BBC Senses Challange

I love BBC's tests and I mentioned some of them here. The latest one I discovered is about testing your senses: 8/20 (I think I was too tired to take this test so late at night).

Zero Day Exploit For MS Word

Ginwui.A Backdoor Trojan Horse is Distributed Inside MS Word Document

Description: Ginwui.A is a new backdoor Trojan Horse that exhibits rootkit functionality and that may arrive at a user's workstation inside an MS Word document. This vulnerability is claimed to be used as part of an attack that involves the exploitation of an unpatched vulnerability in the MS Word application. Fingerprint information is as follows:

File Information:

· [Windows Temp directory]\csrse.exe

· [Windows system directory]\winguis.dll

The shellcode contained in the MS Word document decrypts and drops the backdoor's file as csrse.exe in the Windows temporary folder. After execution, this file then drops a second file, winguis.dll to the Windows System folder. The dropper then deletes itself from a system. The .dll file acts as a main backdoor component. This file also exhibits rootkit functionality since it hides certain processes from the computer user.

Look for the Windows registry key(s) created by Ginwui.A.

Recovery: Remove all files and the Windows registry key modifications associated with this malicious code threat. Restore corrupted or damaged files with clean back-up copies. Restore script.ini and other files potentially overwritten by the Trojan. Validate the functionality of all anti-virus and security-related software.

More info:

• symantec site
• SANS
  

Cutting Edge News

As I love to read technology news and would like to hear new things as soon as they become news, I will list some of the sites that I regularly visit (or syndicate via RSS) to get news:

• On top of my list is Technology Page of Google: news.google.com
• I also recently learnt and became addicted to digg.com
• ghacks.net is one of the first sites I love to read when I fire up my RSSOwl
• Yes, news on Google blog is much more exciting than news on Microsoft these days
• Interestingly, sometimes blogs on google are even more interesting: http://google.blognewschannel.com
• Bink.nu has been my primary source of information on Microsoft for years now...
• Who does not know about slashdot.org (Gee their interface is so outdated)
• I recently discovered a nice information source especially about *Betas* www.flexbeta.net
  
• And finally, Last year, I was sent to Tokyo for a business trip. Having lived in Japan for many years, my manager (then) called me into his office and made me a list of places to see. On top of the list was famous Akihabara, the electronics town! So, if you would like to know about newest, coolest gadgets, here is a site for you: www.akihabaranews.com.

Add yours...

Windows Media Player 11 Beta

It's available in its beta form here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx but honestly I don't know what's the big fuss about. It's polished and surely looks better than previous versions but I have not really noticed a huge difference. Maybe I have not looked around too carefully?

Accessing Favorites/Bookmarks From Anywhere

There used to be a lot of good & free websites, that offered favorites/bookmarks syncronization. My all-time favorite was SyncIt. Then, they started charging for the service and I dropped them! (Hmm, I just checked and it looks like they are free again).

Now that we have google, it's usually faster to find something by searching instead of trying to locate it among your bookmarks. Still, we can't stop bookmarking, can we?

So, in a catch-up game with Google, Microsoft started to offer some internet goodies, one of which is called "Windows Live Favorites". It's free in its beta form. You can easily upload all your bookmarks and access/edit them online anywhere.

There are also some other not-so-bad utilities on microsoft's ideas.live.com web site that you may want to check out.

File/Folder Sharing with PowerFolder

PowerFolder is a free peer to peer tool that synchronizes whole folders over the internet or local network.

In fact, It looks very promising as a back up solution. They just released PowerFolder 1.0 (for Windows & Linux). It's Java-based and installation will not finish if you do not have Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or above, so you may want to go to www.java.com and download it if you do not have it.

[Update - 05/17/2006]
I am really disappointed! Application has many features I love, GUI is beautiful, it is very easy to use and intuitive BUT it keeps on hanging :(
I installed it on my 3 PCs (2 XP and 1 Win2K3) and set up some folders for syncronization. These folders have about 150 folders & 15000 files. What I see is, it detects the differences and starts uploading/downloading but in a few minutes my systems start to hang. It seems to be very resource hungry and kicks my CPU usage to 100% (I have dual P4-2.8 GHz CPU).

Mathieu mentioned another application called iFolder. I also heard about some other file/folder syncronization software like SyncBack, Unison & BestSync...

I already tested Unison but did not really like it. I had to install GTK+, for which I needed to install Gaim for Windows. I could not specify a remote folder using \\ notation. It uses ssh, rsh or socket method to connect to a remote host. Too troublesome...

Free version of SyncBack (v.3.2) seems quite promising actually. I installed it on only one of my PCs and I was able to specify remote directories for sync'ing. Speed was OK. Setting up sync profiles were straight forward too. I am planning to install it on the other PCs and modify sync profiles accordingly. I checked their Support site and two methods to carry profiles were discussed here.

Taking notes via IM: Sabifoo

I was looking for a way to take notes and access them from anywhere and I came across this interesting tool called Sabifoo. You just add it to your IM. Then, whatever message you sent to it will be posted to a web site and you can retrieve it from there.

Service Contact To Add AOL Instant Messenger sabifoo Jabber sabifoo@sabifoo.com MSN Messenger sabifoo@sabifoo.com Yahoo Messenger sabifoo Google Talk sabifoo@gmail.com

There is more to it that you can read at Sabifoo Help Page

Skype: Free PC to landline calls

Yippee! I love skype. Voice quality is very good compared to others. As explained in this FT article, now they are upping ther ante and making it free to call landlines from your PC (skypeOut) *FREE* until the end of the year! Competition is good!

[Update-1]
I've downloaded the latest Skype 2 and made calls to regular home and cell phones without any issues. I've also tried the Skype 2.5 beta (2.5.0.72), which has additional features that makes calling even easier. On the left, you can see the "import contacts from Outlook" screen. Instead of importing them, you can also just "view" them.

Fallacies and how to recognize them

We all have our biases and argue with others. You sometimes see people arguing in a faul way. They use fallacies. Below is a description of fallacies from Nizkor Project Web Site. You can also find there how to recognize fallacies. A must-read!

Description of Fallacies

In order to understand what a fallacy is, one must understand what an argument is. Very briefly, an argument consists of one or more premises and one conclusion. A premise is a statement (a sentence that is either true or false) that is offered in support of the claim being made, which is the conclusion (which is also a sentence that is either true or false).

There are two main types of arguments: deductive and inductive. A deductive argument is an argument such that the premises provide (or appear to provide) complete support for the conclusion. An inductive argument is an argument such that the premises provide (or appear to provide) some degree of support (but less than complete support) for the conclusion. If the premises actually provide the required degree of support for the conclusion, then the argument is a good one. A good deductive argument is known as a valid argument and is such that if all its premises are true, then its conclusion must be true. If all the argument is valid and actually has all true premises, then it is known as a sound argument. If it is invalid or has one or more false premises, it will be unsound. A good inductive argument is known as a strong (or "cogent") inductive argument. It is such that if the premises are true, the conclusion is likely to be true.

A fallacy is, very generally, an error in reasoning. This differs from a factual error, which is simply being wrong about the facts. To be more specific, a fallacy is an "argument" in which the premises given for the conclusion do not provide the needed degree of support. A deductive fallacy is a deductive argument that is invalid (it is such that it could have all true premises and still have a false conclusion). An inductive fallacy is less formal than a deductive fallacy. They are simply "arguments" which appear to be inductive arguments, but the premises do not provided enough support for the conclusion. In such cases, even if the premises were true, the conclusion would not be more likely to be true.

