The ABCs of securing your wireless network

In this practical introduction to the basics of securing your home wireless network, we'll cover the important, high-level points that ordinary users need to know in order to secure a network of game consoles, phones, and PCs. Along the way, we'll also recap some of the relevant information from the original wireless blackpaper...

Link:
http://arstechnica.com/.../wireless-security.ars

Timeline of the universe from before the Big Bang

Some theorists now believe they have found ways of pushing back even further, to the ultimate question: what came before the big bang? To do it, they have had to take on one of the greatest challenges in physics: the marriage of Einstein's theory of space, time and gravity, general relativity, with quantum theory, which describes the subatomic world. Only then can they hope to describe conditions at the big bang, when all space and time was compressed into a volume far smaller than a proton.

Link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/.../universe.physics

Compare your registry before and after an install with Regshot

Regshot is an open-source(GPL) registry compare utility that allows you to quickly take a snapshot of your registry and then compare it with a second one - done after doing system changes or installing a new software product.

Link:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/regshot

My new 404 error page

Link to sample:
http://www.veign.com/

Comments? Let me know what you think about it.

Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/384375/...

Foxit Reader 2.3 released

Whats New:

• Bookmark Design: Makes it possible to have your own bookmarks. Users can create, edit, or delete bookmarks in a PDF file if the security settings allow.


• Multi-tab Browsing: Enables users to open multiple files in a single instance.You can choose to view PDFs in a multi-tab window or multiple instances by setting documents layout from the Preferences dialog.


• Multimedia Player Support: Supports many media formats including audio and video. Read multimedia ebooks with Foxit Reader 2.3.


• Callout and Text box Tool: Creates comments in a callout text box or a box. You can also define their appearance as other commenting tools.


• Commenting Text Tool: Enables users to add most types of text edits by right-clicking on the selected text, including highlight, strikeout, underline, squiggly and replacement. You can also use the Commenting Text Tool to add bookmarks for PDF files.


• Rulers and Guides: Provides horizontal and vertical ruler guides to help users align and position objects on the page. Right-clicking on the ruler enables you to change the unit of measurement.


• Magnifier: Magnifies areas of the PDF files easily as you work on Foxit Reader.


• Automatic Scrolling: Allows users to view documents without using mouse actions or keystrokes.


• OCG Support: Enables the user to view related content stored in a variable number of separate layers.


• FDF Related: Opens FDF files directly with Foxit Reader without any import implementations.

Much smaller (aorund 2Meg) and faster than Adobe PDF Reader.

Link:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/...

AVG Free v8.0 released

Basic antivirus and antispyware protection for Windows available to download for free. Limited features, no support, for private and non-commercial use only.

Features:

• Virus and spyware protection
• Safe web surfing, downloading and instant messaging
• Hacker attacks prevention
• Phishing and E-Mail scam blocking
• Stops threats before they become a problem

I use and install AVG on most of my systems and it has done well for me. This is worth checking out and for the price (free), why not.

Link:
http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download

Yahoo! Local Adds a Circle to Mark the Spot

The Yahoo! Local team had that in mind when they rolled out a new feature to help everyone from the consummate explorer to the geographically-challenged find local businesses quicker and more easily. Now, you can make refinements to your local queries in real-time, directly on the map, based on a specific geographic radius.

Link:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000535.html

Microsoft offers hope for people who want to keep XP

Microsoft Corp. chief executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday offered a glimmer of hope to fans of the company's XP operating system, saying customer demand may see the company reconsider a decision to stop selling XP in June.

Link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080424/...

Even more jQuery samples

jQuery is a great JavaScript framework that opens the doors for a more advanced website giving the user a better experience. Below is more things that can be accomplished with jQuery.

Link:
http://www.noupe.com/jquery/...

How much does Google pay

Google Programmer in Phoenix - $174,000/year
Google Programmer in California - $197,000/year
Google Programmer in Chicago - $222,000/year
Google Programmer in New York - $242,000/year

...and thats just in salary. What other financial benefits does Google offer it's employees?

Read More:
http://www.cherryav.com/articles/technology/...

(source of salaries from Indeed.com)

Skype Offers "Unlimited World" Calling Plans

Regularly making phone calls Internationally can get pretty darn pricey these days! Coming to the rescue of those callers is Skype who today, just announced new unlimited calling plans to overseas phones for an extremely reasonable price. When I say reasonable, it’ll only cost $9.95 per month to make a phone call to 34 different countries around the World. You really can’t beat that price, can you?

Link:
http://cybernetnews.com/...

Vista Web Buttons

Vista Buttons helps you create Vista/XP/Win98/Mac rollover html buttons and html drop down menus with ease.

Well done, but the look is not a style I really like. I guess if you want a website to look like a desktop application running in Vista then it would be great but I have to ask. Why would you? Why have a website look like Vista (2nd behind Windows ME in acceptance).

I will say they have done a great job capturing the look and if this is a look you want you will probably not find a better tool to get it done.

Link:
http://vista-buttons.com/index.html

Best practices when moving your site

Your aim is to make the transition invisible and seamless to the user, and to make sure that Google knows that your new pages should get the same quality signals as the pages on your own site. When you're moving your site, pesky 404 (File Not Found) errors can harm the user experience and negatively impact your site's performance in Google search results.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Video: New version of Google earth

Even more jQuery plugins

Accessible slider:
http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/...


Coda Popup Bubbles:
http://jqueryfordesigners.com/coda-popup-bubbles/



Charts using canvas and jQuery:
http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/...



