We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version, XTS mode, ability of the wizard to create hidden volumes within NTFS volumes, SHA-512, and more.

After four years of development, during which millions of people downloaded a copy of TrueCrypt, it is the only open-source disk encryption software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The newly implemented ability to encrypt system partitions and system drives provides the highest level of security and privacy, as all files, including any temporary files that Windows and applications create on system drives (typically, without the user’s knowledge or consent), swap files, etc., are permanently encrypted. Large amounts of potentially sensitive data that Windows records, such as the names and locations of files opened by the user, applications that the user runs, etc., are always permanently encrypted as well. For more information, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history

I’ve been noticing my interest in non-Microsoft languages has been on the rise lately. I’ve been actively playing with Ruby and PHP and have been blog surfing for information on functional languages like Lisp and Erlang.

I guess that’s why I suddenly became curious about the current popularity ratings of programming languages and started to search for some hard data. The most comprehensive rating system that I found so far is the Programming Community Index published by Tiobe Software.

Here’s an excerpt from their February 2008 results:

The list led me to a few surprising conclusions:

1. .NET isn’t as popular as I thought – It’s easy to lose perspective when you are surrounded by a single technology. For some reason I had assumed that C# and Java were equally popular. Although Java has declined about 5% on this survey over the last six years, it is still almost 5 times more popular than C#. In fact, C# is 8th on list behind C, C++, Perl, and even Visual Basic (oh the scandal!).
2. Ruby didn’t make the top 10 – Although there has been somewhat of a backlash against Ruby in the blogosphere over the last few months, I still assumed it was popular enough to be in the top 10. I suppose I should have guessed as much after the last recruiter I talked to told me that she never heard of the language.
3. COBOL refuses to die – I was saddened to see that COBOL is still 15th on the list. Some languages just don’t know when to quit. This shouldn’t surprise me since the bank I used to work at was at least 3-5 years from retiring their last COBOL program when I left and they were further ahead of the game than the vast majority of other financial institutions (they adopted .NET when it was still in Beta).
4. Python was language of the year for 2008 – Apparently Tiobe awarded Python this status at the end of last year due to its surging popularity. I noticed this right after I got an impassioned endorsement of the language from someone whose opinion I respect. I guess it’s time to check it out.
5. Functional languages are still on the fringe – DotNetRocks has had about a dozen shows on various functional programming in the last several months, so I thought that was a sure sign that the paradigm had gone main stream after a mere 50 years of relative obscurity. However, Functional Languages as a whole come in at a paltry 1.4% compared to the whopping 98% dominance of Object-Oriented and Procedural languages combined. LISP tops out the list at number 20, while Haskell is 36th, Erlang is 46th, and Scala barely made the top 100. Given the fact that we have hit the wall on processor speed and are well on our way to scaling out to a gajillion cores, I’m surprised that functional languages haven’t achieved a Ruby like cult status yet. Do you really want to spend your golden years debugging multi-threaded programs in Java or .NET? I didn’t think so. On a brighter note, Functional language searches rate quite high on reddit as indicated by this other poll. Perhaps there is still hope.
   

   Category	Ratings February 2008	Delta February 2007
   Object-Oriented Languages	54.8%	+3.1%
   Procedural Languages	42.9%	-1.9%
   Functional Languages	1.4%	-0.4%
   Logical Languages	0.9%	-0.8%

6. Dynamic languages are coming on strong - Rails has definitely proven the value that dynamic languages can bring to the table in terms of meta-programming magic and generally making life easier for the programmer, but I was surprised to see that dynamic languages were already almost as popular as static languages in overall usage. I obviously forgot about the prevalence of PHP, Python, and Perl.
   

   Category	Ratings February 2008	Delta February 2007
   Statically Typed Languages	57.2%	-0.2%
   Dynamically Typed Languages	42.8%	+0.2%

As an interesting side note, there were some languages that didn’t show up on the list because of the “Turing Complete” requirements that the site used.

