Open Source News

My linux journey began with Red Hat and Corel Linux, in the 90s. For a long time, I just couldn’t convince my dad to install linux on his windows laptop, the only computer we had then. Then came the 21st century, with linux distros getting more user-friendly with easier and manual-free installations. I shifted from being a long time RedHat Fedora fanboy to an interim PCLinuxOS fan to finally an Ubuntu believer.

Finally after 2 long years, this week, I decided to move on a bit, and try something new. My PC is getting older and constantly struggles to carry the huge processing needs for the latest KDE4 or Gnome and the delicious compiz, which has now become an integral part of the entire Linux Experience.

This week, I tried Vector Linux, a slackware based distro, known to be fast and stable, ideal for older machines like mine and yet never compromising on the features. Read on, to see if it delivered what it promised.

Before we start, here is my PC configuration. It’s an old Compax nx7010 business laptop with a Pentium M(Centrino) 1.6 Ghz processor, 1.5GB of Ram and a 64 MB ATI Radeon 9200 gfx card. It’s pretty fancy for a 5 year old laptop, but it cost a bomb back then.

I downloaded the VL 5.9 Standard Edition iso from the Vector Linux Homepage and gave it a try.

1. Installation
VL has a decently friendly text-based installer. I found it easy at most times but the partition tool still needs some rework. If you are not comfortable using fdisk or similar text based partition utilities, I would suggest creating the swap and root partitions beforehand using gparted or something else, and just select them for installation. It is a lot easier this way.
The installation was really really fast, finished in less that 20 minutes. Lilo autodetects other OSs on your system and configures easily. VL also prompts you to configure xorg and suggests drivers for your card. In my case, fglrx doesn’t work for older ATI cards (pre Radeon 9550), so I selected the opensource radeon drivers. You can also configure your network settings. The system reboots to boot into your new VL environment.

2.Interface, design and usability
VL uses Xfce as it’s default desktop/window manager. It also comes with jvm, fluxbox and other light alternatives. The default Xfce environment looks really polished with Thunar being the default file manager.

It’s nice to log in as Root for a change, though it is never recommended. On top of the standard xfce applications set, VL offers its own control center called VASM where you can configure - display, network, boot systems etc.

Another nice addition is the package manager GSLAPT, which looks like a skinnier half brother of synaptic but has everything you will ever need to install the extra packages.

Overall, for newbees it’s a pretty friendly experience, and seasonal Xfce users will be delighted with the VASM and SLAPT.

2.Quirks, Pains and Woes
I am really tempted to recommend it to everyone, but no OS is perfect, including VL. Firstly, I wasn’t really impressed with the partition tool in the installer. Secondly, newbees who select the wrong graphics driver will be left wondering why their Xorg crashes with “no screen found” each and every time they do “startx”. Thirdly, the built in wifi configuration in VASM refused to obtain an IP address from my d-link router. VL comes with Wifi-Radar, which again gave the same message. I finally had to get Kdenetwork manager, just to get my wifi connected. Users from other distros - Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora etc. will definitely miss the extensive package support in Vector Linux, which currently has a limited package repository. There are some articles online, which talk about using Slackware packages directly on VL, which I still need to read. Overall some hits and some misses.

3. Final verdict
Once all the initial quirks are resolved (especially the xorg issue), VL is a really solid distro. It is fast as expected from Xfce.
For older machines, fluxbox is a really nice alternative. VL packs a wbar, a mac like dock on startup, which can be activated for Xfce with following command.

$ wbar -above-desk -pos bottom -isize 40 -nanim 5

The best way to really speed up things is by choosing a lower desktop resolution. It really works but would you wish to give up your crisp high resolution for a faded 16 bit low res? The choice is yours, speed vs looks. And yeah, forget compiz. The last one really hurt.. right? Enjoy your linux experience, and please do give VL a try. I am off to try Mandriva 2009 RC2, but I have a gut feeling, I will be back again to VL. Have a nice weekend folks!

I am sure a lot of Linux and Mac users were a bit disappointed on September the 2nd, they were shut out in favor of their more popular counterparts; Windows users. Google’s browser, Chrome, took the Internet by storm. Everybody was talking about it, Digg got swamped with Chrome submissions, Tech blogs were buzzing about it, theories were thrown left and right. Everybody was in for the action, except for Linux and Mac users!

However Jeremy White, the CEO of Codeweavers, decided to take matters into his own hands. So on September 4th he summoned his army to get Chromium (which is the open source project behind Chrome) ported to Linux and Mac ASAP. Long story short, they achieved that in only 11 days! Boy Wine has matured!

Anyways enough talk, if you want a piece of the action you just simply need to download Chromium from Codeweaver’s servers:

Google Chrome for Apple Mac OS X:
1. CrossOver Chromium for Apple Mac OS X

Google Chrome for Linux:
1. CrossOver Chromium for Ubuntu and Debian (32 bit)
2. CrossOver Chromium for Ubuntu and Debian (64 bit)
3. CrossOver Chromium for Red Hat, Mandriva, and Suse
4. CrossOver Chromium for all other Linux distros.

