Key Features:

• Now includes 12 months of protection updates and new product features as available throughout the year; annual subscriptions available for subsequent renewal.
• On-going protection keeps your computer protected from the latest Internet risks by automatically renewing your subscription at the regular subscription price, so you don’t have to.
• Enjoy your computer with confidence, knowing viruses, Trojan horses, and worms will be detected and removed automatically.
• Surf the Web without being watched by dangerous spyware or unwanted adware, and without getting hijacked and redirected to spyware download sites.
• Breathe easy when new viruses surface, assured your protection is automatically updated.
• Open email and IM attachments without worry, knowing they’ve been scoured for threats.
• Create and share files at will, knowing even compressed files have been scanned for viruses.

The download and installation of this product felt to me to be easier and maybe even a little simpler than in years past, so I guess Symantec has learned something by simplifying this process. Norton Anti-virus 2007 monitors all the needs of your pc ranging from scanning inbound and outbound emails, the entire hard drive, and even IM attachments. Due to its extensive nature, Norton may be overwhelming to some basic consumers. Norton Anti-virus 2006 is relatively “heavy” on your system as it takes a little over 20mb of RAM during normal operations.

Pricing:

• $39.99- 1 year package or download
• $74.99 – 2 year download subscription

Norton’s customer service is somewhat lacking. While they offer an extensive online help interface, they neglect the phone support which 6StarReviews loves. If you happen to find a number to truly reach a live agent, you will be using your pocket book to pay for this service! Recently, we attempted to get support for the Norton Antivirus 06 that we previously tested. Symantec reminds you that the site is free and if you dig far enough you can find a phone number that is also free (I dug so far I was in China) but that number also provides Priority Service which costs $29.99 or $2.95 per minute. We did hold (after pushing endless buttons) and hung up after about 10 minutes. Seems to us that they have yet to update this process.

Upside:

When Norton Anti-virus software is running, you truly feel that you are protected. It could be a combination of things from the name that is synonymous with “virus protection” to all the bells and whistles.

Downside:

Norton Anti-virus seems to drop the ball when it comes to customer service. While their site is a “library of virus protection” and a destination for everything about viruses, it leaves a confused customer, more confused. If you want to get a service rep on the phone that will cost you $29.95 per incident!

• All-in-One Gestures – merges the popular following extensions for management of mouse gestures, scrolling and power navigation. (Mix of Mouse Gestures, Rocker navigation, Tab scroller, History scroller, Link tooltip and Autoscrolling extensions)
• Tabbrowser Preferences – a comprehensive UI for changing a number of the hidden tabbed browsing preferences in Firefox. It also provides the ability to control how internal and external links are opened in the browser and how the browser will react when links are sent to it.
• Tab Mix Plus – More tweaks added to tabs. Ability to select and open muliple links in tabs, open link in a duplicated tab, merge tabs and close tabs from similar domain…
• Duplicate Tab – allows you to clone a tab with its history and place the duplicate tab in a new window or in the current window.
• Colorful Tabs – Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appeal of the interface.
• Viamatic foXpose – Click on the icon in the status bar to view all the browser windows with a single click.
• Firefox Showcase – easily locate and select any open browser window in Firefox.
• Separe – Helps you keeping tabs tidy by introducing a new kind of tab.
• Permatabs – turn tabs of your choice into permanent tabs that can’t be closed, and stick around between sessions.
• FaviconizeTab – resizes the width of the tab to display the favicon only (and back again).

Control Website Links

• Linky – Lets you open or download all or selected links, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows.
• WebMailCompose – Makes mailto: links load your webmail’s compose page and adds a Compose link to the context menu.
• Linkification – Allows Firefox (0.9+) to view plain-text URLs and e-mail addresses as actual links
• IE Tab – can open the current page or a selected link embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox. Very useful for those IE only pages.
• FirefoxView – Open Firefox with the current page or a selected link displayed in Internet Explorer. Adds “View in Firefox” menu items to the content and link context menus.
• Paste and Go – lets you paste an URL from the clipboard into the address bar and load it as a single step, either via the adress bar’s context menu or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-V
• ErrorZilla – changes the default 404 error page with following choices: a google cache, an archival snapshot from the wayback machine, a ping, a trace route, and a whois lookup

