Well, I knew it would happen sooner or later……Google coming out with an OS. With how bad Windows Vista is and the current state of things in the world, and just the United States economy, I guarantee you that tons of people are going to be running the Google OS when it comes out in 2010.

I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate RC and it’s pretty good. It’s not “great” however like you would expect after a flub like Windows Vista.

I think the general public (myself included) is tired of Microsoft and Apple. Not so much Apple but competition is always good. The folks at Microsoft have sat on their ass for so long that they no longer innovate. As much as I don’t like how Google data mines everything, they sure do innovate.

Microsoft just doesn’t get it anymore. Plus, Steve Ballmer was about the worst thing to ever happen to Microsoft. He just sucks. He’s a cocky jerk-off that behaves like a hyper 14 year old kid. Dork.

Yeah Google Chrome OS is going to be based on Linux but who cares? I don’t. The thing is, if there was any one company that could take Linux and build it from the Kernel up and make the code nice and tight yet without all the BS…that company would be Google. Heck Microsoft hired a bunch of Linux people and what did they do? Nothing.

I would bet a paycheck on the fact that the Google OS will be very slim, nice and tidy. It will boot up in about 10 or 15 seconds at worst, and it will just work. It will not need regular updates like Microsoft does and it will not need all the bloatware that is required on a Windows desktop to keep it free from viruses and malware.

Google makes stuff that “just works”. I mean just look here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

I can tell you there there is no way that I will pay to upgrade or buy any Microsoft OS if I can get Google OS for free. Ubuntu Linux and Fedora (by Redhat) are very close right now at being easy to use and also user friendly. Now that Google has their hand in the Linux cookie jar, Microsoft is done. This is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. Google is already talking with big OEM’s to get the Google OS preloaded on certain machines.

Read more here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

This is gonna rock!

Online games can be interesting and entertaining for those who can play it. But for some, especially those who are new to such games, it can be very intimidating because the new player is always fearful that he or she will spoil the games for the other expert players, by making some silly mistakes. Therefore if you are a novice in the field of online games but would like to play one then read this article so that you can get some idea about online games. This in turn will boost up your performance. So happy gaming!

The first step anyone new to online gaming should take is to first, learn how to play offline. You can read the game’s manual and save yourself from seeing the infamous acronym, “RTFM” scroll across your screen. Know what that acronym stands for? It stands for “Read The Fu**ing Manual” and its spewed by serious gamers to vulnerable newbie’s who interrupt a game with questions like, “What is this place?” or “What am I supposed to do?” You could search the web for game related discussion groups, FAQ’s, and walkthroughs. And you could learn more from game specific Usenet newsgroups. In other words, you could do your “homework.”

Some of the kind of information you want to learn includes how to play, how to create characters, how to gather equipment, and how to implement some smart strategies. Trust us when we say your gaming comrades will appreciate it! In addition to reading how to play an online game, you can familiarize yourself with the game’s interface. Just as you searched the net for a game’s textual instruction, you can additionally search the net for a game’s screenshot (or series of screenshots). Having a graphical representation (.gif or .jpg image) of a game on your screen gives you a chance to memorize where all the game’s controls are.

Knowing where everything is on a game before you play will speed things up not only for yourself, but also for everyone else. No one wants to wait for you to search for an inventory panel or message screen in a game when the location of these items is obvious to everyone else. Once you start with a game, don’t let the pressure of staying in the game prevent you from doing the unthinkable: dying. A character dying in a game is inevitable at certain points, and unless you willingly let go of a lose-lose situation, you’ll run the risk of holding the game up for everyone else. It’s like a game of chess. If it’s checkmate – it’s checkmate. Call it a day and start anew.

Whatever you do, don’t hang around waiting for some magical fairy to come to your rescue. Please let your character die with dignity. On the same token, you don’t want to take dying personally. Remember that online gaming is still just a game. A character that dies in a game is not representative of your character as a person. Turn a death into learning experience. At the very least, you’ll learn your way around an online game by learning all the things that you aren’t supposed to do! Above all else, ensure that your computer has what it takes to maintain the current pace of an online game.