Warning: Chromium should not be used as a main browser, it is not stable enough. From Codeweaver’s Faqs:

Q. Should I run CrossOver Chromium as my main browser?

A. Absolutely not! This is just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do. Chromium itself is just beginning. As the Chromium project progresses, they will be providing more compelling support for Mac OS and Linux, particularly with process security and memory management. Those future versions from Chromium will be better suited for daily use than this version.

Elgg is an open source application for rolling out a social network. It installs like any Web-based software, but instead of a blog or a wiki, it gives you all the components of a social networking site — your own MySpace! It’s popular with educational institutes and used by several universities across the world, in addition to powering social networks of companies such as Swatch. The new Elgg 1.0, released last month, is modular in design, making it easier for developers to build social networks around the platform.

In a blog post on the new release, Ben Werdmuller, CTO of Curverider, the company that develops Elgg, explains that the software now incorporates features central to social networking, such as granular access permissions, cross-site tagging, and emphasis on personal ownership (tracing posts and other activity back to the author), right into the core. He says that after four years in development, the Elgg developers decided to rewrite the software from scratch. “While many applications take a simple beginning and try and duct tape social networking and next-gen features over the top, we started again. And as a result, Elgg is fast, flexible, extensible, and ready to power the next evolution of social technology.”

Elgg 1.0 is available in two flavors, core and complete. The core version is for developers who want to roll their own social networks and decide what features they need. “As the Elgg 1.0+ community expands,” Werdmuller says, “more and more plugins will become available, and who’s to say you should have a blog, or forums, or photos?”

The complete version weighs in at around 1.4MB and bundles social networking features such as user profiles, blogs, file repository, forum, social bookmarking, and a dashboard. Many of the features are bundled as plugins and included in the complete version. The company provides detailed documentation on installing Elgg and configuring plugins.
Easier to customize and import/export data

You can customize Elgg by selecting plugins, tweaking style sheets, and, soon, by modifying themes. But depending on how you want to use the social network, you’d want to customize it a lot more. To help ease the customization process, the Elgg developers have built in several APIs and methodologies that lets developers rolling out their own social networks easily modify all user-facing services.

“The major differences with the new Elgg are a simplified data model and a separation of logic from view,” Werdmuller says. “Every entity in Elgg now inherits a single ElggEntity class, and any entity can have an arbitrary relationship established between them. That means a user (with an appropriate plugin) could link together a blog post, file, and a user profile, and then the system could traverse those connections in a generic way to enhance search results and provide new kinds of functionality. RDF fans will grok the importance of this immediately.”

Behind the scenes, these entities have arbitrary metadata attached to them, which is searchable as tags. Entities also have access permissions associated with them. To see how all this manifests in code, take a look at the tutorial to build a simple blog in Elgg 1.0.

Elgg 1.0 also supports multiple viewtypes. A viewtype lets visitors view Elgg pages for a particular interface. For example, an Elgg-powered site can have a stardard HTML viewtype for normal browsers, and a mobile viewtype for mobile devices.

Werdmuller says that the separation of logic from view means that it’s easier to provide and add new viewtypes. For example, the RSS feed in Elgg 1.0 is literally just an RSS view on the same logic as the page you want the feed for. In addition to RSS, Elgg 1.0 also supports other viewtypes, including JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Friend of a Friend (FOAF), and Open Data Definition (OpenDD). “The JSON view allows for AJAX fun, and we’ve also got extensible RESTful and XML-RPC API architectures so that plugins can add this kind of functionality easily. All this means that you could easily build a J2ME front end for Elgg, for example, and never bother with the default Web interface.”

OpenDD, which is developed by the same developers as Elgg, allows you to copy your data from one social network to another without losing track of your friends network. Werdmuller says that the company is working on federating networks and working with other vendors to provide true data portability. “We think that’s important for the future of the Web.”

Talking about data portability in a blog post, Marcus Povey, senior developer at Curverider, illustrates Elgg 1.0’s data export and import features via the views and actions interfaces.

Povey says that OpenDD will allow administrators to migrate between the previous Elgg releases (now known as Elgg Classic) and the new codebase with “minimum amount of effort.” But since Elgg Classic and Elgg 1.0 are two different codebases, upgrading will require an intermediary script, which Werdmuller says the company will be releasing separately, but didn’t give a timeframe.

Old hardware? Want a faster boot up? Need to free some system resources? Want snappier applications? This is for you. Note, I wouldn’t suggest doing anything within this if it doesn’t make sense to you.

Boot Process

1. Remove Network Manager if you do not need it “sudo apt-get remove network-manager”. If possible give yourself a static IP in /etc/network/interfaces like so:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.150
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.100
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.1.1

Having a static IP helps with boot time as your machine doesn’t have to communicate with the router/dhcp server as much to obtain an address.

