Firefox 3.5 ! Downloaded 5 million times in first 24 hours !

July 5th, 2009
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Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday, 30th June 2009. The new version of the popular open source web browser has attracted considerable attention and is already seeing rapid adoption. It was downloaded over 5 million times during the first 24 hours. This falls short of the record-setting 8 million downloads that Firefox 3 had during its first day, but it still reflects the intense enthusiasm of the browser’s fans.

 

Firefox’s popularity has rapidly climbed over the past few years, bringing it up to between 20-30 percent of the global browser market, according to various Web analytics firms. Based on data collected from 850,000 web sites, tracking firm whos.amung.us says that Firefox 3.5 by itself now accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of the browser market, more than the total market share of rival Opera.

browsermarketshare

 

When Mozilla released Firefox 3 last year, the company planned an elaborate Download Day event, encouraging supporters to obtain the software on the day of the release. They aimed to set a new Guinness Record for the most user-initiated downloads of a software program in one day. The event was highly successful and resulted in 8 million downloads at launch, with the first million in only four hours.

The community’s grass-roots marketing efforts for the Firefox 3.5 launch were not as intensive or widely publicized, but still had a significant impact. Mozilla planned a social network campaign called the Shiretoko Shock, which instructed participants to promote the release on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook at 3:50 PM in their respective time zones. The idea was that the “shockwave” would ripple out from the core community of volunteer Firefox evangelists and spread virally as others re-tweeted and echoed the initial posts. This campaign and general widespread interest in the release propelled Firefox onto Twitter’s trending topics list.

The collective number of total Firefox downloads exceeded 500 million last year and is currently estimated at roughly 950 million. It could exceed one billion by the end of August.

Firefox 3.5 will be available for Windows, Mac and Linux users from Mozilla’s site, or existing Firefox users can click on the Help button and select “Check for Updates”. You can simply just click the following download links to get your Mozilla Firefox 3.5 right away!

Download Firefox - Free 3.5 for Windows English (US) (7.7MB)

Download Firefox - Free 3.5 for Mac OS English (US) (7.7MB)

Download Firefox - Free 3.5 for Linux English (US) (7.7MB)

 What’s the crazy thing in Firefox 3.5!

  • Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:
  • Available in more than 70 languages.
  • Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
  • Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
  • Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
  • The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing.
  • Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
  • Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
  • Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Refreshingly new and Improved Features!

Awesome Bar

A quick way to get to the sites you love—even the ones with addresses you only vaguely remember. Type in term into location bar (aka the Awesome Bar) and the auto complete function includes possible matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you’ve bookmarked and tagged in a drop down.

For example, you could enter the tag: “investments” to find “www.fool.com”. The Awesome Bar learns as you use it—over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better fitting matches. New enhancements for Firefox 3.5 give you greater control over the Awesome Bar, and include privacy settings.

Super Speed

Fasten your seatbelt: Firefox 3.5 includes the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which gives the browser dramatically better performance than ever before. Firefox has always been fast, but this is the fastest Firefox ever (more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2), meaning Web applications like email, photo sites, online word processors and more will feel snappier and more responsive.
Instant Web Site ID

Want to be extra sure about a site’s legitimacy before you make a purchase? Click on a site favicon for an instant identity overview. Another click digs deeper: how many times have you visited? Are your passwords saved? Check up on suspicious sites, avoid Web forgeries and make sure a site is what it claims to be.

Location-Aware Browsing

Now Firefox can tell websites where you’re located so you can find info that’s more relevant and more useful (for example, getting directions or finding restaurants near you).

It’s all optional - Firefox doesn’t share your location without your permission - and is done with the utmost respect for your privacy.

Private Browsing

Need to use someone else’s computer? Switch on Private Browsing mode and nothing will be recorded about your session, including cookies, history, and any other potentially private information.
Better privacy controls

The Privacy preference pane has been completely redesigned to offer users more control over their private information. Users can choose to retain or discard anything including history information, cookies, downloads, and form field information.  In addition, users can specify whether or not to include history and/or bookmarks in the location bar’s automated suggestions, so you can keep private web addresses from popping up unexpectedly while typing in the location bar.


So when are you joining the band?

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Search..or Bing ? | Microsoft’s Search Engine Review

June 19th, 2009
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Finally “Bing” beta is out !!! or is it really !!! Microsoft has been trying to capture the intenet market for quiet some time. In the begining with the MSN search and then with live search, and now with Bing.

There are scores of other internet search websites and portals, including Yahoo Search, ASK and other included, but none of them have been very successful in capturing the average internet user’s imagination. Everyone knows that the key to a great search is to get the results using the least possible keywords, and in the least possible time too. Who cares how many results we get when we try to search for Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie? We want the first result to be the link to what we are searching for.

