AOL all set to bury (long dead) Netscape Navigator

AOL finally decided to trash its “dead” browser Netscape Navigator after several feeble attempts to repackage it and try to serve old wine in new cups. Only a few months earlier they came out with Netscape Navigator 9.0. The latest news from AOL is that they’ll stop active development work and technical support beginning February 1, 2008.

When I worked in AOL last year, I was surprised to see Netscape used as the official browser. Firefox was allowed, but nobody spoke about it openly.

Its a little sad that Netscape is officially being flushed down after the way it stole away many IE users several years ago. When I was studying for my Masters degree in Kansas State University, nobody used IE – the version then was 4.0. Netscape Navigator was the default choice for all the students for obvious reasons. But with the introduction of IE5, many switched from Netscape Navigator to IE5. From then on, Netscape lost its hold until its open-source version Firefox was released, and the rest is history.

Very few people actually use Netscape Navigator now. I just checked the logs on my website aruljohn.com and this is what I see about the browsers my visitors are using:

Thats it – only 1% of my website’s visitors use Netscape. There are more Safari and Opera users than Netscape users. RIP Netscape!

Netfirms Registration

Today during lunch break, I decided to try out Netfirms Inc.’s domain registration signup process after hearing a lot about their services and customer service.

Netfirms Inc is said to charge only $4.95 per year for domain name registration. I went to the signup page and began entering my details. After selecting the bare minimum, this is what I got. Looks like their domain name registration is $5.95 and not $4.95

And, hey wait a minute! Shipping 7.95?? Shipping for what? How do you “ship” a domain name…and by US First Class Mail? Interesting, but I’m not interested any more. I’ll go with 1and1.com or bluehost.com. They are cheaper and don’t carry any extra costs or surprises at runtime. Time to get back to work.

Happy 20th Birthday Perl – Perl 5.10 released

Perl was released 20 years ago by Larry Wall, and as a treat, Perl5Porters have released the latest stable version of Perl 5.10.

Some of the new features in Perl 5.10 are named captures in regular expressions, state variables for subroutines, the defined-or operator, a switch statement and a faster regex engine. As a Perl lover, these new features are a great Christmas gift to me!

You can download the greatest scripting language in the world via Bittorrent.

Read more.

Orkut Server Hacked?

Were the Orkut servers hacked or is there a virus going around?

I got a bunch of these messages from many of my friends in my Orkut scrapbook.

2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc

Look at the screenshot below:

Update: Vikas says that this is an XSS attack. According to him:

When someone sends you a spam scrap and you read that scrap the same scrap is sent to your friends from your account. This will spread for the coming few days possibly till orkut takes some measures.

if possible change your gmail account possible and do not login to orkut till they sort this out.

Check my comments section for the whole explanation.