Hi all,

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Been quite busy lately (real life and trying to make ends meet – poor developer here ). Anyways, there’s a new WIP render of the Sintel Open Movie by the Blender Foundation. Remember it’s a work in progress (some bugs in blender build causing some problems in the render).

Anyways, here’s a youtube video of the wip:

Also, two weeks ago, a trailer of the Sintel movie came out:

All in all, it’s an impressive feat for the Blender team considering they are both working on the movie, plus working on improving blender as well!

And here is what you windows guys are waiting for – an installer for the blender 2.5 alpha 2 svn build date 5-28-2010.

Get your windows blender installer build at the ostalks ibiblio mirror now.

For those finding the latest git windows build of arora is too buggy for you, here’s some great news.

I have compiled openssl 0.9.8n dlls on windows, and used them for the arora 0.10.2 stable build. With these in mind, arora 0.10.2 is running as sweet as ever.

You may download the stable binary for windows installer at the ostalks ibiblio mirror

A few days ago, my wife running Windows XP on the HP laptop I gave her a few years ago innocently clicked on one of those Facebook links posted on her wall “supposedly” coming from her friend talking about a cool video link.  What she didn’t know was that the link she clicked upon inadvertently installed a nasty worm/keylogging software into her computer and sent those links to her friends which we found out later, clicked on the link too!  Talk about the dangers of social networking…

What transpired was that on next boot, her machine ran suspiciously slow, then warnings from her antivirus software came popping up, and eventually came about crashing the whole system on the boot after that, only leaving the wallpaper showing on the desktop.

Adding to the difficulty was that it was one of those malware that loads up even in safe mode.

In the past, I would use live cds like PCLinuxOS 9.1, and Knoppix to boot and rescue the machine using F-prot for linux.  I didn’t have the time or luxury to download these cds since they were all now sporting over 700Mb in download size, which would certainly take a couple of hours to download.

I found a live cd after some searches through Google, which does exactly that and sports a significantly smaller download size too (about 50Mb).  It’s made by a somewhat known antivirus company, named Avira (I’ve installed Avira on my windows machines in the past, but I’ve settled for Avast and AVG, besides, what more could I ask… they’re free for home use).

The Live CD Rescue disk is located at the tools section of the Avira site.

Heres how to use it:

1. Boot up from the live cd:

2. Select the default option, and press enter.  You should boot up to a screen as shown below:

3. Default configuration is to report only infected files.  We would like to change that to automatic disinfection by clicking on the Configuration button and selecting the option as shown here:

4. If your computer is connected to the internet, it is possible to update your antivirus db files by clicking on update:

5. Go back to the Virus Scanner tab and press “Start Scanning”.  The antivirus software should be able to scan all available hard disks for viruses and malware automatically.

I’ve been reading a lot about Google’s flagship OS lately, and if one is to believe all the hype, it will definitely give microsoft a run for it’s money.

Everywhere, news sites such as CNET, OSNews and Ars have been talking about the coming Google sponsored Operating System.  And since we’re talking about Google here, that alone says much about the current buzz about it.

But what is Chrome OS exactly?

For those of you folks who don’t know what this is, here is a snippet of information from the Official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

So what’s the verdict?  Will Chrome OS replace Windows (or OSX, or even Desktop Linux) as a viable replacement?

I can give you an opinion right now of what I think of it… in the near future, not likely.

Here are the reasons why:

1. It is tied to a specific platform.  I consider this as an “apple-lesque” feature.  Come on, Google has set it’s limits to a netbook spec based machine, and a limited one at that (no harddisk, only SSDs, a specific sized lcd monitor, a specified keyboard size, etc).  I remember Intel doing these on netbooks; you can only run the graphics card only up to a certain size and resolution.  It’s pathetic.
2. The center of all activity is the browser.  What can you expect with Google?  Of course, all of the apps are tied up to the “cloud”, but what if I don’t want to use apps in the “cloud”?
3. It is application lock-in heaven.  Think of it.  All data, all your preferences are stored in Google.  Admittedly, I use google services all the time, but with this setup, you are guaranteed of this lock-in.
4. I like my gnome and kde apps.  I even like my games and applications in both Linux and Windows.  With the Google Chrome OS hardware spec requirements, I can only see netbooks coming with this OS installed as something of an internet appliance, nothing more.  I like my netbooks more featured, thank you.
5. Third world countries don’t have abundant internet connection (read: wifi)… so of what use is this to them?

I know, I know, it’s based on the linux kernel, and you can most probably modify the core of this OS. But my question is, what about the applications that Google bundles it with?  Most likely you cannot use these on a modified distribution.

I’m honestly more excited about the  announcement of a modified NX server months ago (called NeatX, which in my opinion is a good remote desktop solution for Linux servers, having used NX and FreeNX on some of the server boxes I manage), than on Chrome OS.

In conclusion, with all these hiccups, I don’t ever think we’ll see Chrome OS displacing Microsoft significantly in marketshare, for at least a number of years.

It seems like that the favorite browser everyone loves to hate is having a makeover.

From the msdn IEBlog site, developers from microsoft are in the process of updating Internet Explorer to have:

1. Speedier Performance – on par with Firefox 3.6.  It finally looks like that javascript will be accelerated like Firefox and Safari/Chrome builds are.
2. Standards Compliance – some HTML 5 support, as well as CSS 3 compliance are being done.  ACID 3 compliance is also being worked upon.
3. Hardware accelerated graphics and text via Direct2D.

Concerning #2, here’s a pic from the IEBlog, concerning Javascript execution speed:

On my own opinion, other browsers have the lead in JS acceleration, and IE is basically playing catchup.  By the time IE 9 gets ready to ship, developments and enhancements in Firefox and Webkit based browsers (Safari/Chrome) will have optimized their javascript engines further.  Furthermore, 3D acceleration has been in development for the other browsers as well.  What remains to be seen, and this is what I think is significant to watch, is whether HTML 5 will be able to unseat flash, considering future browsers are racing to implement HTML 5 compliance (IE included).