AdAge reports that 42 percent of all searches need to be refined after the first query. Furthermore, it has been found that 25 percent of all post-search clicks hit the back button instead of a Website link when looking at the search results page.The inability to find what you want on the first try may be where Bing has an edge…or at least, that is what Microsoft believes it will.

One of the prominent “blings” that Bing boasts about is the “related categories” feature. Well you might say that “other popular” search providers have it too. What is so great about Bing? Well I had the same question, so I did some searching of my own, using Bing of course.

A Simple search for the word Microsoft reveals the Microsoft is trying to see the obvious that others are catching up and they need to do so too.

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However searching for the word “Apple” gives us MTV Roadies battle Ground as the sponsored result. And Apple, like the fruit turns up sixth in the related searches. What exactly is the user trying to search for is what bing needs to look at.

One of the best things about Google is that one can find links to all of Google’s most used services right from Google’s home page. One-click access to Gmail, YouTube, and Orkut from Google.com is a great feature, and shows that Google knows how integrated all aspects of your digital life are. Yahoo is also a fan of one-click access to other Yahoo services, but have you ever tried to find a link to Hotmail on Live Search? You can’t, because the link to Hotmail doesn’t exist.  
 
 

If Microsoft wants searches to come its way and away from Google and Yahoo, Bing needs to integrate with other Microsoft services like Hotmail and MSN Messenger to name a few and not just the ones directly related to search. For example, Microsoft offers 25GB of free online photo storage. Without a Hotmail account you wouldn’t know about it, because there is no link to it on Microsoft’s two primary portals: MSN and Live Search. Microsoft needs to see that it’s not enough if you have the power, you need to let others know about it. People should see that you have it and they can use it, that’s when you can make some money out of it.

MSN Search first launched in the fall of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results (list of web addresses with samples of content that meet a user’s query), the index of which is updated weekly or even daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004 (based on several years of research), and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.

The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. Windows Live Search aimed to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month “more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions.” The new search engine offered users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta.

In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, powered by their own internal image search algorithms.

On March 21, 2007, it was announced that Microsoft would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service to Live Search.And now Bing is out.

That makes Bing the third rebranding in five years, and the fourth, overall, for Microsoft’s search service. Instead of focusing on constant renaming, hopefully, Microsoft has found its final search brand name in Bing.

No matter what Microsoft has planned for Bing, it will be judged against the search’s gold standard: Google.

So what do you think? Will you be Binging or is the Microsoft’s search effort bound to fail?

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My introduction to SMF | Service Management Facility on Solaris 10

June 5th, 2009
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This is my attempt to put down in writing on my initial stints with something crazy that I found on the cool operating system on the planet, Solaris 10.

Solaris-10 introduces new SMF (Service Management Facility) to manage the daemons or services on Unix providing an alternative to the old and traditional SVR4 rc/init scripts. There are several advantages included and the approach to managing the services with SMF has changed quiet a significant, that a service will auto start itself incase the service goes down, providing a self-healing mechanism and a better sleep to system administrators :-)

SMF, by the way, kind of inspiration from the best of Windows services, has introduced the dependencies to the services on Unix. A service can be defined to be  dependent on another service, such that it would not start unless the other service is running, making sure the dependency map is satisfied.

Morever, another good point about SMF is that it decreases the overall boot time of a operating system by parallelizing the startup of the services. In the traditional startup SVR4 style init scripts where there are run sequentially, the SMF intelligently manages dependency map of the services and attempts to get the services online parallelly starting with the basic services like multiuser environment and filesystem. So, parallel startup improves the overall system boot time.

Unlike the system runlevels in SVR4/traditional Unix/Linux, SMF introduces milestones. Example milestones are single-user milestone, devices milestone, network milestone, multiuser milestone and there can be more milestones defined too. Interestingly, a milestone can be dependent milestone on another milestone. SMF is unique with more features like configuration repository, like you can revert to the old service state if any of the new changes to a service are not working, from the snapshots of service configuration repository.

SMF has extensive logging, so debugging a troublesome service is made easy with service specific logs generally stored under /var/svc/log directory.

This is just a start of my notes on the interesting technology of SMF, but I will add more as and when I get a chance to, in the coming series of articles and update the links here. Please bookmark! :-)

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BSOD | Blue screen error of death | windbg troubleshooting

June 5th, 2009
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Blue screen of Death signifies a state where the Windows operating system cannot proceed further and will need the system to be shutdown, because of either a serious hardware conflicts or system errors.

When you look at the blue screen error, it is typical that there are some strange error codes and descriptions specific to the problem. Also known as a Stop error, Blue screen error or casually BSOD. These errors are common due to hardware IRQ conflicts, faulty device drivers, or faulty memory access. If the error has occurred for the first time on your machine, it could be just because of an addition of new hardware. Removing any newly installed device drivers or sometimes just restarting the system will get through the BSOD, but if the issue is occurring repeatedly then there is something more cooking than what a general reboot normally gives a solution.

