DJ Max Technika Tune for Playstation Vita

Will DJ Max games be the next ones for me to play? So far, I know like a little amount of songs so playing those will not be easy and the gameplay is assumed to be tough. Thankfully, there’s DJ Max Technika series which may have simplified the gameplay and I believe that there’s going to be the Playstation Vita version. So, speaking of Playstation Vita release, the gameplay can work with the touch screen controls and it is the only consumer release. The original arcade version is in HD widescreen resolution and the arcade cabinet has two monitors which display duplicated screen. One is for gameplay and the other monitor is for the people to watch which may be unique to see someone playing. What a show off but the cabinet can be damn expensive like that.

DJ Max Technika Tune for Playstation Vita will be released in Summer this year.

Idolmaster Shiny Festa for PSP update

Wow, my prediction about comparing this to Project Diva series is right. It appears that the close to this game is likely to be Project Diva series judging from the PV video I already saw. There are two videos so far but they are actually the first PV videos in two versions.
There will be in-game 3D graphics sort of music videos as well as the anime style music videos representing the game franchise. Divided into few kinds of music videos are, anime style, band style, live style and drama style. For anime style, there will be scenes taken from the anime based on the game franchise. The band style may be interesting to compete with another rhythm game based on the rock band anime on the PSP which is done by the creators of Project Diva series. Interestingly enough, the idols are dressed up in the performance outfits for band performance in addition to performing other stuffs on stage and other locations which may make the entire game the competitor to Project Diva series. The drama style, well, I don’t even know what to say but it seems that this style of music video is also in other rhythm games as well.
Other than four styles of music videos, there will be true rhythm gameplay that is taking place on all music videos. Like Project Diva series, try not to screw up. Lastly, this is what the Idolmaster game can be in the arcades as it makes proper sense in terms of gameplay.

Idolmaster Shiny Festa for PSP

While we have been reporting the news of the upcoming updates for Project Diva F, Arcade and Dreamy Theater Extend, it seems that Namco is trying to compete with Sega with itchy guts after collaborating with them on having Idolmaster DLCs for Project Diva series.

Unlike the actual games in the franchise, this one’s the actual rhythm game divided into three titles on the PSP. The concepts consist of the idols in anime mode, drama mode and other modes as well as the band and idol performances. What do you get when the Idolmaster games have become the true rhythm games like the idols are seen performing on stage while the on-screen rhythm notes are displayed that you’re supposed to press the corresponding buttons to the beat? You get the Project Diva competitor like this upcoming game. If you appreciate the anime music including the Vocaloid one, that’s the good thing but if you behave like a fag or something to someone over this, you don’t want that.

Now for the gameplay concept, it’s still looking like Taiko Drum Master but you need to press the corresponding buttons when the notes reach the yellow circle in the center. Well, it’s a bit awkward at first compared to Taiko Drum Master gameplay but if you have played the actual Idolmaster games like the second series or perhaps Live 4 You, there may be rhythm gaming elements in there as well.

Calendar App on Windows 8

On the IOS devices, there are Reminders app as well as the Clock app which has the timer and alarm clock. The Reminders app is that you can add the tasks to remind yourself of what’s going to happen next similar to adding events on the Calendar app. Certain events like birthdays, anniversaries and other facility-specific events are added to the calendar but the default kind of events on the online calendar in your account is the users’ birthdays. What’s also surprising is that when your birthday arrives and you try to Google something, you will notice the Google Doodle that represents your birthday. The Reminder app also has the alarm clock for the tasks you already specified.

On Windows 8, the reminder component is part of the Calendars app but this is kind of ridiculous compared to IOS devices. Well, there should be TASK, THE TASK APP, and THAT’S SOMETHING WINDOWS 8 SHOULD HAVE. So how the heck does the app remind you? Obviously the notification area is on the top right side in the Metro form. It reminds you like that so that you won’t miss whatever important events and tasks you have. On the Start Screen, the Calendar app can display the notifications on whatever is happening next which is similar to Windows Phone 7 devices. On the IOS devices, the notification from Calendar, Clock and Reminders apps is obviously on the center of the screen like it is here to distract you by such kind of reminder which may be the good distraction. What about the alarm clock sound on Windows 8? Will that be the good way of reminding you what’s going on?

For the Metro Snap for Calendar app, it is again another useful feature but the challenge is likely to be the time, venue, priority and locational route of the events. The meaning of locational route is about knowing where to go by establishing the path to the respective venues. Using the Google Maps or Bing Maps, you need to determine the transport or walking route depending on the venue and choose the route that doesn’t take up so much time or currency to proceed.

Overall, this is seriously useful for tablets and all other types of computers but in a ridiculous way in reminding you on what’s going to happen next.

Mail App for Windows 8

I didn’t even believe that I got reminded of the Mail App on Apple tablet devices. The one on Windows 8 surely looks like it but the lack of toolbars makes the app on crack. The top toolbar is missing for sure but at least, the bottom bar has enough features and top-right buttons are somewhat enough for this app.

So here are the following experiences they have when they developed this app.

• Multiple email accounts are common - This may be needed for redundancy as there may be security issues going on today and you must make sure that your email account is secure with strong security level and strong password. You also have both the personal and work email accounts in which these two types of email accounts serve different purposes.
• Lots of email everyday – It is true that everyone is receiving emails regularly. According to the developers of this app, there are two types of email users. The light email users receive less mails every week than the heavy email users who receive lots of messages every week.
• Email is real-time – Sure, the service itself is synchronously working in real time but in fact, the communication itself is asynchronous for email, where you don’t expect the mails to come in immediately. I think the reason is all about the regards of the bandwidth.

