Archive for December, 2006

I have been using Sony Ericsson K750i for over year and I have fell in love with it! It is one of the best mobiles I have seen. It is small, sleek and efficient and most importantly its sound clarity is amazing! Only downside is that its display is a bit small. So if you are planning to use it for GPRS browsing, you will have a tough time!

Some review comments seen on this phone,

• Sound quality is good, the hands free speakers work a treat.
• Other great things about this phone: Task manager, ability to send a photo directly to a Bluetooth enabled printer, timer, stopwatch, ability to use an MP3 as a ringtone!
• After about eight months the joystick has totally started acting up and does not go down.
• Offers good battery life.

Sony’s TX series is a high end ultraportable laptop series which offers convenience for a premium. Laptops in this range cost over $2500 and is jam packed with features.

Sony VAIO TXN19P/L is small and lightweight (weighs around 2.8 lbs). It is claimed that it can give 5-11 hours of battery life! It also features a brilliant 11.1 WXGA widescreen display.

Fraps is a cool video capture application which works on DirectX or OpenGL games. It runs in the background and seems to have little effect on the performance of the game. It can be used to benchmark game performance(displays frames per second when the game is running), save game screenshots and record game videos in realtime.

Only catch is that Fraps is not free (The trial version allows you to capture 30 seconds of video) and will cost you $37. Latest version of Fraps is 2.8.2 and runs on Window 2000, XP and 2003. Fraps requires Directx 9.0c to be installed for the video capture to work.

Don’t have the money to buy Fraps? You check out Taksi - A free open source alternative to Fraps. But feature wise it is still behind fraps (but hey it is free!). I found the Taksi interface to be primitive compared to Fraps.

Further Reading
Download Fraps (2.8.2)
Download Taksi (0.7.6)

Sometimes knowing keyboard shortcuts can be quite useful. For example, in order to search for a file probably you use start->search but did you know pressing F3 also achieves the same thing? Also programmers can’t think of a life without shortcuts such as Ctl+C (copy) and Ctrl+V (paste). Here is a list of 10 keyboard shortcuts in Windows XP which I find most useful.

0. ALT+TAB - A shortcut eveyone knows. Switch between programs.

1. F3 key - Search for a file or do a Windows live search when you are on Internet Explorer.

2. F2 key - Rename the selected file.

3. F10 key - Activate menu. You can then press underlined letter to activate submenu.

4. CTRL+C - Copy file or content.

5. CTRL+X - Cut file or content.

6. CTRL+V - Paste file or content.

7. CTRL+A - Select all (select all files when in explorer or all content when in an editor)

8. SHIFT+DELETE - Delete the file permanently. It won’t even appear in recycle bin.

9. ALT+F4 - Close the current program or open window. (Use CTRL+F4 to close an open tab in a program)

10. ALT+ENTER - Display properties of the selected file or item.

It is getting bizzare. Many corporates erroneously blocked Gmail since it got reported as a virus! On top of it, all are busy blocking Orkut and Myspace. I had written a recent piece on accesing banned Websites. Most of the methods mentioned there don’t work in corporate networks since network admins are also getting smart

One of the methods I mentioned was number 8 - Your own proxy server. This is superior to all other methods due to a couple of reasons. First free public proxies are never safe. Your personal and private information can be compromised in these servers. Also these will get blocked by the proxy software eventually. Another reason is that using your own proxy server gives you complete control. You can encrypt your traffic so that no one knows what is being browsed.

I will look at setting up a Http proxy server on a Windows XP machine. Please note that this article won’t be covering the case when you use proxy server or WiFi at home. I will be writing another post about such scenarios later.

Step 1 - Download and install Perl distribution
Download Windows x86 version of Active Perl from ActiveState site. Install with default configuration except the directory which I recommend to be set to “C:\usr\”.

Step 2 - Download and install Apache server
Download latest Apache server for Windows (2.2.3 as of today) from http://httpd.apache.org/. Install it under any folder with port 80 as the HTTP port . Setting port to 80 is important since most corporates only allow port 80 access. If you get any error in binding to port 80, probably you have something else listening on it.

Step 3 - Configure Apache server
Now we need to configure Apache to enable CGI.

Locate #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in httpd.conf (located inside apache subfolder conf) and remove the hash(#) in front.

