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KUALA LUMPUR, JULY 31, 2007 – F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced the latest release of its BIG-IP® WebAccelerator™ product. Providing application acceleration of up to four times greater than any other product on the market, BIG-IP WebAccelerator offers an integrated, multi-purpose solution for dramatically boosting the performance of web services and applications. It solves enterprise problems such as painfully slow remote downloads and application access over Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. Customers can use the new BIG-IP WebAccelerator running as a module on the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), or as a standalone system on F5′s 4500 platform now running on TMOS.

Read the rest of F5 BIG-IP WebAccelerator: A Quantum Leap In Web Application Acceleration »

It seems that Microsoft will soon be releasing Works 9.0 as adware, if this post on ZDNet is accurate.

If you don’t know what Microsoft Works is; it’s a light office suite (if you can call it that). I remember it from the days of my second PC. My father bought for me a Compaq Presario and it has Microsoft Works 5.0 bundled along in the default Windows installation.

It has basic word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as scheduling and contact management. If you’ve used Microsoft Office, you might find using Microsoft Works to be hell! It’s like having to drive a decrepit Proton Tiara when you’re used to driving a Ferrari.

Even with the free ad-supported version of Works coming out soon, I find it very, very hard to recommend it over much better free alternatives such as Open Office.

Everyone in the civilised world knows that we’re living in the age of the Internet. Information about virtually anything is available just by entering words in a form field. Upon clicking the Search button, thousands of search results appear on our monitors almost instantaneously.

All these my friends, is made available to us by the client-server model.

Clients are computers requesting information from a resource. Servers are the information resources. Most of the time there will be a whole lot more clients requesting information than servers that actually dishes them out.

Hence, running a server properly requires investment not only in infrastructure, but also in technical know-how. Servers should be properly configured, well tuned, and robust enough to perform under load.

Regardless of who you are, as long as you use a network of some sort, chances are that you’ll interact with a server one way or another. Bear in mind that servers are not purely hardware. Software are just as important an equation when it comes to server. All the best hardware are useless without properly written software to make use of the resources.

Servers are so prevalent nowadays that server news are not only followed by techies but also managers, analysts and entrepreneurs. Frankly, I’m not surprised. At this exact moment, there’s probably trillions of dollars worth of data stored in servers around the world… and I don’t see this trend reversing any time soon.

Just a heads up that I will be mostly offline from 1st to 5th August 2007.

I’ll be in KL during this time. Nothing unusual about my leave of absence, I’m just sending my maid to Indonesia for her holidays.

My maid has been with my family for over four years now. This is the first time that she decided that she wanted to “balik kampung”. She’ll be on leave until 9 Semptember 2007.

I’ll try my best to prepare a few posts that’ll be auto-posted daily during my leave. Hope you’ll enjoy them.

Remember my earlier post about the petition for JB police to improve? Personally, over that time period, I’ve observed that the presence of the police force can be felt much, much more than usual.

Everytime I took a drive in town nowadays, I’ll always see a police car or officers on motorbikes patrolling the streets. Occasionally, a police helicopter would hover around town; at night, you can even see it beaming down a floodlight onto the darker areas of the city. Sometimes it makes me wonder, what was the helicopter doing before? Why didn’t the previous police leadership make full use of its resources?

Anyway, this grateful citizen of JB would like to thank the Malaysian Royal Police for the effort they’ve put in to make JB a much safer place. Let’s hope that they can continue with the sterling effort.