Blumer.com.ar

Brian Harry's posted the final feature list for TFS 2008 (f.k.a "Orcas"):  http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/08/08/final-tfs-2008-feature-list.aspx

A few of my favorites:

• SharePoint 2007 support
• SQL 2008 support
• Simpler installation
• Native CI support
• NET object model for the build server
• Incremental builds & gets
• Get latest on checkout

Whatever useful stuff the good guys come up with, the bad guys ain't far behind. A few months back I wrote about researchers at Carnegie Mellon coming up with a way to use CAPTCHA tools to help decipher words in text by the Internet Archive. The basic idea is that the effort to prevent spammers and others automating their intrusion into websites (signing up for stuff, comment spam etc) should not be wasted.
Now a sleazeball has found a way to do the same thing: get folk to decipher CAPTCHA texts through a small program, delivered by Trojan, that offers striptease in exchange for guessing the texts correctly (Trend Micro, via via Seth Godin):
A nifty little program which Trend Micro detects as TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A disguises itself as a strip-tease game, wherein a scantily-clad “Melissa” agrees to take off a little bit of her clothing. However, for her to strut her stuff, users must identify the letters hidden within a CAPTCHA. Input the letters correctly, press “go” and “Melissa” reveals more of herself.
However, the “answers” are then sent to a remote server, where a malicious user eagerly awaits them. The “strip-tease” game is actually a ploy by ingenious malware authors to identify and match ambiguous CAPTCHA images from legitimate sites, using the unsuspecting user as the decoder of the said image.
As Trend Micro points out, the CAPTCHAs in this case are from Yahoo! Web site, suggesting that a spammer is building up Yahoo! accounts.

CAPTCHA Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me? - TrendLabs | Malware Blog - by Trend Micro

The newest version of OS X, Leopard, has already been adapted to run on a PC. "The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple's new OS, without investing in new hardware -- even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple's terms and conditions. The forum is offering full instructions on how to install the system, including screenshots of the installation process. Not all the features of Leopard function with the patch -- Wi-Fi support, for example, is reportedly inoperable. Historically, Apple's likely next move will be to track down and act against those behind the hack.

http://forum.osx86scene.com/

Personal computing is currently in a state of transition. While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of web browsers. And they are surrounded with controls–like back and forward buttons and a location bar–that have nothing to do with interacting with the application itself.

Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.
The first of these experiments is based on Webrunner, which we’ve moved into the Mozilla Labs code repository and renamed to Prism.

Prism

Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

Prism lets users add their favorite web apps to their desktop environment:

When invoked, these applications run in their own window:

They are accessible with Control-Tab, Command-Tab, and Exposé, just like desktop apps. And users can still access these same applications from any web browser when they are away from their own computers.

The Best of Both Worlds

Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

And while Prism focuses on how web apps can integrate into the desktop experience, we’re also working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.

The User Experience

We’re also thinking about how to better integrate Prism with Firefox, enabling one-click “make this a desktop app” functionality that preserves a user’s preferences, saved passwords, cookies, add-ons, and customizations. Ideally you shouldn’t even have to download Prism, it should just be built into your browser.

We’re working on an extension for Firefox that provides some of this functionality. For more information about the user experience we hope to achieve in Prism, see Alex Faaborg’s blog post. For some of the technical details and new features found in Prism, see Mark Finkle’s blog post.

Getting Started with Prism

We have an early prototype for this working today on Windows, with work continuing on Mac and Linux (for which we should have builds available soon).

To try out the prototype, download and install it: Download Prism for Windows.

Then start Prism. It will display an Install Web Application dialog.

Enter the URL of the application you want to use in Prism (e.g. mail.google.com), a name for the application (e.g. Gmail), and pick where you’d like to create shortcuts to the application.

Then press the OK button. Prism will create shortcuts to the application in the locations you specified and then start the application.

