You have to give it to Valve, the creators of Half-Life and the equally successful Half-Life 2 sequel, not only these guys develop great games, but their focus on detail and execution has really paid off.

It’s good being Valve, after all they have kept on capitalizing big on Counter Strike for the past few years despite of the fact it wasn’t their own creation. But hey, they did create the mod tools and put them out there for gamers to use and expand their game platform (at no cost). They later relaunched the original HL bundled with Counter Strike, since then other similar successful game bundles have followed up until now that they bring the Orange Box.

It’s a beautiful concept, really. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 took way too long to be finished, and Valve knew that. The episodic series momentum was gone for many, so now instead of launching a rather short good game for $30, they have packed it up with the long time coming vaporware-returning-from-the-dead Team Fortress 2, and guess what, it’s another great game. Not to be outdone with that, for the usual retail price of $50, they are giving away the original Half Life 2, the additional pack HL2 Lost Coast, HL2 Episode One, and a sneak peek next-generation FPS single player experience they call Portal.

The Orange Box was just released today through the Steam distribution system and should be available from retail stores as well.

Execution… have to give it to them. From the popularity observed during the Team Fortress 2 beta and the established base of Half Life fans, this looks to be yet another winner for Valve.

For the past 3-4 years I have been recommending Windows XP users to install a small combo of basic applications that will grant a more secure and thus stable experience with the OS.

Nowadays SP2/Windows Defender should be a given and along with it you should install a good non-bloated anti-virus like AVG or AntiVir (both free), a good software firewall like ZoneAlarm, and a couple of trusted anti-spyware apps to run at least once a month. Everyone’s favorites seem to be the free Adaware and Spybot.

If you are familiar with all of those and you don’t rely on any untrusted sites, you should be in pretty good shape. Now I have another one to add to your list if you want to keep your system as secure as possible and rootkit-free. So, what are rootkits?

Rootkits are a specific type of malware which hide in other applications or a computer‘s operating system kernel. They allow malicious applications to collect passwords and sensitive data from the infected computer without the user’s knowledge, this can be used for personal information theft, spam relay and other criminal activities.

From the programs I just mentioned above, the anti-viruses should help a bit but none are specialized in detecting this kind of malware.

There used to be a pretty good free scanner from F-secure but the utility is no longer available. But don’t worry, AVG has got you covered with their Anti-rootkit Free utility, download that here and add it to your list of important programs.

Firefox is my browser of choice. Although we happen to have a rather large number of Opera followers at the TS forums, I have been left unconvinced and kept faithful to Firefox ever since version 1.5 came out. At that point the browser was more secure than ever, rock solid, very polished and popular enough that you had dozens of extensions to customize it to your liking. I haven’t looked back ever since.

Now, one of the most obvious tweaks you can apply to your Firefox installation is removing the annoyance of letting websites resize the browser window at their will. Despite of the more sophisticated pop-up blocker that comes in most recent versions of the browser, many websites still do away with popping those up and in many cases resizing either your main window or maximizing the pop-up window to get your full attention (just before you hit the X button).

You won’t even need an add-on to do this.

1. Go to Tools > Options
2. Click on the Content tab
3. Next to where it says “Enable Javascript”, click on Advanced
4. Uncheck the option “Move or resize existing windows”

You’re done! I will try to bring more of these basic, and other not so basic tips on a regular basis to the blog.

Also remember we have a complete Firefox tweak guide posted in the main site.

If you rely on a remote connection client to get access to your files at the office or from your home, chances are you have probably tried using the client built-in into Windows called Remote Desktop Connection (also Terminal Services Client).

Personally, I don’t like opening up my main PC to the Internet but only to those computers on my local LAN (which only I use). So I use RDC to access my desktop when I’m in bed or somewhere else around the house using my laptop. The biggest gripe of using RDC (which has been way improved since Windows 2000 days) was that I couldn’t use any font smoothing (Cleartype in Windows) so reading documents or browsing the web on an LCD screen was adequate at best.

Well, it just happens that with the latest update of the RDC client (6.0) for Windows XP and Server 2003 that dates back to November, you can now use font smoothing as long as the client PC is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. I just noticed about the change over the last few weeks, so now I’m happily writing this from my laptop running the RDC client connected to my main PC…

Over a LAN it’s not any slower than with Cleartype off, plus it should save some battery on the laptop since I’m not accessing the hard drive or processing stuff on the laptop itself, and my desktop PC is much much faster in the first place.

If you don’t have the latest RDC client installed you can download it here, and enable font smoothing using these instructions:

To enable font smoothing, follow these steps:
1.    Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, click Communication, and then click Remote Desktop Connection.
2.    Click Options, click the Experience tab, and then click to select the Font smoothing check box.

A complete list of features on the latest version of Remote Desktop Connection can be found here.

Some good looking fonts coming our way with Microsoft’s next generation products. Although it will take years until these can become standards (backward compatibility), it will be a welcome update for those of us upgrading from XP in the near future.

“The following are examples of 10 new Vista/Office 2007 fonts, taken in Office 2007 at 11 pts. Although Microsoft has made quite a few more new ones, these are the primarily latin-based scripts that ship with every install, regardless of regional options.”

A development build of Firefox now passes the Acid2 Browser Test. This makes Firefox the latest Browser to pass the test; other Browsers which pass are; Safari, iCab & Konqueror. Opera 9 also passes, however as with Firefox both are non-final releases; that said, Opera 9 will be released well before the Firefox passing version is – Firefox 3 (Expected early 2007). This leaves Internet Explorer (7 & earlier) as the only mainstream Browser making no appreciable effort to pass the Acid2 Browser Test.

