conormulligan.com / blog

Two fine updates have been launched today; Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’, and AVG Anti-Virus 8.0.

Ubuntu 8.04 is the latest LTS (long-term support) distribution, which is designed to appeal primarily to Enterprise users. There’s no shortage of new features, however:

• Virtualization built into the kernel
• Firefox 3 is the default web browser
• Updated Linux kernel
• Windows installer (Wubi)
• New version of Gnome
• New BitTorrent Client
• New VNC client
• Long-term support (5 years vs. the regular 18 months)

I’ve been using the pre-release version of this for a while now, and it’s a solid release. But the real update to look out for is 8.10, which promises a raft of significant new features, and a completely overhauled interface (the current Human theme is getting a bit old; hopefully the don’t go overboard on the brown this time, there’s only so much you can take).

AVG 8.0 is a really nice update, both functionally and visually (AVG had a pretty terrible interface before; now, I’ll go ahead and say that 8.0 is the best looking Anti-Virus software on Windows Vista today).

There’s a table over at grisoft.com that highlights the differences between the various editions (AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, AVG Anti-Virus, AVG Internet Security). You can check it out here.

for /f "usebackq" %%d in (`"dir /ad/b/s | sort /R"`) do rd "%%d"

Who knew it was so easy?

From The Old New Thing, by Raymond Chen.

I’ll say it again: Google needs to buy Remember the Milk.

Remember the Milk is a task-management web-application. This may not sound like much, and rightly so, task-management applications are beyond ubiquitous, but it really is an exciting product that blows away many of the conventions associated with your average productivity application.

In particular, the RTM folks have spend a lot of time integrating their product with others, including three from Google (Gmail, Google Calendar and iGoogle; it also uses Google Gears for offline access and Google Maps for geo-tagging tasks). So, is Remember the Milk an obvious target for a Google acquisition? Clearly not, or they surely would have indicated something by now.

Nevertheless, this is an application that they should firmly set their sights on, particularly as they take the company into more corporate territory with Google Apps, where Remember the Milk could be really useful. The Gmail integration (achieved with the use of a GreaseMonkey-style Firefox plugin) should be enough to convince anyone; if RTM was available to everyone in Gmail’s sidebar I have no doubt the vast majority of users would find it useful. It’s a uniquely suitable place to locate such functionality: everyone views their email every day, a lot (like me) keep Gmail open for hours on end.

Come on Google, this is an easy one.

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

—Pablo Picasso

An intrepid coder over at nihilogic.dk has developed a Super Mario clone with just 14kb of Javascript.

This is a really interesting proof of concept; the size is particularly astounding (although it’s nowhere near a complete implementation).

You can check out for yourself 14kb Javascript Super Mario.