Read more at Nizkor Project Web site. You may also want to visit Constructing a Logical Argument

Google Trends

Google recently announced yet another nice search related feature called 'Google Trends'. Basically, it's a web site (http://google.com/trends) where you can type keywords and see how popular those keywords has been over the time and where they are most popular. It's fun to throw out some keywords into it and see the results.

Let me warn you though, if you put in more than one keyword, then results are displayed so that you will see the cities where the first keyword is most popular and popularity of the remaining keywords on these cities. So, I would suggest to use one keyword at a time.

See above a screenshot for "science". Yet another sign of upcoming India?

Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish?

I'm back in my home country, Turkey, for a few days now and I just heard about some discussions on singing star-spangled banner in Spanish.

Someone in an Orkut Community pointed out to this link where it is said that "U.S. Government Commissioned Spanish-Language ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ in 1919". What's more interesting is this link though:

In the early 1800's musical instruments and performances were not common in America. Music was generally imported from Europe, and popular tunes were frequently re-used as foundations for other lyrics. As an example, Maryland's state song, "Maryland, My Maryland" can be recognized as the German tune, "O Tannenbaum" (Oh Christmas Tree). Francis Scott Key used this English drinking song to set the meter of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Are you good at geography?

Take this test from National Geographic and find out:
http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/index.html

I was not too bad but did not do very well either 16/20. If you are into geography, you may also try this but I am warning you,it is tough, very tough (I guess I am saying that because my accuracy was merely 20%)

I love the new Goowy

Afew months ago, I posted some information about Goowy. Mark Cuban had mentioned it on his blog. I liked the interface then, but they were not offering that much other than 1Gig e-mail which I already had plenty of anyway. It looks like they improved it a lot!

Apparently, Mark liked it so much that he invested in them. After seeing the enhancements, I can understand why. They are now also offering 1 GB free space that you can access from anywhere. They also offer a GAIM like Instant Messenger interface. You can also import your contacts there (they support up-to 1000) either using a CSV file or from other common web based e-mail accounts.

Unfortunately, there is not a Linux version of Macromedia Flash Player v.8, so I could not use it from my Ubuntu installation. They also do not yet offer pop3 access. So, there is still room to enhance but it's a much better site now!

Welcome Mathieu!

I am pleased to announce that my linux guru, Mathieu Wache, has accepted my invitation to join to scorion.net as a contributor. In fact, I would like to soo more of my friends join to this blog and share their experiences. Who knows, maybe someone out there will benefit from entries we post here. Peace!

Digg in?

Ever since Google started their "News Site", I've been using it as my home-page. I customized it a little bit, increased the number of news in Tech/Science, Sports, Business etc... It's a good short-cut to check for technology news.

Yet, it's not enough. Too many things happen in the tech world everyday (thanks god!). slashdot.org is many people's favorite but I never like the interface. So, I was pretty excited when I heard about "digg". A lot of last minute technology news from all over the world. So far, 'I'm lovin' it".

Don't forget to check "Digg spy" to get a sense of updates...

Ubuntu Install

A few weeks ago, Mathieu, a friend of mine from work, gave me a "original" Ubuntu CDs and I promised myself to dump my Fedora Core 4 & test Ubuntu instead. Unfortunately, I was very busy and I even forgot where I put the CD.

INSTALLATION BLUES
Finally, last week, I downloaded Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 (meaning 2005 / October release). Unfortunately, installation did not finish. I kept on getting installation failures about some "initrd-tools".

As I see it, it is good that things do not work and it gives me a chance to do some research and learn while trying to fix it... Some people in Ubuntuforums suggested that they burnt their CD images with lower speeds and it worked but that did not sound right to me. Plus, it did not work for some other people. Yet, they might have a point...

So, I found the CDs Mathieu had given to me and tried to install it on the PCs. It worked like a charm on both. Setup was a breeze :)

To be able to use Synaptic Package Manager to get updates, I had to enter my proxy into Settings > Preferences > Network.

UPGRADING TO DAPPER DRAKE 6.06
Then, I decided to update my Ubuntu to the latest test version: Dapper Drake 6.06 (it will be released in June). The problem I usually faced with Fedora was that if I wanted to upgrade, let's say, from Core 3 to Core 4, cleanest way was to dump the previous version and install the new version from scratch.

As Ubuntu is based on Debian Technology, it does a much better job in handling such issues. Unfortunately my first attempt was unsuccesful.



Then, I wanted to see how the latest Beta was and as someone suggested edited my sources.list file which is like yum repositories of Fedora in Ubuntu World:

sudo sed -i -e "s/breezy/dapper/" /etc/apt/sources.list

Then ran the following commands

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I did not pay attention to any messages and just rebooted when finished and all hell broke loose. X-Server would just not start! I googled to see if anyone else had the same issue and sure enough many people had seen similar issues. Unfortunately, none of the fixes suggested worked:

• sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

After spending a few hours and trying every trick I could find, I gave up & reinstalled Breezey Badger from scratch.

I mentioned my experience to Mathieu, and we tried it together on my pc at work. We first needed to enable proxy by entering the following in a terminal window:
export http_proxy=http://proxyext.ourserver.com:8080

I actually used my old entry in this blog about configuring yum to make the change permenant :)

Then we manually edited /etc/apt/sources.list and replaced "breezy" with "dapper".

Then we ran:

• sudo apt-get update

and we realized that we had missed one entry in the sources.list that was pointing to Breezy Badger 5.10 CD. After removing it, things worked out smoothly. Then, we ran the dist-upgrade:

• sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Upgrade took about 30mins. Once it was finished, I noticed the changes on the screen. New icons are amazingly cute and bright. I loved the new interface!

CONNECTING TO NTFS
The very first thing I wanted to do after I got the new OS was to access my mp3s on my Windows 2003 R2 server. This was surprisingly easy:

Clicked to Places > Connect to Server and just entered the hostname, sharename, username and password. In fact, I noticed that the shortcut that automatically got created on the desktop was still available after reboot, I just needed to enter my password to the key-ring.

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
So, now that I had access to my mp3s, I wanted to play them. As I knew from Fedora, there are licensing issues and official release does not have the necessary codecs etc.

How-to docs were readily available in Ubuntu Wiki > Multimedia section.
By enabling the multiverse and universe repositories and installing the gstreamer0.8-mad packages:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (for Dapper Draker 6.06 only)

I was supposed to be done. As expected, when I clicked on mp3s, Totem Launched without complaining but I heard no sound.

I ran lspci to check if system detected my sound card and it showed

0000:05:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Audigy LS

This reminded me of my "No Sound on Fedora Core 3" entry last year :) I was then able to solve that problem using alsamixer. When I googled for ubuntu sound problems, I saw that some people had solved that problems via alsamixer too.

So, I launched it and started to play with it. I found out that I had to increase the volume level for "Analog Front" channel.

All issues behind, I am quite happy right now. The next is to play DivX, DVD etc. I need to find something like PowerDVD in linux...

Open Command Prompt Here

On my XP box, when I browse to a folder where I need to open a command prompt, I just right click and have the option "Command Prompt Here'. That's available because I installed Windows XP Power Toys, which includes "Open Command Window Here" (aka cmdhere) toy.