Control File Downloads

• FlashGot – handles single and massive downloads with several external Download Managers.
• PDF Download – Every time you click on a link, checks if the target is a pdf file and in this case let you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside a new tab, download it to the filesystem or view it as HTML).
• ScrapBook – helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections.
• DownThemAll! – adds new advanced downloading capabilities to your browser. It lets you download in just one click all the links or images contained in a webpage or refine your preferences using fully customizable filters.
• TargetAlert – provides visual cues for the destinations of hyperlinks. If a hyperlink points to a something that is not a web page (in cases of pdf, doc, zip files etc.), then TargetAlert will try to append an icon to the hyperlink that represents its destination
• Download Manager Tweak – modifies the default appearance of the firefox download manager and allows it to be opened in a separate window, the sidebar, or a tab.
• Download Statusbar – is a browser extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away statusbar
• Disable Targets For Downloads – Prevents sites spawning blank windows when clicking binary downloads.
• FireFTP – is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

Most Popular toolbars

• Google Toolbar- Search with Google from any web page, block annoying pop-ups and automatically fill out forms are just few of the popular features. Check spellings, Autolink and see the pagerank. Quick access to all major Google services.
• Yahoo Toolbar – allows searching the web with pop-up blocker. Anti-Spy Window Spyware protection. Quick access to Yahoo services and add fresh content to My Yahoo! easily to name a few features. And now with tabbed browsing in IE.
• Windows Live Toolbar – tabbed browsing in IE, form filler, pop up blocker, mutiple search options, self updating and feed detector.
• MSN Toolbar – Browse smarter with tabs and switch between Web sites within the same Internet Explorer window . Search the Web and easily locate documents, e-mail messages etc. Fill out online forms and one click Access to MSN services.
• Alexa Toolbar – a free search and navigation companion that accompanies you as you surf, providing useful information about the sites you visit including traffic information and contact info. Find related links for each page and share opinions.
• Stumble Upon – Lets you browse, review and share great webpages while meeting new people. Vote sites you like and read reviews about them. Firefox requires an extension instead of the .exe file in IE.

Other popular toolbars

• Wikipedia Toolbar – The Wikipedia Firefox extension makes editing of Wikipedia pages easier by adding a new toolbar to your browser and by providing new menu items in the context menu (right mouse key). A related WikiSearch Toolbar is available, allowing direct Wikipedia searches from Internet Explorer.
• Ask Jeeves – Search the Web and personalize your search experience with saved locations, your local news etc. Save images, web pages and searches, and access them right from the toolbar. Now with a search box for maps and business listings.
• Dogpile Toolbar - use the web Search, find white pages & yellow pages listings, and keep track with the customized news ticker. It also has a RSS Tool and SearchSpy with scrolling terms to see what people are searching for in real-time. Rated No.1 by PCworld it says.
• AltaVista Toolbar – Gives you the research tools to perform searches and translations from your browser.
• ViewPoint Toolbar – Comparative search with pop up blocker. Graphical search results, visual bookmarks and custom skins.
• Clusty Toolbar – Search and cluster results from several search engines. Clusty Clips gets dictionary and encyclopedia definitions for any term on any page, while the Mini-Mode saves valuable screen space
• Ebay Toolbar – quick, easy access to eBay from your desktop. Stay updated with ebay auctions.
• A9 Toolbar – Search the web and use the Diary to leave notes on any web page. Bookmarks located on the server can be accessed from anywhere. Automatic List feature to ease search result navigation, Check your browsing and search History from anywhere. Get related links and ratings with Site Info and Highlight any term on the page. Associated with Amazon.
• Merriam Webster Toolbar – Just type or highlight a word and click to look up word meanings from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. IE required.
• MapQuest Toolbar – Maps at your fingertips at all times. Access to MapQuest Driving Directions and Yellow Pages.
• Athens Toolbar – Firefox extension to assist existing Athens users manage their accounts and navigate between resources.

IF you do not like any of these toolbars, why not design your own.
Toolbar Designer – This is a Windows application that gives you the opportunity to design own custom Internet Explorer Toolbars. Brand your toolbar with your own images, add multiple search boxes, edit boxes, password boxes, buttons etc. with an easy interface. They have embedded known scripting languages, VBScript and JScript, and extended them with a variety of objects and functions.

Talking of customization, Hotbar can help to beautify your toolbar with a huge variety of skins. Installing multiple toolbars clutters your browser panel and reduces surfing space. You cannot use all of them yet each has its unique benefits.

• Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Helps Google index every article you write.
• Akismet – Checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.
• Evermore – Abbreviate all posts when viewed on multiple post pages. Helpful to create expandable posts summaries in WordPress. Combine with Less that Changes the (more…) link so it displays the entire post, not just the part after the “more”.
• Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
• WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced page navigation to WordPress. Better navigation options on index and category pages.
• WP-cache – Very fast cache module. Survive a Digg.
• Text Link Ads – Powers Text Advertising. Advertising rates.
• Batch Categories – Easily manage the mass categorization of posts that match various criteria. Power edit your categories.
• Global Translator – Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
• Ad Rotator – Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
• Feedburner Feedsmith – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

• Firebug 1.0 Beta
  • To users, perceived performance is the only thing that matters, and that means that investigation should examine the system from the user’s perspective and work backward from there. There was a time when the Firefox TamperData extension ruled the roost for this, but no more. Now that page loading requests can be graphed inside of Firebug, things are getting a lot easier. Not only can the graph view show 404 requests and slow responses, it often lays bare the synchronous nature of script execution and requests and the 2 HTTP connection limit. Generating “before” and “after” evaluations for clients has never been so easy.
• Venkman and Firebug 1.0 Beta
  • Now that Firebug includes some profiling and debugging support, Venkman may finally be on the way out, but whichever tool you use it’s highly valuable to be able to profile in-browser JavaScript performance at a function level. HTTP and server-side problems are often a source of perceived latency, but simple testing with full caches can easily point to client-side performance issues. Any logging or profiling system will impact overall page performance, but you should be using these tools to get relative timing data. There’s a special mode for the Dojo package loader that can be used to get accurate function names and line numbers. While the timing information may not translate 100% across FF, IE, Opera, and Safari, the relative timings tend to be in line.
• dojo.profile
  • The dojo.profile module lets you do tic/toc timings of JavaScript code and provide a table showing averages and total timings. We use this to verify relative timings across browsers once Venkman/Firebug point out bottlenecks and to validate fixes in a cross-browser way.
• Tsung and Apache Bench
  • As I noted earlier, HTTP-level performance problems can seriously impact application latency. Neither tool can pinpoint fundamental problems like outbound bandwidth saturation (making the system more scalable doesn’t matter if you can’t send more data across your link), but when the problem is one of scale and not instantaneous performance, these tools let you begin to validate assumptions. Apache Bench is great for testing balls-to-the-wall concurrency of a single script, but very often you’re more interested in full-app performance under more realistic workloads. While there are commercial tools available that can do this kind of load testing in a “real world” way, Tsung provides a highly-capable “replay” proxy mode that will generate workloads that can be used to monitor system performance from a variety of angles. Since we’re most often interested in “how many users can it handle?” rather than “how many times a second can I request foo.php?”, Tsung is an invaluable ally. As a downside, Tsung often requires a proxy and an Erlang build.
• bonnie++
  • Databases and web servers alike need good I/O performance, and bonnie++ lets us determine if we’re getting anything like the theoretical disk performance out of a system. Knowing the “shape” of your workload is essential, but I find that when remediating disk I/O issues bonnie++ usually finds its way into my analysis.
  • Please, please, please make sure that your file systems are running with noatime set.
• “EXPLAIN” statements and slow-query logs
  • SQL is the ubiquitous abstraction that most of the web runs on, and every database system today provides information on how well it’s returning what you request. A thousand other things can niggle your SQL server performance to death, but nothing should get done without logs and EXPLAIN output to guide you.

System development and tuning need to go hand-in-hand, and expert help can clearly make a huge difference. The tools above are some of the most visible artifacts of the process, but it’s discipline in the process itself that’s of the most paramount importance. Let the data guide you and everything else is likely to work out…assuming you know where the goal line is.

Performance tuning can easily drive you crazy should you not have a goal in mind. Without a goal, there will always be another tweak, another 3% to be eeked out of the system. Combined with the marathon sessions that seem to lead nowhere, it’s important that developers doing performance work remember to keep their eye on the ball and to take a walk or a nap or just stop for the day when there isn’t forward progress for an hour or so. That, of course, means having a ball to keep an eye on. So before you start your tuning adventure (or call us in to help), you need to know what your budget is, what your responsiveness goals are, and what your scalability targets are.

For more thorough treatments of how to build things that both perform well and can be made to scale, I strongly recommend Cal Henderson’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”, Theo Schlossnagle’s “Scalable Internet Architectures”, and Jeremy Zawodny’s “High Performance MySQL”.

