Ash Report

To all our friends who will be celebrating Hari Raya Aidilfitri (also known as Eid in the Middle East and Europe) we would like to wish Selamat Hari Raya and may peace be with you and your family on this joyous occation.

Maybe we can take a day off from staring at the rectangle screen and enjoy the company of real people, I’m sure nothing disastrous will happen if we don’t log in for a day or two. Really… Even emails can wait for a day or two (unless you’re running an e-commerce site - then you probably have not much choice).

Ahh… another web browser is being launched. We’ve seen so many that entered the war zone and so far the incumbent IE still stands tall at 80% of the market (largely because it’s shipped pre-installed for most new PCs) followed by the pundits’ favourite son, Mozilla Firefox at close to 20% and balance of spoil shared by Opera and Safari. (It will add to > 100% because many people had more than one browser on their computer)

This one however must be given notice because it came from Google - the Internet’s undisputed giant that is trying to find ways to venture outside of search engine. Will it be successful? It’s Gmail offering is wildly popular and has now unseat Yahoo and Hotmail off the free-webmail throne. Google’s online apps however has not been anywhere successful.

I’ve downloaded and installed the beta version of Chrome after watching the impressive yet easy to understand comic style Chrome technology guide. That was the second time this week that I have enjoyed serious stuff explained using the comic medium; the first one being the recently launched Dr M’s biography.

I’ve yet to play with it but the first impression is nice. Quickly checked my favorite sites and all of them rendered properly (the close relationship with Mozilla helps I suppose).

• It launched quickly and I love the minimalist design - all the screen-space reclaimed.
• Can’t comment much on websites’ rendering speed - our Streamyx line not exactly a reliable indicator.. sigh.
• Arckk.. where’s the bookmark link?
• There’s the ‘Incognito Window’ for privacy browsing. That’s cool
• What about Firefox add-ons? Can’t live without them… have to watch out for the portability news
• Got built in text area zoom in. Nice, though I don’t use it much
• Somebody commented that “Anyone bother reading the EULA? Congratulations to our commenters commenting using Chrome. While you still own your comment, google owns the right to use it.” Go to clause 11.1 to 11.3 of the License Agreement - yuckk.

It looks promising but I’m not sure that I’m ready to ditch Firefox yet and make this the default browser. Please let me know what you think of this new development?

It appears that the software that managed to put a PC on every desk will soon be retired. Very hard to imagine the ubiquitous Windows no longer running our lives. Yet this is what a new report has suggested.

Apparently this is Microsoft’s strategy for survival in the future. Prompted by the steamrolling usage of OS-independent Internet and failure of Windows Vista, internal documents of Microsoft have described a project codenamed Midori that seemed to be a marked departure from Windows OS.

Midori is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC. It is seen as Microsoft’s answer to rivals’ use of “virtualisation” as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.

It is also supposed to be a cut-down version of the humongous size of Vista. Yeah right… I’ll believe it when I see it. And judging from Microsoft’s recent track record, the clean final version will probably arrive sometime like 2015.

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Mr Jobs had better watch out coz the Android is here. Google showed off a number of exciting new developments by the company and the one that got the biggest response was Android - an open-source platform being designed for “smart” phones and other mobile devices that surf the Web. Looking set to challenge iPhone - Steve Horowtiz (engineering director) showed how an Android phone, using an internal compass, could dynamically adjust Google Street View images to match the facing of the phone user, to a collective gasp and applause from the 3000+ programmers in a conference in San Francisco.

I would surely love the idea of a standard that is available for anyone to build their applications. Imagine if we could build our own add-ons for HTC,SE,Nokia smartphones. The ability to develop applications as add-on is the real killer-apps for succes stories like Facebook or Firefox. It can be an avenue for our entreprising Petaling Street vendors - modified smartphones GUI and applications for as low as RM30 each. This time - it could be legit though.

Check out the video of the keynote presentation of Google’s I/O below. It’s a long video and the Android demo is on 23 min:

I’m not much of a console gamer. Especially current generation PS2 games with fast & furious gameplay and dazzling graphics. To tell the truth, I actually felt dizzy and suffered head ache whenever I spent more than 2 mins on my last PS2. Having said that, I want my Wii.

Against conventional thinking, the best loved games on Wii do not boast of super-realistic rendering but maintained the mould (albeit souped up) of the lovable Mario Bros. And I love their wireless control. I swear it will make a good exercise playing their tennis and sports games. That alone is good enough for my lovely-other-half to agree for Wii as the next b’day gift. Wiihee!

So it’s no surprising when Reggie (Nintendo America) proudly proclaim that the average Wii sits on shelf for only half an hour before it got sold. 17 months after launch and Wii is still sold out in North Americ - amazing!

I’m sure there’s one on the shelf of that game-shop in 1U and it’s got my name on it!