The world of web-browsers keeps changing...new things come up and if you’re not in...then you are definitely out. Let’s see all that’s new with the 3 main browsers used today.

Firefox 3 – “The Best Firefox yet” Hmm..Isn’t that a statement?

 One cannot be but impressed by the extraordinary panache and style with which Firefox is cornering the market. Extraordinary number of add-ons, amazing themes and so many other tit-bits, there is a reason why Firefox is today, the popular choice amongst informed users! It is frankly the best balanced browser there is. Take a look at these, (and this is just 2008, if I added all the awards, I would be exceeding my word count)

·  InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software Awards, August 2008
·  PC Magazine Editors’ Choice, June 2008
·  CNET Editors’ Choice, June 2008
·  American Business Awards Most Innovative Company, June 2008
·  Linux Journal Readers' Choice 2008 - Favorite Web Browser, May 2008

But, let us take an unbiased look at Firefox 3...what’s new and what’s not...

The Firefox team claims that Firefox 3 has 14000 changes from Firefox 2. That sounds impressive in any case. But the claim that Firefox 3 is 2-3 times faster than Firefox 2 seems to be a tall claim. But what I will vouch for is that Firefox 3 is definitely faster, and that cannot be bad.

Among its new features, zooming into the web pages and of course the ‘Awesome Bar’ (their humble name for the address bar) are amongst the ones most noticeable. Surfing had never been so cool....

UNTIL WebKit Open Source Project caught my eye....When Apple chose the KHTML engine for its Safari Browser in 2003 over the more popular Gecko engine that powers Firefox, a lot of people were surprised. Firefox was way more popular than the Konquerer browser and had a lot more open source developers online.

Since then, Apple has really run with the KHTML engine, forking it off, renaming its development version "WebKit" and making it faster and leaner than Firefox on the Mac and both Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC. While it doesn't have a lot of the functionality of Firefox plug-ins and the ActiveX controls of IE, more and more support has been built around the Webkit engine as it gains in popularity.

There is no other way to say it. Holy cow is this thing fast! I currently tested Webkit build r30090 (more recent versions are now there) against standard Leopard Safari 3.04. This unoptimized WebKit build version is running circles around the standard Safari browser. It isn't even close.

I was on a Rev 2, 2 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM on 100 Mb/s Fiber. I ran the two browsers next to each other on a 30 inch display. Webkit feels like I am on a maxed out Mac Pro tower - it really does. Try it if you don't believe me.

If anyone is interested, anyone can join and develop, the nightly projects etc. www.webkit.org . There is simply too much to say about this project and not enough space. But I would like to say this, watch out Firefox!!! Safari is now playing hardball...

OH YEAH...Internet Explorer “Ye olde workhorse”

It has always been the case, that people like to think of Microsoft as a fledgling company with bad products...but fact is Bill Gates is not getting any poorer and IE is not out of this race yet. Check out the IE 8 beta. It’s not half bad ... if you manage to be unbiased.

It’s got this really cool feature called Accelerators (quite intuitive of a company largely accused of being just the opposite). Apart from that enhanced performance, navigation and history management are the latest additions/improvements.

But realistically speaking, slowly Safari and Firefox are moving out of IE’s range. Either Microsoft goes really radical or soon the Age of IE will be no more...

So what do you think, is Firefox still your favourite or does WebKit seem more alluring...or are you still in love with IE (stranger things have happened!!!). Only time will tell who comes out on top...till then keep your eye out for more news on IT Bytes.

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Professor Kan Min-Yen, known to his students simply as “Min”, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing. He has done his PhD at Columbia University in the field of Natural Language Processing.  Natural language processing studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has several applications. One instance is spelling and grammatical correction, such as the tools for the same in Microsoft Word. Sometimes it is difficult to spot similarities in two sentences just because of difference in sentence structure. It is also difficult to infer the meaning of idiomatic phrases like "John kicked the bucket", which would literally mean that some boy named John has kicked a bucket but depending upon the context in which it is used, would mean that John has died. NLP tries to make these tasks easier by interpreting the meaning for us. Summarizing documents is another important application of NLP. Min’s PhD was based on efficiently summarizing documents based on a query. The document would have different summaries depending upon the query asked by the user. Min is presently doing research to help align lecture slides to text books (something that will be useful to all of us :))

Min also does research in the field of Information Retrieval. Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents and also for information within documents on the World Wide Web. IR is the underlying science behind all search engines (e.g., Google and Yahoo). Optimizing the process of IR is very important for quick access to the large amount of data available on the World Wide Web. Min also is the faculty mentor for the SIG.IR SPC students. The SPC students are currently participating in the Star Challenge and have done well to get past the preliminary rounds against international competition. 

Some of the modules suggested by Min for students interested in Natural language processing and Information Retrieval are CS 5246, Text Processing on the web, and CS 5244, Digital Libraries. CS 5246 teaches the basics of a web search engine (how the Google rank and indexing work). The course guides you to build your own web search engine. It also helps you to become more efficient web searchers yourself.  The course requires some knowledge about basic probability statistics and a sound knowledge of programming.

Next Issue at Prof's Corner : Prof Ben Leong

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To view the IMDB profile of this movie, Click HERE

Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Farrar and the crew at Industrial Light and Magic had the difficult task of bringing to life some of the most beloved robots from the Transformers toy line for the live action movie, Transformers. Farrar and ILM worked closely with director Michael Bay to create the look of Optimus Prime, Megatron and the others in the film, and Farrar talked about the process at the LA press junket.

