E-Musings Mon Immorata

Rich Media Powers Virtual Euro 2004 Virtual replays Euro 2004 goals replace Iraq custom message site, Microsoft awarded apple tree patent and cutting-edge Firefox and Thunderbird builds My post-virus blues continue and I still don't have a proper working home system. What I ave are 2 separate PCs on trial running different operating systems. The trick now is to find the one that my family and I are most comfortable with. In the meanwhile I spent most last nights and very early mornings catching up with Euro 2004 on TV. That is until cable operators in Hyderabad, India, where I live, decided to play spoilsport and blocked both ESPN and Star Sports. The reason: these channels were inserting a text streamer claiming a specific operator hadn't paid its dues. The matter is supposedly in arbitration. But its quite common for sports channels to begin arm-twisting during a mega-event. Of course in a cricket-crazy country like India, football is just another sport. Had India been playing, the offending broadcaster would have been arm-twisted into providing free signals. As was done to the Ten Sports Network during India's recent Cricket Tour of Pakistan. But if you too have the TV broadcast blues, leverage the Internet. The BBC Sport's Euro 2004 Virtual Replay uses Shockwave to deliver three-dimensional (3D) animated replays of Euro 2004 goals. And is a visual treat for soccer fans. For each sequence you can vary playback speeds between super-slow to real-time to catch all the action. For the TV-deprived, the Beeb is also offering video coverage of the highlight, match-wise using either RealMedia or WindowsMedia. The clips include sound, and can be viewed in 4 different sizes, including full (browser) screen. Image quality is not all that fantastic even though its from the TV coverage. The Virtual Replay is a whole lot better. In my last post I mentioned a free site that let you send a personalized snapshot of a US soldier with 2 Iraqi teens visit God Bless the Children of Iraq. Or review random images from what other visitors have left behind. Wel,, thanks to the surge in visitor traffic, the site owner's take the picture down. If you did setup a custom pix, try and extract its ID from your browser cache so you can mail him for a copy. Instead feast your eyes on a news item announcing that among the many hundred patents applied for by Microsoft, they also got one for Adam's Apple, a new variety of apple tree! Read more here. The excellent Mike's List (a listed E-Musing link) mentions other Microsoft patents including

Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body, double-clicking on a PDA, method for programmers to keep running "to do" list in code comments, hand-held personal computer, multilingual user interface for an operating system, thread-based e-mail and even one-pass greedy-pattern-matching finite-state-machine code generation (whatever that's supposed to do)

Virus-wise, do beware of infectious meanies swarming the Internet. And attacking users via their web browser. At work we have a pretty robust anti-virus solution. Users are restricted to specific site types and mail access is limited to the company's PCQ Linux-powered mail server via a SquirrelMail web-based interface. However two systems were infected by Trojans downloaded from web sites. With stronger antiviral controls at the mail gateway, virus writers are turning their cross-hairs towards a highly insecure web browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because Microsoft originally (pre-anti-trust) planned IE as an integrated part of the Windows operating system, several vulnerabilities were left unattended to server as openings for future Windows add-ins. Unfortunately, this future-think also opened to the doors to anyone with a yen to hack and destroy. The downside of IE's vulnerability is that MyIE2 is nearly as vulnerable. While its developer has included a blocker for a common spoof attack, the base browser engine that it feeds off is fragile and easily susceptible to infections! So, with a very heavy heart I'm transferring my affections to Opera and Firebox. Both are not end-all solutions. Some sites work best with one. Others with the other. Opera is a great choice since its doesn't support the quite insecure ActiveX technology at all. However, some Java Script and Opera doesn't mix very well. And WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors like HTML Area embedded into web-applications like web log admins and message boards won't work. As a matter of fact, I can't even format posting in Moveable Type using its QuickTags feature because the latter is incompatible with Opera. A key downside of Opera is it isn't freeware. There's a free-to-use copy, but this displays Google text-based advertising. Of course Opera 7.5x includes an email client as well as an IRC Chat room interface. And despite its flaws I still rate it an 8 out of 10 in usability. My second choice is the free Firefox; a wholly re-engineered browser component of the Mozilla (nee Netscape) suite. This is the leanest browser you can get. And its even meaner with the MOOX-optimized builds that use Microsoft's Visual C++ toolkit instead of the open-source CygWin compiler. Plus Moox deliver builds processor-type specific optimized builds. If you have been converted to Firefox already. Or are a MyIE2 user looking for a safer browser, you aren't going to miss all that much. Firefox has pop-up blocking too. And there are free extensions to afford more control about how the browser handles pop-ups, file downloads, cookies and site redirects. For mail I'm gradually shifting over to Thunderbird; the mails and news component of the Mozilla suite that also been wholly rebuilt. When compared to Outlook Express, Thunderbird is still a work in progress. But that is the key. It's a constantly evolving software that improves with each successive build. Outlook Express (and IE) haven't seen anything new for over 2 years. Microsoft even partially disbanded the IE development team but has reconstituted it recently. Whether you do use Firefox and Thunderbird, or are a new adopter, please download Moox's builds of Firefox 0.9.1 and Thunderbird 0.7.1. For both critical bugs in the Extension Manager that caused CPU usage to peak at 100% when loading certain extensions have been resolved. And there's a new icon theme set too. In the web-based mail service battle, Google's 1 GB GMail account seems to have forced the larger providers to improve their free offerings. RediffMail's now offering 1 GB mail accounts. And Yahoo offers 100 MB mailbox space with 10 MB attachments everywhere but India. I like Yahoo! UK which also offers free POP3 access with optional SMTP forwarding. But you need to accept Yahoo-powered advertising messages delivered to your Inbox. And to sign-on you need a valid UK Postcode. Meanwhile for those of us lucky to have GMail accounts, we can nominate up to 4 friends. I have 2 accounts left. Is anyone interested in joining their Beta program? And for those with GMail accounts who want to download them to the desktop? Well, last week's free POP Goes the GMail (PGtGM) has been updated. This free GMail bridger installs itself as a local mail server to which you connect your email client. That's it for the week, Stay Safe! Click Here to Email Me