Safari for Windows Beta 3

~ rbonini

I must say I’m impressed with this addition to the browsers I have installed.  Along with Firefox and IE7, Safari rounds everything off in minimalist style. It invokes the Apple user in be to start clamoring for a Mac (or a Microsoft version of Boot Camp).

Its a Beta and an Apple App running on Windows, so crashes are de rigueur for this kind of thing ( forgive my french) .  And, yes, its crashed more than a few times since I switched to it full time last night (read: 24 hours ago).

As luck would have it, Safari crashed as I was reading this TUAW post. Specifically, it crashed as I read the line:

It has tons of new great features as well as the cursed instability issues…

The Unofficial Apple Weblog post has a nice rundown of the features, some of which I’ve never heard of.

In using any Apple app, you can expect the design ethic of His Steveness to permeate every aspect of the UI. Any Windows app feels like a chain saw in comparison ( that’s right, that goes for those toolbars).

I had one problem with regard to actually surfing. The booking process at easyjet.com broke down in Safari round about Step 4. The Safari team might want to look at their asp page support.

In the final analysis, Safari for Windows lives up to all the hype and is all that we’ve come to expect from Apple

Windows Home Server RC1 Install, part 1

~ rbonini ~ 2 Comments

Hmmm. What’s new in an install process that I can say?

 I’m still doing a little testing of beta 2 it seems, since this is the second time today I’m trying to remove one of my drives so that I can copy all my data off  to said drive to save said data being turned into random bytes by the uncontrollable, tyrannical Redmond installer. Ok, that was a bit theatrical, but you get my drift.

I downloaded said installer last night and set the server to remove the drive in question this morning. said drive still shows up as still being connected despite the wizard being left for “several hours” ( that’s the only time estimate given,which is useless).

I’ve now got to burn said installer to DVD while I wait. While I go and do that, you can look at the these installer screenshots, if you’re geeky enough.

Update: The Wizard has been running for 3 hours now, and the progress bar is less than a fifth of the the way across. I’m thinking of taking more radical action.

Update:Soon after posting the above update, I used remote desktop to bring up the Management Console, changed drive letters for my external hard drive so I could access it and started copying files over like mad. It took , oh, 6-7 hours to copy every thing across. I’ve actually got it installing now. Here’s to the install working first time.  

The Google PageRank

~ rbonini

This made me laugh:

Link Popularity vs. PageRank vs. Yoda

Not that I actually have an opinion on how to best rank webpages. To settle the debate, we’d have to see the actual algorithm that Google uses as well as gauge the ratio of legitimate links to pages (i.e. not from spam/link farms).

Not we’ll get to see the Google algorithm. The best idea is to come up with a comprehensive list of factors that influence a page’s popularity and usefulness that most people can reasonably agree on and write an open source version of the algorithm. As far as legitimate links are concerned, I haven’t the faintest.

What do you think?

The Shrek 3 Render Farm

~ rbonini

I just got sent this fascinating article on the Render Farm at Dreamworks Animation that they used for Shrek 3 (and others).

Its rather fascinating to see what massive amounts of computer power on tap can achieve and can’t wait to see the move when it comes out here in the UK.

Google Privacy Row – Roundup

~ rbonini

Since last night there’s ben a huge row over this report from Privacy International slamming Google over its user privacy policy/practices.

For a taster Mitch Ratcliffe has this to say:

Giving up our privacy for a little Web functionality and storage capacity is like handing over the mining rights to ancestral lands to the first guy who comes along with a better shovel

And he was responding to this :

It’s funny how they know so much about their horrible practices when they even admit Google didn’t respond to their request for information. Certainly that means their practices are the worst on the Internet.

Scoble weighed in by saying:

I was hoping this report was more factual than it looks cause we need to have a real conversation about privacy. If you read the privacy report you should read Danny’s blow-by-blow response to it.

That said, Google’s PR is really stinky. Google isn’t paying attention to what normal people think of it anymore and it’s getting a bad reputation because of that. I heard it slammed over and over again for street-level views on Google Maps and no one from Google responded in most of the mainstream talk shows I heard talking about it. They should have a full-court “feel good” initiative where they have normal everyday citizens come in and meet the engineers, and look at the privacy issues.

Danny Sullivan has a pretty good blow-by-blow account of the report (its a must read):

Overall, looking at just the performance of the best companies PI found shows that Google measures up well — and thus ranking it the worse simply doesn’t seem fair. But the bigger issue is that the report itself doesn’t appear to be as comprehensive or fully researched as it is billed.

Frankly, about the only thing saving Privacy International from many more companies or services being upset over this report is that they singled out Google as the worse. That’s almost guaranteed to make players like Microsoft and Yahoo shut their mouths and point at this silently as vindication they aren’t so bad.

To save itself, I’d like to see Google appoint a privacy czar, someone charged with, as I’ve suggested above, assuming the worst about the company and diligently working to ensure users have as much protection as possible.

All that said, Matt Cutts responds:

Google didn’t leak user queries

In this past year, AOL released millions of raw queries from hundreds of thousands of users. Within days, a journalist had determined the identity of an AOL user from the queries that AOL released. But AOL got a better grade than Google.

Google didn’t give millions of user queries to the Dept. of Justice

In 2005/2006, the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 different companies requesting users’ queries and other data. In fact, the original subpoena requested all queries done by users for two full months. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all gave some amount of users’ queries to the Department of Justice. Google fought that subpoena (full disclosure: I filed a declaration in that case). The judge sided with Google; no queries from Google users were given to the DOJ. But Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL got better grades in this report than Google.

