E-Musings Mon Immorata

Accentuating The Positives 'N Negatives New Google map service, enhanced GMail plus time-limited offer of 10 GMail accounts, preview Windows Server 2003 SP1, new IE and Outlook flaws, Akher-F worm, two neat Firefox extensions. There's lots of action this week. Both positive and negative. But let's stay upbeat for a while. So if you've ever wanted to spy on someone here's your chance. Google's 'Maps & Local' services now indexes the US Keyhole Satellite service. But there is a catch. The only information released to the public are maps of North America. So if you're lost in a Midwestern blizzard, lack a GPS but have a mobile phone or tablet PC that's managing to find Internet access you hopefully won't miss the next Big Mac! To use, just type an address into Google Maps. And Click the 'Satellite' link to see a birds-eye view. You can zoom in, move the focus and even resize the window. Very cool and sure beats the Microsoft TerraServer in usability. But if you're lost outside the US, then all you do have is TerraServer. It even index some cities in India. Of course the map resolution isn't the greatest. And the degree of zoom limited. But its a lot better than those Survey of India maps that are quite useless for navigating modern India. There's a new version of the Windows Update Service coming soon. The Public Beta's in progress (I got an invite). And the service temporarily went live. Long enough for the ever enterprising Neowin web site to grab a few screen shots. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 too was released late last week. Be prepared for a Internet connection crawl if you decide to download a copy. It's 337 MB and even on my 256 kbps broadband connection took nearly 3 hours to download in full. This upgrade does unto Windows Server 2003 what Windows XP SP2 did. And be also prepared for several applications that require Kernel-level access to suddenly 'break'. Some enterprising developers are already releasing software updates than co-exist peacefully with Windows Server 2003 SP1. The firewall used in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is now the same. And by default is in high lock-down mode. As I found out when the remote system I was updating rebooted after the upgrade. And I was shut out of a Remote Desktop Connection. You need to custom open the firewall to continue; a task that requires face time with the updated system. And I anticipate lots of managed servers suddenly going offline of the system management front. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 also takes ages to install. It first inspects your system. Presumably checking if its using a valid serial number. Before capturing an entire System Restore point in case the upgrade goes horribly wrong. Only after all this is over do you even get to the EULA. On average the upgrade takes about 30-45 minutes on a Pentium 4 HT running in dual-processor mode. And its impossible to do anything on the server being upgraded. My advice is leave the update to run until it completes and requests a system reboot. In other Google news, Google Mail or GMail has raised the storage bar to 2 GB and counting. My primary GMail account (when last checked) was now at 2060 GB. GMail itself has been considerably enhanced. It now supports two HTML modes: standard and basic. The mail editor now supports rich text formatting. This free web mail service stands heads and shoulders above the competition. Let's see how Yahoo and Hotmail respond to the challenge. So in a fit of kindness that I'm sure I'll regret I have decided to offer 10 GMail accounts. This time-limited offer expires April 14, 2005. And while there are lot's of interesting happenings on the Firefox front. First we must deal with those dinosaurs still dependent on Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. For whom here's some positive negativity. Yet another security vulnerability that affects all versions of Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, including Windows XP SP2. The flaw allows malicious code to be executed with minimal user interaction. Although eEye Digital Security found the problem and has reported it to Microsoft. There's no information on the eEye site about the exact issue. But while eEye may have behaved responsibly. Web news sites like ZDNet have more details. Meanwhile Microsoft suggests users ensure their firewall is activated and recommended a visit to Microsoft's Web site for more tips on how to protect themselves. And in a switch to pure negativity, don't be infected by Ahker-F, a new worm that promises salacious movie clips of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears. Infected e-mails include body text such as "Watch Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt cought (sic) on TAPE! SEXY CLIP! WATCH IT!" When executed, the worm spreads to the user's e-mail contacts, disables security settings and launches a denial-of-service attack against Microsoft's security update Web site. The worm is also spreading via file-sharing networks, using file names such as PORNO.exe, XXX.exe and Naked Britney.exe. Stay Positive! Use Firefox. Actually use Firefox with enhancements and you'll never go wrong. After waffling about the free FireTune utility, I finally bit the bullet and installed it. I used Numion's web Stopwatch service to verify page load time with and without the tweaks. Test #1 saw me sans any tweaks and without purging the browser cache. Loading the Firefox product home page took 53.607 seconds. After emptying the cache, the same page loaded in 51.113 seconds. I then manually (using about:config) changed the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 30 (default is 8). This time the web page took 48.39 seconds to load on an empty cache. Which was the best performance. Unfortunately FireTune thought my settings too radical and dropped maxrequests to 16 which caused page load to slow to 48.69 seconds! But if you'd rather not manually tweak your Fox. Then FireTune 0.7 is the way to go. I also found a very neat extension for web page developers. The Tidy 0.57 plug-in installs to the status bar and displays in real-time the number of page errors and warnings. It can also check web pages for W3C Accessibility Levels. Double-clicking the icon opens a new Window displaying the page code, warnings and errors detected and a more detailed explanation with suggestions on resolving the problem. The extension can also 'tidy' your code. Which open another 4-tabbed window displaying the optimized code, the original code, the optimized preview and the original preview. And while you can't directly save the optimized code. But you can copy-paste it into your web editor. That's it for this week. More next time! Click Here To Send Feedback