Don’t try to play an online game with a slow computer or slow Internet connection. In fact, if you’re still using dial up, find another hobby. A slow processor and connection will ensure instant death because other players aren’t going to politely wait for their own defeat. They’re going to squash you like a bug. Hunt around for a computer that was built for online gaming and get a DSL or ISDN Internet connection. You’ll need a fast processor, a high quality graphics card, and a sound machine to match.

By following these simple suggestions, you will have passed the “newbie” test and earned respect as a serious gamer much more quickly than if you stumbled your way through what others pride as “the ultimate hobby.”

Read more

Bought myself a new toy.  A Toshiba Satellite L305-S5955 (squeal) ok that’s the girl in me.  I did buy a 2 year warranty for $74.00.  I learned my lesson from my last laptop when that one (it was given as a gift and no warranty was bought)…the A/C adaptor broke off from the male end on the toy thus disabling it.  When I went to Best Buy to find out what it would cost to fix it was told I would have to replace the motherboard.

yyyyeaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh……………

So, it sits gathering dust like a big paperweight.   I was dying for a laptop and my PC simply has me ticked off.  Going to strip the hard drive and start from scratch like I did with my daughter’s laptop when she “forgot” to update her virus protection software and her toy crashed.  It took about 3 hours to get her baby back and running but mama did it!

The laptop is my toy for running the creative juices…I can happily scamper off to Borders and Barnes and Noble to brainstorm for my next book.

We stopped off at GameStop and she bought Kingdom Hearts II for PS2 and SingStar (1980’s) and she is beggin’ mama to sing and I will but not tonight. I spent almost an hour with Charter (who still couldn’t help me)…Best Buy was able to get a connection when I took the tower there and they stated (when a repairman came yesterday) the modem is working and I changed the Ethernet cable (see other post).  I am now typing on the kid’s laptop and will open up my toy some time this weekend.  Mama is tired and she needs to quit being so reliant on the Net for entertainment……….

Ok, kid is going through the SingStar’s repritoire and I am having major flashbacks from high school and from my time in the military (active duty 1986-1990).

I have to remember this and the best way to remember is to share.

We have one regular ( I mean every day, sometimes twice a day) customer to our library who thinks he knows how to use the public computers.  He then spends half an hour swearing at the machine, making everyone feel uncomfortable,  until he finally gives up claiming there’s something wrong with the machine.  Of course, there isn’t, just with the user taking up space in front of it.

Recently, I was told of the acronym for this sort of error, EBCAC, which stands for Error Between Chair And Computer. 

Next time this customer complains about the computers not working for him I can confidently say that it’s a EBCAC issue and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Penguin Band goes on tour once a year! And you need to find them! I have found them over 3 times now, and usually search parties work. Call your friends over hte telephone (best way) me and my friend called each other on the telephone and a 2 man search party met Cadence, Gary, PB, Aunt Arctic, etc… at the Penguin play awards. I have met PB at the music jam and the penguin play awards. Remember, you need a 50 coin pass and you need to be a member to get it. PB will be at the backstage. Tracker time!

Once upon a time, in the early 1960’s, there lived a little girl. She played in the streets of a new type of neighborhood called a suburb. Her house looked just like all of the others on the streets. She wasn’t anything special, either; not a beauty, not an athlete, not a genius; she was just a little girl.

HOWEVER, she and her dad loved to watch football games on their b & w television. Especially the college games. In fact, it was so much fun, her dad had stacked four tvs on top of one another so they could watch all of the really important teams play each week.

Now, it so happened that during the football-game-watching afternoons the little girl and her dad would enjoy a large bowl of crunchy Cheetos and potato chips and fresh fruit from the yard. She would sit on his shoulders and together they would finish off the bowl.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings the little girl was responsible for cooking the slabs of bacon in the frying pan.  Her mom had put it in the utility room with a windowfan on to suck out the grease, but no one thought about a way to suck it out of their bodies.  After frying the bacon her mom taught her how to fry everyone’s eggs by spooning the hot, delicious bacon grease on them. Then they would pour the rest of the ‘gravy’ over their grits.  Not one drop of bacon fat was wasted.

