According to the Unofficial Windows Vista Weblog, the EU aren't happy about some of the new integrated features planned for Windows Vista. You can read that story here (I wrote this one at Gizbuzz), here (the Vista Weblog) and here (Yahoo News).

To be honest, I think that the Vista Weblog have blown this a little out of proportion. I think that it might be likely that Microsoft be forced by the EU to remove some of the new bundled features of Windows Vista (perhaps Windows Defender, their anti-spyware client?) just for Europe. As I mentioned, they were forced to do this before, with Windows Media Player, and 'N' versions of Windows XP were released in Europe without WMP. If anything comes of this story, it will be that Microsoft might have to do the same thing again with the disputed features (probably Windows Defender, or Windows DVD Maker or one of those new programs).

However, the EU might be a little more harsh about it, and say that they must remove the features for all copies of Vista shipped in the EU, and have the bundled products sold separately.

Anyway, it remains to be seen, and this story might still be speculative. So there's your warning, don't rely on these sources to be 100% accurate (I've already said this in my post).

Just in case anyone's interested (unlikely, I know), these are the Firefox extensions that I have installed. I've taken this screenshot from my Windows box, but they're also installed (with the exception of IE Tab), on my SUSE and Fedora Core Linux setups.

I'm now going to go through and say what I find useful about each one.

DOM Inspector:

Comes with Firefox I think, so I don't really know about this one.

Firefox Showcase:

This is a really cool extension, a bit like IE7's Quick Tabs that allows you to see and organise all your currently opened tabs/windows with a press of F12. I originally blogged about this here, back in February, but I still think it's cool.

Download here

Talkback

Another one that comes with Firefox, for sending bug reports back to Mozilla. Not too interesting really.

IE Tab

This is useful for those stupid sites that don't work properly in Firefox, and you're forced to use the dreaded IE (just be careful of the security vulnerabilities). It loads the desired page inside a Firefox tab, just using the IE rendering engine. Of course, this one works only on Windows, so it does mean those stupid sites might force me to use a different computer. Grrr. Open standards, people.

Download here

User Agent Switcher

This is the first place to go if a stupid site says "please open this page in Internet Explorer and try again". Grrrrrr. It simply switches the User-agent header sent by Firefox, so it can 'pretend' to be IE, while really still being Firefox. Most stupid sites work when you do this, so that's why it comes first. And cross-platform too.

Download here

Feedview

This is so cool, and really should already be in Firefox. Hopefully something like this will get into Firefox 2.0. What it does is it creates a nice GUI view of an RSS or Atom feed, so that if you view a feed directly (for example peterwebdev.blogspot.com/atom.xml) it will display a nice Safari-esque page with the latest stories ordered by date, rather than the ugly XML source. Go on, try it.

Download here

Google Toolbar for Firefox

Extends on the Firefox search box with PageRank display, convenient access to Google Desktop, Blogger, Gmail etc. and it's looks just a bit cool as well.

Download here

Google Safe Browsing

Now this is very nice. A neat anti-phishing extension from Google, exclusive to Firefox that gives you an alert if you are on a suspected phishing site. I've never needed to use it yet, but it's always good to know you're safe. Privacy people/paranoids, you might want to steer clear as it does have to send the URLs you visit to Google, although they promise they don't keep this information.

Download here

Reveal

Quite cool, it gives you a 'visual history' with screenshots of pages you've visited, for example, hovering over the back button shows a mini-screenshot of what the last page you visited looks like. Very useful if you forget what a site's called, but you know what it looks like. It also has a handy triple-click magnifying glass feature, so you can get closer to your webpage.

Download here

del.icio.us

Finally, the extension for the popular Web 2.0 social bookmarking service del.icio.us. It gives you tagging features built directly into Firefox with a tag button for your toolbar and new menu. Admittedly, I don't use this that much, but it does come in useful from time to time.

Download here

Whew! Well, there's my Firefox extensions, I'd love to see some comments sharing your favourites too.

