What? How? Who? Etc about the Google Chrome OS in Brief

1. Will be Open Source.
2. Speed, Simplicity, and Security are the pillars of Chrome OS
3. Cloud based OS, which means all your data will be stored online not on the hardisk.
4. Here is the funny part it will be a paid ?
5. Support the latest Web Standards HTML 5 CSS 3.0 etc
6. Not meant to be your Primary OS.
7. Can be run in a Virtual Machine.
8. Main targets are netbooks, since the use of netbooks have been growing at an exponential rate.
9. 7 Second boot time. Everything is flash-memory-based–no hard drive.
10. Will run only web applications no native applications.
11. Chrome OS looks very much like Chrome browser

Here is a video of a prototype of the Chrome OS

What is the Google Chrome OS Video In Brief?

Watch this video which explains it in brief. After the video I have listed out all the technical details.

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2. Uninstall Google Gears From Mac OS X, Windows, Linux
3. Google Updater Service Uninstall, Disable Or Configure The Complete Guide
4. Microsoft’s Secret Run Office 2007 in any Browser And Kill Google Docs, Zoho
5. OpenSocial, OpenBox, OpenMedia What the Hells Going On?

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Google, Open Source, Software, Technology Tags:

Shared Hosting Really Sucks

I while back I recommended bluehost, since their uptime and response time is comparably better than other shared web hosting providers even better than Media Temple overrated Grid Servers. I would like to withdraw my good opinion about them, after they banned my site without giving me a reason. I had to contact tech support to ask them the reason why they had banned me. The reason they gave me turned out to be a really dumb one, according to them I had violated there TOC by posting about a security flaw in myspace and mind you this offending article is more than a year old. I knew they were just looking for a reason to ban me since my site takes up a lot of bandwidth.

Shared hosting sucks for a number of reasons.

1. There are too many Websites crammed onto a single server.
2. You don’t have control over the server resources and application.
3. You are rarely given root/SSH access.
4. Most shared hosts are slow and put restriction on your CPU Usage. My site has show the CPU exceeded error a number of time.

Since my site has grown and deserves much better. The first thing that I did was to purchase a basic Dedicated Virtual Hosting package from Media Temple. I am totally loving the huge increase in performance and response time. My Pingdom account shows that the average response time for the site has dropped below 1 sec unlike the previous 1.5 – 3 sec.

Since MT Dedicated Virtual Hosting is too expensive for me. I did a lot of research into Dedicated Virtual Hosting and finally settled on Slicehost. While I am not a Linux guru I don’t mind getting my hands dirty so currently I am busy teaching myself how to setup a Linux Box from scratch. I plan to run this site on a combination of Lighttpd, MySql, and PHP called a LLMP setup. Expect this site to load 10 times faster than before.

Related posts:

1. Moved To BlueHost Media Temple Grid Server Overrated
2. Advanced Guide On How To Choose A Good Web Host
3. 7 Reasons Why Your Blog Sucks And Digger Hate You
4. Use Free Virtualization Softwares To Run Mutliple OS’s
5. Why My Mom And Dad Don’t Get It

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Technology Tags: Web-Hosting

1. All of them use a some form of Proprietary XML (A super set of HTML) to define the User Interface.
2. The emphasis on the use of existing Web technologies like DOM, JavaScript and CSS.
3. Cross Platform. (Silverlight for Linux called Moonlight is under development and Adobe AIR will run on Linux once version 1.0 is out)

Some people like to point out that XAML is a ripoff of XUL. I don’t fully agree with them, but I am sure Microsoft did borrow some ideas from XUL, but that’s technology my friend, ideas are meant to be copied if someone can do it better then they deserve to win.

One thing that differentiates Silverlight and Adobe AIR from XUL is that both of them come with a runtime engine based on their own advanced Proprietary technology and programming languages i.e. .NET and Flash which greatly enhances their capabilities. And this is where both Silverlight and AIR beat Prism /XUL hands down.

Its interesting to see that Mozilla is pushing Prism as an answer to Silverlight and Adobe AIR. I frankly feel its a rather poor attempt since I don’t see much difference between FireFox and Prism, i.e, Prism is just a stripped down version of FireFox.

XUL had a very good chance at taking a shot at Silverlight and AIR long before they had even come out. XUL, Canvas and SVG could have made a really powerful combination.

