March, 2011 | Gaming, Technology, and Whatever

IE9: Not Your Father’s IE?

Mar 192011

Something strange happened to me. First off, in a moment of insanity, I decided to do something rash. I installed IE9 to find out what all the hype was about. I had been hesitant to install it because of past experiences way back in the Windows 98/ME days, where a new version of Internet Explorer could take down your whole machine in minutes. Thankfully that did not happen this time with my Windows 7 machine. Second, and even more unexpected for me, I actually liked it.

Let’s start with a little background on my web browsing preferences and biases. I’m a long, long time Firefox user. The various versions of Internet Explorer have been the butt of my geeky tech jokes so many times I’ve lost count. Firefox became my go-to browser back when tabbed browsing and raw speed were the main features — back when you had to pay for Opera and Netscape was still around as a behemoth of a program that included an email client and a HTML editor. You used Firefox to browse the web without the added bloat and the convenience of tabs. Add-ons came along later, and made Firefox a platform for everything you could imagine. Things were great and Firefox ruled, at least in my mind. But, things, as they so often do, change. Today, everyone has tabs, Firefox 3.6 is generally considered the most inefficient browser currently on the market, and I have some praise for IE. Times really have changed.

So, back to IE9. The install process was uneventful and quick. No real questions or install options. Of course, in that way that only Microsoft can annoy, it did prompt me to reboot before it could finish. This is something that never happens with a new version of Chrome or Firefox, although, to be fair, the latest update to Safari did prompt to reboot Snow Leopard on my laptop last week. Ah, the joys of browsers integrated into the OS.

Once the irritating reboot was out of the way, it was time to fire up IE and see what damage had been done. I was immediately stunned by the practically instantaneous loading of IE from the moment I clicked its icon. I was used to that kind of speed with Chrome, but IE seemed even faster. I quickly closed and relaunched it again just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, and sure enough, it loads instantly. Checking a load of Chrome 10 on the same machine, it seems that IE9 launches faster. Chrome is almost instant, but IE9 is instant. Of course, this is splitting hairs, but I wasn’t expecting Chrome-like speed from IE. Ever.

With that pleasant surprise out of the way, let’s get into it. It’s 2011, so that means your browser has to do tabs on top. IE9 dutifully follows that trend with tabs on top, along with the URL bar. This leaves the URL bar pretty short by default. Luckily, a right click on any tab will give you the option to split out tabs onto their own bar, which puts the URL bar on top and gives you a full length URL text field. While we’re on the URL bar, you can search right from the URL field, and there is actually no dedicated search box on the right, much like Chrome. Yes, you can edit your search providers, so you’re not stuck with Bing as your default. Switching my default search to Google was quick and easy.

Creating a new blank tab gives you a grid of your most popularly visited sites with some quick links to recently closed tabs along with the option to start a private browsing session. Another thing much like Chrome and Safari. This is configurable to show a blank page or your homepage if you’re not a fan these dressed up history pages. At this point, it’s almost easy to look at IE9 and mistake it for Chrome when taking a quick glance. In fact, this happened with someone standing over my shoulder who made the exact comment “It looks just like Chrome.” Yes, yes it does, but more importantly, it feels a lot like Chrome, too.

There’s other things to like about IE9. It has a full web developer console available just by hitting F12. This has become standard in today’s browsers and it’s great to see it in IE9 as well. Additionally, it has built in tracking protection, which can also act as an ad blocking mechanism. It was easy for me to subscribe to EasyList’s IE9 Tracking prevention list which IE will automatically keep up to date. This will block sites and ad networks from tracking your clicks and page viewing history, but doesn’t actually block ads. I also found an ad-blocking list based on EasyList, however, a limitation in IE9’s tracking protection scheme allows it to only block 3rd party advertisements and cannot block 1st party ads loaded from the same site you are viewing. So while privacy has reached a new high in IE9, the lack of an available complete ad blocking system is a bit of a let down. After using Ad Block Plus for so many years on Firefox, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing no ads at all and don’t think I can go back. A quick Google search shows a few ad blocking tools for IE, but none seem quite as great as the Ad Block Plus extensions.