I have had my turns and heads with Windows BSOD and with some searching here and there on the internet, I figured out that there are better ways to resolve the BSOD permanently. One of them is the ‘windbg’ tool, this has proven quiet handy for me personally and I recommend this tool to be very best in the field.

If you are a serious guy on Windows, and you have encountered BSOD, it is important to understand what is behind the screen causing everything to be just blue with some weird meaning white characters all over.

Whenever a blue screen occurs on your machine, System generates a file named MEMORY.DMP under the directory of C:\WINNT ( this is the default path and you change the location at My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Settings tab in Startup and Recovery column ). The files with extension .DMP are not readable in nomal text editors, they are binary in format. Microsoft generously provided a tool called ‘windbg’, for evaluating these memory dump files and provide the crucial information and hinting reasons for causing the BSOD ( Blue Screen Of Death ).

Enough of the talk, now let us quickly proceed to see how to make use of Windbg tool.

How to use windbg tool: 

  • Install windbg on your machine. You can download windbg from here
  • This is a small executable and installs in just a few quick seconds.
  • Run windbg from Start -> Programs -> Debugging Tools for Windows. This opens a window with a blank screen.
  • Now select File -> Source file and point to the memory.dmp file on your machine. Generally, located under %WINNT% directory.
  • Note: windbg can work on memory dump files created on any hardware certified by microsoft under HAL. This is usually the case that when a machine is not able to boot, the hard disk can be plugged onto another Windows machine and windbg tool can still operate on the .dmp files that are generated on other Windows machines.
  • Once windbg is pointed to the dump file, you can see a textpad frame containing a number of hexadecimal numbers and errors.
  • Don’t worry, this is although cryptic, we do not have to decipher it and do not play with them :-), this is the business of windbg :-)
  • Find out the section with a header ‘Bugcheck Analysis” under which you find below similar lines: 

Example:

-----------------------
*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (50)
Invalid system memory was referenced.  This cannot be protected by try-except,
it must be protected by a Probe.  Typically the address is just plain bad or it
is pointing at freed memory.
Arguments:
Arg1: eaed4304, memory referenced.
Arg2: 00000000, value 0 = read operation, 1 = write operation.
Arg3: bf89ba6c, If non-zero, the instruction address which referenced the bad memory
      address.
Arg4: 00000001, (reserved)
-----------------------
  • In most cases, the above information will yield the exact reasons explaining the root cause for the BSOD errors. In the above case the error was caused due to accessing of a faulty or non-paged system memory (pointing fingers at your application accessing other application data! ).

7. If your are not able to understand the cause from the above section, you have hyperlink “!analyze -v” present on the same page. Click the hyperlink and you will some technical error codes representing the error caused. The “!analyze -v” tool for the above error has resulted me the following error codes: 

-----------------------
READ_ADDRESS: unable to get nt!MmSpecialPoolStart
unable to get nt!MmSpecialPoolEnd
unable to get MmPageSize (0x0) - probably bad symbols
eaed4304
FAULTING_IP:
+ffffffffbf89ba6c
GetContextState failed, 0x80070026
GetContextState failed, 0x80070026
GetContextState failed, 0x80070026
GetContextState failed, 0x80070026
bf89ba6c ??              ???
MM_INTERNAL_CODE:  1
DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID:  DRIVER_FAULT
BUGCHECK_STR:  0x50
STACK_TEXT:
GetContextState failed, 0x80070026
Unable to get current machine context, Win32 error 0n38
 
STACK_COMMAND:  kb
SYMBOL_NAME:  ANALYSIS_INCONCLUSIVE
FOLLOWUP_NAME:  MachineOwner
MODULE_NAME: Unknown_Module
IMAGE_NAME:  Unknown_Image
DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP:  0
BUCKET_ID:  CORRUPT_MODULELIST
Followup: MachineOwner
-----------------------

The error code in bold “DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID” is what you have to look at here. In this case it is “DRIVER_FAULT”, meaning it was a driver conflict or error which has caused the BSOD. You can now proceed with further troubleshooting like finding out if there were any recent hardware/driver changes made to the systems and so on. 

Few Tips: 

  • There could be situations where the bsod doesn’t even allow you to start your operating system, then just try removing any newly installed hardware components on your machine will work most of the times. If not, then look for where exactly the BSOD is being displayed, is it when the windows is starting? Then try logging into Safe mode/Command prompt (by pressing F8 key at the boot menu) and get the dump files copied to another machine and then troubleshoot the issue. 
  • If it is a memory related error, then try swapping the memory modules between their slots. 
  • If it is because of bad blocks on the harddisk, boot the machine from the bootable disk and use the ‘chkdsk’ utility with /P option to fix the bad blocks on your hard disk. 

