Session Yields Big Workload for Kaine
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By Michael Sluss and Mason Adams The Roanoke Times mike.sluss@roanoke.com (804) 697-1585 mason.adams@roanoke.com (804) 697-1584  RICHMOND -- A white-hot debate over transportation funding may have  sucked much of the oxygen from the 2007 General Assembly session.
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Mozilla has been quietly offering live Web support for the Firefox Web browser since the beginning of the year. It is one of the open-source group's experiments in improving the user experience and woo more of them from Microsoft Corp.'s still-dominant Internet Explorer.True to its open-source heritage, Firefox Live Chat is a valiant, all-volunteer effort. But the service remains in beta, buggy, http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2008/02/11/minutes-of-weekly-meeting-211/ and only available to users several hours a day during U.S. working hours."The hours of operation are currently very conservative," acknowledged David Tenser, who runs Mozilla's support programs, in an e-mail.Rivaling Linux itself as most popular open-source project, Firefox has never had trouble attracting volunteers. More than 1,000 people freely contribute code, 20,000 test pre-beta versions of Firefox every night and another 500,000 test the actual betas.But for the unglamorous job of chat-based technical support, Tenser has only been able to recruit about 20 volunteers. And during the actual 3-4 hour sessions, only about 3-5 of them are actually available answering users' questions."What we really need is more exposure so people can both discover how powerful this service is to users, as well as how fun it is to participate," wrote Tenser.Officially introduced in late 2004, Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times. New Mozilla CEO John Lilly claims there are 150 million active users, including 50 million people that use Firefox every day.Firefox is used by almost a third of European Net surfers, though global surveys show Firefox used by about one-sixth of Internet users, with IE still holding three-fourths of the market.Still, Mozilla would like to improve its retention rate, which it estimated several months ago to be less than 30 percent.Mozilla already offers several other forms of user support. Those include forums and newsgroups where users can post questions, knowledge base (KB) articles they can read at their leisure, and even an Internet Relay Channel (IRC) channel aimed at developers and more advanced users needing live support.As of early February, Live Chat volunteers had answered more than 4,100 chat requests, or about 100 a day, Tenser said. Most questions have been from users who had been unable to connect to the Web, usually due to firewall issues, Tenser said, or users having problems related to Firefox extensions.This reporter tried out Live Chat. The first time, no volunteers were available during the scheduled time. The second time, a tech support volunteer offered a fairly general fix to one problem (remove extensions one at a time to see which one was causing AJAX-heavy sites to render improperly), while suggesting I wait for Firefox 3 to fix another (occasionally missing passwords).Mozilla released its third beta for Firefox 3 in early February. The Mountain View, Calif. group is expected to release a final version of Firefox 3 sometime in 2008.Testers say that beta versions of Firefox 3 are faster and use less memory, have user interface improvements, and better security.Microsoft offers similar free and paid support offerings for Internet Explorer users through its support.microsoft.com Web site.IE users who have a retail copy of Windows XP or Vista are eligible for either 2 phone calls or live chats (XP), or 90 days worth of unlimited phone and chat support (Vista), according to a spokesman. After that, tech support calls or chat sessions cost $59 per incident.Mozilla has no plans to charge for Live Chat. Nor does it plan to make it part of a formal support program, something that some large companies have said they would need before they could consider switching from IE to Firefox.Tenser said volunteers do get questions from IT pros."They tend to ask about how to make changes to more than one machine without having to go in and make the changes via the user interface, or about locking down the preferences so users can't make changes," he wrote.
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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The onetime GOP frontrunner's strategy of sitting out the early primaries now appears to have big risks
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House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert faced intensifying questions about the RepublicansÂ response to Representative Mark FoleyÂs messages to a page.
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IT administrators preparing for the Windows XP SP2 juggernaut may want to catch up on their reading before deploying the service pack.
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The Virginia General Assembly adjourned yesterday. Here is a score card of how lawmakers disposed of some of the major issues. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) has 30 days to sign into law, veto or amend bills sent to him. Lawmakers will return April 4 to consider vetoes.