2. Also remove firestarter or whatever graphical firewall frontend you’re using. Learn to control iptables at boot up and shutdown. It’ll be much snappier. Some have been critical of this step, but firestarter is used quite frequently in ubuntu and it runs an additional startup process before the desktop environment is loaded. Doing straight iptables is much faster, plus you’ll learn something anyways.

3. Install bum, “sudo apt-get install bum” and run it with root access. Shut off all unnecessary services. If you’re not sure about a service research it before shutting it off. Also, install sysv-rc-conf. Run the application as root. This will allow you to control, in an easy way, what services start at which run level. It’s like bum, but more detailed. Be very careful with which services you are removing from which run-level. If you don’t know what you’re doing here, research it or don’t touch it. After you do this you may want to reboot to make sure you didn’t break anything.

4. Turn off usplash in grub. (Mind you, you’re bootup won’t be as pretty as the splash will go away).

* vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
* on the kernel line delete the words “splash” and “quiet”
* Reboot to see the changes.

I remove “quiet” simply to show what’s going on. It does not have to be removed.

5. If you have a dual core processor, you can decrease your boot time with concurrency.

* sudo vim /etc/init.d/rc
* and find the line CONCURRENCY=none and change it to: CONCURRENCY=shell
* Reboot to see the changes. (tired of rebooting yet?)

6. Remove some TTYs

I could easily do this by editing /etc/inittab and then commenting the extra TTYs there. With the new upstart mechanism in place, things are a little different.

You have to edit /etc/default/console-setup file. This file defines how many ttys should you get.

Change ACTIVE_CONSOLES=”/dev/tty[1-6]” to the number of consoles you want. Lets say, 3 ttys, then change it to “/dev/tty[1-3]“.

And then goto /etc/event.d/ and change the ttyx files that you DONOT want. Edit them and comment lines starting with “start on runlevel”. So, in this case, you’ll comment the start line in tty4..tty6 files.

Rebooting shoud minimize the number of consoles for you. Worked for me!! Good luck, NOTE: Even though you’ve reduced the tty number, X is still on Alt-F7. Again, go ahead and reboot to make sure you didn’t break anything.
Tune Your Hard drive
Speed up your ext3 file system

The following tweaks assume that you are using an ext3 filesystem for your Ubuntu OS and they will offer a noticeable performance boost! However, there is also a bad side of them… if you don’t have an UPS and your system will power off accidentally or because of a power loss, YOU WILL LOSE IMPORTANT DATA! (don’t say you haven’t been warned)

Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type:
CODE
sudo vim /etc/fstab

WARNING: The following is just an example! Do NOT copy the lines into your /etc/fstab file! Just REPLACE the options marked with underline with the ones marked with bold!

From this:

# /dev/sda1
UUID=19f70288-7340-40c0-82d1-ee4b218fee1d / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

To this:

# /dev/sda1
UUID=19f70288-7340-40c0-82d1-ee4b218fee1d / ext3 noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro,data=writeback 0 1

Save and close. Now type the following command in the terminal:
CODE
sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst

And add the following option…

rootflags=data=writeback

…to the end of the following lines:

# defoptions=quiet splash vga=795 (by default, Ubuntu doesn’t have the “vga=795? option on this line. It appears if you did the second tweak from the first step (see above)).

# altoptions=(recovery mode) single

Save and close, and paste the following command in the terminal:
CODE
sudo update-grub

Type now the following command in order to manually change your filesystem “on-the-fly” into writeback.
CODE
sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdb2

ATTENTION: Please note that /dev/sdb2 is MY root (/) partition. If you have the root (/) partition in another place (for example /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2) change it accordingly. Please look in /etc/fstab for this!

That’s all, now reboot your system and when you get back, you should feel an increased speed in video, image or audio usage.
Tune your swappiness

If you have been running Linux systems for some time and you have used applications like ‘top’ to see what’s going on in your machine, then you’ve probably wondered: Where has all my memory gone? You should know that the largest place it is being used in is the disk cache, as the cached memory is free and it can be replaced anytime if a newly started application needs that memory. Linux systems are made like this to use so much memory for disk cache because the RAM is wasted if it is not used and if something needs the same data again, then there is a very good chance to be in the cache memory.

Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and paste the following code:
CODE
sudo vim /etc/sysctl.conf

Now add the following line at the end of this file:
CODE
vm.swappiness=10

The number at the end of this line can be between 0 and 100. At 100 the Linux kernel will prefer to find inactive pages and swap them out, while value 0 gives something close to the old behavior where applications that wanted memory could shrink the cache to a tiny fraction of RAM. Save, close and reboot.
Preload and Prelink
prelink

Any executable that makes heavy use of shared libraries can benefit from prelinking. Prelinking resolves addresses of shared libraries in advance this reduces number of relocations.

Prelink is also useful in the context of security since we can tell prelink to make libraries load at random addresses until next run of prelink. This is useful since libraries won’t load at fixed addresses on every system.

