The Second Acid Test

Don't you just love it when your browser is standards compliant?!? :)

Okay, another thing I did while I...:

Okay, another thing I did while I couldn't sleep was buy myself a new toy at apple.com a dual CPU, 2.3Ghz, 2GB RAM, 500GB drive, 23 inch cinema display. All told about $5K. Yeah I paid list price, but so what. I think it should be a pretty nice computer. And I deserve it. ";->"

(Via Scripting News.)

I don't like working on desktops. Seems limiting after having used notebooks for the past year or so. I prefer to be able to take my machine wherever I go. Of course that kind of power above is not available in a laptop right now so...

Looks like the white list blogger support said they placed me on, or whatever doesn't work, and I can't post through Mars edit again. Sigh.

Here is the message I get:

Can�t post for Adnans Sysadmin/dev blog because com.google.blogger.exceptions.AutospamException: Your post has been saved as a draft instead of published. You must go to Blogger.com to publish your post. To prevent these errors in the future, request a review at:

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Web 2.01: It's a mistake to rule out the desktop:

Here's the deal: although I agree with many of the ideas that Web 2.0 encompasses, too many proponents of Web 2.0 talk about desktop apps as though they're a thing of the past - and I obviously don't believe that at all.

(Via Nick Bradbury.)

what tian has learned: Anoop Dogg - Drop It Like a FOB

Hahahahahahah!

Microsoft warns that the software industry is ill-prepared for multicore:

A software architect from Microsoft gave a speech at the Fall Processor Forum, warning that programmers are ill-prepared for the coming switch to multicore CPUs.

(Via Ars Technica.)

The Gremlin in PHP - John Lim (PHP Everywhere):

Here's proof that Python is the root of all PHP bugs.

(Via Planet PHP.)

I got an email from blogger support saying that they have identified my blog as not a spam blog, and white listed it. And I was having a bad time trying to publish this blog to my wordpress server. So to keep my archives intact, I guess I'll continue to use blogger for now. They have been adding features to blogger lately, and been actively trying to stop splogs. I'll keep running the other server as a test and play server.

Haiku Development Blog: Finally

OpenBeOS!!!

I'm trying out wordpress here.

Cisco SNMP configuration attack with a GRE tunnel:

Throughout our education as system administrators, SNMP is often a topic that eludes us. One might have a vague understanding of what it's used for, and a general sense of security around some vague concept that it's read-only information.

testing

testing....

I guess blogging with Marsedit is out for the next couple of days. Or I have to get a new blog.

This is getting really irritating.

Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford:

The Amish don�t drive cars. My �car,� with regards to programming the new Harper�s Magazine website, would be something like Ruby on Rails. When I see something like Ruby on Rails I get very excited and think, �Wow! I�ll be able to learn a whole new set of skills, and I�ll spend hours hacking away, creating new problems to solve. Come on AJAX! Come on dynamic database objects!� But I have this big set of problems I�m already trying to solve, and I have the skills to solve them, and a roadmap already written. A few months ago I spent several days dabbling with Ruby on Rails, wondering if I should ditch Java for the Rails framework, until I realized that it was just another broad distraction posing as a narrow distraction. Not to say it�s not a great advance, but in my life switching over to Rails would create more problems than it would solve. It would disrupt the close connection I feel with the Java code I�ve already written. I decided that I would lose more than I�d gain.

(Via 43 Folders.)

I've been trying to post all of yesterday... something was up with the blog. Hopefully its back.

It happened again. I tried posting with Marsedit, and the stupid CAPTCHA dialog came up. And now it won't post. I wonder if this gets through?

testing again

I had the last three posts saved as Drafts, and when I tried to post them successively one by one, I got a message from blogger, and it wouldn't post. The interesting bit is that the message said that a limit had been reached, and that I should go to blogger, where I will have to fill out a CAPTCHA (or something, I'm assuming those picture thingies to make sure you're not a bot). This is good. Looks like Google is working on fighting Splogs.

Update: It happened again, and this time I captured the message:

Can’t post for Adnans Sysadmin/dev blog because com.google.blogger.exceptions.RateLimitingException: For anti-spam verification purposes, please login to Blogger.com and create a post on your blog. You will need to solve a CAPTCHA.

Doesn't look like they have implemented it completely yet. I logged in to blogger, went to create a new post, and no CAPTCHA.

Update: Looks like they've finally implemented it this morning. But once I enter the CAPTCHA, and hit publish post, the web page keeps reloading, without actually publishing. Irritating.

How to Develop Web Applications with Ajax, Pt. 1 - WebReference.com -

ISP-Server Setup - Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

A new way to bypass Windows heap protections:

Windows heap overflows have become increasingly popular over the last couple of years. Papers like, "Third Generation Exploitation" [ref 1] or, "Windows Heap Overflows" [ref 2] introduced the internal structure and handling mechanisms of Windows heaps, and presented ways to exploit heap-based buffer overflows. Techniques to make highly reliable exploits were presented in the paper, "Reliable Windows Exploits" [ref 3]. Heap exploitation is now mastered for systems such as Windows XP, Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000.

How much security is "too much" security?:

That’s not a recommendation to necessarily use PGP to sign your e-mails. It’s the underlying thought that appeals to me. Ingrain good security habits into the way you work and you’ll be fine.

(Via The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog.)

Apple - Aperture - Tech Specs

Ummm... Wow! My poor Powerbook G4 doesn't even meet the system requirements for the minimum system. Its ok, I don't work with Photos that much.

4D sculpture with a 3D shadow:

Alex sez, "Adrian Ocneau, math prof at Penn State, designed this mathematical sculture that revealed a 3-d shadow of a 4-d object."

(Via Boing Boing.)