That’s where a few downsides start to show themselves with IE. The extension/add-on support is nowhere near that of Firefox or even Chrome at this point. There’s plenty of “Accelerators” and “Web Slices” but these are essentially shortcuts to other websites, in various forums. There are some extensions, but things like ad blocking, Youtube video downloaders and scripts that can alter popular web apps like Gmail are difficult to find, if they even exist at all. One more negative that I was quite shocked about is the lack of spell checking built into the browser. I’m not sure how they could leave something that has become so basic, out of IE9. I did find two possible add-ons for that in ieSpell and Speckie but that’s something I wouldn’t expect I’d need to dig up a third-party solution for. Another thing that IE lags behind in is syncing of bookmarks and other browser data between multiple clients. Both Chrome and Firefox4 have these features built in, and Safari does it through MobileMe, but IE has no such feature. You could rely on Xmarks to do the job for you, but it’d be nice to see a built-in solution. One last thing I found missing in IE9 that’s in Firefox4 and Chrome is the “Paste and Go” shortcut, when you right click in the URL field. A simple shortcut when copying/pasting URLs which saves an additional click or key press.

So there you have it. IE9 is pretty good, and seems to be the best IE in a very long time, maybe ever. Even with those annoyances aside, I found IE9 to be a rather pleasant experience. It launches super fast, the UI is clean, and it renders pages as fast as, or faster than Google Chrome. A few strange feature omissions and the lack of a robust add-on library will keep it from being my day-to-day browser on Windows, but I won’t cringe if I launch it by mistake and may even work it into my daily browsing rotation from time to time.

Screenshot Gallery of IE9:

This gallery contains 2 photos

iPad2 Smart Cover Quicklook

Technology News 4 Responses »

Mar 192011

With my new iPad2, I decided to go all in and get the Apple Smart Cover with it — along with the HDMI adapter covered here. Is it worth the extra $39 or $69 if you go for the leather option? Let’s take a look.

Apple has a nifty video ad for the Smart Cover that makes it almost look fun. The video does show how it works and stays true to my experience with it, save one minor “action” they use when moving the iPad from the typing position to the upright position with one finger. See my video demonstrating that below.

It definitely is one of the more unique cover/case type products I’ve seen for consumer electronics, so I decided to add one to my iPad2 order. I went with the $39 polyurethane cover in gray. For the most part it works as advertised. It covers the iPad2 screen, and provides auto locking and unlocking when opening and closing the cover. It’s worth noting that the auto unlock feature with the Smart Cover does not override any security settings on your iPad, so if you force it to prompt for a passcode on each unlock (or after a specified interval) the Smart Cover does not override that. The magnets keep it in the exact place it needs to be, and it only goes on one way, so no need to worry if you put it on right or not.

The protection it offers the iPad2 is mostly minimal. I’d say the main feature of the cover is actually more of a stand than a cover or case. It’s about as close as you’d come to a built in stand for the iPad2, and feels almost like an extension of the iPad itself. It provides two standing positions, one in a table top, typing position, and the second in an upright, near 90° angle great for viewing and interacting with content where you’d do minimal typing. However, don’t expect this to be a sole form of protection for your iPad if you are notoriously rough with your devices. There is zero protection for the back, which the aluminum surface is much more scratch prone than the glass screen. Also, I’d expect drop protection to be near zero too, although I don’t want to test that first hand. When not in use, I stick my iPad2, with smart cover on, in a generic, padded, neoprene 10″ netbook sleeve, for added scratch and drop protection. The best thing about the smart cover is that it adds minimal weight and bulk to the sleek iPad2 design so you almost forget it’s there and never gets in the way.

So is it worth $39? For the most part I’d say yes, although if you’re the paranoid type with your devices, you’ll probably be better off going with a third party solution with more complete coverage, which are already taking advantage of the iPad2’s built-in magnetic sensor for automatic locking and unlocking. That feature is not unique to the Smart Cover, and you can even test the iPad’s lock/unlock sensor with any common refrigerator magnet by placing it on the lower-right side of the iPad2. It would be hard to recommend the leather one at $69, unless you really want a more “sophisticated” leather look and are not concerned about additional protection. Early reports on the leather models state that they are showing signs of wear only after a weeks worth of use.

Here’s a quick video I put together demonstrating the Smart Cover:

Uh oh… Someone is in trouble

News, Technology News 2 Responses »

Mar 172011

RSA just announced that they were cracked. It is unclear what exactly has been put at risk.

Our investigation also revealed that the attack resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems. Some of that information is specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products. While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.