You can install prelink by issuing following command.

sudo apt-get -y install prelink

Change a line inside the configuration file /etc/default/prelink from

PRELINKING=unknown

to

PRELINKING=yes

We will do our first prelinking by executing following command

sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink

Thats it you don’t have to do anything else. Prelink daemon will run periodically to optimize your newly installed executables.
preload

Preload is a little application that monitors files of frequently used applications and and loads them in to the memory when system is idle. This usually results in lesser startup times for those applications. Install preload by executing following command.

sudo apt-get -y install preload

New Applications

Ok time to install a faster window manager and set of applications:

Add this repo in /etc/apt/sources.list:

#openbox https://launchpad.net/~k-belding/+archive
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/k-belding/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/k-belding/ubuntu hardy main

and then:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install openbox pypanel gmrun obmenu obconf nitrogen gtk-chtheme sakura scrot kazehakase sylpheed rtorrent irssi finch decibel-audio-player xfburn mirage abiword gnumeric leafpad epdfview xarchiver pcmanfm ivman

For an explination of each:

* openbox is an alternative window manager that we’ll be using as our desktop environment. It’s snappier than Fluxbox since it was rewritten to no longer be based off blackbox code.
* pypanel - since open box comes with no panel, this is an extremely light weight one, it can be configured in ~/.pypanelrc. You’ll need to add this to .config/openbox/autostart.sh with the line: pypanel &
* gmrun - will give you a small run dialog upon running
* obmenu - graphical openbox menu editting app
* obconf - graphical openbox theme changer, among other options
* nitrogen - lightweight application to change wallpapers
* gtk-chtheme - will allow you to change gtk themes. Icon themes and fonts can be specified in .gtkrc-2.0
* sakura - a light weight tabbed terminal. Easier to configure than aterm, xterm and the like.
* scrot - a command line screenshot tool
* kazehakase - a lightweight browser based on the gecko engine (A heads up about the hardy package: you can’t view the preference menu, it’ll crash. You can control most things through it’s config files and about:config)
* sylpheed - a light weight email application
* rtorrent - a command line torrent app
* irssi - command line irc
* finch - the command line version of finch
* decibel-audio-player - a light weight gtk based audio app
* xfburn - a burning application from the xfce suite
* mirage - an extremely light weight image viewer
* abiword and gnumeric - lighter office apps when compared to open office.
* leafpad - extremely lightweight notepad app
* epdfview - lightweight pdf viewer
* xarchiver - lightweight archiving and compression tool to replace file-roller with.
* pcmanfm - tabbed, lightweight file manager.
* ivman - a behind the scenes auto-mounter. You’ll need to add this to .config/openbox/autostart.sh with the line: ivman &

Here are some great reads on how to configure openbox:

1. http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Main_Page
2. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Openbox
3. http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Openbox

And that’s it. Log into openbox and get to configuring things the way you want it.
Use Readahead

This guide asks you to use the command-line to issue some commands, and uses the readahead-list and readahead-watch applications to profile a bootup. Changes to the system are easily reversible and the worst negative impact would be a reduction in login speed (the irony!). Of course, since you will be doing some things with root access, failure to correctly type in some commands may lead to permanent damage to your software or data. These changes are unsupported by Ubuntu developers. You probably shouldn’t try this unless you have more than 512MB RAM.
PART 1: Profile Login Sequence

First, we need to ask readahead to monitor a login sequence and make note of all the files read during this period. Advanced users may point out that during bootup, there is a GRUB argument “profile” that causes Ubuntu to optimize bootup. We will need to essentially manually replicate what this boot option does, but save the output to a different file.

First, let’s store our readahead list into a ~/.readahead directory.
Code:

mkdir ~/.readahead

Now, log out, and press CTRL+ALT+F1 to log into a terminal. Start the profiler:
Code:

sudo readahead-watch -o ~/.readahead/gnome.root /

This will grind the disk for a while (up to a few minutes) then it will return you to a command prompt. The profiler is now in the background watching all actions. Now, without logging out, go to your GDM prompt (ALT+F8 ) and log in normally.

after you are fully logged in, press CTRL+ALT+F1 to go back to your terminal, then run:
Code:

sudo killall readahead-watch
sudo chown jdong:jdong ~/.readahead -R

Replace jdong:jdong with your user and group name. Now, we need to go prune this list a bit. Especially if you have large files on your desktop (like a 1GB AVI), the login sequence may touch it, causing readahead to think it should load the whole thing into memory! In a terminal, run:
Code:

cat ~/.readahead/gnome.root | xargs -i ls -lk {} | sort -rn -k +5 | less

This will display all the files readahead wants to cache, sorted by largest file first. The 5th column (before date) is the size of the file in KB. Make sure there’s nothing glaringly large. If it’s bigger than 10,000KB or so, it’s probably not worth preloading. You can remove unwanted files from the preload list by opening ~/.readahead/gnome.root in your favorite editor, and deleting its line.

