Bruce Axtens, who describes himself as "middle-aged, grey haired, unremarkable" has been up to some interesting coding. He took an article we posted some time ago about a command line interpreter for Notes, written in Python, and kit-bashed it into a command line interpreter, written in VBScript. Nice job, Bruce. We think you’re definitely worth remarking on!

If you dream of a living room without a tangle of cables connecting the DVD player to the TV to the stereo, IBM has come up with the chip for you. The company has produced chips based on the evolving 802.15.3c specification, which will be capable of passing high-definition files and other content at distances of around 5 to 10 meters, said Brian Gaucher, research staff member at IBM. Current samples of the chip run right now at more than 600 megabits per second, he said. The goal is to get these chips up to 1.4 to 1.5 gigabits per second.

Opera Software on Tuesday plans to release a second preview version of Opera 9, the next version of its namesake Web browser. For the first time, the new version will include support for so-called widgets, Opera representative Thomas Ford said. Widgets are essentially small browser windows that display information taken from the Internet on a user’s desktop. The notion is similar in concept to the widget idea that Apple Computer uses in the Dashboard feature of Mac OS X.

How does a small business send large files that are too massive or too sensitive by email? Large corporations often solve this problem with large custom-built extranets, but small businesses have typically resorted to burning and shipping the files on CD. ShareFile makes the functionality of a large corporate extranet available to small businesses in a package that is affordable, easy to use, and professional. Files can be shared in two ways with ShareFile. The first is similar to traditional FTP, with files uploaded to password-protected online folders. Though unlike FTP, ShareFile transfers files securely and boasts robust features such as easy user administration, e-mail alerts, keyword searches on folders and files, and virus scans on all files. The second way to share files, ideal for easy one-time file transfers, is to send large files via a hyperlink in an e-mail message. ShareFile can send a hyperlink to any e-mail address, allowing recipients to download files or entire folders by just clicking the link with no login required.

Hewlett-Packard will bank even harder on software, especially Internet-delivered programs, to grow its business, the company’s chief technology officer said Friday. That doesn’t mean HP is done with the cost-cutting that has characterized CEO Mark Hurd’s first 10 months in charge, Shane Robison, the company’s chief strategy and technology officer, said at a press event at its headquarters. That will continue, as will HP’s ongoing focus on growth through services, software, and mobility. Robison said he believes software delivered over the Internet represents a huge area of growth for the technology industry.

IBM on Friday announced steps aimed at beefing up open standards-based software development in Russia. The company plans to offer developers, architects, and students free downloads of several of its software-building programs at a special Web site, which will also house trial code, tutorials, technical forums and other educational pointers. Some industry analysts predict that Russia’s population of developers will expand by 40 percent by 2008. As part of a broader push to step up global development of open standards-based applications, IBM’s free offerings are designed to help those developers build such applications more easily while picking up skills in Linux, Java, and other technologies.

Companies and individuals heeded the warning–some may call it "hype"–about a file-destroying computer worm known as "Kama Sutra," helping minimize its damage Friday. One Italian city shut down its computers as a precaution, but otherwise the worm’s trigger date arrived with relatively few reports of problems. For days, experts warned that the worm could corrupt documents using the most common file types, including ".doc," ".pdf," and ".zip." It affects most versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, prompting the software giant to issue a warning.

Alan Cox is so well-regarded in the open-source software community that he can pull in a crowd of eager techies to discuss theoretical software stability on a Sunday afternoon, as he did at last year’s FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Cox wrote much of the original networking subsystem in Linux more than a decade ago, and he has maintained and contributed code toward various kernel releases. Now employed by Linux vendor Red Hat, he is a leading figure in the open-source software community. Last week, after Cox’s talk at a Trusted Computing conference in London, ZDNet UK spoke to him about a wide range of topics, including the next version of the General Public License, software patents, the kernel development process and Linux on the desktop.

An independent security researcher has pinpointed a denial-of-service flaw in Microsoft’s brand new Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview just moments after installing the security-centric browser makeover. Ferris, known online as "badpack3t," found that specially crafted HTML could cause IE7 to crash because "urlmon.dll" does not properly parse the "file://" protocol. A proof-of-concept demonstration has been published on the Security-Protocols site, along with a screenshot with proof of the browser crash.

With the clock ticking on a Feb. 3 D-Day for the activation of the destructive "Blackworm" worm payload, anti-virus vendors are rushing to release free removal tools to help contain the damage. The worm, also known as Kama Sutra, MyWife.E or Nyxem.E, uses the lure of sexually explicit photographs to trick email users into executing an attachment that contains a payload capable of permanently corrupting a number of common document format files. Microsoft has already issued an advisory with pointers to its Windows Live Safety Center, which offers a free scanner that detects and removes the worm.