Some of the key reasons why XUL fails to compete

• Lack of proper documentation Examples.
• No marketing.
• No advanced programming capabilities.
• Inability to package as a Offline desktop Application.
• A Good IDE. (You can’t expect Web Developers to waste time programming in Notepad)

Out of the three I feel Adobe AIR holds a lot of promise, Silverlight is too tied in to Microsoft own platform and they don’t seem committed to making it work on Linux (if they were they would have developed it they selves instead of giving off the work to Miguel de Icaza and the Mono developers) also it is not possible to native develop desktop applications. Prism/XUL is too raw and unfocused to be considered a worthy competitor.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Launches Killer RIA Say Goodbye to Flash
2. The SilverLight Poster and more on Silverlight and Microsoft
3. Internet Explorer 9 and SilverLight 4 Announced Breaking News
4. Microsoft We Screwed Up Windows Mobile, iPhone Competitor Silverlight Mobile 2010
5. FireFox 3.0 And Opera Have Inbuilt Support For Video, SVG Is Pretty Cool

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Internet, Open Source, Technology Tags: Programming, Silverlight, Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards

One of the aspects of open source that has been touted is the contributions from the community and people involved in the projects. In the case of PHP and Apache I see a clear disconnect between the developers and users(developers and designers who use PHP). When it comes to huge projects the open source model some how tends to break down since its very hard to keep/manage the communities of massive sizes and take everybody’s views.

There are three projects that I would like to point out which have been massively successful in maintaining the open source model.

• Mozilla FireFox
• Joomla
• Ubuntu

All three of these projects have beautiful sites, great marketing, huge communities.
My first experience with open source communities started with Mambo/Joomla CMS and it really fascinated me how a whole community and developers together left Mambo to create Joomla. As a projects becomes bigger other than development and maintenance it becomes important to handle other aspects of the project. Here take a look at some of the key people who are responsible for Joomla. If you notice out of the 17 key founding members only 9-10 of them are developers and project managers below is a list of other roles.

• Sites & Infrastructure Coordinator : Forum Admin
• Shop Team Lead
• Fundraising Team Lead
• Documentation Working Group Coordinator
• Events Team Lead
• Design & Accessibility Working Group Coordinator
• Quality & Testing Working Group Coordinator
• Translations Coordinator
• Marketing & Media Team Lead

Hey even have a honour roll that shows the list of previous Key members and their roles. the same goes for Mozilla FireFox because the roles and responsibilities have been divided among a few key community members the whole project benefits since these key members can focus on their roles. Have you seen The FireFox Campus Edition website do you think a developer came up with this idea? very unlikely. I love the design and plus what a great way to attract students to use FireFox. All they had to do was create a funky looking WebPage and repackage FireFox with some cool/useful extensions. Shows how important marketing and media is for any projects.

Another thing I really liked about Joomla was their forum which is massive and well organised and structured with a ton of volunteers. All the developers, Volunteers have real pictures in their profiles.

The problem with most Open Source projects is they are started by developers who continue to follow the same process even when the’ve grown big without realizing the need to expand and evolve, they rather take refuge in a restricted mailing lists far from the noobs.

Hey WordPress Devs you need to learn a few things here.

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1. "Crystal" Superb Beautiful Open Source Icons
2. MovableType 4 Released Does Anyone Care?
3. Opera Sucks, At Least Some People Have Sense
4. FastCGI for IIS is Released, PHP On IIS Faster Than On Apache
5. Unblock Blocked Websites like Myspace, Bebo and Orkut

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Open Source Tags: Open Source, Web-Design

Readwriteweb author Marshall Kirkpatrick rightly questions is Google Exercising Leadership or Control? I happen to think this is all about gaining control. Google, knew very well that they were incapable of creating a social-network that would become as big as MySpace or Facebook which is evident from the failure of Orkut which has mostly been dominated by Brazilians and Indians(take a look at the public stats page you need to be signed into Orkut to view it). The growth of facebook over the past months has show how opening up a platform to developers, can have a exponential/big impact on on how users use their services.

And suddenly we have API coming up every where. The fact is most of these API aren’t really open and are mostly tied up to their own platform or are severely restricted in terms of usage.

