Archive for January, 2005

Straight off the Steam News site:

The official Counter-Strike Bot will be released for Counter-Strike: Source on Monday (January 17th). The Bot features enhanced abilities and will be available for all owners of Counter-Strike: Source. Also included in Mondays release is an updated version de_tides, rebuilt by Turtlerock Studios. For more information or to purchase your copy of Counter-Strike: Source, please visit http://www.steampowered.com.

I just relogged into Steam and it gave me this more detailed news:

First, we’re going to release the Counter-Strike: Source version of the CS Bot. This will be an improved version of the Condition Zero bot, and will be available for all owners of Counter-Strike: Source. Right now we’re planning this for sometime early the week of the 17th. Also included is a remade version of the Condition Zero map, de_tides, rebuilt by Turtlerock Studios.

Valve also note that there will be a new map out for CS:S in Feburary.

The MP3 format has finally gone 5.1. The new “mp3 surround” codec by Fraunhofer allows music to be encoded with 6 channels. Software to play the tracks will remain free of charge – and the new files will be backward compatible with older players, which will simply play them as if they were conventional stereo tracks. The company claimed there was only a marginal increase in file sizes for new surround-sound MP3s.

Download the codec

As for the Google news:

An Israeli hacker has uncovered a flaw in Froogle, Google’s price-comparison service, which could allow access to users’ Gmail accounts. Nir Goldshlager, who discovered the flaw, warned that URL-embedded Javascript could end up causing personal information to be revealed.

If users execute the script by clicking a link, they would be redireted to a malicious website. From there, hackers can read a user’s cookie. It may contain personal information, such as purchase histories, or the username and password used to access Google services – such as Gmail.

Goldshlager warned that even if the user chooses not to save the cookie, the hacker can still discover the username and password for other services such as Google Alerts and Groups because of the way that data is stored.

The Mozilla team has put out some info about their release dates of the Firefox browser:

Firefox 1.1 (Dubbed “Deer Park”) is slated for release in March of this year, and will be the end result of the post 1.0 “Aviary Branch – Trunk” merge. Mozilla also plans to release 2 additional milestone builds of Firefox before 2006. (With Fx 1.5 “The Ocho”, and “Firefox 2″ being released near year end)

People that tweak Firefox might want to read this statement from one of the devs:

Yes, enabling HTTP pipelining can dramatically improve networking performance. The downside, and the reason it’s not enabled by default, is that it can prevent Web pages from displaying correctly. If you’ve enabled this, and you find pages that aren’t displaying correctly, please don’t blame Firefox or the Web developer. It’s probably the fact that you enabled an “unsupported” feature which is incompatible with some Web servers and proxy servers.

Setting the initial paint delay at zero, may get you some content on the screen faster, but it’s worth noting that it will dramatically slow down the time it takes the entire page to display. Here’s what’s going on. Gecko, Firefox’s rendering engine, is trying to optimize between the cost of waiting for a bit more data versus doing more painting and reflows as new data comes in. Waiting a bit longer before it starts painting the page gives Gecko a chance to receive more content before chewing up CPU cycles to render and reflow the document. If you drop this value down to zero or near zero, that means you’ll see the page start displaying a bit earlier, but not having received much data in that short interval, you’ll have a lot more paint and reflow cycles to complete rendering of the page.

New features we expect to see in Firefox 1.1 include, better Macintosh integration, Safari and Mac profile migrators, a revised options window, and hundreds of performance and stability releated bug fixes. Mozilla also plans to include a new “Sanitize” option button, which would let users instantly clear all personal information from the browser cache.

Check out the updated roadmap!

Some reasonably cool MS news as appeared today. This spans from their general updates to MCE2005/6 and new Longhorn dates.

EWeek reports that MS will be beta testing patches externally to speed up the patching process. The down side to this is that the customers testing will not be able to find out what the patch is actually trying to fix. More at Eweek…

Neowin reports some new news about the Longhorn dates:

Milestone 9 (platform complete) – 16th March 2005
Beta 1 – 25th May 2005
Beta 2 – 12th October 2005
Release Candidate 0 – 22nd February 2006
Release Candidate 1 – 12th April 2006
Release To Manufacturing – 24th May 2006

Its not likely to find Beta 1 at WinHec 2005 but maybe there will be a slimed down M9.

