A recently discovered security flaw that would allow access to a locked iPhone will be fixed next month, Apple said on Thursday.

"The minor iPhone security issue which surfaced this week is fixed in a software update which will be released in September," Apple representative, Jennifer Bowcock, said in an email to Macworld.

[ Special reports: IT's guide to the iPhone |  Apple launches the iPhone 3G ]

The security flaw allows access to a locked iPhone by pressing the emergency call button at the unlock screen, followed by two taps on the home button. That will take you to the iPhone's private 'favorites' page without the need to enter the unlock code. If the owner of the phone has favorite entries in their address book containing URLs, e-mail addresses, or mobile phone numbers, then those entries can be used to launch the browser, mail application or SMS software and gain access to private Web favorites, e-mail messages and text messages stored in the phone, again without entering the unlock code.

Bowcock offered some advice to protect your phone until the software update is released. She said you can set the iPhone so that double-clicking the home button will take the user directly to the home screen, which if password protection is turned on, will be the unlock screen.

Fixing performance issues that have plagued previous versions of its Windows client OS and Internet Explorer (IE) browser are key development goals for the next versions of those products, Microsoft has revealed in company blogs.

IE 7 and Windows Vista have had serious performance problems early on that have alienated users and damaged the reputations of the products. Some IE users switched to Mozilla Firefox because of IE 7's frequent crashes and performance glitches, while Vista's bugs, incompatibility problems and other issues have been well-documented.

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Microsoft is paying close attention to performance in Windows 7 and IE 8 as it develops both products, the company revealed in separate internal blogs about each product, "Engineering Windows 7" and "IEblog."

"We've re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area (performance) in Windows 7 (and IE 8)," according to the Engineering Windows 7 post. "This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams."

The company has an uphill battle to improving performance, particularly with Windows 7, said one analyst.

"I'm not surprised they're going to focus on performance," said Mike Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "I'm somewhat skeptical how much improvement they're going to make at this point."

He suggested Microsoft consider performance for Windows 7 the way it approached security when the company decided to make that a key priority for Vista. When Microsoft decided security was integral to the OS, the company engineered Vista so "every feature has a security attribute to it," Cherry said.

Similarly, the company should make performance such a priority that "anyone checking any code into Windows 7 not only has to make sure it's the most secure code and the most reliable code, but they'd better be addressing the performance of the code as well," he said.

While performance is made up of "many elements," the Windows 7 team is focusing on six areas of improvement in Windows 7, according to the post. They are memory usage, CPU utilization, disk I/O, the boot-shutdown-standby-resume feature, the base system, and disk footprint.

CPU utilization in particular is a problem in Vista, and could use improvement in Windows 7. Cherry said he runs a 32-bit version of Vista on a PC with a 64-bit processor and 2GB of RAM. However, when he starts his Outlook e-mail client, it uses 100 percent of his CPU resources for more than a minute and a half. "It blows me away," he said of the problem.

Indeed, Microsoft said a key engineering goal for Windows 7 is to "keep the CPU utilization low as that improves multi-user scenarios as well as reduces power consumption," according to the Windows 7 blog post.

The focus of IE 8 improvements, according to the IEblog post, will be how to make pages and images load faster for "everyday" browsing. This will require improvements to scripting, the rendering engine and networking improvements, among others, the company said.

Microsoft has said it expects to release Windows 7 in early 2010; however, the company has not provided a time frame for the final release of IE8, though it is safe to say it likely will be a part of the Windows 7 release. Microsoft released IE8 beta 2 on Wednesday.

Google unveiled on Thursday its plans for a store where mobile users can find Android applications, a concept similar to the iPhone's App Store.

The first handsets running Android, expected to appear later this year, will include a beta version of the Android Market, Google's Eric Chu wrote in a blog post. Initially, users will at least be able to find free applications there. After that, Google expects to update the Market to allow users to buy and download paid content.

[ Special report: Google Android: Invader from beyond ]

The Market will feature a feedback and rating system similar to that used in YouTube, Chu said.

