Yahoo!

There’s an interesting easter egg on Yahoo! website. Go to Yahoo! website and try clicking on the exclamation mark on the red Yahoo! logo with your audio speakers on. It only works on Classic Yahoo.com, so if you see ‘m.www.yahoo.com’ on your browser address bar, click on ‘Return to Classic Yahoo.com’ link first before clicking the exclamation mark.
It requires JavaScript and Flash, so if you’re blocking JavaScript and/or Flash, remember to unblock them for Yahoo! website.
Go on, try it for a little fun.

OpenOffice.org is available for these operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows
• Linux RPM
• Linux DEB
• Solaris x86
• Solaris SPARC
• Mac OSX Intel
• Mac OSX PPC

OpenOffice.org is a collection of applications that work together closely to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. The components available include:

Writer

A word processor similar in look and feel to Microsoft Word or WordPerfect and offering a comparable range of functions and tools. It also includes the ability to export Portable Document Format (PDF) files with no additional software, and can also function as a basic WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing web pages.

Calc

A spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system which automatically defines series for graphing, based on the layout of the user’s data. Calc is also capable of writing spreadsheets directly as a PDF file.

Impress

A presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint. It can export presentations to Adobe Flash (SWF) files, allowing them to be played on any computer with the Flash player installed. It also includes the ability to create PDF files, and the ability to read Microsoft PowerPoint’s .ppt format. Impress suffers from a lack of ready-made presentation designs. However, templates are readily available on the Internet.

Base

A database program similar to Microsoft Access. Base allows the creation and manipulation of databases, and the building of forms and reports to provide easy access to data for end-users. As with Access, Base may be used as a front-end to a number of different database systems, including Access databases (JET), ODBC data sources and MySQL/PostgreSQL. Base became part of the suite starting with version 2.0. Native to the OpenOffice.org suite is an adaptation of HSQL. While ooBase can be a front-end for any of the databases listed, there is no need for any of them to be installed.

Draw

A vector graphics editor comparable in features to early versions of CorelDRAW. It features versatile "connectors" between shapes, which are available in a range of line styles and facilitate building drawings such as flowcharts. It has similar features to Desktop publishing software such as Scribus and Microsoft Publisher.

Math

A tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae, similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. Formulae can be embedded inside other OpenOffice.org documents, such as those created by Writer. It supports multiple fonts and can export to PDF.

What’s new on OpenOffice.org 3.0

In addition to read and write support for the Microsoft Office binary file formats (.doc; .xls, .ppt, etc.), OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 is now capable of opening files created with Microsoft Office 2007 or Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). Thus, OpenOffice.org users can interact with users still using Microsoft Office. The various filters for the Microsoft Office file formats also make mixed environments possible, so that some users stay on Microsoft Office while others use OpenOffice.org.

Mac OS X users will be pleased with 3.0 as OS X support is even more robust. OpenOffice.org 3.0 works right out of the box with minimal effort. Another good news for OS X users is that features that were dropped from the Mac version of Microsoft Office such as the spreadsheet Solver and VBA support are included in the Mac version of OpenOffice.org.

Better collaboration is one of the new features in OpenOffice.org 3.0. Spreadsheet collaboration is now possible among multiple editors with the Workbook Sharing feature. The spreadsheet now can have up to 1024 columns of data compared with the 256 available to previous OpenOffice.org. As for collaboration on Writer, different editors get different colors to help keep the note taking and editing process more streamlined. The author note location shifted from the document text itself to the margin, similar to Microsoft Word, which greatly improving readability.

In the latest version, the crop and other drawing tools get updates, they are now more polished and intuitive to use. Simple things like cropping a picture within a presentation slideshow or document have become much easier as the layout and functionality of the tools now have adapted standard interfaces the user has already familiar with. The chart engine is improved, which now renders charts more quickly and with a lot more options than before.

Today, the OpenOffice.org servers have been hit hard, but so far download speeds is quite well.

"Apologies - our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are trying to come up with a solution.

Thank you for your patience."

~~ OpenOffice.org website on October 13, 2008

OpenOffice.org 3.0 download links

Free download of the Opera 9.60 here. (5.4 MB for English-US and 7.1 MB for International language).

Opera 9.6 for Windows Changelog

Release Notes

Opera 9.6 is a recommended security and stability upgrade.