It's possible to do the same on Windows 2003 and you can do it too:

1. Open regedt32 and navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell folder.
2. Add a new key called “Command Prompt“
3. Modify the default custom string to read “Open Command Window Here“
4. Add a new key to this folder called “command“
5. Modify the default custom string to read: Cmd.exe /k pushd %L
6. Changes will take effect immediately

Or just copy the lines below to a text file and rename it as something like "cmdhere.reg". Then, when you click (or double click) it, you will have the option to import it...

------ Include all lines below this line -----
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\CMD]
@="Open CMD Here"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\CMD\command]
@="cmd.exe /k pushd %L"
------ Include all lines above this line -----

Me Gusta Muive Muive

If I remember correctly, that means something like "I want to move it move it" :) I guess it well describes the game I want to mention here:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~pontipak/redsquare.html

There is a little red square that you can move with your mouse. You should not touch any of the blue squares or black space. Can you do it for 18secs ?

Can not Install SyncToy...

We were seeing some issues with the hard drive on my wife's pc recently so, I ordered two Maxtor 300GB Hard drives from Tiger Direct last week.

It turned out to be a very timely order! To my surprise, I lost two hard drives out of four on my two HP XW6000 PCs the very same weekend. Luckily, I was checking the Event Viewer and noticed "dsk" alerts like:

"The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent."

I was able to back up all my data before they totally crashed :) So, I installed new drives on my PCs. One XP and one Windows 2003. I tend to use my own scripts & robocopy for back up but wanted to install Microsoft's SyncToy 1.2 on my XP box. Guess what? I could not...

During SyncToy installation, I got the message below:

This setup requires the .NET Framework version 1.1.4322. Please install the .NET Framework and run this setup again. The .NET Framework can be obtained from the web. Would you like to do it now? Yes Button No Button

Yes Button will lead you to http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx. From here you have the choice of 3 .NET Framework versions to choose from as of this writing, among Service Packs, SDKs, Compact Framework, Redistributable for Windows 2003, and others. And nowhere does it mention version 1.1.4322, which is required according to the message mentioned above.

Because I installed everything from scratch, Windows update installed .NET Framework 2.0.50727 on my machine and it appears that it is not backward compatible. What a shame!

I downloaded .NET Framework 1.1 from Microsoft but it would not install. I googled and it looks like there are others who had the same issue. I liked the blog entry from Haidong Ji, who has a good blog called Ji Village News. You can read his story here...

So, I guess I will keep on using Robocopy :)

Rosetta Stone for SysAdmins

My friend, Nageen "Bad-Boy" Panchani sent this link: http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
You can choose from a number of OSes including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and a bunch of other *nix flavors, and you will get a nice table which tells you what the command is for a specific task in each OS.

Access denied .File is in use blah blah

Oh, don't you hate to see access denied messages when you trying to copy/delete a file?


A friend of mine had showed me a trick that sometimes work:
If the filename is abc.dll -> rename the file like this abcd.dll_
that magical "underscore " may help you.

But if not, try this nice & free utility named Unlocker.

AlertBear

So, you have tons of RSS feeds and rather than reading them like e-mails, you would prefer to get alerts as the feeds become available? Let me introduce you to AlertBear (Windows Only)!

Altiris Software Virtualization Solution

With Altiris SVS, you can install any program to a transparent layer that snags all attempts that the program makes to write to your system, instead saving them inside of the layer. That means no extra .dll’s and no permanent registry changes - SVS takes care of all of that....

Read the rest of the article at LifeHacker.com

Disposable e-mail services

I saw a nice article at ghacks.net about the subject:

There are two ways to avoid spam when registering somewhere on the internet. First you can use Disposable Email Address Services that allow you to check an email account that is not your own and email aliases that webmailers like gmail and yahoo mail offer. I will only post free sites that offer the first service.

The procedure itself is always the same. You go to the website of the service and take a look at the requirements of the email address. For example the service www.mytrashmail.com offers only free emails that use somename@mytrashmail.com. After this you visit the website you want to register with and enter an email address which could be anything as long as it ends with @mytrashmail.com....

Email Aliases:

This is becoming increasingly popular. I only tested it with my gmail account but friends told me that yahoo for instance is offering a similar service. You can send emails using a service called plus addressing. This is not documented yet in the help files so I explain the basic concept. Lets say your email address is ghacks@gmail.com and you want to register at a website. You might register with an email alias that looks like ghacks+sitename@gmail.com. The verification mail will be send to your inbox and you can reply to it to activate the account.

Read all at source

Meet the Life Hackers

This is a lengthy but a must read article about "life hackers"...

Meet the Life Hackers
Can anyone find a way to make your constantly beeping computer leave you alone and let you work? Inside the nascent field of interruption science.
by Clive Thompson
Read at source

David Lynch: Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain

A wonderful webcast I would suggest everyone to watch: David Lynch: Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain. Check out Wikipeadia for more info on David Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet & Straight Story are among my favorite movies.

Also, someting to check if you are in NYC: Practical Philosophy

Free USB Drive from Microsoft

Head over to the Mystery Solved site of microsoft.com and click on the usb stick on the right where it says Get Yours. You need to sign in with passport.net and answer the following questions:

Q1. How many ways are there to obtain a full Microsoft® Windows® Desktop license?
Answer:: 2

Q2: Volume License Agreements cover Windows Desktop operating system upgrades only.
Answer: True

Q3: OEM operating system licenses are non-transferable.
Answer: True

Q4: The most cost-effective way to acquire an initial, full underlying Windows Desktop license is preinstalled.
Answer: True

It will take between 6 and 8 weeks before you get the stick, but free is free, right ?

Microsoft's Origami Project

Have you heard of Microsoft's Origami Project? Have you seen http://www.origamiproject.com, you must be wondering what the demo is talking about and what will be announced on March 9, 2006.

Hmm, here is a tip: would you want to have just one device that would do what all other devices like blackberry, treo, palm & camera phone, mp3 player can do? :) Well, at least that's the promise of the new gadget Microsoft is supposed to announce in a week from now & we'll see if it is hot or hype

What's Up? Need Global News?

I recently found about 'What's up?' thanks to Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion. It's a global news service! Hmm, I can't really imagine myself sitting in front of this watching what's wrong with the world but I like the idea!