Developers can add their applications to the market by registering as a merchant, uploading the content, and publishing it. Google expects to add features for developers after the initial launch, including a dashboard where developers can find analytics information about their content. Developers will also be able to upload different versions of their applications that might work better on different devices.

Android followers have wondered how Google might support application distribution. Its Android Market is a similar concept to Apple's App Store, but differs in some ways. For instance, because all iPhones run on the same software, developers don't have to create different versions for different phones. Android is open, and handset makers may decide to include different hardware capabilities or opt not to support all Android features, which has an effect on the way applications work.

Historically, the mobile market has struggled with how to best sell and distribute mobile applications. Prior to the iPhone, the best way for an application to become widely used was for a developer to convince an operator to pre-load it onto a phone, a challenging accomplishment. Mobile phone users only very seldom download applications to their phones.

Due to the three outages that Gmail suffered earlier this month, Google will extend a credit to all paying customers of its hosted Apps suite and has vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.

In an apologetic e-mail sent Wednesday to Apps Premier administrators, Google said it will automatically extend annual subscriptions by 15 days at no extra charge. Apps Premier subscriptions cost $50 per user per year. This 15-day extension is the maximum credit of the 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement Google offers Premier customers for Gmail.

"We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have," reads the letter.

One outage, on Aug. 11, lasted about two hours but affected almost all Apps Premier users. The other two, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 15, hit a small number of Apps Premier users, but both outages were lengthy, lasting for some affected users more than 24 hours. In all of the incidents, users were unable to access their Gmail accounts, getting instead an error message when trying to log in.

In Wednesday's letter, Google said that system reliability is a top priority and that, although it can't promise zero downtime, it commits to solving outages quickly. "More importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem," the letter reads.

In addition, Google plans to improve the way it informs Apps Premier administrators about system problems via a new dashboard that will become available in a few months.

That dashboard will provide descriptions of problems, especially of their impact on users; a regularly updated estimate of when the issues will be resolved; and, if necessary, a formal report within 48 hours of the resolution. The report will describe the incident, explain its cause, list corrective and preventive actions taken, and provide an outage timeline.

Google officials will also make themselves available to participate in live discussions about the incident with Apps Premier administrators and their companies' managers.

The plans for fuller disclosure of problem causes, fixes and prevention plans sound good to Gartner analyst Matt Cain, but he's confused as to why Google didn't start applying these principles with this letter, which he found slim on details.

"I'd like more transparency into what actually happened and why. They don't go into that [in this letter]. That's what they should have done in this note," Cain said. "Why start in the future and not now?"

Crediting all Apps Premier customers across the board and taking proactive steps to prevent future outages were the right actions for Google to take, said analyst Rebecca Wettemann from Nucleus Research.

"These are natural growing pains for an on-demand vendor," she said. "Google is doing what it needed to do [to respond to the outages], but in fairness to Google, it's held to a higher standard in terms of uptime and availability, as are many on-demand vendors, when you compare them to internally deployed applications."

Apps comes in various versions, including the free Basic and Education editions and the fee-based Premier edition. In addition to Gmail, it includes Google hosted services like Calendar, Sites, Talk, and the Docs word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

Overall, more than 500,000 businesses with 10 million active users use Apps. Hundreds of thousands of those active users have Premier subscriptions, according to Google.

With Apps, a hosted suite of communications and collaboration applications, Google is a leading proponent of SaaS, an emerging model of software delivery that backers say represents the future.

Because vendors host applications in their own data centers, companies don't have to concern themselves with hardware provisioning and software maintenance. By living in the Internet "cloud," these hosted applications simplify sharing and collaboration among employees.

However, outages such as the one Gmail experienced are among the biggest question marks regarding SaaS applications, as IT and business managers ponder whether to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their companies' servers.

 When applications hosted by vendors go down, there is little that IT and business managers can do to remedy the situation and respond to their angry end-users.

Google Apps critics question whether the suite can really provide enterprise-grade software availability and performance and thus be a real option in large companies to conventional, on-premise options like Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange or IBM Lotus Notes/Domino.