A language is considered a programming language if it is Turing complete. As a consequence, HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. This also holds for data query language SQL. SQL is not a programming language because it is, for instance, impossible to write an infinite loop in it. On the other hand, SQL extensions PL/SQL and Transact-SQL are programming languages. ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, and AJAX. Finally, we have also excluded assembly languages, although Turing complete, because they have a very different nature.

No matter how you look at it, there are a lot of options out there that are being taken seriously these days and the number seems to only be growing.

It reminds me of a quote that I recently heard from Steven Forte. He stated in an interview that he won’t hire candidates if they have too much experience in any one language. He suggested only spending about 2 years on a language before moving on to something else. I was skeptical of his career advice at first, but now I’m starting to think that he had a point.

We are clearly entering the era of the polyglot programmer, which means that diversification is becoming more and more of a career asset.

Someone please tell me this is just a teaser to the real Flashing Lights video by Kanye West or I’ll be severely disappointed!

Btw.. in case you’re wondering, the model is the vid is Rita G.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of the first film collaboration between martial arts superstars Jackie Chan and Jet Li. If not, here’s the latest trailer for The Forbidden Kingdom.

The film co-stars include Li Bingbing who plays a white haired assasin and Liu Yifei who plays an orphan warrior.

Li Bingbing

Liu Yifei

Jet Li

Jacki Chan

The movie hits theaters April 18th.

This semester 25 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will gather in a classroom with one particular purpose: playing with cell phones.

The students are taking a class geared around Android — the first fully open mobile operating system developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG). The class will cover the ins and outs of the Android platform and build applications to run on the operating system.

The class, which at least 50 students tried to enroll in, is being offered to students in the computer science major at MIT and is designed to give them an early edge in what could soon become a dominant platform among cell phone operating systems. As smart phones and cell phones with Web functions have grown in popularity, there is growing interest among computer science pupils to learn how to create and launch applications and software for mobile operating systems, said Andrew Yu, mobile devices platform coordinator for MIT.

“It’s definitely something that captures students’ interest,” he said. “Given the fact that they actually have the devices, they want to do something with it.”

[via Bizjournals]

In various presentations throughout 2007, the Twitter team has made reference to a pure Ruby message queue server called Starling, written by our own Blaine Cook.

Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth. An asynchronous messaging solution is becoming a necessity for big web applications, and Starling fits the particular needs we have at Twitter. It’s fast, it’s stable, it speaks the memcache protocol so it doesn’t need a new client library, and it’s disk-backed for persistence. When other parts of the Twitter site go down, Starling stays up. It’s a champ, and we love it.

Until now, Starling has lived a sheltered life in the Twitter code base. We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve. We’re eager to see patches and to start a proper open source community around Starling.

To give Starling a try today, just sudo gem install starling on your favorite Ruby development box. Let’s see some serious queues!(Twitter)

YouTube launched a Korean-language interface to its popular video streaming Web site Wednesday.

The new service also includes content from local partners and will face tough competition from established local video sites like Pandora TV and portals like Daum.

Korea has a high level of broadband Internet penetration and streaming video has been popular for several years. It was one of the first countries in the world where over-the-air TV networks offered their full programming live and on-demand through their Web sites. The emergence of community and portal sites has also made user-generated video popular, although YouTube has not seen much success due to the strong local sites.

Last year YouTube set to expand its international reach with local language interfaces and domain names for several countries including Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. It also launched local sites for the U.K. and Ireland.

Google, which owns YouTube, has also had mixed success in South Korea but last year began building up a local office in Seoul. In May it renewed its Korean homepage with the addition of a toolbar and animated icons that provide shortcuts to site features. The update represents the furthest Google has moved from its classic minimalist design on any nation pages.

[via PC World]

Automattic, the company best-known for blog publishing software WordPress, has raked in $29.5 million in Series B funding. Originally reported on several blogs, the funding round was confirmed by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg in his personal blog Tuesday evening.

