Backing up your data on a regular basis is important, and turning a spare computer into a backup server is often the best way to make sure it gets done. But most methods require either a good deal of command-line learning or serve only one operating system. Not with Restore, a free, open-source backup system that can install or run from a live CD, work with any OS, and operate through a simple browser-based interface. Today I'll demonstrate backing up a Windows laptop to an older desktop, but you'll see how Restore can be easily molded to fit just about any home backup needs.
The "Cult of the Dead Cow" hacker group – cDc for short – has published a tool that searches for vulnerabilities and private information across the web. Using well-chosen Google search queries, Goolag Scan discovers links to vulnerable web applications, back doors, or documents inadvertently put on the internet that contain sensitive information.
This kind of "Google hacking" is already well known: a hacker using the pseudonym Johnny has already published quite a collection of these "Google Hacks" or "Google Dorks" on his web site ihackstuff. What cDc has done is create an automated tool that allows an unskilled hacker to use these same techniques.
Logos are the ultimate mark of distinction and everyone loves them. We see logos everyday - on the highways, on consumer goods, on the Web and in the institutions and organizations we support. Read about the different types of logo designs here and learn what principles and techniques are used to create them. Discover what the future holds for logo design!
Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information -- from videos to presentations -- and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.
This is a very simple idea. Take a movie and reduce it down to a 5min movie cliff note where the plot and the best movie points (key lines, jokes or action scenes) are brought out.
This will let you watch any movie in 5min and be able to hold a conversation with someone about it.
Would be interesting to see if someone could do it.
The Gmail CAPTCHA has been cracked—albeit not easily—raising new concerns about spammers' ability to abuse Google's e-mail services. Websense Security Labs pointed out the security breach late last week, noting that spammers have a lot to gain by being able to use bots to automatically sign up for new accounts.
You probably know how to create multiple email aliases in Gmail by adding the plus symbol and dots to your Gmail username but there’s something more interesting.
When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses - one is the regular @gmail.com while the second email address has @googlemail.com in the domain.
One of the improvements highlighted in the document is the increased performance of file copying for multiple scenarios, including local copies on the same disk, copying files from remote non-Windows Vista systems, and copying files between SP1 systems. How were these gains achieved? The answer is a complex one and lies in the changes to the file copy engine between Windows XP and Vista and further changes in SP1.
Way more than any one person would really want to know.
Slimbox is a 7kb visual clone of the popular Lightbox JS v2.0 by Lokesh Dhakar, written using the ultra compact mootools framework. It was designed to be small, efficient, more convenient and 100% compatible with the original Lightbox v2
If you've never signed up for the various webmaster accounts at the major search engines (Google, Live Search, Yahoo!) then you're missing out on a lot of very valuable information on your website. These are great tools to help increase your position within the various search engines.
Where to find:
Google Webmaster - Help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
Yahoo! Site Explorer - Allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page
Live Search Webmaster - Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view
myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005 is the first web-based management tool specially designed for MS SQL Server 2005.
It lets you manage most objects of your databases and servers, including new objects such as snapshots, schemas, and credentials, etc. through a web browser. Faster than SQL Server Management Studio, its intuitive interface will seduce all users, from the DBAs to the webmasters, including the web-hosts.
The Event ID database contains 9,666 event IDs and 455 event sources, with 15,226 comments provided by 3,322 contributors, 1,732 submitted events or comments pending validation.
Great source to find out what those sometime cryptic events ids mean or what other users have found out about them.
Toshiba said Tuesday it will no longer develop, make or market HD DVD players and recorders, handing a victory to rival Blu-ray disc technology in the format battle for next-generation video.
"We concluded that a swift decision would be best," Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida told reporters at his company's Tokyo offices.
A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.
Koolwire makes it very easy to convert documents to PDF by following these basic steps:
1. Create an email and attach your document to convert
2. Send the email to pdf@koolwire.com
3. Wait for the return email with a PDF attachment
In my test I sent a Word document containing a high-res image and some text. Within 2min I received an email back with the PDF attached (named the same as the Word doc). Quality was great.
This is a masked input plugin for the jQuery javascript library. It allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates,phone numbers, etc). It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6/7, Firefox 1.5/2, Safari, and Opera.
A mask is defined by a format made up of mask and placeholder characters. Any character not in the placeholder character list below is considered a mask character. Mask characters will be automatically entered for the user as they type and will not be able to be removed by the user.
Had it working in less than 5min and it works like a charm. jQuery just keeps getting better for me and has a promising future for Veign's Web Development.
Regular expressions are very useful. If you have to deal with text at all, you will find them indispensable. In programming, they can be used to verify user input (e.g check an email is valid), sanitize input (make sure the user only used allowed characters), remove sections of the string (remove all non-alpha-numeric characters) and . And not just for programming! You can use regular expressions in many text editors to edit the current file. You can use them in the grep command to find very specific lines, or in the sed "stream editor" to edit out bits of a file..
Establish Retrofitted Designs as a sustainable high-design decor and organization products manufacturer that balances its commitment to profitable growth and community focus.
What a cool and innovative idea. Seems like more and more companies are offering means to make your electronic devices a bit more personal (check out ColorwarePc.com). Schtickers goes beyond the custom look by allowing a bit more 'feel' to your laptop with suede products available.
I would use a black one with my tribal logo on it .