Google acknowledges that most Apps subscribers are individuals or small and medium-size organizations. However, the company has high hopes that the Premier edition, with its IT management and enterprise software integration features, will push into the enterprise market of large companies.

Google has proved it can learn from mistakes and has improved as an enterprise IT provider, Cain said. However, Gartner's advice to enterprises is to hold off on adopting Gmail as an e-mail system, and this month's outages justify that position, Cain said.

"A 24-hour outage of e-mail for many companies would be catastrophic. That indicates that our cautious approach is warranted," he said.

Before giving the green light to its customers, Gartner wants to see at least a dozen enterprise deployments of Apps Premier with at least 10,000 Gmail seats, each running successfully for six to 12 months, Cain said.

This story was updated on August 28, 2008

Aptana, which has enabled Web 2.0 development via JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and PHP with the Aptana Studio IDE, has added Python to the mix through its acquisition of Pydev, which was announced this week.

The company plans to combine the Pydev Eclipse-based development environment with Aptana Studio, which has supported AJAX and has been downloaded nearly 2.3 million times, Aptana said. Developers now can use Aptana Studio and Pydev side by side or plug them into Eclipse. Both are open source with commercially available extensions.

"Python kind of completes the portfolio of popular scripting languages that people use to build Web apps," said Kevin Hakman, Aptana director of evangelism.

Aptana currently has no timeframe for full integration between Aptana Studio and Pydev. The company also would not reveal how much it paid for Pydev.

With Pydev, developers get capabilities for code completion and analysis, a debug console and server, and refactoring. Aptana Studio, meanwhile, supports Web development by integrating AJAX tooling with PHP and Ruby on Rails. Ruby development is supported as well.

Aptana stressed the popularity of Python, particularly Google's selection of the language for use with its Google App Engine hosted application service. "When Google gets behind something, there tends to be a lot of attention [paid] to it. We've seen an increased utilization of the Python language," Hakman said.

Through the Pydev IDE, developers can deploy and manage applications to a computing cloud via linkup with the Aptana Cloud product for cloud-based deployments.

IT project management practices are stuck in the mud, and they're hindering IT departments' ability to deliver projects successfully. That's the conclusion of a recent Forrester report, "Stretching Your Project Management Muscles," which was published in July.

Mary Gerush, author of the report (and a former IT project manager herself), notes that the project management discipline has not kept up with the pace of change in business or in IT.

[ Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

Gerush writes that while IT departments have adopted service oriented architecture (SOA) and Agile software development practices to become more responsive to business needs, the project management discipline has remained largely focused on methodology. And traditional project management methodologies are proving to be too rigid, cumbersome and bureaucratic for today's mercurial and competitive business environment. In fact, Gerush notes, these methodologies can work against IT departments.

"Traditional project management practices, which are designed to improve the likelihood of project success, often have the opposite effect in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment," writes Gerush in her report.

The reason traditional project management methodologies can backfire on IT departments is because they require so much rigor. For example, says Gerush, project managers have to follow scores of pre-defined processes and steps, and they have to deliver reams of documentation at each phase of the project-all of which dramatically and often unnecessarily protracts projects.

"There's so much rigor and normally so much documentation and so many processes you have to go through to follow a methodology that it weighs you down and that you can't move as quickly as the business needs you to move or as quickly as technology enables you to move," she says.

The Remedy: Flexible Project Management

To keep pace with the business and with the rest of IT, project management offices need to make their project management practices more flexible. Gerush offers five measures project management teams can employ to improve their responsiveness.

1. Adopt a framework. A framework is a collection of various pieces of project management "functionality," says Gerush. When projects come in, the project management office can choose which pieces of the framework to use to provide just the right amount of oversight necessary for the project, as opposed to following every step of a methodology.

2. Figure out which deliverables you really need."For projects of short duration, an informal e-mail status report may be more appropriate than a formal document, and formally documented use cases and design specifications may be overkill for some projects," writes Gerush. That's why she advises project managers to customize project deliverables according to each project's needs.

