Archive for January, 2008

I had recently installed Windows Live Messenger on my pc at work. Along with it came a pesky toolbar addon called Windows Live Search. This gets attached after the URL box and is irritating to say the least. I prefer to use Google and I don’t need a toolbar!

I thought it should be pretty easy to remove Windows Live Search. It turned out that there is no direct option to remove Live Search! What you can do is to change the search provider. But hey! I don’t want a freaking toolbar!

After a bit of google research, I came to know that there is a registry hack to prevent the Windows live search textbar. Open up the regedit and look for the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\InfoDelivery\Restrictions. Sometimes you may see path only up to Microsoft. In that case add the path Internet Explorer\InfoDelivery\Restrictions. Then add a DWORD under Restrictions named NoSearchBox and set its value to 1.

A new virus called Trojan.Mebroot has been infecting windows computers recently. What makes this virus unique is that it uses Master Boot Record (MBR) to hide itself. MBR contains operating system loading code which is executed first.

A machine gets infected when the user of the system accesses Websites intended to spread the virus (such as warez or illegal downloads). Mebroot uses Internet Explorer vulnerability to write directly to the Master Boot Record of the machine! The trojan itself is around 450kb in size and is stored in the last sectors of the harddisk. It then creates a backdoor on the machine.

Once the backdoor has been established, the program looks for any user access to internet banking sites. It then sends the captured banking userid/password etc. to a thirdparty site! Pretty impressive, eh?

It is estimated that over 5000 machines are affected by this virus.

The easiest way to remove this virus is to run “fixmbr” command from Windows recovery console. This overwrites the virus entry on MBR. Also some of the latest BIOS setting allows you to make MBR readonly. Any modification to MBR will throw a BIOS warning! So enable MBR protection today.

Lastly never visit any Website which offers warez, cracks, serials or free downloads. The real purpose of most of these sites are to spread keyloggers and other types of viruses. If you really want to check those sites, create a virtual pc using vmware or windows virtual pc exclusively for that purpose.

HECToR is a new supercomputer assembled at University of Edinburgh, UK. This is one of the fastest machines in Europe which can do 60 million million calculations per second! The total cost of this machine is over $200 million and equivalent to over 10,000 desktop computers.

HECToR contains over 5000 AMD 2.8GHZ dual core Opteron processors the peak performance is 63Tflops. The total memory of HECToR is 33TB (6GB per processor)!! The storage used is high performance RAID disks with a total capacity of 576TB. HECToR uses Unicos/lc as the operating system and has two components - compute node linux for compute nodes and linux distro(SUSE Linux) for service nodes. The communication network uses 6 sets of Seastar2 chip based system and each link offers bi-directional bandwidth of 7.6GB/sec!

HECToR (High-End Computing Terascale Resource) is a project funded by research councils in UK and this facility is available to researchers in UK Universities. The main use of this supercomputer will be in simulation of complex natural phenomena such as climate change prediction.

HECToR is composed of 66 individual units as shown below and each of the unit is as big as a large shelf!

You can see the current status of HECToR supercomputer here!

Ruby on Rails is the hot new Web application framework based on Ruby language. It offers unmatched programmer productivity and has taken over the Web2.0 application development. In this post, I will look at some of the free tutorials and free ebooks on Ruby on Rails available for download.

1. Tutorial on Ruby on Rails - This is a beginner’s tutorial on RoR. Hosted by RoR official wiki, this is the best place to start on Ruby on Rails.

2. Rolling with Ruby on Rails Part I and Part II - This tutorial written by Curt Hibbs is a good introduction to Ruby on Rails. It takes you through a sample application end to end.

3. Learn Ruby on Rails in 4 days! - This is a PDF book on Ruby on Rails. It gives you a toolbox of Rails techniques and can be used as a bridge from Rails basics to Advanced rails.

4. Fast track Web application development with Ruby on Rails - This article from IBM takes a quick look at developing a Rails Web application.

5. Beginner’s guide to Ruby on Rails - Another introductory tutorial on Ruby on Rails.