The last Windows XP x86 Service Pack, SP2, was released in August 2004. Service Pack 2 upgraded the security of the original XP, adding Windows Firewall among other security improvements.

Windows XP x64 can be updated by using the Windows Server 2003 SP2. The Windows XP 64 bit version of SP3 won’t be available until Windows Server 2003 hits SP3, since they share the same code base. So, if you are running XP x64, my sugestion is to upgrade to Windows 2003.

System administrator tools have not fundamentally changed from Windows XP SP2. SP3 can deployed using Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, or third-party solutions. The deployment process is essentially the same.

Features and Improvements:

• Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0
• Microsoft Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
• Microsoft Windows Installer 3.1 v2 (3.1.4000.2435)
• It improves compatibility with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 security credential providers.
• Various other security improvements
• Wi-Fi Protected Access 2
• “Black Hole” Router Detection
• Network Access Protection (NAP)
• Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) 2.1
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 2.5

SP3 seems to also fix many of the performance issues introduced as part of Service Pack 2. For some benchmarks read the zdnet blog post, however I don’t buy the claims that Vista is faster than XP, and it certainly doesn’t feel that way. I have Vista as one option on my multiboot Windows box, and it is faster than XP, but this is caused by the fact that I don’t have that many things running on it, and indeed not many run anyway.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Download Links:

The Service Pack 3 white paper.

Service Pack 3 direct download.

Service Pack 3 via Windows Update.

However I would wait at least a week before downloading it to see how many issues surface.

UPDATE:

Well, it didn’t take long at all.

About an hour ago Microsoft announced in a written statement that there is a "compatibility issue" between the XP Service Pack 3 and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, a retail chain management program for small and midsize businesses. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has the same bug and it was temporarily withdrawn from Windows update as well.

In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center.

To help protect our customers, we plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Download Center."

Makes you wonder what other software will break that they didn’t test yet.

The above download links are still good, and I will update them when and if the fixed pack comes out, so I advise caution downloading it till the dust settles.

In Unrelated News:

In the last quarter Microsoft’s earnings dropped by 6% from the previous year. Revenue from Windows alone also dropped by 24%.

A little back story first.

Quake III Arena is a multiplayer first-person shooter released in December 1999 which was developed by id Software. On August 19, 2005, id Software released the complete source code for Quake 3 under the GNU General Public License, however the game data, such as models, textures, sounds, shaders, and other scripts, is still proprietary. The game immediately became very popular in the open source community and numerous mods are released as self standing games. The main project is at ioquake3 (or ioq3 for short) and introduced many state of the art enhancements. The subversion is at icculus.

iTouch

The SDK, and a TIFF exploit jailbreak, allowed Scot from HermitWorks to compile the icculus source and with a few modifications, he made it run on the iTouch. Multiplayer no less! The accelerometers controls movement, and a touch fires your favorite weapon. The only drawback I see, is that you can not control the view. Still fun nonetheless. I only wished they released it! Here is the video:

Nice to see that games like Quake 3 are hitting the iPhone/iTouch platform. First person shooters are the only games worth playing in my opinion, and besides I still play Q3 once in a while. If you never played Quake 3, then go grab a copy, it’s heavily discounted, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and it’s loads of fun. Well worth it.

Source: HermitWorks.

That was white rice. Did I mention you should turn your sound down? Watch the pets as well.

Cymatics is the study of sound waves in a medium. One of the earliest to mention this phenomena in writing was Galileo Galilei in his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" published in 1632, but some of the patterns can be seen in ancient art. However the term cymatics was not coined until much later, in the 1967 book titled Kymatik by the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny, who was inspired by the earlier work of Ernst Chladni.

So how is it done? A plate of glass or metal covered with lycopodium, flour, sand or rice is vibrated by stroking the edge with a violin bow, a speaker placed underneath, a piezoelectric amplifier, a mechanical wave driver or other methods.

Here are some of the best videos of cymatics in action.

One of Dr.Hans Jenny’s rare old movies:

Weather cocks? NVM that, here is a newer one:

A liquid medium:

A compilation of several set to music:

Enough of that, I think I got a headache now!

Today, Google and Virgin Group announced that the two companies would join forces to establish a permanent Mars base by April 1st, 2108, a hundred years from today. Virgle as the new joint venture is called, has selected the Martian Lunae planum as the site of the future human settlement on Mars.

If you would like to apply to be considered for the Mars mission go here. Many people have already left applications.

Ok, it’s an April’s fools hoax, but remember that real products like Gmail were announced on April 1st (2004) as well, and everyone was sure that it was a joke because the huge disk space of 1 GB was unheard off back then in a free service.

As for me, I’d like to believe, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be disappointed, as I was when the Google TiSP turned out to be a joke. OMG, did they mention you can use a septic tank? Yeah, right! The tyranny of Verizon shall continue.

For a full list of Google April 1st hoaxes visit Wikipedia. I am sure that by now Virgle found its way there.

MoneyQuake is a powerful Firefox extension from the same folks who gave us the amazing SeoQuake and the Serp EasySurf. MoneyQuake displays your real-time earnings statistics, after a quick configuration, from most popular PPC and other advertisment systems.

It also seems secure and the login/password information is encrypted and stored only in the FireFox browser. It also received the Softpedia seal as being free all malicious code or malware. Authorization is handled via POST method, and the configuration file is in XML format and can be easily extended by editing in any other ad provider that is not currently included.