3. Incent project managers differently. Project managers are usually rewarded for delivering projects on time and on budget, and of course, they rely on their methodologies to accomplish those goals. But if you want project managers to become more flexible, you have to encourage that behavior, writes Gerush. So reward them when they adapt easily and quickly to changing business needs, even if their maneuvers impact timelines and budgets ever so slightly.

4. Train project managers to be leaders rather than control freaks. Left-brained project managers can over-rely on their analytical skills to complete projects on time and on budget. "But flexible project management is not a left-brain, black-and-white endeavor," writes Gerush. "It requires the full brain and touches on all shades of gray, requiring understanding and exercise of adaptive leadership versus command and control."

5. Keep improving your project management practices. Your approach to project management should evolve alongside the business and IT. Solicit project stakeholders and business partners for their ideas on how you can make your project management practices more responsive.

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft yesterday warned users of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they won't be able to uninstall either the service pack or Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) under some circumstances.

The warning was reminiscent of one Microsoft made in May, when Windows XP SP3 had just been made available for downloading. At the time, the company told users they wouldn't be able to downgrade from IE7 to the older IE6 browser without uninstalling the service pack.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

In a post to the IE blog today, Jane Maliouta, a Microsoft program manager, spelled out the newest situation, which affects users who downloaded and installed IE8 Beta 1 prior to updating Windows XP to SP3. If those users then upgrade IE8 to Beta 2 , which Microsoft unveiled today, they will be stuck with both IE8 and Windows XP SP3.

A warning dialog will appear to alert users. "If you chose to continue, Windows XP SP3 and IE8 Beta2 will become permanent," Maliouta said. "You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won't be able to uninstall them."

She recommended that users instead first uninstall Windows XP SP3, then uninstall IE8 Beta 1; they should then reinstall XP SP3 and follow that by installing IE8 Beta 2.

It's unclear how many users the warning is aimed at. Although users running Windows XP and IE8 Beta 1 could manually download and install Service Pack 3 from Microsoft's site, the company set its Windows Update service so that it didn't offer SP3 to systems with IE8 Beta 1.

Windows XP users who do have the first beta already on their machines will be offered the update to Beta 2 via Windows Update if they have Automatic Updates enabled, Maliouta continued. "A prompt in your Windows task bar will alert you when IE8 Beta 2 is ready for installation," she said.

Windows Vista users, however, will not see IE8 Beta 2 in Windows Update because update apparently cannot sniff out instances of IE8 Beta 1 and uninstall them automatically. Instead, users must remove Beta 1 manually, said Maliouta.

Several additional updates are required before installing IE8 Beta 2 on Vista, including one that, if omitted, blocks its installation entirely. That fix, a revised version of a Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) prerequisite that earlier this year sent machines into an endless series of reboots, is also necessary for IE8 Beta 2; users with SP1 will, of course, already have it in place, but those running pre-SP1 versions of Vista must still install it.

Microsoft also spelled out a long list of IE8 Beta 2 known issues and compatibility problems in release notes it posted on its support site Wednesday.

Ironically, of the nine applications called out as incompatible with the new IE8, the only two that will lock up and crash are Microsoft's.

Visual Studio.NET version 7, said Microsoft, will crash on a PC that also contains IE8 Beta 2. "No workaround is currently available," Microsoft said in the release notes.

The other Microsoft incompatible application is Windows Live Mail, formerly called Windows Live Desktop, and the desktop mail client meant to replace Outlook Express and Windows Mail. "If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Windows Live Mail will crash when you create or reply to an e-mail message," Microsoft warned.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Sprint Nextel will put location-based services front and center on its Xohm WiMax service, offering a portal with widgets for local weather, traffic, events, reviews, and other information.

The carrier was set to announce on Thursday a partnership with uLocate Communications, along with Google, AccuWeather, Navteq, reviews site Yelp, and other content providers.