How to Get Involved

Prism is just the first of many experiments we hope to conduct around improving the usability of web applications. It’s open source, like everything we do, and we’re interested in hearing from and working with anyone interested in further developing this concept.

 http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

 

Linux growth in the U.S. x86 server market has, over the past six quarters, started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to Windows Server and the market as a whole.

The annual rate at which Linux is growing in the x86 server space has fallen from around 53 percent in 2003, when Windows Server growth was in the mid-20 percent range, to a negative 4 percent growth in calendar year 2006, IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures show.

Over the same time period, Windows has continued to report positive annual growth, outpacing the total growth rate in the x86 market by more than 4 percent in 2006, indicating that Linux has actually lost market share to Windows Server over this time.

The same holds true for worldwide Linux x86 server shipments, which dropped from the huge annual growth rate of about 45 percent is 2003 to growth of less than 10 percent in 2006, the IDC figures show.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that the migrations from Unix to Linux have slowed down markedly.

Is open source dying? Click here to read more.

"We have seen the rate of migration from Unix slow over the past few quarters," IDC analyst Matt Eastwood told eWEEK. "In my view this is because much of the low-hanging fruit has been moved and the applications that remain on Unix are stickier because they are seen as business critical and more political candidates for migration overall."

IDC analyst Al Gillen pointed out that the number of servers shipped does not perfectly equal the number of operating systems in the market. This is particularly the case with Linux where a substantial portion of the overall market opportunity comes from deployments aboard recycled servers, PCs and workstations deployed as servers, and Linux deployed as a guest operating system.

"This does not contradict any trending taking place on server hardware," Gillen said.

He added: "But we do need to remember that the Linux software ecosystem does not track exactly the same as does x86 hardware shipments."

Click here to read more about how Windows Server is wooing away Linux customers.

Margaret Lewis, the director of commercial solutions for AMD in Austin, Texas, has also noticed the slowdown in Linux growth over the past few quarters.

In 2000, Windows comprised about half of the server operating system market, followed by Unix and Netware at about 17 percent each and Linux reaching towards 10 percent, she said, noting that today Windows owns about 70 percent, Linux about 20 percent, with Unix below 10 percent and Netware barely registering.

"Looking at these large operating system market swings, you could draw the conclusion that Linux has gotten the 'low-hanging fruit' in terms of migration," Lewis said.

"Without the larger pool of Unix and NetWare users who are ripe for migration, there is not quite the level of fuel. You could assume that Linux is now ready to settle down to a more regular growth curve representative of a more mature technology."

The fact that Windows has maintained a steady growth rate over this same time frame could be the result of companies expanding their Windows-based IT infrastructure to meet the demands of users who always want to be online, she said.

"Windows-based Web hosting sites are experiencing strong growth, the Exchange infrastructure is expanding to offer unified messaging and many small businesses are moving to a real server infrastructure for basic infrastructure instead of a network of desktops," Lewis said.

Read more here about how some Windows Server 2008 features address the Linux challenge.

Bill Hilf, general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., has also noticed these trends, and says that increased customer adoption of Windows Server 2003 in a broad range of enterprise scenarios is driving significant growth of that business.

"I spend a lot of time talking with both Linux and Windows customers and partners, and the feedback that I hear is that, in volume, Linux is primarily deployed in two workloads—high-performance computing and as Web servers," Hilf told eWEEK.

"It appears that Linux server growth is moderating considerably and, while it's certainly still a player, it's not being considered across the broad range of workloads that Windows Server is, from ERP to CRM to messaging and collaboration to core infrastructure like file and print," he said.

This is the homepage of the Shape Contexts based approach to break Gimpy, the CAPTCHA test used at Yahoo! to screen out bots. This method can successfully pass that test 92% of the time. See EZ-Gimpy in action at Yahoo! The approach this soft take uses general purpose algorithms that have been designed for generic object recognition. The same basic ideas have been applied to finding people in images, matching handwritten digits, and recognizing 3D objects.

