Google Chrome - cleaner, faster and cooler!

Published on September 3, 2008 in Review and Web. 3 Comments

Google Chrome - It is not the much-hyped Google OS but pretty close. And if it becomes popular the Google OS might not even be worth it. The browser WILL be the OS.

Read the long but interesting comic announcing what it is or go ahead and download it and try it out.

Google has a finger in every online service pie - it has a nearly complete suite of online services - check out Google Labs. From just controlling the server end of things Google Chrome is a very smart foray into controlling the browser side too. It is all about controlling the experience. If you are the browser maker you decide how it behaves, what elements are shown, how it behaves and what components are optimized. You drive essential standards and the ecosystem of web applications.

Google Chrome is full of new features, both user-visible and purely internal.

A faster and leaner new JavaScript engine called V8 compiles JavaScript and has tighter memory management than the current JavaScript engines. This ensures that JavaScript-heavy (AJAX) applications such Gmail and Google Reader run faster.

Chrome implements a one-process-per-application model. This means application behaviour (unintended or malicious) is localized, crashes are easier to deal with, debugging is easier and memory management is more efficient. This also makes the browser design more flexible and extensible.

The UI is minimalistic and stylish, a signature Google UI. Tabs are the central element in the user interface and therefore are at the very top of the browser. Less important elements of the UI such as the status bar and bookmarks are hidden by default. The default home page shows the 9 most visited sites plus most searched sites, a pretty sensible default and something I know I will get used to in a few days. The best part about the UI is that everything is better but in a subtle, non-distracting manner. All the (Firefox) shortcuts work as expected and everything is where I expect it to be. Google Gears is in-built and provides the interface to the user’s file-system and allows applications to behave more like native applications.

Security is built-in by design. Applications and plug-ins are sandboxed from each other and from the rest of the user’s system. Processes cannot write to the filesystem (no persistent cookies!) and cannot read from sensitive filesystem folders or files. Conventional browser anti-phishing mechanisms are also in place checking sites visited against a list of known malicious sites.

The browser itself and the V8 JavaScript engine are open-source allowing others to use these in their projects. And good features developed by others can be introduced in the core codebase by the Google team effectively allowing a larger team to contribute to these projects albeit indirectly. Open sourcing is also a smart defense against monopoly allegations I guess.

This is a major shakeup of the browser market. Chrome was announced around the same time as the IE8 announcement, this is probably a deliberate move intended to invoke comparisons and garner more publicity. Users shifting to IE8 from IE7 or to IE7 from IE6 might decide to give Chrome a try and stick with it. Users of the various Google services are also a primary audience, the browser has the Google brand and that says something for the users of those services. But most disruptive of all Google Chrome will probably take away a significant chunk of the Mozilla Firefox userbase.

IE is the OS’s browser. It is the default browser, the “e” icon that most users associate with the Web and the browser that renders almost everything nicely. Firefox was the “alternate” browser. It is the browser with a rich ecosystem of extensions and thus more flexible. It is the preferred browser for tech-savvy surfers, slightly more secure and of course available on non-Windows systems.

Google Chrome is all set to displace Mozilla Firefox and become the preferred “alternate” browser. Today it does most things that Firefox can do, eventually it will do ALL things that firefox can do and I am not sure what Firefox’s differentiator will be to make me choose Firefox over Chrome. Today Chrome lacks the plug-ins/extensions that Firefox has but that is just a matter of time before Firefox extensions are ported to Chrome.I am going to hazard a guess and say that Chrome will have a third of the browser market a year frmo now.

All in all very interesting times in the browser world :-)

Upgrade to Windows XP from Vista

Published on December 16, 2007 in Fun and Windows. 2 Comments

After reading this post I am also thinking of dumping Windows Vista and upgrading to Windows XP :-)

Choosing good passwords - memorability and security

Published on December 6, 2007 in Policy. 0 Comments

Password policies are an integral part of security for most computing facilities. Even though passwords have supposedly outlived their usefulness they are still the single most common security control for authentication for online systems. Thus having a user-friendly but secure enough password policy and enforcing it is very important.

An administrator usually has the ability to set the acceptable password policy for a system. However common questions that arise are - What is the minimum length of a password? How many non-alpha characters (numbers and special symbols) should it have? Are there any restrictions on using both uppercase and lowercase characters? And many more.

