• The next version of Windows will be called simply Windows 7, Microsoft's Mike Nash explains how they came up with that particular number. Interestingly, Windows XP isn't counted as a major release, just a 5.1 release, with Windows 2000 being 5.0. Windows Vista is 6.0, and Windows 7 is actually version 6.1!
  Tags: Windows 7
• Kongregate, the online Flash games site, where the boys are, according to Rafe Needleman, has put up a tutorial series aimed at beginning Flash game developers. The tutorials show how to build a basic space shooting game using Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0, and there is an accompanying developer competition.
  Tags: Flash, online games
• Experienced, but mainstream, Yahoo users don't get OpenID, shows a usability study released by Yahoo Developer Network. If you own a domain you can run your own OpenId server using phpMyID, as I do on the emented.com domain.
  Tags: OpenID
• If you want to use IIS on a Windows server, instead of Apache, to run popular open source PHP applications like Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress, you're in luck, as Microsoft just has released a Web Platform Installer tool, which simplifies the deployment process to almost a click of a button.
  Tags: PHP, Windows
• Opera released some Web statistics obtained by their "Metadata Analysis and Mining Application", MAMA: 
  

  MAMA is a structural Web-page search engine—it trawls Web pages and returns results detailing page structures, including what HTML, CSS, and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates.

  It's a vast resource for Web nerds, with results ranging from the least and most popular HTML elements to Flash and AJAX usage per country. Some key findings: Apache is used by 68% of web servers, IIS by 26%. The ratio of HTML to XHTML usage is about 2 to 1. The "table" element is more popular than "div", 8th vs. 14th place, respectively. 33% of web pages use Flash. Only 4% of URLs pass the W3C markup validation test. When testing my site, 38 errors were reported, so nobody is perfect. I guess Wordpress is to blame for a lot of those errors.
  Tags: statistics, web standards

• Yahoo continues the roll-out of their Open Strategy, dubbed Y!OS. The latest release is a new universal profile page.
  Tags: Yahoo
• Ars reports on benchmarking results for the new Flash 10 player compared to Flash 9. On Mac and Linux platforms there are substantial performance improvements up to a factor of 4. The Flash performance on those platforms are still far behind the performance on Windows though. Sporting the same hardware, Flash 10 on Vista outperformed Flash on Mac by a factor of nearly two.
  Tags: Flash
• Nonconformist blogger Ted Dziuba has relaunched his rebellious Web 2.0 blog Uncov, after recently leaving his startup Pressflip. It's mostly fun reading, as he tries to be a thorn in the side of the Web 2.0 aristocracy. Additionally, the accompanying pics of Fail and other misfortunes makes it a worthwhile read. On a somewhat related note, Christopher Beam writes here about the popularity of the word Fail.
  Tags: blogs

Related articles by Zemanta

• ReactOS: Open source Windows
• Pressflip Founder Quits: "I'm Tired Of The Fight"

• The much touted security of Windows Vista seems to be worthless, according to findings by the two security researchers Mark Dowd and Alexander Sotirov. SearchSecurity writes:
  

  By taking advantage of the way that browsers, specifically Internet Explorer, handle active scripting and .NET objects, the pair have been able to load essentially whatever content they want into a location of their choice on a user's machine. [...] That's completely game over.

  The researchers seems to have found a way to compromise .NET objects, which IE assumes are safe, effectively using the objects as stepping stones for other attacks.
  Tags: security, Windows Vista

• Dave Winer has a piece about why he thinks Vista may fail, comparing the operating system to two other failed OSes of the past: OS/2 and Apple III. "Vista has the smell of death," writes Winer, outlining a few other reasons why he disapproves of the OS. The ones I particularly agree with are "5. Everything is happening in the web browser now," and "6. [...] there is no demand for new operating systems." No one actually needs grand new operating system, just keeping tuning and tweaking the existing OSes should be enough. That's one thing I like about Linux (the kernel specifically), it's (almost) from the beginning been called Linux and will probably be called that forever. It just has a version number (currently 2.6.26), which is incremented as bugs are fixed and new features are added. The only reason I see for Microsoft to release a new OS is if they come up with a complete rewrite, with all junk code discarded that has piled up through the years (cf. this highlight mentioning the current problem with Windows core architecture). This could be the promise of Midori, which is pointed out as Microsoft's future non-windows operating system, see the next item below.
  Tags: Windows Vista
• Ars technica reports on recent speculations about Midori, a coming non-Windows operating system from Microsoft. Key features of Midori are that it's based on managed code, .NET presumably, which takes the load of memory management off the developer. Further, the OS should be easy to virtualize, even allowing it to run as a separate Windows process. This would facilitate backwards compatibility, as the OS could initially be run inside a legacy Windows OS. Midori is also assumed to be well prepared for cloud computing, allowing for asynchronous API calls and making it easier to program for multiple processors. This last part is important from a performance and efficiency point of view, as CPUs get multiple cores. Multithreaded programming is a difficult and error-prone task, not well suited for the everyday programmer.
  Tags: Midori
• On a lighter note, Lifehacker featuring the How-To Geek, debunks a number of Windows performance tweaking myths. Like registry cleaning and memory optimizing, as is offered by several tools, and disabling of Windows services (except for possibly a few ones). Personally, I use CCleaner to remove temporary files, and I defragment my hard drives a few times a year, which seems to be enough to keep Windows XP reasonably fit.
  Tags: tools, Windows