Was it all CG or were there some models used?
“It was 99% done in the computer.”

Did you have a program that does the transformation? Did it have to be tweaked for each character?
“We had separate artists, some of our resident braniacs, working on those. One guy who was Keiji [Yamaguchi], like his brain is just designed to do this sort of thing. He's brilliant at it. I told Michael early on. Michael loves to know who the artists are. He gets gleeful pleasure to know the individual, which is cool. Not many directors get into it like that. He loves working directly with the artists. So Keiji was the one to figure out some of the earliest transformations. Then we had different other people assigned to do those sorts of things.
Keiji was the one that even after months of design, finally Michael came up to me with everybody and we told Michael about this passionate guy that was working on Optimus' transformation. [He] wanted to meet him so Keiji came in and he said, ‘You're exactly how I pictured you except I didn't imagine the red sweater.’ But Keiji said, ‘I don't think Optimus looks heroic enough.’ I go, ‘What?’ ‘No. I think this is an insult. I think his head should be positioned…’ So after a lot of designs, Michael listened to Keiji and he came up with a new design. Why would that happen? The people who were designing, Ben Procter was in the design group who was coming up with most of the designs for the robots but it's all in 2D. Once you go to 3D, trying to get the 2D views to conform in a three dimensional fashion, then things change.”

Going from vehicles to robots, is it different for each character?
“A lot of that was just simply sketched out on paper by my art director, Alex Jaeger. That was done very early on so that we would know kind of how the movement would occur. It was kind of based on some of the animatics that had been produced. It was also so that Hasbro would know what we were going to do so they would know what to build. There was a little back and forth on that. They'd say, ‘Hey, how about if you do this?’ We'd go, ‘Okay, we'll do that.’"

Is it an extension of morphing?
“No. It's actually physical pieces moving. This all is very complex. This toy in front of you has 51 pieces. Our Optimus Prime in the movie has 10,108. So what you're talking about, and all that has to be chained. ‘Chained’ means it's all got to be hooked together so it all travels along together as it moves, whether it's an arm move or a body movement or a transformation. That means it's complex, yes, of course. There's a lot of firepower that has to be in the computers to have all that information travel on, not only the pieces but all the information. The paint, the detail, the colors, the dirt, all the things that are textured onto it.”

How does Michael Bay embrace real stunts with computer enhancement?
“I just loved it, I've got to tell you. One of the first meetings, he said, ‘Yeah, Scott, I liked it.’ And I hadn't worked with Michael before so we were both learning to know each other. We hit it off well. We really got along on this movie and I really enjoyed working with him. He knew that I was very strong on what images looked like and just lighting and photography and composition, all the rest of it, and he is too. He's a very smart filmmaker from the standpoint of just image. He said, ‘I like to shoot things messy. I like to shoot it dirty.’ I said, ‘Fantastic’ because I come from a world where everybody in visual effects, ‘Oh, we'll shoot it clean and then we're going to shoot layers and layers of stuff to muck it up afterwards.’ That's kind of the classical training to follow. Again, I come from a photographic kind of bias and I said, ‘Fabulous.’ Most directors don't want to take the time to do that. ‘You're going to blow that up and flip the cars and knock that part of the building down for me? Okay, great, let's do it.’”

How do you beat effects fatigue and really make a difference?
“Good question. I'd like to tell you, I come from a photographic background. I started as a DP, visual effects photographer and I'm very good friends with Dennis Muren. We work together a lot. We're buddies and we've generally been displeased with how computer graphics work has looked for a long time. It's been a tough crossover going from photochemical days where you photograph either shots on set or you shot miniatures or you shot real elements and you composited them. Okay, now we enter the world of computer graphics. What is that? Well, it's a compositing tool, put the thing together, but it's also a method of creating all kinds of things, simulations, dirt, debris, objects, what have you. But a lot of the stuff has not quite looked as good as what you could just go out and photograph.
The attempt in this movie was to ratchet up a little bit higher, hit a little bit higher watermark of making, in this case, hard body surfaces look real. I was kind of surprised it really hadn't been done before, especially like a giant robot movie kind of lends itself to that kind of a thing."

To read more details, click HERE

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Rhys Watkin of Roke Manor Research in Hampshire, U.K. and his colleagues have developed software that could one day be used by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The software will identify upwards-moving thermal air currents and the aircraft will glide along these currents in order to prolong endurance capabilities and save fuel. The software analyses video of the sky by using an on-board camera and combines the analysis with real-time weather forecasts and computer simulations of local air flow to predict future thermal currents. Combined with GPS technology, the system could enable a UAV to self-navigate through as many thermal currents as possible. In the future, the software could be enhanced to provide analysis of maps of an area and estimation of how well ground surfaces emit heat, further adding to its ability to predict thermal currents. To learn more click HERE

Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Sami Ayyorgun is developing wireless sensor network technology that could lead to improvements in a variety of fields. Engineers could wirelessly monitor miles of gas and oil pipelines for ruptures and tampering, rescue workers could detect signs of life in a collapsed building and armed forces could monitor a combat zone or international border with sensors that could alert soldiers to intrusions or illicit traffic. Like cell phones, wireless sensor networks rely on small, independently powered devices, known as motes, to communicate. To read more on this article click HERE

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