So, it looks like RSA’s SecurID is immediately at risk. Who knows what else the crackers got. This crack is more significant the crack against HBGary that happened several months ago. This shows how difficult information security is when even the experts are having trouble keeping their doors locked.

iPad2 Output to an External Screen

Technology News 2 Responses »

Mar 172011

I haven’t seen too much coverage on what you can do when outputting the iPad2 to a TV or monitor, so I decided to see how it all works. Using the “Digital AV Adapter”, it’s pretty simple to output the iPad to a HDTV. It mirrors the iPad screen as advertised, even the home screen. Rotating the iPad also is mirrored on the external screen, so it’s always replicating what you’re seeing on the actual iPad screen. It doesn’t up-scale the resolution, (unless your TV is set to do that, of course) so you’re basically seeing a 1:1 ratio (1024×786) on the external screen. Apps are all also mirrored completely on the external display. Additionally, with the HDMI adapter, it will send the sound output over HDMI as well, which is great.

Some apps are “external display aware”, so you may get different results, depending on the app. Netflix is one of these apps, and how it works is you can browse the library of titles on the iPad while the external display just shows a red Netflix screen. Once you start playing a video, it goes full screen on the external display at 720p, and the iPad just shows controls for pausing, fast forwarding, etc. Same is true of another favorite app of mine, the MLB app. Other apps that have embedded video like news apps or even Safari work fine, and when you tap the full screen icon, it will show in full screen on the TV as well with no letterboxing. No trickery needed…it just works. I even gave the Hulu Plus app a shot. I don’t have a Hulu Plus subscription, but the app is free and it will let you watch a few select things for free to “tour” the application. I was half expecting Hulu to have some clever block in their app preventing output, but that’s not the case (yet?) While the Hulu video didn’t go completely full screen on the external display, it was still completely mirrored on the TV.

Taking a look at the Keynote app, which is another “external display aware” app, it lets you output your slides to the TV, and gives you options of showing just the slides or slides with your own notes on the iPad screen only. Great for giving presentations so your not broadcasting your personal slide notes to everyone in the room.

Of course, being a gamer, I was thinking it’d be pretty neat to play some games on the big screen. It’s probably not the most ideal from a comfort standpoint, but I just wanted to see how it’d work. I’ve hoarded a few higher end games through various sales, so I had a few I wanted to test out.

First up, I gave Rage HD a test. The intro movie played only on the TV, while the iPad was blank. Then the game’s main menu showed only on the iPad. Once the game started, the TV remained blank, and all that I could see on the iPad was the HUD and no other graphics. Definitely weird. After playing around with it, I found if I pause the game, disconnected, then reconnected the connector, the full game showed on both the TV and iPad, and I could play the game. It’s probably not the most optimal way to play the game because I kept looking down to tap the controls, but it works.

Next I gave Infinity Blade a shot. It had no problem mirroring the full game on both displays. Graphics were crisp on both. Same goes for Dead Space and Madden, no issues with either. While I don’t see the iPad replacing the Xbox or PS3 in your entertainment center anytime soon, it’s not as far away as you’d think. Graphically, the iPad2 can rival and even beat those consoles, although touch controls will always be more limited than analog controls.

One thing I did find, that’s not widely reported, is that the original iPad/iPhone VGA adapter will also mirror the iPad2’s display to a VGA connection. It’s $10 cheaper than the HDMI one, and will work great in more business settings where low cost VGA projectors are everywhere. Chances are most small/medium business won’t have a high-def projector or display in their conference rooms yet, so the VGA adapter is a safe bet if you’re planning on doing presentations. The down side is that you’ll lose the sound output, so you’d have to use a stereo cable off of the headphone jack if you needed to output the sound elsewhere.

So overall, I’m impressed with the output functionality of the iPad2. It really makes it take a big step closer to replacing a computer with this functionality, and it can be useful in a lot of different scenarios. I don’t see it being a permanent item in an entertainment system, but it’s not really meant for that. More of a temporary hook up for presentations or other demos of a “hey let me show you this” type situation. I’ll have a video demonstrating all this in the near future, time permitting.

“Beta” is the new “RC8”

Console Gaming, Gaming, PC Gaming No Responses »

Mar 162011

Killzone 3 caught a little game-journalist flak earlier this year for offering a “beta” that was, for all intents and purposes, a polished demo rather than a beta. Discussing plans for Gears of War 3, Epic’s Rod Fergusson recently weighed in on this trend at StrategyInformer.

Money quote: “For me I think it has to do with people moving from PC to consoles.”

Basically, he’s arguing that PCs require some basic familiarity with hardware and software maintenance, but consoles are a black box to most users; console users therefore expect all products to be finished products, even free “betas”. In a literal sense, Fergusson is suggesting that console users are just plain ignorant.