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/

After almost three years since the release of GIMP 2.2, the GIMP developers have just announced the release of GIMP 2.4. The release notes speak of scalable bitmap brushes, redesigned rectangle/ellipse selection tools, redesigned crop tool, a new foreground selection tool, a new align tool, reorganized menu layouts, improved zoomed in/zoomed out image display quality, improved printing and color management support and a new perspective clone tool.

http://www.gimp.org/

Brief Description

Standard distributions

• Red Hat Linux 9.0
• SuSE Linux 9.3
• SuSE Linux 10.0
• SuSE Linux 10.1
• SuSE Linux 10.2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bf12642f-77dc-4d45-ae4e-e1b05e0a2674&DisplayLang=en

Study shows that sleep deprivation leads to a rewiring of the brain's emotional circuitry
There's no question that people need their sleep: studies have linked a lack of shut-eye to everything from disruptions in the immune system to cognitive deficits to weight control.
In fact, psychologist Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, says that "almost all psychiatric disorders show some problems with sleep.'' But, he says that scientists previously believed the psychiatric problems triggered the sleep issues. New research from his lab, however, suggests the reverse is the case; that is, a lack of shut-eye is causing some psychological disturbances.
Walker's team and collaborators from Harvard Medical School reached their conclusions, published in Current Biology, after studying 26 healthy students aged 24 to 31 after either an all-nighter or a full night's sleep.
Fourteen subjects spent 35 straight hours without getting a wink before being rolled into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners where their brains were observed while they viewed a set of 100 photos that became increasingly disturbing as they progressed. Early slides were snapshots of an empty wicker basket on a table; the scenes changed as the series progressed, however, to more shocking settings, such as a tarantula on a person's shoulder and finally pictures of burn victims and other traumatic portraits.
The researchers mainly monitored the amygdala, a midbrain structure that decodes emotion, and observed that both sets of volunteers had a similar baseline of activity when shown the innocuous images. But, when the scenes became more gruesome, the amygdalae of the sleep-deprived participants kicked up, showing 60 percent more activity relative to the normal population's response. In addition, the researchers noticed that more than five times more neurons in the area were transmitting impulses in the sleep-deprived brains.
Walker described the heightened emotional response in the weary as "profound," noting, "We've never seen a magnitude of increase between two groups that big in any of our studies before."
The team also checked the fMRI readings to determine whether any other brain regions had a similar pattern of activity, which would indicate that the brain networks were communicating with one another. In normal participants, the amygdala seemed to be talking to the medial prefrontal cortex, an outer layer of the brain that, Walker says, helps to contextualize experiences and emotions. But, in the sleep-deprived brain, the amygdala seemed to be "rewired," coupling instead with a brain stem area called the locus coeruleus, which secretes norepinephrine, a precursor of the hormone adrenaline that triggers fight-or-flight type reactions.
"Medial prefrontal cortex is the policeman of the emotional brain," Walker says. "It makes us more rational. That top-down, inhibitory connection is severed in the condition of sleep deprivation. … The amygdala seems to be able to run amok." People in this state seem to experience a pendulum of emotions, going from upset and annoyed to giddy in moments, he says.
"There seems to be a causal relationship between impaired sleep and some of the psychiatric symptomatology and disorders that we're seeing," says Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in this study. He cites research linking sleep apnea, in which breathing is disrupted, to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the evidence of a connection between depression and insomnia as examples. "It might be that those medial frontal regions tell the rest of the brain, 'You can chill,'" he says. "Those circuits become exhausted or altered after a lack of sleep."