This post is interesting. Considering my increased interest in 4D from a show called Threshold.

I, Cringely . NerdTV | PBS

Nerd TV interviews founder of AutoDesk.

Global Rich List

SITE NEWS: Introducing widgets for your blog or web site:

Want to include top memeorandum headlines in your blog sidebar?

(Via tech.memeorandum.)

Yup, its in my sidebar!

Slashdot | Rootkit Creators Turn Professional:

Signalling a trend towards increased 'outsourcing' of some elements of malware creation, worm authors are increasingly turning to commercially available rootkits to help their creations slip past virus detection engines. Those root kits in the mean time are becoming more professional. Antivirus vendor F-Secure reported last week that it had detected a first rootkit designed to bypass detection by most of the modern rootkit detection engines.

(Via Slashdot.)

I've been going through some javascript madness today. I had a simple string:
"/\n", a forward slash and an end of line character. Now I had the string stored in an array of strings.

The statement was:

if (arrofstrings[i] == "/\n")

Even though I know that at least one string in the array of strings is a match, it would fail.

arrofstrings[i].length would return 2. But no matter what I tried it kept failing. And only in Internet Explorer.

I ended up doing:


tempstr = arrofstrings[i];

if tempstr.charAt(0) == "/" {

if (tempstr.charcodeAt(1)) == 13 {

......



Any clues as to why the above problem happened? It occurred in both IE 5.0 and 6.0.

Flock is Launching Publicly Today:

I just heard from Geoffrey Arone at Flock that they will be launching it to the general public within 3 hours (by 5 pm PST).

(Via TechCrunch.)

Editing in Flock

I configured the Linux version of Flock to post to my blog. I have two blogs within the blogger account. It selects the one I don't want to post to by default. Clicking on the top bar brings in the previous posts for the other blog. I wonder if this gets posted on the right blog.

I got an email inviting me to the flock developer preview. This is going to be fun.

Reducing browser privileges:

Security companies and researchers have made careers out of identifying the latest bugs in Internet Explorer. While Microsoft has been relatively idle, the developers of Firefox have continued to add functionality and provide what was perceived to be more secure code. The story doesn't end there, though. The past six months have seen major vulnerabilities in Firefox too, and its adoption has slowed. Some people are beginning to question the wisdom in switching to another browser that is possibly just as insecure as IE.

There are two major reasons why I would move to Firefox. First the improved usability. Whether you are a normal web surfer, power web surfer, or a web developer, there are extensions that make using Firefox essential. If that isn't enough, relative safety from having spyware installed on your system from a misbehaving ActiveX control or other similar vectors of infection should be the second reason to switch.

It seems from the articles I've been reading that the security community has forgotten all about ActiveX exploitation. At least Firefox removes that from the mix if not more. And the Firefox team are pretty good at fixing vulnerabilities in a timely manner. Isn't that reason enough for a switch?

Packet forensics using TCP:

This article is set to arm you with the knowledge that allows one to approach a packet stream and successfully be able to determine if there are any missing packets. This is imperative in cases where your data set is missing packets that may contain crucial indicators of the breach. You would only know that by doing the analysis shown below.

Planet Jeffrey - Text editors & word processors

List of Text Editors for Windows.

Tips from the Wiki for watching less TV:

There’s a good, evolving page on the Wiki with tips for Watching Less TV

(Via 43 Folders.)

I found the perfect solution to watching less TV. Don't have a TV! Haven't watched television in a long time, yet there are still too few hours in a day! Sigh...
...
...

FTC Asked to Address Fake Blogs:

“The consumer advocacy group Commercial Alert has asked the FTC (PDF) to investigate 'stealth' marketing campaigns, where companies create and maintain blogs that appear to be from ordinary people but are in fact created by corporate marketing departments for the purpose of selling products, among other tactics.”

(Via Micro Persuasion.)

Apache News: 18 October 2005 - Apache HTTP Server 1.3.34 Released:

The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.34 of the Apache HTTP Server ("Apache"). This Announcement notes the significant changes in 1.3.34 as compared to 1.3.33.

(Via PlanetJava.org.)

News: Say hello to the Skype Trojan:

Virus writers are targeting Skype users with a new Trojan that poses as the latest version of the popular VoIP software.

(Via SecurityFocus News.)

Zend and IBM to co-develop new PHP IDE and framework - SitePoint Blogs:

Word on the street is that Zend and IBM are cooking up a big open source initiative called the PHP Collaboration Project. The project will be based on PHP and Eclipse, and will aim to compete with Microsoft’s .NET platform in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), whose needs aren’t great enough to warrant adopting the Java platform for Web development.

(Via Planet PHP.)

Flock’s Refines Features, Expands Beta:

Flock’s CEO Bart Decrem expanded the beta over the weekend to 1,007 people, most of whom are now blogging about it.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse

Howstuffworks "What is the Year 2038 problem?":

If you have read How Bits and Bytes Work, you know that a signed 4-byte integer has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647, and this is where the Year 2038 problem comes from. The maximum value of time before it rolls over to a negative (and invalid) value is 2,147,483,647, which translates into January 19, 2038. On this date, any C programs that use the standard time library will start to have problems with date calculations.

VirtualWiFi: Software

Connect to several different WiFi networks with one card. No support for Wep yet..

LoTR/World of Warcraft mashup animation:

Some imaginative soul has taken a series of screengrabs from Jackson's Lord of the Rings and turned them into an animated GIF with humorous (very, very humorous!) captions from World of Warcraft, in nearly incomprehensible gamerspeak.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Model Railroad Slums

A Comparison of Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD Kernels at OpenSolaris.org:

I spend most of my time teaching classes on Solaris internals, device drivers, and kernel crash dump analysis and debugging. When explaining to classes how various subsystems are implemented in Solaris, students often ask, "How does it work in Linux?" or, "In FreeBSD, it works like this, how about Solaris?" This article examines three of the basic subsystems of the kernel and compares implementation between Solaris 10, Linux 2.6, and FreeBSD 5.3.

Tim Bray : "We have an emergency...:

Tim Bray: "We have an emergency on our hands."

(Via Scripting News.)

What is this all about? Splogs have been around for a while. Why is it a big issue now?

Sphere:

Relevance in blog search is very difficult. Google-type PageRank analysis, which looks at incoming links to a piece of content, simply doesnt work because new content doesnt have much in the way of links. Until now, no one has come up with a way to properly sort blog posts by relevance, and the general default way of showing results is reverse-chrono, which simply puts the newest stuff at the top.

A very interesting problem. How to provide relevant results for new dynamic posts, that don't have a lot of links. Memeorandum still works on the concept of how many links are created to a post. How do you provide relevant search results for matter that has not been linked to. Maybe sphere has an answer...

Sphere appears to have solved the problem, or at least taken big steps in the right direction. Their approach involves three key algorithms - an analysis of links into and out of a blog, an analysis of metadata around a post (links, post frequency, length of posts, etc.), and something Tony calls their “secret sauce”, which is content semantic analysis to filter out spam and to understand what a blog post is talking about.

Don't be evil. - Lukas Smith:

Google is also the company that makes GMail or Google Mail here in Germany. A product that is to be considered illegal by German law, yet somehow exists over here, even with its own brand name, due to trademark issues. Then again it’s not uncommon for web companies to not really comply with German consumer and privacy laws like with Amazon. In Google Mails case its simply not allowed for any one to shift through other peoples emails, be it a human or machine, regardless of what they end up doing with that information. It’s for similar reasons why sysadmin can go to prison for installing a spam filter. Btw in Amazon case it’s because they force upon their users the out-of-country processing of their personal data (along with an extensive data trail that they claim is not personalized).

(Via Planet PHP.)

Wow! Thats interesting. I had no idea that some countries had such laws. In fact, I had no idea people cared so deeply about people machines reading their email. I personally don't care about it and have been using Gmail for a while now. Should I care? Think about it. Spam filters on your server are machines reading your mail. Why do we not have a problem with Spam filters?

The writer goes on to say:

Anyways, Google always said "Don't be evil". These days they have changed the wording to say "You can make money without doing evil". I liked the first variant better as it stated intent to not be evil, the other just states the possibility.

Its interesting how things change as a company grows!

Virtual Development:

It's the last item I want to focus on. The desktop. This is the context where developers assume sole ownership. That is no longer true. Corporations do not like the PC. More accurately, they like them when they solve problems and not when they cause them. And they are beginning to cause lots of problems, from security, price, management overhead and their downright complexity. Thin clients are becoming more popular. They share resources to simplify the environment and reduce costs. I expect IT's question of "tell me why you need a thin client" will slowly be replaced by the "tell me why you can't use a thin client". Many of you know that I think this is inevitable (and I admit I may be a loon).

(Via Sun Bloggers.)

So is Kant right or Hume?:

Immanuel Kant, grandiose philosopher, maintained that we have "synthetic notions a priori"; notions prior to experience that are embedded, as we would perhaps say today, in our DNA. David Hume, the empiricist, on the other hand maintained that our mind is a "tabula rasa" -- a clean slate that experience writes upon and we have no notions prior to experiences.

Should SOA start to be embedded in the DNA of the Enterprise or is it something that should be left as best addressed piecemeal, project by project, on an "as need" basis?

(Via Ali Arsanjani's weblog.)

Much ado about Google Wallet:

Information has been steadily leaking about Google's plans to launch their own online payment service. Will this be competition for PayPal or something completely different?

(Via Ars Technica.)

MTV Networks Acquires IFILM
:

MTV Networks, a unit of Viacom Inc.
(NYSE: VIA and VIA.B), has acquired IFILM Corp., one of the leading video
destinations on the Web, for $49 million.

They just hired the lead developer of GAIM.:

For the layman, Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.

Free del.icio.us videos in iTunes:

Here is a great tip for getting some free video content into iTunes. First, tag the files you're after in del.icio.us, and then subscribe to the resulting RSS feed in iTunes:

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Setting up a development environment on my Mac |

Myspace CSRF and XSS Hack - Chris Shiflett:

This attack seems pretty harmless (I'd rather not discuss ethical concerns), but it demonstrates something very powerful - a combination of XSS and CSRF. If your site has XSS vulnerabilities, they can be used to launch much more effective CSRF attacks. Rather than only a small percentage of people being affected, everyone is, because the attacker is guaranteed that all victims have an established relationship with the target site, yours.

(Via Planet PHP.)

Amazon Web Services Blog: New SQS Tutorial on IBM's developerWorks

html-css-php-and-more-cheat-sheets

Apple posts video podcast tutorial:

Much like the podcast tutorial we saw a couple of months ago, Apple has posted a "Creating Video Podcasts on Mac OS X" tutorial to its website. They suggest you use an iSight camera (of course) and Quicktime Pro 7.0.3 to create your video. Once you've finished recording, select the new "Movie to iPod (320x240)" option from the "Export" menu to ensure iPod compatibility.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Sockets programming in Ruby:

Explore Ruby's fundamental sockets interfaces for networking applications

(Via IBM developerWorks.)

It's hard to convey how much talent...:

But I didn't mention that Gabe Rivera, the author of Memeorandum was there too. I've become a regular user, subscribed to its RSS feed, and several times a day I visit the site and use it as an aggregator of what's happening in the tech blogosphere. It's become a totally essential tool, in just a few weeks.

