iP3K

It is now official and very real. Smoking in public places is not allowed anymore in the province of Quebec. I present my condolences to every smoker out there that will have to grief their cigarette during break times or will have to bend to extraordinary circumstances to get their smoke. I won’t hide my joy, I do not believe smoking is good for our health especially those of us that don’t usually smoke and are imposed upon. The government seems rather serious since if you are caught smoking in front of a building less than 9 meters from the entrance you get a $500 fine and the building a $1000. Every time they pick someone who outlaw he’ll fuel the province with a fresh $1500 that will help paying for the health care system.

But no matter how great it is for non-smokers to visit bars, pubs and restaurant that are smoke free, there is something much more important being that law. Are we finally considering all the negative effects of smoke? Why not extend it to the massive pollution we initiate as humans, by cars, industries and such. We might finally become responsible and slowly start kicking out bad habits for our own good and the well being of everyone else. I must state once again that you can’t compare smoking to other habits that are putting your health at risk because all the other ones (junk food, alcohol, sleep depravation, and lack of physical activity) do not involves directly the health of the others. Smoking was the first target but there is still work to be done to take care of our collective health.

From now on, up to the end of 2006. SkypeOut calls made from US & Canada to US or Canada land line or cell phones are free. You read right! In order to make free calls you had to have two Skype accounts using their computer. You also had to pay a small fee to make calls outside the Skype network. But in a mind blowing move, Skype owned by eBay gives more free calls! Now through my initial testing of the feature one call I made to a friend was even clearer that using my regular phone. I called her with Skype and at the same time used my regular phone. She stated no one would notice the difference since the Skype call was loud and clear. However it seems the first few minutes are not at optimal quality.

It seems some IPs that start by 7 don’t have access to the feature yet. I guess it’s that easy to filter users that are not logged in Canadian or US territory. My Bell Sympatico access starts by a seven and SkypeOut is not working yet. However my Vidéotron access starts by a 6 and it’s with it I’ve made my calls. You can check what is your IP address by looking at the top right of the DNS Stuff webpage.
Anyway feel free to add me to your list, I usually prefer typing my ideas but I’m willing to make new exceptions!

Get Skype and call me for free.

Previous posts on the subject:

• The place where I belong
• VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol)

UPDATE: IP issue seems to have been solved within a few hours. Now it works fine! For Bell Sympatico users and many more IPs starting by 7.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is underway. I’d really enjoy being there and taking part of one of the most important event of the game industry. But thanks to the power of the Internet and Gamespot.com I’ve been able to “attend” all three major press conference by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. All those major companies were praising their current success and showcasing their next game console. After seeing live broadcast of the conference I got into some thinking about the Nintendo Wii, previously code named Revolution. Yes, that crazy idea of using a motion sensitive remote control to play turned out to be very interesting. So even if Nintendo doesn’t have fancy High Definition (HD) gaming the fact that you can play tennis by swinging the controller as if you were holding the racket is amazing. Just think about getting in a sword fight with that controller! I know that controller is nothing new, but something weird happened yesterday during Sony’s Press Conference. The previous design for their controller had been changed from the Batarang/Bannarang to a all time classic DualShock controller. Not only being wireless enabled but also features six way movement detection.

Now I do believe that Nintendo will be successful in the sense that their console is oriented to the general public and is the less expensive one. Their controller will introduce logical movement to the gaming world. So does the PS3 with their new controller. On Sony’s side they’ll have an impressive collection of games, stunning visuals and Blu-ray compatibility. I believe the PS3 to be the “ultimate” gaming engine, and Xbox 360 to be some kind of mid-level. The X360 has been available since last November but I can’t say I appreciate the work from Microsoft.

Sony’s press conference was the one I was eager to see, of course there was nothing new really. Except the release date and price of the PS3 that will come in two formats, a 20GB hard drive version ($499 USD/549 CND) and a 60GB version ($599 USD/659 CND). It will support a super network where you’ll be able to buy music and videos. I must say right now that the 60GB has much more than just an extra 40 GB to save data! It has Memory Stick, SD, or Compact Flash inputs, Wi-Fi capabilities, and HDMI output. I’ll end on a bad note, since Sony lost their lawsuit against Immersion Technologies for the ownership of the vibration fuction we can say goodbye to our good old shaking controllers. None the less, I believe that the Playstation 3 keeps a good formula working and is set on bringing to our homes the best and the most interesting products.

This review, or should I say preview, of the leading browser on the market was hard to make. I can’t say I have all the tools for a professional nor an in depth analysis of loading times or anything of this sort. But are statistics the only thing worth analyzing? I believe not, and as an amateur web designer that has been making websites since 1998 everyone should see what’s really behind this often named “Browser War”. Recent stats from March 2006 place Firefox with a benchmark of 10% of the market share, and yearly statistics from 2004 to 2006 show a drop in Internet Explorer lead. It’s easy to understand that Internet Explorer (IE) decided to make major improvement to their next version.