How about the recent announcement about Android

How Google Android Routes Around Java Restrictions.

Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals… and found the solution for the licensing problem. It’s called Dalvik and it’s the new name of Sun’s worst nightmares.

Dalvik is a virtual machine, just like Java’s or .NET’s.. but it’s Google’s own and they’re making it open source without having to ask permission to anyone (well, for now, in the future expect a shit-load of IP-related lawsuits on this, especially since Sun and Microsoft signed a cross-IP licensing agreement on exactly such virtual machines technologies years ago… but don’t forget IBM who has been writing emulation code for mainframes since the beginning of time).

OpenSource Fighting against OpenSource? I guess the GPL wasn’t open enough. Proof that GPL is not a solution for all opensource projects especially for commercial solutions. Google was smart enough to realise not many would invest or touch Android if it was released under a GPL licence. Heck they even have a FAQ about this. Why are you releasing the code under the Apache Software License instead of GPLv2?

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4. Flock The Web 2.0 Social Browser To Be Forever In Beta?
5. Google Chrome OS All About it – Breaking News

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Google, Open Source, Technology Tags: Google, Social-Networks, Web 2.0

With Microsoft’s implementation of the FastCGI open standard, IT Professionals will be able to host PHP applications on Windows Server® 2003 and IIS 6 with increased reliability, scalability, and security. Customers also know that they will be able to count on Microsoft to stand by and service the Microsoft FastCGI Extension. By supporting the open standard, Microsoft has made it possible for PHP and other CGI compliant languages to be hosted efficiently and effectively on Windows Server 2003 and IIS.

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2. Windows Live Mail, Writer and Messenger Beta Released
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4. Recover Lost Forgotten Windows XP Administrator Password
5. Why Is Microsoft So Coy About Service Pack 1 For Vista?

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Microsoft, Open Source, Software Tags: Web-Hosting, Windows

• Instantly publish blog posts
• Connect with your friends across multiple networks
• Easily share your photos, videos and favourite links
• Create your own world so you are also informed
• Inbuilt RSS feed reader
• Instantly find media form Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook
• Grab your favourite photos, text and links
• Instantly upload photos Flickr, Photobucket, Piczo and Facebook
  

To download Flock, click HERE

Post published by Michael, find more about me HERE

Related posts:

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4. ScribeFire 1.4.1 Released
5. The Best Free Blogging Tools for Power Bloggers

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Open Source, Software Tags: FireFox, Photos, Social-Networks, Software

While you might have heard of Flash, SilverLight etc which are proprietary application frameworks to create RIA(Rich Internet Application) and have been developed by Adobe and Microsoft respectively. But did you know that Firefox has inbuilt support for various frameworks such as SVG, Theora and OGG, which can be used to create and build RIAs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) an Open Standard by W3C is an XML specification and file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated.
• Ogg is an open standard for a free container format for digital multimedia, unrestricted by software patents and designed for efficient streaming and manipulation.
• Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies’ VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3’s lineage, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video (e.g., H.264, Xvid and DivX), RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.

FireFox 3 Added Inbuilt Support for Video Playback

FireFox 3.0 has officially added inbuilt support for the open video format Theora. You can download FireFox 3.0 from here to see the examples in action. For example you can easily use Html tag like the example given below to show a video without the need for installing any Third Party tool to view the video.

Also Check Out this cool implementation of the inbuilt video support and SVG it tries to simulate the Microsoft Surface interface.

FireFox 3 And RIA

What do think happens if you are able to combine all these Three Open Source Standard? I see the possibility of creating RIA based purely on Open Standards.

While SVG has been there for a really long time and FireFox has inbuilt support for it not many use it for animation. I did a bit of hunting around and found some cool SVG Applications. These are built using only SVG hence you can view them only in FireFox.

• Blobular – Check out this amazing demo using SVG. If you play around with it you can see how powerful SVG is.
• Photos – If you have seen Microsoft Surface then this demo will Wow you.
• CanvasScape – How about a 3D game
• An MS Paint Application

source: Mozillalinks

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2. How To Restore And Recover Your Firefox Bookmarks
3. Opera Sucks, At Least Some People Have Sense
4. FireFox Hidden Easter Egg – The Book Of Mozilla
5. Google Announces "Gears" Offline Support For Web Applications

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Open Source, Software, Technology Tags: FireFox, Silverlight, Web-Development

Adobe’s Creative Suite is one of the best productivity products of, perhaps, all time. And yet, does it really serve to be the perfect product for everyone?