I have some code that when run on a webpage and the user attempts to print will cause a script error. The page has no scripting and only a DIV tag with a class name of tags
Ever wonder how Google ended up with the logo that they did? The designer of the logo, Ruth Kedar recently talked about what went into the process and even shared some of her early ideas. Surprisingly it started out more complicated and ended up as the more simple logo that is known around the World today.
A compact and well presented site of the jQuery API. Not only do they provide the function description, but offer more samples of usage over the jQuery website.
Our search quality and Webmaster Central teams love helping webmasters solve problems. But since we can't be in all places at all times answering all questions, we also try hard to show you how to help yourself. We put a lot of work into providing documentation and blog posts to answer your questions and guide you through the data and tools we provide, and we're constantly looking for ways to improve the visibility of that information.
I believe that good developers are always passionate about programming. Good developers would do some programming even if they weren’t being paid for it. Good programmers will have a tendency to talk your ear off about some technical detail of what they’re working on (but while clearly believing, sincerely, that what they’re talking about is really worth talking about).
This morning, Google unveiled an intriguing new collaboration feature that lets users embed forms in their e-mails. It involves the company's existing Spreadsheet platform, and it could be a new tool to expand its online apps' user base.
You know that one browser that has only a vague association with modern web standards? Yeah, Internet Explorer. Wouldn't it be great if it supported stuff like translucent PNGs?
Well, now you can add decent PNG support to IE5.5+ on Windows with no changes to your website HTML source code. This script will add near-native PNG support with full alpha opacity, with only one line in your CSS file, that applies to all tags and also background images!
This was just implemented in a project or mine that uses lots of high quality, transparent background, PNG files. Added it in about 2min and it works like a charm.
In case you want another option check out this IE PNG Fix. Implemented just as easy but seemed to cause issues with img tags that use the vertical-align css property.
Who Is Hosting This is a tool that enables you to find out who is hosting any web site. Simply type in any domain name, and you'll get a link to the company that's hosting this particular domain.
Its a little fun and a whole lot of geeky. I actually quite like tools like this since it gives me, at times, valuable information in a simple and easy to use interface.
Page Headers is very similar to the tool above. It gives the header information from any domain. This can be used to see what type a server a domain is hosted on (why I created it).
Domain Twister - Find different domain combinations with this tool.
DomainsBot - Provides domain suggestion to GoDaddy, Tucows and BulkRegister. Thanks to their semantic search engine you can find hundreds of meaning related suggestions for available, expiring, expired and on auction domains. Try their LiveBot to customize your semantic search.
EyeOnDomain - Combines domains from user keywords and checks them for availability.
123Finder.com - Finds domain names by generating keywords and making up name variations.
Pdom.com - Searches for personal names to register as domains.
BurnAware Free Edition allows you to easily perform the most common disc burning tasks: write to all CD/DVD media types, including Blu-Ray; write Audio CDs and DVD-Video files; create and burn disc images; write multi-session discs and much more.
BurnAware Free Edition has a modern interface and supports Windows 98/NT/2000/XP and Vista (32 and 64 bit). The application is free and contains absolutely no adware or annoying banners.
Yahoo provides a robots-nocontent class tag that can be used to remove content from the page flow from being indexed (or used in determining a pages weight). Does Google support this tag? If not, are there are plans to support such a tag?.
He answered:
"We don’t current [sic] support that tag, for a couple reason. We think we do pretty well on detecting boilerplate (e.g. you’re not likely to run into any issues of duplicate content for header/footer type stuff). The other reason is that we haven’t seen a lot of sites using the tag after Yahoo mentioned it. Given the choice on where to put engineering resources, not a ton of people have asked for this feature."
Contracts and forms for designers are an important part of any design business. No matter if you are a graphic designer or web designer, a solid contract or good pre-project questionnaire can make every project go smoother.
A good contract can go a long way. Not only does is provide you, the designer/developer, a level of protection but it forces you to properly define the project and deliverables. This way both parties know whats expected of them and the client knows what they will be receiving from you.
Microsoft Corp. will release Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Monday, Feb. 4, according to reports Friday from Tech ARP.com, a Malaysian Web site.
Other sources, meanwhile, claimed that Windows Server 2008 will also reach RTM (release to manufacturing) in the coming week.
Luckily I'm still on WinXP and probably will be for the next couple of years. I see no reason to move to Vista and will probably wait to see what Windows 7 is like.
I blogged about pForm last week saying how great it was for creating some very stylish forms on an easy to use, free, online service. It would seem that there is a commercial version available that takes pForm to the next level, called MachForm (same company).
From the dev:
MachForm is an intuitive, browser based, self-hosted HTML form builder program. Designed as a modern HTML form builder, it makes use of the latest web technologies like AJAX, CSS, and Javascript to provide a fluid browser based experience
What does MachForm do:
Drag and drop interface
Numerous field type selections
Ultimate Spam Protection
Easy form manager
Email integration
MySQL database integration
Form validation
Export data to Excel or CSV
Password protected form
Limit one entry per IP address
Some things that could be better:
The tooltip could be a floating tooltip. The current one could widen your page if you pull the form into your design - happened to me.
Give the ability to create your own groups of fields (like the address block). What I was looking for was to create a block for Phone numbers (phone, mobile, fax) under a single block. If/When this gets added it will make this tool extremely customizable.
Basically, I will be using MachForm to create all forms in the future. I may provide the plumbing but having the interface done is a huge savings for me.
Nothing to say, except. Wow! (not sure if thats good or bad).