Microsoft has 200 programmers working on slimming down the Windows kernel for the next version of the operating system, a company engineer revealed in a presentation last weekend at the University of Illinois.
"A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system, and that may be a fair characterization, I have to admit," said Eric Traut, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at Microsoft. "[So] we created what we call MinWin. It's still bigger than I'd like it to be, but we've taken a shot at really stripping out all of the layers above and making sure that we had a clean architectural layer there."
Traut talked about MinWin last Saturday at a conference on computing sponsored by the university's student-led Association for Computing Machinery. Much of the hourlong presentation was taken up with a discussion of Microsoft's virtualization efforts -- Traut's specialty.
Traut showed off MinWin and bragged about how much leaner the microkernel is than the current core of Windows. While Vista uses 5,000 files for its 4GB core, MinWin weighs in at just 100 files and 25MB.
MinWin is so small that it lacks a graphical subsystem. When Traut booted MinWin, for example, its start-up screen showed the standard Windows flag logo, but the design was built from ASCII characters, a technique discarded decades ago by everyone except spammers.
The microkernel will be used only internally and won't, as Traut put it, be "productized." Instead, it will be the basis of all upcoming versions of Windows, including the next-generation edition now saddled with the code name Windows 7. Microsoft has given out almost no information about that operating system other than a delivery timeline that puts its final release in 2010.
"We'll be using [MinWin] to build all the products based on Windows," said Traut. "It's not just the OS that's running on many laptops in this room, it's also the OS used for media centers, for servers, for small embedded devices."
Microsoft has been knocked in the past for Windows' poor performance and its large size, two criticisms that have been leveled against Vista since its release earlier this year. By stripping the current kernel to the bare minimum -- Traut's MinWin -- and then using that as the code base for Windows 7, Microsoft is trying to reduce the operating system's memory footprint and boost its speed at the same time.
It's probably doing so for good reason, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based research company. "This sounds like it's for the new hypervisor Microsoft's been talking about," said Cherry. "It really looks like [in the future] we'll be running some thin hypervisor layer first and then the OS on top of that. So anything Microsoft can do to make that first layer as small as they can is good."
A hypervisor, also called a virtualization manager, is software that allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware processor. Popular software-based hypervisors include Microsoft's own Virtual PC and VMware Inc.'s VMware Workstation. Microsoft has been talking up hypervisors and integrating the technology into Windows for years.
"The problem for Microsoft has always been trying to figure out the right balance between putting things in the kernel for performance reasons and pulling them out for stability reasons," said Cherry. "The question here, though, is, can they discipline themselves to not put things into this new microkernel?"
A video of Traut's hourlong talk can be downloaded from or viewed on the conference Web site.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, ifpi.org, is quite unhappy that the .com is now a link to the (still not live) International Federation of Pirates Interests. The ifpi.com domain has been free as soon as March of this year, according to WebArchive. Nevertheless, the "real" IFPI wants to take it to the WIPO under the accusation of cybersquatting.

http://www.ifpi.org/

http://www.ifpi.com/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071018-battle-brewing-between-pirate-bay-recording-industry-over-ifpi-domain-coup.html

Voters in Argentina's upcoming presidential election have found an interesting solution to their political apathy: eBay. 'New and unused' votes are being posted from $0.30 to $95. Electoral authorities say they're powerless to stop it. 'Argentine electoral authorities say they can do little to stop the practice because it falls into a legal vacuum. One of the voters, Martin Minue, a doctor from the northern province of Rioja, told a newspaper it was his way to protest against useless politicians. Mr Minue, 33, told the Clarin paper he felt powerless to change the country's situation. The doctor, who works in the city of Chilecito, posted his vote on an auction website with a price tag of 20 pesos (US$6).

Steve Jobs announced an iPhone SDK today. The plan is to release it in February, and the suggestion is that apps will need to be digitally signed (not unlike digital signing in Leopard). Here's hoping that developing for the iPhone/Touch will be cheap (or free) enough to allow the folks who have been writing apps to continue doing so. Says Jobs: 'It will take until February to release an SDK because we're trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once--provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task.'