What’s special about the Mail app in Windows 8 is that there will be three-pane support for 16:9 screens compared to 4:3 screens where there will be two-panes instead similar to Apple tablet devices. When selecting multiple messages, the bottom app which is the App bar appears automatically and you can select what to do with them. Selecting the name of the sender or the recipient in the message pane brings you to the People App so you can add in the sender to the contacts list.

When writing email to your friends, the screen will be made up for two-panes and the left-pane is optimized for touch, and keyboard. Now for formatting, you have to enter some text first and then select some text you want to format. You can choose to make the text italic, underlined, bold or even highlighted. You can also choose to change the font and the font color.

Then, using the Metro Snap for Email app, you can refer to certain stuffs and then put them in the email you’re writing to. Also, you can check out the email while doing other stuffs, hoping that the app will be working in real time. This is much better than going back to the Hotmail website or Windows Live Mail app which may be taking you time to re-check for new emails.

Now, when it comes printing e-mails, you can use the Devices Charm and then choose the printer you want to print the mail. This may be needed in case you need to have the hard copy of the email you’re supposed to fill in before submitting.

The lock screen on Windows 8 is kind of flawed. Sure on the IOS, you can slide from left to right on the notification message box which is on the center on the screen as well as to slide from left on the unread message you want to read. So for the unread message list on the IOS Lock Screen, it lists down the following unread messages so you can choose which message you want to read but before that, you’re asked for the passcode or password if you have one. On the Start Screen, you can check out the incoming messages on the Mail tile as long as the tile has Live Tile turned on. You can also pin the respective messages to the Start Screen for future reference similar to saving E-mail messages on the desktop apps. Just like the email notification box on smartphones, you can check out the notification box on the top-right corner of the screen.

Today, email is one of the important parts in our daily lives of technology. It is believed that people want the great email apps that meet their modern expectations. However, it may seem that the Email Metro app is not as good as Windows Live Mail but there may be more features to come.

People App for Windows 8

The address books today are stored in the cloud but they are also synchronized between your computer and your account. If this app is supposed to be cloud-powered address book service, that will be great. And what’s even easier is that you can import your contacts from other services straight to your account such as social networking sites for instance. On the What’s New tab, you can check out what’s going on from your friends as if this tab is like the homepage of social networking sites which may be also similar to using Windows Live Messenger. I don’t know if this should be in Messaging app but this being in People App makes half a sense as the social networking app that came with Developer Preview version is likely to be third-party app. If there are Facebook and Twitter official apps on Windows 8, at least it can make more sense. Also, you can notice the Windows Live homepage with your account signed in to Windows Live in which you can also check out what’s going on from your friends. Lastly, like Windows Live, you can get connected to multiple social networking services in People App including your Hotmail and Exchange accounts.

This may be where modern devices come with modern contact list because the users we communicate and share with are so important to how we use them. These may consist of email, messaging, phone calls, social updates and comments, video communication and so on. The People app is a modern take on the flat contact lists of the past, it’s built for the way you communicate today and like other services, it’s connected to the cloud you already use. Modern devices require the modern address book that’s crafted around a few principles:

1. Complete and Connected – All your personal, work and social contact are there, alive with their social activities, photos, videos and other social media stuffs depending on the social networking sites that let you instantly engage and react to them.  The social data syncs from your email and social networking accounts rather than getting this info from a one-time import and you get a simple unified contact card for each user, regardless of how many versions of their contact info you have from different accounts. What about the merged contacts and contact info by then? Do we have the time to re-manage the contact lists like checking for duplicate contacts?
2. Cloud powered – Your contacts and settings are effortlessly backed up so they just work when you sign in from the web or the new device.
3. In control – You can decide on what you want to share with whom across your home, work and social networks. And of course, those networks decide what information is shared and connected, respecting their policies and customer privacy. Hopefully, this should be driving you good social networking at work, not those Anti-Facebook type policies we had already seen on the online news. If that’s the case in getting around the problem because of those bad policies, you can be better off with using Twitter or other social networking sites no one else has known of.

You can easily import the contacts from your social accounts and other accounts of yours without having to invite your friends whatsoever so that there’s no reason for the apps like this to spam your friends with invitations like hell. Yesterday, some friend of mine had the guts to chat with me with the use of Windows Live Messenger just because I was active in Windows Live Messenger. The truth is that, my account is completely active in Windows 8 but who knows if that is true or not. Also, there’s no reason to transfer contacts between devices like that but imagine using the non-modern mobile phones where you have to re-make the contact list based on the modern device you’re using. So, the People App is assumed to be using the Exchange ActiveSync technology as well as the secure standards-based APIs exposed by social networking sites to sync a copy of your contact list from the cloud. It’s always up to date with new friends you add, edit and remove so you don’t have the problems of a brittle one-time import.

What’s new to Consumer Preview is that People app now supports the Share contract, allowing you to post to share stuff on social networking sites from any Metro style app including Internet Explorer Metro version. What about the desktop apps? Another great feature is the People picker contract. With this, any Metro app can speed up simple tasks like sending a package from the website or emailing a list of friends by letting you quickly select contacts from the People app. You can also use the Share charm to share stuffs on the blogs but it won’t be the case as if the entire article is exactly copied like hell or some sort without major modification.

So for desktops and laptops, the People App may seem to be optional but with third-party tools that allow you to customize Windows Live Messenger skin including the latest version of WLM, it may be the fact that you’re better off with WLM instead of this Metro app as the People App is likely to be optimized for tablets. What’s not touch-friendly though is the Windows Live website which is still looking like it is for desktops and laptops. However, there’s also Mobile version of Windows Live website that you can get the around the problem in case the site is not touch-friendly on the tablets. So, there will be the upcoming Metro version of Hotmail that can be easily used for smartphone and tablets in the future.

