Bashar's technical news blog

My Blog Has Moved...

2007-01-23T22:42:00.000Z

Yes that's right. It's been a great experience using Blogger for the past two months, but no matter what, your own hosted blog can always give you much more power and flexibility. My new blog now has moved to its new location and name: BlogAllAlong.com. I tried my best to move all the posts and comments from here to there, sadly Blogger does not provide a convenient export mechanism, and the suggested work around solutions did not work for me. So please, excuse me for any mistakes on old posts.

I will be writing there soon a full review about my experience in Blogger, and who and why might chose to host his own blog.

iPhone clone already?

2007-01-19T17:11:00.000Z

LG have announced their new KE850 touch screen only mobile phone, very similar in look to the iPhone. Is this by chance? Is it a tradition that people copy Apple interface? Or is it the other way around this time? No reports seem to have been made so far. What is interesting however is that the new LG phone might beat the iPhone to the market. Whether that is good to LG, or bad to them since Apple fans will keep waiting, we will know the answer soon.

oneCompare has more on the news with a photo of the new phone.

Finally, A Vampyre Story set for release end of 2007

2007-01-17T10:40:00.000Z

It was a long wait, it was a touch fight, and we are still going to wait. But in the end, I think it's all worth it. The dream of Bill Tiller and his new Autumn Moon studio is coming to reality finally. A Vampyre Story release date in France and United Kingdom has been announced and is intended to be at the end of 2007. I can still recall when the game designer vowed to release the game, even if he had to do so on his own budget.

Well, his efforts seem to have been rewarded and the fans are eagerly waiting for the new 2D style adventure game. The French distributors are now targeting the end of year for the release. You can read the translation of the article here. The original French version is available here as well.

US Console Sales lead by XBox 360 in Dec

2007-01-15T13:43:00.000Z

The Register writes about the game console sales in US last month, lead by XBox 360 with 1.1m unites, followed by Wii 604,200 and Sony 3 490,700. PS3 is still in the last place, and XBox 360 taking the lead among. This lead is most probably due to the lack of productions units for Wii and PS3. Why is the PS3 also less popular? Well I suggest you browse for the PS3 games and see which game is worthy of buying the $400 console. There is no killer app for PS3 yet, but they should be coming in 2007 or else Sony will be kicked out of this round.

The amazing thing is the sales of the old consoles however. PS2 reached 1.4m, 1.6m for Nintendo DS, and 953,200 units for PSP. How could people still buy the PS2 I wondered, and then I remembered the tag price for new consoles. The total console sales in December rose %59.2 from last year, totalling $1.6bn! Can you imagine. And my dad used to tell me video games are just for kids.

Read the full article here.

Telltale Vs Lucasarts

2007-01-14T16:52:00.000Z

March 2004, the famous anticipated sequel to the Sam & Max Hit the Road was cancelled by Lucasarts for good, and and all other adventure game plans have been put on hold until further notice. A late comment came from Lucas officials late last year saying they will get back to the adventure games in 2015!

Fans went mad, petitions started on the internet, and even the Lucas employees who were working on the game felt frustrated. A group of the employees heard the cries, quit Lucas and started what's called today Telltale games back in June 2004. They have managed to acquire the license for the abandoned Sam & Max and already released two episodes which were well accepted by the fans.

Now, and after 3 years and a half, I thought of making this comparison between the small Telltale, and the Star Wars fueled Lucasarts. The first thing I tried was how often people Google for one over the other by using Google Trends.

Lucas are still in the lead, but as it is properly called Trend, you can see end of 2006 how Telltale closed up on Lucasarts. This was when Sam & Max Ep. 1 was released. A clear message from the fans to Lucas I suppose. Also, you can see below the difference from Alexa for Reach and Rank:

Daily Reach has still a huge gap between the two, though at every Sam & Max release this gap gets a lot smaller. If we look at Ranking it gets much more interesting. At Nov and Jan, when the two Sam & Max episodes were released, the 3 1/2 years old company, living on the forgotten and leftovers of Lucasarts beats Lucas in ranking! Now that Lucas are out of new Star Wars movies, and Telltale still gathering up their forces, there could be a real turn in situation here. I don't believe Lucas will start losing, no. But their sales may get affected now without new Star Wars fresh movies coming, and may really consider appealing back to the fans they turned their back to.

