Guinness World Record for Firefox 3 downloads

Mozilla has set a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours.

When they released the Firefox 3 web browser on June 17 2008, which is known as the Firefox Download Day, an amount of 8,002,530 downloads were recorded.

Firefox 3 promises exciting new features, including one-click bookmarking, the smart location bar and lightning fast performance. Other features include built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom. It also offers more than 5,000 add-ons, including Shareaholic which allows you to share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages quickly via a wide array of web 2.0 social networking sites. Shareaholic currently supports: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, foxiewire, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, kaboodle, magnolia, mixx, myspace, pownce, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, streakr, truemors, tumblr, twitter, ycombinator, bzzster, etc.

To date, more than 28 million downloads for Firefox 3 were made, and the counter keeps counting. You can click here to see the counter.

Windows XP patch screwed up Internet connectivity with ZoneAlarm

Just now, the Automatic Updates in my PC downloaded several patches for the Windows XP operating system, which require my confirmation to install them, and need to restart the PC after installation.

After the restart, I was unable to connect to the Internet anymore. I couldn't contact with the mail server and also couldn't browse the web. However, I found that I could still resolve domain names and perform the "ping" action. This mean the Internet line is still up and running, but somehow the outgoing TCP connections are blocked somewhere.

I disabled the ZoneAlarm firewall, and the Internet connection was back to normal. So, the problem is dealing with ZoneAlarm.

I enabled back the ZoneAlarm function, and looked into the log of ZoneAlarm firewall. Whenever I made an outgoing TCP connection, it is blocked by ZoneAlarm.

This problem is solved after I set the Internet zone security level in ZoneAlarm from High to Medium.

Then, I found out from ZoneAlarm User Forum that this problem is actually caused by the KB951748 Microsoft Update, which suppose to fix up the security flaws in Windows Domain Name System (DNS). This fix has changed some kernel file that ZoneAlarm is working with, therefore causing the problem.

If you are also having the same problem, you can try my workaround method as mentioned above, or you can try to uninstall the KB951748 security fix from the Windows Add/Remove Programs control panel.

Btrfs the new generation Linux file system

Todays storage system is scaling up from gigabytes to terabytes to petabytes all the way to exabytes. As a result, file systems need to scale in their ability to address and manage large storage, and also in their ability to detect, repair and tolerate errors in the data stored on the disk.

Announced by Chris Mason of Oracle in 2007, Btrfs (pronounced as "Butter FS") is a new generation of copy on write, snapshoting file system for Linux aims to replace the ext3 file system (the most commonly used file system in Linux nowadays) while removing a number of its limitations, particularly with respect to file size and total file system size.

The distinctive features of Btrfs include:

• Extent based file storage (2⁶⁴ maximum file size)
• Space-efficient packing of small files and indexed directories
• Dynamic inode allocation (no maximum number of files set at file system creation time)
• Writable snapshots
• Subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots)
• Object-level mirroring and striping
• Checksums on data and metadata (multiple algorithms available)
• Strong integration with device mapper for multiple device support
• Online filesystem check and very fast offline filesystem check
• Efficient incremental backup and file system mirroring
  

Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone. Currently it is still under heavy development, with Version 1.0 planned to release by 4th quarter of 2008.

Here are some of the benefits of Btrfs:

• Support for large storage, with maximum file size up to 16 EiB, maximum number of files is 2⁶⁴ and maximum volume size is 16 EiB.
• Ultra fast copy-on-write system which is capable of quickly creating snapshots of the state of the filesystem at any time.
• Online resizing possible to change the size of the file system while it is mounted and busy, such as shrinking the file system.
• Storage pools enabling the file system to span multiple devices.

So how can you be benefited from this new generation of file system? Perhaps you can get a faster Internet search result, more reliable banking data, and more robust stock exchange system. (Remember what happened to Bursa Malaysia on 3 July 2008 when their system faced a storage system faulty?)