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research. Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star. As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called "gravity grid" of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves -- ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light -- that Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place. It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it's a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.
"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."
He also says that the console's Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer -- if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.
"The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford's http://folding.stanford.edu/) or clustered together (like Khanna's), says Sony's senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.
According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.
This is precisely what Khanna needed. Prior to obtaining his PS3s, Khanna relied on grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use various supercomputing sites spread across the United States "Typically I'd use a couple hundred processors -- going up to 500 -- to do these same types of things."
However, each of those supercomputer runs cost Khanna as much as $5,000 in grant money. Eight 60 GB PS3s would cost just $3,200, by contrast, but Khanna figured he would have a hard time convincing the NSF to give him a grant to buy game consoles, even if the overall price tag was lower. So after tweaking his code this past summer so that it could take advantage of the Cell's unique architecture, Khanna set about petitioning Sony for some help in the form of free PS3s.
"Once I was able to get to the point that I had this kind of performance from a single PS3, I think that's when Sony started paying attention," Khanna says of his optimized code.
Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.
"Basically, it's almost like a replacement," he says. "I don't have to use that supercomputer anymore, which is a good thing."
"For the same amount of money -- well, I didn't pay for it, but even if you look into the amount of funding that would go into buying something like eight PS3s -- for the same amount of money I can do these runs indefinitely."
The point of the simulations Khanna and his team at UMass are running on the cluster is to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for almost 100 years but have never been observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day. Indeed, with NASA and other agencies building some very big gravitational wave observatories with the sensitivity to be able to detect these waves, Khanna's sees his work as complementary to such endeavors.

Internet users in Egypt, India and Turkey are the world's most frequent searchers for Web sites using the keyword "sex" on Google search engines, according to statistics provided by Google.
Germany, Mexico and Austria were world's top three searchers of the word "Hitler" while "Nazi" scored the most hits in Chile, Australia and the United Kingdom, data from 2004 to the present retrievable on the "Google Trends" Web site showed.
Chile also came in first place searching for the word "gay", followed by Mexico and Colombia.

The top searchers for other keywords were as follows (in order from first to third place):

• "Jihad" - Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan
• "Terrorism" - Pakistan, Philippines, Australia
• "Hangover" - Ireland, United Kingdom, United States
• "Burrito" - United States, Argentina, Canada
• "Iraq" - United States, Australia, Canada
• "Taliban" - Pakistan, Australia, Canada
• "Tom Cruise" - Canada, United States, Australia
• "Britney Spears" - Mexico, Venezuela, Canada
• "Homosexual" - Philippines, Chile, Venezuela
• "Love" - Philippines, Australia, United States
• "Botox" - Australia, United States, United Kingdom
• "Viagra" - Italy, United Kingdom, Germany
• "David Beckham" - Venezuela, United Kingdom, Mexico
• "Kate Moss" - Ireland, United Kingdom, Sweden
• "Dolly Buster" - Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia
• "Car bomb" - Australia, United States, Canada
• "Marijuana" - Canada, United States, Australia
• "IAEA" - Austria, Pakistan, Iran

The Pirate Bay has now taken up residence at IFPI.com, a domain once owned by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The Pirate Bay says the site will now promote the International Federation of Pirates Interests. IFPI can still be reached at ifpi.org. Torrentfreak has up a brief interview with Brokep, one of the administrators of The Pirate Bay, who says: "It's not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it's ours and we're keeping it."

Later, from The Pirate bay blog: :P

IFPI wants police secrets

A lot of e-mail leaks lately. Recently we got a copy of an e-mail sent between the lawyer Peter Danowsky at Danowsky & Partners, which is also a board member of the Swedish "Upphovsrättsföreningen" (roughly translates to "Intellectual property organisation") and his clients at IFPI. We can read that IFPI wants to get a copy of the ongoing investigation as soon as possible in order to "protect their claims". They also don't consider this being something that would in any way be a problem for the people being investigated.

IFPI and the companies they represent are of course not respecting the privacy and laws in Sweden, that's no news. Hopefully the prosecutor will protect the peoples rights but it would be the first time the he would do anything correctly in the case."

