Writely, the company google bought a few months ago was closed for new accounts. It seems like they have finally opened up again. But instead of using google accounts it still requests users to create a new one. They did mention that the will eventually integrate with google’s signin soon.
Archive for August, 2006
Writely is taking new accounts
18
Aug
Dzone: Digg for developers
16
Aug
I found a new site for called Dzone today. Unlike Digg its focuses on programming, coding tools, processes and practices. The feature which made this site uniquely stand out among the other 100 digg replica’s is its ability to take “webshots” of the URL being linked which is shown as a thumbnail.
dzone fills a void which in a developers life which sites like digg and slashdot can’t fulfill because of their unfocused news items. Lately digg has been trying hard to develop more focused pages, but its no where close to what developers are currently looking for.
Flashy Speed test
16
Aug
There are tons of speedtesting tools out there. But here is one you might not have seen before. Its called speedtest.net. Whats cool about this site is that it allows you to test your bandwidth against multiple server in US and Europe instead of just one.
250 Web 2.0 APIs
16
Aug
This site programmableweb has a cloud of 250 apis. If you are into mashups, here are a few more APIs to play with.
Create your own Web logo
16
Aug
Found this cool site today called msig.info which allows you to create logos for your own site in a jiffy. Checkout the new Techhawking logo.
Google Talk
16
Aug
Google has released a newer version of Google Talk. This one allows you to leave Voicemails.
File and photo sharing in Google Talk works like you’d expect: Simple, fast, and fun. Simplicity means that you can drag and drop one or more files directly onto a chat window. As soon as your friend clicks ‘Accept’, the bits will start flowing. When the transfer completes, the recipient can open the file or find it on disk with a single click.
File transfer is fast. Google Talk makes a direct connection to your friend’s computer whenever possible, enabling the fastest speed available. And even if your super-secure firewall won’t allow a direct connection, we’ll still get it there at a decent speed, because we’re nice like that.
Photo sharing is fun! When you drop up to 10 photos on Google Talk, smaller previews automatically appear right inside the chat window, so you can chat about them right away. The previews adjust to the size of your chat window, so just enlarge the window when you want to see more detail. To view the images at full size, or to save them for later, click the ‘Download Originals’ link.
Is Microsoft afraid ?
14
Aug
Microsoft came out with Microsoft Live Writer today. What surprised me was that it is one of the first tools which I can think of in recent years which has support for non-Microsoft products.
Remember the good old days of Novell servers when Microsoft came with a file server which could talk to Novell servers and what about 
I know everyone is excited about Microsoft doing this, but I being me, am skeptical about the true intentions behind this. Infact, most of the times microsoft releases a product supporting other non-microsoft products, is because when its afraid of loosing market share to a competitor. So the real question is, who is microsoft really afraid of other blogging software or services out there ? Blogspot, MySpace and services like wordpress, typepad are significant competitors to MSN spaces. Microsoft Live Writer is not very different from any other Free Microsoft products in the sense that it is designed to do one thing. Convert.
That being said, I’m glad it has jumped into the market. I can see a lot of improvement in overall blogging experience across the board. Oh and BTW I posted this entry using Microsoft Live Writer.
Detecting browser bandwidth (in perl)
10
Aug
If your website has file downloads in megabytes, it can take multiple minutes to download from far away places. Detecting user’s bandwidth and predicting the time it might take might become essential to help your customers understand why its taking so long. Detecting bandwidth of a client could be as simple as timing a downloading of a simple file. But there are a few problems with this.
To begin with, most browsers can open multiple download threads to the same destination (IE uses 2, Firefox uses 4). This is not a problem, but its good to know. Then there is a TCP start/stop overhead, impact of which can be minimized by using large files and enabling keepalive. The biggest problem however is caching intelligence within the browser which can trick detection logic to think that it has a superfast network connectivity. The same problem can also confuse multiple browsers behind a caching proxy server.
The solution to all of these problems are relatively simple. First of all use multiple file downloads to maximize the usage of all the browser threads to the server. Enable Keepalives on the server to minimize TCP restart overheads. Use relatively large files for sampling and finally use random numbers as URL parameters to force the cache to discard previous version of the file from cache “?randomnumbers”
Here is the version of Bandwidth Tester I implemented for huntip
[http://www.webtrace.info/speed/index.cgi]
Feel free to download, modify and use the source from here. I would appretiate if you link back or update me with any enhancements you make over this.
The Blue Pill – 100% undectable malware
09
Aug
During Code Con 2006 7 months ago I first heard about the existence of virtual machines based rootkits. I’ve also been reading about hypervisor technology and about products like Xen which are trying to build a better virtual machine engines. Amd and Intel now, officially, have hooks in the processor itself to support this. Unlike traditional virtual machines which “emulate” all the processing within another OS, using this new technology, each OS could infact live along with each other talking directly with the processor.
But what took me by surprise is that within this short time of all this happening, there is a new technology called the “Blue Pill” which has been demonstrated and discussed in the underground world, which makes use of the virtualization features of the processors to make 100% undetactable malware.
Here is an extract from authors description of blue pill..
All the current rootkits and backdoors, which I am aware of, are based on a concept. For example: FU was based on an idea of unlinking EPROCESS blocks from the kernel list of active processes, Shadow Walker was based on a concept of hooking the page fault handler and marking some pages as invalid, deepdoor on changing some fields in NDIS data structure, etc… Once you know the concept you can (at least theoretically) detect the given rootkit.
Now, imagine a malware (e.g. a network backdoor, keylogger, etc…) whose capabilities to remain undetectable do not rely on obscurity of the concept. Malware, which could not be detected even though its algorithm (concept) is publicly known. Let’s go further and imagine that even its code could be made public, but still there would be no way for detecting that this creature is running on our machines…
References
- Introducing Blue Pill
- SubVirt: Implementing Malware with Virtual Machines
- InvisibleThinks.Org
- Virtualization RootKits
- Defending against new Rootkits
VMware for Mac is finally out !
06
Aug
Bootcamp is nice, but Virtualization is better. This is what almost everyone in the mac user community have been waiting for.
Parallels is already selling a virtualization product for Intel based Macs for last few months and has an edge over VMware in the world. But VMware’s large user base from the windows and linux community, can disturb Parallels’ lead in this market segment almost overnight.
VMware had been the defacto standard in PC-virtualization for few years until Microsoft came along. Recently it came out with a free version of its product called VMware Player which could “play” virtual machines created by its non-free products. While its possible that VMware may not release VMware Player for free in the Mac world, it might price itself low enough to compete with Parallels.
VMware’s latest move kind of confirms what Parallels has been betting on for all this while, that the Mac running on Intel will lead to more Windows users to buy and experiment with Apple products. Infact Steve Jobs has a lot to gloat about during tomorrows Keynote address, since VMware’s this move wouldn’t have been possible without the switch from PowerPC to Intel.