New and improved features in Opera 9.6

Opera Link

Custom search engines and typed history (typed history is only the history you explicitly type or select from the address bar) are now joining bookmarks, notes, personal bar and Speed Dial in Opera Link.

Opera Mail

Feed Preview

Now you can preview an RSS/Atom feed before subscribing.

Follow/Ignore threads and contacts

Follow and Ignore are new features for users that receive numerous messages. It makes it easier to dismiss unimportant messages and easier to recognise important messages.

• Activate this feature by selecting Follow/Ignore in the email context menu (or click the message subject header), then select either Follow Thread or Ignore Thread.
• Also, you can click the names in the From or To headers to enable the following or ignoring of contacts.

Go To Thread

You can now also use “Go to thread” which means that you can view only the messages from that thread. This is useful for those that employ flat view.

Low Bandwidth Mode

Low Bandwidth Mode is a setting on mail accounts that makes Opera Mail use as little bandwidth as possible.

• For IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): Opera will only synchronise new messages and it will not fetch message attachments unless requested
• For POP (Post Office Protocol): Opera will not fetch more than the first 100 lines of a message unless requested

Opera Scroll Marker

The new Opera Scroll Marker makes it easier to continue reading when you scroll through a Web page. At the end of the page it will indicate the previous position of the bottom of the screen so you can easily see where to continue reading.

Enable Opera Scroll Marker in the Preferences dialog box.
Navigate to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Browsing > Show scroll marker (check box).

• Check the box to enable Opera Scroll Marker
• Leave the box unchecked (default) to keep it disabled

Using the opera:config Preferences Editor opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableScrollMarker, you can also set Opera Scroll Marker to show every time you scroll less than a full page down or up. The options in the drop-down menu are:

• 0 — off
• 1 — show when reaching the bottom or top of the page
• 2 — always show when scrolling

Changes since Opera 9.52

User Interface

• Opera now remembers the bookmark panel position after restart
• Added a setting opera:config#UserPrefs|ShowBookmarksInAddressfieldAutocompletion to prevent bookmarks from showing in the Address field auto-completion drop-down
• When setting opera:config#TransferWindow|KeepEntriesDays to 0, Opera now removes the transfer history when restarting
• Sites using HTTP Auth are now saved in typed history
• Opera now stops loading pages with iframes when closing the page or pressing stop
• Page encoding in site preferences can now be reset to automatic
• Browsing Intranet sites now works after changing proxies in a running session
• Improvements to Opera Link include the synchronization of search engines and typed history
• Changed the default global history to 1000
• Added a new default speedial.ini
• Fixed sorting by progress in Transfers
• Fixed copying of multiple entries from the history manager
• Fixed a bug that could cause notes to be lost when using certain characters
• Fixed dataloss situation when note folders had more than one line in their name
• Fixed spurious highlighting when using the space character in inline find
• Fixed an issue that would prevent links in frames from being opened by the keyboard

Mail, News, Chat

• Added popular Chinese providers in mailproviders.xml
• Made all top-level access points (except All Messages) selectable
• Now copes better with broken POP servers that send empty UIDLs
• The “Large font” setting is now respected for subjects
• Cache files from feeds no longer show up in Transfers
• Feeds are now detected even when served as text/html
• Fixed the synchronization of removed labels for IMAP accounts
• Fixed an issue where the signatures wouldn’t change if the default account signature ended with a space
• Fixed an issue where sent message bodies could disappear under certain circumstances
• Fixed DCC transfers in IRC

Display and Scripting

• Improved Acid3 support: The document property has been removed from iframe objects for compatibility with Gecko, WebKit, and the Acid3 test
• Added support for the caller property on functions:
  http://developer.mozilla.org/En/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Global_Objects:Function:caller
• Special characters are now displayed properly in the Address bar drop-down
• Opera Dragonfly element highlighting no longer stays on the page after closing the developer tools window
• Script focused elements are no longer highlighted
• Fixed saving of SVG when right clicking
• Fixed an issue where custom search engines would not get a favicon

Security

• Verisign and Comodo are now formally EV-enabled: see Yngve’s blog post
• Fixed an issue where specially crafted addresses could execute arbitrary code, as reported by Chris of Matasano Security; see our advisory
• Java applets can no longer be used to read sensitive information, as reported by Nate McFeters; see our advisory

Miscellaneous

• Added the Opera Core version (currently “Presto/2.1.1″) to the User Agent header
• Improved performance with large wand.dat files
• Fixed Fast Forward on Google search results pages

Windows-specific changes

• Fixed a bug where network paths that start with \\ would not work, which in particular caused issues with sent mail when storing profiles on network drives
• Fixed installation problems on Windows NT 4.0

VirtualDub is a video capture and processing application for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee. VirtualDub is a free software, given that the software is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and hosted on SourceForge.net. VirtualDub is commonly used for audio/video capture, filtering and recompression. All the operations goes to an AVI files, requiring that appropriate video and audio codecs are installed.