On Sunday nights they would enjoy a rich, fatty steak.  It was always the little girl’s job to start the charcoal and get it hot enough. And the mom would put real butter and real sour cream on the table for the potatoes. Everyone ate happily and had to clean their plates because, “There are starving children in Africa.”

Some special weekends about once a month the little girl’s family would host a huge fish fry in their large back yard. All evening everyone would gorge on fresh fried fish, fried hushpuppies and baked potatoes with all of the fixings, especially that real butter and sour cream.

And DESERT!  There was always a desert about an hour after dinner. Apple pie, rhubarb pie, real ice cream, puddings, brownies, cakes, cookies. Everything in the little girl’s house tasted delicious because that’s what counted.

Year 2009: Intervention Cardiac Physician’s Office

Sitting in the doctor’s office I recalled our lifestyle of the 1960’s, ‘70’s, even ‘80’s until doctors and advertising finally convinced some of us that fat in foods and no exercise was bad for us.  That combined with the deaths of many from that era by heart failure with massively clogged arteries (atherosclerosis).

My father, after being obese his entire adult life, died of a massive coronary two years ago, his second one, after a quadruple-bypass. And that was after living with congestive heart failure for ten years and taking high doses of rat poison (Coumadin) so his blood was thin enough to flow through his arteries.  After the heart attack he changed his eating habits, because mom forced him to, but it was too late. The damage had been done when he was a youngster and then a young adult. AND he had passed on the family bad HDL genes as well, so I was now fighting for my health on several battlefields.

The real story started in June after dinner. For many years I’ve tried to prepare fairly healthy meals and with three vegetarians in the family it’s not always hard. In addition, my husband and I will have a glass of red wine with dinner a few times a week. So I was working on my book when my heart started doing flip-flops in my chest. Literally.

I froze and waited anxiously. I could feel my heart stop, wait a second and then BOOM it would beat again for a few strokes then stop. I broke out in a cold sweat and became very nauseated. I didn’t want to upset anyone, so I got my husband’s attention and softly told him what was happening, in case I passed out or something.  I sat, listening to my body and fearing the worst.

“I’m too young to die. I have young children and an unfinished book. I can’t die yet. God, please don’t let me die this young.”

It lasted about half-an-hour then just eased away. The next day I made a doctor’s appointment.  When I explained what had happened she immediately gave me an EKG in her office.  The result?

I had had a mild cardio infarction. A heart attack.

She asked why I hadn’t gone to the ER, but I hadn’t had any pain or numbness, no tingling.  She put me into the hospital overnight for tests.

The nurses, technicians and doctors gave me several more EKGs with the same result, an EEG (abnormal) and monitored everything I did.  The doctor wanted me to recreate the event so the heart monitor I was wearing could pick it up.  I walked and literally danced down the halls, listening to my iPod, after visiting hours, of course, but to no avail.  The nurses waved as I passed their work station for the fifth, eighth, tenth time.  No reaction.

“Come back tomorrow for a stress test.”

So I went home to my own wonderful bed and slept like a log. Although hospitals are meant to make people feel better, they wake you every two hours for blood pressure, vitals, blood samples or just to listen to you breathe deeply and make sure you’re still alive.

The next day I went in for the stress test which took several hours. They injected a radioactive isotope called Thallium into my bloodstream after taking a set of pictures of my heart at rest. Then I waited a while before they took more pictures and compared them.

Meanwhile, I went upstairs for the chemical part (stress without the exercise) of the test. They injected Dobutamine) a form of adrenaline directly into my IV cause my vessels to dilate instantly.  It was the weirdest medical test I’ve ever taken. My whole body instantly flushed hot, my head felt about to burst and it felt like elephants were sitting on my legs.  This passed in about a minute, but that was a verrrrrry long minute. The headache remained for several hours.

After this injection I went back downstairs for the pictures of my stressed heart which would show where the blockages were.

