more of a trust issue with any of microsoft services than with google or yahoo services.Actually I would personnaly feel more confortable with microsoft handling my data than google and i think most people wouldn't care and go for the best service/package anyway.The trust issue is more with Microsoft as a whole, the company, than with any of it's particular product or services.Actually , speaking of products, how many can a consumer really buy? Windows, office, xbox… that's about it. Microsoft is a plateform company and most of its other products are targetted at companies or developers which makes it a bit of a stretch to compare it with Apple.But still, to come back to the trust issue, i think it breaks down on the following:

1. You can't trust Windows : it is insecure by default and you need anti spyware, anti virus , anti anything to keep it more or less working. On top of that, it "feels" insecure as you need to reboot it with every update. Looks like the problem is deep inside.

2. microsoft only works (well is compatible with) with microsoft.

3. lame desinformation campaigns against linux and/or opensource software. Why do you even think of spending money on that? Nice to see Bill Hilf lab bringing a bit of pragmatism there thoughfor the last 2 , the average non techy users don't care/know but the influencers (and most of the second life generation is going to be) will

Soo how to try to cure those sources:

1. Make vista unbreakable. Sell Win XP PCs with SP2 installed and fully patched

2. Give people choice. Accept that people can use other stuff than microsoft but this doens't mean they don't want to buy microsoft products.For example Why have the (great by the way) .net framework only run on windows while it could run on all OS.Windows can still be the best of breed platform to run .net apps offering the most features ut why not let it run on other OSes?A lot of companies would actually choose the windows solution over the linux solution but would just like to have the choice. Just by giving the choice, more people will trust microsoft and their investment in microsoft technology.So for the companies who run linux, you can still sell them visual studio instead of having no sale at all. If windows solution is so much better (and it will be) at running .net , people will choose windows, because the want it : more trust

3. Quit doing that, it's useless

Finally, kepp all the great people working at microsoft and keep them blogging (Scott Guthrie (one of the best), mini , the windows mobile team , Charlie Owen etc.. (long list of many other excellent ones))

Technorati Tags : micrososft

Everything you want to know about windows Vista

… except may be the release date

At last some decent piece of information regarding the upcoming Microsoft windows Vista. This 313 pages document released by Miscrosoft introduces most of the features we have already heard about (Aero interface, sidebar, gadgets, integrated search…) with ome nice screenshots and explanation

Download Here : Windows Vista Product Guide Beta 2.pdf (right click and choose save as)

Technorati tags : windows vista microsoft

How to stay up to date on tech info : RSS, tech.memeorandum and del.ico.us

As the quantity of tech information (of very disparate quality) available on internet is becoming unmanageable, we need to find improved ways to keep track of news in the areas important to us. MSN, Yahoo, google news, CNET news, pcmag or other established websites are clearly not enough to report all the latest news and point of views regarding the latest tech issues… So what is the solution? Well , it's a mix of RSS, blogs and appropriate tools: Let's start y one of the most interesting tech site to appear recently, tech.memeorandum

• tech.memeorandum is ctually using a software / bot which will crawl the web to look for latest tech info. It will then display the link to the info (web page / blog) on the main page as well as the link / discussions related to it. This is really the perfect place to have several point of views on a specific tech related news or issue.

After using tech.memorandum for a while, you will start to see recurrent names of bloggers and sites based on which information you are interested in. This is the moment to start using RSS and subscribe to the feeds of the sites you are interested in. I personnaly use the RSS client integrated with firefox because of it's quick and easy. Just browse to a page, watch for the firefox orange RSS icon to light up , click on it and that's it! IE 7 (now in beta 2) also have the same feature so the RSS subscribing via browser will be available to most users very soon. If your number of feeds start to grow exponentially , you can have a look at more advanced online RSS readers like Blogline (my favorite so far) or Rojo. Another good way o keep track of your own (and others) browsing so of the information you see is to use del.ico.us.

• del.ico.us is a bookmarking and tagging system that will help you keep track of the sites you visit. Thans to some handy buttons that integrate to your browser, you are able to bookmark sites as you browse. The URL of the site will be stored under your account on del.ico.us server so you will be able to access it from any computer connected to internet. Nice, no need to have all your favorites / bookmarks wherever you go! The other compeling feature of del.ico.us is the possibility to give tags to the URL / sites you visited.