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The Internet doesn't have time zones, and while my colleagues in the blogosphere who happen to be located in the Eastern or Central time zones were watching the debate live on TV, we in the western states were left to either wait three hours, or DIY a Ustream webcast of the debate, which we did. About half way through we figured out how to make the local New Hampshire ABC affiliate webcast work on a Mac, and it was a little easier to understand what was going on. In 2008, sixteen years into the web, there's no excuse for not broadcasting a political event live to the world. If ABC News hasn't got the ability to do it, then ABC News shouldn't be running it. That Facebook lent its name and reputation to this fiasco is amazing. Why didn't they speak up?  BTW, otoh, Charles Gibson was a great moderator and the format was, in every way, fantastic. What a shame we all couldn't experience at the same time.
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Several major websites are brought down by the largest denial-of-service attacks ever staged. Compiled by Tony Long.
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Chuck Shotton has his Leopard, but hit a wall. "Leopard's migrate user function has failed 3 times on 3 separate clean installs. This is a seriously broken, critical piece of the OS."  Mossberg and Pogue missed it, didn't make it into USA Today. That's the motivation behind the flash conference idea. After two or three days, organize the knowledge as covered by the bloggers, really cover it as tech news has never been covered before. If necessary, have another flashconf two weeks or a month later.
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Ziff Davis - Sun is opening a massive grid with six grid centers around the world that customers can access for a fee of &#36;1 per hour of CPU usage.
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Super Tuesday isn't just draining campaigns of much-needed money and challenging their organizational mettle. Feb. 5 also is turning out to be a "big test," campaign aides say, of the reach and power of the Internet.
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Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) is expected to propose spending more than $40 million today to begin overhauling the state's mental health system, which has come under intense scrutiny since 32 people were killed this year at Virginia Tech by a gunman with a history of psychiatric problems, according to...
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By Hugh Lessig And Kimball Payne, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.  Feb. 25--RICHMOND -- State lawmakers Saturday passed what they admitted was a flawed transportation spending plan. Attention now shifts to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who will propose a major overhaul.
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Senior Giuliani campaign staffers forgo paychecks ... Arizona Gov. Napolitano to endorse Obama ... Obama, Clinton in fierce competition for South Carolina's black voters
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Â· Leader's supporters baffled by intensity of row Â· Senior Tories claim party made to look chaotic
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(InfoWorld) - A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it has been spreading a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors, a security researcher said Friday. This is the first time that Storm has taken to the Web for its victims, said Dan Hubbard, head of research at San Diego-based Websense. "The big news is that Storm has added infecting sites to its arsenal," said Hubbard. Storm debuted in January but only cracked the top malware lists early this summer, and has become infamous for its ability to adapt its infection strategies. "They have a knack for latching onto the latest newsworthy events and capitalizing on the public interest in them," Symantec researcher Hon Lau said last month. "And if no newsworthy events are happening at the time, then they will just make them up." Until now, Storm has infected users via files attached to e-mail or through links embedded in spam. The change noticed by Websense's scanners, however, means that Storm's backers have moved to other attack vectors -- in particular, compromised Web sites that sport malicious IFRAMEs. Users visiting such sites are instantly infected with the Trojan if their browsers are not patched against whatever exploit the IFRAME code is throwing out. According to Hubbard, several hundred sites have been compromised by Storm's makers, then seeded with IFRAMES that can inject the Trojan into vulnerable PCs. One such site was a Republican Party Web site for the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin. Within hours after Websense notified the site's owners, however, it had been purged of the dangerous IFRAME code. By mid-morning Friday, it was safe to visit. Hubbard did not know how the site was compromised. The motive behind Storm's continued attacks and its expansion into new areas like this, said Hubbard, is a never-ending appetite for bots -- compromised computers that can be used for spamming or other criminal activities either by the original attackers or by others who lease sections of the botnet. "Storm's botnet is clearly the biggest around," said Hubbard, who estimated its size as "conservatively, in the hundreds of thousands, although some people have thrown out numbers like 1 million or 2 million or even 4 million." Earlier this month, in fact, MessageLabs pegged the botnet at 2 million machines. In the last few weeks alone, Storm has spread through e-mails touting a real-time scoreboard site for National Football League games, spam hyping a Web site that wished Americans a happy Labor Day holiday, and more mail that used YouTube videos as bait. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate