Prediction Time!

This time of the year is for predictions and we have come up with our set for 2007!

• Vista will still make money! and yes, not surprisingly it will still be insecure
• Few Web 2.0 startups will survive 2007
• AOL will survive 2007 ;-) or get taken over
  
• Google will continue to dominate the world diversifying even more
• Ubuntu will gain more popularity than ever
• You will start seeing more video ads!
• Blogging will surge even more and a promiment medium for communication
  
• India will start to find some outsourcing competiion from other countries but will continue to lead
• We will see the Apple Phone which will be very popular
• Firefox will continue to gain market share - around 30% this year end
• Skype will run on losses - VoIP will be more widely used
  

More as they as come...

Money Money Money!

Arrington - $60K/month - maybe people pay to get into his site!

Pavlina - $30K/month - Read how humble his beginning was

Agarwal - $25K/month - WOW! This guy earns more than Bollywood stars - Rs 1.3 cr per year ?

Rowse - $16K/month - Not much known

And then there are other biggies

Script.aculo.us: How to easily AJAX your site

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and all you need to know is a little bit about HTML and how to read. If you already have your own website, it is not hard to do. Follow these steps to AJAX up your site in no time:

Downloadsquad has the instructions

Google - No.1 in 2007?

Internet search giant Google, which defied gravity this year, is set to become the world's most visited Internet site in 2007.

Google's revenue hit $7.2 billion for the first three quarters of 2006. Its stock topped the $500-a-share mark (now at $468). Most significant, Google in October acquired highflying video site YouTube for $1.7 billion. Measurement services ComScore Media Metrix and Nielsen/NetRatings plan to add YouTube to Google's overall rankings next year.

Read about Google's Surge

Firebug - the next generation web tool

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Get Firebugged!

Blake Ross - Google is no longer trustworthy!

Call me naive: I think you can make a lot of money, go public, even monopolize a market, and still retain a moral compass that points in the direction of Google’s stated top priority—users.

But Google lost me today:

Read Why!

StudyBuddy for your kid's homework

AOL has something called Study Buddy which they call is a search engine for homework - Ask your kid to try it out and see if its any good or wikipedia anyway ! :)

divshare - unlimited sharing

divshare lets you share files and here are some of the features

1. Upload unlimited files
2. Serve unlimited downloads
3. Files stay online forever! NEW!
4. No pop-up ads or spam
5. Incredibly fast, reliable servers
6. Add a link and logo to your download pages
7. Easy image galleries and thumbnails
8. Nearly every file extension supported

Go enjoy till it lasts .. bubble just got bigger!

Sniffing On Ethernet Undetected

All you need is a MAC and a dev and you can sniff without sending packets.

So I have been in some tight spots where I had to sniff a password or two off the wire, or sniff some packets off the wire undetected and based on the packets content do something.

So I tried a few things and this is what worked..

Learn more..

Top 10 Blogger Babes of 2006

RELISH!

The Microsoft JOKE!

First, they send laptops to bribe bloggers loaded with Vista. After that PR disaster, now, they want the laptops back saying they are for review only !

Gmail Tragedy!

The first message, posted on the Google Groups forum on December 19, stated “Found my account clean..nothing in Inbox, contacts ,sent mail..How can all these information residing in different folders disappear? ..How to write to gmail help team to restore the account..is it possible?..Where to report this abuse?.Any help ..Welcome..Thanks in advance ps101″

And Google says

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

Read more and before that .. BACKUP your MAIL!

TLA - Text Link Ads - Blogger Support

Text Link Ads or popularly called TLA and one of the alternatives to Google Adsense has added support for the new blogger. So, publishers, go ahead and loot the advertisers :) - hey - you know I don't really mean it - :D

Favicons for del.icio.us

Get this Greasemonkey script to add favicons for del.icio.us

The Saga of decrypting an AACS protected movie, by Muslix64.

December 6:

I just bought a HD-DVD drive to plug on my PC, and a HD movie, cool! But when I realized the 2 software players on windows don't allowed me to play the movie at all, because my video card is not HDCP compliant and because I have a HD monitor plugged with DVI interface, I started to get mad... This is not what we can call "fair use"! So I decide to decrypt that movie. I start reading the AACS specification I have found on the net. I estimate it will take
me about 4 weeks of full time job to decrypt that. I was wrong, it was in fact, easy...

BTW, when I disable my HD monitor, I can watch the movie,on my old VGA screen, but, what is the point of having a HD monitor and not being able to watch a HD movie on it!

December 7 to December 12:

Nothing, I try many things, but I'm going nowhere. I change my technique

December 13:

Now I focus only on title key. I was very surprise to realize that the title key is there, in memory! Can it be that easy? Around 7PM, I decrypt my first movie "pack". Around 11PM, I have now a totally decrypted movie! But there is a problem. Frame skipping.

December 14:

After many tests, I found a field in the Nav pack, that fix the frame skipping problem.
Wow! Now I can watch a smooth playback of an HDDVD film that I have decrypted!
After only 8 days of work, I was able to decrypt an HD-DVD movie! What's the problem? There is a major security problem somewhere.

December 15 and December 16:

I put together a small program called "BackupHDDVD", a java based command line utility to decrypt movies.

December 17:

I made a small video called "AACS is Unbreakable" where you can see the output of the program while decrypting.
You can also see a playback of a decrypted movie.


December 18:

Upload that video on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oZGYb92isE

December 20:

Upload the program and source code on RapidShare (V0.99)
http://rapidshare.com/files/8318838/...HDDVD.zip.html

December 21:

I want to go further in the decryption, so I decide to track down the "Volume unique key" instead of title key.
I found it also! I'm preparing BackupHDDVD V1.00, that will support volume key and title keys.

December 25:

Merry Christmas!

December 26:

I create a thread on the Doom9 forum about BackupHDDVD. People don't believe it..

50 Coolest Websites

How do we select our finalists? We evaluate hundreds of candidates—some suggested by readers, colleagues and friends, others discovered during countless hours of surfing. Many of this year's choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips. Think we missed one? Send us your thoughts and we'll post a selection of your comments online. There's always next year.

See them!

Turn off the annoying system beep

Yes, this is much easier than this

rmmod pcspkr

To Get it back on - woudn't know why you would want to do that !

modprobe pcspkr

Send Anonymous SMS

AnonTxt is offered completely free of charge and there's no registration required, so you can start sending free or anonymous online text messages, to anyone in the United States or Canada, in seconds.

Start sending FREE SMS!

Wired Vaporware for 2006

10. Optimus-103 Keyboard
9. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
8. The "IPod Killer"
7. Gran Turismo 4 Mobile
6. Airbus A380
5. SED Televisions
4. Spore
3. Skype for Symbian
2. TiVoToGo for Mac
1. Duke Nukem Forever

Got time ? Read in Detail!

2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards

You, the readers, have sent us your picks for the lamest quotes from or about the world of technology during this eventful year. We have selected the "best" of those and present them to you now.

Leading off with a stupid quote from President Bush might seem a little too easy, perhaps unfair, a bit like stealing candy from a blind kid or something. But in a year chockablock with moronic quips, obtuse observations and mind-boggling inanities, you still have to put Dubya front and center. He is, after all, the most powerful man in the world.

"One of the things I've learned on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see -- I've forgotten the name of the program -- but you get the satellite, and you can -- like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It reminds me of where I wanna be sometimes."
-- Bush, asked during an interview with CNBC if he ever googled anybody.

"The Google." How quaint -- if it were coming from your grandmother. (And that would be Google Earth, Mr. President.)

Read Via Wired

Windows 95 Commercial

Asterisk 1.4.0 released

Asterisk is a complete IP PBX in software. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX including many advanced features that are often associated with high end (and high cost) proprietary PBXs. Asterisk supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

Asterisk is released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), meaning that it is available for download free of charge. Asterisk is the most popular open source software available, with the Asterisk Community being the top influencer in VoIP.

Get Asterisk 1.4.0

AJAX for beginners

Take a look on the net and you'll see endless pages of AJAX Frameworks: libraries which promise to do all the trivial and dirty AJAX work for you, leaving you free to code without actually understanding how the application you're writing really works. So lets pull back the smoke and mirrors and see what AJAX is and why it's just a simple evolution of client/server tricks Javascript programmers have been doing since the web was born.

Simply put, AJAX is a method for your javascript programs to talk to your server and send and request data. There's nothing particularly new about this. Javascript programmers have been communicating with the server in the background ever-since the FRAME tag became available. So we'll begin learning about AJAX by learning how things were done before AJAX became buzzworthy. The first thing to do is to set up an iframe somewhere on the page.

Read More

Using Ajax from Perl

This one is a old article but does teach you how to use do AJAX with perl

Free Ajax Ringtone Maker

This ringtone maker lets you edit ringtones and share it too

MySQL Cheat Sheet

The MySQL cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing useful information about MySQL. It includes a list of the available functions in MySQL, as well as data types. It also includes a list of MySQL functions available in PHP, and a list of useful sample queries to select data from a database.

Get them!

Web 2.0 how-to design guide

The list below is a summary of many of the common features of typical "Web 2.0" sites.

Clearly, a site doesn't need to exhibit all these features to work well, and displaying these features doesn't make a design "2.0" - or good!

I've already addressed some of these factors in my introductory Current Style article.

Read Via WebDesignFromScratch

Programmer Hierarchy

(CLICK to View FULL SIZE)

Discovered Via DIGG

PDFs with PDFCreator

For many Windows users who want to create PDF files, Adobe Acrobat is overkill. Acrobat has more functions and features than they'll generally use, and with a price tag of $299 ($449 for the professional edition), Acrobat costs more than many people want to spend. Luckily, Windows users can create PDFs from any application using the GPL-licensed PDFCreator. Built on top of Ghostscript, a popular free PostScript interpreter, PDFCreator is fast and configurable. For most purposes, it's a great alternative to Acrobat.

You can download the installer for PDFCreator from its SourceForge.net project page. You can get the installer as either a Windows executable or as a Microsoft Installer package. The Windows executable comes in two versions -- one with Ghostscript, one without.

Read Via Newsforge

Update:

There was a suggestion in the comments to use OpenOffice, ofcourse you can use that - but then, not everyone uses OpenOffice and Pdfcreator can be used to "Print" to a PDF from ANY Windows Program - OpenOffice included :)

Splitpane sucks

I’ve recently been involved in some discussions surrounding ixd issues and attempted to use Yahoo Mail and Google Mail as examples of bad/good interface design techniques. There was a lot of push back because there were no follow up details outlining why one was good and the other bad. A complete analysis of the two applications would take much longer and require more effort than a random blog posting so I decided to focus on one core annoyance I have with Yahoo Mail - its use of ye old “Split Pane” re-sizable control.

Read Via Sitepen

The 25 BEST things ever said, by anyone

Nothing tech about this ..but here you go

Why Widescreen Movies is better

Here is a good explanation of why you should be watching Widescreen movies and not full screen ones

See widescreen

Free Books for Doctors

For all those Docs who search the internet for Free books - Here is one site which gives them just that!

Go there

Compiling & Installing a perl module

This is a basic but essential tip on how to install a perl module

First of all, get the perl module via http://search.cpan.org

For example - XML::Twig

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MI/MIROD/XML-Twig-3.26.tar.gz

Extract it

tar zxvf XML-Twig-3.26.tar.gz

Now execute the following steps

perl Makefile.PL (Create the makefile)
make (compile the module)
make test (test the module)
sudo make install (install the module)

You can also use perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/opt/perl/modules

to install your module at a different location - /opt/perl/modules

Wikiasari - the search engine

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is preparing to launch a search engine. The Times of London reports that the new search engine will be called Wikiasari, combining the Hawaiian word "wiki" which means quick with the Japanese "asari," which means rummaging search.