If you have home on a different partition as root, you should repeat Part 1 for each partition, replacing gnome.root with a different name, and replacing the mountpoint / with each interested mountpoint.
PART 2: Hooking this into the login sequence.

Next, we need to tell Ubuntu to do this readahead on every login. I am going to use /etc/X11/Xsession.d for this, but if you have another preferred way to execute things before everything loads, be my guest!

Create a file called /etc/X11/Xsession.d/00readahead and put this in it:
Code:

for list in ~/.readahead/*; do
readahead-list $list &
done

wait

Save the file. Now, you can reboot to try it out. You will notice the login
“hang” at the orange screen while the disk works without much grinding, then once that is done the bootup should soar as if it were a fully cached login. This brings my login session to around 30 seconds, a notable improvement.
PART 3: Hook into bootup sequence

Often times, we don’t log in immediately when the prompt comes up. We might be getting a cup of coffee, or an entire lab might be turned on before students arrive. It makes sense to cache a login as a part of bootup. Open up /etc/rc.local in your favorite text editor, and before the exit 0 statement, add:
Code:

for list in /home/jdong/.readahead/*; do
readahead-list $list
done

Note you need to hard-code a particular user in there, and this time we don’t background it. (We could, but there is not much motivation to)

Now, reboot, and wait for all disk activity to stop before logging in. This
time, I get a login speed of 19 seconds.

You might have two common questions at this point:

1. How much time does it take to call readahead again on files that have been cached once already? About 0.05 seconds to call readahead on the same list a second time

2. How much overhead does it add to bootup if the background readahead was still going, and you tried to log in? About 2 seconds on my setup
Conclusion

In my case, applying this readahead hack lead to a 10-second improvement in login speed in the worst-case scenario, and a remarkable doubling in login speed when the system idles at the login prompt for a few seconds.

This is a pretty appreciable improvement and it would be nice if a nicer version of this hack can be added to Ubuntu. The basic idea should be fairly simple to adapt to an /etc/readahead/readahead.gnome file representative of the default system and hooked by an Xsession.d script.

Many more applications come to mind as taking a long time to load while the disk grinds (Firefox? Openoffice? Eclipse?). You can use a procedure very similar to this to write a “wrapper script” that first performs a readahead-list call on a list, then call the application with the original arguments. I’d be interested to hear of any improvements gained by that method.
Undoing readahead

Remove, remove, remove! Delete the ~/.readahead directory, delete /etc/X11/Xsession.d/00readahead, and delete the line you added to /etc/rc.local
All Done

Your system should be a 100 times more snappier.

В этой статье я вам расскажу о не так давно появившейся системе Blogun. Эта система, скажем так, сводит блогеров и рекламодателей в одном месте, достаточно удобном и многофункциональном.

Итак. Имея свой блог, вы можете размещать в нем рекламные посты, которые будут предлагать вам рекламодатели. Также рекламодатели могут просто предложить вам написать пост и вставить в него определенные ссылки, картинки и тп. Оплата составляет приблизительно от 0.1$ до ~ - это зависит от тематики, посещаемости и контингента в вашем блоге. В основном, рекламодателям нужен трафик, если у вас нет трафика – не рассчитывайте на большую оплату. Единственное что может повысить цену при таком раскладе – это высокий PR вашего форума (от 4 и выше) или хорошо работающее ссылочное.

Далее. Если вы рекламодатель, вы можете создать рекламную компанию и искать блоги самостоятельно и предлагать цену за размещение своего поста, а можете ждать предложений от самих блогеров. Многие блогеры специально завышают цены на размещение, или тупо верят что пост на их практически нулевом блоге стоит 5$ и тп. Поэтому система предусмотрела вариант торга. Вы можете отправить ему встречное предложение со своей ценой. В итоге, блог размещает ваш пост, и вы смотрите на качество исполнения работы, оцениваете и ставите ему оценку. Так и двигаемся дальше.

Я работаю с этой системой около двух недель. Размещено 22 публикации, в которых рекламируется проект RuPartner. Заплатил я за это 4.3$, половину из которых забрала система. Так как у неё ооочень высокая комиссия, которая составляет аж 50%. Вот. Собственно за это время было несколько десятков переходов и естественно, сайт поднялся по продвигаемым ключевым словам в Google. То что я потратил там для эксперимента – это ничто для развития такого рода проекта. Поэтому в ближайшем будущем я планирую провести более масштабную «атаку» блогов. Это привлечет большое количество заинтересованных посетителей и хорошо поднимет проект в выдаче по интересующим меня запросам.

Что мне понравилось, так это то что в проекте есть реферальная программа. Вы будете получать 20% от потраченного или полученного каждым привлеченного рекламодателем или блоггером, соответственно. За две недели я заработал на этой программе около 10$. Баланс постоянно растет, радует. Копейки, а все равно приятно ;).