Useful links:

What is a BSOD?

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Data recovery software or tools for a formatted hard disk!

May 21st, 2009
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Data recovery software or tools for a formatted hard disk!

Recently couple of months back, I have formatted my comp’s hard disk and later realised that I had some important files on the formatted disk which are lost. I have searched for data recovery tools online but most of them I could get were of trail version. It was then that one of my friends told me about Recuva a free data recovery tool. This is the first time I have used a data recovery tool and it worked successfully for me. I was able to recover all my files from the formatted hard disk. I then started exploring more about such free data recovery tools and unbelievably I could find plenty of them, and probably because my google search techniques improved a lot!

During my hunt for the recovery tools, I have come across many forums saying that you cannot retrieve the data from a formatted hard disk most of the times unless you are lucky enough to get through, but I strongly feel against it. After my first data recovery experience two months back, I have come across same kind of issues with few of my neighbours and friends hard disks. I started using the free and powerful data recovery tools and I was able to recover all their data back and it was only once that I couldn’t recover some of the files as they were in a bad state and were unreadable.

Lemme all tell you some juicy stuff here, usually formatting a hard disk does not erase the data present on it, but instead just deletes the references to all files on the disk. Any file system that maintains inode tables which contain information about location of a file on the hard disk, which sector? which block? etc…and formatting this hard disk will only delete these inode entries and creates a new file system on the hard disk. That is the reason you cannot access data from your Operating System after the hard disk is formatted since you do not have any references to them.

The data recovery tools are designed to read this over-written inode/file system information and scans through the entire disk partition to get the information about which file existed where on the hard disk before it being formatted. However we have advanced data wiping tools which rewrite the entire disk partition with a fixed format of hexadecimal code in which case it becomes impossible to read any previous data on the disk.

Trivia: DOS’ FORMAT command writes the hexadecimal code ‘F6′ to every data sector on the disk during the format operation.

I am sure that by following the below steps you should be able to recover all your data back from a formatted hard disk:

1. As soon as you realise that you have to recover the data from a formatted hard disk, stop using it for any of your activities and place it aside safely. The less you have used the formatted hard disk, the more becomes the chances for you to recover complete data in good format. This is because when you keep using the formatted hard disk, the disk re-writes new information into different areas of your hard disk in which case the data recovery tools may not be able to recognise the over written files and shall not retrieve the required data.

2. Never install the data recovery software on the disk/partition that you want to recover data from unless the software specifically recommends you to do so. This is because the data recovery software tries to read and restructure the deleted inode information for the files and will face difficulties if it is running on the same hard disk on which the “needs to be reocovered” data exists.

Let me talk about Recuva which was the first data recovery tool I used and I am glad that it still stands the best among that I have come across:

  1. You can download Recuva from www.recuva.com
  2. Install this tool on a different different hard disk/partition other than the one you wanna recover data from.
  3. Connect the formatted hard disk as an external drive.
  4. Open the Recuva tool Wizard from Start->Programs.
  5. You can specify the type of files Pictures, Music, Documents, Video or other type of files that needs to be recovered.
  6. You can select a specific location from which you are trying to recover data from or select the entire drive. Note: Narrowing your search location will lower the time taken to recover files. You can also say that you are not sure about the location so that the software scans the entire list of drives on your machines.
  7. Select Start scan button to start scanning for recoverable files. You can enable the “deep scan” option if you not able to find the files you are looking for with the simple scan. Note that deep scan might take few hours depending on the disk size.
    Recovery with Recuva

    Recovery with Recuva

  8. Above is a sample picture of the files listed by software. The red ball indicates that the file is in bad condition and will not be able to recover the file in readable format. Green ball indicates that the file can be successfully retrieved. You also yellow ball (not shown in the picture) which indicates that the file is partiatlly recoverable.
  9. The ‘info’ tab on the right side gived the inode information for the selected file eg: Creation time etc.
  10. If you remenber the file name or part of the file name that you wanna recover you can quickly find it by putting it in the search box.
  11. Select the files by ticking the check box for the files and click on Recover button to start recovering them. You will be asked to specify a location to save these recovered files during the recovery process.

Other options with the tool:

- The view of files can be changed to either Tree mode or thumbnail mode. Tree mode makes it easy for you to browse to the specific folder under C:\ drive and also recover selected folders at once. Please find a sample pictures below:

Advanced Data recovery

You are also provided with some advanded options like selecting hidden files from Options->Action tab.

There are also a list of other free data recovery tools along with their download links as mentioned below. The procedure for installing and using any other data recovery tool will mostly be similar to the one explained above.

Hope you find this article informative and you have a successful data recovery, in case you are trying to. Please do let us know your experience (with any other tools?) in the comments section. :-)

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