Wales is basing Wikiasari (which Techcrunch reports had initially been billed as Wikisearch) as an improvement upon the traditional search engine method. Sites like Google rely on computer-based algorithms to determine which search results are most relevant to your query. Wikipedia is based on a million trained monkeys (that'd be you) constantly updating an online encyclopedia. Why not apply that method to search results?

The search engine will be open source, and the index will be available under a GFDL.

See More

CVS tutorial

Want to learn and use CVS ? Linux.ie has a good basic tutorial on CVS with lot of examples

Turn off that cranky beep

Ubuntu sounds that cranky bell everytime you enter a command through the virtual console.

Turn it off by issuing the following command!

setterm -blength 0

Gartoon Icons

Really like the Gartoon icons - although they were designed for kids - they do make my Gnome look very silly and nice :). I discovered them when I was fiddling around with Edubuntu

Do check the other icons by Zeus Box Studio

the LANG variable woes

I don't know whether I am going to make any sense of this nor I know why this fixes the problems I face but here you go anyway!

My installation of Linux comes with a LANG variable set to en_US.UTF-8. This however causes my man pages to display some weird characters such as 80x22 for ' (?)

My primary language of communication would be en_US and the way to fix the above weird characters was to unset the LANG variable to nothing

so, I do a export LANG=

and set it to null

Search package by the filename

Install apt-file using the following command

sudo apt-get install apt-file

Update the required files for apt-file using

sudo apt-file update

To search for a particular file and its related package

Use

apt-file search libtermcap.so

25 Killer Apps of All Time

Read Via Eweek

AJAX Cookbook - recipes for interactive webapps!

Brett Taylor presents for your coding pleasure - AJAX cookbook! He is a Senior Product Manager at Google and founded/launched Google Maps

Read the recipes !

Unhappy Internet Company Tech Workers

It's a unhappy world out there(here) ? Right from Yahoo to Ebay to AOL to even Google!

Ebay has its own set of problems after that few billion dollar investment on Skype and not knowing what to do about it

Yahoo is more concerned about the peanut butter Industry

AOL has been doing the annual culling event for 3 years now

And yes, Google keeps its employees like kids who want to encash and run!

Wonder where we are heading!

Pretty fonts on your LCD

You can make your fonts look pretty in Ubuntu - some even claim that better than Cleartype!

We will use Defoma - Debian Font Manager to do this

Run ..

sudo dpkg-reconfigure defoma

Say Yes if it asks you to manage fonts

Click on Subpixel Smoothing and try fiddling around with each of settings to check which one looks good for you. Your results may vary!

TeamSpeak - Voice Over Internet

TeamSpeak is a quality, scalable application which enables people to speak with one another over the Internet. TeamSpeak consists of both client and server software. The server acts as a host to multiple client connections, capable of handling literally thousands of simultaneous users. This results in an Internet based teleconferencing solution that works in a variety of applications such as team mates speaking with one another while playing their favorite online game, small businesses cutting costs on long distance charges, or for personal communication with friends and family.

Skype makes its moves...

Skype users will have 2 things coming at them

Skype 3.0 - the new version of Skype

SkypeOut for US will no longer free. However, you can buy US/Canda calling for 14.95$ (till Jan 2007) & 29.95$ later. Looks like a good deal. However, you still have to pay the normal rates to call other countries.

Craythur.com WEB Desktop Manager

Apparently written in JavaScript (based on Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and a lot more).

Why digg is destined for failure

If you've ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg's homepage, you've enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it's certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.

