Wednesday, March 30, 2011

From IE 1 to EI 9

From the same creator of from DOS 5.0 to Windows 7 this time we can see all the IE versions since version 1 which came up on 1995.

He installed all the versions and also run the acid tests on every single version.



A couple of things that surprised me are:
  • IE 5 was the first version that could be installed in most OS and that is true I remember that you could use some hacks to install it even in Mac's, Linux, and almost all Windows versions.
  • The first IE version able to pass Acid Test 1 was version 6 (it took MS 6 versions!).
  • Acid Test 2 was passed in version 8.
  • IE 9 still is not able to pass Acid Test 3 ( scores 95 over 100)  and finally has HTML 5 support. Just to compare FireFox 4 scores 97 and Chrome dev 12 scores 100.
Because of these reasons and a lot more is that I love Chrome and FireFox.

Enjoy the video.

Friday, March 25, 2011

From DOS 5.0 to Windows 7 in 10 minutes!

I found this video showing an experiment. This guy started with DOS 5.0, a clean and empty VMWare instance and spent a whole day installing every single MS operating system until Windows 7!

Something impressive is that the games installed in DOS still worked! ( they broke in windows 2000, but got back in XP) that is almost 25 years of compatibility! pretty impressive MS really! while watching the video I remembered all those days when loading DOS from a 5 1/4 disks was a real pain!



It is a nice video if you want to remember those days. I wonder if some did something similar with any Linux distribution.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

FireFox 4 is here baby!!

Finally today, Mozilla has made it official. You can download FireFox 4 now.  I like the new UI it is more minimalistic and clean. Some things I like are:
Panoramic View
  • Finally you can drag and drop tabs from windows to windows like in Chrome.
  • Talking about tabs one feature I really like it is the group tabs. you can group them in a different way, it is really cool.
  • You can pin tabs.
  • It is 6 times faster than the old version according the release notes.
  • You can now sync Firefox so you can access your data from any where.
  • If you want, you can hide the menu bar and it looks cleaner and it is replaced with just one button, the same way the new MS office does.
  • The add-ons manager now opens in a tab and has completely changed.
New tool bar
In general they made it more minimalistic the same way Chrome does and looks great!!! it feels faster definitely a good improvement. Some of my extensions did not work but I am sure it is just a matter of time and they will be back again with a new version compatible with this one.
Add-ons Manager
IE 9 just got out and there is already charts comparing all major browsers and still Chrome, Firefox and Opera are leading them :)

You can check more details and watch a video here.

Happy browsing :)

Monday, March 21, 2011

Letter Sweep

I saw this on Tim Bray's blog basically you type any letter  in your chrome omni box bar and see what the browser will assume you tried to write.

So here are my A-B-C guesses, They say a lot about me and as I always say, the browser you use tells a lot about you ;)

What are yours???

[A]bout:flags Well I am using Chrome OS i go a lot there to check, enable or disable new things they delivered frequently

[B]ankofamerica.com My bank account, nothing great here.

[C]ode.google.com Google code repository I visit it every day to check libraries and documentation.

[D]ropbox.com so far the best I found to share files in the cloud. I like it!

[E]bay.com Well I guess I go there from time to time looking for gadgets ;)

[F]acebook.com no way to avoid it ;)

[G]roups.google.com I was surprised about this. I thought it was going to be Google but makes sense since I do all my searches from the omni box and well i visit Google groups most of the the time to respond Android and Chrome OS questions.

[H]otmail.com The second email i check the most.

[I]kea.com best store if you want to look for good furniture.

[J]etblue.com I was looking for cheap tickets to go to Google IO :)

[K]irk vs. Picard the most geeky question of all times :)

[L]inkedIn.com Best professional social network.

[M]int.com Good to manage your financials, bank accounts, credit cards, 401K, etc etc

[N]etflix.com I have not decided yet if I am to subscribe to it, it is very good though.

[O]scar.com Well the Oscars were couple of weeks ago so I had to watch it :)

[P]icasaweb.google.com I use it basically for all my blog posts and personal pics :)

[Q]wop it triggered a search query for qwop =/

[R]edbox.com I just started renting movies :)

[S]untrust.com Work bank account.

[T]urboTax.com I finally sent my taxes. Man, I took a lot!, at the end i go my check though :) :)

[V]oice.google.com I just love Google voice :)

[W]ebsms.nuevatel.com/websms3.php  I use this page to send SMS's to my wife to remind her how much i love her :)

[Y]ouTube.com You gotta distract and rest your mind from time to time ;)

[Z]appos.com Well I do not shoes but i had to buy a present for my friend's father.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

IE 9 has arrived

I barely use IE not even for work well maybe for testing and things like but to be honest I do not use it very often, and if it were up to me, I would stop using it forever, but sometimes you are still stuck with web sites that only work with IE. Anyways yesterday its new version came alive, IE 9.