I think it’s obvious that PC owners tend to have more troubleshooting savvy than console owners, but his overall argument is a little too reductionist for my taste. Still, the most interesting part to me is the first line (quoted above). Who is “people”? The PC market is still here, and it’s doing pretty damn well (if recent digital sales figures are any indication). The real problem might be that the developers have moved to consoles – not the users.

Save 20% on Amazon’s Downloadable Games

Gaming Deals 3 Responses »

Mar 152011

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Amazon does downloadable games now — and not just casual games, but “core” titles too. As an aside, for some reason the whole “core” moniker attached to games that are the opposite of casual games (hardcore games!) I find irksome, no specific reason why.

Anyway, Amazon is doing 20% off of all their “Core” game downloads, making a serious run at Steam. They’ve been matching Steam’s weekend and midweek deals recently too. Definitely worth checking out as another option to Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc. New titles in there too like Bulletstorm, Homefront, Dragon Age 2…you get the idea:

Amazon 20% off Core Games

Shatner on Microprocessors in 1976

Technology News 1 Response »

Mar 152011

I’m a sucker for old videos and articles which would predict what things would be like today, and AT&T used to do tons of promo materials like that back in the day. Maybe it reminds me of dreams I had as a kid, wishing to have a device like a tablet, which could hold all of my school books, and could keep track of my place in each one. Also, it’s hard to deny that anything Shatner does, especially back in 1976, is pure awesome. Thanks to AT&T for sharing this one from their archives:

AT&T Tech Channel

Goodbye Zune, we hardly knew ye.

News, Technology News 1 Response »

Mar 142011

Multiple sources are reporting that Microsoft is winding down the Zune physical media device. They are planning on continuing with the Zune software, presumably on Windows 7 phone. This allows them to still sell music & subscriptions through their online store.

The Zune has never gotten a whole lot of love. One of my favorite references was when it was mocked in the popular with geek television show, Chuck episode Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer.

Windows to Mac Transition for Non-Techies

Miscellaneous No Responses »

Mar 142011

In what I’m expecting to be a bit of an Apple fanboy week for me (yes my iPad2 has shipped and is scheduled to be delivered this week), I wanted to share an experience I had of setting up a Mac Mini for my parents over the weekend.

A little bit of back story: My parents are not the most computer literate people around, although they’ve grasped email and do some online banking, they’re not stuck in the stone age either. They’ve used some form of a Windows PC for all of their computing experience, and really never even seen a Mac, let alone used one. However, my parents, and my Mom in particular, are avid iPad1 users for doing things like checking/sending email, playing games and reading books. They even stream some of their favorite shows at the breakfast table via the ABC app that they may have missed the night before. They purchased their iPad last summer and have loved it since day one. These are people without any technological biases, unlike many of us who pretty much eat/breath/drink tech every day of our lives. They don’t really know the difference between operating systems (mobile or desktop), and could care less about Steve Jobs or any of that stuff. They’d never get any of the snide jokes we make about Apple’s “walled garden” or Android being “open” when it only suits Google. They just want things to work, and not require an extensive background in technology to do things.

They’ve had a Dell desktop computer running Windows XP for about 6 years now, which was getting to be quite sluggish and running out of disk space. 50GB doesn’t go as far as it used to, even for casual users with iTunes libraries full of music and lots of digital pictures. I offered to set them up with a Mac Mini, to which they had no real idea what that meant. I said that a Mac is a bit different than a PC, but for the most part things will be very similar, and possibly a little less stressful. The vexing thing for my parents was always the need to manage antivirus on the PC. I’ve tried to set them up with low maintenance solutions, first with AVG, and then going to Microsoft’s Security Essentials, but even that would have its troubles from time to time. If it wasn’t able to update on a particular day, all sorts of errors and warnings exclaim that “your computer may be unprotected!” Other cryptic and ominous sounding messages would tell them their computer was unsafe, even though the antivirus was active, it hadn’t updated in a day or two. These are things that most computer savvy people may ignore, but something that can be unnerving to novices who hear things about a killer virus going around the internets destroying everything in its path, in the most sensationalist way that only main stream media can achieve. Of course the first thing that was asked was “What kind of antivirus do you need to run?” After telling them you don’t really need to worry about that (although, yes, there are plenty of Mac viruses out there, if you practice safe computing, you won’t need to worry about them) they were quite amazed.

