ServerBeach Blog

Since the new release of popular web browser Mozilla Firefox 3.0, over 14 million downloads have been registered by the counter posted on the Spread Firefox website. But just in a few hours (about five) after the Mozilla Firefox 3.0 was made available to the public, security flaws have been reported.

TippingPoint, a provider of network-based intrusion prevention systems, was informed about existing security issues in Mozilla Firefox 3.0 through its program Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) that rewards security researchers for exclusive information disclosing vulnerabilities founded in software products.

Even the new security features of Firefox 3.0 have the main priority to maintain personal information safe and to protect users from phishing and malware, TippingPoint confirms the existence of a critical vulnerability of high severity that affects Mozilla Firefox 3.0 (ZDI ID: ZDI-CAN-349) and prior versions of Firefox 2.0.x: “We verified the vulnerability in our lab, acquired it from the researcher, then promptly reported the vulnerability to the Mozilla security team shortly after. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Not unlike most browser based vulnerabilities that we see these days, user interaction is required such as clicking on a link in email or visiting a malicious web page.”

Read full story…

Around the internet, it’s being said that in just five hours, the new version of the Firefox Web browser had as many downloads as its predecessor got during its entire first day.
Firefox 3 has been in development for nearly 3 years and has been publicly tested since November.

Tuesday’s release was delayed as visitors checking for the update overloaded Firefox’s Web servers. When Firefox 3 was finally released for download, the Firefox website was distributing nearly 9,000 copies every minute. By Tuesday evening, Firefox 3 had reached 1.6 million downloads.

Guinness World Records must certify the world records sought by Firefox supporters for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period. This process could take some time, some speculating a week or longer.

According to AlertSite, an Internet monitoring company, the Firefox website was slow or at times unreachable for approximately 2 hours beginning around 12:45 p.m. ET - which just happened to be 15 minutes before the scheduled release time. Ouch! Luckily, performance improved later in the day.

Firefox 3 includes several enhancements to help its users organize their frequently visited Web sites and block access to sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software. Another added feature for users of Yahoo’s mail service is that they can now use Firefox 3 to send e-mail by clicking on a mailto link that is included in a name or contact link on a web page.

I’m curious to see the Guinness World Records final number.

Free Webinar Hosted by PEER 1 Offers Strategic Insight on Issues Surrounding SaaS Development

PEER 1 will host a free webinar with partners OnDemand Solutions and Mural Ventures, Tuesday, June 24 at 2 p.m. EDT. In this first-time event, industry experts will share their extensive experience and innovative methodologies that have helped ISVs build successful and profitable Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Attendees will learn how to escape pitfalls that have hobbled other ISVs, potentially saving their businesses thousands of dollars.

SaaS is here to stay, with an estimated 25 percent of all software delivered in the next few years expected to be SaaS, according to Gartner projections. As successful SaaS companies know, in order to take advantage of the considerable benefits of this delivery method you must run your company in a completely new and different way rather than rely on the traditional methods. This webinar will help companies avoid many of the more common mistakes.

What: Free webinar on “The Seven Deadly Mistakes of ISV SaaS Offerings,” which include:

• Cannibalizing your current revenue by providing your existing offering to the same customers
• Underestimating the power of and need for customer service in the SaaS model
• Offering free trials that don’t convert prospects to customers
• Underestimating the importance of web-centricity for marketing, sales and support

Who: Featured speakers

• Mike Jalonen, CEO, OnDemand Solutions
• Jeff Hagins, Partner and CTO, Mural Ventures
• Robert Miggins, Vice President of Business Development, PEER 1

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern

To Attend: For more information and registration visit http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/Peer1/PER06242008/frmRegistration.aspx?bdls=15176

“We are very pleased to be offering this valuable webinar along with our partners,” said Robert Miggins, vice president of business development for PEER 1. “Through our experiences we have found there are many reoccurring key issues that business owners and developers alike are unaware of. Through this presentation we will give listeners practical steps and insight to address these issues and in turn increase customer reach and satisfaction.”

About PEER 1
PEER 1, a leading online IT infrastructure provider, believes in the limitless opportunity of the Internet and the business growth and continuity it provides for its more than 10,000 customers. PEER 1 delivers highly scalable managed hosting and co-location solutions to ensure customers’ online presence is always fast, always available. Since 1999, PEER 1 has grown to include data centers and network points of presence in 17 major cities across North America and Europe. Serving a variety of companies, PEER 1 offers solutions that grow through every stage of web commerce, regardless of company size. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and the stock is traded on the TSX under the symbol PIX. For more information visit: http://www.peer1.com.

About ODS
OnDemand Solutions provides business and technical services to established and startup organizations who are already using, or who are looking to use, the OnDemand or “Software as a Service” (SaaS) delivery model. Our services and best practices are designed to rapidly develop and launch new OnDemand and SaaS businesses, accelerate growth for organizations with a current SaaS offering, and assist independent software vendors (ISVs) to convert from a perpetual license model to a subscription revenue model.

About Mural Ventures
Mural Consulting is a specialized team of Software-as-a-Service experts. We work with ISVs and Service Providers to create SaaS strategies that drive real actions, and then execute those actions side-by-side with our clients. We deliver business success in the fast-changing, competitive SaaS environment. Mural has conducted over 300 executive SaaS business design sessions globally. From that experience, we’ve assembled 8 Key Success Factors for SaaS success. These KSFs form the foundation for all of our strategy and execution services.

