IE8 beta team wants to know why you would be a great beta tester for their upcoming IE Beta 2 release. Are they serious? Though widely used stats still shows that IE has the largest browser share, the gap between IE and Firefox is too close for comfort. I won’t be surprised if FF takes the browser share lead by the next major release. Yet IE team has the audacity to cherry pick beta testers for a free product, that is going to be released soon.

When pressed about it on comments and asked why they don’t follow examples set by success full projects (read FF) and have a publicly accessible bug tracking tool; they argued that the IE users are hundreds and millions in numbers and they would easily litter bug tracking database with “stupid” bug reports. They insists that there is a problem with mozilla bug database is that it is way too easy to file a bug report. This is too funny, you have to read their reply to comments to understand how close-minded their product development process is. Sometimes I wonder how many software developers actually work on IE.

Is this going to be the last year for IE with majority of the browser market share? They should enjoy it while it lasts.

On a separate note, here is a list of top 3 browsers (different versions) comparison on standards support.

For a command-line junkie like me, this is a geeky fun way to scan your system with spybot with CMD, with few easy parameters. For a spyware only version of the scan I used this parameters:
“C:\Program Files\Spybot - Search &
Destroy\SpybotSD.exe” /taskbarhide /autoclose /autocheck /autofix /onlyspyware

For a list of other available parameters, (from Spybot website):

• /taskbarhide
  Runs Spybot-S&D completely hidden (no window, no taskbar icon), so make absolutely sure you use it only in combination with /autoclose (otherwise it would remain in memory sitting idle). Useful only in combination with /autocheck, /autoupdate or /autoimmunize, as it cannot be controlled when completely invisible.
• /minimized
  Starts the window minimized.
• /uninstall
  Uninstalls Spybot-S&D. This command line parameter is very outdated - unins000.exe should be used instead!
• /blinduser
  Starts with support for blind users (special menus).
• /autoupdate
  Does an update after starting the program.
• /autocheck
  Starts scanning immediately.
• /autofix
  Fixes problems after scan.
• /autoclose
  Closes program after it has scanned or updated.
• /autoimmunize
  Runs the immunization at program start.
• /onlyspyware
  Fixes only spyware (red) entries with /autofix, leaving all usage tracks as they are.
• /easymode
  Starts with easier interface for beginners.
• /createenglish
  Updates the English.sbl language file with the newest texts; useful only for translators.

Diskeeper, which sells a dumbed down version of it’s program which gets shipped with Microsoft OS, along with PerfectDisk are the leading commercial defragmenter out there. While there has been many free alternative, nothing was good enough to rival their performance, until now. Defraggler is a free disk defragmenter, which is not only a free alternative to commercial counterparts but also very good at it’s job. Defraggler is brought to you by the same guys who made CCleaner, a useful file and registry cleaning software.

Click on the picture for larger view.

Defraggler works much like the same way CCleaner and most defragmenter’s work, first it analyzes the drive for fragmented files and folders and gives you and option to choose which file to defrag or not. Having a choice to defragment individual file is an option that is not available with any defragmenters I have tried, or I know of. It gives you status of the defrag process and the option to pause/start and restart whenever you feel like. Unlike window built-in defragmenter, using your computer while the program is running doesn’t effect it’s performance. Two things I would be looking forward for the upcoming version of Defraggler would be the option to schedule a job in a certain time and defragment on the fly in the background.

Find more (and download) about this awesome software from it’s website: http://www.defraggler.com/

The process of creating a custom “Manufactured and Supported by” logo involves two parts.

1) First you have to create a logo with the size not bigger than 180×114 pixels. Save it as a bitmap file with the name oemlogo.bmp. Save the file inside C:\WINDOWS\system32 subfolder.

2) Create an configuration file with a text editor and save it as oeminfo.ini. Save this file also inside C:\WINDOWS\system32 subfolder. My configuration file looks like this:

[general]
Manufacturer=blah
Model=

[Support Information]
Line1= Windows 2003 is better Than Windows Vista
Line2= Osx is better than Windows 2003
Line3= Ubuntu is better Than OSX

We could do a little registry hack to make “CMD Here” option appear in every folder by a simple right click, and it will prompt from the desired folder, like this.