Next time: why the Dojo build system matters, why the x-domain package loader is awesome, and other stupid HTTP tricks.

• point out the online reference RPM documentation
• describe one method of configuring a build environment
• outline a simple specfile (sysreport package)
• describe the process of building the package from the specfile
• introduce a few convenient RPM macros

Here are a few terms:

• specfile a file containing the rules for building an RPM package
• RPM the distributable package intended for the target
• SRPM a special package containing all the source code and the specfile for a given package
• rpm the command-line program used for installing packages
• rpmbuild the command-line program used for building packages

The best place to get detailed documentation is the Maximum RPM Book, which is a bit old, but has documentation on most RPM building questions.

In order to build RPMs, you need a handful of things in addition to a normal build environment (gcc, make, etc.). You will need a package which includes the rpmbuild command. Some RPM-based distributions package that in a package called “rpm-build” and others include it in the main “rpm” package itself.

Once you have the rpmbuild utility, you’ll need to configure your (preferably non-root) build user’s directory. It’s possible to build software as root, but much safer to build packages as non-root.

You will need to create a set of directories to contain the types of files on which rpmbuild operates. I almost always put these files into a directory called ./packages/ just off my home directory. That leaves you with something that looks like the below tree.

$ pwd
/home/mabrown
$ tree -d -L 1 packages/
packages/
|-- BUILD
|-- RPMS
|-- SOURCES
|-- SPECS
|-- SRPMS
`-- repodata

Not that you could get clever and symlink the RPMS and SRPMS directories to a developer-writable system-wide repository. This is not necessary, just my particular predilection. Here’s what you’ll find in each of these directories.

• SPECS This directory contains a single spec file for each package you want to build.
• SOURCES This directory contains tarballs, patch files or any other files used in the actual building of the package.
• BUILD When rpmbuild is untarring the source tarballs, it will create temporary its directories here. If a particular build fails, then, you’ll find the evidence under this directory.
• RPMS Successfully built packages will end up here. There will be a subdirectory for each architecture (e.g., x86_64, i386, i586, noarch).
• SRPMS Under usual invocations (rpmbuild -ba "$SPECFILE"), an SRPM file will be built and left here, as well. This SRPM file contains all of the required SOURCES (patches, tarballs, etc.) and the specfile itself.

To make all of these directories, fairly simply (I assume bash is your shell):

cd && mkdir packages/{BUILD,SRPMS,SPECS,SOURCES,RPMS}

Naturally, there is a configuration file to tell rpmbuild where to find all of the above. The default is a $HOME/.rpmmacros file. I have included one example below. There are dozens of things you can configure and set in this file, but the most important one is the %_topdir macro.

%_topdir %(echo $HOME)/packages
%_smp_mflags -j3
%debug_package %{nil}

The %_topdir macro should expand to the directory name which contains all of your BUILD, RPMS, SRPMS, SPECS and SOURCES directories.

Now, let’s take a look at a simple package and specfile and prepare to build the package. For example, the sysreport package contains a simple example of a specfile. So, how do you extract the specfile itself? You simply install the SRPM (sysreport-1.3.15-6.src.rpm), which install the source files AND the specfile into your build environment.

rpm -Uvh sysreport-1.3.15-6.src.rpm

Presuming you have configured your build environment correctly with %_topdir, $HOME/packages/SPECS/sysreport.spec should now be available to you. Additionally, this will put the tarball(s), patch files and other required files into the SOURCES directory.

There is not much inside this package, but let’s look at the three most import phases of the build process before we actually try to build the package. The three most important phases of the build process should be terribly familiar to anybody who has installed GNU software before. These three steps (%setup, %build and %install) are simply the familiar triumvirate.

• The %setup phase untars the software “tar -xvzf $TARBALL”
• The %build phase is the analog to “./configure && make”
• The %install phase performs “make install”

Most modern specfiles define an attribute called Buildroot. This attribute should properly be called install root, but it is hard to rewrite history. Almost all specfiles (in 2007) use the buildroot (also known as $RPM_BUILD_ROOT) and will specify it as an argument to any “make install” commands. In the sysreport.spec, the “make install DESTDIR=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT” command shows exactly where we are going to install our freshly built software.

The remaining sections and attributes of the specfile are largely metadata for end users (%changelog and %description) or important metadata and rules to take the results of the build process and turn that into the desired software package.

The %files section is a complete list of all of the files that should comprise the package. Everything (except the documentation files) is sought under the $RPM_BUILD_ROOT.