Locate the “you set DocumentRoot to” string in httpd.conf. Under that you will see Option directive. Change it to Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews

Step 4 - Download and install CGIProxy (nph-proxy)
Download CGIProxy (nph-proxy) from http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.cgi.txt. Rename the file to nph-proxy.cgi and copy it to Apache’s document root (htdocs). Now change the first line in nph-proxy.cgi to #!C:\usr\perl\bin\perl.exe

Start Apache from the bin folder (httpd.exe). Now open a browser session and point to http://localhost/nph-proxy.cgi. If everything is ok you should see the following screen.

Find the IP address of your home connection. This can be viewed by typing ipconfig on the command prompt. Now from the office machine access http://IP ADDRESS/. You should see the proxy form which we saw above. Happy orkutting!

Note : This will need more steps if you have a WIFI network at home (port forwarding). I will cover these issues in the next post.

Further Reading
Top 10 ways of accessing banned web sites.

Mozilla today released 2.0.0.1 version of Firefox. This was auto updated by version 2.0 on my PC. It is basically a collection of security fixes and enhanced support for Windows Vista. Interestingly on Windows Vista Firefox can not yet be set as the default browser! Check this bug for details.

The version number 2.0.0.1 looks funny though!

List of major security fixes in Firefox 2.0.0.1,

• XSS using outer window’s Function object
• RSS Feed-preview referrer leak
• Mozilla SVG Processing Remote Code Execution
• XSS by setting img.src to javascript: URI
• LiveConnect crash finalizing JS objects
• Privilege escallation using watch point
• CSS cursor image buffer overflow (Windows only)
• Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.0.9/1.8.1.1)

For further info check out Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 release notes.

I bumped into Plaxo from one of the official mails I got. The mail I got had a rather big signature with the following line, “Add me to your address book… Want a signature like this?” and this was linked to Plaxo.

Plaxo is a service to stay connected with your contacts. If you update your info, all your friends address book also gets updated and vice versa. It can also automatically update outlook address book if outlook integration is enabled.

Following is the Plaxo feature list,

• Update your address book when friends change their contact info
• Update friends’ address books when your contact info changes
• Sync your contacts, calendar, tasks, notes across Plaxo-enabled applications
• Get reminded of a friend’s birthday just a few days before
• Receive a Plaxo alert whenever a contact’s info has changed

Plaxo integration with Outlook is pretty neat. Check out the following screenshots of outlook after integration and the useless but jazzy e-mail signature creator.

Plaxo offers a premium service also. The main attaction of the premium service is the ability to send e-cards.

But I am yet to find Plaxo attractive enough (eCards is cool, but only with premium) to sign up!

Following code in Java illustrates how Jakarta HttpClient package can be used to tunnel through NTLM proxy. This is handy if you want to download a page periodically and then serve it from your local web server. For this code to compile packages needed are httpclient 3.0, logging 1.0.5 and codec 1.3 (Later versions are also fine). All the jars for these packages must be in classpath while running the code below.

import java.io.*;
import java.net.Socket;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.*;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.auth.AuthScope;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod;
 
public class NTLMFetch
{
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception 
  {
    // Enable proxy to host logging
    System.setProperty("org.apache.commons.logging.Log", 
               "org.apache.commons.logging.impl.SimpleLog");
    System.setProperty("org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.
                       showdatetime", "true");
    System.setProperty("org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.
                        log.httpclient.wire.header", "debug");
    System.setProperty("org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.
                        log.org.apache.commons.httpclient", "debug");
 
    // Update this to the actual URL
    String url = "http://mysite.com/index.html"; 
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
    HttpMethod method = new GetMethod(url);
    HostConfiguration hostConfig= client.getHostConfiguration();
    // Update this to point to NTLM enabled proxy
    hostConfig.setProxy("192.168.0.0", 80); 

    // Authenticate using NTLM
    client.getState().setProxyCredentials(AuthScope.ANY,
          new NTCredentials("userid","password","",""));

    int statusCode = client.executeMethod(method);
    System.out.println("Stat=" +HttpStatus.getStatusText(statusCode));
    String strOutput = method.getResponseBodyAsString();

    // Write the output to a local file
    PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter("c:/down.html"));
    writer.println(strOutput);
    writer.close();
  }
}

 AceMoney Lite is a freeware personal finance manager. It helps you to track your income and expenses. I have been using it for a year now and is pretty impressed by its simplicity. The only limitation with the lite version is that you can use only one bank account at a time.

