November 20th, 2007

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Mozilla Firefox v3.0 Beta 1 Released

The beta version of the third incarnation of Mozilla’s open source browser, Firefox, is available to download online.
However, Mozilla has cautioned anyone who isn’t a developer or part of its testing community not to download it.
“These beta releases are targeted to web developers and our testing community to gain feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process. The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users,” Mozilla said.
Firefox is a popular option for those who shun Microsoft products. It generally doesn’t suffer the same level of security attacks as the Internet Explorer browser, though the current version, Firefox 2, has required patching up recently.
Many of the new features in the beta of Firefox 3 are security-focused, including better malware protection and integration with your existing anti-virus software, informing it when you download files.
Other changes are introduced with the aim of making it easier to use, with better password management and a new download manager. Mozilla said it has also improved the integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS.

Download : Mozilla Firefox v3.0 Beta 1
Link : Other Languages

Written by ShaDow on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Need for Speed ProStreet on Linux with Wine

About Need for Speed ProStreet

A new spin on the Need for Speed franchise, ProStreet thrusts players into a head-to-head competition against the best street racers in a multitude of racing showdowns. The game is a true taste of raw adrenaline and racing with consequences. Every dent, every scratch and every crumpled body panel is a battle scar, proof of your commitment and competitive mettle. With an aggressive and skilled AI system, you become immersed in an unmatched believable race experience. Add in a revolutionary online mode that will redefine the meaning of competitive social play, and Need for Speed ProStreet is the ultimate formula for an emotionally charged street racing showdown. It also pushes the “Autosculpt” technology to a new level, allowing you to directly impact your car’s performance for the first time as well as personalize its appearance.

Wine configuration

This is with a clean configuration directory and running in a 1024×768 virtual desktop.

$ winecfg

Once the .wine directory is built the configuration tool will start and you can set a virtual desktop in the graphics tab if you wish. This is a good time to also set your Audio driver in the Audio tab.

Installing NFS ProStreet

There is a demo of Need for Speed ProStreet here.

After you download the demo, you will want to create a temporary directory in your home directory, I named the one I created simply nfs

tom@tuxonfire ~ $ wine NFSProStreet_Demo.exe fixme:shell:SHAutoComplete SHAutoComplete stub fixme:shdocvw:PersistStreamInit_InitNew (0×1296b8)

Now we need to edit the registry and turn off GLSL and use OpenGL as the backend for DDraw. If you have a modern video card you can also change the amount of video memory thats reported, 64MB is the default. there is more info on useful registry keys here.

tom@tuxonfire ~ $ regedit

First run of NFS ProStreet

tom@tuxonfire ~ $ cd /home/tom/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Electronic\ Arts/Need\ for\ Speed\ ProStreet\ Demo tom@tuxonfire ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Electronic Arts/Need for Speed ProStreet Demo $ WINEDEBUG=-all wine nfsdemo.exe

Here is some random in game screenshots……..

Feel free to comment about this post at the wine-forum.

Written by twickline on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Build your own burrito battery

Up until now, the best way to MacGyver a battery has been to stick a copper wire and a galvanized nail into a lemon (or an apple, or a potato, or…). Fruit or vegetable batteries produce a respectable voltage (around a volt) but only a tiny amount of current- not enough to light a flashlight bulb.

Now there’s the “burrito” battery. It produces 400 times as much current as a lemon battery- enough to actually light a little holiday lightbulb, or run a small DC motor. All you need is some duct tape. And a piece of aluminum foil, some table salt, a paper towel, some activated charcoal, and some copper wire to use for leads. You make a “burrito” with the aluminum foil as the tortilla. Line the foil with the paper toil, moistened with salt water. Fill the burrito with activated charcoal, also moistened saturated salt water. Sink one copper lead into the charcoal and duct-tape the other to the aluminum foil and voila! You should have about 1 V, with 100 milliamperes of current. Attach several cells in parallel for more current, and in series for more voltage!

You can find a step-by-step guide for building the battery at http://www.exo.net/~pauld/activities/AlAirBattery/alairbattery.html. The authors of that page have published a nice classroom activity sheet to go along with the battery in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education (M. Tamez, J. H. Yu, J. Chem. Ed. 2007, 84, 1936A-1937A).

How does it work?

All batteries work by running chemical reactions that release electrons in one place, and capture electrons in another. When you run a wire between these two places, an electric current flows through it. You can tap off some of the energy of that current to light a bulb or drive a motor.

In the aluminum-air battery, the aluminum in the foil is the electron source. Aluminum on the surface of the foil reacts with hydroxide ions in the salt water to form aluminum hydroxide. Every aluminum atom that reacts releases three electrons into the foil:

Al(s) + 3OH^-(aq) –> Al(OH)₃(s) + 3e^-

This is called an oxidation (a reaction that involves a loss of electrons).

Air absorbed in the nooks and crannies of the activated charcoal acts as the electron sink. Specifically, oxygen gas captures electrons using this half reaction:

O₂(g) + 2H₂O(l) + 4e^- –> 4OH^-(aq)

This is called a reduction (a reaction that involves a gain of electrons). Notice that the activated charcoal doesn’t actually do anything in this reaction. It just provides a nice place for the reaction to occur. It has a high surface area, so it is in contact with a lot of oxygen molecules. It is also able to shuttle electrons from the copper wire to oxygen absorbed on its surface.