The result? 90% chance of blockage leading to my legs.  I would need a heart catheterization.

The next test was the quickest and most definitive of them all, but also one of the most expensive.  The cardiologist made a tiny incision in the artery at my groin, where the right leg is attached, then inserted a dark dye through a catheter. This is called coronary angiography.  Pictures were then taken of the heart and arteries, following the dye progress. In my case the dye remained dark and highly visible all over the place, NO BLOCKAGES!  Yay!

Dye results in heart

Had they found blockages, the doctors would have inserted a stent, a small metal basket-tube on the end of a balloon catheter. Once in place the balloon is expanded pressing the stent against the walls of the artery and opening it for better flow.  In my case that was not necessary.  My father, however, had that procedure before his bypass.

So I have a follow-up appointment with my regular doc next week to discuss everything.  I know he’s going to insist that I lose weight, and I’ll try harder this time. But the prognosis is pretty much this:

• Eat healthy

• Small portions, even if it means 5 meals instead of 3,

• Low fat,

• Low salt,

• Plenty of fiber

• Drink plenty of water or green tea (antioxidants)

• Reduce caffeine

• No smoking (I don’t anyway)

• Drink red wine occasionally

• Exercise! Even if it’s just walking for 30 minutes every day.

Will I listen to these guidelines?  Absolutely.  I was given a wake-up call.  Just glad I answered.

Here are just a couple of awesome sites to check for even more information  about heart fix-ups.

http://www.heartsite.com/html/chemical_stress.html

http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/stress-test–(dupe)

http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4491

There is an increasing threat from software attacks that take advantage of vulnerable web browsers. We have observed a trend whereby new software vulnerabilities are exploited and directed at web browsers through use of compromised or malicious web sites. This problem is made worse by a number of factors, including the following:

* Many users have a tendency to click on links without considering the risks of their actions.
* Web page addresses can be disguised or take you to an unexpected site.
* Many web browsers are configured to provide increased functionality at the cost of decreased security.
* New security vulnerabilities may have been discovered since the software was configured and packaged by the manufacturer.
* Computer systems and software packages may be bundled with additional software, which increases the number of vulnerabilities that may be attacked.
* Third-party software may not have a mechanism for receiving security updates.
* Many web sites require that users enable certain features or install more software, putting the computer at additional risk.
* Many users do not know how to configure their web browsers securely.
* Many users are unwilling to enable or disable functionality as required to secure their web browser.

As a result, exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers has become a popular way for attackers to compromise computer systems.

I have spent more time in my sent emails than ever before. Mainly, I’m double checking what I sent and when it was sent – looking for names again. Inevitably, while I’m in those sent emails, Firefox crashes. Every few emails that I open, there it goes . . . crashing again.

I haven’t noticed it on any other pages.

Brent Housing Partnership (BHP) is the company that looks after 13,600 council properties in Brent and they have asked Dumo Developments to install a network of P1 19″ touch screen kiosks along with an interactive touch screen application, allowing local residents to source local information and contact details of government services.

Dumo Developments have been approached by FUTEX the proprietary trading house to create a bespoke web based trader reporting application, allowing users to note their trading reports and profits.

This is the first of many interactive applications that FUTEX are instigating in the view of advancing their business

I really like what I read in this entry.

Candid Reaction from Zoho to the Potential Threat of Office 2010

Zoho is full web-enabled productivity suite.  Unlike traditional office suites which have a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation package, Zoho goes so much deeper.  There is a project planner, online organizer, chat, database application, and many other products.

A reaction to the announcement of Microsoft’s Office 2010 free web based suite of application could be to put up the “For Sale” sign.  Instead, the CEO Sridhar Vembu takes a philosophical approach, outlining all of the functionality of Zoho, and a commitment to never stop making their base products better and to continue to develop new.

It’s this attitude that spells the difference between successful applications and unsuccessful ones.  I hope that the company lies up to this statement.  I also hope that others stand up and take notice to do the same thing.  It’s time to make good products great.  It must be daunting to have a huge corporation like Microsoft announce that they’re coming to play in your space.