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Sprint will discover subscribers' locations using information from its WiMax base stations. With uLocate's Where platform, it will present local content and services from the other partners, said Art Spivy, director of content and community services for Xohm. By the end of the year, Sprint also hopes to integrate uLocate's Buddy Beacon friend-finding service in the service.

Xohm will be a data-oriented service that users will access on devices sold by manufacturers at retail rather than by the carrier, as is common for cell phones. In addition, those devices won't have a standard "deck" or lineup of services constantly presented by Sprint. Client devices are expected to start with laptop cards and eventually include MIDs (mobile Internet devices), personal entertainment devices and other platforms. The service is set to launch in September in Baltimore, with more markets added in the coming months.

The location-based content will be presented on a Xohm Web portal and will change as a subscriber moves from one place to another. Subscribers will also be able to personalize the portal to offer information on the kinds of things they want. But they won't be forced to use that portal as a home page.

"We're not trying to replace AOL's or Yahoo's portal," Spivy said. "We're really trying to be a great start experience for your mobile session."

The content partners' information will be presented through widgets on the portal page. Other initial partners are set to include events and tickets company Eventful and localized news provider Topix. Sprint later plans to open up the portal to many more partners through a developer program. Policies for the privacy of user data will be included in that partner program, he said.

Sprint's move is part of an overall trend away from tight service-provider control of mobile content, according to analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Research. Using the location data it gathers will help to draw subscriber's to Xohm's own portal on devices that could easily be used simply for Web access, but in the wake of the iPhone's personalized home screen, Sprint is not alone, he said.

"Everything, generally speaking, is moving toward greater openness and customization," Sterling said.

The European Court of Human Rights has refused U.K. hacker Gary McKinnon's appeal against demands for his extradition to the U.S.

McKinnon stands accused of breaking into computers belonging to NASA and the U.S. military, and had appealed against his extradition under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. He had claimed that the conditions of detention he would face if convicted in the U.S. would breach a European prohibition on inhumane or degrading treatment.

[ Read the related story about the U.K.'s hacker's fight against extradition to the U.S.  ]

The court said Thursday it had refused his appeal, and will not prevent his extradition. The court had previously ordered that his extradition be delayed until midnight Friday while it considered his request.

It was in 2002 that a U.S. court first indicted McKinnon for the offenses, committed in 2001, although he was not arrested by U.K. police until 2005. The U.K. government first approved his extradition in 2006.

McKinnon has never visited the U.S., and the offenses of which McKinnon is accused were committed in the U.K., his lawyers Kaim Todner LLP said.

"We maintain that any prosecution of our client ought therefore to be carried out by the appropriate British authorities," the London law firm said. "U.K. citizens are at the mercy of the ever-increasing tendency of overseas prosecutors to extend their jurisdiction to crimes allegedly committed in this country."

Security consultant Graham Cluley of Sophos said the decision sent a warning to hackers.

"The message is clear -- if you hack into computers you have to realize that the legal consequences could be severe.  Others should take note of McKinnon's predicament and ask themselves: do I want to end up in his situation?" Cluley wrote.

McKinnon's lawyers said they will make one further appeal against the extradition, to the U.K. Home Secretary. The appeal will be on medical grounds, as McKinnon has recently been diagnosed as suffering from Asperger Syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by obsessive behavior and deficiencies in social interaction.

Nortel hopes to tackle the security of remote work with an "office on a stick," a USB drive that can link an employee's PC with a corporate VPN and keep all the information from a session encrypted.

The drive itself, similar to a typical USB (Universal Serial Bus) drive with 1GB or 2GB of storage, is just one piece of the Nortel Secure Portable Office, a product that also includes a Nortel VPN (virtual private network) gateway and services to help enterprises set up policies and user permissions.

As work becomes more mobile for many enterprises, IT departments are coming up against the simultaneous growth of privacy regulations and worries about data theft. They commonly use software VPNs to keep remote work secure, but Nortel is aiming to do so without the need for VPN client software or URLs (uniform resource locators) that employees have to remember. With the software for a VPN session residing on the USB drive, users also can log in from almost any PC.

