SUPERAntiSpyware – makes you think, “What a cocky name – it probably doesn’t do much at all.” Fortunately, however, it lives up to its cockiness. It effectively removes a multitude of tough bugs, such as the Vundo trojan and winspyware. While the free version lacks real-time protection, the full version does include it. SUPERAntiSpyware, in combination with AVG 8.0 Free, is sure to give those viruses quite a nasty experience.

Image courtesy of SuperAntiSpyware

Google has struck again, this time through a deal with the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education in Australia in which 1.3 million new users would switch to its free email product.

Through the deal, the students and teachers will receive customised Gmail accounts. Although Gmail is free, the costs lie in the tight security and integration with existing systems that Google would provide.

Microsoft probably won’t be too happy with this, as the $9.5 million three year contract is replacing the previous five year, $30 million contract with Microsoft’s partner Unisys. The users will be switching from hotmail accounts to Gmail ones – a change I frankly wouldn’t have minded.

According to spokesman Matthew Kaufman, this is “one of the biggest Gmail deployments in the world.”

Google is not only obtaining a contract, but rather also a chance to show its services to more than a million users – services that may impress and keep them for the distant future.

via The Sydney Morning Herald

I don’t know about you, but I hate talking to a machine when I call a company. It takes forever, and it’s a tad anticlimactic when you realize you waited so long just for a number to press. It’s so much easier to just talk to a person.

Your mileage may vary, but there’s always DialAHuman.com, which has a list of companies and ways to get to an operator. The list doesn’t have all the companies in America, but it has major ones such as Paypal, Samsung, Verizon, etc. This may come in handy one day and save you from a lot of time and pills for headaches.

Woot! (woot.com) features a specific item for sale each day. The items are quite often high-quality products being offered as a cheap deal. Each item is accompanied by a rather long, prose-like description and some nice stats as to who bought the item. (Interestingly enough, most items have a buyer within ten seconds and quite a few people buy more than one of each item.)

The Woot Off

Today is a special day known as a Woot-Off.

Today is the day that Woot! sells one item after another, continuously for up to two days.

The bar underneath the item, unique to Woot-Offs, approximates the amount of the item left in stock. (During normal days, there is no bar – you’re kept guessing.)

The Bag o’ Crap

Dedicated Woot-ers usually stay up all night for this event, one that happens every few months.

Bags o’ Crap are a buck each, and each person can buy at most three at a time. Not actually a bag of crap, the Bag o’ Crap is more of a grab-bag that can be anything from dollar store items to a Nintendo Wii. Woot servers usually go down for a few minutes when this item is up. So if you want to buy one, you better be waiting all day with a fast Internet connection!

Firefox Extensions

Woot Watcher is especially meant for watching Woots – it’ll put a little message in your toolbar. On the other hand, Reload Every is another Firefox extension that reloads the page every so many seconds, depending on how you set it. It’s another great tool for Woot-Offs.  But if you ever see the Bag o’ Crap come up, be sure to quickly disable it – I speak from experience here.

Woot! usually has very good deals on everything from Roombas to gaming mice. Definitely recommended as an addition to your daily site routine.  It’s very addicting, and you might just find yourself waiting for a new item at 12 AM central time every night!

Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine

Text API for the <canvas> element

The <canvas> element seems to be a very convenient way of generating images on the fly, and with the new Text API the element just got even better. I am afraid, though, of the potential misuse of this (using <canvas> to generate fancy headers, for example).

Support for using border images

Now this is amazing. Reading through the W3C editor’s draft, rounded corners just became a whole lot easier. Of course, rounded corners is only the tip of the iceberg when you can use images as a border. The implementation is interesting – the image to be used as a border is sliced up into nine pieces in a three-by-three grid (the size of the rows and columns are set through CSS). The corresponding border slices are then used in the corresponding positions of the styled element, stretched or repeated as per CSS code.

An image like this

could be used to make a border like this

(Images taken from the W3C example.)

Support for Javascript query selectors

In short, query selectors allow Javascript to use CSS selectors as an argument in a function to select certain elements. Read the Selectors API (linked above) for more.

Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar

You can now restrict the results shown by typing certain key characters after your query:

• “^” for history
• “*” for bookmarks
• “+” for tagged pages
• “@” for matching URL only
• “#” for matching title/tags only

This is in addition to some about:config setttings you can change. Again, follow through to the above link for more.

A new tab switching behavior

I’m rather lukewarm about this feature. I love being able to ctrl+tab through my tabs, in the order they are shown on my screen. With the new tabbing behavior, ctrl+tab brings you to your last active tab – repeating ctrl+tab would let you toggle between two tabs. Also, it brings a new feature of showing tab previews, much like that of Vista.

I’m going to have to move from ctrl+tab to ctrl+pageDn, which does the same thing as the original ctrl+tab. It’s a bit more reaching for my fingers, but I guess I can suck it up. The previews aren’t that hot either, and flash content doesn’t show up at all. All in all, I think this is a feature that isn’t completely necessary and should be left as a plug-in.

via Mozilla Developer Center

Pronounced “cool,” the new search engine at cuil.com created by former Google employees claims to have three times the amount of sites indexed as Google, ten times as that of Microsoft.

Led by Anna Paterson and Tom Costello, Cuil’s secret lies in the formula used to index sites, an innovation that has allowed the company to index so many sites while spending only $7 million and using 140 servers. (In comparison, Yahoo!’s search engine cost $300 million.)

First, I have to give Cuil some credit for making a nice looking engine. Although I personally don’t like black, the display of the search results puts them in three columns, with large chunks of previews. (You can toggle over to two columns as well.)

Now, being able to search 121,617,892,992 pages is most definitely handy. Unfortunately, however, the old “quality versus quantity” adage may apply. There is a lot of junk on the Internet, and those 81,078,585,328 extra pages that Google doesn’t have (two-thirds of 121,617,892,992) may not be the search results one is looking for.

In addition, how the engine ranks those pages severely impacts search results. Do a search for mildlyhotpeppers.com (my web comic), and you’ll find that the site itself isn’t even the first result. Do a search for nubmuffin.com, and…

Apparently Cuil suffers from high load every single time I search for it. Try it yourself. Now, the probable reason is that NubMuffin is a new site, and it just hasn’t been indexed. Just tell me that outright – I can take it like a man. Don’t lie to me and tell me you’re suffering from high load – admit that you can’t find it, and move on! Jerks.

Finally, do a search for cuil.com, and you’ll see that it hasn’t indexed itself yet. I realize that it’s probably useless for a user on cuil.com to be searching for cuil.com, so this isn’t exactly criticism. All the cool kids are doing it, though.

On a more serious note, do a search for “muffins in new jersey” (I said more serious, not serious). The results are very interesting. The first result, “prowler candy apple red links to pictures of famous …,” led me to a page that could not be loaded (it timed out). The second result, “Frozen Yogurt Monmouth New Jersey. Of Customer …,” is about frozen yogurt. I can keep on going. I see American racing, native americans, a shameless pursuit of paper products, honey bee research jobs, and “Powell’s Books – Once Upon a Tart.” Search the same thing on Google, and WHAT IS THIS!? The entire first, second, and third pages deal with MUFFINS.

Cuil, you might have a boat load of sites indexed, but to me that’s useless. As the BITS article suggests, sell yourself to another company -cough-Google-cough-, and the world would be a better place.

via Bits Blog