AceMoney lite is lean and mean and its download size is only 1.5MB. You can download it here.

Here is a quick round up of its features,

• Create and manage budgets
• Track performance of investments
• Do your financial math in multiple currencies
• Enjoy the convenience of on-line banking
• Don’t miss the next deadline for bills
• Plan debts and mortgage payments
• Do e-business with AceMoney

Are you looking for a software to run a site like digg? Pligg is a CMS which has digg like features out of the box. Pligg is a free and open source software which requires PHP and MySQL.

Some interesting Pligg features are,

• All the main features are Ajax enabled. 
• Automatic preview of the site linked.
• Color schemes for categories.
• Automatic tag cloud.
• Avatars and Gavatar support.

Unfortunately Pligg (beta8 ) still requires considerable modification before it can be used on a production site. Also pligg is yet to implement email activation, so you will end up fighting spammers or implementing activation features yourself. On my server, Pligg was damn slow sometimes taking almost 10 seconds for submission!

Check out the Pligg demo which is based on the latest beta 9!  

Further Reading
Download Pligg
How to install Pligg?

Microsoft recently released the latest version its media player named Windows Media Player 11. I am thouroughly impressed by the simplicity and usability of the new interface in version 11. The user interface is clutter free and offers easy switching between different media types. It also offers better online integration.

I think a picture is worth 1000 words. So take a look at the Windows Media Player 11 interface on the right.

Windows media player 11 installation file is about 25MB and can be downloaded here. Please note that you need to have Windows XP with Service pack 2 and a genuine Windows installation. The installation does check for a valid license over internet.

If you are already using a previous version of Windows Media Player, it is the right time to upgrade!

Gmail offers more than 2GB of storage space and the limit is increased by almost 3.5MB per day. I am currently using 82 MB (3%) of allotted 2794 MB. Yeah, 82MB is too low and I achieve the low usage by deleting all useless mails. Ever since I started this blog I have been keeping a backup of the site contents (I run 3 websites in total) in a pen drive. Then I thought why don’t I backup the files on Gmail since so much space is free!

Sending a mail to myself everyday became tedious soon. Hence I was looking for tools which could upload files easily instead of going through the Gmail interface. I found two services - Xmail hard drive (which is still in beta) and Gmail drive shell extension. In this post I will look at Xmail harddrive. I will explore Gmail drive shell extension in the next post.

Xmail hard drive offers an online interface to upload and maintain files in a Gmail account. But to be frank I am not confident in entering my Gmail Id and password on a third party account. So I suggest you to get an alternate gmail account if you plan to use Xmail hard drive. Also you never know when Gmail will block this! So use it only as a backup to your backup

Following screenshot shows the Xmail hard drive interface. Pretty simple, select your file and upload it. For images, it offers thumbnail functionality. As can be seen in the next screenshot, all your files will end up in your inbox and hence one more reason to use an alternate mail id.

Xmail screenshot

Gmail inbox after Xmail usage

Today I came across a stunning photo gallery by Gil Azouri on China. These photos were taken by him in 2005. Everything that a great photograph needs (subject, lighting, composition etc.) can be seen in his photos. Rarely you find such powerful photographs.

I don’t know whether there is any better photo collection on China! So when are you getting your air ticket to China?

Enjoy the collection…

I got this interesting notepad tip via email recently. This neat trick can make your notepad as the simplest digital diary possible! Here is how to use the Windows notepad as a digital diary,

1. Open notepad and type .LOG as the first line and press enter.

2. Save and close the file giving any filename.

3. Now open the file again in notepad. Surprisingly the current date and time is inserted automatically after the .LOG line. Now you can enter the daily dairy entry here.

The cool thing is that every time you open this file, a new line with current date time is inserted making it a digital diary! Notepad also supports manual entry of date time using F5 key.

If the above instructions are too complicated for you to follow, check out the following instructional video on metacafe.

Social bookmarking site Furl is going downhill! It seems that manipulating Furl is child’s play. Most of the time what you see in the “Today’s popular items” on Furl home page is spam. This reduces Furl to a mere page archiving system for the individual users.

Check out the Furl homepage as of today (14 Dec). Except the last entry all others are manipulated using newly created user entries. The Furl signup does use a captcha, but it seems smart guys have written programs to get around it.

When you look at the members who furled it what you find is a bunch probably auto created furl users,