To use the USB stick, workers can simply plug it into a USB port and enter a username and password, said Rod Wallace, director of security services and solutions at Nortel. Software on the stick first checks the PC for viruses and required security mechanisms, and then sets up an encrypted remote session. It typically will provide access to remote applications via the Web browser or another method. It can completely take over the system using a remote desktop and block off printing, document-saving and remote drives, preventing employees from improperly copying sensitive data.

The remote session is encrypted and all data the employee enters or downloads can go directly from the PC's memory onto the encrypted USB drive, Wallace said. As a result, IT administrators can know that sensitive information isn't out in the world on PCs they can't control. Policies can be configured so that users who plug the drive into less-secure PCs get either limited or no access to applications, he said.

One place the Secure Portable Office has been deployed is with community-based midwives who work for Liverpool Women's Hospital in England. They can enter and access patient records while away from the hospital and keep them private, without needing client software or complex log-in procedures, Wallace said.

The Nortel Secure Portable Office is available worldwide. For a typical enterprise deployment supporting 100 or more concurrent users, it costs between $30,000 and $60,000 for the complete package including services.

A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education.

And France is not stopping: This summer, an economic commission set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy recommended tax benefits to stimulate even more open source development.

[ See? who won InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Awards -- and what you can learn from these winners. ]

Today, France is arguably the most fertile ground for open source development in the world. The well-known and respected OW2 Consortium for open source middleware has its roots there. Giant corporations, such as France T?l?com, have embraced open source whole-heartedly.

The fruits of this labor reveal a lesson that U.S. developers would do well to take note: Everyone prospers when working together under a single, shared technology vision.

Benefit 1: A focus from the outset
France's future grip on open source looks particularly strong, as it courts the next generation of open source developers. French authorities, for instance, handed out 175,000 open-source-software-equipped memory sticks to high school students last year. Technical universities have made open source their top priority, and some offer advanced degrees.

"All students in France use open source," says Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder of Talend, a French pioneer of open source data integration software. "A lot of universities in the U.S., except probably MIT, use traditional tools like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP." As a result, open source talent is more prevalent in France, Diard says; development is faster, and software quality is higher because French developers aren't distracted by proprietary and competing technology. "The culture of open source is more advanced here."

So what should U.S. developers, IT managers, and business execs learn from France's open source experience? "Change your vision," says Marc Sallieres, CEO at Altic, a French open source integrator.

Benefit 2: Uniting technology for the good of many
The capability to pull together various open source parts to create a single, unified platform may be France's most important open source benefit. It's what led to the amazing feat of government, education, and industry coming together to foster an environment for leading-edge open source development.

Miguel Valdes, co-founder of the Bonita Project, which has developed an open source workflow system, believes French open source developers have a better understanding than their U.S. counterparts about reusing code and integrating with other systems. "France is definitely the good place to be when working around open source," says Valdes, a Spaniard living in France. "The French social model was appropriate for innovators and entrepreneurs to start working on alternative solutions [to proprietary software], fostering the creation of new projects in which a good mix of experienced professionals and skilled computer science students work together."

Put another way, French open source developers have played a major role in laying the groundwork on how to aggregate six, seven, or more open source projects into a comprehensive platform, says Massimo Pezzini, a Gartner analyst.

Benefit 3: Liberation leads to creativity
It's not surprising that open source aggregation and integration skills have developed rapidly in France and spread elsewhere in Europe. "In the U.S., open source projects tend to be narrow and only for leading-edge organizations, whereas in Europe they're mainstream," Pezzini says, adding that France leads the way, followed by the Nordic countries. "European organizations have a business opportunity to combine multiple [open source] point projects into solutions for virtual private networks, SOA enablement, business intelligence," and so on, he says.

Consider the French word for open source, logiciel libre, meaning "free software" in the sense of "free as in speech, not free as in beer." Logiciel libre could easily be the rallying cry of the global open source community. Freed from the shackles of narrow point products, secretive software components and forced workarounds, French open source developers are encouraged to experiment creatively and liberally.