(Via Scripting News.)

Memeorandum is amazing. Its what Google News should have been. The internet has gone from a place that delivers news, to a place where you can discuss it. A whole big forum. With postings on topics made by various people on their blogs. How do you track this conversation? Use Memeorandum!.

OPML on the other hand is a little confusing. When Dave Winer added that OPML directory to his site, I thought "Oh thats what its for". To categorize blogs, and provide directories. But there is more to it. There is the outline aspect of OPML. And then I heard Daves podcast, where he says something to the effect of OPML being the next web or something. I'm still confused, I guess I'll have to do some more research over the weekend.

NewsForge | Shopping cart comparison: Drupal's E-Commerce vs. Mambo's mambo-phpShop

Open source Web site content management systems (CMS) don't provide a full solution for the needs of many Web site administrators because they lacked a shopping cart. But thanks to projects like Drupal's E-Commerce shopping cart and Mambo's mambo-phpShop, things are getting easier: The shopping carts integrate directly into the core of the system, providing an acceptable shopping experience without requiring multiple logins, and they keep the theme of the Web site intact

Blogger adds inbound links to posts:

Blogger blogs can now easily add a listing of inbound links to any blog entry. The new feature utilizes Google Blog Search's URL search feature to display the a list of links on the individual post page.

Each view of the individual post page results in a dynamic JavaScript call to generate an array containing a link URL, title, excerpt, author, and time. Each link uses the "nofollow" attribute value. Users without JavaScript see a link to Google Blog Search for the post URL.

(Via Niall Kennedy's Weblog.)

There seem to be two very useful features added to blogger that might prove useful. The first was the backlinks above. The second was word verification for comments. I've re-enabled comments, and hope that I won't get as much spam due to word verification like the last time.

Nightly builds of Webkit available:

Lost in the shuffle of all the big news yesterday was this gem from Surfin' Safari, the Webkit development blog. Now all you Mac geeks on the bleeding edge, and developers who depend on Webkit for your apps to function properly, can keep abreast with the current build of Webkit. Every night a new version will be posted for download, using a different icon so you don't confuse the real Safari for the nightly built variety.

Help the Webkit crew squash those bugs and make Safari even better.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

The Buzz:

The Long Tail -- I sure heard this a lot during the conference. The term was coined in an Oct. 2004 Wired magazine article by Chris Anderson, The Long Tail. A quick summary: "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." For example, your local video store can only stock top sellers due to shelf-space but Netflix can offer 15,000+ movies profitably. Your local book store can only stock a limited number of books but Amazon can offer almost anything ever printed, whether in or out of print. Once you get past the best-sellers, you get to the long tail, and there's a ton of value that can be derived there for the first time thanks to the Internet.

MSN and Yahoo to Link IM:

Sources tell me that Microsoft and Yahoo will announce a new partnership tomorrow that includes Instant Messaging network sharing that will effectively allow MSN Messenger users to talk to Yahoo's IM users, and vice versa.

(Via TechCrunch.)

This is terrific news, now I'll be able to have family and friends from just one client. I wonder what kind of audio support this would have, if any. And when are we going to get audio capabilities in Yahoo Messenger?

gDisk:

gDisk is a little tool that lets you use your free space on your GMail account, as an extra hard drive. This is the first release (0.1) so still it’s lacking hard of features like drag n’ drop, progress bar when uploading, and a Delete and Pause button for your uploads to name a few. GMail also have a 10Mb file size limit, so your not looking at a replacement for your .Mac account either.

(Via Cool OSX Apps.)

Apple's Weak Sales Disappoint Investors Despite Solid Profit:

Apple Computer disappointed investors on Tuesday with lower sales than analysts had forecast for its fiscal fourth quarter.

(Via Investor's Business Daily: NEWS.)

I was surprised to see that Apple investors were disappointed which is totally opposite of what I've been reading on the various Mac sites!

For instance, here:

For those of you who play the numbers, here's where things stand. Apple reported revenues of $3.68 billion with net quarterly profit of $430 million ($.50 per diluted share). Compare with results from a year ago, which saw revenues of $2.35 billion and net quarterly profit of $106 million ($.13 per diluted share). That's what we call GROWTH. Gross margins were 28.1 percent, up from 27 percent in the year-ago quarter and international sales accounted for 40 percent (!!!) of the quarter’s revenue.

(emphasis is mine!)

Web 2.0: Land of Opportunity, or Land of Absurdity?:

I'm sensing a backlash about the rising VC interest in Web 2.0. Mike Rundle takes aim at Flock in his post subtitled "The Leaning Tower of Buzz". He thinks Flock is only useful to the blog crowd and doesn't have a viable business model. Bart from Flock disagrees, saying in the comments that they do have a plan to make money and the market will decide. Then I went and read Kevin Burton's post, entitled Dot Bomb All Over Again?. Kevin blames "tech reliance on Venture Capital" for what he thinks is too much hype and too little value. Om Malik specifically references YouTube, a video-sharing service that got $5 million in funding, and says the "Web 2.0 funding frenzy is in full effect."

(Via Read/WriteWeb.)

Google Targets Del.icio.us:

Google has quietly launched a nascent bookmarking and tagging product as a feature to search history.

It’s not “social” bookmarking, like del.icio.us, because bookmarks are not public and cannot be shared among users. The product also requires way too many steps to create a bookmark.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Gotta try this later. The review finds some good things, and bad things about the service. Seems to me that Google (RSS reader, and now this) and Yahoo (blog search) are releasing sub-par products to try to stay ahead of each other lately. Or maybe I just don't like their apps. MSN on the other hand hasn't released anything yet... which begs the question:

"Is something better than nothing?".

