Google Chrome V8 Javascript engine contains assembler from Sun

There has been lot of talk about the new Google Chrome's Javascript virtual machine called V8 . I just glanced at the google chrome's third party software licenses and was surprised to see that V8 assembler is licensed from Sun Microsystems. Sun made no news about it and it is another example of great innovation coming from Sun.

Update: I just checked the source code of V8 and it indeed contains Sun's source code. Check out assembler.cc . Also check the wikipedia entry for V8.

Mozilla Firefox Security Shortcoming

Mozilla Firefox is one of the most secure browsers. I am surprised to see that it has not been able to fix its website to redirect its users of old versions to the latest version or atleast warn them that their version of firefox is outdated and can contain security vulnerabilities. The following page illustrates the problem.

http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0/whatsnew/

which is the default page on version 2.0 of firefox. It says in clear bold letters that you have been updated to the latest version of firefox, which cannot be further from truth.

Offline mobile blog reader

I am discovering new uses to the EEE PC everyday. With Gears (google gears) , one can now read blogs/news feeds offline from anywhere on eee pc. This is allowing me to catchup with with thousands of unread entries on Google Reader. There are a few problems, like not displaying images in offline mode and not able to view the full content depending on the blog.

I see lot of potential for Gears powered web applications which in combination with UMPC s can lead to killer applications. Other powerful applications for gears are Google Docs , Wikipedia with GearsMonkey .

Snapfish album sharing security hole

Just search for snapfish share and you get results which allows you see someone's non-public albums. I think this should not be allowed by snapfish and I would not trust that my private albums on snapfish are really private.

VMWare workstation 6.5 with Unity on Ubuntu

I am forced to use M$ Lookout at work. I just cannot be productive on windoze, so I have been trying various options to work from ubuntu but still still be able to access all the internal tools. I am delighted to say I have found the perfect solution. VMWare Converter allowed me to export my existing windows partition/installation as a virtual machine image. VMWare workstations 6.5 beta allowed to me run this in Ubuntu with great ease. The unity feature in this release is very impressive. The screenshot show how it looks to have unity enabled on a virtual machine.

Web Services Security in Metro Webservices stack

In this video Ed Ort of the java.sun.com staff interviews three key members of the Metro Web Services Security team about support for web services security in the Metro web services stack.

I am happy to see my ex-team members talking about the products on which I worked on with them.