The Changelog for Build 30009 (1.8.6, stable): [September 21, 2008]

[bugs fixed]

• Wheel scrolling in the Set Text Information dialog closes the edit control.
• Save Segmented AVI now works with VBR audio.
• Animated GIF export now fails with an error if the current output format is compressed or otherwise not supported.
• JobControl: Fixed crash when one machine attempts to run a job in distributed mode right when another machine deletes it.
• JobControl: The filter crop mode saved in jobs was opposite from selected. (This only affected YCbCr cropping.)
• Capture: Fixed crash when capture driver sends audio samples when DirectShow graph is not running.
• D3D: Fixed sporadic crash on lost device.
• D3D: Fixed Direct3D errors when display debug information is enabled and a video filter fails to initialize.
• Frameserver: Frame rate adjustments weren’t always propagated correctly.

[regressions fixed]

• Fixed crash when using fast/normal recompress mode without a video codec.
• Fixed divide by zero crash when loading video and a video filter in the list is unable to initialize.
• Changing the “source rate adjustment” option no longer invalidates the current selection.
• Rendering would loop endlessly if an error occurred during video compression and threaded compression was disabled.
• Disabling the “directly decode YCbCr formats” option works again.
• Filters: lMicrosecsPerFrame and lMicrosecsPerSrcFrame were reporting milliseconds (broken since 1.8.0).
• JobControl: Fixed case where a non-distributed “load job list” command can fail due to erroneously running distributed-mode code.
• JobControl: Fixed problem where dialog would suddenly close when editing job names.
• Script: Fixed crash when removing video filter from filter chain.
• DV: Audio decoding works again with NTSC DV files (broken since 1.8.4).

VirtualDub Official Website
List download mirrors for V1.8.6 (32-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.8.6.zip)
List download mirrors for V1.8.6 (AMD 64-bit) release build (VirtualDub-1.8.6-AMD64.zip)
List download mirrors for V1.8.6 source code (VirtualDub-1.8.6-src.7z)
Note: The source code archive is an compressed using the 7-zip compressor.

Screenshot

This easter egg made references to two popular Internet memes: Internets and Series of tubes.

Google Chrome is a free and open source web browser, so if you’re curious about the code that shows the easter egg, you can see it here.

Basically Chrome execute “sspipes.scr” from Windows system folder (usually “C:\Windows\System32″) and embed it on the current tab. This “sspipes.scr” is a built-in screensaver that comes with Microsoft Windows XP. So if you don’t have that “sspipes.scr” file on your Windows system folder (like most Microsoft Windows Vista systems), typing about:internets won’t show the tube animation, it only changes the titlebar to “The Tubes are Clogged!”.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

~~Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Google’s Engineering Director

Clean, simple, fast and a streamlined web browser, Google Chrome promises to deliver today’s complex web applications and contents to your desktop. Google Chrome also comes with a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, that could power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Windows beta version is scheduled for tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Read the official announcement on Official Google Blog.

Update: Comic

This is the comic that started it all, the one that describes Google Chrome. The comic that Google acknowledged as “accidentally released early”.

Update 2: Download

Now Windows beta version is available for download here.

Download link is here.

“A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a technique, called trace trees, which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey. A major goal of the project has been to set JavaScript up to compete with natively-compiled code, rather than simply against other interpreters. This means that we’re starting to see speeds that are completely out of this league when it comes to performance.”

~~ John Resig, a JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation.

Another improvement also comes from a new support of querySelector[All], which can speed up CSS selector processing. Some tests on slickspeed selectors from the Mootools project shows an impressive ~3-7x speedup.

For those who cannot wait to try out these improvement can download Firefox 3.1 Shiretoko Alpha 1 here.
Please be aware that Shiretoko Alpha 1 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community.

More info in here and here.