Read Via DownloadSquad

Simplicity - ways to build a product

Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacked what they considered to be ‘critical’ features. So, what do people mean when they ask for simplicity? One-button operation, of course, but with all of their favorite features.”

Read Via Joel on Software

DVguru - the Video Blog

Hadn't seen this one before - DVguru from Weblogs Inc is a blog all about Video

Netscape Extensions

Netscape has released 2 browser extensions that allows you to check your sitemail and track your friends' activity. Pretty good. I am hoping they have more tech stuff or even India news for me to visit them more often. Am sick of Digg - slow and mostly useless news

Network Interface Configuration Using ifconfig

For you Linux networking newbies, DebianAdmin explains the basic networking commands used in Linux

Go there

Spokeo - Social Networking

Spokeo allows you to organize friends from MySpace, Youtube, Digg, Facebook and more at one place. Think of it as gaim for social networking.

OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox

If you are using Firefox 2, you can add your own Search Engine plugin to the Search Engine List by defining a OpenSearch based xml file

See more on Opensearch Plugin for Firefox

Refcontrol - Control your referrer info!

Refcontrol lets you block/forge/customize referer information. You can customize referer information for specfic sites as well. This is useful because some sites - such as rediff or indiatimes send your login id when you click on a link from your mail

Quite a useful Firefox extension to have !

Install it!

Learn about Referer

The first ever Microsoft Vista commercial!

Hmm ... If you thought Apple ads suck .. what do you call these ?

XDrive - easy online backup

I had used xdrive long time back when I was on dialup :-). Don't remember how my experience then was. I thought I would give it a go again. Requires Windows, their software maps a drive to their server and you can drag and drop your files as well as use their software to backup your entire document folders

5 GB of free space and no strings attached!

Get your free space

bmon - monitor your bandwidth

bmon is a little utility for Linux which lets you monitor your download speed & data transfer just like the DU Meter on Windows You can do minutely, hourly or daily monitoring and do it through ascii art ;-) Ubuntu users: sudo apt-get install bmon

Page View metrics to die in 4 years ?

Underneath the Internet advertising economy is a key metric that dictates how properties are valued and how online media is bought and sold - the page view. While it's not the only way to measure the health of a site (time spent and unique users are among the others), it's still very popular. Unfortunately, the trusty page view is on life support and I give it four years to live.

This may sound like heresy to most of you. After all, the page view has served us well. It has established a universal way to measure web sites. However, the metric is about to become a moot point.

Read Via Micro Persuasion

IE6 and IE7 on the same machine

So, you upgraded to IE7 and to your horror you see that some of the sites like AOL Video don't work with IE7.

IEBlog tells you how to get a IE6 image and then run it through the Virtual PC

BenQ's fastest 19inch LCD monitor

The FP93G X+ features an ultra-fast 2ms gray-to-gray response time, a slim 13mm bezel and a contrast ratio of 800:1. Should be available this month

Agloco .. refer someone too!

For those who signed up Agloco - the Get Paid to Surf program - Do refer other people who you think are interested in such a program - because you get paid when they surf! Your referral url would be something like http://www.agloco.com/r/BBBB5653

If you haven't signed up yet! Sign up now!

Agloco is yet to release their viewbar. Once they do that, you earn 1 share of Agloco for every 1 hr you surf with their viewbar

AVG Antivirus 7.5 FREE Edition

There is/was some confusion about whether AVG Antivirus 7.5 has a free version or 7.1 is the last free version that would be available.

There IS a free AVG Antivirus 7.5 version

Go get it

Gmail Greasemonkey Scripts

Tina Gasperson has a compilation of cool greasemonkey scripts for Gmail

Read here

You can see all the gmail based greasemonkey scripts here

History tricks in Bash

• ! ! - Last command
• !n - Get the "n" th command
• !-n - Get "-n" command from the current command
• !str - Get the command which matches "str"
• ^str1^str2 - Replace str1 by str2 for the last command