The next thing they found amazing was the Mac Mini form-factor. Apple has a way of creating something that is not only functional, but looks and feels great while doing it. Love them or hate them, the Mac Mini definitely has one of the smallest and sleekest form-factors for a desktop computer. Along with that, they noted how much quieter it was versus their old Dell, and that it wasn’t spewing tons of hot air after running for a while.

Getting them set up on the desktop was fairly straight forward. Switching from the Start Menu system in Windows to the Mac OS X dock they found to be an improvement, and common things they do, like using Firefox, Gmail and iTunes were obviously unchanged. The thing that really won them over was iPhoto. Since getting their first digital camera around 4-5 years ago, they’ve taken tons of photos of pretty much everything. I had previously tried to set them up with some ways to try to keep them organized on Windows, starting from just creating a folder organization scheme in Windows Explorer under “My Pictures” to introducing them to Google’s Picasa, and all resulted in limited success that I think served more to confuse them than to actually organize anything. Questions like “how do I email this picture to someone” were frequent and the answers always changed depending on the method the picture was stored.

iPhoto was just the thing they were looking for. By dragging and dropping a backup copy of their photos into iPhoto, it automatically organized them into events based on their previous folder structure, and then started by recognizing every one’s faces. My Mom even quickly learned how to do a slide show (without any help), and was amazed that it was no effort to do, with fancy animations and transitions, all set to music with just a couple clicks of the mouse. I even had her scanning multiple pictures at once on her HP multifunction without any driver or software install procedures.

To end the whole thing up, as I left them, they were excited to go “play” on their new computer later that day, without my guidance or supervision, and are actually looking forward to using the computer, rather than just fighting with it to do the tasks they wanted to do. For my next trick, we were already planning on replacing my Dad’s 4 year old iPod classic, which he uses religiously with all the traveling he does each month, with an iPod Touch, so I’ll show them Facetime so they can video chat while he’s away.

I was a bit unsure how they’d take the transition from PC to Mac and was a even bit surprised it on how smooth it went. The whole experience reminded me that Apple really does try to focus on the end-user experience so that your average day-to-day user doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on under the hood. Just turn it on and go. Even with the advancements Microsoft has made in Windows 7, it still can’t compete with Mac OS X in terms of usability, and there really are no Windows equivalents to the programs that come bundled with every new Mac in iLife.

40th Anniversary of the Computer Virus | Fortinet Security Blog

News, Technology News 5 Responses »

Mar 102011

Fortinet has recently posted a blog post on the history of computer viruses at 40th Anniversary of the Computer Virus | Fortinet Security Blog. From a historical perspective it is a fascinating read. A couple of ones from a personal note:

Creeper: Catch me if you can. This was an experimental virus developed in 1971. It is the grand daddy of viruses. It was a relatively benign virus. And, it was actually a demonstration of mobile code. It would pick itself up and move to the next computer, vs. replicating like today’s viruses.

The article does not deal with The Morris Worm. However, I feel it needs to be mentioned in any discussion about malware. The worm utilized known vulnerabilities in a variety of UNIX services. Unfortunately, it got out of control and ended up performing a Denial of Service attack across the young Internet in 1988. The CERT was created by DARPA as a result of this worm.

When I was a UNIX administrator back in the mid 1990s, we would laugh about all of the forwards people would send about warning of viruses from email. After all, how could you get a virus from reading an email in Pine or Elm. The I Love You virus in 2000 changed all of that with help from Microsoft’s desktop security model. This was one of the first full scale viruses to affect normal users.

In 2001, IIS, Microsoft’s web server was attacked via Code Red. This is different than the traditional virus or worm which attacks the desktop. It exploited a buffer overflow in the indexing system of IIS. I remember being on the front end of the fight of this battle. Our Internet connection was acting slow. While troubleshooting, we decided to reboot our firewalls. When this happened our IIS servers crashed. Funny coincidence we thought. An hour later, we did it again. They crashed again. It was not until the chatter on the security mailing lists picked up late that afternoon that we figured out what was going on. At that point, we were able to take the appropriate action.

Just last year, Stuxnet appeared and targeted Iran’s nuclear industrial machines in a very subtle way. I am not going to get into the details of Stuxnet, as there are plenty of sources out there who can explain it better than I. What is fascinating about it is that it appears to be the start of nations writing malware to directly attack another nation’s specific resources. The effort, skill, and knowledge needed to implement this malware successfully is quite amazing… and scary.

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