Recognizing the advantage of such effective creativity when applied across the entire IT spectrum, French universities are in the forefront of teaching open source to the new generation of developers and IT managers. "The key [for the U.S.] is to introduce more support for open source in universities and colleges," Pezzini says.

An open-source technology has been launched to help developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 find duplicated code in their software projects.

Called Clone Detective for Visual Studio, the product allows developers to analyze C# projects for source code duplicated elsewhere. These duplicates can lead to inconsistencies and indicate poorly factored code, according to the Clone Detective Web page at Microsoft's CodePlex site for open-source projects.

Version 1.0.0.0 of Clone Detective for Visual Studio was released on August 16 under an Apache 2.0 license.

"Duplicated source code can be an indicator for quality problems," said project coordinator Immo Landwerth. "Having the same algorithm spread across the whole application in slightly different variations will lead to increased maintenance effort, which ultimately may result in inconsistencies."

Among the reasons for code duplication is "lazy" developers who only know how to cut and paste, Landwerth said. Other reasons could include architectural constraints and methodology issues.

While currently limited to C# code, the next release will add capabilities to examine Visual Basic .Net and C++ code, Landwerth said. The integraton between Clone Detective and Visual Studio was developed by Landwerth and colleague Thomas Dallmair in cooperation with Technical University of Munich.

"Clone Detective makes it easy for developers to perform a clone detection and visualize the existing clones. However, in some cases, the source duplication cannot be easily removed (e.g. the cost of removing the clones outweighs the costs of keeping them due to heavy design change requirements)," Landwerth said. "In this case, Clone Detective helps by reminding you that a given portion of code is duplicated (by a purple bar in the code editor). So if you make changes to it you should review the other occurrences and make sure you keep your application consistent."

Clone Detective leverages the university's ConQUAT (continuous quality assessment toolkit) tool for clone detection.

The next version of Clone Detective will be able to find "fuzzy clones," said Landwerth. "Fuzzy clones are clones that are almost identical but not token by token. This will allow you to find existing inconsistencies in your code base," he said.

Separately in the Visual Studio realm, TeamExpand this week is offering timesheet-tracking software for Visual Studio.Net software development teams. Functioning with the Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server) application lifecycle management server, TeamExpand's commercial release of its TX Chrono timesheet application allows project managers to submit and analyze timesheets.

The Web-based application features a set of notifications and reporting capabilities lacking in TFS, TeamExpand said. TX Chrono offers workflow and TFS compatibility to make software development activities more predictable and visible, the company said. Bug fixes are included as well.

TX Chrono offers:

*Automated notifications and alerts on projects, individuals and activities.
* Timesheet submission and approval.
* Individual and non-standard schedules.
* Non-standard working hours per day or week.
* Separate billable and non-billable tasks.
* Custom timetables.
* Advanced reporting.

TX Chrono is licensed at $15 per seat each month. A 30-day free trial version is available at this Web page.

LG Electronics will launch in October a netbook-class laptop PC based on Intel's Atom processor that also includes 3G wireless, it said Wednesday at the IFA show in Berlin.

The X110 will include an HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) cellular data modem that should be compatible with the newer 3G networks now being rolled out by most major carriers around the world. HSPA is typically capable of download speeds of several megabits per second, and the latest versions of the evolving technology also offer megabit-per-second uploads.

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In addition to 3G, the machine supports 802.11b/g wireless LAN and has a wired Ethernet connector.

The X110 is based on the same 1.6GHz Atom processor that many of its competing devices use and has a 10-inch WSVGA resolution (1,024 by 600 pixels) screen that, if it wasn't for the 3G, would place it very close to competing netbook PCs.

LG has decided to go for a conventional hard-disk drive in the X110 and will offer models with either 80GB or 120GB of capacity. Some netbooks use faster solid-state disks based on flash memory chips, but they typically offer much lower capacity.

It runs the Windows XP Home operating system.