So I took one laptop from work because mine has windows XP and IE 9 only supports windows vista and 7, yeah we started with wrong foot here. So I took the laptop and downloaded it and here I am writing this post on IE 9.

The first thing I noticed is the tool bar, It looks like Chrome, with just some icons on the right side to access tools, go Home and bookmark web pages. One interesting thing is that only has one omnibox so it does not matter how many tabs you have all will share the same omnibox  which by the has a compatibility option when you go a web site that is designed to display better in older versions.
New Tab

The second thing I noticed is when you open a new tab it shows you your most visited pages, with colors indicating how often you visit those pages. You can remove them, you can't re-order them though. It also has options to turn related sites, Private browsing, re-open closed tabs and sessions. You pin sites and it has a built in SmartScreen Filter in case you visit a dangerous web site.
Compatibility View

Related Sites


This particular version is supposed to work with HTML 5 and it seems it does. I tested with a couple of sites and it was fast and smooth, the only site I had problems was Picasa, I couldn't upload pictures the uplowder wouldn't even show. YouTube had no problems playing videos in HD and by the way if you want WebM support you can download the plugin from here. You can visit the official site and see all the new highligths IE 9 has.
WebM plugin

If you ask me, it has nothing I have not seen before in browsers like FireFox and Chrome as usual it is trying to catch up with other browsers. Anyways, I like testing news versions that way I can give my personal opinion about them. IE is better than older versions that is for sure, does it have something new we have not seen before? not really.

Pwn2Own

From March 9th to March 11th, Vancouver Canada was the host for this years Pwn2Own. Basically Pwn2Own is a computer hacking contest. The contestants try to hack by any methods specific software most of the cases web browsers by exploiting their vulnerabilities .  All the environments are previously set up with the latest version of the stable browser installed in the OS it behaves better, Safari in Mac OS, IE in windows, well you get the idea.
This year Safari and IE were hacked in the first day, Safari was defeated in 5 seconds!!! really not an improvement from last year which took 15 seconds. They two iPhone 4 and Blackberry Torch 9800 were successfully exploited. It was not a good year for Apple both desktop and mobile browsers were hacked this year.

Google even offered a price if someone was able to hack Chrome but no one was able to do it. With this this is the 3rd year in a row that Chrome walks out victorious from the Pwn2Own. Last year Chrome was the only one not hacked.

This year the winners are Chrome, FireFox, Android and Windows Phone 7.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A sneak peack of the future of Blogger

I think Blogger is one of the products that Google is not investing time at least not as much other products. It takes a lot of time to get new thinks here and even they changed the interface, added templates, stats and a lot of cool things, it is still missing some other.

Well hopefully this year we are going to see a brand new UI and more useful tools. In the SXSW conference days ago they showed the new Blogger which is coming later this year and I was impressed it has a brand new UI which uses GWT, the Editor and the Dash Bord have changed completely and they really took advantage of GWT it looks awesome!

You can read all the details in the official post and enjoy the video.


I am really looking forward for this update :)

Saturday, March 12, 2011

7 ways to think like the Web

I read this great article today and I wanted to share it. It explains some principles that people apply or should apply in order to work well all together online or like author says: computational thinking of thinking like the web.

The web has grown a lot these last years it has become an ecosystem where no longer humans are a part of it also machines. Both machines and people are responsible for this evolution of information and technology for example sometimes machines publish our data for us sometimes we publish it directly sometimes machines subscribe what other machines or/and people publish sometimes people do.

Because of this hybrid nature is that we need to teach people  the best way to take advantage of this new distributed environment and that is how they came out with this 7 principles:
  1. Be the authoritative source of your own data.
  2. Pass by reference not by value.
  3. Know the difference between structured and unstructured data.
  4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions.
  5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope.
  6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both publisher and subscriber.
  7. Reuse components and services.
Some of them make a lot of sense to me and I do follow them by instinct like Pass by reference not by value which means instead of passing the whole article you pass a link to source of the article this way we avoid duplicated content and we all can share our opinions on the same topic. Another example is Know the difference between structured and unstructured data. This blog is an example of that I am not only writing posts and publishing them which is unstructured data I also have RSS feeds which is basically XML which obviously is structured data that way I allow RSS readers to subscribe it a read the information as I update my blog.

I  could explain all of them but I really invite you to read the entire article because it is really good and you will find the explanation for each one of these 7 principles and more resources for each one of them.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Are Tablets Killing Creativity?

I wish I could remember where I read this question, it was long time ago though more or less by the time the first generation iPad arrived. I did not pay attention since the iPad was the only of its kind in the market and devices like the Nook or Kindle were book reading oriented only.