Better performance for rich and extensible media platform

The whole performance is still as crippled as ever when it comes to beta testing of the products and there may be a bunch of angry feedbacks from beta testers in order to help the developers improve. Will the new plans and goals from the developers help? Who knows but let’s a look at the goals they’re planning to have.

1. Maximum performance: The media playback must be fast and responsive, enabling the full power of the hardware while maximizing the battery life on the PC. It may be true that the battery life is quite long when viewing media files but then, certain apps like the Videos app are still taking so much of the battery. Hopefully, the Photos and Music app will not take a lot of the battery while retaining the maximum performance.
2. Enable a breadth of scenarios: A high performing, highly efficient and extensible platform can enable a wider range of music, video, communications and other multimedia apps.

Performance is one of the key aspects for important activities but here, it is especially critical in multimedia scenarios as well as the user experience. Videos need to play in real time, voice communication needs to fell instantaneous, and all  these tasks need to minimize the drain on your battery.

Another improvement to the performance is when playing audio data without draining so much of the battery, that is, maximizing the battery life during the audio playback. By batching up large chunks of audio data and doing all the processing for that chunk at one time, the CPU can stay asleep for over 100 times longer which can result in dramatically increased battery life.

Unfortunately, this approach isn’t perfect for all scenarios like this since the increased buffering introduces additional delay. Audio and video offloading are just a couple of examples of the ways the media stack is optimized in Windows 8 to provide lower CPU utilization, lower memory utilization and better battery life for Desktop and Metro apps. Hopefully, the Desktop apps that support Windows 8 will not be taking up lots of battery regardless of the interface and interactivity. By getting those multimedia Desktop apps like that, we must know which ones support Windows 8 in addition to supporting the previous operating system. So can this work for video editing and audio editing and especially when using the advanced Desktop apps like the video editors, audio editors, Digital Audio Workstation to name a few? For Metro apps, it’s already a force to support such kind of guidelines in not taking up so much of battery life.

Real-time communication on the computers and mobile devices has seen a huge growth over the last decade. To make improvements to communications on Windows 8, here are the two areas of efforts they are focusing:

• Enable built-in low-latency media capture and rendering: Low latency is essential for communications apps so Windows supports low-latency media capture and playback into the OS.
• Support HD cameras to enhance video communication experience: Perhaps this should be done earlier but in Windows 8, the HD videos make your communication experience more real, enjoyable and shaper with HD camera devices. Provided that you have HD webcams like I already have, you can communicate even better. Hopefully, the communication should be smooth when using HD webcams, not choppy performing communications regardless of resolutions.

When you communicate with another user, you expect near-instant responses. However, there is a shame that there’s some kind of delay when communicating with another user like that on certain communication software while using the webcam for video communication.

Another example of improvement for Windows 8 devices is through OS support for HD cameras. New class drivers will work transparently with applications to provide support for HD video features. Windows 8 will offer a consistent, high-quality, hardware accelerated, power efficient media communication experience on devices designed for it.

Argh, when it comes to recording videos on the camera, we including the developers may have experience the frustration of the video being upside down or sideways when viewing it on the computer. Since the video scan pattern if fixed, videos may not be oriented properly when viewed. So when viewing pictures or videos taken using your smartphone or tablet device on your computer, you may have this kind of realization too.

To overcome the problem, the cameras are beginning to author orientation metadata in mainstream file formats when saving recorded videos to storage devices. To ensure the better viewing experience of the videos:

• The orientation metadata will be supported in MP4 and ASF videos.
• Videos with orientation metadata are auto-rotated during playback. Well, for smartphone and tablet devices, the problem is already solved so when turning your device in any orientation you want, the video rotation will follow. The only problem is the outside bars of the video and that surely depends on the video editing.
• The thumbnail for the video with orientation metadata is auto-rotated.
• Apps with video capture capabilities can easily read and author orientation metadata.

Adaptive bitrate streaming provides a smoother, more responsive video playback experience by enabling the device to adapt to the most appropriate bitrate under varying networking and resource utilization conditions. As a result, startup and seek times can be significantly improved as the first few frames can be delivered at a lower bitrate to reduce buffering time and increase responsiveness. If the network or device conditions change, the device can negotiate a lower or higher bitrate to minimize the buffering or increase video quality. Man, I hope that this feature is not annoying or some sort although this may be comparable to watching YouTube videos in respective qualities. Through the extensibility of Media Foundation Platform in Windows 8, apps can have custom media sources and adaptive bitrate media sources to support new formats. Custom media sources and streaming protocols can also take advantage of hardware offload and content protection.

It seems that you can play media files on the external device from your computer in multiple ways such as using networking for media streaming and especially when using third-party programs that allow video streaming. There’s also video streaming support for HomeGroup users and this is where Windows 7 introduced Play To. Using Play To, you can use it to stream media files to supported external devices from Windows Explorer and Windows Media Player. Well, what about Windows Media Center? Can you stream media stuff on Windows Media Center? I assume that it’s the same or different. In Windows 8, you can share personal media collections and HTML5 media with Play-To-enabled devices at home. With it, Play To is easier to discover and will deliver a consistent, high quality experience. Here are the improvements they have done include:

• Improved Setup – Play To devices are automatically discovered and installed on your computer for home networks.
• Improved device experience – Metro style apps only work with Windows certified Play To receivers. These devices are validated to support modern media formats, DLNA standards-compliant and have greater performance. This may include Xbox 360 with the update coming in to support the Play To technology later this year in which I will try to view some videos for better experience myself. The desktop experience first introduced in Windows 7 is added to the Windows 8 Explorer and will continue to support all DLNA DMR devices.
• Integrated into IE Metro edition – This allows you to stream HTML5 media data to your external device. Hmm, how can this work on Xbox 360?
• Works with Music, Video and Photo apps

Similar to YouTube, there will be a feature to enable captions of the written transcript in web media players on the web platform in Windows 8. Also, there will be multiple audio tracks in the same video similar to watching movies or playing games with multiple voice tracks. It’s the same for music where the same songs can be sung in different languages.