High-tech companies and groups representing American engineers are famous for clashing over whether it's a good idea to allow U.S. companies to hire more foreign workers on temporary H-1B visas.

But what's sometimes forgotten in the debate is a key point of agreement among at least some representatives of the warring sides. A new joint letter (click for PDF) to Congress from the Semiconductor Industry Association and IEEE-USA, the U.S. branch of the world's largest professional society of electronics engineers, seeks to remind politicos of that common ground, which is this: we need more green cards.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9796498-7.html

Microsoft recently purchased a company called Jellyfish.com, based in Madison, Wisconsin.  Jellyfish has done some really innovative work in comparative shopping engines.

http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/10/01/microsoft-acquires-jellyfish-com.aspx

Scott Guthrie announces today that Microsoft will offer “the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them” later this year.

According to Daniel Moth

The cool bit is not that you can just read the framework code in your favourite text editor once you download and accept the license; no, the real goodness is that when you debug your applications with Visual Studio 2008 you will have the option to debug right down into the Framework code (with an autodownload feature from an MSDN server)!

Scott Hanselman has a Podcast on the topic and Channel9 will be publishing a video at the end of the week.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Microsoft has just announced the final release of the IIS FastCGI module for IIS 5.1 (XP), 6 (2003), and 7 (2008). This FastCGI module was built with collaboration from Zend, the creators of PHP, and is intended to solve the CGI on Windows problem.

Since early 2006, Microsoft and Zend have been working together on a technical collaboration with the PHP community to significantly enhance the reliability and performance of PHP on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. As part of this collaboration, the IIS product group has been working on a new component for IIS6 and IIS7 called FastCGI Extension which will enable IIS to much more effectively host PHP applications.

Today Microsoft is eager to announce availability of the Go Live release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download. The Go Live release is the last step in the Microsoft beta process and represents the highest level of quality and reliability. For the first time, customers have a license that permits them to deploy the FastCGI Extension on their production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

http://www.iis.net/php

 

There are plenty of ways to generate attention for your web site, but you’ll also want to make sure you’re covering the basics too. We talked to web site marketing expert Celeste Bishop, who runs Bishop Market Resources, to learn what you can do right now, this week, to optimize your site.

1. Figure out what key words and phrases are going to be important to your site. Bishop suggests brainstorming to come up with a list of what you believe your prospects and customers would put into a search engine to locate your products and services. Then run them through a tool such as WordTracker, the Google keyword tool or Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector Tool to see what the volume of search activity is and find alternative phrasing to add to your list.

Next, take each page that’s important to you — not the Contact Us page or Site Map — and make sure that keyword or phrase is used prominently. Use it early on in the text and at the end of the page. Put it into a heading with an H1 tag or a subhead with an H2 tag. But, she advises, “Don’t overuse it. Don’t change the way the content is reading, so it sounds ‘horsy.’ It’s better to have good content than have keyword phrases sprinkled in.”

Also make sure it appears in your metatags behind the page. Yes, metatags still have value — though not from a search engine ranking standpoint. “You have to think of a metatag as a kind of ad,” says Bishop. Search engines use that to show additional text as part of the organic listing. “If you’ve got a metatag that isn’t compelling and doesn’t have keywords in it, [people] won’t click through even if you do rank well.”

2. Make it your “career” to get links into your site. That includes getting links to more than just your home page and using your keywords as part of the anchor text. To get links, Bishop said, write articles and place them on other sites. Then make sure it includes a resource box or bio at the end of the article that includes your URL in the first line and something that will compel readers to go to your site in the second line, along with another link. (For example: Dian Schaffhauser writes for Web Worker Daily at http://www.webworkerdaily.com. Read her report on how to talk with your CEO about Web 2.0 here: http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/09/18/does-your-ceo-get-web-20/.)