Flexgrid:
http://webplicity.net/flexigrid/

Hack into a Windows PC - no password needed

A security consultant based in New Zealand has released a tool that can unlock Windows computers in seconds without the need for a password.

Link:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/security/...

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0

Over the past few weeks, we've [Yahoo!] been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.

As the new software undergoes a phased rollout to our production crawlers over the next several weeks, you'll see the following changes:

a) The crawlers will start crawling from a different and much smaller set of IP addresses, but it'll still be from the crawl.yahoo.net domain.

b) The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, 'Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.'

Link:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000531.html

Useful MySQL SQL statements

Useful MySQL SQL statements is a list of some useful and maybe tricky SQL statements for MySQL.

NASA Science website launched

The Science Mission Directorate (SMD) engages the Nation’s science community, sponsors scientific research, and develops and deploys satellites and probes in collaboration with NASA’s partners around the world to answer fundamental questions requiring the view from and into space. SMD seeks to understand the origins, evolution, and destiny of the universe and to understand the nature of the strange phenomena that shape it.

Link:
http://nasascience.nasa.gov/

MySQL 5.1 coming with fixes and performance upgrade

Among the advances in 5.1 are partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering. They are fairly standard features already offered by rivals IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, but they should help MySQL compete in environments where performance and the ability to scale are critical.

"One thing we're really most proud of is, frankly, we fixed a lot of outstanding bugs in 5.0," Urlocker said. "So 5.1 has not only greater reliability, but a performance increase of 20 percent. It will be more in some cases and less in others, but there's a significant performance boost and scalability enhancements."

Link:
http://www.cio.com/article/333613/...

Where Are All The Google Data Centers?

Google’s data infrastructure is massive and spread across the world. All that Web crawling, indexing, and searching takes enormous amounts of computing power, not to mention everyone pounding away at Gmail, Google Apps, Blogger, Google Reader, and every other project dreamed up at the Googleplex. But where are all of these data centers and how many are there?

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/...

Google App Engine

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data

So they can get at your data and know everything about your website.

Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies, Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions), Automatic scaling and load balancing, Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email, Fully featured local development environment.

Seems powerful enough.

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack

Nice

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

That's pretty large.

Link:
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/

Mario Brothers in JavaScript

Mario Brothers, sorta, in a 14K JavaScript file:
http://blog.nihilogic.dk/.../super-mario-in-14kb-javascript.html

CSS List Boxes

Using a simple unordered list this experiment aligns the boxes across the page with the end result being to showcase items like services, products, or specials. One of cool thing about this — if you turn off styles — is the extractable semantics with the headings and paragraphs used.

Link:
http://mikecherim.com/experiments/...

Still on Dialup, try PhoneTray

PhoneTray Dialup will notify you when someone is calling while you are online. You can choose to take the call or ignore the call. With PhoneTray you can put internet on hold and answer incoming calls without disconnecting from the internet.

Plus, you get full-featured Caller ID software that shows and speaks callers name and number, logs all your incoming calls, blocks unwanted calls and zaps telemarketers.

Link:
http://www.phonetray.com/

Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents

This conversion service will convert to text Adobe PDF files that are in English and most West European languages.

If it comes from Adobe it will probably do the best job since its their format.

Link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/...

Magento seems to be a promising eCommerce package

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control.

Magento was designed with the notion that each eCommerce implementation has to be unique since no two businesses are alike. Magento's modular architecture puts the control back in the hands of the online merchant and places no constraints on business processes and flow.

This application looks extremely promising. The resulting interface is nothing short of professional. I was working with Zen Cart but really need to sit down with Magento to see if its mature enough to replace it.

Link:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Supercharge Your Camera

Digital cameras have powers beyond what is immediately available to the user. On a standard Canon, for example, the fastest shutter speed option offered is 1/1,600 second, but the hardware can handle much more than that -- up to 1/60,000 of a second.

CHDK, the Canon Hacker's Development Kit, is an open-source software project that can be loaded on cameras using Canon's DIGIC II or DIGIC III firmware platforms. It unleashes new features including RAW file format, live histogram display, a battery readout, and the ability to run scripted actions on a camera.

Link:
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/...

Windows XP life extended

Today Microsoft announced the worldwide extension of the availability of Windows XP Home for an emerging, new class of mobile personal computers commonly known as ultra-low-cost PCs, or ULCPCs. Windows XP Home for ULCPCs will be available until the later of June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/...

Secrets of Google News exposed!

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn't include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we've noticed that there's a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We'd like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

Quick Points:

• Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
• Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
• Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH
• Articles that are just images or video won't be included TRUE
• There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News MYTH
• Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
• Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
• If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

Read about each point above:
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/...

10 things IT needs to know about Ajax

The introduction of any new Web technology will affect a network's infrastructure in ways that range from inconsequential to earth shattering. Ajax is one of the more disruptive new Web technologies traveling across networks today. To help you minimize future surprises on your network, we've outlined the 10 things you should take to heart about Ajax.

Link:
http://www.networkworld.com/...

Microsoft's Rich Signature (undocumented)

In this article I'm going to try to provide documentation for the undocumented Rich Signature produced by Microsoft compilers. I'm not completely sure when this signature was introduced, I wrongly believed that I had been introduced with Visual Studio 2003, but I was shown that it is present even in VC++ 6 executables. So, I guess this signature has been introduced with that compiler. Information about this topic is non-existent (seems strange, but it's a fact). Thus, most readers probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Link:
http://ntcore.com/Files/richsign.htm