With Adobe’s not-too-recent acquisition of Macromedia, the next release of a Creative Suite would be sure to include Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. CS3 sure did, but at a cost: over AU$2,000 (US$1,500) and that’s just for Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop! For both Macromedia and Adobe’s Products, you would fork out AU$4,445 (US$1,399). There just has to be a better way!

Luckily, there is. There are several open-source and shareware/freeware options out there.

Photoshop

• The Gimp is a open-source “photo manipulation program”. With excellent flexibility, loads of plugins and a interface that looks suspiciously similar to the real thing, The Gimp is an excellent alternative to Photoshop.
• Paint.NET, which utilises the Microsoft .NET Framework to create a stable, lightweight app with nearly every major function the home user could want, from a Lasso tool to Gaussian blur. The interface is completely familiar, with the added benefit of translucent panels that make it easy to see what’s going on when the windows get cluttered. Paint.NET doesn’t yet support RAW format, however, which certainly limits its range.

Illustrator

• The only major free competitor for this vector image editing program is Inkscape, again open-source, which is very responsive and extensible. Easily a very good, well written program. Sure, it looks a bit different, but when it comes down to it, Inkscape’s interface is still very easy to use.

Adobe Acrobat

• Adobe’s Own free version of Acrobat. Mind you, it’s laggy and is for viewing pdf files only.
• Foxit Reader is the pdf viewer that I personally use, and is very compatiable with different forms of pdf files. It also has basic editing tools, and may, in the future, come with a built-in OCR software.

Dreamweaver

• Nvu is an excellent, intuitive program that I was using at one point. The interface is very clean, and Nvu can (like Dreamweaver) edit in WYSIWYG or code view. The produced code is very clean and user-firendly, validates and uses CSS.
• RapidWeaver, (Mac only) is very similar to Apple’s own iWeb software in both its looks and designs. The code produced is valid, although not as nice-looking as Dreamweaver or Nvu.

Edit

• Notepad ++ is an extraordinarily useful replacement for Note pad. However, its main feature (for me) is that it supports automatic code highlighting, enabling it to be a replacement for Dreamweaver’s Code View. Open-source, useable and light-weight, Notepad ++ is perfect for coders (it supports many languages, Python, HTML, CSS, C, C+ etc etc).

Summing Up

Here are the best alternative that I would use to replace the Creative Suite. However, with these programs, you don’t get the “combined” interface that CS3 has, and there are not (due to licensing restrictions) alternatives for every product.

Me? I use CS3 (a legal copy; remember, pirates are losers) and because I could afford it, I prefer it to these Alternatives.

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2. Plotr 0.2.0 OpenSource JavaScript Charting Library
3. Flock The Web 2.0 Social Browser To Be Forever In Beta?

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Design, Open Source, Software Tags: Adobe, Free, Open Source, Photoshop, Software

A new version of ScribeFire, one of the most popular blogging Extension for FireFox has been released after a long time. Most of the changes are cosmetic. Here’s the list of changes. You can download it from the Official Mozilla repository for extensions. (You might want to wait a few more hours before you download it, since the Extension has not been fully loaded and takes time to get updated on the repository)

• Navbar is now collapsed by default
• Rotated nav bar toggle to show direction of flyout
• Shrunk sidebar toggle to match navbar toggle
• Restyled publish button to be more consistent
• Moved navbar and sidebar toggles into the top row the editor to save space
• Categories have been relabeled as tags
• Added confirmation to post deletion
• Blog list now uses radio buttons
• Added link to each blog in blog list
• Removed “View this blog” link from bottom of editor
• Put blogs, tags in groupboxes
• Moved “add/edit blog” button into groupbox
• Moved “add tag” button into groupbox
• Fixed bug where all spaces were being encoded as
• Added Strong, Em buttons to editor
• Fixed blockquote button
• Added Dutch translation

Source: ScribeFire

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4. Flock The Web 2.0 Social Browser To Be Forever In Beta?
5. Clean A Free Wordpress Theme

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Software, Wordpress Tags: Download, FireFox