The machine will be available in several colors, including white, pink, or silver. LG didn't announce the price.

Cisco is buying PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, for $215 million and plans to add those capabilities to its on-demand Web Ex Connect collaboration platform.

PostPath makes PostPath Server, an e-mail and collaboration server the company touts as a replacement or supplement to Microsoft Exchange.  An archiving edition of the software is available to store e-mails in a less cumbersome fashion than Exchange does with its journaling of old e-mails. The company also offers a version of PostPath Server for VMware.

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Cisco plans to put the server in the cloud and sell an e-mail and calendaring service to its customers. "Our 'cloud-based' delivery model offers our customers rapid deployment and compelling economics," says Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group (CSG).

PostPath is all about requiring no middleware to interoperate with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Active Directory, ActiveSynch and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, among other applications. But it also promotes itself as a Linux-based replacement for Exchange that gets around some of the Microsoft platform's shortcomings, including larger data stores and higher performance in terms of how many hits per minute the platforms can handle.

Cisco bought WebEx last year to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, including instant messaging, team spaces for collaboration, wikis and document sharing.

Privately held PostPath was founded in 2003.

Cisco says it expects to close the deal by the end of October and add PostPath's 67 employees to its Collaboration Software Group. CSG is part of Cisco's recently established Software Group that oversees the IOS network operating system, network and service management, unified communications, policy management and SaaS offerings.

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Microsoft loyalists could be forgiven for feeling a little smug after all of the publicity over outages and lost e-mails at online services run by archrivals Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail.

Microsoft, it turns out, isn't invulnerable. Some users of Microsoft's Office Live Small Business have also reported intermittent e-mail outages, according to interviews and postings at discussion forums for the Web service, which is used by more than a million small companies.

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Through a spokeswoman, Microsoft acknowledged Tuesday that a "brief isolated" e-mail outage occurred last Friday.

But at least one user says he was told by Microsoft technicians that some of his e-mails were permanently lost.

"Outages you can understand, but the outright loss of data? They should be ashamed of themselves, being the biggest computer company in the world," said Joe Reilly, owner of Marine Wireless Internet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Reilly said he is a paying customer of Office Live Small Business, which he uses to host his tech firm's Web site and provide his e-mail, through which he gets important messages, such as customer payment confirmations.

Reilly said he "became suspicious" when he did not receive "my usual 20-30 e-mails" on Monday morning. Confirming through his self-testing that e-mails were not being delivered, Reilly said he talked to Office Live's technical support, who told him that the service was "experiencing some issues."

First launched in 2006, Office Live Small Business is a service that allows small firms to design and host their Web sites, run their e-mail, an e-commerce store, Web advertising campaigns and more from a single service. Some of the services are free and some are provided for a fee.

E-mail for Office Live Small Business users is provided through Windows Live Hotmail.

The spokeswoman confirmed that Office Live Small Business and Hotmail customers were hit by a two-hour outage early last Friday afternoon.

"We are sorry to hear about this customer experience and are doing everything we can to help the customer restore his emails," she wrote in an e-mail. "This incident only affected a handful of customers and to our knowledge all customers' emails are being restored."

Not according to Reilly, who said he was reassured on Monday that mail would "trickle through in the next few hours." When that didn't happen, Reilly called back, and was told there was an "extended server outage" and that some customer e-mails had been permanently lost. After demanding a written confirmation, Reilly said he was referred to Microsoft's legal department.

Another Office Live user, Russ Bellew, said he has also experienced recent "intermittent outages," though he hasn't permanently lost any e-mails as far as he knows.

Microsoft had a much larger outage that affected multiple Windows Live services, including Windows Live Mail, back in February.

For now, the recent outage appear less severe than that incident or the problems affecting MobileMe and Gmail.

Relaunched this February, Office Live Small Business competes with services from Yahoo and others.

It is different from Office Live Workspace, an online document storage and collaboration service that competes with Google Apps.

Reilly says that while he's disappointed with Office Live Small Business, he doesn't plan to switch. "I'm kind of stuck with them," he said.

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