Link:British parliament attacked using WMF exploit

CNet reports that The British Parliament was attacked by Chinese hackers trying to exploit the WMF vulnerability.

The emails were individually tailored and pretended to come from a Governmental organisation. Spammers are trying harder everyday. The more information they gather on us through spyware, the easier they can beat spam filters since most spam filters work on the premise that spam and genuine email read completely differently and can be told apart easily by a human.

Btw..has anyone noticed Gmail's spam filter faultering lately. Its been letting quite a few spam emails into my inbox and it also produced a false positive the other day.

Link Posts

I am starting to experiment with simple one sentence long posts linking to stuff that I have been reading about but doesn't really deserve sitting down and pouring my thoughts out. I think it will make this blog much fresher as it will be updated on a far more regular basis. The theme will however stay the same, with most topics being about Google, Firefox, gadgets and random tech or comp sci stuff.

I will of course migrate the whole thing to a del.ico.us style linkblog in the future, however, for the time being I want to leave the links open to simple thoughts from myself. In this way I can perhaps maintain the blog even when I am very busy during the week.

Link: Google Won't Hand Over Files

Wired Magazine's take on the Google vs DoJ farce.

Link: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview

A comprehensive preview from Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle.

Colour Music

An interesting concept by one of the people in my year at Uni is the link between Colour and Music. He is doing a final year project based on the link between how we associate different colours to different types of music. He has made a piece of software that plays music just like your average WinAMP, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc with the unique feature that instead of sorting by the usual Artist, Genre or Album classification you can sort by your colour perception of the music. His software available for testing (exe) purposes and I think he welcomes downloads from as many people as possible to download and send back colour information so that he can enrich his database.

So what do I think about the idea? I think that the human brain will very quickly restrict the amount of colour variation of the music when presented with the music in that way. You will get clusters of brown, black, red and blue which really won't tell you any more than just looking at the Genre of the music. Also since the brain often needs premption the colours will come directly from the Album cover or the genre colour.


What I think would be cool is if all your music was automatically imported for you into the media player and then all the information about the music was retreived from sources on the internet (such as length of song, album covers, free music videos, etc) and this info was used to generate a classification based on some sort of complex formula then you could get some interesting "Party Shuffle" style playlists.

Google Buys Radio Ad Company

And between the music here's an advert..... "ViAgRa...cheap Viagra", "Play 3D poker online for Free, Free Las Vegas poker trips, prizes"...

CNet reports that Google is to buy a radio ad company (DMarc Broadcasting) for $102 Million Dollars. They go on to say that with additional payments this may rise to $1.1 Billion Dollars. Ah here's a quote from Google...

"Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media," Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president of advertising sales, said in a release.

Personally I don't think it will work. Sure you can see where this is going. Targeted ads which are analysed through speech recognition and broken down into socio economic status, geography, time of day, etc and then depending on the type of person who listens to the station the correct ad is played back. It all sounds good but the reason why it wont work is because listening to the radio is different than coming across an ad on a website. When you see a Google Ad on a site you are ready to click on the next thing that catches your eye.

When a relevant advert from Google comes across you dont think twice and click on it as if it were a link from the article or from an email itself. However, the same cannot be said for radio stations, TV, etc. It's not possible in my view to use the advert to start off the long tail effect that Google has created through simple text based ads since Radio and TV advertisement is more of branding and awareness than of putting people through the front door. I'll prob be proved wrong but this my argument regardless.

Synergy - 2 Screens but 1 Mouse+Keyboard

Ok so many of us have more than one computer. What's more is that often these computers are on the same desk and come with their own Keyboards, Mice and Screens as computers no doubt should. The combination is often a desktop computer fixed and the laptop that we use around the house.

Synergy is an open source project that allows you to use both computers with ONE set of mice and keyboards. The way it works is pretty simple, you designate one of the computers to be the server (meaning that it's mouse and keyboard become the ones you use) and the rest of the computers (can have up to 4 I think) to be clients. When you move your mouse to the left hand side of one screen it will reappear on the other screen and that computer will be allowed access to the mouse and keyboard.

It also does some more advanced things such as work across Linux and Windows, synchronise screensavers, lock screens simultaneously and some other stuff I'm sure that I have not discovered yet. All that is required of the user is to provide the machine name of the other computer across the network and the rest is done by running the Synergy service on both computers.

Gmail Web Clip Snippets

One of the problems I have with the Gmail Web Clips is that just the heading of a post is not enough to get you to understand what the post is on about. More often than not the headings are obscure titles that only make sense in the context of the blog's other posts. What I would like to see is snippets from the post, in the same way that Gmail provides snippets for emails.

Since you provide the RSS feed to google they have at the very least a partial feed from the blog and so providing a one line snippet should represent no extra bandwidth for the blogs themselves.

Bluetooth --> Wifi

Wouldn't it be useful if we were able to access the internet on our mobile phones in Wifi Hotspots. My idea is that we have some sort of device (like a wireless router) that takes in bluetooth signals and converts these into wifi and then sends them onto a wireless router. Obviously the process would be easier if the bluetooth convertion occurred within the router itself. If a wireless router had a bluetooth antenna attached then it could also connect with bluetooth phones. The signal would be processed into a web request which would be executed. The result of the request would have to be processed into a bluetooth signal again and transmitted to the device that sent the request.

I think devices that encourage multiple devices to perform the same action are the next in thing for our society. It is slightly different to what we imagine "Convergence" to be since that is about stuffing as much as you can into one device. What I suggest here is a way for these multiple devices to interact, though they may be on completely different technologies/protocols/implementations.