Goosh.org, a UNIX-like command-line interface for Google combines the search functionality of Google with the simplicity of command line. Do any of you remember the days of Pine for email?

Written by Stefan Grothkopp, Goosh dubs itself “the unofficial Google shell,” a clever browser-based interface that mimics command-line interaction. The results are displayed in the same color style as Google with blue links, green links, and black text.

Type ‘help’ for a list of commands -

Check out a location -

Or check out a blog -

Definitely check out all of the commands in the help file and give it a try. I will be Goosh’ing all the time!

How many of you are die-hard Firefox users? How many of you are constantly looking for tools, add-ons, or anything else to make your browser experience just a little bit better? I read an article today over at MakeUseOf.com that included 6 pretty cool extensions for Firefox that’ll save you some time -

1. Hyperwords 3.6 - Interact with all the words on the web, not just links!

2. Paste Email 3.2 - Paste your email address (or any other text) into text fields.

3. Read It Later - Save pages of interest to read later.

4. Shareaholic - Allows you to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly without leaving your browser.

5. Next Tab - An add-on that improves the tabbed browsing.

6. TinyURL Creator - It takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place.

Are any of you using some of these already? Do you have some neat add-ons or extensions to share? Let us know!

“An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.”

We all visit websites, leaving many of them quickly for any of the following reasons:

• Loads too slowly
• Too hard to navigate around
• Information you’re searching for seems like a game of hide ‘n seek

If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout Six Revisions has posted some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.

A couple of tools listed on that site include -

ClickHeat, which is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored

Crazy Egg, who offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.

Check out the rest of that list and see if your site can benefit from any of those tools.

I have always loved candidness from businesses. I get tired of hearing corporate canned sales pitches or canned responses to the press. When businesses are open, honest, frank, and to the point about their products whether it be good or bad - it’s always a win.

For those of you familiar with NVIDIA’s CEO - Jen-Hsun Huang, you know that he’s a very down to earth man who speaks candidly. During the company’s recent financial analyst meeting, not long into the call Huang began to speak what was on his mind -

“We’re going to open a can of whoop ass,” he told analysts, who quickly broke out into laughter.

Intel and NVIDIA have been playing a game of cloak and dagger with technology press, along with secret slide shows and secret slide show rebuttals. The sole reason for this battle is the integrated graphics market, and some of the claims attached to it. Jen-Hsun Huang doesn’t hide the fact that his company is spending nearly a billion dollars each year ready to take on Intel’s graphics offerings.

Throughout the bulk of the conference call, Huang continued to lament Intel for poor graphics performance. He hints at another Intel slide deck that claims Intel GMA 3100 is Windows Vista Premium compatible — a claim which was debunked by Microsoft employees in a recent lawsuit.

Intel fired back minutes later, sending emails to analysts detailing NVIDIA’s poor track record when it comes to Vista crashes due to incomplete drivers. Almost on cue, Huang responded once again.

“NVIDIA has to support several new titles every week,” he said, alleging that Intel’s graphics just have to support the basic office packages. “You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago,” he said.

The statement clearly struck a nerve with Huang, who paused for a second before adding “How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?”

You can read the full article here.

I had the opportunity to attend the Dallas WordCamp 2008 this past weekend. Aside from the drive from San Antonio to Dallas, the weekend was great. Cold, but great. WordCamps brings the largest gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, designers, programmers and aficionados to teach, learn, eat, drink and generally have fun with one another.

In the opening segment on Saturday March 29th, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and founding developer of WordPress spoke about WordPress 2.5 and the changes that were made from previous versions. The poor man just had his wisdom teeth removed and was in a little pain that day, but he was a trooper! While he spoke, he displayed the changes in WordPress 2.5 on the big screens. A couple of changes included a new Dashboard (many people learned of WordCamp 2008 through the Dashboard widget), new Gallery Features - upload feature: set thumbnail sizes, proportions of pictures, extracts all photo information from your digital camera (date, time, pixels, camera type), comments in 2.5 - editing has been completely re-designed, cookies are now encrypted and a couple more added security features.

The Mayor also popped in for a few minutes to thank everyone for coming, that was a pleasant visit.

Lunch was catered in from Rudy’s BBQ, thanks to Find My Host who funded it. It was the perfect opportunity to mingle with other bloggers, podcasters, and the like.

The majority of the event, we sat and listened to bloggers and podcasters speak about tips and tricks, how to drive traffic, security, and best practices. These people have done their homework. I was really taken in by some of the tips they were giving, things that had never crossed my mind. Did you know that Google Analytics only tracks people who have Javascript turned on? If someone has Javascript turned off (I generally do), they’re not being tracked - skewed numbers, not good.

After Saturday’s event, many people got together afterwards for a night out and had a great time. Sunday was a jam packed day full of a lot of Q&A and the weekend in general was a very good learning experience for all bloggers and podcasters. John P. moderated the panel and asked very real questions that companies face when looking at building a blog presence. Why should businesses have a blog? What if my employees post something bad? What if my customers post something bad? These are questions that companies have to take into account when making a decision to have a blog - just as ServerBeach did. One of the panel members, Liz Strauss, was dead on when she said, “a blog can turn the faceless company into real humans you can relate to.”

All in all, it was a great event. The city of Frisco, TX allowed WordCamp to use their city council chambers. Many thanks to those who made this possible and I look forward to attending many more in the future.

You can see some of the photos taken at WordCamp 2008.