Windows Defender Beta 2

You can download & install Windows Defender Beta 2 from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

Online Games

I just finished chapter 1 :)
http://www.samorost2.net/

Nba games on Google Videa

http://video.google.com/nba.html

Free Picture

Oh, the extend people go to for a free picture! This is hilarious:
http://www.youtube.com/player.swf?video_id=vEWLwz6JRNE&l=357&s=B4BC767

Super Bowl ads on Google Video

Just in case you missed any of the Super Bowl ads yesterday, you can see them on Google video: http://video.google.com/superbowl.html

Starbucks Promotion

As a sign of gratitute for our hard work, one of our managers gave us Starbucks cards. I loved it & I have to habit of registering such things. So I went to Starbucks' site for registration http://www.starbucks.com/card and there I saw a good promotion: If you put $50 into your card using a visa credit card, they treat you for $10. Not bad, eh? Offer valid until the end of February

See details here:
http://www.starbucks.com/card/visa_promo.asp

Less Known Firefox Addons

I saw a good article titled "10 Useful Firefox Extensions that don't get glamorized":

1. Download Statusbar - view and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar, so that downloads don't get in the way of browsing
2. Colorful Tabs - May sound really boring, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to distinguish between tabs
3. Image Zoom - This is one of my personal favs as it allows me to zoom in on images on a page without having to download them
4. PDF Download - For all those annoying sites that seem to grow and grow where they are worried about you stealing their content. This extension allows PDFs to be opened in a tab for easier management
5. Tab Mix Plus - Every tweak and option under the sun you could ever want to manage tabs
6. WebmailCompose - Fantastic extension that opens your chosen webmail compose window if any email addresses are clicked on
7. Optimoz Tweaks - If you a heavy user of sidebars this great extension makes it easier to open and close them
8. Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer - The only bookmarks sync tool I've found that works seamlessly between PCs
9. Autohide - This one isn't promoted heavily, but if you like browsing full-screen it gives some useful control over what elements Firefox displays
10. MediaPlayerConnectivity- automatically launches all media elements in their correct players, allowing full-screen playback of embedded videos

New Beta Apps

Google Toolbat 4 Beta: This is a nice upgrade to previous version with lots of wild reviews. Yeah, yeah, ability to add custom toolbar icons is cool alright!

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview: It's not even Beta 2 but what the heck! I downloaded it anyway. Guess what? I could not install it as I already had Beta 1 on my Windos XP box and I am yet to find out how to uninstall that version first :(

Sniffing Wireless Internet Connections Around...

Nobody will be surprised to hear that there are plenty of 'open' wireless routers out there that one can use. More and more people, however, are not broadcasting their SSID. Sheer Boredom has a nice article telling us about how to sniff them ;-) Oh, BTW, one of the apps they mention is named Kismet. Guess what, I guess the author of the app is not but the word Kismet is a common Turkish word which means 'fate'.

Quick Reference Guide

I saw a web page with nice Quick Ref. guides here. It includes quick reference guides to:

• Visual Basic
• Perl
• Win32 Perl Routines
• Apache
• Linux Administration
• Solaris Administration
• Bash
• Emacs
• Vi

MSN 8.0 Beta - Windows Live Messenger Beta

I got an invitation to join Windows Live Messenger Beta (MSN 8.0 Beta) testers. Thanks, Tolga! I downloaded and installed it. It looks pretty good! Messenger blog is here. You can see some screenshots there too.

Voice calling? How will that work?
Using Windows Live Call in Messenger, you’ll be able to start making calls within minutes to your friends’ across the country or around the world by singing up for MCI Web Calling. You will be able to purchase minutes upfront from MCI and then add minutes when your balance runs low. One of the great things about this will be the affordable domestic and international calls you will be able to make.

What are Sharing Folders?
Sharing Folders will be a new and simple way for you to share personal photos, documents, and files with your Messenger contacts. You will be able to create a Sharing Folder by simply dragging files onto a contact name in Messenger. This will create an exact copy of the files on both you and your contact's computers, and create a Sharing Folder that can be accessed from Messenger, and on the desktop.

I can already share documents using e-mail. So what's the big deal?
The Sharing Folder will be easier than email for sharing photos and documents. In a Sharing Folder, any time a file in the folder is added, modified, or deleted, those changes will be synchronized with the person you’re sharing with. The Sharing File icon in Messenger will also show you a gleam on a contact so you will know when a Sharing File has been updated. And it will be a simple drag-and-drop to share files, even simpler than the “send file” and “save as” functions you are already familiar with in Messenger.

The Sharing Folders will work pretty much like the PC folder experience you already know, so it will make sense right away. Just like in Windows, you will be able to drag and drop, get different views of files, copy, paste, etc. You will be able to access a Sharing Folder from your desktop, to manage files whether online or offline. And a Sharing Folder requires virtually zero setup or configuration, and efficiently handles file synchronization without any fuss.

10 things I don’t miss about Norway

Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon) is famous for his DeCSS application which decodes the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement. This software finally led to successful copying of DVDs.

As of 2005, Johansen is now working at MP3tunes in San Diego as a software engineer. He has a blog named So Sue Me and a few days ago he wrote an entry titled 10 things I don’t miss about Norway

This led to numerous discussions and in my opinion tons of hilarious comments, this being my favorite

Downloading Google Video and YouTube Clips » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel

A nice article from Inside Google Blog:

One of the frustrating things about websites that use Flash video is that they rarely provide links to let you download the video files for offline viewing or transcoding/syncing to portable devices. That time has come to an end with this funky Greasemonkey plug.

Joshua Kinberg made it happen, now it’s your time to go have some fun !

Google Video Getter
YouTube To Me

To install these scripts you will need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. After installing Greasemonkey, relaunch Firefox, then right-click the links above and select “Install User Script.” Now whenever you browse to a Google Video or YouTube webpage, you will see a prominent download link at the top

Jay is Games : Top 20 Games of 2005

I have to confess: I did not pay attention to 'addictive' nature remarks & spent two hours solving the puzzles of Planarity. Kudos to the developer,Case Western University student, John Tantalo!

There are lots of other games mentioned in Jay is Games Blog entry of Top 20 games of 2005 that you would probably want to check out if you have time. ADDICTIVE!

Beautiful Wallpapers

I was testing yet another .net based RSSReader called RSS Bandit (which I will cover later on when I have enough to tell about it) when I came across this link: www.joejoe.biz in the New Links section of Populicious.

You will find incredible wallpapers on this site, which is very well organized and pretty fast. Take a look.

Goowy

Goowy is a name I heard on Mark Cuban's blog. If you are familiar with Yahoo's Widgets, you will find yourself at home. They are giving away 2GB free e-mail as well as other stuff. You can either use their nice web site or download Goowy desktop client.

By this time you should be asking why the funny name. Here is a few answer s from their FAQ:

Why did you name the service goowy? Isn't that a funny name that people are put off by?
goowy is actually meant to be playful and easy to remember. But its more than that. It's a play on words - the term GUI which is pronounced the same way, refers to a Graphical User Interface. We felt that one of the key areas where our application would make a difference is with the vibrant, interactive interface. And so goowy was born. There are people that feel funny about giving out something@goowy.com as their email address, but we imaging that when Hotmail and Yahoo first launched, there were similar reservations about their naming decisions. As we grow to be a household name, this will cease to be an issue.

What does the (re) in goowy (re) mean?
The (re) in goowy(re) stands for "rich experience". We believe in providing a truly interactive medium for managing our member's digital lifestyle.

What's a widget?
A widget is a small specialized application that provides easy access to frequently used functions or provides some visual information. Examples of widgets are news (rss) viewers, desktop notes, quotes, bookmarks, search windows, etc.

Where to Invest in 2006?

Here is an article titled "My investment advice for 2006" from Mark Cuban. In short he is telling everyone to stay away from stock market and go with an interest bearing investment. Why? See below an excerpt:

"For every stock you buy, there is someone selling you that stock. What is it that you know that they dont ? What is it that they know, that you dont ? Who has the edge ? If its not you. Chances are you are going to lose money on the deal."

He also has another article about the subject which to me is A MUST READ FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO INVEST IN STOCK MARKET. I guess I'll buy that "The Number" book he mentioned but I don't know if I'll probably take his advice and not go deeper than I already am.

Windows Live Ideas

What is Windows Live Ideas?

