Microsoft and Yahoo? 2 + 2 ≠ 4!

All this Microsoft and Yahoo stuff has got me thinking — how desperate are the CEOs of Microsoft to narrow the gap between them and Google?

How to Hack Silverlight for Linux in 21 days

A developer and his team from the Mono project were offered by Microsoft a 10 – 20 minute presentation on the Mono project's efforts on bringing Silverlight to Linux. As all they had working at that point was a rectangle that could move a bit and not much else, the team decided that they would stage a 20 day hack-a-thon to complete as much Linux XAML implementation as possible before the talk which was going to be 21 days later.

At the SLIDE7 event a Microsoft speaker said that they were developing the Silverlight plugin for both Mac and Windows; IE and Firefox — but not for Linux, as there was 'not enough demand' for it. 

It'll be great to see the new 'Moonlight' plugin for Mozilla when the first few alpha or beta builds surface.  

MS Slide7: Go to hell Hull

I recently went to a Microsoft event in Reading called SLIDE7. We were informed of the event by a lecturer at the University. It is a Web development day put on by Microsoft, dedicated to students; Or at least I thought it was…

Upon arriving at the event, we passed mild-to-medium security, as each visitor had a unique badge to identify them, and to allow them access to the event. As I am an idiot, I signed up my Hotmail account over 5 years ago, so my badge said (with all appropriate Microsoft branding, of course ;P ) …

Andy Callaghan
Jib Corp.

The day began with a strongly Silverlight themed keynote speech by a senior education guy at MS. We were shown what could only be described as an advert for Silverlight, including skaters, young people, 'Web 3.0', nothing related to Silverlight whatsoever and lots of lovely swirling colours. Pretty!

What I couldn't stand was that at the beginning of the presentation, the speaker personally thanked the University of Hull for various things (I can't remember what now). This is the same University of Hull who have three of the five Software Engineering Imagine Cup invitationals, and stole the title this year away from fellow friends competing in the UK finals. It was so plain to see that some obvious dodging dealings had happened between Ms and Hull over money and Imagine Cup success in exchange for fresh young MS ready clones graduates.

A little birdie told me that the 'reason' why Hull 'win' the IC UK final so much is that their first year Computer Scientist's get taught C# in the first term. Not exactly from basics… At Reading, we got taught C and then C++ which is a lot more solid introduction to good programming skills. C# teaches jack.

Ehem. 

My group of friends then decided to go with the beginner track rather than the advanced track, so we got ASP.NET and more interestingly a mis-titled talk called 'Mobile Web Development' after lunch, which was incidentally extremely nice and was effectively all-you-can-eat, as MS had order about two lunches per person at the event. Woot!

The mobile development talk however was presented by none other than Hull's very own Rob Miles. The lecture was good, but we were all a bit miffed to be taught in effect, by the enemy. Here a picture of the event that the lecturer took on the day of all the attendees in his talk…

I am the hairy on the 4th row from the front, 3 seats in from the right.

I think this is a good place to point out that in all the talks, something went wrong. Not saying that it's the speakers fault, as I know how hard it is to put on events, but it is sweet to see MS techies squirm as they claim that the application is failing as "it's only an beta version".

At the end of the day we received a surprisingly good lecture about Silverlight. MS plan to make Silverlight compatible with IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows and MacOSX.

At the end of the talk, my friend Ruben asked the speaker "Why are you providing Silverlight support in Linux?", at which point the speaker conveyed that there is simply not enough demand for Linux for it to be worth their while. Fair enough I guess, at least they acknowledged it's existence…

After the Silverlight talk we had a complementary BBQ, and then we all went to the pub and then back home. Good times!

Apple release Safari Beta for Windows

In a move to further Apple's brand on PCs, they announced yesterday that the new Safari 3 beta version is to be made available for Windows users. In a statement, Steve Jobs said:

"We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive Web browsing can be with Safari. Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari's superior browsing experience too." Source

I believe that the new version of Safari will convert some Firefox users, and hopefully in time – IE users. For Apple, it is yet another demonstration of Apple furthering their brand to the average Microsoft user.

Without the iPod, Apple may well be now dead or nearly so. 

So far, the iPod has been hugely successful at making young people aware of Apple, and the style they bring. The Safari GUI being a more mature version of the iPod's design will inevitably draw the iWhores in.

Borisbot Chatbot

I have now finished and handed in my Chatbot final year assessment project for Programming at Reading University. Whenever I get the time I will release the source code, and executables for Windows and Linux as open source. The following is an extract from a reflection I gave on Reading's own Comptuing community, Redgloo…

I've leant alot about C++ whilst doing this project.

The main area that has signicantly improved my code during this project was in classes and objects. I have been able to manipulate them in such a way that means that I can reuse exactly the same classes later and still be completely relevant. I quickly setup a files class and object.

I quickly saw that implementing this class simplified my code significantly, and reduced my main() to only 16 lines of code.