Google will anonymize query logs

In March, Google announced that it would begin anonymizing its logs after 18-24 months. Google has continued to communicate on the issue, including a post on the Google blog in May discussing the reasoning behind that decision. In fact, we talk a lot about privacy, from blog posts to Op-Ed pieces in the Financial Times. To the best of my knowledge, no other major search engine has followed suit in a plan to anonymize user logs.

I Don’t think I can really add to all that. Other than the idea that Google is firewalking here. As soon as it makes I really, really clear what its policy is, in detail, and appoints a Privacy Czar, things may well quiet down. Google just has to get used to the idea that this is going to happen more often.

Datacentre v. Earthquake

~ rbonini

(via Johnathan Schwartz’s Blog)

Sun Engineers decided to put Project Blackbox on a shaketable ( that’s shaketable as in “simulate an earthquake”).

See for yourself what happened (notice how Greg P’s laptop is running Windows???):

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HNGM-rje7U]

According to Schwartz, there’s another project in the works.

Sneak peek here. Select Chapter 3. According to Schwartz, its behind the big, black drape. I’m still waiting for the video to load – WiFi problems.

After this test I can see geologists the world over adding this to their wishlists.

Breathing freely

~ rbonini

This TUAW post starts by saying:

Here at TUAW, we welcome all those yearning to breathe free of Windows

Which made me laugh since it reminds me of the inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The post, although short point to a ComputerWorld article by Scott Finnie entitled: “Why Microsoft Should Fear Apple”. Its a pretty good look at the Microsoft/Apple status quo. The articles main point is that Microsoft has to act instead of just copying Apple’s innovations.

There was a time when people jokingly described Apple as Microsoft’s advanced software lab. Anyone who follows operating systems — please, be objective if your knee-jerk reaction is to disagree — has to realize that Microsoft has imitated literally hundreds of features and behaviors of Apple’s OS X. Yes, there are some advantages that originated with Microsoft (such as file icon thumbnail previews). But OS X is clearly leading the desktop OS parade. Everyone is copying Apple — and with good reason.

He puts all of this down to one main reason:

The Mac is a closed hardware/software system. The OS isn’t forced to contend with a vast variety of hardware, and the hardware is carefully vetted so that it works perfectly with the software. Apple controls the horizontal; it controls the vertical. The hardware and software are a matched set.

I agree completely with that. Microsoft has too many hardware combinations to worry about instead of concentrating on Software. Microsoft are starting to change this.

First, their much rumored Surface platform will have  Microsoft hardware and software.

Second, the Xbox and the 360 are proof of what Redmond could do once freed from hardware compatibility constraints.

Third, in terms of a new consumer-level product on the scale of an OS/hardware combo, Microsoft is working with industry partners to bring Windows Home Server to market in specially built machines.

Ok, number 3 isn’t really  something you can compare to Apple, but its close. And if memory serves, Microsoft tried to do something similar with the UMPC thing – which turned out to be a disaster of epic proportions.

So, yes, Microsoft is innovating. The question is, is it fast enough? 

Windows Home Server

~ rbonini

The black box has been humming along quite nicely for the past few weeks. I’ve nothing to actually say about its because nothing has really gone wrong.

The folder duplication works great. My only small gripe is that it keeps reminding me that duplication is failing for one file in  my Music folder. And I can’t tell it to ignore this issue. So I’m reminded of this about 10 times a day. This is actually a good thing as its driving me to get a new hard disk  – its an itch  that needs to be scratched. Once I get around to buying it, the new hard disk should take me well over 1Tb of storage. Which is perfect for SageTV (which I will take a more serious look at once WHS has been released).

The only other small thing that I’ve found is Remote Access goes out the window as the Router changes the Servers IP address and messes up the port forwarding. If the Wizard actually worked, I wouldn’t have this problem.

Its rather startling to have a Microsoft product that just works. Its uncanny. After years of using XP is till have to wrestle go get stuff done occasionally. WHS is totally a painless experience (unless you happen to be testing extreme use cases).

The rumor mill reports that a Release Candidate is due to be released in the very near future. And once again I will spend a happy weekend installing it.

Now for WHS news that is sort of connected, but isn’t really, the WHS team has a new member ( blog here). The official blog post announcement from the team:

The Windows Home Server team decided to offer a summer internship to one of our earliest beta testers and top forum contributors.  Tom Z. is a high school student from Arizona and he will be spending the next 2 months with us working on a wide variety of projects from building home server demo hardware for various events to trying to code his first add-in

Its really interesting to get an outsiders view of a) the team and b) Microsoft.

If you read a few of his previous posts you’ll see that he’s also beta testing Windows Server 2008. I assume that this will be come the backbone of WHS 2. The fact that the server can be installed in a Core configuration has interesting ramifications for WHS. if you look at the Server Storage tab you’ll  see that the OS takes up 10GB. Under a Core setup, the OS could install in 1 Gb or less.

My point is simply that WHS 1 is the beginning of something extra ordinary. I can’t think of any other company that has ever tried to target Server- grade software into the homes of ordinary people.  And bring about a product that works as slickly as WHS.

In short I’m excited at the prospect of what WHS 1 will do (as in, turning the whole network into one massive PVR via SageTv), I can’t wait to see what the Team have up their sleeves for the next iteration of this grand experiment.

 PS. This is my third post with the new Live Writer. Its a great improvement over the old one. More later.