Cool Fonts Online

If anyone is looking for some cool fonts to use for Logos, Menus, Pictures, etc I would suggest perusing through Vitaly Friedman's post on the 25 best licence free fonts or through the source of many of these fonts, a site known as DaFont. I used the "Pigiarniq Inuktitut font" for one of the menus I did and I think that the curvy letters look wonderful, especially the "l" in the word Blog.

First impressions count!

A piece on the BBC reveals that people often make judgments about a site in an instant just by looking at it.

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows. Researchers found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage. They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion. The study, published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology, also suggests that first impressions have a lasting impact.

This adds to what I believe is one of the key constituents of a successful Web 2.0 project. I've written before that I think that a good start-up should focus on both usability and design (the arty type) so that users feel as comfortable as possible when trying out the new service/software/application. Don't forget that the person who has come up with the idea and has written the code is taking care of the functionality, but since users often use little of the powerful features of an application unless presented with a simple yet effective interface it is of paramount importance for a new company to focus on getting the powerful functionality in front of the user as simply as possible.

It is the very same reason why people who perhaps only a few years back would have laughed at the idea of having blogs and pontificating about their daily stresses and strains, but now contribute daily to what we call the blogosphere each day pouring their thoughts into Battelle's fictitious "Database of Intentions" ("The Search" by John Battelle).

For me Google was the fastest search engine and the most simple (without all the banner ads and flashing monkeys) and for this reason alone I started using Google over AlltheWeb.com. This was back in the day when we had a very slow connection. I think users at the end of the day want things done within two-three clicks without a complicated interface that requires them to learn anything.

Moving Site

Over the weekend I finally managed to take the plunge and get my domain hosted. As of now the Utills.com has a place on the net, but so far I've kept it to forward the URL to this present location. However, I have installed Wordpress 1.5 on the server and configured it so that all my previous posts written here (except the very latest ones) have been imported with comments over to the new site. I used a brilliant script by Andy Skelton to import all of the files across along with a screenshot based tutorial written by Catsudon.

The Wordpress blog currently resides at www.utills.com/blog but so far I have left it at the default template. I plan to make a few design logos and templates which I'll try to put online until I settle on one that I am happy with. However, it looks like my Uni work will only allow me to work on it on Wednesdays and in the weekend since I am pretty much tied up with all the traveling and the assignments I need to do over the semester.

The host used is called CobraHosts and has a nice basic package of 50Mb Webspace and 2Gb traffic which should be more than enough for my purposes. The cost is pretty low also ($1 a month) and so it should be good for the short term while I learn my trade. On the horizon for me is learning PHP and MySQL to do general web functionality stuff, and XHTML + CSS + Javascript to learn how to improve on the display and usability aspect of web design.

A few of the logos I've come up with so far :-







A few menus that I've drawn :-





I need to start designing some simple templates and look into ways in which I can enhance the functionality provided on the blog as well as on the other sections I will introduce over time. One of the things that I would like to implement is to load the comments section through AJAX without needing to do any refresh. Also it might be an idea to add a "Add Comment" link which also works through AJAX so that any comments can be added without doing refreshes.

I guess as I get used to the web design world I will improve my skills and generate better ideas. For the time being just think of me as a programmer in a designer's world.

Linksys Wireless Router

The joy of wireless. From the amount of nothingness (yes know it's not a word...or is it?) that I've achieved over the past month at least the setting up of a wireless network was a piece of cake. For once the whole process went completely flawlessly from the installation to the configuration of security and access settings.

The Linksys WAG354G is an excellent router and although one of my laptops had initial problems from accessing the internet two rooms away it has a powerful wireless connection. I solved that by using a cable for the USB wireless adapter on the laptop instead of directly plugging into the back of the laptop. Also I can access the net on my PSP all the way to the front door (my room is somewhere in the middle).

I set up WPA-TKIP encryption with MAC authentication which is all done through a web interface making the whole process even easier. The Desktop computer and my Thinkpad are using Wired LAN and my brother's laptop and my PSP are using the wireless. I also managed to set up file sharing with the windows boxes and my linux box using Samba. This was suprisingly very easy to do.

About two weeks ago I started to use linux on my desktop so that I can learn how to use the shell. Ubuntu is an excellent distribution in my opinion as it has the ease of use of Windows and the power of Linux. Downloading and installing new packages is as easy as invoking a single command or using the powerful Application Manager interface.

Using the "apt-get install" command I basically downloaded and configured Samba. The only thing I had to do was run "smbpasswd" to change the default samba password so that I could share files with my laptop.

Overall, the router is excellent, does everything you'd ever need it to do and has a very simple setup procedure. The advanced settings allow you to set up access restrictions (ports, time, URLs, etc). However, I couldn't find anything for bandwidth control or a way to monitor the bandwidth of the overall network which is usually a must for anyone with more than two/three computers attached to the network.

Holidays are over

Ah! The holidays. A time to reflect and recharge. All that being done, its time to start blogging again. I need to try and work out a schedule for my blog as currently I seem to only blog when I am bored and have nothing else to do....err...like now! Also since I seem to end up writing long posts I think I'll try and blog twice a week or something.

Anyways, on the agenda this semester at uni is Systems Programming, Distributed Systems, Principles of Programming Languages, Software Design Study and a few other boring modules. Most of these, the exception being Software Design Study, don't require much work since they are 80% exam and so I think I'll have much more time this semester to try out the things that I've always wanted to do.

I've jotted down a few ideas to write about which I'll try to blog this weekend. I may not publish all the posts I write this weekend since statistically blogging readership tails off in the weekend which is why start of the week and end of the week may be a good time to blog.