Let’s first make a quick overview of the key features you get with those browsers:
You might be confused about the screenshots because I used each browser to visit it’s competitor’s website.

Internet Explorer 7:

• RSS feeds support
• Tabbed browsing
• Anti-physing build-in security
• Toolbar search box
• New rendering engine
• Pop-up blocker
• Quick Tabs

Opera 9:

• Tabbed browsing
• Widgets
• Email integration
• RSS & IRC support
• BitTorrent downloads
• Toolbar search box
• Skins & customization of the layout
• Pop-up & Content blocker

Firefox 2:

• Tabbed browsing
• RSS Feed support
• Integrated search
• Skins customization
• Extensions support
• Pop-up blocker
• Open source

Now, I’m sure you all noticed how some features are just repeating themselves… You’re right of course but those features are in high demand and made the popularity of browsers like Opera and Firefox famous. I will not hide it, I have a bias towards Opera since I’ve been using it and promoting it since version 5 but I’ll do my best to remain as objective as humanly possible (is it even possible for humans?). I’ll spit out my criticism right away so it doesn’t get in the way of further reviewing. I believe that Internet Explorer is playing catch-up and is barely bringing to it’s browser some features that made alternate browsers interesting.

I’d like all of you to forget about the repetitive argument of security, it is very real and a serious issue but it come with popularity. Given Opera owned 85% of the market it’s code would be scrutinized to find every possible flaw and security alerts would be much more frequent, same goes for Firefox. But what has to be considered is that both Firefox and Opera release their patches/updates way faster then Internet Explorer seems capable of. The recent IE flaw is being patched by third party software, that’s real sad…

Enought with criticism, on to the review! I’ve tested all three browsers on a Windows XP SP2 system, 2.4 Ghz Intel Pentium IV, 768 MB of RAM, with an ATI 9550 256MB video card.

At the beginning of my post I mentioned I’ve been designing websites for years, but I’m still a heavy Internet user and I’m always looking for the best surfing experience there is. I’ll start up with scrolling down a page: You may find this stupid but it’s not, when reading a page or looking for something in particular (besides using in-page search) scrolling should be fluid and not visually aggressive! I found Firefox 2 to give me the “bulkiest” scrolling but since everyone is still in Preview/Beta/Alpha massive changes will hopefully still occur. When talking about what meets the eye all those browser look the same. You get tabs line-up, small X to close then and you can move then around to organize the websites you visit (except IE where they are stuck in the order of creation). What’s new and really stunned me was the way IE7 rendered the pages. I’ve came to call it “super-smooth” fonts, they’re good looking and I’m sure eating up more memory. I believe this will be eventually standard across all browsers on all platforms and this font feature is for Windows users only. The rendering of Firefox and Opera seem virtually to be the same, still at least those browsers are supported on both Mac OS and Linux witch is not the case with Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 7	Opera 9

From Gateworld.net

Most thing considered when the next version of Internet Explorer is released most people still won’t see the reason why they should switch browsers, the saddest is that some people will love and discover those features not knowing that they’ve been around for YEARS! As a web developer you must stay conscious that most users will remain with their OS default browser (check the stats of this blog).

I’ll close my longest post to date with a few thoughts:
While working under Linux I had made some modifications to the layout of this blog. But it took days for me to realize that the layout did not show up properly under Internet Explorer! Now who is right? The browser that makes custom modifications of web standards or the ones that are looking for web standards…

Under Windows, Internet Explorer is obviously the browser compatible with the most websites and plugins, but it is a shame to notice that some websites today are still design for Internet Explorer only and that they block access to them from other browsers (Thanks to Opera 9 you can bypass that and mask the browser as an other browser).

I guess the point of that post was to make sure people knew that having only one browser might not be the best idea. Seeking for replacements is a good thing but the idea of using alternate browsers as complements is quite ingenious. Call me crazy all right, because people are looking for something easy and don’t want to be caught up using three browsers all the time but that is an arguable position. When a website doesn’t work properly on my favorite browser, I try it on Firefox and ultimately on IE. My only ending words will be: try alternatives, commit yourself, stop doing what you’re told or imposed, make your own selection of browser what ever is your operating system.