With the market share of Firefox still growing & surpassing IE in some instances hopefully Microsoft will re-assess it’s current level of commitment to standards support (Although IE 7 does fix many of the more common implementation bugs), so that site Developers & End-Users can finally be quite certain that a site will render the same in every Browser & there’ll be no more need for implementating time-consuming hacks just to get a site displaying correctly in a specific Browser.

As many of you are well aware, I (& many others) have taken issue with the Firefox Myths site. Rather than argue the issues with the author; who consistently never answers, ignores, or attempts to weasel out of such disputes (e.g. Ars Technica) I’ve decided to create a Firefox Myths Debunked post on the forums.
Here I’ll be covering certain of the Myths, with reliable sources used to provide information & fuller use of quotation. In particular be sure to check out the Quotes section which highlights the misquoting of people completely out of context; backed up by the full original comment.

Update 20/02/2006 – The Author has now chosen to add me to his Quotes section, butchering some points I made in Firefox Myths Debunked. What a decent bloke ehh?

Update 19/03/2006 – The author chose to respond here on 25/02/2006; to which I’ve asked why he purposefully misquotes & misrepresents myself & 7 others on the site (No response still). We’d appreciate an answer why these quotes are still unamended & on behalf of myself & the 7 others would request they either be posted in full (As can be read in full on my forum post) or be removed.

Update 25/03/2006 – I’ve made a few updates to the forum;

1. Despite what’s stated on the site there are no patched/unpatched vulnerabilities rated as “Extremely Critical” for Firefox in Windows – “All Myths relate to running the default install of Firefox in Windows with no extensions” as the author indicates.
2. Added another (mis)quote, ironically the source states that “the contents of this e-mail are very much sarcastic & are purely intended to point out flaws in his article”.
3. Updated the Browser Standards Support table.
4. Updated the Secunia Vulnerability report (Only change being that IE 6.x went from 22 out of 92 advisories unpatched to 20 out of 96 Secunia advisories unpatched).

Noticed they’ve begun public(ish) testing of Winamp 5.2 Beta. Some interesting changes/fixes in the current Beta;

* New: [ml_pmp] Synchronization the Media Library with your portable media player (Compatible with iPod, Creative, & Microsoft Plays For Sure devices)
* New: [in_mp3] gapless MP3 playback
* New: [in_wave] in_wave 3.0
* Improved: [in_mp3] unicode id3 tags
* Improved: [in_mp3] preliminary id3v2.4 support
* Fixed: [in_wave] 32bit floating point WAV playback distortion
* Updated: [enc_lame] LAME 3.97b2

Seemingly new builds will be released every few days/weekly so if you’re into Winamp you might be interested in trying out what’s coming up. Again, note it’s BETA. I still currently prefer foobar2000, but no doubt it good to see things like Gapless playback & a syncronization manager for portable Media players. Now where’s the next foobar2000 V9 Beta ;)

Noticed over on The Burning Edge that several changes have been made to the tabbed interface;

* Close buttons on tabs, including background tabs (as long as browser.tabs.disableBackgroundClose is true & each tab is at least browser.tabs.tabClipWidth pixels wide).
* Make it easier to get back to the “parent tab” when you click a link that opens in a new window: if a link opens a new tab with focus, when that tab is closed, focus returns to its parent tab only if you have not manually switched to another tab.
* Simplify the preferences available for tabs.
* Improve the visual appearance of keyboard-focused tabs.

Seemingly these were conceived a little too late to make it into Firefox 1.5, though will certainly be in Firefox 2.0.

Speaking of next version Browsers, I’ve also had a look at Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 (As you may have seen in the news in the past few days). The interface is actually quite like Firefox in some regards (Address bar + Search bar on top, along with menu to add/modify search engine). While the Delete Browsing History feature is the exact same as Firefox 1.5′s Clear Private Data. IE 7 also features a phishing filter (Firefox 2.0 is due to implement one also).

It’ll be interesting to see how rapidly site developers conform to the security & other changes in IE 7 though. We’ve all read how Firefox & Opera have compatibility issues with certain sites & ironically IE 7 will encounter these in part due to actually improving compliance with standards, e.g. by default I was unable to download iPod Updater from Apple’s site (Due to the security pop-up after submitting my details), at an iVillage forum my wife visits the layout was incorrect.

Note – For detailed information on the authors intellectual dishonesty & deliberate misquoting of people (Myself included) please see my Firefox Myths Debunked post.

Noticed the site behind XP Myths has posted up a new article – Firefox Myths. Alas, while the former I think can be pretty useful in many instances this is not & offers a bias/misrepresented look at Firefox (Not to mention the fact that sources have been misquoted/misread).
For a thorough debunking of the Firefox Myths article I’d suggest you read Nanobox’s blog – They’re one of the (misrepresented) sources in the Myths article. For example;

Ironically Internet Explorer supports changes to the XHTML 1.1 standard better than Firefox.

While they (Nanobox) point out that (In a message to users redirected to their site from Firefox Myths);

The article you have just come from states that Internet Explorer has better support for the XHTML 1.1 changes than Firefox. It should be noted that although Internet Explorer does support some of the relevant elements, it does not support them in any fashion in which it is correct to use those elements. Internet Explorer only supports the elements as proprietary extensions to HTML. True XHTML 1.1 must be sent with the content type “application/xhtml+xml” or a generic XML content type, which Internet Explorer does not recognize as a webpage without the application of special hacks.

You have been warned. I know I’ve said this a decent few times over the years but, if you notice I’ve made an error in a guide I’m quite happy to edit the content as I hate making & promoting incorrect info.

Update – I see another site’s posting how Operas is the most secure Browser around (Amongst other things). Technically, Lynx is based on the fact that all (2) vulnerabilities are patched (This being their own definition of secure). Security is a relative condition.