OK, I've been meaning to do this for a while. A while ago I started building a very small project in Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition (for Windows only, I'm afraid). It was basically going to be a Notepad replacement with some really cool features. It has got the really rubbish name of Text Editor, and I've finally decided to release what I've done so far to the community.

So here it is, fully open source and licensed under the GPL.

Get the installer here.
Get the source code here.

Enjoy, and I hope to make it even better soon. Use it at your own risk, though and it does need the .NET Framework 2.0.

I've started work on a new web development project. As ever, details at the moment will be sketchy. All I can tell you is that it's codenamed Kite, and it's going to hopefully be a next-generation instant messaging system (currently only by a web interface), but with an interesting twist.

I'm currently doing preliminary tests on the concepts behind Kite, and have already built a basic 2-user Ajax-powered messaging system, with more to come soon.

Stay tuned for info on Kite...

I know this isn't a new story, but French police are switching their desktops from using Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox. They've also switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. Now this is progress; c'est fantastique (sorry). France seem to be the only country in Europe to actually recognise there is an alternative to using Windows, IE and MS Office (hey, a new acronym - WIM). I'm not saying there's anything wrong with using Microsoft solutions, I'm just saying that it's wrong when everyone uses Microsoft solutions. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket, although it's already happened around the world (MS advocates/employees, I'm posting this using Windows and Firefox and have Microsoft Office Outlook open).

Also, the French financial government department are evaluating a move to their desktops to Linux. Considering Microsoft's ad campaigns about "lower TCO with Windows", you'd think financiers among all people would know about TCO, wouldn't you? It remains to be seen what their decision will be.

Also, considering the latest draft law to open up DRM submitted by French MPs (see my previous post), it seems the French know where it's at, and are pushing in the right direction to create open standards.

Before the Microsoft and Apple people start yelling at me again, I'm not against proprietary software. I use proprietary software and open source stuff every day (both willingly). I think there is a place for proprietary and a place for open source. What I don't agree with is when companies lock open source solutions out of new and emerging technologies, by closing their standards and patenting stuff.

Open standards are great. Think about it; the only reason the internet is as popular as it is today is because it is based on open standards. TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML can all be understood and built into by any platform. Imagine what it would be like if one company controlled all these standards with, say, a patent. Open source would immediately be locked out for a start, if a patent was involved, and other companies would end up having to pay fees. People would have to pay this parent company to set up a website, to use their technology. We'd be in a mess, basically.

So make your choice about what solution to use. Choose the solution that is best for the job, whether that be a proprietary solution or an open source solution. But, please, be aware of the alternatives and if you're pushing the next-generation internet, make it an open standard. Thanks, the [open source] community thank you, and it'll probably be more popular too.

I know, I really should have learnt my lesson about cross-posting by now, but this is a quite interesting story that I found and posted, and it will be interesting to see what the response of Microsoft and Apple to this, as I'm sure they won't like it.

As I explained, it's Apple's marketing strategy to lock iTunes to the iPod, and Microsoft's to sell out their standards to hardware manufacturers, but neither will enjoy releasing source code, or whatever it is that the French law advises.

Still, in my opinion it's a good move for the French to take, as there can be nothing wrong with having open standards that all platforms can tap into. Hey, it might even get WMA DRM and iTunes music on Linux...

It's official - Fedora Core Release 5, also known as Bordeaux, has been released. I have been playing around with Fedora Core 5 Test 3 (the equivalent of the third beta), but now it looks like I'm downloading an additional 3 gigabytes (it comes on one DVD). At the moment there's not enough seeders on the official torrent (yes, there are legal uses for BitTorrent you know), so I'll probably wait until more people have downloaded it, and choose a time to download when there's less people online, like tomorrow morning.

Anyway, can't wait to (not) see the bugs they've fixed. Good work and well done to the community and of course to Red Hat to getting out a great OS.

Whew, what a day!