The most notable of the investors is the New York Times Co., which joins existing Automattic investors Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Automattic turned down an acquisition offer several months ago from a “larger Internet company.” Mullenweg’s only apparent reference to this in his blog post was his statement that WordPress had become so successful that choosing between the “approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments” became an obvious next step.

Automattic has about 18 employees, according to the Journal, and also operates several lesser-known software products like forum software BBPress and spam management product Akismet. But WordPress is its centerpiece, powering around 2.2 million blogs–active and otherwise–from personal blogs to the digital properties of high-profile media publications like The New York Times, Fortune, and CNN. The Journal hinted that some of the $29.5 million will be used to allow some early employees and investors to cash out; GigaOm’s Om Malik suggested that the company may also hire more engineers, anticipating continued growth.

Mullenweg’s blog post seemed to confirm this speculation: “Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better Web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in antispam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.”

[via news]

The presentation lacked the revolutionary fervor of previous years, but the Apple CEO did introduce a slew of useful and sexy products.

It’d be a cheap shot for me to say that Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote this year was a little bit of a let-down. It’d be true, but it’d be a cheap shot.

I think Jobs himself was aware this isn’t a revolutionary year for Apple — he omitted his characteristic “one more thing,” the statement used in past years to signal the introduction of game-changing technology.

Still, Jobs introduced a slew of meaty and attractive new products and services at his keynote Tuesday. The ultra-thin MacBook Air is guaranteed to be the notebook computer of choice for the fashionable geek this year. Updates to iPhone and iPod Touch software will make the devices more easy-to-use, useful, and fun. New wireless backup technology will make it a lot easier for users to protect their data.

And one of the announcements might prove revolutionary after all: The package of movie rentals over iTunes, along with upgrades to Apple TV. But it’s too early to tell whether movie rentals will transform home theater the way iTunes and the iPod transformed the music industry. iTunes movie rentals will launch with a very limited selection — although the business could prove formidable indeed if Apple can ramp up its catalog rapidly.

Everybody’s talking about the MacBook Air and iTunes, so I’ll run down the keynote in chronological order, which will let me highlight some of the less prominent — but still interesting — announcements, and describe what it was like to be there.

Introducing Time Capsule

The keynote kicked off with a viewing of a recent I’m a Mac/I’m a PC commercial, with a “Happy New Year” theme. The Mac guy was happy because he had a great year. The PC guy… not so much. But the PC guy was looking forward to a great 2008, copying what the Mac did in 2007.

Jobs took the stage dressed as always in black mock turtleneck sweater and jeans. “Thank you for an extraordinary 2007,” he told the audience, and then trotted out the statistics: Leopard shipped 5 million copies in 2007, making it the most successful Mac OS ever. Nineteen percent of the Mac OS X installed base has upgraded.

He introduced Time Capsule, a hardware companion to Leopard Time Machine backup software. When Leopard shipped in the autumn, Time Machine required backing up to an attached external or internal hard drive, which is especially inconvenient for notebook users, who need to be able to take their devices with them. Apple introduced the Time Capsule home backup server to allow wireless backup. The Time Capsule includes a built-in 802.11n Airport Extreme base station, with a server-grade hard drive. “You can back up every Mac in your house to one server,” Jobs said.

The Time Capsule will come in a 500 Gbyte configuration, priced at $299, or 1 Tbyte for $499.

Jobs broke for another I’m a Mac/I’m a PC commercial. This one showed the Mac guy duplicated many times, to illustrate Time Machine, which the PC guy found annoying. Oh, that PC guy, how put-upon he is!

What’s New For iPhone

iPhone Upgrade Jobs then transitioned to talking about the iPhone.

“Today happens to be exactly the 200th day since the iPhone went on sale,” he said, “and I’m extraordinarily pleased to report that we have sold 4 million iPhones today.” That’s a rate of 20,000 per day, he noted.

In its first quarter of availability, the iPhone became the second-most popular smartphone available, with 19.5% market share, topped only by the RIM BlackBerry, with 39% market share — statistics which Jobs attributed to Gartner. The iPhone has more market share than Palm, Motorola, and Nokia. As a matter of fact, those three vendors combined have only slightly more market share than the iPhone.

