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Microsoft Office Labs releases the first community prototype from Office Labs: Speed Launch. Community prototypes are projects Microsoft employees work on in their spare time. The goal of Speed Launch is to provide lightning quick access to all the documents, files, and websites you use often. It runs on either XP or Vista, but note that it requires .NET Framework 3.0.

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By now most people have likely already upgraded to Windows Vista Service Pack 1, but one of the smaller feature upgrades might have passed most people by: You can now configure automatic defragmenting for All drives, as well as defragment all of your drives at the same time.

Set Automatic Defrag Options

Launch Disk Defragmenter by typing dfrgui into the start menu search or run box (or you could just search for defrag in the start menu or control panel)

Once you are there, you will notice the new “Select volumes” button that wasn’t there before Service Pack 1:

This will launch a dialog where you can choose which drives should be automatically defragmented at the scheduled time:

Note: Vista SP1 most likely already scheduled all your drives to be defragmented by default so there’s really nothing to do but make sure you have the latest Vista Service Pack!

Wordpress is getting an iPhone-native WordPress client! It supports WordPress.com blogs as well as self-hosted WordPress.org blogs running version 2.5.1 or newer.

Timing wise, with the launch of Apple’s iTunes App store this morning, they expect to see this showing up very soon. You can check out their screencast here.

Alternatively, you can go for WPTouch. Simply put, it’s a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch. The entire package for WPtouch is only 660kb. It was designed to be as lightweight and speedy as possible, while still serving your blog’s content in a richly presented way.

You can grab WPTouch here.

Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3’s launch.  You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and the Firefox guys were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen.  However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what they did:  they looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected.  At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.”  What happened next?

A big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later:

There is other scientific evidence proving the Bump’s effect.  If you’re interested in that previous study by James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego, you can read the complete version here.

The Register is reporting that a warez group called NoPE has released a fully cracked copy of Vista. The install appears activated, updates work, and no key needs to be entered, straight from the installation media without any effort on the part of the pirate. There have been other Vista cracks out there, but they required a bit of effort on the part of the person installing it, it wasn’t exactly mainstream ready.

It’s taken a few months since the launch of Windows Vista but the product now seems to be successfully cracked It’s even more simple to install than previous leaked copies of WindowsXP - which always required a serial.

So can Microsoft’s new anti-piracy measures, coupled with Windows Update, will be able to counter-measure this new release? Even if it does, now that warez groups have found a method to install pre-cracked versions on the installation media Microsoft will have a significant fight on its hands to keep Vista piracy-free.

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