Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta. Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5. However, my tests (using same 720P video posted by Jan) on Windows with Google Chrome showed that both are equally bad CPU hogs, but HTML5 was also very buggy and still had very bad image quality.
Google is beta testing HTML5 for video playback on YouTube, and my initial impressions of the technology are not good at all. A few months earlier, I couldn’t get Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Google Chrome to run HTML5 video. I am able to get the latest version of Chrome to render the video, but the results look terrible in its current stage.
Figure 1: YouTube HTML5 beta interface
As you can see in Figure 1, the rendering is horrible compared to Figure 2 in Adobe Flash mode. The image scaling looks like it merely using pixel duplication rather than something decent like cubic interpolation much less something good like Lanczos3. That’s why the image looks extremely blocky and pixilated. There’s no apparent support for 480P, 720P, or 1080P either.
Figure 2: YouTube Flash 10 interface
In Figure 2, we see a mature Flash 10 interface with much nicer quality image rendering as well as higher resolution support. This isn’t to say that there’s fundamentally something wrong with HTML5, just that the current implementation on YouTube has a long way to go before it can replace Flash. This is a major issue for iPhone/iPod/iPad users and Steve Jobs is throwing his whole weight behind HTML5 and has no intention of supporting Adobe Flash.
There’s good reason not to like Flash as it is very buggy and full of security holes that expose its host operating system to nasty malware attacks. Furthermore, the performance of Flash on many laptops and nearly all netbooks is horrible short of having a really fast laptop with rarely deployed dedicated graphics hardware. Microsoft Silverlight (which has been beta tested on iPhone) performs much better on similar hardware than Adobe Flash so there’s a possibility that HTML5 mode might also perform better. But until the implementation becomes much more mature and capable, HTML5 doesn’t even appear to be worthy of being beta.
Somehow, Microsoft hasn’t released a security bulletin for this, and they aren’t calling it a “critical” security problem, or classifying the patch as being security related in the update system, even though it is obviously a security problem!
This has to be one of the coolest things I’ve seen it a while, but word is emerging about a new secret Skunk Works project called “Courier” which is a new innovative “booklet” design. This thing apparently has 2 7″ LCDs on a rigid hinge and it looks like something that might be direction tablet computers are heading towards.
One thing I’m not sure about is whether this design allows you to operate it like a notebook computer with a virtual keyboard if you need to type an email. Had this device been invented 10 years ago when a lot of people didn’t know how to type, it would have been an instant mega hit. These days, almost everyone knows how to type so they’re probably going to want a keyboard. It’s also not clear if you can flip the booklet back to back so that you have something you can hold in one hand though I doubt it since it’s probably too big for that. While it’s definitely a very cool device, I’m not sure if it’s as useful to me as a laptop. The user interface looks good but who knows if it actually works as responsive as it appears in the video. Ultimately, this may be a very nice niche product but I think it needs to be smaller, thinner, lighter for easy standing operation.
Microsoft Office Web Apps is looking pretty impressive. The real time collaboration is something you can’t even do on the native Windows applications. Having the conditional formating in Excel, all the other rich animations in PowerPoint, and native Office compatibility makes this look extremely usable. Microsoft already has had a usable Outlook Web application for a long time and this just seems to be the natural extension for the entire Office Suite.
The Windows SMBv2 zero-day vulnerability (disclosed vulnerability with no software fix) appears to be more dangerous than initially thought. The vulnerability does not affect the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, but it does affects Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The danger is no longer just a system crash or reboot, it can lead to a full system compromise.
In the absence of a patch, Microsoft released some instructions for disabling SMBv2. For your convenience, I’ve packaged two REG files that you can download that enable and disable SMBv2 in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. So until a software patch is available, you need to disable SMBv2 double clicking the disable-SMBv2.reg file and then rebooting. The workaround does not break your ability to serve files, but it does reduce your SMB file serving speeds down to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 levels which would result in a moderate decrease in performance. When the patch becomes available and you have applied the patch, just run the enable-SMBv2.reg file and reboot.
Mozilla has patched a very critical flaw in Firefox that allows attackers to pose as a legitimate Firefox update server and implant harmful code into a victim’s computer. Firefox 3.0.13 and 3.5.2 are no longer vulnerable to this attack and the update should automatically run. It would be prudent to check it manually under the Firefox “Help” menu and open the “About” window.
Immediately rebooting after the latest Microsoft Windows Update pushed to me (even though it isn’t patch Tuesday) seemed to have nuked Outlook 2007 with the dreaded message:
“Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.”
My first reaction was to do a system restore to before the update was applied which was a mistake as it didn’t fix the problem. A quick search on the support forums indicates that the correct solution is to run an “outlook.exe /resetnavpane” command from the Windows Run prompt. Then after I applied the Windows Update again, Outlook broke again with the same error message. Running the same resetnavpane command fixed the problem again so I would have saved myself a lot of trouble had I not performed a system restore.
This weekend I did my first P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversion of a machine using SCVMM 2008 (System Center Virtual Machine Manager). I expected the worst. Instead, I got a really pleasant experience. It worked like a charm, so long as the right ports were opened and you knew the username/password of a user who is a local administrator on the destination machine. In my case, I simply plugged the secondary NIC on the machine (it was a machine in my DMZ, ironically enough, it was previously my VMWare Server box) into a switch on my LAN, started the conversion process, and an hour later, it was done. As expected, I needed to reconfigure the NIC (I always expect this, since it is considered a new NIC). One nice surprise is that it maintained the volume lettering, even though I did not convert all of the volumes. In this case, I had a D drive which I did not convert, but I did convert the F drive, and even though the converted F drive was the secondary drive on the virtual adapter, Windows was still calling it F. That ensured that I didn’t need to mess with anything after conversion. Overall, I can report that SCVMM did a P2V with flying colors, and should not be feared or avoided.
I recently updated my SCOM (SystemCenter Operations Manager) 2007 installation to 2007 R2. Not only was the upgrade pleasantly smooth, easy, painless, and fast, but the results were worth it. The new administration console has features which made it worth it for me. The first, is that it no longer periodically crashes when I run it on my local PC (Vista, connected to the network over a VPN), so I do not need to work from the server’s console to use it. The other feature I love, is that I can now install management packs directly from the site within the console, and I can search for them too. Even better, there is a filter to show only the MP’s that are more recent than what I have installed. Now, I can actually keep my MP’s updated on a regular basis!
Mozilla has patched a very critical flaw in Firefox that allows attackers to