Jobs mentioned the upcoming software developer kit, which will allow third-party developers to write software for the iPhone, only in passing. Instead, he talked about a significant new upgrade to the iPhone software, made available after the keynote Tuesday.

The new version upgrades the Maps application so the iPhone can find and display its current location, by triangulating on nearby cell towers using technology from Google. The mapping also triangulates on Wi-Fi hotspots using technology for Skyhook Wireless, which has mapped 23 million hotspots worldwide, and can triangulate based on beacons from known hotspots even if the user isn’t logged in to the hotspot.

The Maps upgrade gives the application a less-confusing user interface. Users can drop a pin on a specific location and bookmark the pin.

Users will be able to use Web Clips to bookmark Web pages on the iPhone home screen. Users will be able to create up to nine home screens, which they can toggle between similar to the way they now browse photos. The iPhone will also support sending SMS messages to multiple recipients. Video upgrades include adding chapters, subtitles, and graphics.

Web clips not only work as bookmarks, they remember the specific zooming and panning in the browser, and return to that location and zoom level — handy if you want to mark your place on a specific section of a specific page, like the technology section of the New York Times home page.

Users can rearrange icons on the iPhone home screen by simply tapping and holding on any icon for about three seconds. At that point, all the icons start to wiggle, and can be slid around with a fingertip, or moved to another home screen.

And the iPod application was upgraded to allow displaying song lyrics, where those are available. (Good. Now maybe I’ll be able to figure out the lyrics to “1-2-3-4″ by Feist — which, by the way, was playing just prior to Jobs coming on stage.)

The upgrade is free to iPhone customers.

The iPod Touch — often described as an iPhone without the phone bits — gets an upgrade to incorporate the iPhone’s Mail, Stocks, Weather, and Web Clips applications. The upgraded software is being built into new Touches immediately, and it’s a $20 upgrade to existing users.

You Ought To Be In Pictures

Movie Rentals Jobs said the iTunes store reached a landmark last week, selling its 4 billionth song. On Christmas Day, the store sold 20 million songs. In the history of the service, it has sold 125 million TV shows and 7 million movies. “That’s more than everyone else put together, but it’s failed to meet expectations,” Jobs said.

Buying movies doesn’t really fit the way that most people consume movies, Jobs said. They’ll listen to a favorite song thousands of times, and so it makes sense to own it, but they usually only watch a movie once.

To boost sales and better fit how people use movies, Apple introduced movie rentals in iTunes. Jobs said that Apple has lined up the six major American movie studies: 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony. “We have every major studio supporting it,” Jobs said.

The service includes all popular first-run movies, and a library of old movies.

Jobs said that the service will have over 1,000 movies by the end of February, and movies will be available 30 days after their DVD release.

Movies will be viewable on Macs, PCs, current generation iPods, and iPhones. Users will be able to start watching movies instantly if they’re connected to broadband. Users will have 30 days to start watching, then 24 hours to finish. Movies can be transferred from one device to another — for example, they can start watching a movie on their Mac, and finish on the iPod.

Pricing is $2.99 for movies in the library, and $3.99 for new releases — $3.99 and $4.99 for high-def. The service launched Tuesday in the U.S, and internationally later this year.

The movie rentals are an intriguing offering, especially when paired with the new Apple TV (more on that later). Ramping up the selection will be essential to the service’s success. One thousand titles sounds like a lot, but actually it’s not much at all. Netflix has a selection of 90,000 DVDs for rent, plus 5,000 available for viewing on demand.

Jobs then turned to Apple TV. He reviewed the history of media-center PCs briefly, noting that Microsoft, Apple, TiVo, and others have tried interesting users in media-center PCs for their living rooms. “And you know what? We all missed,” he said. No one has been successful.

Apple introduced Apple TV last year, a device for viewing movies and TV downloaded from iTunes. It required a network connection to a PC or Mac running iTunes.

