do watch the movie "Catch A Fire"

The quote which popped in to my head was "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"

When you look at any current world conflict remember this quote. It will put the conflict in a new light.

application [delivery] platform

Internet is maturing and moving to the next phase.

Technologies such as AJAX (AJAX is not really a technology, rather a technique), Adobe Flash, Flex and OpenLaszlo are transforming the Internet from platform to carry information (WWW) and deliver services such as email and file transfer to a full fledged application delivery platform. Internet is becoming a platform delivering applications (Rich Internet Applications) and the browser is becoming the platform for the user interface.

This concept has redefined the traditional view of application and their delivery. It also has redefined the development and maintenance of applications. Applications are not just a piece of software you buy as a CD and install and use it in your PC any more. The concepts of software as a service and Internet as an application platform both have powered each other and has turned the the concept of application on it' head.

Classic examples are the new Yahoo mail [which looks and function like a desktop based email client] and Google services such as online spreadsheet and word processing. There are plenty of other Rich Internet application examples. But these two clearly demonstrate the transition of traditional desktop application based functionality to online functionality.

There are several browser-based "operating systems" or "online desktops" are also starting to appear. But these have to mature a little bit more.

Contrary to popular belief, Internet as an application platform is NOT as same as Web 2.0. Internet as an application platform enabled the delivery of Web-based applications and desktops and Rich Internet applications which are part of Web 2.0.

IE 7 should come with a warning...

IE 7 should come with a warning "To be used only in a super computer". Ok, that statement was bit of an exaggeration. But this is what I went through while installing IE 7 on a decently speced Toshiba Laptop.

• While I was downloading IE in the background, I just couldn't do any work in the foreground. The system just slowed down.
• The download was so big. It's strange, Microsoft's own IE is so big compared to the third-party browser Firefox.
• It took ages to load up for the first time
• It crashed while I was going through the initial configuration (once I loaded IE for the first time).
• When I am running IE it seems to bog the system down. Again, Firefox runs faster than native IE.

I haven't used it long enough to do a thorough review. But, I do like the slick new interface and the way it allow previews of the open tabs. I am not so sure about the ClearType (font smoothing). Some sites don't look good with font smoothing.

The oh-so-simple interface and the vast array of add-ons makes picking Firefox over IE a no brainer.

Another strange little reason why I prefer Firefox:
Long time ago someone thought me a very simple trick to beat the annoying and band-width hogging Flash ads embedded in the web pages. Find out the host name of the ad-server and add them to the host file and map it to the IP 127.0.0.1. This is a very simple way to block out the ads and hosts which drop tracker cookies.
This trick has a side effect in IE, if a page with embedded (blocked) ads is loaded in a browser, a DNS error will replace the ad space. This is expected as the adserver hosts are now being remapped to localhost [and I don't have a web server running on localhost]. But in IE, if I click back button it doesn't go back to the previous page. If the page has 5 blocked ads, I have to click the back button 5 times before I can go beck to previous page.
This issue doesn't exist in Firefox. Just one click will take me to the previous page regardless of number of ads blocked. Hmm.....