I recently decided to reinstall my operating systems, both XP and the recently-released Ubuntu 9.04 codenamed Jaunty Jackalope. The main reason for doing this was the release of Jaunty and that XP was getting sluggish because of all the bloat of the updates I was installing unknowingly. At first, I tried installing Vista lite, the one that floated around the torrents and is a stripped-down version of Vista Ultimate that fits in a single CD. It was fast, but after a few updates it went sluggish and started warning me that my copy might be a pirated one. Heh. I then proceeded to install the 64-bit version of Jaunty, letting Vista lite sit in there for a while. I ran into an issue where grub, a Linux boot manager/loader, wasn't able to find the Jaunty installation, so I decided to reinstall it and made sure I installed grub in the hard-drive where Jaunty is also installed. It worked, and after a few minutes of tweaking Jaunty, I decided to check out my Vista lite install. Grub started spewing error messages one after another basically telling me that it can't load my Vista lite installation. After doing some fixes that I know of, it left me frustrated. This issue wouldn't have happened if my IDE drive had a jumper that placed it in Master mode. I don't know how it happened, but I lost that jumper and was running my operating systems while the IDE drive was in Slave mode. I decided to make a jumper of my own so I can set my hard drive to Master. It worked. I then decided to reformat and reinstall my legal copy of XP as I realized that Vista lite was going to cause me trouble in the long run. After loading all the drivers for my desktop, and making sure I installed all the software I needed, I then proceeded to install Jaunty Jackalope, but this time, I decided to use the 32-bit version, because Adobe AIR apps, and more particularly, Adobe AIR, still has issues running 32-bit libraries installed in a 64-bit environment. I simply just can't let go of my AIR apps. Maybe in a few months, Adobe AIR gets updated and have 64-bit libraries for 64-bit Ubuntu releases. Here's me hoping Adobe does something about it. For now, all is quite well, and so far, Jaunty is living up to the hype of being a more performance-oriented release of the much loved Ubuntu distro. Hats off to Canonical for another great release.

After reading an interview of one of the winners, Charlie Miller, of this year's PWN2OWN hackfest, I realized how vulnerable Apple's OS X is. Sure it is *NIX-based, and inherently secure, but it doesn't mean it IS secure out-of-the-box. Firewalls and Antivirus programs are simply not enough to protect one's OS. If a bug is found and exploited in one of the applications, the whole OS is screwed. An operating system is only as secure as the applications running on it. In the hackfest, contestants try to hack different browsers by finding bugs and exploiting them as proof of the bug's existence. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous and applications are moving to the cloud, browsers are becoming a more critical application, and it is only logical for hackers to try and hack into the system by exploiting a browser's vulnerabilities. In the interview, Charlie Miller stated that Safari on a Mac is the easiest to exploit, and Firefox on a Windows PC is the second hardest. The hardest application to exploit was Google's Chrome, partly because of Windows and partly because of the Sandbox framework(?) Google used in developing Chrome. Safari on a Mac was easiest because of Mac OS X. I'm not faulting Apple for releasing an unsecured OS. OS X is secure, don't get me wrong. However, part of the OS is the browser, in which Apple "forgot" to secure Safari, which makes OS X vulnerable to attacks as well. And with all the money in the world, Apple could have secured the OS a whole lot better. Even if almost all viruses are targeted at Windows-based machines, there's still the off-chance that one of them will be targeting OS X, or other operating systems for that matter. And as I've mentioned before, more and more applications are moving to the cloud. Viruses or other malware don't have to run on the system itself. There are websites that embed scripts that try to download and execute malicious code without the visitor even knowing about it. Having a secure operating system, however, is not enough in preventing attacks. No matter how secure the operating system, and the developers can only do so much as to warn everyone of every single virus there is out there, if the user is stupid enough to download and execute a virus, there's just no way of preventing a virus from infecting a system. It's time for people to start wisening up and prevent user-initiated errors. This, in my humble opinion, is the most dreaded type of calls, and is abhorred by tech support. Charlie Miller also mentioned in the interview that Google's Chrome and the way they developed the browser was the next evolutionary step in developing future browsers. Although Chrome was based in an open-source software dubbed Chromium, Google made it sure that Chrome is future-ready. I recently tried a pre-alpha version of Chromium, not Chrome, on my Linux install, and although it looked almost the same as Chrome, I doubt it is as secure. Preliminary tests regarding speed (in executing javascripts) were amazing. There were a number of critical things that don't work, like setting options, navigating opened tabs (tabs were invisible), and saving bookmarks (it was non-existent). And there was no support for Flash, yet. It was like Lynx with a graphical user interface. But it did pique my curiosity, and I am eagerly awaiting Google's release of Chrome's Linux version. As for me buying a Mac in the future, it will only happen when I have extra, and I mean EXTRA, cash laying around. And that would be in about N years. Maybe by that time, a Mac netbook has been released.

I just bought a new laptop last Friday and, being an advocate of Open Source and everything that is Linux-related, I'm ashamed to admit that Vista, at least Vista Home Premium, was, well, okay, so to speak. What made me realize it was ok was mostly the hardware it was running on. The Blue Notebook, equipped with an Intel Core Duo processor, a gig of RAM, 120 gigs of storage space, a dual-layer multi-dvd burner, and a lot of bells and whistles, simply hummed away while running Microsoft's latest abomination. The notebook, which I'm officially dubbing as BB (as in B.B. King), has bluetooth, firewire, and USB connectivity, as well as a built-in dialup modem and LAN card. The notebook earns two-thumbs-up, as it has technology that can keep up with the times, or at least for a couple of years, and is relatively cheap at PhP 36K (roughly US$ 840). Systems with the same specs averages around PhP 45-60K (US$ 1075 - 1400). What was amazing with BB was that there were buttons that aren't really buttons. It's like a touch screen, except that it's not on the screen, but on the casing itself, and there's a volume control that you just slide your finger on the bar to increase or decrease the volume, much like the one on an iPod.

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