On the other, I take off my hat and salute all the people at Telltale for their continuous and hard working efforts that really seem to be paying off. They have won the fans heart and loyalty in a way that with every release, we customers face serious issues launching the game, and can still feel the sense of humor between fans and the company. How could a company like this fall I wonder?

Google Top iFrame not appearing

2007-01-14T16:10:00.000Z

Today I noticed when I Google for any word that has results, there is an iFrame above the results that results in 404 Page Not Found. I thought in the beginning it's only my slow connection timeout, but I keep getting it in both Firefox and IE7. Opera did not have that iFrame for some reason. At least I didn't see it. See below the image.

Does anybody else have the same thing?

Yahoo doing Evil against Google?

2007-01-13T20:50:00.000Z

Marketing Pilgrim are posting the incident of an individual who download Yahoo Messenger, and upon installation, he got an innocent vague looking auto-update option, which he normally assumed it's Yahoo Messenger related update and decided to keep it. What he found out later is that the update downloads the IE7, sets it as default browser with Yahoo as the main page, and not only that. It changes the default search engine to Yahoo from what it was, Google.

This is a very strange incident to be, and someone already mailed Yahoo for comments. Read more and see snapshots from the original post.

Google brings live stock price!

2007-01-12T20:04:00.000Z

Google have been in discussions, and are moving on with the SEC, NYSE, and NetCoalition about what seems to be not a desperate attempt to bring the live stock market prices through all various Google services, including but not limited to Google Finance, Google Mobile, and Google Personalized Page.

The negotiations are still going on very well as it seems from Google Blog's tone and if it happens, this will give them a jump ahead over Yahoo, who have their prices delayed for at least 15 minutes. But in the meantime, Google Finance has all it takes of a stock market site, from searching quotes with on the fly suggestion, related news, share holder info, and now your can create your Portfolio to track your favorite stocks, mark down the shares you have and track your gain/loss over time.

Basically, Google Finance now has it all except for the live quotes. Could we see Google soon turning into an online stock market as well? I am eagerly waiting for that to be honest. Since the launch of Google Finance, I hardly see my self going to any other financial site, which is not healthy ofcourse.

Apple comes with iPhone, Cisco fires back in the court

2007-01-11T13:25:00.000Z

Apple's Steve Jobs just introduced the long awaited and rumored iPhone to the fans.
Fans are happy and crazy about it
Apple stocks raises up
Cisco files a lawsuit against Apple for using their iPhone trademark which they got by acquiring infogear back in 2000.

Funny thing is that Cisco surely knew all the time that if Apple comes with it's phone, it sure is going to call it iPhone.

Also to come, is the Apple TV in February. Next few months are going to be really interesting for Apple fans.

Best 100 Companies to Work for in US, Google Tops Them

2007-01-09T10:06:00.000Z

CNN Money have compiled a list of the best 100 companies to be working for in the US for 2007, and Google fairly tops the list. Competitors Yahoo and Microsoft came in the 44th and 50th position accordingly. Is it a coincidence the order is inversely proportional to the company age? And that with time and as Google grows bigger it will become more vertically structured oriented and start to lose it's advantages? Possible, but still avoidable.

Click here for the full list.

IE6 was unsecured for 284 days in 2006

2007-01-07T05:34:00.000Z

Slashdot posted a link to a washingtonpost article compiling the number of days IE6 had open exploit code with no fixes from Microsoft. The result is more than 9 months (284 days) of the year, the IE6 browser had known unpatched security flaws. There was also another 98 days without fixes to IE flaws that criminals were using to gain personal and financial data.

Could a customer sue Microsoft over his losses because of the lack of support for the browser? While Microsoft enforces Internet Explorer as the default browser in all it's operating systems, this causes the majority of people to go with the crowd and use what's already there. And with the results given from the article, I think Microsoft should be held legally accountable for the loss of millions of user data, and in the future, they have a choice of either removing IE from their system, or showing one of those scary warning signs they have to the user saying "We do not guarantee the confidentiality of the information you send and receive over the internet if you use our Internet Explorer" Just like what they did when they lost the lawsuit against Sun for licensing their own modified JRE.