Thanks to these tags you will be ale to retrieve information easily months after the site was bookmarked. Due to the growing number of bookmarks you tend to get, the tagging feature is most welcome to search through your bookmarks.. and others! Yep, you will also be able to search through other users tags with the search available on the del.ico.us site, anoter handy feature to get the sites related to your interest bookmarked by others. Also, as del.ico.us has recently been bought by yahoo (for around 40 million US $) , the integration of tag search with the main yaho search engine seems imminent though there is only speculation on how it will eventually be integrated. Ok, so that's a good start on the common sites and handy tools fot the moment. I will go into more details about del.ico.us and the favourite bloggers very soon! In the meantime start using tech.memeorandum.com, an RSS client together with a bit of del.ico.us and you should see a good improvement in your awareness of latest trends and issues related to the tech world. The combination of the same tools will obviously serve you well for any field you are interested in. For those interested in politic news, there is a version of tech.memeorandum, the original memeorandum, available at http://www.memeorandum.com/

Technorati tags : RSS del.ico.us technology

IIS 7 looks cool

Finally something looking good regarding IIS administration and functionality. No need to dream about apache mod_rewrite anymore at night… as according to Scott Guthrie

IIS7 is a major upgrade of IIS, and will ship in both Windows Vista as well as Windows Longhorn Server. It includes a ton of new functionality, including some very rich integration with ASP.NET. This includes:

1) The ability to now have HttpModules and HttpHandlers participate in all requests to a server. You no longer need to map requests to the ASP.NET ISAPI in order to write managed modules that participate in requests. This makes building modules for flexible authentication, authorization, logging, url-rewriting, auditing, etc. super easy with .NET. You could even now have an ASP.NET HttpModule provide forms-authentication to a PHP or JSP page (in addition to .htm files and static files like images and movies).

So Scott Guthrie has a good summary of the new administration features which will allow us to administrate IIS ( aka "the black box of death" until now) much much more effectively.

Just look at how easy it is to get some information about IIS 7 request handling from .net :

As you can see in this article, there is now an easy .NET way to perform a lot of common tasks (much easier than doing it via ADSI or WMI). My favorite one is this code-snippet:

ServerManager iisManager = new ServerManager();

foreach(WorkerProcess w3wp in iisManager.WorkerProcesses) {

Console.WriteLine("W3WP ({0})", w3wp.ProcessId);

foreach (Request request in w3wp.GetRequests(0)) {

Console.WriteLine("{0} – {1},{2},{3}",
request.Url,
request.ClientIPAddr,
request.TimeElapsed,
request.TimeInState);
}
}

In case you are wondering what it does, it is a simple command-line program that uses the new .NET APIs to query IIS7 to get a collection of all active worker processes on the computer, and then print out a list of all current requests being proceeded in each one — outputting the request's URL, the client-IP address of the remote user, as well as how long it has been executing, and how long it has been in its current state (for example: is it in the authentication module, authorization module, executing within the page, etc)

Some more information on IIS 7 upcoming administration features can be found here

bye bye IIS 6! Just hope IIS 7 won't follow IIS 6 and run on only one version of windows (Win 2003 Server for IIS 6 and potentially Vista for IIS 7)

Technorati tags : IIS microsoft

Google Mobile search is quite smart

I was thinking the other day how nice it would be to be able to access any internet site with your mobile phone, using the exact same URL you use on your PC browser, not a dedicated WAP page. The idea would have involved a proxy (basically a box between your phone and the web site) to transform the web site content adequately to each phone based on the phone user agent (the identification of the phone model). By proxying the request made by the phone, we would be able to check the user agent against a user agent library like WURFL to determine its display capabilities, either WML or XHTML as well as its screen size in order to eventually resize the text and the images. With this information we would have then been ale to return to the phone a WML or an XHTML page instead of the classical HTML (not really XHTML compliant) used by most web pages at the moment.

So this proxy would transform HTML to XHTML or HTML to WML based on the phone characteristics. The operators could have used it to allow their subscribers to access all internet web pages without any phone/plan upgrade. This proxy could have also been used by large traffic web sites like yahoo.com, Microsoft.com… to allow mobile users to access their site.
So the first thing to do was of course to check the newly released Google mobile search in order to see what solution they implemented. I imagined they would have simply put a special WML page and XHTML page accessible for the phones. You would enter the traditional http://www.google.com in your mobile phone browser and would be directed to either the specific http://www.google.com/wml or http://www.google.com/xhtml page based on your phone user agent. Pretty simple.
You would then be stuck I thought (I didn’t think very far obviously) when you click on a search result. You would be directed to the html site which your phone browser would not be able to read.
Well not at all , Google is actually proxying ALL the pages you access from their search results. Which means any site will be converted to either WML or XHTML so that you can access the page on your phone, how nice is that?

For example, let’s try to search for Microsoft on http://www.google.com/xhtml using Microsoft Mobile Explorer:

Everything is fine so far, the URL is http://www.google.com/xhtml?q=microsoft&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Search&site=search&mrestrict=xhtml which is what we expected. The search results are displayed in xhtml as they should, But what happens we click on the first link? Do we go to the Microsoft.com site? Well yes… and no… You actually go to a Google generated page of the Microsoft.com web page. Look at the URL after clicking on the link : http://www.google.com/gwt/n?q=microsoft&site=search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&mrestrict=xhtml&ct=res&cd=1&rd=1&u=www.microsoft.com/ Yes, you are still on a Google page ! and the Microsoft site is displayed properly in the XHTML your phone wants:

This is literally “The web viewed by Google”. Too bad for the proxy idea though, Google is already very well on it.

Technorati tags : mobile google search google mobile