Apple TV Take 2 removes the requirement for a second computer, allowing users to rent directly from their televisions. The machine will support high-definition movies with Dolby 5.1, allow users to view photos on Flickr or the .Mac service, or YouTube video.

Apple TV will also allow users to buy TV shows. Jobs made no mention of renting TV shows, which seemed a gap in their service. If people are more interested in renting movies than owning them, surely that goes double for TV shows.

The user interface for Apple TV borrows elements from hotel-room pay-per-view services, Amazon.com, and TiVo. Users can browse by genre, see what other movies people who rented a given movie also rented, and search using text.

The service also supports over 125,000 podcasts.

The Apple TV demo was the occasion for the only glitch in the demo that I could spot — the Flickr photos didn’t come up. Jobs was very calm about the whole thing — he just waited a little bit to be sure the screen remained blank, commented, “Nope, I’m afraid Flickr isn’t serving,” and moved on.

The new capabilities are a free software upgrade for Apple TV.

Apple also announced a price cut for Apple TV. “Now, it sells for $299, ” Jobs said, “but not anymore.”

“Wow!” I thought to myself. “They’re cutting the pricing to $199.”

But the new price was $229. That’s a respectable discount, but it lacks that sub-$200 thrill.

The new Apple TV will be available in two weeks.

Fox will offer DVDs with technology on it that allows consumers to copy the content to an iPod or iPhone.

Something In The Air

The MacBook Air The tiny MacBook Air was the big gun at the keynote. Jobs said the device is the world’s thinnest notebook computer.

He compared it with most ultrathin notebooks, which, he said, weigh about 3 pounds, with 11-12″ displays, miniature keyboards, and 1.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

The MacBook air also weighs about 3 pounds, but other than that, it’s different from and more advanced than other ultrathins, Jobs said. He compared it to the ultrathin Sony Vaio, which, he said, is a wedge-shaped notebook that’s 1.2″ at the thickest and 0.8″ at the thinnest. In contrast, the MacBook Air is 0.76″ at the thickest, and 0.16″ at the thinnest. In other words, the thickest part of the MacBook Air is thinner than the thinnest part of the Vaio. It fits inside a big manila envelope — the kind that closes by looping red thread around buttons. Jobs showed a TV commercial demonstrating just that, and removed the MacBook Air from a manila envelope onstage.

The notebook has a magnetic latch, a 13.3″ instant-on wireless display with LED backing, built-in iSight camera, and full-size keyboard with backlight that automatically switches on when ambient lighting dims. “This is possibly the best notebook keyboard we’ve ever shipped,” Jobs said.

The notebook has a large trackpad, which supports multitouch gestures similar to the iPhone. Jobs demonstrated a few gestures using iPhoto: Double-tap and drag to move a window, pan a large photo by dragging with two fingers, rotate the photo by rotating two fingers, flick through photos by swiping a finger, and pinch in and out to zoom on a photo.

The notebook comes with an 80 Gbyte hard disk drive standard and optional 60 Gbyte solid state disk option. The spinning drive is a 1.8″ hard drive, same as on an iPod. The processor is a 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, with option to go to 1.8 GHz, same as in other notebooks and Macs. The processor was built specially by Intel to make it 60% smaller than the standard Core 2 processor.

The notebook has a magsafe connector and 45 watt power adapter. A latching door on one side of the unit accesses a USB 2.0 port, MicroDIV connection, headphone jack. The unit supports 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1.

Missing from the notebook: A hard Ethernet connection.

Also missing: An internal optical drive. Eleven years ago, Apple attracted criticism when it shipped the candy-colored iMac without a floppy disk drive built in, now it’s shipping a notebook without an internal optical drive. Apple will sell a detachable USB optical drive for $99. “But you know what, we don’t think most users will miss the optical drive. We don’t think most users will need that optical drive,” Jobs said.

Users use optical drives for movies, to burn backup disks, burn CDs for their cars, and install software, Jobs said. But iTunes will provide movies, Time Machine and Time Capsule will provide backup, and users can listen to music in their cars using iPods.