Итог: хорошая и самая популярная программа для рекламы в блогах.

Mozilla Labs has rolled out an experimental Firefox plug-in that promises to streamline the way Web surfers manage the mountains of information online. Called Ubiquity, the proof-of-concept prototype is an experiment with two parts — it’s both an interface and a development platform, notes the plug-in’s developer, Aza Raskin.

“Ubiquity 0.1 focuses on the platform aspects while beginning to explore language-driven methods of controlling the browser,” Raskin said.

Instant Translations

The main goal of Ubiquity is to simplify the time-consuming interactions that Web surfers typically perform on the Internet today, Raskin said. “It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible,” he added.

Browser users now must use cut and paste along with a separate Web site such as Babel Fish to translate foreign-language content on the Web. With Ubiquity, however, users simply highlight the text they wish to translate, then right-click to open a menu of commands that includes the “translate” option. The text is then automatically converted into English and inserted right onto the original Web page.

The same technique can be used to initiate a wide range of other commands, such as defining an unfamiliar word or technical term, access weather information, or even Twitter friends with the latest news. Moreover, Web developers eventually will be able to build customized Ubiquity commands to which online visitors can subscribe.

Language-Based Instructions

Ubiquity also features a separate command-line box that opens in the upper left-hand corner of any Web page whenever a user presses the Ctrl and spacebar keys simultaneously. The command line, Raskin said, empowers users to control browsers with language-based instructions.

“Let’s say you’re arranging to meet up with a friend at a restaurant and you want to include a map in the e-mail,” Rankin said. “Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a Webmail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed.”

The command-line box gives users a way to transform all that clicking, typing, searching, copying and pasting into very simple tasks. For example, users can type and then select the address they want, then type “map” in the command line, Raskin said.

“If you execute the command, you’ll be taken to the Google Maps page,” Raskin said. “Or you can click on the image in the preview to get a larger, interactive version. After scrolling and zooming this map to your liking, you can click the ‘insert map in page’ link to insert the map into your e-mail.”

Currently, Ubiquity only works with Google Gmail accounts. However, Raskin said there is no reason why the plug-in shouldn’t eventually work with all major Web-based e-mail providers, as well as standalone e-mail applications like Thunderbird.

Mozilla’s long-term goal for Ubiquity is to enable users to instruct the browser — whether by typing, speaking or otherwise using language — about what they want to do.

“There’s a long way to go with this interface, though,” Raskin noted. “It still needs thought and a lot of refinement.”

San Francisco - They’re back! Just when you thought the “browser wars” were over, with the two camps ??? Microsoft and Mozilla.org ??? settling in for a kind of intransigent d??tente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly, Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (that is, Gmail, Google Docs, and so on).

To that end, Google has designed an almost completely new Web browser. In fact, other than the core rendering engine ??? which is based on the open source WebKit standard of Safari fame ??? everything in Google Chrome constitutes a rethinking of how you engineer a browser application. For example, with the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process ??? a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application.

[ What's the secret to speedy Web apps? Tom Yager says, "Skip Google's Chrome, and jump straight to WebKit." ]

Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process, then leveraging the built-in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won’t necessarily take down the entire browser ??? the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

This is a big deal for Google, which is banking on wider adoption of its hosted application offerings and battling the perception that browsers are unreliable, especially when you start running multiple Web applications in a tabbed format. Nobody wants to trust their line-of-business applications to an unstable environment, so Google hopes that Chrome will provide the kind of robustness that can assuage customers’ fears.

Double-stuff browsers
Of course, few technology ideas are truly original, and the case of the multiprocess, tabbed browser is no exception. In fact, Google can’t even claim to be the first to market with this model ??? Microsoft beat it to the punch by a week when it released its own take on multiprocess browsing in the form of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Like Chrome, IE 8 uses multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab’s contents. However, while Chrome takes a purist approach and literally launches a new process with each opened tab, IE 8 uses more of a hybrid model: It creates multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process but doesn’t specifically assign each tab to its own instance. Thus, a look at Task Manager under Windows will show an equal or greater number of Chrome instances than running tabs, whereas IE 8 will generate a fewer number of instances ??? for example, six copies of iexplore.exe to support 10 discrete tabs ??? and share them among the running tabs.

How these two variations on a theme will hold up in the real world remains to be seen. My take is that Google’s purist approach will ultimately prove more robust, but at a cost in terms of resource consumption. In fact, both Chrome and IE 8 stretch the limits of current PC hardware by gobbling up enormous amounts of RAM while saturating the system with lots of concurrent execution threads.

This new development ??? browsers chewing up more memory than their host OS ??? is something I documented in my Enterprise Desktop blog earlier this week. At the time, I was shocked by how bloated IE 8 had become, consuming 332MB of RAM to render a simple 10-site/10-tab browsing scenario. Then I evaluated Google’s Chrome and my expectations were reset yet again. Not only did the “fresh start” Chrome use nearly as much RAM (324MB) as the legacy-burdened IE 8 during peak browsing loads, it actually out-bloated IE 8 over the duration of the test, consuming an average of 267MB versus. IE 8’s 211MB (you can read more about these test scenarios at the exo.performance.network blog).