Just rolled out my first web application (PHP/MySQL of course) which was used by more than 100 people in just one hour. Now for all you professional developers (yeah, like professional developers read my blog) out there, that doesn't sound like much, and, well, I suppose it isn't.

But, nevertheless, it was about an 80-90% success, and I'll explain why. It was a simple web app to collect comments to go under people's names in our school yearbook. Well, a problem I didn't anticipate (and really I should have) was that we would have MD5 hash clashes. Not through the algorithm, but the fact that I only generated the hash from a secret word and the current timestamp. That meant that anyone who submitted in the same second as someone else was assigned the same hash, and, needless to say, this caused problems. I should have used microtime() instead of time(), and also used some other unique data to generate the hash. Ah, well, never mind.

That was basically it, that just caused semi-major problems, most of which I could manually deal with. Other than that, the system worked exactly as I planned it to, collecting about 110 comments.

So, learnt my lesson, use microtime() and some other data. I'm off to relax...

Yesterday evening I actually stepped away from gaming for a second to fix a fairly major problem with Project Krystal (which I haven't talked about for so long, I better tell you it's a Website Management System and it renders your website from a MySQL database setup).

The problem was in the way that some pages used data after the .php bit of the URL, for example: http://server/products/chainsaws.php/4. In either PHP 5.x (or our remote server setup), the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable wasn't getting passed to the script, so I devised a slightly messy workaround:

$var = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$pro = strstr($var, strrchr($var, ".php/"));
$pro2 = substr($pro, 5);
// echo $pro2;
// die();
$featureidrq = $pro2;
if (empty($featureidrq)) {
 $featureidrq = "";
}

Again, if anyone can do any better I'd love to see you add a comment with your code.

I haven't posted for a while mainly due to the fact that I got a new game on Friday, Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Naturally I bought it for PC ("Real gamers choose the PC, real geeks choose Linux or *BSD") and on my mid-range gaming system it runs well (i.e. it maintains more than 25fps) at full detail level at 1024x768. If you're interested in my gaming box's spec it's:

• Intel Pentium 4 3.00 GHz with Hyper Threading (not Dual Core, though)
• 1024 MB RAM
• 256 MB Geforce 6600 GT
• 19" CRT monitor

So, nothing special, but it does me fine (I don't really get hyped up about the difference between 30 and 75 fps, what human can tell anyway??). I'll attach a screen, but I'm sure you clever people can use Google.

OK, more webdev news including Hybrid stuff will come soon.

The new Hybrid site is so close now. The domain has been registered, the layout is almost done. Read the news here...

I've just started playing with my newly downloaded copy of Fedora Core 5 Test 3. It's essentially the latest beta version of the popular Fedora Core distribution. I hope that at some point I will be doing a proper review of my experiences with Fedora Core for the first time, which I might submit to a few sites.

In the meantime, have some screenshots.

If you read this, you might want to see the ZoomCloud for this blog:

Here's a video of one of the really cool features in the upcoming Windows Vista, speech recognition.

Interestingly this video was filmed using Vista build 5270 (the latest build being 5308), but nevertheless it is interesting to see that the features are quite well developed in this build, including quite a nice UI for the speech recognition panel. It certainly beats the current look if you use Windows XP + Office 2003 recognition, where the somewhat irritating Language Bar becomes even more bloated with buttons.

The original story, with a link to the video is here.

(this is a cross-post at Gizbuzz)

I finally now have a dedicated box I can use as a server. Specs follow:

• AMD Sempron 2600+
• 512 MB RAM
• (at the moment) 8 GB HDD (will be upgraded at some point)
• SUSE Linux 10 (will be Fedora 5 when it comes out)

It's going to be great to finally be able to test out stuff not on my primary machine and to constantly install and then reinstall Linux distros etc.

Can't wait...

UPDATE: Just upgraded the RAM to 1.5 GB for all those VMware Virtual Machines. See the photos below of the insides.