• Yahoo continues their open strategy with the launch of Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). This is a different offering than SearchMonkey, which just allowed you to enhance the presentation of the search results. The new service has quite liberal terms. It allows you to re-order the search results and mix in other results as you see fit. These are desired options I wrote about in my first post on this blog. The terms also have a no-attribution requirement, which expressively requires you not to mention Yahoo in your search offering. Still you are not allowed to use the search index data in any way you might want to. You must provide a search service, with a search box, and only query the index in response to a search performed by a real user of your service. Also, considering the current uncertainty of the future of Yahoo, building a business on top of BOSS seems a bit risky.
  Tags: search, Yahoo
• From the security department, there was much talk about a potential, yet unexploited flaw in the Domain Name System, DNS, the "address book" of the internet, which translates human friendly URLs to IP addresses. Dan Kaminsky, who discovered the flaw, secretly informed the major vendors without talking to the security community, which has spawned some speculation about the significance of the discovery. The details of the vulnerability will not be publicly disclosed until August 7. Though, it is likely related to insufficient randomness provided by the 16 bit session ID of DNS. In that respect, the vulnerability is rooted in the same problem domain as the OpenSLL flaw I wrote about in May.
  Tags: security
• Two news from the virtual world(s): Google launches a customizable and embeddable virtual world called Lively. Second Life, the hitherto largest virtual world, reported on the first successful teleportation of an avatar between two (experimental) virtual worlds. They also recorded a video of the event.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• Ars Technica writes about recent speculations about a new non-Windows operating system in development at Microsoft, code name Midori. To be released some 9 years from now, probably beyond Windows 8.
  Tags: Windows
• The new URL shortening service bit.ly, has a host of innovative features, including an API, as reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Dave Winer is one of the brains behind the service.
  Tags: URLs, tools
• Soon we might be able to program Flash using C, meaning a speed boost that is useful in gaming applications, for example.
  Tags: Flash
• Moopz, a FriendFeed conversation aggregator reviewed by Sarah Perez. Among the features are item threading, noise reduction and automatic summary and tag generation. Only items containing a link are considered, thus reducing the noise. First impression is that it's a useful service. (Btw. I'm jobol on FriendFeed.)
  Tags: aggregation, FriendFeed
• Josh Catone is back to blogging. Now at SitePoint, a resource site for web developers and designers, where he is running the News & Trends blog. Glad to have him back.
  Tags: Josh Catone
• Finally, a bonus video on the math theme featuring fractals, found via Brad Feld.
  

• A year ago there was much buzz about companies and public institutions embracing virtual worlds like Second Life, but since then the interest has declined and this year has been really quiet, until now perhaps. ReadWriteWeb refers to an article by Alana Semuels of the Los Angeles Times, who writes about several companies who regularly use private islands in Second Life for meetings and conferences, and entrepreneurs that build virtual conference facilities. The social behaviour of avatars is also getting more controlled and uniform, though some excessiveness still occurs. As she writes: "Just like social culture in the real world, it evolves."
  Tags: virtual worlds
• The useful and free Windows system tools from Sysinternals are now available online, as reported by Ed Bott.
  Tags: tools, Windows
• The browser extension Google Gears turns one and is rebranded as Gears, writes ReadWriteWeb. Gears gives developers early access to future web standards proposed in for example HTML 5, as I wrote in a previous highlight about Gears.
  Tags: Gears
• Alex Iskold has another useful post, this time about the lightweight semantic markup techniques microformats, eRDF and RDFa, where the latter, RDFa, is the most capable, but also the most complex in terms of implementation. Further, he gives some background to the Yahoo! SearchMonkey initiative, which is a way to encourage publishers to add semantic markup to their pages. See also my previous highlight about Yahoo semantic search.
  Tags: Semantic Web, Yahoo
• Finally, there was the discussion about comment ownership that I wrote a separate post about.
  Tags: comments