For this hack we have to edit the registry. Go to Start –> Run –> Regedit.

The entry that we will edit is located under, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ Directory\shell, we will navigate into that folder and add a new key called “command”, edit the entry and call it whatever you want. I named it “CMD Here”, which is what it will say when you right click a folder.

Now create another key right under the “command” key with the same name. But the value for this entry would be cmd.exe /k “cd %L, basically it is calling cmd from the given folder.

That’s it! Just close the Regedit window and any other explorer window open. Open a new explorer window and you will see this new option to open command prompt from that folder by right click. If you are a heavy command prompt user you will find this option very useful.

For me this is much better than the windows built-in defragmentation tool. Power Defragmenter has a simple, straight-forward GUI with easy options. You can choose from four defragmentation options:

1) Defragment Files
2) Defragment Folders
3) Defragment Disks
4) Powermode Disk Fragmentation

The last option defragments the files and than tidy up the drive for optimum performance.

Power Defrag in action:

Download Power Defragmenter GUI 2.0.125:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Power_Defragmenter_GUI_d4647.html

Download Contig by itself from sysinternals:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx

The page itself is harmless and actually supposed to be help full for a newly installed IE7, so that you can customize your IE setup. But after you choose your settings not that it only doesn’t save the chosen options but also goes back to the same time whenever you open IE. Needless to say, it very annoying. This is how the runonce.msn.com page looks like:

Short Solution: copy & paste this three line in a notepad and save it with .reg (ie IE7.reg) extension and run the reg file after saving it. This should automatically edit the necessary setting needed to fix this problem.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“RunOnceComplete”=dword:00000001
“RunOnceHasShown”=dword:0000000

Long Solution: Run regedit from Start –> Run –> regedit. From there, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main and you will see the obvious entries that needs to be changed, you can add the above entries manually:

The problem seems to with third party anti-spyware which are doing it’s job by preventing you from editing your registry settings from URL, and doing it’s job very good.

Acid2 is a test suite published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers and authoring tools. Acid2 was released on April 12, 2005. It has been developed in the spirit of the Acid1 test from 1998. The Acid tests test many features on a single page and report test results graphically.

Acid2 tests features of HTML and, more prominently, CSS. The purpose of testing such features is to highlight the problems with browsers that do not display it correctly. The Acid2 test should render correctly on any browser that follows the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications. Because Acid2 tests how web browsers deal with faulty code, the test is intentionally not written to W3C CSS standard specifications, and fails validation. This is expected and was the intention of its designers.

Let’s test out the leading browsers and see how they handle Acid2 test, including the latest IE8 beta .

(click on images to get larger size)

IE7:

IE8:

Firefox2:

Safari:

Opera:

Netscape:

Safari and Opera are the only browsers that seem to pass the Acid2 test. IE8 is very close but not quite there.

In it’s own words Microsoft promotes IE8 for “professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.“, because of it’s built in tools for debugging purpose. ReadWriteWeb has done a great job promoting IE8, this is what they had to say regarding it’s standard compliance:

There were hints that IE8 would be a remarkable offering on the IE Blog as they released tidbits about the browser’s capabilities. For example, the announcement of IE8’s passing of the Acid2 test (a test for standards compliance) marked a milestone in IE8’s development. The standards mode was originally going to be turned off by default letting web developers code for it by including a “meta” tag to make use of IE8’s new standards compliant mode. Later, Microsoft came to their senses and made the default the standards-compliant mode.

That’s great news. It seems Microsoft has finally done something right, regarding IE, by following web standards; which has been a cause of headache for many web developers and freelancers like me trying to get websites compatible for two different browsers.

Let’s look at some IE8 standard compliance power:

Readwriteweb.com under IE8:

Readwriteweb.com under Firefox: (the way it was supposed to load)

I was trying to load linux.com and it tells you microsoft’s feeling towards open source software by the way it was loading the website:

All off this are reproducible by IE8. Try it at your own risk.

I am sure IE8 has some good new interesting features, but I was busy trying to find problems with it. And you have to admit this was way too easy. Next time I will I will try to point the new features, some of which are quite interesting.

JtR is described as follows (from http://www.openwall.com/john/): “John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt (3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hashes, plus several more with contributed patches.”

You can download fscrack here: http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/fscrack.htm