Windows Vista did not steal Mac interface...

2007-01-06T16:20:00.000Z

From the begin of the Windowing systems, people claim that Bill Gates copied Apple interface and credited it for him self. Now with Vista soon going in for public, many are also saying it's a copy of Mac OS X, while the Microsoft fans are talking in pride about the innovative Vista interface.

New York Times have this video demonstrating the clear differences between the two, for you to watch and judge. Click here to watch it. Enjoy.

Sam & Max episode 2 out today

2007-01-05T08:10:00.000Z

Technically, it's the 5th of Jan in many areas of the world, and fans have already started spamming telltale blog with complains and funny comments about why the game, Sam & Max episode Situation: Comedy is not out yet. The company PR and officials are sharing the laugh as well, saying it's still not 5th in California.

The episode is the second of 6 as a whole that will end up the first season of Sam & Max Adventure game series. Sam & Max started as a comic in the 80s, and was later turned into a PC adventure game in 1993 called Sam & Max Hit the Road, and it was really a hit. You can see the intro cutscene below. Around 1998, TV Series for the dog and rabbit comic started before it was soon stopped. Fans kept looking for more of the funny two characters, but all hopes were gone when Lucasarts stopped the production of the Sam & Max Freelance Police game.

As the news came out, it was a clear message Lucas are no more into adventure games, and have set focus on purely Star Wars sequels. Mass petitions started, and lots of people cried for help. A group of Lucas employees listened to the crowd, left the company to start their own. To be able to fuel their on going expenses, they made the games into short episodes, and it seems to be turning out good.

For now, enjoy the the two clips below:

Sam & Max Hit the Road (2003)

Sam & Max Freelance Police (2004) - Got cancelled

Best SEO Blog of 2006

2007-01-04T15:14:00.000Z

SearchEngineJournal have revealed the results of their competition for the best SEO Blog for 2006. You can see the results here and find use of the top blogs.

Aljazeera Voting System fake?

2007-01-03T18:19:00.000Z

I don't post usually about politics, but it's a special occasion where the responsible for death of millions over the past 3 decades, and even after his death, has been hanged to death. Not every day you see a president sentenced to death. Many philosophical minds start to argue now, and talk about human rights and nobles. How could the president be hanged, it was not a fair trial, and even the execution was a revenge.

I say to them, what do you expect? No heart feelings. All is well, we will just hang you because the judge said so. We forgive you for spraying halabcha with chemicals, invading Kuwait, taking on Iran in one of the most tough battles mankind ever knew, just when Iran was healing from internal revolution. And the hundreds of Islamic Shite leaders you murdered all forgive you as well. I will not say it was right how the US entered Iraq, and neither it's OK for people to shout loud during the execution, but then name me one reason why Saddam Hussain should be treated fairly? There are hundreds of bodies laying in iraq waiting to be dig out, if ever. Body of my relative was brought to Kuwait last year from the Iraqi captivity during invasion of Kuwait.

Aljazeera now has a poll on whether you agree to Saddam being hanged, and before I even see the results, I knew it. Result is NO! It's always the mentality of Aljazeera to take on sides. Anyways, I did my vote BIG YES, and just to test the trustworthy of the vote, I wrote a small script to post a 100 vote for YES. Not surprisingly the results didn't change a bit. Percentages are exact the same, and number of votes didn't change accordingly. I tried manual votes and View results. Within minute you sometimes see number jumping from 47250 to 47330, and then another refresh in a new browser shows lower number of votes again. I tried to refresh two sessions at the same time, the first was higher in number of votes than the second by 2!

Nevertheless, the difference in percentage is always the same. Lets do a simple math here to see why. With total number of votes 47300, and the percentage is of 3 digits, e.g. %37.8, it means that it needs another 50 votes for the change to take effect, which apparently it has. But still, the results remain the same. Either it's a total game from Aljazeera site, and we have seen many posts with strange results in the past, or their posting solution is still in Alpha testing phase, so I suggest you keep away from it.