3. Start a blog and participate in other blogs. These two go hand in hand. By “participate,” Bishop doesn’t mean leaving comments just to be able to include a link back to your own site. She means becoming part of the “ecosystem” of the community. “Over time the people whose blogs you’re commenting in will notice you and start making references back to you.”

The value of blogging on a reasonably consistent basis — aside from being able to share your expertise and opinions with the literate world — is that search engines will index your site more often. Bishop says small business sites, especially, can go for a long time without being indexed. Google does that by design. “They know that the site exists. It’s known as the Google Sandbox. But they want to make sure you’re not a pornographer or a bad actor, basically. You can get around that by having what are known as ‘authority links’ coming back to you.”

For example, if you’re writing about tennis, and you participate in the important blogs in the world of tennis, having those links coming back to your site would be regarded as authority links. “That’s a clue to Google to get you out of that sandbox,” says Bishop. “Links are the new gold standard in managing to get ranking on the search engines.”

4. Add something interactive to the site that will make people come back over and over. Bishop said one client, a high-end real estate finance organization, added a calculator where people can figure out how their taxes would benefit by doing something with the firm. “People come back repeatedly to use it.”

Besides being fun and having potential viral implications, interactive devices help your site to “get embedded in [visitors’] psyches,” said Bishop. “I constantly have clients tell me that the difference in their sales process from this is like night and day. People talk to them as if they already have a relationship.” This can shorten the sales cycle and reduce the amount of effort you have to put forward to build credibility with potential customers or clients.

5. Don’t worry about how many people come to the site but with how long they stay. That means focusing on those areas that will encourage people to hang out longer. To measure this, Bishop recommends Google Analytics because, although it has problems, she said, “it’s free.”

6. Forget about email newsletters. Bishop said problems with spam filters and firewalls are making this web site staple a waste of time. “You’d be better off having a blog that you put newsletter-type content in and have people subscribe to it with an RSS feed.”

What about those newsletter sites that promise to do everything possible to make sure your email gets delivered? Bishop said just because a newsletter delivery report has few rejections, that doesn’t mean the email is getting through to the subscriber. “They don’t measure it the right way,” she said. “I do test studies. Most firewalls won’t give you the courtesy of a bounce-back. It’ll look like it went through, but it gets stopped at the firewall.”

The SQL Server Driver for PHP is designed to enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. The Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that allows the reading and writing of SQL Server data from within PHP scripts. It provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all Editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 (including Express Edition), and makes use of PHP features, including PHP streams to read and write large objects.

Windows XP SP3 build 3205 is the first official & authorized release of the next Windows XP service pack; and has been made available to testers as a part of the Windows Server 2008/Windows Vista SP1 beta program. NeoSmart Technologies has the run-down on the included 1,073 patches/hotfixes including security updates. Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with new features/components, most of which have been backported from Windows Vista. Some included features: 'New Windows Product Activation model: no need to enter product
key during setup. Network Access Protection modules and policies have been brought to XP after being one of the more-well-received features in Windows Vista. New Microsoft Kernel Mode Cryptographic Module - the Windows XP SP3 kernel now includes an entire module that provides easy access to multiple cryptographic algorithms and is available for use in kernel-mode drivers and services. New "Black Hole Router" detection - Windows XP SP3 can detect and protect against rogue routers that are discarding data.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/windows-xp-sp3-beta-build-3205-released-analysis-included/

ASUSTek has introduced the P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, which in addition to using Intel's new X38 Chipset also features a soon-to-be-announced technology by DeviceVM. SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop environment that is embedded onto this motherboard. Within seconds of turning on the P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, you can boot into this Linux environment that currently features a Mozilla-based web browser and the Skype VoIP client. Browser and VoIP settings can be saved and there are plans for the device to provide new features and support via updates. At Phoronix is a review of this $360 motherboard embedded with Linux and a web browser.

http://www.michaellarabel.com/
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=572&l4=0&model=1872&modelmenu=1
http://www.devicevm.com/home.html
http://www.splashtop.com/