Friday, October 9 2009, 13:33
By JC - Development - Permalink
Software evolves… new versions of major software are released once
every few years, they contains improvements, bug fixes, but sometimes,
some features disappear just like they appeared… without any seemingly
valid reason…
So is the case, with the useful “Object search” feature, which was present in SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer but somehow didn’t make its way into SQL Server 2005 and 2008’s Management Studio.
Sunday, June 7 2009, 23:55
This week, I had the occasion to work on a computer who had been infected by several malwares. Removing the malwares wasn’t much of a problem using my customized BartPE-based BootCD but the nasties left all sort of tracks behind them that I had to wipe clean. One of the consequences of these infections was that several administration tools wouldn’t run, most noticeably Regedit. Several viruses try to make the job as hard as they can for the computer user to get rid of the malwares and one of the best way to prevent this is to disable several tools that are usually very helpful in the process…
Thursday, May 21 2009, 23:31
By Fred - Internet - Permalink
About one year ago was released Cuil, the self-proclaimed Google-killer. Although Cuil's search quality has significantly improved since the grand (and failed) opening, the site could only grab a negligible share of the overall search market and does not currently propose a compelling enough service to grab more. People are still waiting for the real Google-killer to come... So this is no surprise to have a huge buzz around WolframAlpha, the new "search engine" sponsored by Stephen Wolfram, the world-class scientist behind Mathematica. But…
Friday, April 10 2009, 20:19
Some days ago, a BetaNews article caught my attention with its sensational title “Can Mozilla escape a premature endgame for Firefox?”,
which hypothesizes that the popular web browser can’t last long,
especially since Google’s arrival on the market with Chrome. It is true
that the browser’s market has been rather busy in the last months,
especially in the Windows area with the arrival of two challengers,
Google Chrome and Apple Safari, in an area which was thought to be
locked down by both Microsoft with IE, and Mozilla with Firefox. It is
funny to remember that roughly 10 years ago, the first browser war was
raging between Microsoft and Netscape for the domination of the Windows
browsers market and the winner remained unchallenged for a bit less
than a decade. Let’s see how things are changing with the appearance of
outsiders and what it means for each of the warriors in the arena.
Monday, March 9 2009, 16:32
If you are a regular follower of this blog, you’ll probably remember my couple of rather recent entries regarding the current state of the anti-virus technology and whether this kind of products still are as useful as they were in the past in today’s world. I’ve been going into great lengths regarding their weak points and how they tend to lagging behind the Operating Systems more and more every year due to their missing of infections, delays in signatures updates, which makes their protection far from being bullet-proof. What’s worst than everything, though, is when a system isn’t infected but the anti-virus thinks it is… and has identified an important system file as an offender…
Monday, March 2 2009, 12:07
I have been using SmartFTP
so far for my FTP needs but my current hosting company is having some
compatibility problems with it (or rather, it is the other way around
since all the clients are fine with this server). SmartFTP is one of
the best FTP clients feature-wise but unfortunately has a lot of little
annoying bugs and I decided to check out for more stable, and possibly
free alternatives. Of course, Google was my friend and FileZilla
turned out to be one of the most popular results. I obviously had heard
of this software before and often under a good light, but I decided to
review it a bit more, especially regarding the security… and for an
open-source application, the mentality of the developers towards this
important matter in our increasingly connected world doesn’t fail to
surprise…
Saturday, February 7 2009, 16:25
To be remarked and distinguished, one's products must be clearly different from the others: it is a fact of marketing. When applied to software, there are two main kind of differentiation possible: the invisible to the eyes, yet noticeable, differences, such as better internal engineering and better performance, and the visible ones, most particularly the user-interface. In operating systems supporting windowing systems, the user-interface is one of the most important aspects of the product because it is the interface between the user and the machine: this interface thus needs to be both pleasing to the eyes but still ergonomic and efficient for the user to be able to accomplish his duties as quickly as possible.
Having one’s application stand out from the others is maybe a good thing for marketing, but what happens when every application on the system wants to look different from the other in term of user-interface of the system taken as a whole? This is what we are going to see through this argumented rant, with the help of some applications examples, and try to see whether the short-term benefits of these moves are worth the longer-term inconveniences of inappropriate user-interface skinning.
Monday, January 5 2009, 19:30
As we have seen earlier,
the anti-virus current detection schemes are not bulletproof and tend
to let threats get through for a number of days and sometimes weeks.
From this bleak situation, we can legitimately ask ourselves whether
anti-viruses still are the right answer to nowadays threats and if a
more drastic approach is not to be envisaged, and if the
security-mechanisms implemented in the modern Operating Systems do not
make anti-virus products redundant, or even excess their performance.
Ironically, anti-virus products were created to protect the weak
Operating Systems and acted as its sole immunity system for a long
time, but with the Operating Systems maturing and outgrowing their
original weaknesses, what is the future of anti-virus products,
especially in the corporate world?
Monday, December 22 2008, 19:00
Anti-viruses, as everyone knows, are software that prevent intrusion of
malware into the system where it is installed and active. But what
happens when anti-viruses become less efficient in this mission than
the the very Operating System that they are supposed to protect? In
this article, I will try to establish whether anti-virus as they
currently stand are a trustable protection to the current threats, and, in the next installment of this two-parts series,
what’s their future, in a IT world where the focus on security has
never been so high, especially in the Operating Systems area.
Sunday, December 14 2008, 16:35
By Fred - Software - Permalink
The latest fashion in terms of user interface is the Office ribbon, this thick horizontal bar containing various visual icons grouped by general task. After getting through most of the applications of the well-known suite, the ribbon will also invade most of the Windows accessories soon…
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