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Google and Apple seem to have taken on left- and right-hand roles, with neither quite sure what the other is up to. After Google’s long-hyped iPhone Voice Search application’s rocky launch, they have again hit a pothole:

Does Google Mobile use private APIs?

Surprisingly enough, Google appears to use both dynamic linking and calling unpublished APIs … it looks like Google decided that it was better to get the job done and provide a richer user experience to the end user than to live according to Apple’s exact dictates.

Google admits flouting Apple App Store rules

Google has acknowledged breaking the official rules of Apple’s iPhone software-development kit when it created the latest version of the Google Mobile application for the iPhone, but denied a more serious charge.

Reports like the following piss me off:

A flaw has been found in Windows Vista that could allow rootkits to be hidden or denial-of-service attacks to be executed on computers using the operating system.

Asked about the severity of the flaw, Unterleitner pointed out that administrative rights were needed to execute a program calling the function that would cause the buffer overflow.

Source: Kernel vulnerability found in Vista.

So an “evil person” would need a root account, to run an exploit that could potentially give him access to a root account… Isn’t this kinda like saying an exploit has been discovered that allows hackers to permanently delete your documents and settings folder… if logged in as an administrator, a hacker could shift-delete your personal folders!

The report itself actually isn’t the annoying part, the little flame-war in the comments between Linux and MS zealots is typical of the single-cell mentality shared by the two factions, and makes me wish someone would provide some venture capital for this to be developed.

A couple of weeks old, but still news to me: Windows 3.x retired.

Who remembers the hotdog stand theme?

In long-awaited anticipation the free competitor to Microsoft’s Office Suite, OpenOffice.org v3.0.0 Final will be officially released sometime today. OOo v3.0.0 was already available for download on some of the mirrors since late last night. I assume given the time-zone differences the official release details will be shortly forthcoming. Their site is currently down so it’s probably a safe bet that they’re currently updating as I write this article seeing as when I checked 2 hours ago it was working fine and contained no details regarding the official release.

I’ve long maintained that OOo, while not exactly a poor comparison to the very mature and comprehensive suite that is MS Office, it is not the brilliant masterpiece that supercedes MS Office that so many people claim it to be. However for a free office suite it is definitely not lacking in features or functionality, so it should be interesting to see what v3 Final brings to the table and see how much closer it comes to truly rivaling MS Office.

Added: Local Mirror #1 (http) Local Mirror #2 (ftp)

So it seems that a lucky few (or unlucky depending on your viewpoint) will get their paws on the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft. A pre-beta build of Windows 7 will be given to all attendees, along with a bunch of other stuff from the conference.

The successor to Vista, Windows 7 currently promises a lot, yet what does it truly offer? I doubt many people will be too impressed should it deliver the same sort of results that Vista did. Considering how far they are in the development phase, it looks they could make the widely assumed release dates of late 2009 — early 2010 based on the history of releases. For me, the biggest question now is: what happens to Vista? Does it make any sense to even adopt Vista now that the next OS is around the corner? With the PR nightmare Vista has had, it doesn’t look like there is much incentive to do so.

In the end the real question to ask would be: can Windows 7 surmount the negative image that has built up since the release of Vista?

For the better part of a year the primary server room of the company I work for smelled much like a sewer, courtesy of the broken pipe in the toilet next door. I surmise that the AC pulled in and circulated some rather rancid air resulting in an enclosed room where you would not wish to linger for too long; changing the filters had no apparent effect. Our secondary server room is so narrow that removing a full depth rack-mounted device would actually require us pushing the rack back so we had enough space to pull it out. So, I’m certainly no stranger to the quirks one might find in a data centre, which is possibly why I found this project interesting.

The driving purpose behind this project is to see if it’s possible to get a data centre environment down to or as close to, a PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) of 1.0. As explained in the article:

A PUE of 1.0 essentially means that all the power consumed in the data center generates compute operations and there is no additional cooling or power overhead.

Air-conditioners will in most data centres be the largest consumer of electricity aside from the actual servers themselves. In a traditional enclosed server room, AC is absolutely essential, as anyone who has turned them off will notice that the room tends to get rather steamy in a very short period of time. However, one thing I don’t quite understand is the tendency for people to set the AC to blizzard mode. The last time I checked servers were quite capable of, and indeed rated to be able to run at temperatures substantially higher than room temperature. Having your tongue frozen to the roof of your mouth and your snot forming icicles in your nose is not a great deal of fun. As a bit of advice you can stand behind server racks to thaw out a bit. Setting the temperature to something more normal will probably save you a whole lot of money.

So it seems that using the environment as far as possible to cool the servers goes a long way toward achieving this goal. Already there are some initiatives that should see this come to light in the future.