I just read a reasonably old but very useful paper titled The Memorability and Security of Passwords Some Empirical Results authored by Jianxin Yan, Alan Blackwell, Ross Anderson and Alastair Grant. It is short 11-page paper describing an experiment carried out on approximately 400 students that gives empirical results on the memorability and security of passwords chosen via 3 different approaches - allow user to select, random password, mnemonic passphrase.

In a nutshell the paper recommends users to choose mnemonic passwords that are at least 8 characters long, preferably longer with individual characters being a mixture of letters, numbers and special symbols.

And while you are at it do read this article by Bruce Schneier - Choosing Secure Passwords. He talks about a password recovery program called PRTK that assumes that all passwords are made up of a root (need not be a dictionary word but is usually pronounceable) and an appendage (a suffix or prefix to the root). His recommendations for a difficult to crack password:

So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something not on any of the root or appendage lists. You should mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use two roots with an appendage in the middle.

Even something lower down on PRTK’s dictionary list — the seven-character phonetic pattern dictionary — together with an uncommon appendage, is not going to be guessed. Neither is a password made up of the first letters of a sentence, especially if you throw numbers and symbols in the mix.

Interesting.

Desktop screenshot - Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and GNOME

Published on November 26, 2007 in GNU/Linux and Miscellaneous. 1 Comment

This is how my desktop looks like. I am running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) and Gnome platform. I have been using Ubuntu for 3 years now and it is my all-time favourite operating system. It is easy to install, user-friendly, looks good, is fast and has almost everything that I need for my day to day work.

Varun’s Desktop - Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and GNOME

Review - HP Pavilion dv9502AU Portable

Published on November 26, 2007 in Hardware and Reviews. 12 Comments

I bought my laptop (HP Pavilion dv9502AU Portable) around 3 months ago and I guess it is the right time to write up a quick review.

Overall I am very happy with this laptop. It suits my needs very well and I am very satisfied with it. The price (50K INR) is also a bargain for a 17 inch laptop in India. I bought this laptop from the Croma store in Malad.

This laptop has many good features (that is after all why I settled for it in the first place). Almost all of the laptop’s “basic” features get a pass grade easily. The processing power (1.8 GHz, 2 x 512 KB L2 Cache) and RAM (1 GB) allow Windows Vista to run reasonably well (though an extra gig of RAM would help significantly) and anything other than Vista (say Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux) runs like a breeze. The 8-cell battery consistently lasts for more than 3 hours and takes around 90 minutes to recharge fully after being fully drained. The laptop’s looks are decent enough but nothing stunning. The laptop also has all the bells and whistles expected from a modern machine (CD/DVD reader/writer, Ethernet card, modem, 5-in-1 card reader, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g, Bluetooth, ExpressCard slot, all kinds of slots, VGA webcam, microphones etc.) and till now I have not felt anything amiss. The laptop weighs a respectable 4 Kg, though this is pretty heavy if you have to lug around your machine a lot. Continue reading ‘Review - HP Pavilion dv9502AU Portable’

Get a list of installed packages in Ubuntu for reinstallation on another system

Published on November 25, 2007 in GNU/Linux. 1 Comment

How do you get a new Ubuntu (or Debian or any distro using dpkg) installation to quickly have a specific set of packages installed without scouring through the list of packages and selecting packages one by one? More specifically how do you get a new Ubuntu installation (the target system) to have the same packages as your current one (the source system)?

Solution

Step 1: Configure and enable one or more repositories on the target system so that all repositories available in the source system are available in the target system. This Ubuntu help article - Adding Repositories in Ubuntu” - has more info on how to do it. Remember to add any non-standard repositories (for e.g. Google repositories) in addition to the standard ones.

Step 2: Get a listing of the packages currently installed on the source system using the following command.

sudo dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 > installed-packages.txt

Step 3: Use the following command to feed the list of packages into apt-get on the target system, wait for apt-get to download and install all the packages and voila! you are done.

cat installed-packages.txt | sudo xargs apt-get install

Technorati claim

Published on November 21, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 0 Comments

Technorati Profile

Hello world!

Published on November 20, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 1 Comment

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!