In summary, Windows 8 media platform is designed to deliver a responsive media experience with great battery life. As media applications continue to evolve, it will enable these experiences to shine across all Windows 8 devices. It may remind the users of Apple AirPlay where you can use ITunes to stream media from your computer running it to AirPlay certified devices. For me, we’ll get to find all these out after this blog post but if the update with Play To support arrives on Xbox 360, I’ll give that a try as well.

IPv6 with Windows 8

OK, it seemed that Microsoft was one of the participants in World IPv6 Launch day. It was a great opportunity for the company. For me, I took a great opportunity to get IPv6 enabled as well as I’ve been using the GogoClient for this. It may be an important protocol for the future of technology and if you’re not aware of it and you’re still surfing the net like that, I can say it’s a shame on you. The shame is even more real for saying that the IPv6 is not important and you’re forcing us to keep on surfing the net like that without the use of it over various purposes. Finally, simply excluding IPv6 as part of educational learning for technological students and teachers is another complete shame on the campuses and schools but thankfully, the students and teachers who are into learning computer stuff a lot like me are already aware of running out of IPv4 addresses.

For several years, Microsoft has been working to roll out IPv6 across various devices, services and network infrastructure. So how does this work? Well, starting with Windows XP SP3, there will be IPv6 supported which is possible for IPv6 transition. And the future of the internet with IPv6 is likely to be now or even later.

They have been working on the deployment of IPv6 to ensure that we have continuous access to the internet. However, upgrading the entire Internet and technology to IPv6 is not as instant task. It is even more difficult to learn than IPv4 as there may be more tons of subnetting than IPv4 has. Furthermore, the address is long and the numbers are all hexadecimal. This may have taken them many years to where are today and they have lots of work to do. Currently, the percentage of devices connected to IPv6 is quite low if not, starting to increase thanks to the awareness of running out of IPv4 addresses.

Man, I hope that my ISP is fucking aware of this as the entire Internet here is still IPv4. I already told some of the staff but it seems that not all staff are aware of running out IPv4 addresses. Where’s the progress? Why is this still serving customers like there’s no new work?

There are three categories for the network transitions.

• IPv4-only network: This is what many users have today and the ISP doesn’t even have the IPV6 technology or perhaps the ISP is still working on the transition. On Windows, it provides IPv6 connectivity by tunneling the traffic inside various transition technologies such as the use of Teredo, where IPv6 packets are encapsulated in IPv4 UDP packets. By default, the top protocol version priority is IPv6 in Windows 8 so Windows 8 attempts to choose IPv6 connectivity when the device is not using IPv4. The Teredo is enabled by default only on non-domain networks and it may not be available if your network blocks the UDP.
• IPv4 and v6 networks: This is way obvious to prevent the Internet cut-off so the IPv6 is another important option not all users will notice. If the ISP has both IPv4 and v6 in which your computer is starting to have these two protocols, it may be the fact that the broadband device is supporting the IPv6 provided that the ISP has support for that protocol besides IPv4. Last year, websites from Microsoft like www.microsoft.com, www.xbox.com and www.bing.com had IPv6 enabled in World IPv6 day so it is obvious that they are having IPv6 support in addition to IPv4 support so there’s no reason to worry about.
• IPv6-only network: If you have a device that is IPv6 only, then the luck during the transition process is not quite easy. While many websites still use IPv4, the ISPs must use a translation device to allow IPv6 network devices to access IPv4 websites. This is known as NAT64 and is becoming popular in the mobile environment because having only one kind of IP between mobile device and the operator’s infrastructure is simpler to deploy and cheaper than using dual-stack configuration. This is already the time we are going to run out of IPv4 addresses and the exhaustion is serious severe so don’t even think or say that the transition is not important.

Address sorting relies on Windows being correctly configured by your router. Windows analyzes the routing information provided by the router and uses that information in conjunction with address sorting to ensure fast connectivity to named resources. If IPv6 is configured by your router, it should be preferred.

Compared to this year’s IPv6 connectivity event, the last year was unfortunately flawed. Some clients were configured with IPv6 routing information but there was no IPv6 access whatsoever. This may be the result of misconfiguration by some ISPs or buggy home routers. Personally, those who are not aware of this network transition at all while working at ISP are likely to be at some faults. Using some kind of priority, Windows attempted to connect to websites using IPv6, expecting it to work but it didn’t. Eventually, it fell back to IPv4 connectivity and that was a BULLSHIT MOMENT to the people.

NVIDIA GeForce drivers for Windows 8 RP

Finally, the drivers for Windows 8 Release Preview were released and I’m going to install them straight away after this blog post. Before this installation is bound to start, I installed the latest drivers that were for Windows 7 and below on my computer running Windows 8 Release Preview so the driver update is now. The driver version for Windows 7 and below is 301+ and the Windows 8 RP driver is 302 so expect better performance of my computer after this installation and hopefully, there will be no more crashes of the video card. We had been waiting damn long for the drivers to be released so enjoy your gaming with the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers on Windows 8 RP.

Silver Forest Disbanded

How regretful to inform you of this this is by the way? According to Silver Forest official website the other time, the vocal artist is in not in good health and she’s suffering from some disease that the entire group would be bound to be disbanded at the end of last month. Well, there has been great efforts from Silver Forest and especially for other Touhou Indie Artist Groups like IOSYS, Cool & Create and so on but starting this month, Silver Forest is already no more. Why the suffering like this, you may ask? Who knows but I do have some assumptions.