The battery won’t work unless the oxidation and reduction reactions can work together. By itself, the foil will build up a positive charge as it loses electrons. It’s hard to pull negatively charged electrons from the positively charged foil, so the oxidation reaction will stop if the charge on the foil isn’t neutralized somehow.

Similarly, if you keep dumping electrons into the oxygen in the charcoal, a negative charge would build up. The reduction reaction will shut down, because you couldn’t force any more negatively charged electrons onto the negatively charged surface of the charcoal.

This is where the wet, salty paper towel comes in. The towel acts as a salt bridge that prevents charge from building up on either the foil or the charcoal. Chloride ions in the salt (Cl^-) move towards the foil, neutralizing the positive charge buildup there. Sodium ions (Na⁺) migrate towards the charcoal, neutralizing the negative charge buildup caused by the reduction.

Written by senese on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Steam on Linux with Wine

About Stream
Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to digitally distribute and manage games ranging from first-person shooters and RPGs to racing games and cross-genre independent titles. Among its clients are Take-Two Interactive, Eidos Interactive, Introversion Software, Strategy First, PopCap Games, Capcom, id Software, and most recently THQ. There is over 200 PC games available on Steam, and there are approximately 13 million active users.

Wine configuration

This is with a clean configuration directory and running in a 1024×768 virtual desktop.

$ winecfg

The first thing we need to do is install Gecko, what is gecko?

About Gecko

Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape releases. Written in C++ and licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license, Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards. Originally created by Netscape Communications Corporation, its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation.

The easiest way to install Gecko is to simply run “wine iexplore” and Wine will install Gecko for you.

tom@tuxonfire ~ $ wine iexplore

The built in wine explorer browser will render web pages quite nicely btw, there just isn’t a location bar in place at the moment so you have to navigate via the command line :D

tom@tuxonfire ~ $ wine iexplore http://wine-review.blogspot.com/

Installing Steam

Download Steam from here.

Now execute the Steam installer with this command and the install process will begin.

$ msiexec -i SteamInstall.msi

After this error message Steam will close… Don’t be alarmed, all you need to do is re-start Steam and it should run perfectly fine. If you have chosen to run the install in a virtual desktop you will want to un-select this. The main Steam window will always be the front most window and cover any server or config windows that you start.

Feel free to comment about this post at the wine-forum.

Written by twickline on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Windows Vienna(now Windows 7)

Now that Vista is on the shelves, Microsoft is focusing on its next major operating system release, Windows Vienna. Even though Windows Vienna is going to be a major release with a totally revised GUI, Microsoft made a bold statement: by the end of 2009 Vienna will hit the shelves.
However, Microsoft needs to keep the buzz on Windows Vista for now and so they are not releasing any Windows Vienna official information to the public yet, expect for the fact that they are working on it.
Julie Larson-Green, responsible for the user interface of Office 2007, and also the person behind the ribbon-like interface has been transferred to the Windows 7 team.

The current release date of the Windows 7 operating system is expected to be in late 2009, early 2010, returning to the 3-year pause between desktop operating system versions that was common at Microsoft for all Windows versions prior to Windows Vista.

The most common dilema about Windows 7 right now is whether or not to use backward compatibility. Strong rumours have suggested that the OS will be developed from scratch on top of the Windows NT kernel, given its maturity in both security and stability terms. The backward compatibility, however, is something that Microsoft developers would frown upon, since it prevents truly revolutional ideas to be implemented. Windows Vista, because of its backward compatibile, carries a large amount of code libraries with it, thus the large size of the operating system. However, many businesses that haven’t upgraded their software in a decade or more would not purchase Windows 7 if it was not compatible with their applications. As a result, the current options that Microsoft has are to either make Windows 7 backward compatible, or to maintain a legacy version of Windows in parallel, for for the business customers, one which will be kept alive by Microsoft though patches and updates

Written by SABI on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate build is live. Microsoft is hammering away at the third and final service pack for Windows XP, and is making consistent headway in the matter. Truth be told, since the 2004 availability of XP SP2, and after the numerous delays of SP3 across 2006 and 2007, Service Pack 3 is long overdue. But at the same time, the refresh is getting closer and closer at a fast pace. Microsoft has in fact synchronized the development milestones of Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP SP3.

The third service pack for XP was initially introduced as a Beta preview version concomitantly with Windows Vista SP1 pre-Beta in mid July 2007. Ever since that point, Vista SP1 and XP SP3 have been joined at the hip. In this regard, Vista SP1 moved into Beta stage at the end of September 2007, with XP SP3 Beta following closely behind in early October. Last week, Microsoft opened up the test driving process of Vista SP1 with a preview of the first Release Candidate to the service pack shipping to approximately 15,000 testers. (more…)

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Written by Jason on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on windows xp service pack 3 and xp service pack 3 and access xp and SP3 and service pack 3 and Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP and xp and rc and Windows Vista SP1 and Windows.