Clearly, these are products targeted at the next generation of PC hardware. With nearly 20 percent of a 2GB PC’s memory consumed by Web browsing, and with IE 8 spinning more than 170 execution threads on Vista to complete the same aforementioned 10-site scenario (Chrome spins a much more conservative 48 threads), we’ll need to rethink our ideas of acceptable minimum system requirements. At the very least, you’re going to need multiple processing cores and many gigabytes of RAM to support this new, more demanding take on Web-centric computing.

To be fair, I must mention that both IE 8 and Google Chrome are still in the beta stages of development. Chrome, in particular, is in its first public test release cycle, while IE 8 is only now being made available in a “feature complete” form (previous IE betas were notably short on innovation). And it’s also important to consider all of the nonarchitectural changes that these browsers bring to the table ??? most notably, enhanced rendering performance and usability.

Lean or luxurious
As with any Beta release, I’m loathe to discuss performance characteristics beyond a simple “they seem a lot faster than IE 7″ type of empirical observation (though others are reporting that Chrome clobbers the competition, especially when it comes to JavaScript execution). However, usability is fair game, and here it becomes a classic debate between fans of the “kitchen sink” approach and purists in the “less is more” crowd.

Internet Explorer 8 is the “kitchen sink” browser. In addition to carrying forward the legacy of Microsoft’s much-maligned ActiveX architecture, IE 8 adds a host of new capabilities, including Web Slices, which are sections of a Web page that are isolated and reproduced in a separate, updatable mini window; Accelerators, which are basically context menu options that activate common Web services such as dictionary lookup or translation; and InPrivate Browsing, aka “porn mode,” which lets you surf without leaving behind a browser or search history, cookies, temporary files, and other evidence of where you’ve been. Microsoft has also revamped the address bar to provide better auto-complete suggestions and expanded the dedicated Search field to include images and other rich media as part of the drop-down results set.

Google Chrome is definitely from the “less is more” school. The browser’s UI is Spartan compared to IE 8’s and has no dedicated Search box, instead combining search and auto-complete suggestions as part of a single, unified address superbox. New tabs open to reveal thumbnail views of frequently visited sites (IE 8 offers a similar view but focuses on recently closed tabs) and can be dragged into, out of, and between Chrome windows, allowing you to isolate, combine, and reorganize tabs on the fly (something you really need to experience firsthand to appreciate). And in a sign of the times, Chrome features its own take on “porn mode” (dubbed Incognito), where cookies and history data are deleted as soon as the tab is closed.

Overall, both IE 8 Beta 2 and the Chrome Beta look like compelling options. Each pushes the boundaries of Web application robustness while consuming gobs of resources and generally ignoring legacy hardware (in other words, systems more than 18 months old). Chrome will no doubt receive most of the attention, if for no other reason than it’s from Google and, thus, “newer” and “cooler” than IE (not to mention, potentially more stable). However, I wouldn’t count Microsoft out quite yet. The company still has the upper hand in overall browser share, and if nothing else, IE 8 is designed to appeal to Microsoft’s user base by extending and enhancing what they already know. And, of course, IE 8 will eventually ship as part of the next Windows, a fact that virtually guarantees Microsoft’s influence will continue to be felt in the next phase of the Web’s evolution.

What’s behind Google’s release of its new Chrome browser? While the software boasts some impressive technology, does Google seriously mean to reopen the browser wars, even against its open-source partner Mozilla?

On the one hand, observers say, Chrome is an assault on Microsoft, but not in the obvious, browser-war sense. On the other hand, a number of revelations about how Google is using the browser raise substantial privacy concerns.

Indeed, they say, Chrome reveals just how vast Google’s ambitions are — and they go well beyond roughing up Microsoft.

Google vs Microsoft

For starters, Chrome is a “direct attack on Microsoft,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, in an e-mail message. Even the name is a dig. “Microsoft Chrome Effects was the most ambitious attempt to transform the Windows front end, and it failed largely due to internal politics and an untimely disagreement with Intel,” Enderle said.

Chrome isn’t about unseating Internet Explorer but a stab at Microsoft’s fundamental life force — Windows itself. “Chrome is intended to render Windows irrelevant by taking over the windowing system and allowing it to be platform-independent, breaking the dependency over time on legacy Windows applications,” Enderle said.

A PC World article pointed out how Chrome is missing numerous features that users take for granted — a drop-down menu bar, plug-ins and extensions, a powerful history search. But Chrome isn’t about users, Enderle said. It’s meant to be a “better front end for applications, not Web browsing,” he said. “Chrome is a feint at IE but a flanking move on Windows.”

Google vs the World?