It was quite a statement to make about a product that doesn’t exist yet – just word of something to come.

I wish them all the best for success.  Those of us who use applications like this appreciate the commitment to excellence.

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I wish I had seen these things before I let my laptop get scatched up! I think they are a great alternative for those that want to decorate their laptops without getting one of the hard plastic cases. There are actually two designers featured in this post. Take a look at their shops for a larger variety of images available.

Artist: DesignsbyCat
      

Artist: michellechristina
          

Ok so you want to upload a file to your webspace. Easy enough you just need some sort of server-side language. In this case it’s PHP, this tutorial should work with versions 4 upwards.

So we’ll build just 1 file to handle the upload, display status and the form.

Im going to call this upload0r.php (you can call it whatever you want)

First of all make a folder in your webspace/server called uploads, by default it should have read, write and execute permissions (chmod 777) if it doesn’t you can use something like Filezilla FTP client to alter this.

More here: Upload a File Using PHP

Why would you need to do this? Well for instance if you were using 3rd party AJAX APIs and you wanted to capture the data from them perhaps, or maybe you just have a complex form.

Or you could use this for form validation to return errors from the server without refreshing the browser, for example, if the data already exists in a database you could let the user know.

Either way its pretty simple. Basically we just use javascript to post the form object over http to a serverside page – e.g. PHP, JSP, ASP etc…

More here: Using Javascript/ AJAX to post HTML form data

Currently the version states: version 1.0b13

Postbox is yet another email client, cross platform on both mac and windows. It runs like magic from the first time you run it, I’ve been hooked on it and I have sadly abandoned Thunderbird until the new release comes out.

What makes Postbox a lot different, in what I’ve noticed, is the ability to be extremely easy for users to set up their email accounts, a lot easier than Thunderbird, Outlook, and Apple Mail. The interface is a lot like an “Aero version” of Apple Mail yet the function-ability is a lot better. There’s tabs to allow you to view your multiple accounts in different tabs. Attaching files, receiving mail, loading messages, switching between mail accounts and emails is extremely fast. No bugs that I’ve noticed so far.

Unlike Thunderbird, Postbox does a great job with HTTP and Yahoo! Mail Plus. HTTP being support for Windows Live Hotmail, ancient yet a lot of people use it, I still do too. It also supports AOL Mail which I honestly don’t use yet it would be good for high schoolers to transition into college (it’s in IMAP as well).

The authoring/writing on Postbox is much like most other email clients [besides Outlook's new Ribbon interface] yet for some reason it gives a lot of clarity and simplicity to it which makes it a lot more relaxing to type up something. One of the most creative features on it and most useful for writing is the “Compose sidebar.” The sidebar features search, not any ol’ search, it allows you to search anything recent you’ve attached or sent, links, documents, images, and it also features something I found really helpful thesaurus and signatures. The image search allows you to find images in your mail, on Picasa Web Albums, and on Flickr.

Good things added on are always great, but because it’s in a beta and they’re still trying it out, I would have to suggest a few things: the tabs should be given more credit, compose/reply shouldn’t be a new window instead it should be in a new tab. And I understand this isn’t Outlook but I also understand this isn’t a Mac-only application, my point: add the ability to change the interface’s colors or add support for themes. The option for me to select multiple messages and mark them read.

Now because Postbox is in BETA and we expect it to get better, hopefully they realize Beta isn’t an excuse to just have buggy software. You guys are doing a great job, keep it up!

Here’s how Postbox puts up against other popular clients, this is on a Windows 7 PC [nothing fancy here], it’s Postbox BETA 13, Thunderbird 3 Beta 2, Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail 14.

You can easily see that it hogs the resources, yet it’s in beta so we should let it slide.

Anything I missed or have you noticed something I didn’t? Let me know! :]

P.S. I wrote this in Postbox

Update: I posted this through Postbox’s compose yet when I saw it online, the images were first on the bottom not where I wanted them in the post, another thing I didn’t notice until after posting. Thunderbird is great with this.