Now, you have the specfile itself, and you can modify it to your heart’s content. In order to build the package completely and build the SRPM (so that you can distribute the source, the specfile and any patches), you simply run rpmbuild:

rpmbuild -ba $HOME/packages/sysreport.spec

If everything went well, the rpmbuild process should exit zero, and it should also report to you that it has written out two package files (at least). One of them will be the package for the target platform, and the other should be the SRPM.

Here are some additional, interesting and/or useful macros or sections.

• different systems have slightly different choices about filesystem locations. Most converge on FHS, but even so, the following macros insulate the packager from needing to know what the convention is on a particular platform. Here’s a brief chart of common macros (and a common path value for that macro):
  • %{_sysconfdir} /etc
  • %{_var} /var
  • %{_bindir} /usr/bin
  • %{_sbindir} /usr/sbin
  • %{_mandir} /usr/share/man
  • %{_infodir} /usr/share/info
• %patch0 is a simple macro for applying a patch defined as “Patch0″ at the top of the specfile. %patch1 would apply Patch1, and so forth. Arguments to this macro are handed through to the patch binary (e.g. %patch0 -p0 = patch -p0 < the-file-defined-as-Patch0).
• %configure, a generic and simple macro chosen by the systems integrator for your platform.
• %if, %else and %endif. RPM provides conditional logic, too. This can be useful, in case you are building packages which might have different needs on one platform or distribution (e.g., CentOS init script vs. SuSE init script).
• The %pre and %post script hooks allow for custom script actions before a package is installed and just after it is installed.
• The %preun and %postun script hooks allow for custom script actions before and after a package is uninstalled.

I have updated Moxie, a demo offline web based word processor, to use the new Dojo Offline UI. Check it out. I have confirmed that the UI widget works in Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, cross-platform. Play around with the widget and tell me if you find any glitches. Please note that the Dojo Offline Widget’s UI doesn’t currently actually do any persisting or synchronizing; it is ‘dumb’ and is just driven by the rest of Dojo Offline (dojo.dot and dojo.sync, which isn’t currently implemented.

From a coding perspective, bringing the Dojo Offline default UI into Moxie was very easy. First, inside my editor.html file, all I have to do is place a DIV with the ID ‘dot-widget’ in my HTML:

Dojo Offline automatically fills this out with the default Offline Widget.I also have to bring in the Dojo Offline Widget’s CSS stylesheet:

<link rel="stylesheet" />
type="text/css"
xhref="../../src/dot/ui-template/widget.css" >At the top of my Moxie JavaScript code, I simply add the following as well:

<code> // configure how we should work offline

// set our application name
dojo.dot.ui.appName = “Moxie”;

// we aren’t going to need a real offline cache for now;
// we will just have our server return good HTTP/1.1
// caching headers and rely on the browser’s native cache
dojo.dot.requireOfflineCache = false;
This defines my app’s name, which is dynamically inserted into the default Dojo Offline UI (including the Learn More page you get if you click the ‘learn more’ link). I also indicate that I won’t be using a real offline cache for now. See details on what this means here.

View Moxie’s editor.html file
View Moxie’s editor.js file

• An offline widget that you can easily embed in your web page with just a few lines of code, automatically providing the user with network feedback, sync messages, offline instructions, and more
• A sync framework to help you store actions done while offline and sync them with a server once back on the network
• Automatic network and application-availability detection to determine when your application is on- or off-line so that you can take appropriate action
• A slurp() method that automatically scans the page and figures out all the resources that you need offline, including images, stylesheets, scripts, etc.; this is much easier than having to manually maintain which resources should be available offline, especially during development.
• Dojo Storage, an easy to use hashtable abstraction for storing offline data for when you don’t need the heaviness of Google Gear’s SQL abstraction; under the covers Dojo Storage saves its data into Google Gears
• Dojo SQL, an easy to use SQL layer that executes SQL statements and returns them as ordinary JavaScript objects
• New ENCRYPT() and DECRYPT() SQL keywords that you can mix in when using Dojo SQL, to get transparent cryptography for columns of data. Cryptography is done on a Google Worker Pool thread, so that the browser UI is responsive.
• Integration with the rest of Dojo, such as the Dojo Event system

To get started: See the Dojo Offline home page; read the new tutorial titled “Creating Offline Web Applications With Dojo Offline“; download the new Dojo Offline 0.9 beta SDK;