The computer world is powerfully dominated by Microsoft. To fundamentally change that equation means, in Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s estimation, not a power-sharing arrangement but the decimation of the empire. In the language of geopolitics, Microsoft is the Soviet Union. The question is whether Google is Russian leader Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin.

In a piece for ABC News called “Is Google Turning into Big Brother?” Michael Malone posited that Google announced its new browser on a national holiday in hopes of making Chrome look like an afterthought. The reason? “Google’s ambitions are bigger than most of us have ever imagined, and the company is now rich enough, and powerful enough, to execute them — even if it means the short-term sacrifice of a major new revenue source.”

If Google does pull off its strategy, “it will be the most valuable company on the planet. It will also be the scariest and we should start worrying about that right now,” Malone wrote.

‘Scary’ Big Brother

What’s so scary? A number of recent revelations about Chrome — from an end-user license agreement that originally gave Google a perpetual license to all content transmitted through the browser (Google rewrote that) to the fact that Chrome by default transmits browsing history to Google — suggest to Malone that Google is serious about controlling all the data on the Web.

“Microsoft only wanted all of our money. Increasingly, it seems that Google wants all of our data,” Malone wrote.

But while Google presents itself as the Yeltsin to Microsoft’s Mikhail Gorbachev, tearing down Redmond’s foundations of Windows, IE and Office, Google’s true aim may be to consolidate the old power under a new crown. “This isn’t a revenue play; the goal is to both destroy Microsoft and replace it, and what they plan has a high probability of being successful,” Enderle said.

“Google’s intentions appear to go well beyond Microsoft and suggest a level of control and power that AT&T, IBM and Microsoft couldn’t even dream of. For what they are attempting, the word ’scary’ is incredibly inadequate,” Enderle said.

It would be a serious mistake for the international community to regard the dramatic escalation of violence in Georgia as just another flare-up in the Caucasus.

The names of the flashpoints may be unfamiliar, the territory remote and the dispute parochial, but the battle under way will have important repercussions beyond the region.

The outcome of the struggle will determine the course of Russia’s relations with its neighbours, will shape Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, could alter the relationship between the Kremlin and the West and crucially could decide the fate of Caspian basin energy supplies.

Quite what triggered the Georgian offensive, on the day that the world was supposed to gather in peace for the start of the Beijing Olympics, is not yet clear.

It was known that a serious confrontation had been building up. British Intelligence predicted this year that a war in the Caucasus was probable. The focus was Georgia, the West’s main ally in the region and the only export route for Caspian oil and gas outside Kremlin control.

Part of the responsibility must lie with President Saakashvili. The US-educated Geogian leader has rightly been praised for turning around his country’s dire economy, transforming the Soviet-style army into a modern Western force and standing up to the Kremlin.

Georgia has been saddled for the best part of two decades with breakaway regions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both supported by Russia as part of the Kremlin’s strategy to weaken Tbilisi’s authority. Nevertheless, seeking to reintegrate the separatist provinces by force is a risky, some would say reckless, move that threatens to trigger an all-out war between Russia and Georgia.

On paper the small Georgian military is no match for the might of Russia. But Mr Saakashvili has calculated that his friends in the West, notably America and Britain, will protect him. Russia must also shoulder responsibility for the crisis. Under President Putin, the Kremlin increased its support for Georgia’s breakaway regions, offering their inhabitants Russian citizenship and arming separatist forces while pretending to be honest broker.

The Kremlin tried to break Georgia’s resolve by deporting its citizens from Russia, imposing blockades and banning the import of Georgian goods. It had been hoped that the election this year of President Medvedev might lead to an easing of tensions between the two neighbours. It seems more likely that, thanks to Mr Putin’s continued influence as Prime Minister and the role played by hardliners in the military, Mr Medvedev may instead find himself embroiled in war.

The West, in particular America, has stoked the regional fire. At the Nato summit in Bucharest this year it pressed for Georgia and Ukraine’s membership of the alliance. The move was blocked by the Europeans but Nato did give a commitment to offer the two countries membership later. That move was seen in Moscow as a challenge to its dominance in what it calls the “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics.

Since then Russia has made clear in word and deed that it will do anything to prevent Nato’s expansion on its western and southern flanks.

America and Britain are closely involved in providing military assistance to the Georgians in the form of arms and training. The support is aimed at encouraging the rise of Georgia as an independent, sovereign state.

But the help is also partly a means of protecting the oil pipeline across Georgia that carries crude from the Caspian to the Black Sea, the only export route that bypasses Russia’s stranglehold on energy exports from the region.

If Georgia succeeds in reimposing its sovereignty over South Ossetia in the face of Russian opposition, it will be a huge setback to Moscow’s influence in the region and embolden other former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and Azerbaijan. A defeat for the Georgians could signal the end of Mr Saakashvili’s rule and severely set back Georgia’s efforts to establish itself as a modern Western-looking democracy. Either way, the conflict risks further undermining the strained relations between Russia and the West.

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