Windows Live Ideas is where you can check out the very latest Windows Live products—so new that they're not even finished yet. So give them a try and then tell us exactly what you think. And don't hold back. We need your help to make these products the best they can be.... You can continue at source & sign up for some beta Live products.

Windows .wmf vulnerability

Well, this has been around for a few days now but it looks like vulnerability is getting more and more dangerous. Although it's the .wmf files that has the vulnerability, attackers are simply changing the extention to .jpg or other innocent looking files.

Microsoft has released an advisory but no patch yet. There has been a patch made available on Hex Blog by Ilfak Guilfanov. I've already downloaded it from SANS' page and installed it. Use at your own risk.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you, dear reader, whoever you are!

With all these disasters around the world, I guess it was not a great year. but let's hope that 2006 will be a better one...

5 Best Freeware Games of 2005

I saw a good writing about the 5 Best Freeware Games of 2005 in ghacks.net. Nice :)

Firefox 1.5 now available

Mozilla foundation has just released Firefox 1.5. I'm using it now and seems to work fine with Blogger...

Live Domains Beta from MS

A new service was added to the Windows Live Beta family today - Windows Live Custom Domains. The basic idea is that anyone with a domain can now point their MX record to the Live servers. What that means is that users can have Microsoft's servers hosting their own domain's email accounts for free. There's a restriction of 20 email accounts per domain, with each mailbox getting 250MB of space. In addition, the same account functions as a Passport account, and can be used to sign in to MSN Messenger, MSN Spaces etc. I'm assuming users also get access to the spiffy, new AJAX-enabled Windows Live Mail Beta service as the webmail frontend for all their accounts, although that isn't explicitly mentioned anywhere on the site. The team that's working on this also has an official blog, just like all the other Live teams do. View: Windows Live Custom Domains View: Custom Domains Blog

Windows Desktop Search Enterprise Avilable

The new Windows Desktop Search (WDS) Enterprise version is now freely available for download from Microsoft.

Unlike the unmanaged consumer WDS version, the enterprise version is designed to work with automated deployment tools such as Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), Active Directory (AD), or Group Policy, or via any third-party deployment product. That means it supports a wide range of configuration options, allowing administrators to specify which features are available, which document types can be searched, and so on.

The product has several new capabilities as well. The Outlook toolbar is better integrated into the Outlook client, providing search results directly in the application--not in a separate window as with the consumer version. The scope of user searches is now configurable by administrators, letting you not only specify one or more custom intranet search strings but also a name of the WDS deskbar that identifies that location. For example, in the consumer version, the deskbar lets you search locally or on the Web; with the enterprise version, users will see a third choice--named as you see fit instead of a generic label such as "intranet" or "local network." Finally, because WDS is easily extensible via a simple API documented on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), corporations can easily add search support for custom document types that they use inhouse. And a wide range of free and low-cost add-ons for WDS is already available on addins.msn.com.

MSN Search Toolbar for enterprise is available too.

Wanto to see how people draw paintings?

Just sit back and see how amazingly creative artists can draw their paintings on the web using flash at http://flashcards.territory.ru/vec/

You can see the exact strokes from the beginning up to the final picture. The quality of some pictures is amazing....

Why QWERTY?

Ever wondered why we have the keyboard letters arranged as they are? A good article about the past of qwerty tells us why:

The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.
.
He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced....

Continue reading at the source: http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

Sony DRM Story

News is everywhere. Sony's latest CD installs a rootkit which hides itself from Windows OS. A few days ago Mark Russinovich wrote about his ingenious investigation and reveal of the rootkit in his blog. Apparently, rootkit was hiding any files that started with $Sys$. Fire caught up and in two days time Sony felt to pressure and responded with the "somewhat sloppy" fix.

SysInternals has a free utility called RootkitRevealer that I would suggest everyone to use as RootKits are much more dangerous that Viruses and Worms. You may never know you have it in your system to begin with! Congrats Mark, you are my hero :)

8GB USB Thumb Drive

Ok, here we are! 8GB USB drive is available from Trancends but guess what I won't buy this toy! Not at its current price of $770.

I really love these drives and have bought several in the past. Right now 512MBs are cheap and maybe you can go for 1Gig but anything above is still not worth the price.

Gizmodo has more on this.

What to buy next?

Boy, have I been on a shopping spree lately! First off, I got my hindistan.net domain back, yeehaaa! I signed up with Yahoo again and it took them really sometime to get over the technical difficulties. Problem was that I had bought the management of this domain sometime ago but had lost the lease for it. When I tried to re-register the domain, they told me that I already owned it (yeah sure) and therefore could not register it although it was seen as available even on their own site. I had to forfeit the management to be able to buy it back! It took 3 hours of talk on the phone with several customer representatives to sort it out.

Then, I decided to add an external HD back up solution for my home environment. I bought a Maxtor / DiamondMax 10 / 300GB / 7200 / 16MB / ATA-133 / EIDE / OEM / Hard Drive from TigerDirect. It's still available for $89 after $45 rebate


As for the enclosure, I had no prior experience so after some digging I bought Ultra 3.5" Mini Portable USB 2.0 / Firewire External Hard Drive Enclosure. Don't let the image decive you. It's really small and almost has no weight itself. It seems to work fine and I was easily able to connect my HD. The only complaint I have is about the fan & the accompanying noise :( It's really bothering me after a while but as it is intended to be a back up solution, I don't run it all the time. I am also trying to find some information on the fan-less models. I am a bit worried that they would get too hot and cause the HD fail. Still, I intend to but another 300-400GB HD but this time with a networked/silent enclosure.




I also had my eyes on LCD monitors for sometime and after some research I settled on 19" ViewSonic VP930b from B&H for about $450. As expected, it turned out to be a superb choice. B&H shipped it immediately and my wife is enjoying it for sometime now. Oh, we actually tilted the screen 90 degrees and she is using it that way. Why not?

Next was a DVD burner and although I tinkered with the BenQ for a while I bought SONY DRU810A RTL DVD+/-RW. I have used a few others Sony DVD burners and never had any issues. It's available at NewEgg.com for about $99 now.

Of course, I needed some blank DVDs and visited Shop4Tech.com and ordered
100 x DVD+R 8X Silver Bulk by Taiyo Yuden
100 x 52X CD-R 80min/700MB Thermal Silver Bulk by Taiyo Yuden
just for $74. I also wanted to get some slim jewel case but to my surprise, shipping would cost me more than jewel cases...
I'll be travelling to Argentina & Brazil in December and I desperately need a digital camera. I've already gave away my old Nikon Coolpix 5400. I loved its flip-out screen and I am looking for something similar to it. I'm asking around hoping camera-savvy friends will suggest a good model but have not found anything yet :(

Advanced Google Searching

I've seen an interesting discussion at ghacks.net about using google to find movies. Numerous comments took me to Johnny's ihackstuff.com who has created a very nice pdf document - which you can freely download - discussing advanced google search techniques. As everyone uses Google, I would highly recommend you to visit the links above...

An example to search movies for Claudia Schiffer (God bless her!), use the following search string

-inurl:htm -inurl:html -inurl:php -inurl:asp intitle:”index of” (mpg|avi|wmv) “Claudia Schiffer”

BTW, Johnny has some other useful downloads including a guide for Securing Windows XP in 15 mins.

Yahoo Podcasts

Yahoo opens its Yahoo Podcast Site...