This picture has changed though. Right now the tablet market is growing and really fast and there are a lot of competitors which will make tablets more accessible and cheaper although right now they are still expensive, at least we can see more devices and manufactures building them and even more since the released of Android 3.0 a.k.a HoneyComb.

The fact is that these devices are really and extremely portable so it means that you can take them almost everywhere. The problem is that you are always plugged in even when you go to bed you carry your gadget and start reading something, browsing, updating you facebook status, watching a movie why? because these devices let you do virtually everything. Without noticing is already 2 am and you are still plugged; here where the issue arrives, you are not letting your brain rest, the part of the brain that takes care of creativity and develop new ideas needs to sleep. It has been proved that a good sleep helps a lot to your brain and its development but if you are all the time plugged and watching your gadget's screen, you do not let your brain rest and develop this part. In other words a good sleep can increase your creativity. I still remember the days  I used to have dreams about a problem and woke up inspired and after some minutes coding I was able to solve it :) I still have some of those glorious moments, not as often as before though. The article I read has so much sense now.

Ironically since I got my CR-48 I spend so much time plugged than before because it is really portable, the battery is amazing and it is just so easy to turn it on and spend some time and I take it with me everywhere. Even most ironically, I am writing this post just before going to sleep sitting in my bed :(

I love gadgets and I really like the new iPad 2 and HoneyComb but I am still hesitating if getting one is a good idea. At some point it is a need to unplugged your brain for a while and enjoy a nice day with out technology.
 

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Last Call to go to Google 2011

Today Google gave developers one more chance to get a ticket to Google IO 2011. It was hard to believe when they sold out in about an hour, a lot developers left begin and everyone was sad, upset, everything.


Although there is still hope since Wednesday, March 16, Google will launch a contest which will last 10 days and each there will be 10 challenges so you have 100 chances to get a ticket.

The schedule is as follows:
  • March 16 - Android, 9:00 am
  • March 17 - Chrome, 9:00 am
  • March 18 - App Engine, 9:00 am
  • March 21 - YouTube APIs, 9:00 am
  • March 22 - Game Developers, 9:00 am
  • March 23 - Google Maps / Geo, 4:00 pm
  • March 24 - Commerce, 9:00 am
  • March 25 - Developer Tools / GWT, 9:00 am
  • March 28 - Accessibility, 4:00 pm
  • March 29 - Google Apps / Enterprise, 4:00 pm
As you can see each day is one developer product so get ready for the day you like the most because there would be a lot of competence that is for sure. Just for fun I would like to try on Android and Chrome to see how difficult the challenges are, let's see if I have enough time.

More detailed information about this contest can be found in the official contest site. The winners will be announced on April 4 and this is only valid to the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, so international developers won't be able to give it try.

So who is up to the Task?

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Android Market Security Update

Yesterday Google announced that over last week they identified malicious applications in the android market. Devices running Android 2.2.2 and up were save of this attack which by now is a good percentage but still there were a lot of devices vulnerable. According to the post he malicious code took of advantage of a known vulnerability and they could have obtained MEI/IMSI, unique codes, and android version of the running devices but giving the nature of the exploit they probably were able to get more than data and information.

Because of the severity of this attack they had to do 4 things:

  1. Remove the malicious applications from the Android Market and suspend the related account.
  2. Using the remote application removal feature in android they are removing all the malicious applications from the users cellphone.
  3. They pushing a Android update Market to all devices affected. If you were affected you will receive an email  and notifications about applications being removed and the security update. All of this should happen in the next days.
  4. They are working  hard to improve security in the android market and prevent this kind of exploits in the future .
For more information and help on this issue you can visit the Android Help Center where they explain in more detail everything about this exploit.

Since Android is moving so far I am not impressive that it is going to get a lot of attacks and malicious exploits. Google says that you mobile is one of the most important things for you and it holds everything about you, like, personal numbers, access to all your data, maybe bank accounts and who else what's more that is why it is a great target. If you are able to get through the security  and get all the users data the price is incredible.

Android needs to change a lot! I know they flexible about publishing your apps but at some point they need to improve the process so this kind of attacks won't happen again. We, the users, trust them but if we get this kind of news, we were no longer trust or at least not the Android Market and competition will gain more space and who knows maybe Amazon Android MarketPlace is better.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Google Demo Slam finals

Time ago I wrote about Google Demo Slam. Basically these are videos, funny videos demoing Google Products and they are really really creative and funny to watch and you get to pick the winner every time.

Right now they are in the final match just 2 videos are left and just one is going  to be the absolute winner . You can go now and vote for your favorite and also enter to win a Google TV :) I already made my choice let's see if I win something :)
SLAM!!!!

