After seeing glowing recommendations for the heuristic-based ThreatFire anti-malware app from PC Tools, I decided to install it to complement my antivirus scanner and other anti-spyware tools such as Spybot-S&D and Ad-Aware.

Initially, it worked fine. While I don’t know how much protection it really added, it was intuitive, easy to configure and didn’t slow down my system like many other real-time scanners might have. However, I ran into some trouble with my web development environment, consisting of Apache, MySQL and PHP (in the form of XAMPP) that I could only attribute to ThreatFire’s presence.

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If you tried to reach this site sometime within the past 24 hours, you probably were either unable to connect or served with inexplicable 404 errors. It appears that the server this site was hosted on experienced some downtime yesterday. Sorry for any trouble this may have caused.

The good guys over at Site5 are busy fixing the problem and my site appears to be have been safely restored from a backup. It appears that there was an unexpected catastrophic failure of the file system and as a result, they had to reformat and restore from backups. Hopefully the restoration goes well.

Over the last week, many people became aware of Bell implementing throttling on their Internet services. Throttling, (or traffic shaping) aims to improve the overall Quality-of-Service (QoS) by delaying or limiting certain types of packets so that the network is not overloaded.

Traffic shaping itself is not insidious; in fact it’s a widely used method to maintain the stability of networks. However, the reasons that Bell and other providers have done this, as well as how they’ve carried it out, have created much controversy.

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A while back, I talked about my new computer. The biggest change? Going quad-core. True, I have no use for such hardware currently, but it’s a bit of future-proofing that I could afford. I don’t use a laptop that much, so that’s why I’ve poured money into my desktop as with my current usage habits, my four-year old Dell Inspiron 5100 is still more than enough. Since I first mentioned my new system back in January, I’ve had some time to play reflect on it. Here are a few of my notes from that.

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When I first heard of the OpenID concept back in 2006 it seemed like a novel idea that would go well with the increasing prevalence of web services and applications. Most of these services require registration, and who could possible remember different passwords for all of them without using a specialized tool? Instead of using the same password for every site, OpenID presented a solution to allow you to organize your online accounts under one login, using the concept of Single Sign On (SSO).

It seemed like a daunting task. Up until that point, single sign on had had limited success on the web. Microsoft’s Passport system, since rebranded as Windows Live ID, had mixed success with popular websites such as eBay and Monster, and both of those eventually discontinued support. It appeared that they did not like having their user base under potential control and monitoring of a third party. OpenID aimed to solve that by being, well, open. Just as any website could support OpenID login, there could be a multitude of OpenID providers that would allow you to obtain an OpenID-enabled URL, which would form the basis for your online identity.

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If you’re into web development you’re likely aware of the big news from Microsoft that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is now available. This comes less than 1.5 years since IE7 was released, and represents a much faster development cycle than was observed with IE7. (Over five years passed between the initial release of IE6 and IE7)

With Firefox Beta 3 released not long ago and the final version due in the first half of 2008, Microsoft has been feeling the heat and probably has decided to devote real effort towards improving Internet Explorer in order to regain market share lost mainly to Firefox.

However, what’s most interesting and impressive about IE8 is not its fast follow-up to IE7, but its broad support for web standards and other improvements that many did not expect, especially after the poor track record of IE6 that wasn’t improved much by IE7.

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* Sensationalist headline inspired by previous posts

Eclipse is my IDE of choice, as you’l probably have noticed from some of my previous articles. I had been wanting to write an article about why I use it (and why I switched to it), but kept putting it off. Recently, Matt Mullenweg wrote about his problems with Dreamweaver, and this perhaps prompted me to organize my notes on why I’ve chosen to use Eclipse. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating that you immediately switch and throw out your current editing tool (the headline above, as noted, is purely for sensationalism) – but rather I’m just urging you to consider Eclipse for your next project.

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If you’ve been reading the news today, you’re likely aware of Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo!. When such rumours were discussed last year, I doubted the validity of the claims; however this time the hearsay was truth. Yahoo’s declining stock price and current business troubles may have also played a role in the bid actually taking place this time. Continued

It’s been over 1.5 years since I built my current computer, and back then it was pretty decent. Heck, it’s still pretty decent right now and there’s no real reason why I decided to upgrade, other than the fact that I had the upgrade itch. So, that’s why last week I ordered a bunch of components (again from Netlink Computers) to build a new computer with. The parts arrived yesterday, after some haggling with Purolator, but everything seems to be in good shape and I’m excited to put things together!

I decided to go with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor. Why? Well, it was a sweet price – $270 – and it’s quad-core. Just the name sounds so badass – it’s reminiscent of the “Quad Damage” power up of the Quake FPS series, and heck, quad is better than dual, no? But let’s be real here – I probably have no real need for a quad-core processor, and claims of future-proofing may be dubious at best. After all, I am on a roughly two-year upgrade cycle, so by the time quad-core becomes commonplace (like dual-core is right now) I will most likely have upgraded to a new CPU.

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JavaScript has a complicated history. The name itself seems to indicate a relationship to Java, when in fact, the two languages share little in common except for a common syntax relationship by way of C. Add to this the myriad of browser incompatibilities and numerous examples of bad usage, and you have what is perhaps the world’s least understood popular programming language. (I had to add the ‘popular’ qualifier, since I am sure there are some esoteric languages out there that only a handful of people know)

This is why inheritance in JavaScript is probably one of the least understood concepts. While languages like Java have well-defined constructs for inheritance, the topic is of less importance with JavaScript. In many situations, you’ll never have to deal with these aspects when programming in JavaScript, simply because it isn’t required for a lot of client side scripts. However, for larger-scale web applications, applying object-oriented principles to your code may make it easier to design, improve and maintain.

There have been many articles written about inheritance in JavaScript and how it can and should be done. You really don’t need to read mine to gain an understanding. Rather, I’m just going to write about what I’ve learned, the process I went through and the experience I’ve gained along the way.

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