What is Podcasting?
Think of a podcast as a radio show. Each show consists of a series of individual episodes that you can listen to how you want — on your PC, using your MP3 player, or with just a web browser.

If you've never listened to podcasts, you're in for a treat. Sports, comedy, movies, food, politics, music, books, speeches, walking tours, whatever — you name the topic and you'll find podcasts about it. Not only do you have incredible choice, you can listen whenever and wherever you want.... Continue reading at http://podcasts.yahoo.com/start

Google RSS Reader

Google has released a Web based RSS reader in its, - yes you guessed it right - BETA form. I am not a big fun of Web based readers...

Still, I tried to import my susbcriptions that I had exported to an .opml file and it looked like it could not do it. But when I refreshed the page, they all appeared as new subscriptions.

I like tree-like hierarchy so , it look a bit difficult to read if you have a large number of feeds, I think...

Windows Vista CTP Version

Windows Vista CTP - 32-bit - Build 5219 (English) is available to MSDN Subscribers. It's about 2.8 Gig DVD ISO. Downloading right now... :)

Scot's Newsletter - Oct.2005

I regularly read Scot Finnie's monthly newsletter and find it useful. This month's issue is our. You can read it here: http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/73.htm

IN THIS ISSUE
New 'CTP' Beta of Windows Vista
60-Second Briefs - Office 12 to Support PDF Creation Natively - Office 2003 Gets Service Pack 2 - Microsoft Announces Reorg and Jim Allchin Retiring - PC Today Columns on Windows and Office
Using the Canon EOS 20D Digital SLR Camera
Firefox 1.5, Opera Free, IE 7
Revisiting MAC-Address Recommendation
I Get Mail — And I Can't Read It All
Link of the Month: IEBlog

Opera Freed

It's been a long time since I tried Opera. It was one of the first to come up with one of my favorite features of a browser: tabs! Of course, several browsers use it now and personally I like to use Firefox. However, when I heard that Opera decided to finally go free with version 8.5, I downloaded it and started testing.

I really liked what I saw. It's fast as promised and feature rich. I like the ability to cascade web pages I'm browsing. It proves useful when checking things in two different sites. One thing that bothered me is that, it does not seem to work properly with blogger.com. Images do not show up properly and some of the menus disappear (so I'm using Firefox to type this message), speaking of which, Firefox 1.07 has been released today. I hoped they ironed out these nasty bugs I was seeing in the beta version.

Last (Minute) Action Hero

Oh well, no need to hide, I was never a big fan of eBay's auctions. If I want to buy something, I simply can NOT wait. BUT, now there seems to be a solution: Last-minute auction web site. Yeah, it has lost of junk too but as name implies, it tells you about the auctions that has a minute to end. Get your bids ready, fire away!!!

Originally reported by LifeHacker. Go ahead and read'em!

Web Based Instant Messaging

I just read in LifeHacker that a company called Meebo has come up with a Web Based IM that you can use to sign on to your yahoo, msn, icq and aol messenger.

ICQ already has a web based IM for quite a while. Although, it's a good idea to combine them, I'm sure many companies will block them in no time :(

Google BlogSearch

Finally! Google has now joined the ranks of daypop, Feedster, IceRocket and Technorati in searching the blogs. Yes, it's still beta and can be accessed either at http://blogsearch.google.com or at http://www.google.com/blogsearch. It does a very good job, I must add.

You can sort by date or relevance (default) and it will also give you the 'related' blogs too. Nice!

vbscript saves the day

I had some mp3 tracks of an audiobook in different folders but not in succession
Disk 1 - > 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3
Disk 2 - > 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3, 03.Trackmp3
Disk 3 - > 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3

I wanted to put them all into the same directory but to do this I had to rename them so that end result would be like

Disk 1 - 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3
Disk 2 - 03.Track.mp3, 04.Track.mp3, 05.Track.mp3
Disk 3 - 06.Track.mp3, 07.Track.mp3

I googled for file-renamers but did not see one that was fit for this purpose so, I wrote a simple vbscript:

set oFSO=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set oFolder=oFSO.GetFolder(".")

Dim sUsage
sUsage = "Usage: cscript rename.vbs NumberToAdd"

If ((Wscript.Arguments.Count = 0) or (Not IsNumeric(iAdd))) Then
Wscript.Echo (sUsage)
Wscript.Quit
End If

Dim iAdd: iAdd = CInt(Wscript.Arguments(0))

For Each oFile in oFolder.Files
sFile=oFile.name
sFirstTwo=Left(sFile,2)
sRest=Mid(sFile,3)
If IsNumeric(sFirstTwo) Then
sFirstTwo = sFirstTwo + iAdd
sNewName = sFirstTwo & sRest
Wscript.Echo (sFile & "-->" & sNewName)
oFile.Move (sNewName)
End If
Next

Results:
C:\Disk 9>cscript rename.vbs 159
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

01. Track 1.mp3-->160. Track 1.mp3
02. Track 2.mp3-->161. Track 2.mp3
03. Track 3.mp3-->162. Track 3.mp3
04. Track 4.mp3-->163. Track 4.mp3
05. Track 5.mp3-->164. Track 5.mp3
06. Track 6.mp3-->165. Track 6.mp3
07. Track 7.mp3-->166. Track 7.mp3
08. Track 8.mp3-->167. Track 8.mp3
09. Track 9.mp3-->168. Track 9.mp3
10. Track 10.mp3-->169. Track 10.mp3
11. Track 11.mp3-->170. Track 11.mp3
12. Track 12.mp3-->171. Track 12.mp3
13. Track 13.mp3-->172. Track 13.mp3
14. Track 14.mp3-->173. Track 14.mp3
15. Track 15.mp3-->174. Track 15.mp3
16. Track 16.mp3-->175. Track 16.mp3
17. Track 17.mp3-->176. Track 17.mp3
18. Track 18.mp3-->177. Track 18.mp3
19. Track 19.mp3-->178. Track 19.mp3
20. Track 20.mp3-->179. Track 20.mp3
21. Track 21.mp3-->180. Track 21.mp3
22. Track 22.mp3-->181. Track 22.mp3
23. Track 23.mp3-->182. Track 23.mp3
24. Track 24.mp3-->183. Track 24.mp3
25. Track 25.mp3-->184. Track 25.mp3

Overly simplistic, but did the trick :) Copy the code sniplet into the directory and give it a name eg. rename.vbs to run it.

Oh, BTW, I would strongly suggest that you take a look at a free utility named Ant Renamer by Antoine Potten who also wrote another fantastic free application called Ant Movie Catalog

[UPDATE]
I actually talked to Antoine today and told him the story. He mentioned that I could have in fact used 'Enumaration function' in the Ant Renamer to add sequential numbers in front of the filenames and then delete the old numbers using "Characters Deletion" function. Nice!

Mexico City Pictures From Above

In his W2KNews e-mail, Stu has mentioned a link to a site that has Mexico City pictures taken by a guy named Oscar Ruiz.

Oscar took these large number of impressive pictures while he was working as a helicopter pilot.

Definetely worth checking out!

Coming from a Civil Engineering background, I especially liked the creatively shaped apartment buildings like the ones on the left.

Simply Fired | If You Don't Laugh, You'll Cry

I've read about someone named James Garrison being fired 'because he ate two slices of left over pizza' in Micro Persuasion Blog. He was the winner of an offbeat Internet contest that solicited stories about outrageous firings.