• The idea for newer Touhou remix soundtracks may not be quite easy or so like trying to increase motivation or some sort.
• The lack of some parts of redundancy might be cause of disbanding. Why not have the other vocal artists from Silver Forest to take over instead of disbanding the entire group?
• Overshadowed? Nah, it sounds jackass to say so but their works are already awesome all along.
• The songs we already know of from the Touhou franchise are likely to be remixed tons of times countlessly.
• Not all people may accept the contents of the franchise? Well, this can’t be the reason regarding the disbanding.
• Too much of motivated energy has been used up?

Well, the assumptions here may not be true as we don’t know the true reason on why is this happening to Silver Forest.

Ginga Force for Xbox 360

Eschatos for Xbox 360 may seem to be successful after Judgment Silversword and Cardinal Sins but from some social networking site like Twitter, I stumbled upon the new game from the creators of Eschatos. It is scheduled for August 30th release and it is another shmup game for Xbox 360. Other than this, there’s no other information so call this blog post the rumor.

Mushihimesama Futari Black Label on IOS

Wow, Black Label edition, really? Yes, otherwise, things will not be perfectly the same as the Xbox 360 version as the Xbox 360 version apparently has Black Label mode as the DLC. However, what’s new in the IOS version of Black Label edition is that there will be Lock-On Boss Rush Mode. Not only you have to fight the bosses from this game, but also the bosses from the prequel. Wow, fighting the prequel’s bosses with this game’s weapon set? That surely sounds like the Cave Lock-On technology for Boss Rush mode so it can’t be the same for the whole game itself. However, there’s a grading system that is somewhat comparable to Tetris The Grand Master series. So if you play well, you will deserve higher grades so I assume that I won’t have such kind of higher grades due to getting my ass kicked a lot in further parts of the game. This may be similar to buying Dodonpachi Resurrection Black Label for Xbox 360 where you can get the Arrange Mode for that edition instead of buying the DLC for the original version which is Ver 1.5. It’s a shame that they have to decrease the graphical quality of Black Label edition of Dodonpachi Resurrection though and especially for Arrange Mode where-else the Arrange A of Ver 1.5 game surely has better looking laser beam as well as better looking Hyper weapons. In Arrange B, almost all the effects are made translucent which is as nice as Mushihimesama Arrange Mode on Playstation 2.

Solutions against cyber-attacks

Various sites like LinkedIn, eHarmony and last.fm were under cyber-attacks from the hackers with the message written in Russian language. What kind of reason for this attack is this? I surely have my LinkedIn account but then who takes the shit about it. Sure, my Wordpress blog and my Box.net data can be seen there that I may need better passwords for those two services as well as my LinkedIn account and after this blog post, the password change plans will be taking effect from me.

The first issue is that companies need to do a better job in protecting our data and especially our security credentials, not to mention their networking equipment, computer equipment and other equipment that hold the services the companies are doing and especially for the servers that are holding our stuffs. The fact that LinkedIn forgot to salt the password hashes had made the task of cracking password infinitely easier for hackers. If they had salted the password hashes earlier as a proper opportunity, the salt would have minimal overhead to them and would have gone a long way to reduce the impact of the breach. In addition, there are various tools usually, hardware and software tools as well as proper security and business plans that help organization detect and stop these types of attacks.

So things are not perfect and no system can be perfectly secure like breaches will happen and passwords will be released. But how can we protect our passwords and identities?

1. One way is to have a central password safe that all sites rely on for authentication. This is something that Facebook is offering like you can login to various websites with your Facebook account such as Jolicloud, Myspace, Nico Nico Douga to name a few. This has the benefit of allowing you to pick an ultra-secure password and not risk forgetting it. It also means that you can hopefully rely on the universal platform to properly store and secure your passwords in such a way that even if they are compromised, the actual data can not be read. However, the downside is that this may seem to be a poor idea overall for various reasons.
2. Another way is to use a token in your possession that constantly changes. Sites like eBay already provide this functionality and it’s a good way to help secure your identity. Unfortunately for me, I don’t buy things online as I may be nervous to do that and besides, I don’t even have the credit card perhaps for eBay service and it’s not easy to buy things online if you have entered your personal information incorrectly. Even if someone attempts to steal your password, the login will be impossible without the token. This isn’t a foolproof solution though as last year’s attack on RSA proved but it’s another layer of protection that is a step in the right direction. This may be better than the first way but unfortunately if you have to carry hundreds of tokens, this doesn’t help to scale well around on your key chain to access the web.
3. Or the best solution will be to tie access information into your smartphone. Many people are using smartphones, so instead of a token, sites can provide apps for your smartphone or perhaps send the SMS message that contains the password to you. For me, I do have my Ipod Touch but that’s not the case. The downside is that more companies will have access to your phone number and if you lose your smartphone device, you may end up letting anyone to access your data on the web and the device you have lost. Other than this, this may be a better solution than having poorly secured passwords that attackers can easily obtain.

But then, which method am I going to use for higher level of security? This is not the first time we had seen such news like the last year’s April Playstation Network attack. What had that attack got to do with some governmental action? We SURELY NEED to be MORE SECURE but how can we find such tools and solutions for this? You know, during my college days, I had learnt certain modules like IT security as well as certain IT Free Training videos regarding the cyber security related topics and nowadays, there are more IT Free Training videos coming and best of all, the Windows 7 Chapter list is complete this year! Downside though, not all chapters I learnt from IT Free Training were submitted for my juniors to learn last year during my Industrial Attachment Program. At that time, the chapter list wasn’t even complete yet. Furthermore, IT Free Training is even busy with other Microsoft certificated courses so I have even more to learn.

