Archive for the 'Social issues' category

My preferred Internet browser, Opera, has now reached a new version v10.50. Not only is it still the same nice, friendly and powerful browser, but it packs interesting new features:

• Faster: I did not try the beta versions so I was surprised: It’s fast, very fast. I am not sure if it warrants the “fastest browser on Earth” title that their promoter want to give it, but it is not often that you feel such acceleration from a mere version upgrade.
• Win7-ready, perfectly integrated in Windows 7: Special menus for the integration into the icon bar, a specialized animated icon, optimized window, etc.
• Private, secured navigation windows upon request.
• The widgets can now be dropped onto the desktop.

Since Opera is compatible not only with Windows, but with Apple, Linux and most mobile phones, this is very good news about to spread around.

The excellent office desktop suite, OpenOffice.org (Word, Excel and PowerPoint, in a free form, if you want) just moved to version 3.2 (still free).

New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

The TED Talk conferences are often a great moment of technologie accessible to the largest numbers and an opportunity for the démonstration of what could be our future if the great thinkers of our time work on it.

The following conference (from Pranav Mistry) wants to give us a rought idea of perspectives opened by a rather recent technologie named SixthSense willing to put computers in our world rather than forcing us to flow in the computers mould.

It gets real speed and starts getting exhilarating after 6 or 7 minutes. Be patient, it’s worth it.

Thanks Xtian.

The debate rages, for a few weeks now, after the attempted bombing of the Amsterdam-Detroit flight in which a terrorist tried to ignite an explosive device hidden in his underpants. Shouldn’t we install this wonder technology that allows to strip naked search the passengers and to see anything they transport under their clothes? “Long live the body scanners!” shoot the industry, “This is the end of privacy in transports” reply the freedom rights partisans (and I will not even quote those worried about bringing up uniformed voyeurism).

But shouldn’t the first question be: “Does it work?”

A German TV channel decided to ask the question and invited a leading company in this field for a demonstration of such a machine in a TV studio under the surveillance of their best expert while submitting a “would-be terrorist” to a body scan.

You don’t need to speak German to understand what happened: All goes down the drain when the machine sees the wireless microphone box at the belt of the “guinea pig”, but -most important- does not detect the presence of several components of chemical products that will be used to manufacture a powerful explosive (very similar to what happened on last Christmas, wouldn’t you say?)

Technology failed here.

You really want to install those expensive gizmos in airports for the sake of theatrical security?

And don’t make me believe that this was unfair: No airport can hope to keep the manufacturer expert in front of the machine to analyze the images… The reality would be much worse. The fact that the “victim” did his best to hide the chemical products was just representative of what a determined terrorist would be trying with a real bomb.

This week has seen a pretty exhilarating story develop in front of our Internet eyes. Started as a muddy conflict between Google and the People’s Republic of China, it turned into a Firefox marketing victory. Let me summarize it a bit.

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

3x Firefox

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

An enormous aquarium in Japan (Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium).

Think about it: Some divers dream of meeting a Whale Sharks. Here, you can meet four of them!

If you’re like most people, you’d like to have pretty wallpaper on your desktop background. You can always go to wallpaper web sites but most of them are choke-full of ads and they always provide the same usual set. How about getting new ones?

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

Free wallpapers on Google

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

The larger our displays, the tougher it gets to find adequate wallpapers. NASA (through a sĂ©lection from Chamorro) comes to our resscue with these exceptionnaly beautiful high-resolution images. Our computer will have a hig-technology look even in 4000×3000 pixels.

Atlantis Space Shuttle

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

I can’t stop being amazed by the beauty of Nature. Planet Earth presents such an unbelievable diversity of shows, such a superb collection of small and large moments of pure beauty. Here are some I would like to share with you.

• did you know that beaches may really have all possible colours that your mind would think? Including the nicest green.


Green beach (Papakolea)

• Underground caves are also bizarre. Colors abound, but I find most surprising that sometimes you can find there huge crystals that make you think that Hollywood film makers never invented anything.


Giant crystals in Mexico

• Nature can be horribly hard on Man (for example, in the hottest and driest deserts), but it can also offer the real marvels of life itself (as some oasis).


Oasis - Turpan, China

Sharks are amazing killing machines, very efficient predators of the seas. But they are not only that. They also have some behaviors that could be described as interesting, astonishing, amazing, curious or mind-boggling (depending on your state of mind and what you think about the interaction between sharks and divers).

May I parallel this video with a previous post where I was showing the photo of a Japanese diver putting identification marks on a giant jellyfish?

If you wonder what all those computer experts do when they assist you, the dirty secret is only a diagram away:

Become a tech support expert

You see? No expertise, just a little trick.

So, scuba divers, did you dive on a stingray as beautiful as this one already?

Microsoft Project is expensive, very expensive. But once you started using it, you can’t stand not having a nice clean GANTT project chart. Why not get a free Microsoft Project? Even better than downloading MS-Project for free, I am proposing you to use an on-line GANTT chart/project builder that is completely free and works on-line: Gantter.

Gantter

I have been really impressed by the quality of such a software program. It may need to get some interface polish for Opera users (I had a couple of little display bugs), but the operation is fully adequate for many projects.

Sometimes an image (from Nepal or elsewhere) hesitates on the better orientation to give to the photographer. Which one of these two Nepalese paddy fields would you choose?

Copyright (C) 2009 Yves Roumazeilles - All rights reserved - Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it

Copyright (C) 2009 Yves Roumazeilles - All rights reserved - Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it

Martin Luther King Jr has been inspiring for many great people and a lot of other human beings. This is a Bible-inspired speech I found.

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

DemocracyNow via BoingBoing.

With the repeated announcement of (minor) incidents with the security of the original PDF reader from Adobe, I wondered what could be a good replacement. Obviously, it seems important to stay around free or low prices (Adobe Acrobat: Windows/Mac/Linux, Basic: free, Pro: $299), but is it possible to beat the Adobe product to read PDF files?

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

Don't waste electricity

There could be waste in the most surprising places. So, don’t waste, use electricity wisely.

Via FAIL Blog.