And for software installation, Apple is introducing technology to allow the MacBook Air to borrow optical drives from nearby PCs or Macs over a network. Users install special software on the remote machine, and the Air can address the remote machine’s optical drive as though it was the Air’s own. The Windows version of the software will allow PCs to run Mac installation programs on the Air’s behalf.

The unit has a five-hour battery life. Many ultrathin notebooks only have enough juice for an hour and a half.

The price will start at $1,799.

Jobs said the MacBook Air is designed to minimize harm to the environment. The aluminum case is fully recyclable. “As a matter of fact, it is an extra desirable recyclable material,” he said. It uses the first display that’s free of mercury and uses arsenic-free glass. And retail packaging is 50% less volume than previous MacBooks. Apple has been taking heat from Greenpeace, which claims the company’s environment practices are unsound.

The keynote concluded with music from Oscar-winning singer/songwriter Randy Newman, who wrote and sang for the soundtracks of Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and other Pixar movies.

He sang a satirical song about the end of the American empire. It was kind of a downer, actually, and added a political tone to the keynote that I thought was inappropriate.

But Newman saved the day by singing “You’ve Got a Friend In Me,” which, he explained, he wrote for Toy Story. “I actually wrote a great love theme, but they cut the Buzz-Woody love scene,” he said.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a long-awaited slimmer notebook, movie rentals for iTunes, and iPhone and iTouch updates at Macworld in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Mr. Jobs called the new Macbook Air “the world’s smallest” notebook.

Investors were underwhelmed. Shares of Apple dropped $11.55, or 6.46 percent, at $167.23.

Observers expected most of the announcements, and Jobs’ much-anticipated keynote address at the Moscone Center in San Francisco—while filled with showmanship—threw no curveballs.

But the audience still gushed with excitement when an image of the new Macbook Air was shown on a giant screen behind Jobs. With a maximum thickness of 0.76 inches, Apples’s newest laptop can fit in a standard manila folder, a claim Mr. Jobs proved on stage.

The new laptop will have a 13.3-inch widescreen, LED backlit display, a full-size keyboard, and multitouch gesture sensors. It will retail for $1799 and begin shipping in two weeks.

There had been speculation that the new laptop would use exclusively flash memory to help reduce its size, but that proved unfounded. Instead, the MacBook Air will borrow from iPod technology and have a 1.8-inch thick hard drive. Intel’s tiny new Core 2 Duo 1.6 Ghz processors have also helped shrink the motherboard.

“MacBook Air was built to be a wireless machine,” Mr. Jobs said.

The laptop will have built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity and a new option for remotely borrowing the optical drive of nearby computers—meant to make up for the new Mac’s lack of its own optical drive.

Apples’s wildly successful iTunes store will now offer digital movie rentals, where before it only gave the option to buy. Jobs announced content deals with major motion picture studios, including Universal, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Paramount, and Sony Pictures.

“This is a pretty big move,” Inside Digital Media analyst Phil Leigh said.

iTunes has become a retail powerhouse, used by 22 percent of the U.S. and Canadian online population and accounting for at least 20 percent of all U.S. music sales in 2007, according to Forrester Research.

But as popular as iTunes is for music purchases, the same has not been true for video. Apple hopes to change that by offering more content and the option to rent.

The Mac maker also plans to roll out the next generation of AppleTV, which can connect a living room TV directly to the Internet without the need of a separate computer. Users will be able to rent those iTunes movies and watch them on their flatscreen TVs. The new Apple TV will retail for $229, down from the previous $299 price tag.

iPhone users weren’t forgotten either. The new mapping feature will use Skyhook Wireless and Google technology to triangulate the phone’s position and then place it visually on a street map.

“The iPhone is not standing still,” Mr. Jobs said.

iPhone users will now be able to send SMS messages to multiple contacts at once, and users will be able to customize up to nine home screens by adding icons for links to web sites.

Apple also launched Time Capsule, a wireless external hard drive meant for backing up data. The new hard drive will retail for $299 for 500 gigabytes and $499 for 1 terabyte.