Paul Thurrot mensions that 7 different flavours of Longhorn:

-Starter
-Home
-Premium/Media Center
-Professional
-Small Business
-Mobility/Tablet PC
-”Uber” (Combines all of the above except starter)

Of course these names aren’t final.

Neowin (not long after) reported on some MCE2005/6 news:

This year will see the release of a small update for Windows Media Center Edition 2005. Bringing the Media Center Edition version up to v4.0. The update is due to beta in March and last approximately 4 months until it RTMs. There will be a Beta 1, Beta 2, RC0, RC1 before Release to Manufacturing.

The update is currently at M1 stage awaiting escrow for Beta 1. Code named Emerald the update is expected to Improve the following:

Premium TV
-Native digital cable
-Content Protection
-HD on Xenon
-Improve burning (DRM, network, Hi-def, DVD-RAM)

Scale-up MCX
-MCX integrated into Xenon
-UI Parity w/ PC (remote rendering on Xenon)
-MCX on WinCE clients (Babylon, TV2 as stretch goal)
-Bobsled feature parity integrated into 1 partner device (e.g. Linksys, Dlink)

Reliability
-Playback reliability
-Running 3rd party apps out of proc
-Address top usability issues
-Platform Security

More Locales
-Additional languages and locales

Looking deep into the future for 2006, Microsoft are planning a Media Center v5.0. Currently code named Diamond the release will rely upon Longhorn Premium and Longhorn Ultimate. These two versions of Longhorn are expected to include v5.0 of Media Center. Current dates are following the same pattern as the Longhorn schedule I posted recently.

Holy crap! I downloaded this a while ago but completely forgot to write up about it

ChangeLog:

* Created new eMusic bundles
* Critical Security bug fixed in in_mp4.dll and enc_mp4.dll and libmp4v2.dll
* HTTP Seeking corrected for webservers that refuse to return Accept-Range
* Critical Security buffer overflow fixed in in_cdda.dll

Lite | Full | Pro

Just before I start this blog entry – those that still use Outlook 2003 there is an update to it’s Junk Email Filter (KB890854)

Download

Onto the news about yesterday:

If you didn’t read the blog yesterday – I met up with Patrick from XGenesis.net to show him around Adelaide for the first time. Started off at my house to play a bit of CS:S then headed out to the City to meet up with Howlett. Walked down Rundall Mall, went into the Myer Center to grab some lunch. After all that we walked to the market not knowing that it was closed and down to Chinatown. Around the corner was Aztec but it had noone in it so we went over to Cyberhive to play a bit of CS 1.5 , CS 1.6 and UT2004. Stayed there for about 2 hours then took the tram down to Glenelg – walked the jetty and down the main road then went back home to play some more CS:S.

That pretty much sums up yesterday – a lot of travel.

Not long after CES2005 – the Macworld expo has started. This morning Steve Jobs at Apple announced 3 new products:

-Mac Mini
-iPod Shuffle
-iWork Suite

Neowin has a reasonable write up about it here: http://neowin.net/comments.php?id=26639&category=main

Microsoft today have also released 3 fixes for NT based systems (includes XP) as well as the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool which is a cut down version of an AntiVirus to clean out the currently most harmful trojans and viruses roaming the net. This is not the AV Microsoft will be releasing sometime at Q3-Q4 of this year.

You can get this at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ad724ae0-e72d-4f54-9ab3-75b8eb148356&DisplayLang=en

The famous Alienware from the US has opened an Internet store for Australia.

The high quality, high priced (:D) and great looking Alienware systems have hit Australia finally. You can visit the shop at http://www.alienwaresystems.com.au

Patrick from XGenesis is giving up Wednesday to travel over to SA to meet up. Should be going into the city and having some games of CS:S and UT2004 at Aztec or CyberHive. If you just happen to be reading head over and meet up.

On the other hand, visit his funny site:

http://xgenesis.net/

Not much has happened to me or the tech world recently. This weekend I was messing with anyMCEv2 by BetasIRC in an attempt to install Media Center 2005 on XP Pro but failed misserably

This computer needs a format soon so I might install MCE2005 as the default OS as it may as well be XP Pro with extras.

However; the small amount of tech news:
Brief plans of AMD and Intel at CES 2005
Nero Burning ROM 6.6.0.5