Bone Director's Cut

2007-01-02T12:09:00.000Z

Following the release of the first two Bone episodes, and while the fans were busy playing and more often discussing the Sam & Max season, Jeff Smith and his team have had their hands full working on new updated versions of the two Bone episodes. Updated version is available for FREE to people who already purchased the game, and include:

1- New "Prophecy" cutscene at the begin of Out from Boneville, that will be related to the remaining of the episodes
2- Better and more clear ending of the first episode, as Mr. Jeff believes they rushed in the release and didn't make the ending as good as it should.
3- improved Thorn look and voice.

Rarely we see people revisiting their sold work to enhance it again, which shows to what degree they are taking care of the details of their story. Read their official post, and interview with Jiff Smith here.

Top 10 anticipated Nintendo Wii games

2007-01-01T16:46:00.000Z

Here you will find a lits with some YouTube videos of the top 10 most promising games for Nintendo Wii in 2007. Enjoy!

Apple stocks fall as Jobs goes under investigation

2006-12-28T12:13:00.000Z

As the news spread that Apple CEO Steve jobs was handed 7.5 million stock option back in 2001 without the board of directors approval, an official investigation started to take place, and the Apple CEO have already appointed his lawyer for the case. The Apple stock saw a black day yesterday when his stock from $81.5 to as low as $78.34, lowest this month, before it adjusted to normal again. MSN News has more on the story.

PlayStation 3 Kiosks Freeze on purpose?!?!

2006-12-28T06:42:00.000Z

Destructoid is writing about his experience in the PlayStation 3 Kiosk freezing nature, saying that on different occasions he has seen the PS3 kiosk shut down. When he asked about it, some told him it's because it keeps freezing. Later on a Best Buy employee told him the locking and freezing of the console is intentional by Sony. They have made the PS3 locking intentionally to disallow people sticking in the shop playing it all day long! A second sales person also indicated to him the same thing.

I am not sure how true is that. Is it a cover up story or a real awkward decision. If it's a cover up story, we should see full list of bug reports, and if it's true, then that means if your PS3 keeps freezing at home, the shop have sold you the kiosk version of it! So get back there and get your money back.

2006 Top 20 Innovative Products

2006-12-28T06:26:00.000Z

PC World have published a very interesting article on the top 20 innovative products of 2006, arguably Microsoft Office 2007 leads the list! The list nevertheless is rich of useful information I advise you all to go through it. For me, the thing that really caught my eye and is something not known for many, YouOS.com , the heavily AJAX-Based WebOS. You can use a demo and see the desktop, run (still simple) word editors, view RSS feeds, do live chatting, run commands from the shell window. This WebOS and AJAX thing is a story to be told separately and cannot be covered in details right now.

Anyhow, enjoy the list, and tell me what's your favorite afterwards!

Santa's Toy Hunt on Google Earth

2006-12-24T18:28:00.000Z

Starting from Dec 12, up till Christmas eve, every day there will be a clue outside Santa's north pole, which if you could solve will lead you to the hidden toy on Google Earth. This is the new quest launched by Google, thats sounds really interesting and fun. Education to the end user as well. Google can use it to pin point the hot areas that people might miss otherwise.

Read more about it on the Google Blog or go to the main quest page.

Give your handset sometime to heal

2006-12-24T18:16:00.000Z

One of the trivial ways people usually lose their mobile handset is when it falls into water, or sometimes when babies chew it and their spit cause its circuits to disfunction. The latter happened with my Nokia 6600 phone 3 weeks back when I suddenly found out only the zero button does not work! This means I cannot call numbers with ZERO, or send an SMS of more than 1 word (zero is the space button). Ofcourse it was later I used the new line break to write SMS.

I was still holding to a hope however that within few hours the phone would dry and get back to normal. I opened the phone and started drying it from inside. I was shocked by how wet it was! All my attempts however did no good. Not even after a day or two, nor a week or two. I just went lazy on replacing the phone, which is a must now until this morning. I was half a sleep when I heard the phone battery going dead. Later on I recharged and started it, and voila! The magic happened and the zero button is working better than ever.

I don't want to curse it or suggest this would always be the case, but the point is, with little care and try, you can save your self the cost of new phone.

Zudeo Video Community

2006-12-22T18:14:00.000Z

Zuedo is the code name of the new Azureus project for high definition movies and videos downloading. Azureus is well known for their BitTorrent java based Client for Peer-to-Peer file sharing. Now they have introduced Zuedo, mainly for full length high definition movies. All you need to do is download their small client and start downloading all the movies you want.