So eventually, let’s get more secure as ever and keep on computing and gaming securely. Refer to my profile to check out my interests.

IPv6 Day is here again to keep the Internet growing and active

Today makes THE DAY OF IPV6! Wow, I’m fucking excited for this and I already have my GogoNet account as well as the GogoClient installed on my computer. However this time, I’m going to make the rest of my workstation enabled to IPv6 as well into installing GogoClient on all the partitions out there.

Today is June 6th, which means that participating ISPs, hardware manufacturers and search engines must stick to their word and permanently enable the IPv6 address system and we’re encouraged to do the same like I already did. The ultimate purpose of this is to allow trillions of users to have their own IPv6 address, instead of just a paltry few billion permitted by the IPv4 standard that continues in parallel. Will the Internet collapse that people will lose their jobs due to this? No, this will not happen thanks to Google and the others having tested the system during the pilot programs.

Last year, I was IPv6 enabled with the GogoClient tool on my computer after stumbling upon the news about running out of IPv4 addresses during my college days. I might have tried to implement IPv6 address on my DIR-615 router but it didn’t work that way. Also, the organization which oversees the allocation of IP address, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA, ran out of IP addresses to give in February last year during my Chinese New Year days. This caused a serious technical problem that will be effective in the future as the Internet users will have to begin sharing IP addresses if a new IP isn’t put into place. This is like running out of copies of the product you’re selling and there’s no way further customers will be able to get the product. But there’s already a solution all along which is making more copies of the product for instance and deploying more IPv6 enabled devices as well as more encouragement to get ISPs and their customers IPv6 enabled. Now, there will be plenty of newer IP addresses to get around the problem and companies and services and others participating in the deployment of IPv6 have already implemented the new standard.

Now, let’s base this article on the article from Google Official Blog. When the Internet launched operationally in the 80's, its creators never dreamed that there might be billions of devices and users trying to get online. But now, almost three decades later, it appears that there are nearly 2.5 billion people and 11 billion devices across the globe that we’re running out of space. Actually, it might have seemed that IANA and other organizations that manage the IPv4 addresses, had already run out.

In order to connect to the Internet, each device has to have an IP address, a numerical label which identifies every computer, smartphone, tablet, E-book reader, etc. IP address allows machines to find and communicate with each other online. Without the IP addresses, you can’t check the email, visit websites or even watch videos for example and in fact, you can’t even get the network access if you have the invalid IP address. But like a telephone network that is running out of phone numbers, the current Internet is already running out of IP addresses like it’s already happening nowadays ever since last year.

The Internet so far today has space for 2^32 addresses which is about 4.3 billion. The new, larger IPv6 expands the limit to 2^128 addresses which is more than 340 trillion, trillion and trillion addresses. It is enough for essentially unlimited growth for the foreseeable future. Without the rollout of IPv6 which should have happened last year and this year, there will be no room we need to grow the Internet.

While some of your devices may already share a single address, if IPv6 isn’t implemented, you will soon have to share a single address with multiple people or even a whole neighborhood. This is indeed a bad idea and this tangled, constrained Internet will be unsafe and unsustainable.

IPv6 Day which is already happening today is coordinated by the Internet Society, marks the day that they are switching on IPv6 permanently in parallel with IPv4. Looks like Google is one of these participants and they’re proud to experiment the IPv6 networking, virtually all Google’s services have been available over IPv6 for a while but IPv6 access was only available to networks participating in the Google Over IPv6 program. From now on after this day, these services will be made available to any IPv6 network on the Internet.

The complete transition from Google will take some time. I already had my computer enabled to IPv6 the other time and I’m already enabled today. Using GogoClient Utility, I can connect to various IPv6 websites and before this blog post is bound to be posted, there was an invitation to IPv6 Day on Facebook and I wonder if that is an online event, offline event or both. And I can’t even believe that my ISP staff knew nothing about this when I told about it the last time, lol. That is going to sound dishonest like there was no awareness whatsoever.

Sine Mora for Playstation Vita

Well, I still haven’t got past that freaking Arcade Mode as it is hard as balls. I already had certain skills like button-mashing but that was not enough for this game. Having to hold down the Time button while mashing the shot button is going to be a mess. If only there’s a patch that allows the auto-fire to be faster when holding the shot button, the problem will be solved but that will ruin my opportunity to show you the god damn run with button-mashing.

It’s been a few months after the game’s release on Xbox Live Arcade, there’s an upcoming Playstation Vita version with the character from Under Defeat. The HD version of Under Defeat has an additional helicopter as the DLC unit as well as the New Order Mode which is the widescreen gameplay similar to Mamoru-kun Has Been Cursed on Playstation 3. The New Order Mode also has its own soundtrack but the only songs that are new are obviously the stage and final boss BGMs which may seem to be the incomplete soundtrack for sure. It may be a surprise to G.Rev as Sine Mora seems to be influenced by Under Defeat in terms of graphics and with the Vita version containing the character from Under Defeat, this is how Sine Mora can be called as ‘Under Defeat Next Generation’.

So let’s 16-Shot in Sine Mora besides shmup games on NES.

Windows 8 RP Part Two with Upgrade Offer

It seems that they are not finished yet and there is more to come after Windows 8 Release Preview release.

So check out the new stuffs and improvements such as more personalization options for the Start Screen, improved multi-monitor support, and new Family Safety features to name a few. Other improvements include Mail, Photos and People apps and we can notice Bing-powered Travel, News and Sports apps. Nah, I’m not using the Bing-powered Travel, News and Sports by the way as I’ve no interest on them so all is left is to use the Bing Search and Bing Weather. IE10 also has new capabilities like Adobe Flash Player and Do Not Track set to on by default.

