John Lamansky

Firefox 1.5 has just been recently released, but planning is already underway for Firefox 2.0. You can find some proposed features for Firefox 2.0 — and even version 3.0 — here and here.

Some possible Firefox 2.0 features:

• Improvements to search engine bar.
• New Bookmark and history system.
• Integrated Session Saver (yea!).
• New RSS reader and fully integrated RSS functionality.
• Anti-phishing.

And some possible Firefox 3.0 features:

• Spell Check (hooray!).
• Find improvements.
• Aging population accessiblity.

According to this PCWorld Article, the world’s largest chip maker is ditching its 14-year-old “Intel Inside” slogan and its 37-year-old logo. The company will soon have a new tagline, “Leap Ahead,” and a new logo, which it has been working on for much of the year 2005.

However, it seems that the word “inside” will still be used in the form of, for example, “Intel Pentium 4 Inside” or “Intel Celeron D Inside.”

“We’re aligning our brand strategy with our platform strategy,” says Bill Calder, a spokesman for Intel. The “Intel Inside” campaign focused solely on the company’s microprocessors, such as its popular Pentium line of chips. But Intel has broadened its focus to entire platforms–not just the microprocessor but also surrounding chips and chip sets, such as Centrino for laptops able to surf the Internet using Wi-Fi, and the upcoming Viiv platform for home entertainment computers. The new logo aims to reflect this change.

“As we evolve as a company, it makes sense to evolve our brand,” says Calder.

SuperSite for Windows has an interesting review of WinFS Beta 1, which was given a surprise release in August 2005. Although the fact that it was a “surprise release” seemed to have resulted in not many people knowing about it.

The article says that a WinFS Community Technical Preview is due on February 15, 2006 — coming right up.

About three months ago, the Microsoft RSS Team posted a request for feedback on various proposed RSS icons.

About two months later, Microsoft announced that they would be using the same RSS icon as Firefox.

I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.

Actually, the icons aren’t identical, but they are very close:

Firefox 1.5:
Internet Explorer 7:

Shortly after the Internet Explorer announcement, the Outlook team announced that they’ll be using the same icon in the next version of Outlook (currently known as Outlook 12).

I find it surprising that Microsoft would be willing to work together with its biggest competitor in the browser market — and vice versa. The only possible explanation for such cooperation that I can think of is a genuine attention to the needs of the end-user on the part of Microsoft and Mozilla. Which is really good; it means a further step towards XML feed identification consistency, something sorely lacking as evidenced by the array of XML buttons available today.

Microsoft is offering “Buy Local Bonus Packs” — the values of which range from $615 to $780 — just for buying a PC locally. Here’s a list of the basic requirements:

• Your copy of Windows must pass the Genuine Advantage test (which makes sure your copy of Windows is not pirated).
• You must NOT have bought the PC from a retail store or from an OEM (i.e. a major PC company such as Dell, Gateway, or HP).
• You must have bought the PC during the period of October 11, 2005 through February 28, 2006.

Some of the rewards, depending on the version of Windows you bought, could include:

• Roundtrip airfare for 2.
• Internet filtering software.
• High-definition movies.
• Network mangement software.
• Do-it-yourself legal tools.

Although this sounds good, I’m guessing there’s probably some strings attached. I haven’t looked into it extensively because my family usually doesn’t buy computers from local manufacturers. But if you’re interested, visit this Windows Marketplace page for more info.

Our family was at the house of another homeschooling family, the parents of which were named Gail and Joe, for a New Year’s Eve party. At about 9:30 P.M., I asked Gail if I could try out a program, which I had made, on their computer, and have their kids and some of the other kids there test it out.

She said yes, so I went to the computer, plugged in my portable USB flash drive, and copied the program onto the hard drive. I had actually run the program on the computer before, but it didn’t work because the computer had 24-bit graphics instead of 32-bit, which was what I had set the program to require. I had since fixed the problem, so I double-clicked on the program, and this time it ran.

It showed the splash screen, and was about to move to the next phase of the program when suddenly the screen went black. The “hp” logo appeared. Uh-oh… I knew that the computer had restarted.

Hmm, it must’ve been a driver problem with either the USB flash drive or DirectX. But that didn’t make any sense because I had used/run both the USB flash drive and the game on the computer previously (except, as mentioned before, the program didn’t work).

As Windows XP booted, I was planning to use System Restore to revert to an automatic restore point from earlier that day. The Windows XP boot screen disappeared. Normally the Welcome Screen would appear, but instead, I was met with a blank screen and a lot of hard drive access noises coming from the computer.

I held down on the power button. The computer turned off. I then removed the USB flash drive from the USB port and started the computer up again. The “Windows did not start properly last time” message appeared. I selected the “Start Windows Normally” option. The same thing happened.

I turned off and turned on the computer. This time, I selected “Last Known Good Configuration” from the menu. The same black screen.

I tried again, but this time selecting “Safe Mode.” As usual, the screen then displayed the name of each driver or system file as it was loading. But then it stopped on a file called MUP.sys. And I got the same hard drive access noises.

Great. If not even Safe Mode would work, then something was seriously wrong.

After Gail and Joe found the Windows XP CD-ROM, I inserted it into the top drive, which was a CD-RW drive. It was a little before 10:00 P.M.

I restarted the computer, but I wasn’t even asked if I wanted to boot from the CD. Since there were two drives, Joe asked if I was sure I had it in the right drive. I said I was sure, since the top drive, as far as I knew, was always the master drive.

I also noted that the light on the CD-RW drive was orange instead of green. Hmm, that sounds a little too familiar.

I decided I would need to go into the BIOS to change the boot order. I restarted, and repeatedly pressed F2, which is the BIOS setup key on my computer. That didn’t work. I repeatedly alternated between pressing F2 and the Delete key. None of them worked.

I asked Joe if he could look for the computer’s manual. Since the BIOS had finished loading before I had time to try anything other keys, I had to restart the computer again. Just as Joe found the manual, I pressed F1 and — tada! — “Entering Setup…”

Oh boy. The CD drive was set to load before the hard drive. That meant something must be wrong with the drive, as evidenced by the orange light and the fact that it would not boot from the Windows XP CD.

I was about to open the computer when it dawned on me. In the BIOS, it said the CD-ROM drive was set to boot before the hard drive, not a CD-RW! Oops. It was the bottom drive.

Hooray! The XP CD booted. I went through the screens until I came to the option to repair an existing Windows XP installation.

As Windows Setup repaired Windows, Mark (who was back from college for Christmas break) and I were pondering as to what could have happened. It couldn’t be something with DirectX, as that worked fine with other games. It couldn’t be my USB flash drive, as I had used it before on this computer.

We thought it had to be my game. But, naturally, I didn’t program any such destructive action into it. Was it a bug in the language I used to create it? Did a virus latch onto it? The bug theory didn’t make sense, since I had run the game on other computers before. The virus theory didn’t make sense, since my computer and their computer both had updated antivirus software.

Today I did a Google search for “MUP.sys” (the name of the file that was last to load in Safe Mode before the computer would freeze). I found that apparantly this file can be corrupted by a virus, or it can just become randomly corrupted. I’m guessing the latter was the case.

But Mark and I came to the conclusion that it must have been a Y2K6 bug that came two hours early.