Of course, everything is not black or white and several people have interesting comments about the firing in the simplyfired.com forums...Funny!

Live Blog from New Orleans

I've seen the link about this blog in W2K News where Stu said the following:

directNIC is a domain name registrar in New Orleans that has employees there trying to keep the servers up. One of their employees' blog is extremely interesting. It's a first hand report on what is going on, pretty much a posting every hour...

There was also a link to 'An extensive collection of Photo's of Katrina devastation''

When a Wall isn't a Wall

When a wall isn't really a wall. The French call it "trompe d'oeil".

You can search for this term on Google and get some good links too, it's an art form many centuries old.

Useful Active Directory Links

Below is a collection of links from a friend at work about Active Directory...

This is a great readme and is holding up well despite its age:
Note: Firfox does not wrap the line so I introduced hard breaks
copy them to the same line:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=6&q=
http://users.skynet.be/alain.lissoir/hp/Part% 25201%2520-%2520Understanding%2520Microsoft %2520WSH%2520and%2520ADSI%2520in%2520
Windows%25202000.pdf&e=912


http://dev.coadmin.dk/Resources/ADSI%20SDK%205%20HTML/default.htm

The best is yet to come: ADSI primer parts 1-12:
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4732
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4818
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4991
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5126
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5281
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5456
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5629
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5878
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=6128
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=6188
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=7456
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=7666
Understanding ADO Search Filters in LDAP Queries

Slightly off topic: You may also want to check out http://www.openldap.org and http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Architecture .

Combine this with http://Openfiler.org, http://samba.org, http://www.xorp.org, http://www.postgres.org, http://www.mysql.org and http://www.opennms.org/wiki/, We should all be well-rounded network experts.

I know we are still a big MS shop but a lot of this stuff is platform neutral (to a degree) and are freely available.

For those who want to mess with RHEL there are 2 very good Redhat Clones out there: http://www.centos.org and https://www.scientificlinux.org/ .

You might as well skip Fedora. For desktops, I like Centos, Memphis and Knoppix.

Problem with displaying properties of "My Documents"

I am not sure when it started but for some time now, whenever I right click the properties of "My Documents", it just gives me an error message: "The properties for this item are not available".

Anyway, today I decided to look into this, because I am going to move around "my documents" folder. I found the simple solution in a forum:

Go to Start > Run
Type regsvr32 mydocs
hit enter!

That's it! It worked for me and I can now see the properties of my documents folder properly :)

Yet another funny video from Rocketboom

I love to watch daily videos from RocketBoom. Apparently, Amanda Congdon is on vacation to Russia. In this video, you see her dancing in several magnificent places tuning to an Ukranian folk song named pidmanula. Everyone must see this! Oh my God, she's so funny!

Well, while you are at it, you may want to see from where Amanda got the inspiration.

Oh, BTW, CBS news recently had Rocketboom and vlogging in the news. You can check out the news and the video on their site.

Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Audiobooks

GOOGLE TALK
News is everywhere: Google finally has its instant messenger application available as a, yes you guessed right, BETA product. It can be downloaded from www.google.com/talk. Don't expect miracles, it lacks a lot of bells and whistles other IMs have.

Some people are already talking about Google Talk Easter Egg in Inside Google blog.

You need to use your gmail account to log on. If you do not have an account, leave me a message for invitation or better yet, get an invitation from Google via SMS. Once you get your invitation on your cell phone, go to step 2 and enter it, there you go!

MSN MESSENGER 7.5
As reported by NeoWin.Net, MSN Messenger 7.5 (build 299) is out and can be downloaded from http://messenger.msn.com
Among the new features are Dymanic Backgrounds and Voice Clips. Dynamic Backgrounds fill your MSN Messenger conversations and subtly animate during the conversation. Voice Clips allow you to send short audio clips (15 secs max) to your friends on MSN Messenger.

New audio improvements mean talking over MSN Messenger is far improved from recent versions.
You can also do the following:
Start a conversation with a contact: msnim:add?contact=@hotmail.com
Add a contact to your contact list: msnim:chat?contact=@hotmail.com
Send an invitation to start a video conversation: msinm:voice?contact=@hotmail.com
Send an invitation to start a voice conversation: msinm:video?contact=@hotmail.com

AUDIOBOOKS
I am so much into Audiobooks these days. I've listened Harry Potter Vol. 4-6 in the last week via my new Rio Carbon. I've seen interesting article about turning a DVD into an Audiobook. I liked the VLC Media Player application, which can be downloaded from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. It seems like a nice media player (still testing)!

Some crowded audiobook newsgroups:
alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks
alt.binaries.mp3.audiobooks.highspeed
alt.binaries.sounds.audiobooks

Back from Jamaica

We got back from Jamaica on Saturday night (8/20/2005) after a wonderful week in Couples Negril Resort. I'll post some pictures tomorrow.

Removed Google Desktop Search Tool

On my WinXP Pro box, I have about 2 hard drives with a total capacity of ~300 GB. That was enough for me for quite sometime. Recently, however, I noticed that I was running out of space. So, I decided to do some clean up last night and noticed an usually large folder: my profile which was taking up about 12.5 GB.

That did not seem right and invited further investigation which made me realize that Google Desktop Seach Tool was the culprit!

The size the folder below
"C:\Documents and Settings\ADIL\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search" was 11.6 GB! What the gell is going on here?

I also have MSN Desktop Search Tool and "C:\Documents and Settings\ADIL\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Desktop Search" only occupies 600 MB???

I removed Google Desktop Search Tool, as I really did not need it. I checked their search help page but they do not offer any info. What I learnt from there is that For text files, it indexes McAfee Antivirus Scans)...

Yum Update issue in Fedora

In one of my Fedora Core 4 (FC4) installations, I started to have issues with yum

[root@var]# yum -y update
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
updates-released 100% |=========================| 951 B 00:00
extras 100% |=========================| 1.1 kB 00:00
base 100% |=========================| 1.1 kB 00:00
Reading repository metadata in from local files
primary.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 553 kB 00:01
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz: [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: repodata/primary.xml.gz from extras: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

I still could not resolve the issue :(

I tried:

• yum clean all (which removes the files from yum's cache: /var/cache/yum)
  
• yum makecache

Nope! Suspecting proxy could be the issue, I've checked if I could access the file via web browser (successful) & via WGET, no problems there:

[root]# wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz
--16:26:29-- http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz
=> `primary.xml.gz'
Resolving proxyext.xyz.com... {Internal Proxy IP}, {ProxyIP}
Connecting to proxyext.xyz.com{Internal Proxy IP}:82... connected.
Proxy request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 565,841 [application/x-gzip]

100%[========================================================>] 565,841 473.93K/s

16:26:30 (472.87 KB/s) - `primary.xml.gz' saved [565,841/565,841]

I also tried playing with wget cache as suggested in this article. So, after I clean yum cache, I went into
/var/cache/yum/extras and run the following:
wget --cache=off http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/primary.xml.gz
wget --cache=off http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/fileslists.xml.gz
wget --cache=off http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/repomd.xml

After successfully downloading these files, livna repos started to crap out. I used the same method to fix livna and back to original problem, extras keep on failing. Pretty frustrating...

[UPDATE-1: 8/11/2005]
Workaround:
I edited /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras.repo to disable this repository:
enabled=0

I ran yum -y update, it worked!