A short sampling of the ad services it supports:

• Google Adsense
• Bidvertizer
• TraficCashGold
• StreamRay
• UmaxSearch
• PeakClick
• Buckster
• SoftwareProfit
• AdultAdsCash
• KlikVip
• AdultFriendFinderrn
• Begun
• Yandex.Direct
• Glavmed
• WildCash

Download it from here.
The official site is here, and don’t forget to grab the other cool extensions!

Not many extensions will work with the new version, Firebug works though, so it should be installed using a separate profile. This is ideal since it will prevent many issues that might arise out of running both firefox 2 and Firefox 3 with the same profile. Did I mention Firefox 4?

First identify you profile location. The default locations are these:

• Windows Vista/XP/2000 - %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• Windows 98/Me - C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• MacOS - ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
• Linux - ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/

The xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.

Next make a copy of the profile an move it wherever is convenient. Doing a backup at this point will prevent loss of settings, boomkarks, and passwords, and should be done on a regular basis anyway.

On Windows create a shortcut of Firefox, copy it on the desktop, then right click it and chose properties. Chose the second tab named Shortcut. In the target field add this at the end: -no-remote -profile “path_to_your_new_profile”. Now each time you start Firefox with this shortcut it will use the new profile you created.

On the other operating systems running it with the -no-remote -profile “path_to_your_new_profile” argument will do the trick.

Having more than one profile is also the right thing to do if you have more than one member of your family using the same computer. Name the new shortcut created whatever you want, but make sure it reflects the profile, or user.

As for me, I’m running four Firefox 2, one Firefox 3, and also the Minefield build. In case you haven’t tried Firefox 3 yet, you should, since it’s pretty stable and has many features that make it worthwhile.

Get Firefox 3 from here.

Firefox 3.0 is not even out of beta, latest nightly is Firefox-3.0b5, and the devs at Mozilla are well on their way to giving us Firefox 4.0, the first in what is sure to become a long series of releases.

Firefox-4.0a1pre Minefield can be downloaded from:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-actionmonkey/

So is this firefox 4.0? Who cares, it’s the latest nightly build, so grab it, and check out how your sites get rendered. Oh, and if you wonder why it is called Minefield, it is because it’s not stable enough to earn the Firefox logo yet. You’ll notice that the “bomb” icon is just the earth globe, but without the “fire fox” encircling it.

To achieve a high PR you need backlinks. So what do you have to do to get backlinks anyway? Anything, and everything! I’m getting kinda upset to see all those sites peddling gizmos and widgets, and everything else that can put a link or more on your site. Even registering to a site nowadays requires a backlink. Yeah, steal my hard earned rank, small as it is, why don’t you! Here we go:

My Technorati Profile

Curious if it likes it unsalted!

UPDATE:

Well it didn’t like the rel=”me external nofollow”. It has to be a rank giving link! Sure I will get some backlinks from them, but they will be from unranked pages, 0/10 if I’m lucky. Temporarily removing the nofollow…

2nd UPDATE:

Nope, didn’t work! I guess the rel=”me external” did it, or maybe the class=”external”… Anyway, they are making darn sure they get a front page, ranked, backlink.

Doesn’t work now no matter how many times I try. The first nofollow was the deal breaker. I’m pretty sure that from now on I’m gonna gave a real low Technorati rank. Yay, I’m gonna be last

RANT:

So what is the difference between some poor guy that that uses RSS Equalizer, or one of the many Wordpress RSS importers, to set up an adsense site, which then gets banned by Google for having duplicate content, and a well funded site that does the same thing? A paid license perhaps?

Guess not.

PayPerPost, who needs that Google, you’re next! FTW

LAST UPDATE:

It seems it wasn’t Technorati’s fault anyway. I pinged them when I first wrote this, and I saw the feed of the article on their site, but their “spiders” didn’t seem to work. Maybe it was a screwup on my end, I do not know. I tried pinging them again from autopinger.com and got this error:

Application failed during request deserialization: undefined entity at line 1, column 117, byte 119 at /usr/local/lib/perl/XML/Parser.pm line 187 faultCodeClient

So, anyway, sorry Technorati.

Remember: Never bite the hand that you feed!

I kinda freaked out, when I saw my sites down, and realized I didn’t have current backups. Dreamhost.com was down as was everything except www.dreamhoststatus.com. Was thinking they have absconded with the 7.2 millions they incorrectly over billed recently. Well I’m the paranoid kind, since I’ve seen this happen before. OK, maybe not a host as big as Dreamhost… Like everything else uptime is not what it’s all cracked up to be, and “stuff” happens.

Anyway the official story as found on www.dreamhoststatus.com says this:

Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline. This includes all email, web hosting, etc. A technician is about 15 minutes out from our datacenter to undo this mistake.

I apologize for this mistake. I was intending to be editing our non-live access-list, and edited the live one by mistake.

I’m curious if Dreamhost was the target of the denial of service attack or some site it hosts. Also interesting would be to know who was the source. A botnet perhaps? We’ll know soon I hope.

It seems in the process of “resolving” now, and dreamhost.com is up. Pheeeew.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently experimenting with micro surgically altered insects such as moths and beetles whilst they are in pupa stage. The insect grows and seamlessly incorporates the cyborg implant. The radio signal from the implanetd electronics as well as the camera and microphone output are processed by a remote computer. DARPA researcher are hopping to engineer insects that could be sent, or fly up to 300 feet away and then remain in the target range until they are remotely instructed to leave.

According to New Scientist which reported on the developments:

“The next time a moth lands on your window sill, watch what you say.

“It may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy - one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement.

“Be warned, flesh-and-blood bugs may soon live up to their name.”

The previous DARPA experiments included larger creatures such as pigeons, rats and sharks that have been fitted with surveillance, remote control and other hardware including lasers.