Ha, it looks like we’re fucking excited and curious in using Windows 8 Release Preview and it’s the same for some of my ex-college classmates. Starting from June 2nd, Microsoft will roll out Windows Upgrade Offer in 131 markets. Consumers who have purchased eligible Windows 7 PCs that are preinstalled with Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate and include a matching and valid OEM COA through January 31 next year will be able to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99 which will be redeemable when Windows 8 is generally available. When the consumers register for the Windows Upgrade Offer, they will be able to download Windows 8 Pro starting the day it’s made RTM and the upgrade comes with 90 days of support from Microsoft. I’m already trying out Windows 8 RP on my old computer.

One bonus thing is that if you have a mouse or keyboard from Microsoft Hardware, you’re suggested to try Microsoft Device Center Beta. Device Center allows you to easily customize your mouse and keyboard experience in Windows 8 and is compatible with Windows 8 RP. It also helps bring the touch experience to your mouse within Windows 8 RP as well if you have an Explorer Touch Mouse and Touch Mouse. Microsoft Hardware will have more details to share regarding their Touch Portfolio of products sometime around Windows 8 RTM.

Updates to Skydrive for Windows and OSX Lion

In April, they released preview versions of Skydrive for Windows and Mac OSX Lion, along with big updates for IOS and Windows Phone. There was also a new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage up to 100GB just like other cloud storage services have.

It has been an incredible month in May since! The goal is to build a cloud that seamlessly connects your data to the apps and devices you use everyday and that is a promising step with the power of Skydrive as a cloud computing power for Windows 8 which may be comparable to local storage on IOS and Android devices. Well, there should still be hard disk drive or perhaps the SSD drive to store local data in addition to cloud data. This can be what Windows 8 can be installed to as well as the apps. In just a few weeks, more people were using Skydrive than Mesh but I use both of them by the way. People using Skydrive for Windows or Mac are now the most engaged users, syncing files across several devices, sharing with SkyDrive.com and working together with Office Web Apps and Office Client Apps. What about Live Mesh like that?

There will be different updates to be pushed to all the above mentioned platforms. You do not need to do anything to the updates as they are background automatic updates.

Here are a few of the improvements the fixes in the updates:

• Skydrive for Windows desktop will power a cool new feature in the upcoming Windows 8 Release Preview, available in the first week of June which is already happening right this moment. From the Photos app in Windows 8, you can fetch photos stored on other PCs that have Skydrive installed.
• Your Skydrive folder now updates more quickly and reliably when changes are made on other devices, including SkyDrive.com which still leads you to skydrive.live.com.
• The limit on the number of total files in the Skydrive folder is raised from 150K to 10M. This should unblock some power users from easily adding lots of files to their Skydrive folder.

Well, that’s it for the updates but the Skydrive desktop app is still in Beta phase, lol.

Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 RP

They might have built the experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware-accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other web standards. The browser may provide the best protection from malicious software on the web while providing convenient control over your online privacy. How true this can be when it comes to Windows 8 tablets and on ARM devices? If they are supposed not to have desktop support, then there’s still sign of virus infection that targets the desktop mode files which may contain both the core of the Metro and desktop experiences. Perhaps, the Metro style browsing experience is the best way to browse on the touch screen devices. Metro style browsing offers you a full-screen ,immersive site experience like other browsers on the tablet devices except that this one’s completely chrome-less. Using the Charms bar, you can share and print stuff and search for various stuff you want to look for but what’s missing though, is the bookmarks for Metro edition. In other tablet OSes, their web browsers surely have the bookmark management. Sure, you can search by text as well as to share something and switch the tabs. Eventually, the fast speed is still focused on the SSD devices and other computers that are even better than mine to be frank.

The Release Preview version of IE10 Metro edition includes its own Adobe Flash Player Metro version. How the heck did Adobe collaborate with Microsoft like that? With Flash Player on IE10 Metro, this won’t be a problem accessing certain Flash stuff so it’s kind of fair enough just like using other tablet devices. So sites like YouTube may still have best experience with Flash as watching videos like that in HTML5 mode is kind of bitchy in terms of the interaction and there’s still delay whatsoever. Can IE10 Metro edition get around the problem for HTML5 mode of YouTube? In fact, the Javascript is also the pain in the ass like things refuse to work when clicking on the Javascript links on the browsers.

What about copying some stuff from IE10 Metro browser on the tablet? I haven’t seen this working like that as I’m using Windows 8 on my laptop. Can you copy the picture, whole paragraph, whole sentence, certain words or perhaps, parts of the screen on the Windows 8 tablet? If this kind of copying is there, good for the company. Otherwise, it’s a serious shame on Microsoft. There will be AutoCorrect when you enter stuff on the browser.

There are certain things like double tapping to zoom in and out and toggling full screen on and off on the browser. For toggling full screen on and off by double tapping, this is in Release Preview when focusing on HTML5 video.

The SmartScreen and InPrivate browsing are still there but the other parts of security are missing in IE10 Metro version. If those from the desktop version are put in Metro version, then the Metro version will be as secure as I can guess. What’s new in Release Preview is that there will be Paste and Go command for fast navigation to copied URLs or search terms on the clipboard. The address bar supports the progress indicator when the page is loading and includes indicators for site compatibility and tracking protection. The navigation bar includes commands for Find On Page, and Open in IE on the desktop mode which is supposed to be unnecessary for tablets. Opening IE desktop edition is for compatibility with sites that require legacy plug-in technologies, or for when you are using desktop tools and wish to continue in your existing workflows. Perhaps not all plugins are likely to work correctly on desktop web browsers.

