Gmail compromised

A report on Nana - net says Gmail has been compromised. It involves capturing the victims cookies and using them to authenticate with Gmail.

Jargon

After exposure to my new work site for just below a month, I was awash in jargon. Now, I have found somebody else who is finding this silly and he has got a blog of jargon generators. See Bullshit Generator.

Tweaking Search

Search Grid and Find Forward attempt to improve your google searches by playing about with the order of words. I quite like Find Forward.

More space for email

Digital Media news reports that lycos is offering 10Gb of email space for €5 per month. This is getting silly.
However I can't seem to find any mention of this on Lycos' site.

Search Engine

People never seem to tire of trying to make a better search. Been playing with Exalhead. Didn't like it too much. They plan to release a desktop search too. Everybody seems to be into the desktop search thing.

Google desktop search - let down

After Google Desktop failed to install at home I tried it out at office. Wow! It was fast. But, it does not index pdf files. That means most of my reference documents collection gets overlooked. That is not at all what I wanted. So now I shall try Copernic Desktop Search. Its supposed to be a bit more comprehensive, but I shall miss the integration with google searches.

Go Google yourself

Google Desktop has been released in beta. This indexes your local PC and then puts in a little local webserver. No, don't panic its only accessible from local host so its not really a security issue. But there may be other security issues. In my case Google Desktop was particularly upset about me having eTrust Suite from Computer Associates installed. So it did not get installed and instead took me to this support page.
Hope they release a revision soon that works with my system. I guess if it works on my office PC it will be good enough.

Do something useful with that camera phone

Cambridge University researchers have come up with something useful for the camera cell phone. Pictures like the one above called SpotCodes would be placed on things such as maps, packages and virtually anything. You point your camera phone at a SpotCode and click and it will connect you to online data associated with that SpotCode. NeoMedia Technologies has been developing stuff like this for some time. Applications for Symbian Series 60 OS phones are available at Bango
This reminds me of CueCats another early attempt at convergence between printed matter and the net. CueCats failed to really take off.

I need a freeware that generated SpotCodes. Sure beats marking my territory the old fashioned way. ;) 

Command Line

A guide to Oracle, Windows, Linux and OS X commands from SS64.com.

BBS Open Source codec

The BBC has released an open source codec called Dirac. Read the article here.

Query Google via sms

You can now send an sms to google and it will treat it as a query and SMS you the results back. Read more at Google SMS.

What's happening in my network

I was looking for something to monitor servers. Of course, there is WhatsUp Gold, but I was looking for something that is both free and easy to setup. I am very lazy. I think I have found it. big brother seems to meet these needs. And since it is kind of open, there is another site, deadcat with contributed extensions to the software. Yeah, I know the name is not very nice. I love cats.

Movie stills

I like movie stills. Just wish I could get them in real high resolutions. Here is Film Asylum and Great Posters.

Bypassing office restrictions

The office site I am on today is very restrictive when it comes to accessing the internet. I found a link I had bookmarked that is quite helpful. It teaches how to bypass most firewalls.

Search

When we want to search the web, most of us start and stop at Google. However, there are a lot of other new search engines being added. Some of them are not really ready yet, but they are getting there.

Microsoft has a preview of its search here. Some of these search engines even add new features not available on Google such as storing your bookmarks. You can see this on Amazon's A9 search engine. And also on Yahoo's My Yahoo Search. A few other search engines are Clush and Clusty that offer what they call clustered searches. Then we have Teoma and Blinkx. The only problem with Blinkx, is that it is a downloaded app that wants to be with Microsoft Explorer.
Yahoo Local lets you search by geographical region, however this wont work everywhere yet. A good place to keep track of all this at Search Engine Watch.

Novell :-*

If you thought Novell had rolled over and died, you need to read this article. OK, Novell is a little crazy, but I still love them.

ffdshow

After soooo long an update to ffdshow is available. This is the best decoder for playing back DivX. Its small and fast. Just partner this with Media Player Classic and its all you need to watch videos.

JPEG GDI Vulnerability (MS04-028) scanner

SANS has released a scanner for the GDI Vulnerability (MS04-028). You can get it here. There is a GUI as well as a command line version.

This is more comprehensive than the scanner released my microsoft.

If all this is nice and confusing, you need to visit Grinler's GDI Scan Tutorial at BleepingComputer

Terabyte DVD

While we are just getting all excited about BluRay DVDs that are supposed to store 25Gb and more, another monsted storage is waiting. When DVD was introduced it seemed 4.7 Gb was lots of fun.

Imperial College scientist Peter Török & University of Neuchâtel's Martin Salt have come up with Multiplexed Optical Data Storage (MODS), that gives the pits that hold data on a DVD an angular sub-structure. They claim that this could hold at least ten times more data.

Read the entire article on Optics.org.

Karaoke

The wife wanted some form of Karaoke setup on the PC. At last I found a freeware that does it quite nicely. Vanbasco's Karaoke Player seems to have solved most of her Karaoke requirements.

Old Spice

I have always thought of Old Spice aftershave as very much a men's brand. I know a few girls who like the fragrance so much they use it as perfume. Today I idly typed it into Google and read up on the history of Old Spice. Its seems they started out with a product called Early American Old Spice for women, and came out with the men's product a year later.

Sadly I can't find the original glass bottled Old Spice around. All we seem to have is an awful plastic bottle.

Bombay Mumbai

Found a photoblog on Bombay.(or Mumbai). You can see it here.

Photographers have problems

Some people just hate to be photographed. Funnily enough people getting paid to be photographed can be a problem too. Nude photography can be pretty weird I guess. A photographer from NewNudeCity shares his frustration in their journal. Hes got a clean girl, a painful girl and a chased girl.

Sony to Support MP3

SonySony says its going to add native MP3 support to its portable music players. Till now they used Sony's proprietary Atrac format. Amazing. Did they really think that they could be the only one without MP3 support?