Fractals

I still remember when I was a child and I thought that fractals were just cool draws with nice colors and shapes later in high school I learned that fractals are pure mathematics, the beauty of mixing  recursion and an equation. Basically a fractal is a shape, geometric most of the times, that can be broken in different parts and each part is a small representation of the original, cool isn't it?

Julia Map is a web site, that shows the power of HTML 5 and fractals at the same time. It has a lot of fractals on which you can zoom in and out, change colors and then share it. It is pretty impressive since the power of rendering these kind of equations is not quite low.  The one that I liked a lot is the well known Mandelbrot.

I order to play with it you just need a HTML 5 compatible browser like Firefox or Chrome  and a good graphics card.
Pretty Cool :)

Thursday, March 3, 2011

The iPad 2 has Arrived

I am usually a Google guy but I also enjoy playing with a lot of gadgets and to be honest the iPad is really cool. I was about to get one last year but I always think is better to wait for second generation gadgets because they learn from the market and they evolve for better and this is the case of the iPad.

Anyways, Today Steve Jobs announced a lot of things on the Mac Special Event. He started with some numbers:

  • Over a 100 million iBooks downloaded in less than a year.
  • Over 2500 publishers.
  • 200 million accounts with credit cards and one click purchase on the apple store.
  • They have paid out over 2 billion dollars to developers in apple store.
  • 100 million iPhones shipped so far.
  • 2001 de iPod, 2007 the iPhone and 2010 the iPad.
  • 15 million iPads sold in 9 months 9.5 billion in revenues with over 90% market share.
  • 65000 tablet optimized applications ( he even showed the honeycomb logo and just 100 apps, might be true right now ).

Pretty impressive numbers although every keynote I have seen so far, it does not matter if it comes from apple or android, has impressive numbers with their strengths of course so I am not really really surprised. It is just marketing for me, it helps though.
Some technical details are:

  • A5 chip with dual core processor so 2x faster CPU and 9x faster in graphics.
  • 2 cameras front and rear (Finally).
  • Gyroscope.
  • Same battery life, 10 hours working and over a month in standby. 
  • 33% thinner than first iPad so 8.8 mm thick (thinner than ipad and iphone 4).
  • Lighter, it went from 1.5 to 1.3 
  • 2 colors black and white from day one.
  • Works on AT&T and Verizon models.
  • The same price as the first iPad.
  • Start shipping in march 11 in USA and more countries 2 weeks after.
  • HDMI mirrored video out put accessory  up to 1080p for 39$.
  • Smart Covers with magnets grasp to auto-align it, automatically puts it to sleep and wakes up and comes in Polyurethane 39$ and leather 69$ each one in 5 colors. These are really cool.


Along with the hardware it had to come the software so they are releasing iOS 4.3 and some features that i like are:

  • Comes with safari performance thanks to nitro javascript engine that is in the Mac 10.
  • Better airplay integration with apple TV to stream movies, videos and photos.
  • Personal hotspot, just for iPhone 4 though.
  • It will only support iPad, iPhone GSM and iPod touch 3rd and 4th generations.
  • iMovie, GarageBand the demo was amazing!!! this must ideal for musicians I love it. Both for 4.99$
  • More applications to play with the 2 built in cameras like face time which by the way looks great on the iPad.


I can already see a lot of chart comparisons between the iPad 2, Xoom, HP Touch Pad and BlackBerry PlayBook or the iPad 2 versus  HoneyComb and it is normal the market is just starting and everyone wants to get some of it.

I still do not know if I am going to get a tablet or not. It seems like a really nice gadget that you just take it everywhere but still, I am a developer and I do not see myself doing development on these things. So these things are just for common use like reading books, check your email, or to waste sometime. It has its pros and cons but so far I am not really convinced about getting one maybe I will keep waiting.

For more information about the iPad you can check the official web site  or if you want, you can watch the complete event and the demos here.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Android 2.3.3 a.k.a. Gingerbread update for Nexus One

Finally this morning my Nexus One got the official  Android 2.3.3 a.k.a Gingerbread. I think the only two phones getting it are the Nexus S and Nexus One and makes sense since they are their children ;) and what's more the Nexus One is the official android developer.

The update as usual went smooth and in less than 15 minutes got it up and running. It feels a little bi faster than before and the new UI looks fantastic :)

Before this update they released the final SDK, updated eclipse plugin, android tools and the emulator. You can check all the details here. Time ago when they released the preview I also talk about the new functionality packed gingerbread and now it is official and even though is more gaming oriented it really feels more stable and faster. You can check all the highlights here.

You can also check the official video



I read that for some the update broke Google voice text messaging but in my case the only thing weird is that my widgets were gone. I had to add them again and they are working just fine.