Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 18, 2011
by sjvn01
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Chrome 14: The best Web browser keeps getting better

It’s odd. When Firefox moved into its accelerated development path, Firefox really didn’t get much better. In fact, it’s been getting less stable. Google’s Chrome Web browser though just keeps getting better with every new release. Chrome 14, in my opinion, is now clearly the best Web browser for any operating system available today.

Why? Well, look at all the raw numbers. To see how Chrome 14 ranked, I put it up against the latest releases of Firefox and IE 9 on a Windows 7 box.

When it comes to Web standards compatibility, Chrome 14 is a winner. On the Acid 3 compatibility test, which checks out how well a browser complies with Web standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and Extensible Markup Language (XML), Chrome had a perfect score. Firefox 6 had a score of 97 and IE had a 95.

On the recently, August 23rd, updated HTML5 Test, which checks to see how compliant the Web browser is with the HTML5 Web page standard, Chrome is king of the mountain again with a score of Firefox showed a significant improvement. This time, it came in with 341 points out of a possible 450. Firefox 6.02 came in second with 313 and. IE 9.0.8 came in a distant last with 141. Anyone who tells you that IE is HTML5 compliant is trying to sell you Windows. It’s not. It’s not even close.

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September 15, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google opens Google+ up for developers

Questions about Google’s new social network real name policies aside, I quite like Google+. One of the things I like about it, in stark contrast to Facebook, is that Google+ lets you access and back-up your personal data. Now Google has taken it one step further: The company has opened up some of Google+’s Application Programming Interfaces.

On Google+, appropriately enough, Chris Chabot, a Google developer advocate, announced “I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step towards bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.”

Chabot continued, “These APIs allow you to retrieve the public profile information and public posts of the Google+ users, and they lay the foundation for us to build on together – Nothing great is ever built in a vacuum so I’m excited to start the conversation about what the Google+ platform should look like.”

So excitement aside, what’s the story with these APIs? A quick look at the Google+ Developers site reveals that we’re still in the early stages here. The sites states that “This initial set [of APIs] is focused on providing read access to public data. We’ll be adding more APIs over time to build on this foundation and help you create more types of integrations”

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September 15, 2011
by sjvn01
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You’ll soon able to opt-out of Google Wi-Fi snooping

You did know those cars and trikes Google uses to take photos for Google Street View were also collecting your Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) information and location too right? Well, they have been since 2009, and now, thanks to complaints from privacy advocates in Europe, you’ll be able to opt out of this “service.”

In a Google blog site, Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel, wrote, “Even though the wireless access point signals we use in our location services don’t identify people, we think we can go further in protecting people’s privacy. At the request of several European data protection authorities, we are building an opt-out service that will allow an access point owner to opt out from Google’s location services. Once opted out, our services will not use that access point to determine users’ locations.”

Of course, as Paul Ducklin, the Head of Technology, Asia Pacific, for a Sophos, a security firm, notes, “This is a Catch-22. Google pretty much has to keep you on file, simply in order to know that you didn’t want to be on file in the first place. Otherwise they’d just add you back in next time the Street View Wi-Fi scanner came round – and then you’d have to opt out again. Sadly, you can’t opt out of the Street View collection process proactively.”

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September 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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Google and Intel Android pairing spells trouble for Microsoft

While all the attention was on Windows 8’s preview this week I wonder whether the real end-user operating news wasn’t happening elsewhere. To be exact, I think Google and Intel’s announcement that Android was coming to the Intel chip family will end up being the bigger news.

My fellow ZDNet writer James Kendrick touches on this when he says that, besides Intel and Google themselves, the winners of this deal include “OEMs already fluently speaking Intel yet not already on the Android team.” You know, those companies like Dell that have been speaking fluent Windows for the last couple of decades.

I’m not suggesting that Android will challenge Windows on the desktop. No, I think Google’s Chrome OS can spell trouble for desktop Windows, but not Android. Not yet anyway.

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September 14, 2011
by sjvn01
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Windows 8 distribution takes a page from Linux

You, yes you, can now download a copy of Windows 8. This marks the first time that Microsoft has released a pre-beta version of one of their flagship programs to the general public. I wonder where they got that idea. Could it be from Linux? After all Linux distributions has been making early versions available to the public since Linux started 20-years ago.

The Windows 8 Developer Preview alpha build, was released shortly after 8 PM Eastern on Tuesday, September 13th. The last time, debuted a similar developers preview of Windows 7 in October 2008, the company limited the early look to attendees at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The unwashed general public to wait until next year for a beta . That failed. Copies were leaked to BitTorrent sites within hours.

This time Microsoft elected to cut out the middle man and just release the preview to everyone… just like Linux distributors.

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September 13, 2011
by sjvn01
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Some Linux Foundation crack attack details emerge

A well-maintained secure operating system, like Linux, can be safe. But, that doesn’t mean that a Website built on top of it is necessarily safe. The Linux Foundation has found out the hard way. The Linux Foundation’s main site, and related sites such as Linux.com are still down after a break-in was discovered on September 8th.

This attack came on the heels of the main Linux development site, kernel.org, being compromised in late August. Kernel.org is still down. In the meantime, Linus Torvalds has uploaded the mainline Linux source code to GitHub. This is a site that uses Git, a distributed version control system, for distributed software development. Once kernel.org is back in working order though Torvalds will be returning the code to it.

But while work continues apace on this site and over the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), the Linux Foundation sites remain dark. If you visit these sites you’ll find the following message:

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