BBC: Web enjoys year of biggest growth:

The web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom, says a study.  —  In the year to October the web grew by more than 17 million sites, says monitoring firm Netcraft.  —  This figure exceeds the growth of 16 million sites seen

(Via tech.memeorandum.)

MacDevCenter on OS X rootkit vulnerabilities:

Over at MacDevCenter, Peter Hickman has written an interesting article about possible security vulnerabilities in OS X called Mac Security: Identifying Changes to the File System. Here's the description: "Black-hat hackers often use a bundle of tools called a rootkit to secure access to your machine and cover their tracks. When working on your computer, they need to store files and be sure that you will not stumble across them and get suspicious. Peter Hickman explains how this works."

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Blogger Add-On for StarOffice 8 ?:

Someone from our StarOffice team recently posted on an internal web site a blogger add-on for StarOffice. I could not resist to test it and pave the way to a public release of this nice piece of code.

(Via Sun Bloggers.)

Gada - Tag Meta Search Done Right:

Gada takes a query and runs it against sites like Google News, Technorati, Flickr, IceRocket, Amazon, Wikipedia, 43Things, etc. Searches can be narrowed via a drop down box to “photos”, “social” etc. for more specific results. The search itself, and any narrowing, are also accompished via the domain name. For instance, a photo search for “web2con”, the tag people are using for last week’s web2.0 conference, is also accomplished by the URL web2con.gada.be/p. The query is the subdomain, and the photo filter is the /p at the end.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Info on how to help south asian earth quake victims

I got this email from a friend:

Unicef : www.unicef.org
Oxfam : www.oxfam.org.uk
World Food Programme : www.wfp.org
Kashmir International Relief Fund :www.kirf.org
Red Cross/ Red Crescent : www.ifrc.org
ADP : www.developpakistan.org

And ...

Some 42 hours ago, tragedy struck Pakistan in the most horrific proportions we have seen in our country's history. The magnitude of the disaster appears to be growing as we speak. With an estimated death toll of over 18,000, one thing is certain - we need to respond and respond immediately.

Association for the Development of Pakistan (ADP) has set up a website for Earthquake Relief at www.DevelopPakistan.org where we are collecting online donations for Edhi Foundation and the President's Earthquake Relief Fund, which are uniquely qualified to mount the kind of large-scale response that is needed. The web site also has information on how to contribute to other NGOs engaged in relief efforts. Over the course of the coming days, we will add more information on how you can respond to this catastrophe within your local communities.

Please give generously to help the thousands affected by this disaster, and do encourage your friends, both Pakistani and non-Pakistani, to help. All donations via our web site will be deductible for US tax purposes.

Best regards,
Adnan Khalid
Secretary,
Association for the Development of Pakistan

Edhi Foundation
Run by Abdul Sattar Edhi, one of the most respected philanthropists in Pakistam, Edhi Foundation has a long history of providing welfare services and emergency relief throughout Pakistan. Mr. Edhi is personally directing relief efforts from Islamabad right now, and has told ADP that their helicopters have already begun airlifting supplies and medicines to the affected areas.

President's Relief Fund
Given the scale of the disaster and the remoteness of the affected areas, the government is uniquely positioned to provide immediate relief. President Musharraf has set up a fund dedicated to earthquake relief and has encouraged people to contribute to the effort. He has also guaranteed complete transparency and accountability in the use of funds.

Another friend email me the following:

Please donate through any organization you are comfortable dealing with. For those of us who are not aware of any such organizations you may want to contact these guys:

www.islamic-help.org
telephone# 011441214465682
They are based off of UK.

OR

Name of Account : Consulate General of Pakistan
Account No : 00990-41526
Bank of America, California

For wire transfer:
Routing/ABA#121 – 000 – 358
Swift code: BOFAUS6S

For more iformation about this fund please goto the website :
www.embassyofpakistan.org

Learning to SMIL: SMIL Guide

Multimedia4everyone, Learn SMIL with a SMIL Presentation

Defining UNIX/Linux System Administrator, System Engineer, and System:

UNIX/Linux System Administrator is synonymous with System Engineer

(Via Sun Bloggers.)

South Asian quake toll nears 20,000

Called my family today in Karachi Pakistan. Thankfully they are all ok. My thoughts and prayers go out to all those passing through this difficult time.

Update: I just got a message from a friend that says the following:

Just scraped to ask you guys to donate as generously as you (and we) can. I case u r wondering where to send your donations;

1) GIVE clothing, tents, tetra packed milk, wheat , sugar and other non perishable items at PAF museum , karachi, today. (and tomorow, MONDAY, also)

2) Give your monteary donations to any Edhi centre, or President's relief fund (051-9222666).

3) Without even leaving your homes, donate by calling GEO on their no 0900-99970 ( calls will be charged rs 16+ tax)

I'm not sure how we outside Pakistan can donate yet.

CPAINT - John Cox:

CPAINT is an AJAX tool kit which appears to be developed the right way.

(Via Planet PHP.)

Google Reader - Beautiful, Needs Work:

As I mentioned above, Google Reader is targeting heavy RSS readers. The product isn’t useful, however, for moving through a large number of feeds efficiently.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Thats a good point above. I hated the interface. Plus, the whole point of choosing a web based (Bloglines, NewsGator Online) RSS reader over native (Netnewswire) would be the fact that you can access it any where. However, the Google RSS reader doesn't work as well on all browsers (Safari). Why would I switch from Bloglines? Bloglines works on all browsers I use.

HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials | The Open Source Howto Development Web Site.:

HowtoForge provides free Howto hosting and discussion forums for OpenSource software)

All about Linux: Using TCP Wrappers to secure Linux:

TCP Wrappers can be used to GRANT or DENY access to various services on your machine to the outside network or other machines on the same network. It does this by using simple Access List Rules which are included in the two files /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny .

There goes Scoble again talking about search:

Do any of those link to Sony's official HDTV site or other manufacturer's sites? Nope. Part of that is Sony's fault. Sony did a Flash site without thinking about search engine optimization. Lame.

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

Thats another reason why I hate Flash! Isn't what Scoble outlines more like a portal than a search site. I go to a portal. Type in HDTV or HDTV Manufacturer. It gives me a list of HDTV manufacturers. A portal. Why are we going in circles. Altavista thought portals were big. They came decided to work on the portal aspect rather than search. It turned out people wanted better search, and Google wanted better search. Now Robert wants portals again? Now I kind of see why the execs thought portals were a big deal.

Bink/Bink.nu: Microsoft warns, don't use "Windows XP Service Pack 3 Preview":

This is not the first time that Windows fanatics create their own "Service Pack" by collecting all available hotfixes in to one installable pack.

(Via tech.memeorandum.)

ning! double ning! - Adam Trachtenberg:

I wanted to blog about it immediately; however, I really didn’t have anything interesting to say. Not that it’s stopped me before, but still. As a rule, I feel that in order to really understand something, you need to get your hands dirty using it. And in this case, I couldn’t just explore the example sites, I actually had to figure out how to build an application on the ning platform.

Fortunately, I know PHP 5 and so does ning.

(Via Planet PHP.)

Oracle buys InnoDB - Bertrand Mansion:

Scary news this morning : Oracle Announces the Acquisition of Open Source Software Company, Innobase

(Via Planet PHP.)

Google surprises no one and releases a...:

Google surprises no one and releases a very nicely done RSS reader. What an amazing week

(Via Scripting News.)

I actually didn't like the Google RSS reader. Maybe I haven't played enough with it, but it just looks ugly to me right now. Or maybe its because I was using Safari. **Sigh**, why is it that I always get hooked to a third/fourth string browser, the one that has the least amount of support. Earlier it was opera, then konqueror, and now Safari. Konqueror and Safari, are the same engines (KHTML).

Tim Bray: OpenOffice Mac Sanity:

A week ago, in my OpenOffice.org conference report, I wrote that the X11 Mac Port was being abandoned in favor of a Cocoa version. Every bloody Mac site in the world picked this up as though it were a major news story, and now I hear from Patrick Luby, chief maintainer of NeoOffice/J, that as a result, the people who’ve been supporting his work are threatening to cut him loose. This is madness; at the moment, Neo/J is the only actual shipping version of OpenOffice that you can run on a Mac with the menus in the right place, with drag-&-drop and fonts that Just Work, and so on. This is going to remain the case for some time, because the task of switching over the current X11 version is going to be huge, slow, and high-risk. (Patrick was also mad because I said Neo/J was “behind”, and, without going into details of Java and OO.o versions, he’s got a point). So for the time being, I’m going to go on using and supporting and probably blogging about Neo/J, because that’s all there is. And I still think that Apple should take an interest in this work.

(Via PlanetJava.org.)

Om Malik on google rss:

Bloglines you got competition. First impressions : it has a nice interface, with all the Ajax goodness we expect from Google. It has the same look and feel as Gmail. It has labels which can help with creating groups and all. I think just like MyYahoo, this could be a big step forward for RSS and its mass adoption.

Its timing out right now, but this will be really interesting to see once its released.

Jon Udell: What is the future of open blog infrastructure?:

But now that an 800-pound gorilla has arrived on the scene, I'd like to know whether its vision extends beyond weblogs.com to an open federation of notification services.

Sneak preview of Windows XP SP3 surfaces:

An unofficial preview of Windows XP SP3 has been posted online. Does this mean an official announcement is imminent?

(Via Ars Technica.)

What a day!:

The bootstrap of weblogs.com is something a bigco should not attempt, it's hard to make it go, and most bootstraps don't, and it requires trust, something an individual is more likely able to inspire than a big company. On the other hand, running a serivce that other bigco's depend on (like Google, and Microsoft, to name two) is not something a person like myself should attempt. I think Verisign is the perfect company to do it. Their name servers, I hear, respond to 250,000 requests per second at peak loads. In comparison, weblogs.com's 1-2 million pings a day seems a drop in the bucket. Further, it will require great resources to tackle the ping-spam issue, and there Verisign's expertise, not just what's visible today, but what's coming down the road, will make all the difference. I was in no posiiton to do this on my own. And belive me, the Technorait's and PubSub's, even Feedster and Bloglines, weren't helping out very much. I belive they'll respect Verisign much more than they respected me. And this deal will free me up to work on new ideas around blogging, RSS, OPML, web services, podcasting, etc. I'm good at digging holes, I have to pass off to others to make the trains run on time when the service grows as big as weblogs.com has.

(Via Scripting News.)

Fish:

Fish is an aquarium simulator

(Via Cool OSX Apps.)

Hey its Friday, I thought I'd post something completely useless and fun!

Nessus security tool closes its source | CNET News.com

Ummm... that sucks. But I guess if no one was contributing to the open source engine it really does make sense for the company to close the source. Its still available for free though. At least Nmap is going to remain open.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 available:

Do developers ever sleep? The folks at the Mozilla organization have made Firefox 1.5 beta 2 available for download.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Thunderbird 1.5 Beta2 has also been released. It takes forever for the window for creating a new email to come up in Beta 1. I hope its fixed in Beta 2.

None of the extensions work in Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 or 2, so I switched back to 1.0.7.

You can�t take the sky from me

Serenity is one of the best movies I've ever seen!