Recently I had to build a system that would take an address, pass it to google and return latitude and longitude values. The result is then stored for later use and display on Google maps.

However, firstly I found that the default XML geocoding service provided by Google that allows you to do bulk geocoding on a data source and the geocoding provided by their maps API/ AJAX library (GClientGeocoder) had huge differences in results. Most postal codes passed to googles XML geocoding service were miles out or just not recognised. Yet when using the same postcode in the maps API when calculated on the fly the results were more or less spot on.

More here:Google Maps API part 1: Accurate Geocoding for UK Postcodes

A snappy title for this tutorial! This is a quick guide with a bit of extra info that I’ve learnt along the way to getting this working, showing that we can:

A) Use a supplemental power source to power the motor
B) Use the L293D chip to drive the motor
C) Use a switch to change the direction of the motor

More here: Control a DC motor with Arduino and L293D chip

A quick circuit showing how to control the speed of a DC motor with a potentiometer with your Arduino board. Also shows how to use a TIP120 transistor to allow the Arduino control a larger power supply.

More here: Arduino: Control a DC motor with potentiometer and multiple power supplies

A guide to using the SRF05 with Arduino in order to calculate distances from objects. In this case I’m also altering the output of an LED with PWM according to how close an object is to the sensor. So the nearer you are the brighter the LED.

More here: Arduino: Sonic range finder with SRF05

Quite useful, I had the case where I needed to provide a CSV file to an external party from our Oracle 10g database. No problem, there are loads of CSV export tools out there. But it then transpired that the CSV’s that I was generating were using quote (”) marks to identify fields e.g. “field1″,”field2″ and so on…
More below at my main blog site:
Spool a CSV file from Oracle/ SQL*Plus without quotes

Atul Dwivedi, an Indian hacker paid a visit to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) last Monday by defacing their website.

This accident comes amid a raise in violence targeted towards Indian native in Australia and apparently Dwivedi protested this situation by leaving a message on the website:

“This site has been hacked by Atul Dwivedi. This is a warning message to the Australian government. Immediately take all measures to stop racist attacks against Indian students in Australia or else I will pawn all your cyber properties like this one.”

Racist incident in Australia against Indian students has increased in the last months

This site is now up and running as per normal. Of course the webserver wasn’t connected to any internal network and didn’t contain any classified information according to a spokewoman:

“No sensitive information was compromised as the air force internet website is hosted on an external server and, as such, does not hold any sensitive information,¹“

Microsoft products are used in pretty much every Western armed forces. So it’s save to assume the webserver used by the RAAF is probably running IIS. Of course, IIS implies as Windows machine and a Windows Server machine means that everything is almost certainly all Microsoft based. Of course we can now verify those claims and according to David M Williams from ITWire² the website is hosted through Net Logistics, an Australian hosting company. The aforementioned article tries to explain the hack with the use of exploits. Which might have been the way Dwivedi did it, but the analysis is quite simple and lacks depth. The site still has an excellent link to a blog detailing the WebDAV exploit, see below for the link.

It’s not impossible to think that Dwivedi might have tricked someone into giving out too much information also. Social engineering can do lots and is usually easier than technical exploits. The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick should convince most people of that. Someone could look up on Facebook or another social networking site for some people in the RAAF and then try to pose as them and pose as them.

Then also, why not look for the FTP server? And God knows what else the server is running; maybe a SMTP server also (and probably it does). Now I wouldn’t suggest doing this, but running a port scan would probably reveal a lot of information. Moreover, using web vulnerability tools like Nikto could help find misconfigured settings in ASP or forgotten test/setup pages/files. Up to there, only two things are important: information gathering and imagination.

See also:

“Hacker breaks into RAAF website”, AAP, Brisbane Times, July 16, 2009, http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-national/hacker-breaks-into-raaf-website-20090716-dmrn.html accessed on 2009-07-17

“WebDAV Detection, Vulnerability Checking and Exploitation”, Andrew, SkullSecurity, May 20, 2009, http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/?p=285 accessed on 2009-07-17