In the end, the problem boiled down to only a few cruicial function:
1. Read()
2. Respond()
Written in C++ code as
respond( read () );

This was then encased within a do-while loop.

Before beginning the chatbot project, I had little clue about how to implement fiels in C++. But lots of coffee, skittles and visits to cplusplus.com later, I can basically do anything with them.

Half way through the problem, I soon came to realise that C++ is not the ideal language for chatbots to be written in. Unlike most modern languages, C++ is platform dependent (with larger programs anyway), has no regular expression in built functions and handles stings extremely badly.

Regular expression would have been a Godsend to this project, as they could have searched through a user's input for particular words. But i had to make do with setting up vectors of strings, and compairing two vector elements together methodically.

We’re in the second round of the Imagine Cup 2007!

Me and my team, Rediverse entered the Web Development invitational for the 2007 Imagine Cup competition in Korea run by Microsoft and other companies.

Stage one consisted of around 200 teams and required each team to produce a document detailing what we would do if were to go through.

Our plan is secret at the moment, as we don’t want people to nick ideas off of us, but it involves education, the web, ASP, .NET, C# and plenty of pizza, beer and late night coding sessions!

We and 59 other teams go through to the second round, and get to actually make our product. We will also present our final product to judges at the UK Finals around the 20th May.

I’m so excited about this; I can’t wait to get my little fingers whirring, coding a complete web system with my friends.

Microsoft and the cheesy vision of the future

It may sound stupid, but Microsoft are thinking way into the distant future (3 years) of what using their collaboration software will be like in 2010.

This is one of the most corniest things I’ve seen in a long time, but they say it’s ‘visionary’.

Video: Microsoft’s Vision of 2010.

Lots of work, stress and virus troubles. Cancel or Allow?

I have got alot of work to complete recently – my algorithms assignment, software engineering and final programming project (to be uploaded in the not to distant future).

So I, Andy Callaghan, officially blame Windows Vista for making my life even more stressful by ‘contracting’ a virus mid-programming and doing my work.

Due to the Windows virus, I got banned from the Uni network. The viral traffic was detected by the Universities firewalls. They completely locked me down… no email or web (except the windows update site, naturally). I was crapping myself. I couldn’t access (still can’t to a degree) my network drive in the University so none of my work could be accessed.

After installing all the anti-virus software they could throw at me, they unbanned then quickly banned me again a day after with the same reason – Poebot virus traffic.

All of this, was occurring on a fully up-to-date legal version of Windows Vista – reportedly the most secure operating system that M$ have ever produced. Safe? Yeah right. The user-access control is a joke! (but you can Cancel of Allow anything that the system may do!).

It is simply not sensible to trust all my work and grades in an insecure system.

I duly formatted the Vista infestation off of my machine, and reinstalled Win XP.

To add insult to injury the Windows installer, of course, completely scrubbed the boot sector of my drive for it’s own boot loader, erasing GRUB – so I couldn’t boot into openSuse. I rebuilt the boot-loader from the openSuse disk, to then find that Windows had corrupted my root drive for Linux.

A re-install of openSuse allowed me to see that my t’internet connection had been re-enabled as my entire machine was functioning in openSuse. However in Windows, after a fresh install and driver install of what I could, the following still don’t work.

• Network
• Sound
• Dual screen (even with Nvidia drivers installed)
• Webcam, printer and scanner (but these are less important)

I am now enjoying openSuse, merely because it works perfectly and is a lot less likely to lose my work by viruses. Kdevelop rocks!

This is a picture of my openSuse desktop, in all of it’s dual-head transparency loveliness.

Ending comments:

If (exoskeleton || (green && wiggles)) eat_it();

Windows Live OneCare fails basic virus detection tests

An independent security group that test the effectiveness of the major virus scanners have failed to certify Windows Live OneCare because of it’s crappy performance in the tests.

The following programs were tested:

Avast
AVG
AVIRA
BitDefender
Dr.Web
eScan
NOD32
FortiClient
F-Prot
F-Secure
AVK
Kaspersky
McAfee
MS OneCare
Norman VC
Symantec Norton
Trustport AVW

WIndows Live OneCare on average detected only 80% of infections, whereas other programs such as AVK can boast over 99.4% detection rate of all the viruses detected.

See the report here

Europe not happy with Microsoft. Again.

The chair of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), has recently accused the big M of trying to ‘hijack HTML’ and take the web away from open standards with the new XML-based declarative language XAML, which is only available with .NET 3.0 Framework, and therefore only Vista, XP and Server 03.

The website, www.xaml.net details most of the technical stuff, and writes the following requirements for the new ’standard’.

• Windows XP (SP2), Server 2003 or Vista
• Pentium-class 1GHz CPU (min) and 256 MB RAM (min)
• DirectX 9 hardware accelerated graphics

That doesn’t sound standard at all!