Then there comes a disadvantage though for Release Preview version, the page flip which flips through the entire webpage which is not a good thing. It should be in the Reader app, not the web browser because the PDF files are like virtual books on the Kindle and Ipad where you can flick left and right to flip pages and flipping pages like that on the web is a lousy idea. Imagine that you’re reading articles on the news or blogs and you see some navigations on the top side, left side and right side of the web and you flip like that to see the next article. That is freaking awkward and there’s no flipping on this blog either as we’re already moving on to abstract/futuristic sort of blog design on this blog. You know, transitioning to next tabs may be worth it. After all, the article section is vertical so is the rest of the blog layout.

Like the desktop version of IE10, you can clean up the tabs in the Metro version. I guess this closes the other tabs leaving the current tab intact.

IE10 takes a clean, “low nag” approach to notifications. All alerts and user prompts come through a notification bar at the bottom of the screen. It uses the Metro style “fly-outs” when more interaction is needed. This is like the Open With Metro edition when you want to use which app to open which type of file like opening PNG files with Photos app for instance. Notification bars automatically dismiss as appropriate. Downloads in the Metro style browser protect you from malicious software via SmartScreen’s Application Reputation similar to the desktop edition. The Release Preview adds support for “pop-up” windows as background tabs in the Metro style experience.

In Release Preview, the developers can provide higher resolution PNG file site icon and specify the tile background color. With IE10, sites can provide background notifications for new messages and other account activity on the website. The site can also program additional commands that appear in IE’s navigation bar in a touch-friendly way, the same way that sites can program jumplists for desktop edition.

Oh man, if only there’s a trademark button about linking to specific Metro apps at Windows Store just like linking to specific IOS app at the ITunes App Store. What this mean is that if you’ve stumbled upon Wordpress App for Windows 8, you can click on the button that brings you to Windows Store and goes directly to Wordpress App just like clicking on the button that goes to ITunes App Store. Moreover, you’re going to need ITunes client in order to download apps using your computer. However, an inaccurate thing they did was to add Get App For This Site command from the menu that has Find On Page and View On The Desktop. That sounds kind of bullshit not because Windows 8 isn’t still finalized yet.

Now, for Charms that cooperate with IE10, the Search charm is an optional way to search stuff on the net elsewhere the Devices charm can allow you to print, project and play to external device.

Next, IE10 offers the same industry leading security, privacy and reliability features, building on IE9’s SmartScreen, XSS filtering, Application Reputation, InPrivate Browsing, Tracking Protection and Hang Detection and Recovery. Well, it seems that those features on the desktop edition still behave like those on IE9 as well like there’s no difference whatsoever when the browser crashes for example. For Metro version, I don’t know the actual difference. In addition, IE10 makes the security and privacy more convenient with Enhanced Protected Mode for better isolation of website content in each tab, and new in RP is one simple setting for sending the Do Not Track signal to websites. The Do Not Track signal may be damn useful as if nobody can mess with you like that but if you’re using other browsers or perhaps Windows 7 and below, who knows?

Summary of improvements from CP to RP version

• Support for full-screen HTML5 video, including double tap that toggles full screen on and off.
• Support for Flash in Metro IE10
• Context menu for Save Image and Paste and Go
• Support for High-Res image for pinned sites tile in Start Screen. Pinned sites on Start Screen? Well, that’s not considered bookmarks like that by the way
• Integrated network troubleshooting tools in Metro style IE
• Auto-complete drop down in Metro style IE
• Do Not Track setting for RP version

Overall, this may seem to be quite okay for desktop and laptop users but for tablet users, it’s like a freaking disappointment due to the fact that there’s not enough good work done and therefore, the browser is kind of slightly below average for tablet users. It was average for CP version for tablet users but hopefully, Microsoft should try even harder or there will be scolding for sure for not putting up enough finalized resources on the web browser. It’s okay for desktop and laptop users but it’s not for tablet users. So the Metro version of IE10 RP for tablet users will be more like IE10 Cloud Release instead.

Windows 8 Release Preview

The Consumer Preview version in my computer is already struggling with dis-functionality like hell due to some infection or perhaps some deep OS modification with the tools that allow you to customize the Start Screen and the Charms Bar. For the Start Screen customization, it’s basically the font colors, tile colors, colors for the bottom bar and the right bar which is kind of like Settings bar or something and the custom backgrounds while the Charms Bar customizer tool allows you to have custom icons in addition to custom bar colors. What a cool thing to allow custom icons but for the Start button, it’s kind of unfortunately inaccurate by the way. Another struggle is the serious delay when the incorrect password is entered. This can affect the tablet devices. It’s a shame on Microsoft for such laziness like this as it is already an annoying technical problem.

The Release Preview is the final pre-release and its Internet Explorer 10 Metro edition has the Flash support. However, the real on-going bastard is that we still can’t move the freaking tabs in Metro edition. Other features in Internet Explorer 10 Metro edition are apparently missing compared to the Desktop edition such as managing Bookmarks for example. I mean in other smartphones devices’ web browsers like Safari for IOS, you can manage bookmarks but I don’t know if you can move tabs in Ipad version. The Skydrive Metro app is sort of manageable but the automatic synchronization can surely happen in Desktop edition although the desktop version is still in beta phase by the way. In addition, there are more Metro apps in stores for us at Windows Store but certain Xbox Live games on Windows 8 are unfortunately not in Release Preview Windows Store. Instead, they are under Xbox Live for Windows 8 Marketplace which will be coming in final version of Windows 8 or something.

Now, for Xbox Live service on Windows 8 Release Preview, I finally manage to get connected but even then, I’m still able to use my Xbox 360 console to view pictures, music and videos from my computer easily through these Metro apps on the Dashboard compared to Windows Media Center whose controls on the console are way too delayed.