Tim Bray: What’s Going On?:

Check out the architecture; this is a competitor for existing server-side communications products like Microsoft Exchange and Sun’s Messaging Server. It also has a decent-looking AJAX front-end, inspired mostly by Outlook but with what seem to be cool integration hooks (Rich Sharples wonders whether JavaScript is really the right tool for the job). Anyhow, good luck to Zimbra

(Via PlanetJava.org.)

Rumor: Weblogs.com sold to Verisign:

Latest rumor, as reported on Jason Kottke's site: Weblogs.com sold to Verisign?

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

Oh... not good. I'd rather trust something as important as weblogs.com in Dave Winers hands rather than a bigger company. But I guess a bigger company was needed to handle the growth pains weblogs.com was experiencing.

Slashdot | Blog Network to Sell For $20 Million Plus

Slashdot | Blog Network to Sell For $20 Million Plus:

"Blogs are big money. The Weblogs Inc Network is apparently about to be sold for over $20 million to AOL, an individual blogger is making over $400,000 per year from his living room, a blogger writing about shoes is claiming a six figure income and blog networks are starting every second day with hopes of making it big. It looks like it might be time to dust off the old blogspot blog again."

Really! Can I have some of the money?

Jeez, I didn't know that the $2.08 from the adsense ads that I have had on this blog for more than a year could turn into a million dollars by the end of the year. I think I'll quit my day job now! ;)

Quite a lot of useful articles from developerworks below. Enjoy! :)

Ajax for Java developers: Java object serialization for Ajax:

f you're doing Java Web development using Ajax, then delivering data from the server to the client is probably your top concern. In this second article in the "Ajax for Java developers" series, Philip McCarthy walks you through five approaches to Java object serialization and gives you all the information you need to choose the data format and technology best suited to your application.

(Via IBM developerWorks.)

Sockets programming in Python:

Develop networking applications using Python's basic sockets features

(Via IBM developerWorks.)

Use PHP and XSL to create a DHTML link graph:

Use PHP, XSL, and JavaScript code to create a dynamic link graph based on data from RSS feeds. Link graphs display keywords from a data source in which each keyword is sized based on its frequency within the data set.

(Via IBM developerWorks.)

pgpool page:

pgpool caches the connection to PostgreSQL server to reduce the
overhead to establish the connection to it.

Also, pgpool could use two PostgreSQL servers for fail over. If the first server goes down, pgpool will automatically switch to the secondary server.

Moreover, pgpool supports scheduled switch over.

Newsgator buys NetNewsWire:

Update: here is the confirmation. Existing NetNewsWire full-version customers will receive a free 2-year paid subscription to NewsGator Online. Yup, good enough reason to switch to NewsGator from Bloglines. “Synchronization is set to be the killer feature of the next generation of feed reading software,” said John Gruber, author of the popular Mac weblog Daring Fireball.

(Via Om Malik's Broadband Blog.)

OpenOffice.org scrapping X11 port for native OS X version:

On his "Ongoing" blog, author and Sun Microsystems' Director of Web Technologies has posted that the OpenOffice Mac porting team are dropping their X11 work and switching back to developing a truly native Aqua version. This is great news, especially since in January of  this year Barb Dybwad blogged their announcement of the exact opposite; that they were dropping Aqua work for X11.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Maybe they should merge with the NeoOffice people, so that they don't have to start from scratch.

Cheap Publicity Ploy:

he Google-Sun announcement in the end turned out to be nothing…

(Via Om Malik's Broadband Blog.)

Oh well, an openoffice that runs in your browser was too good to be true. I should have known...

WWW SQL Designer - John Cox:

Sometimes I run across a web application that makes my jaw drop.

(Via Planet PHP.)

Slashdot | Google & Sun Planning Web Office:

"According to this post at Dirson's blog, Google and Sun Microsystems are to announce a new and kick-ass webtool: an Office Suite based on Sun's OpenOffice and accesible with your browser. Today at 10:30h (Pacific Time) two companies are holding a conference with more details, but Jonathan Schwartz (President of Sun Microsystems) claimed on Saturday on this post of his blog that "the world is about to change this week", predicting new ways to access software."

Wow! I was late on picking up this bit of news. I certainly hope it is a web version of OpenOffice. This would hopefully change a lot of things for the computer industry, certainly verifying the internet as a viable platform for day-to-day business applications, if that hasn't been done already.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

As I've mentioned before, Unity is a Mac-only game development platform. You can read the full feature list here, but I have to point out this is a powerful tool.

JL Java Announcements: Exchanger XML Lite - Free XML Editor:

Cladonia Limited, the publisher of Exchanger XML Editor, have released a free XML Editor for use in a non-commercial environment called Exchanger XML Lite. No registration required, no 30-day limit

(Via PlanetJava.org.)

Macintosh Garden:

Macintosh Garden is not game, but a website with 100’s of them . It’s a site dedicated to “preserve” the old games that are no longer developed or sold anywhere, or the so called abandonware. There is over 800 of the old classic games like Monkey Island, Lemmings, Doom and Leisure Suit Larry you freely can download and play.

(Via Cool OSX Apps.)

NewsGator to acquire NetNewsWire?:

NetNewsWire is a popular RSS aggregator on the Macintosh. NewsGator is my favorite aggregator. NewsGator already own RSS aggregators on:

1) Outlook (their original client).

2) Windows (FeedDemon, which they acquired earlier in the year).

3) The Web (they have a pretty comprehensive service that you can read, and rate, in your browser).

4) Windows Media Center (getting a LOT more important with HDTV and Xbox 360).

5) SmartPhone and PocketPC through Web service.

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

This is good news, I love NetNewsWire!