Some people will start to picture me as a Linux activist, that is a good description because I fell in love with one of it’s distribution. To sum it up, Linux is like an operating system, it’s operates at the same level as Mac OS or Windows, despite their differences they can all be used to run a computer and make us enjoy the digital life style we all know of. Watching movies, listening to music, surfing the web, chatting with friends you can do with Ubuntu! So you get the picture, now since Linux is open-source and freely distributed many alternate versions were created. I can name SuSe, Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat and of course Ubuntu (based on Debian). Now from the myriad of distributions there are out there the first one I experienced was Ubuntu 4.10. As mentioned earlier I’ve been sticking with it since then, dual-booting with Windows XP.

Now on to the preview. So for this new release which has been rescheduled to a June 1st launch you can expect lots of improvement from the previous versions. It is obvious to expect faster boot times and new versions of about everything especially GNOME 2.14 witch is the graphical window manager and bundle of many applications. Now the main reason I believe this upcoming version has to be considered important is because it is the first release to be supported for 3 years on the desktop edition and 5 years for the server counter-part.

Some surveys claim that Ubuntu now represents 25% of the desktop Linux distribution, just before SuSe that has around 11%. Now the word Ubuntu means “humanity to others” and is aiming to reach all of humanity with it’s main powertool, the free CD distribution that gives people with limited Internet access to the hottest distro out there. A good thing for newbies is that Ubuntu also ships (or can be downloaded) a Live CD, that lets you run the system directly from the CD without affecting your hardware at all. This means it’s a 100% safe to try since it does install on the hard drive disc. Once satisfied you can partition part of your hard drive and install Ubuntu along side any other operating system you already have. This way when you boot your computer you can easily pick the one you need.

Xgl moving cube, transparency, jello windows, glass tabs and more

For those still drooling about Windows Vista, I am now convinced it has nothing to make Linux world turn green with envy. The forthcoming of Xgl will be a definite competitor to Windows Vista Aero Glass visual look and features. Not to mention that Windows Vista has been postponed to a January 2007 release.

There are many reason why someone should use Linux, a few years back I had no reason to but here I am now, 18 months after testing a Live CD given to me by a friend I am in love with that system. The open-source software, the free alternative, the customization, the thrill of be controlled free and finally create and bend things to your likings is one of the great many things Linux gave me. I could go on like that to make you believe that you don’t have to waste thousand of dollars on software when sometimes the alternative would suit you.

I’ve been slightly slipping about the preview but the best way get the latest of Dapper Drake (code name of the next Ubuntu version) is to check all the pictures and info included in their wiki. The beta versions are available for download but are still unstable, you can see all info related to them by checking out Flight2, 3, 4 and 5 showing the added features one by one.

One last thing I’ll point out from the new GNOME included in the next version of Ubuntu is the Deskbar. It’s like an equivalent to Google Desktop or something. Almost forgot about something important, the OS comes with a software called Synaptic that lets you check for updates on existing programs and let you choose new programs to add from a gigantic data base. So you get to download a software that has been fine tuned for the system that you are using. If the software is not listed you would have to manually install it, that would require using some command codes, it’s all changing now! You will be able to use a graphical installer to help you install any software you download elsewhere from the Internet. Ubuntu is so cool, I can’t wait for the next release!!

A new chapter just unfolded. The next generation of Metal Gear has been presented. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots features Snake (Solid or Boss?) with his high-tech gear and well aged Otacon. Of course we’re getting a few glipses of what PS3 graphics will look like. Picture yourself in a few months playing this game! Not much details to shout out. Let’s take this as a nice tease.

Read more on GameSpot and IGN

Also we have Black & White 2 coming up as well as F.E.A.R.
The gaming industry is doing it’s best to keep us on our toes.

Yes, the King of pop, Michael Jackson is out. He’s been declared NOT GUILTY on all ten charges. I’ve got a simple thing to say, all of you out there who think he was saved because of his money be wrong. You just have preconceived ideas about that! I don’t know if he’s really innocent, I might be guilty or totally innocent. But was one of you there?

So I’d like people to leave the judgement to the department of justice. If we’re talking about comments it’s different! How will he get up from this? Will he make a next album?

Personally I’ve always fought it was a scam, but for him to be charged more then once (over time) is kind of suspicious, people should get the lesson and watch their children. Just a last info, the kid had cancer, MJ paid for everything and brought the kid out of his depression. His mom was glad to let him bound with MJ. Still think she was careless.

Let’s say I’ve got a lot on my chest and a blog seems like the new way to express yourself and point of view. Not looking to be famous or anything this blog is like a personnal notebook (to the world to read). I was looking for a nice name and thought anything would be better than “PhoenixP3K’s Blog”. Yeah, PhoenixP3K’s the nickname for those of you who know me I say hello. For those who don’t know me; Hello World!

As for the name iP3K, it’s just a variation of PhoenixP3K the “i” standing for “information” sort of. Don’t try to dig, it’s useless