Economists Join Blogging Frontier

That was the title of an article I read in WSJ today. It mentioned some dominant blogs by well-known economists including:

• Econbrowser by James D. Hamilton, Professor of Economics at the Univ. of California, San Diego
• Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal, Professor of Economics at the Univ. of California, Berkeley
• Vox Baby by Andrew Samwick, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College
• RGE Monitor (Roubini Global Economics Monitor) by Nouriel Roubini NYU Stern School of Business
• Economist's View by Mark Thoma, Assoc. Professor of Economics at Univ. of Oregon, Eugene

Hot or Not Meets Google Maps

Yet another fusion of Google Maps: Hot or Not + Google Maps = Hot people by Zip Code! Hmm, is not that cool. I like the idea...

Microsoft SyncToy Beta 1

My pc is connected to my wife's Pc via my home-network. To back up them, I cross copy the files. Ie. My files to her pc, and her files to my pc. We also have common folders. I use robocopy to sync these folders across the network.

I read about synctoy in "Windows Tip & Tricks July 25 Update" (Click to subscribe) and it looks like a good solution instead of command line based robocopy. Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite agrees:

New SyncToy Gives Briefcase the BootLike many business travelers, I maintain roughly overlapping sets of data on two PCs--my desktop PC and my notebook. Although various ways exist to synchronize data between two such devices, including the out-of-date Briefcase tool that first appeared in Windows 95, Microsoft recently released a beta version of a free new PowerToy called SyncToy for Windows XP that lets you keep the contents of a folder synchronized between two locations, regardless of where they are.As a PowerToy, SyncToy is unsupported, but if you're looking for a super-simple way to keep data files up-to-date in two different locations, you could do a lot worse.

The SyncToy interface is pure simplicity: You create a folder pair, which represents the two locations you'd like synchronized. After selecting the two folders, simply called Left Folder and Right Folder, you determine how to pair them: Choices include synchronization (new and updated files are copied each way); echo (new and updated files and renamed and deleted files are copied from the Left Folder to the Right Folder); subscribe (updated files from the Right Folder are copied to the Left Folder when a file of the same name already exists); contribute (new and updated files and renamed files are copied from the Left Folder to the Right Folder, but deletions aren't repeated to the Right Folder), and combine (new and updated files are copied both ways, but renamed or deleted files aren't copied either way).The tool is amazingly powerful. You can preview how the synchronization will change things, run synchronizations, and manage existing folder pairs from a simple interface. SyncToy is available from the Microsoft Web site and requires Windows XP. Definitely check it out if you have a need for this kind of functionality.

Fixing Corrupted Desktop Icons in XP

After I logged on to my XP pro with a different user id, some of my desktop icons including My Computer icon & Internet Explorer icon got corrupted. I recalled from my desktop support days that it had something to do with dllcache but could not remember exactly how I used to fix it. So, I googled it and instantly remembered the solution when I saw it here:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1083714822

To fix the problem:

• Right click on the desktop
• Go to properties
• Select Appearance
• Click Advanced
• Select "Icon" from the Items
• Increase Size from 32 to 33
• Click OK & Apply
• Repeat the same procedure to resize icons back to 32.

Installing JRE Plugin for Firefox in FC4

Many web sites need Java Run Time Environment Plugin for Firefox and but it can not be installed automatically and manual installation will direct you to Sun's site. Fedora Core 4 release documents, however, advise against installing the rpm from there as it interferes with FC4 libraries:

6.1.8. Java Package Recommendations

Fedora Core 4 users are advised not to use the Java RPM provided by Sun. It contains Provides that conflict with names used in packages provided as part of Fedora Core 4. Because of this, Sun Java might disappear from an installed system during package upgrade operations.

Fedora Core 4 users should use either the RPM from jpackage.org or manually install the Sun Java tarball into /opt. Sun Java 1.5+ is recommended for stability purposes.

So, here is how I installed it:

• download the JRE 1.5.0 update 4 (not the rpm version) from Sun Site to "/opt" directory
• chmod 755 /opt/jre-1_5_0_04-linux-i586.bin (make it executable)
• ./jre-1_5_0_04-linux-i586.bin (unpack the package)
• clicked yes; it installed the package to /opt/jre1.5.0_04 directory
• cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
• ln -s /opt/jre1.5.0_04/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so (create a symlink)
• Restart Firefox & Test your installation.

Windows SharePoint Services Templates

Microsoft Download site has been flooded with Windows SharePoint Services Templates today. Something to check out!

Windows Vista Beta 1 - First Impressions

I've downloaded Windows Vista Beta 1, formerly known as "Windows Code Name Longhorn", from MSDN yesterday. I was planning to install it on my pc where I have Fedora Core 4 but this version is picky about file systems and refused to install there. I could have probably tried the suggested method of hitting shift+F10 and use diskpart to get rid of all partitions but decided to install it on my other pc which has 2 disks.

Anyway, I was able to just insert the DVD when I was using XP and install it. Installation was seemless. It just asked me a couple of questions and installed it.

I am not sure how much disk space it actually takes but Windows folder itself is about 3.2GB, Program Files takes less than 200 MB, so does the users and others folders. So, it looks like a 4GB installation.

I've installed on my HP XW6000 workstation with 2x2.8GHz CU, 1 GB memory, nVidia Quadro4 980XGL card, Sony DVD RW 510A, Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Card. They all work fine with the default drivers but nVidia already has alpha drivers for Windows Vista which according to some NeoWin.Net Vista Forum users works (There are several Vista forums there). It did not, however, recognize my FlashCard when I attached it to SanDisk Reader and claimed that it needs to be formatted.

I have tried to run Yahoo Messenger but it kept on crashing. There does not seem to be windows messenger bundled with this version either :( When I go to messenger.msn.com, site thinks that I have Windows 98 and offers me to download that version of MSN Messenger. I installed XP version but could not connect yet.

Microsoft has a Windows Vista site up but there is not much content there. MSDN Windows Vista Site has more information about Vista with lots of Screen Shots.

I'm using Free Edition of AVG Antivirus application which sems to work OK for the moment. Vista has not been performance tuned yet, so it is kinda slower than XP.

Vista Beta 1 comes with IE 7.0.5112 which has tabbed browsing and a nice, very clean interface. I have not managed to make RSS feeds work yet though. I will post more info as I find more about it later...

[UPDATE - 08/02/2005]
MSN Messenger finally worked! I also found out how to add a RSS feed to IE7: just right click the RSS/Atom/XML icon and choose "add to favorites", then choose feeds.

[UPDATE - 08/03/2005]
I think I found out why IE7 is painfully slow. It has an option to check the authenticity of the sites you are opening in your browser. When asked, I had selected to check the sites. To turn it off, Go to Tools > Options > Advanced and select "Turn off Phishing Filter". Life is back to normal.

Ouch!

I fell from my mountain bicycle yesterday and hurt myself (I am doing that pretty often these days). Anyway, here is a video that describes how I feel.

MSDN Channel 9

MSDN Channel 9 is probably not news to MS techies but I'll blog it anyway :)

It's a forum/blog etc. where you can talk to MS developers and listen to them. It hosts pretty cool videos with the key people inside MS.

Nowaday, the half an hour video of Chris Jones talking about Windows Vista Beta 1 is quite populer. Check it out.