OpenBSD: Improved Memory Allocation, Beta Testing 3.8:

Two examples:
Over the last two months, some OpenBSD users noticed that the X server was crashing occasionally. Two bugs have been diagnosed and fixed by us. One was a use-after free bug in the X shared library linker. The other was a buffer-over-read bug deep down in the very lowest level fb* pixmap compositing routines. The latter bug in particular was very difficult to diagnose and fix, and is about 10 years old. We have found other bugs like this in other external software, and even a few in the base OpenBSD tree (though those were found a while back, even as we started experimenting with the new malloc code).

This is amazing. Bugs are detected in software packages that are 10 years old, in software that might be even older. I wonder if something like this can be brought in to OS X?

Tim Bray: Jonathan’s Question:

Jonathan was giving a keynote and asked the audience: “Would you rather give up your browser, or all the rest of your desktop apps?” The answer is obvious, but the follow-on questions are real interesting. Most ordinary database-backed business apps have migrated into the browser and they’re not coming back, no matter how great Windows Vista is. Given that, what kind of apps justify the irritation and inconvenience of having to download ’em and update ’em and back up the data and so on? Jonathan lists a few, including the browser itself, Skype, Google Earth, OpenOffice. But what’s the pattern behind that list?

(Via PlanetJava.org.)

My vacation is over, a lot of fun in a week. The week just flew by!

Sylvain Wallez: Electric shock in Cocoon land:

Stefano, Cocoon's original creator, sent two days ago a provocative post on cocoon-dev: "Is Cocoon obsolete"? That's not uncommon from Stefano to put a firebrand in the anthill. This even one of the social engineering techniques he uses when a community has become somehow sleepy: force the group to unite again to face a danger. And the fact that it happens just a few days before the annual Get Together is certainly not a coincidence.

(Via PlanetJava.org.)

Free RSS reader Vienna:

It's free, it's open source, and it's in beta. Vienna is a pretty sharp little RSS/Atom reader. I put it up against NetNewsWire, and it held up pretty well. Despite some strangeness involving dates, I actually like parts of Vienna better than NNW. For one thing, there are already three handy  Smart Folders set up for you: Marked Articles, Today's Articles (the one I had date issues with), and Unread Articles. Once I set it up to operate pretty much the same way NNW does, the only difference was a simpler interface in Vienna, a brushed metal UI, and less resource hogging. Hm. This Vienna thing is pretty cool...

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Zoho Writer - Another Ajax Word Processor:

Quite frankly, it’s many people’s opinion (ours included) that Writely, Jotspot Live, Writeboard, Chalk and others are ultimately addressing the same customer pool - those who want to create, share, and group-edit documents online.

Zoho Writer is the newest entrant and is as good as the rest. Think Word + Group Editing + Ajax. It’s a rich ajax application that allows sharing and group editing, and, like Writely, has a great wysiwyg editing interface and excellent image import and manipulation features.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Lots and lots of web 2.0 applications coming online! One thing that interests me. If I create a document, can I save it to my local hard drive? I don't like leaving my data on a server run by someone else. Even with gmail, I have POP access, and thunderbird keeps a local copy of the messages for me.

Writeboard Launches But Needs Feature Upgrades:

Unlike competitive solutions, you must use a special markup language to format text (no wysiwyg), you cannot upload images, and there is no ajax or other functionality to move content around on the page. It is also a little buggy - comments are not showing up at all on our test page. Frankly, if it wasn’t 37signals, who generally create awesome applications, we would not be profiling it yet.

However, our guess is that they will be adding functionality quickly. We are also looking forward to the launch of Chalk.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Is Memeorandum a good thing, blogger asks:

Oh, by the way, 37 Signals' Writeboard is already out, and, yes, I think we'll all talk about it over the next 24 hours since it just opened up. I created one. Looks interesting, but I wish I could link off of my Whiteboard. That wasn't obvious. It looks like a dumbed down Wiki, to tell you the truth.

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

I tried Writeboard too, and it just looks like a very simple collaboration tool with version control. I'll play with it a little more if I get time later.

Its weird, when I go to blogger.com using Safari, the browser keeps going to http://www.blogger.com/sorry.html. Firefox works fine.

I'm turning of comments on my blog for now. Too much spam.

Master, console, and servant:

I love console in Rails. It is absolutely one of my favorite tools in Rails. I probably spend more time testing stuff in console than I do in a browser, which is a good thing. Right?

(Via Robby on Rails.)

Is Morfik the one, Geoff asks:

No, that's not what I was thinking of, but, it is interesting indeed. Morfik, as Geoff notes, lets developers create Web applications that run on the desktop after being unplugged from the Web. Morfik will be one of the things launched this week at the Web 2.0 conference

(Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

OpenTable Restaurants and Restaurant Reservations

A directory of restaurants in various cities, and you can make restaurant reservations online. A useful service for all those traveling consultants I'm sure.

O'Reilly: What Is Web 2.0:

In the year and a half since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

Report: SBA computer woes delaying Katrina aid - Sep. 30, 2005:

The newspaper also reports that the network that connects inspectors with their offices is frequently down and that workers in the field can't read the screens of their tablet-style computers in the glare of Gulf Coast sunlight.

This does not seem like good news for tablet PC's. I'm sure they will figure out a solution sooner or later, I just hope its sooner.

The Raven X41 Linux Tablet PC by EmperorLinux - Engadget - www.engadget.com:

The RavenX41 by EmperorLinux, based on the Lenovo Thinkpad X41, is a'you guessed it Linux based Tablet PC with support for all of the above features, along with full utilization of the Thinkpad biometric fingerprint scanner.

Terminal Tips: "Uninvisible" the invisible files on your iPod:

I've covered different ways to get your Music off of your iPod before, but now that I am going all nano all the time, and preparing to get rid of my 60GB iPod, I wanted a nice, quick, and easy way to get all those songs off of my old iPod.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)