OpenOffice.org is an office suite application is almost identical to Microsoft Office that most of us are familiar with. Earlier this week, it was announced that version 3.0 Release Candidate 2 (Build OOO300_m7) has been released.

In contrast to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice application suite is a free and open productivity suite. There are equivalent applications to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, such as Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Base.

The great thing about this software is that it is cross-platform; it is made available in multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

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OpenOffice 3.0 Release Candidate 2

Thanks to TorrentFreak, the release of the Mac version of uTorrent is made known publicly, although it is yet to be officially released. Despite made available, this application is still considered to be an early alpha release and is still in heavy development by the uTorrent developers team.

Given a very mac-like interface, Mac fans can now have something to cheer for, especially uTorrent is widely popular amongst Windows users and such progress is beneficial to the community. It was also mentioned in the TorrentFreak that it is better than its Windows counterpart.

The downside is that it’s not available for direct download from the website; it was made known when someone posted a torrent file on The Pirate Bay. You can definitely try downloading the application to use, but at your own risk. Since it is still in alpha development stage, there are likely to be some bugs that has yet to be suppressed. So, enjoy.

Microsoft has release the beta version of Windows Live Messenger. I presume this application should be quite familiar to you. This is the renowned MSN Messenger.

There are quite a number of new things from this release of Windows Live Messenger. Click on the screenshot on the right to see more details.

System Requirement

• Operating system: Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (32-bit edition only), or Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit editions)
• Processor for Windows XP: 800 MHz or higher
• Processor for Windows Vista: 1 GHz or higher
• Memory for Windows XP: 128 MB of RAM (256 MB or more recommended)
• Memory for Windows Vista: 512 MB
• Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later
• Internet connection: Internet functionality requires dial-up or broadband Internet access (provided separately). Local or long-distance charges may apply.
• Resolution: Minimum 1024 x 768
• For Movie Maker only: Movie Maker does not support Windows XP, and requires ATI Radeon 9500 (or higher) or nVidia GeForce FX 5900 (or higher).

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Windows Live Messenger Beta

In less than 3 days, Mozilla released the next version of Firefox 3.0.3. According to the release note, the developers have found and fixed a problem where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords.

This bug has been filed under bug 454708. There is no any other changes. For more information on this new release, you may want to check out version 3.0.2, which was more of a major update from the previous version.

I did not realise the existence of this bug since I never save my passwords using the browser. I’m glad that Mozilla managed to turn this over within 72 hours.

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Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3

Just a moment ago, when I logged on to my laptop to use Mozilla Firefox, I found that Mozilla has released the next version of Firefox – Firefox 3.0.2. So, catch the latest version to update your Mozilla Firefox browser now.

Over the last few weeks, I’m sure you have been stormed by Google’s release of its own web browser – Google Chrome. A lot of comparison has been made on the speed improvement on the Javascript, benchmarking the Chrome’s V8 against Mozilla’s TraceMonkey. However, do note that this version does not include TraceMonkey, which was rumoured to be much faster than Google Chrome.

Anyway, users are advised to update to this latest version, as it contains several bug fixes.

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Mozilla Firefox 3.0.2

According to Dave Merten, there is a security bug existing in QuickTime that may be used as a vector to attack the system. Available on both Mac OS X and Windows, the latest version of QuickTime 7.5.5 has been reported that the ” ” tag fails to handle long strings, which can lead to a heap of overflow in QuickTime Player, iTunes or any other programs that utilise media using QuickTime plug-in.

Such programs include, but not limited to, browser, Mail or even when a user attempts to view a file with Quick Look. The outcome results in crashing the programs, but the malicious code could be added to such files, and may be executed with no user interaction.

Detail are as follow:

Exploit: OSX.Exploit.QT755-1
Discovered: September 18, 2008
Risk: Low 

No patch is yet to be released.

The latest release of Google Chrome version 0.2.149.30 still considered as a beta software, albeit it might be running stable for 99% of the time. Google is very cautious at using the word “stable” as they did not want to perceive a release version to be buggy at any point in time.

To me, this latest version of Google Chrome works like a charm for me. However, to be adventurous, I suppose there must be some developing releases that we can try out, especially we know that Google Chrome is an open source web browser and users can even build them on their own.

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After its initial release of Google Chrome web browser, Google has finally released the next updated version to patch its bugs and security fixes.

The previous version of Google Chrome was 0.2.149.29 Build 1798. To update to the latest version, simply click on the Tool icon at the top-right hand side of the web browser and then click on About Google Chrome. That will bring up a dialog box, similar to the one shown on the thumbnail at the right.

After updating, the latest version will reflect 0.2.149.30 Build 2200.

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The latest release of VLC Media Player 0.9.2 is now available for public to download. To-date, it has already achieved close to 1 million downloads for this version, averaging about 2-3 downloads per second (Quite curious myself too, as if that’s really the case). The VLC Media Player is both a cross-platform multi-media player and a streaming server.

As a media player, it is highly portable, supporting various audio and video formats, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, etc. Furthermore, the VLC player also playbacks DVDs and VCDs. In addition, it also works equally well as a streaming server to support unicast or multicast in IPv4 and IPv6 on high-bandwidth network.

The application is also available in many operating systems, thus making it ultra-portable. Download VLC Player here.