The good about the service is that all the movies are full length, well produced with high quality, and its all legally submitted by the content owners. You can't find any short home made movies, it's not the place for that kind of stuff. If you are a producer or a publisher of original content, you can upload your stuff through the client for the world to watch.

The bad thing however is that the site is still small in content (this is what happens when you restrict for original stuff only!) and it still needs to get more publicity, which is what I am trying to achieve here. Another bad thing, for me at least, is that once I start downloading anything, the client start eating all my available bandwidth. Theoretically, I have a restriction on the bandwidth for around 25 kb, and I am paying quite a lot for my 256 ADSL Connection. But I still lose it all for a single download, and I find my self forced to shut it down. I am still trying to figure out whether I am doing something wrong, and I sure hope I am.

Still, I like to open it before I go to bed and chose my next morning movie before I head to work. Tomorrow is the first day of our working week by the way, God help me.

Monkey Island Cartoon...

2006-12-21T14:58:00.000Z

Its now almost 10 years since the last worthy Monkey Island game sequel, and 17 since the start of the monkeying era. Since 1997, and the fans are eagerly waiting for a Monkey Island sequel. The cries were heard and a frustrating Escape From Monkey Island, by all means do escape it, was released. Most fans were let down, and to me, it was a like a clear message "Don't ask for a sequel next time!".

Still, loyal game fans are all over the net posting, creating fan sites and themes. We have seen the Monkey Island theatric play by high school kids, which was not bad at all. Later on, we started hearing about the Monkey Island movie, except that it was released by Walt Disney based on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride that initially inspired Ron Gilbert to create the Monkey Island game. Still, even Ron himself admired the movie, and the fans loved it crazy, me included ofcourse. The last part of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy is coming in 2007, and Lucasarts have clearly said they will get back to the old games by 2015! Thats a long wait for the fans.

Today however, I came across a great 2D animated Pyrats movie, with some 3D aid. It was so fun and amusing to watch. Reminds you of the Curse of Monkey Island drawing, though much more advanced. But it was also TOO SHORT! when I looked for the release date I found out this is only a short movie that was made by 5 French students over 7 months for the Annecy 2006 international animation festival. It was so much frustrating, but very promising at the same time. From what I see, they have created the characters and theme of the movie, and this all can't be done for 1.5 minute play and thats it. I think they must be trying to sell their skills to come with a full length movie later on. Check the site to see the movie. If Disney wants to get back in the 2D cartoon business, those are the people who they should be hiring.

ViewDo shows you how to do it!

2006-12-20T21:36:00.000Z

few years back in my college days, a friend told me he has a graduation to attend and he doesn't know how to wear a tie. He said he looked for it on the net and couldn't find anything. I thought its kind of funny. Apparently, I was too naive. ViewDo does it for you. The site is a media library of explanatory videos showing how to do things, like wear a tie, create a network cable, roll a sushi and anything else you can think of.

It is the kind of target video community for people who want to share their knowledge (by video), or for people looking for that kind of knowledge. What's more is that you can download the videos to your iPod, Play Station Portable, or any other media device. The site is still kind of new, but if it lives up to what it promise, this could be a real hit.

Bye Bye Google Search API

2006-12-19T18:49:00.000Z

It was never complete great, it was never carefully taken care of. It was something that's done once and left for Beta forever. Google Search SOAP API has been (quitely) taken out of service for good. No more users are accepted in the program, and pretty soon we are likely to see existing ones not able to query anymore.

The service was introduced in Beta back in 2002, and remained so with limited 1,000 query a day, and 10 results per query, until it was canceled for good. I was working with the API, I loved it although it had some stability issues. I and many others were waiting for it to go live with unlimited queries and have more flexibility. Unfortunately, this thing never happened. Tough luck for the Google Hacks author and people who bought it like me!.

Google are inviting users to use the AJAX Search API, which is apparently even more restrictive and does not allow reordering or mixing of results. Shall I agree to change to AJAX API and obey by the terms, what makes me sure the AJAX API will not be dumped in 3 years time again?

Google Answers cancellation may have been a must, as it was a wrong concept perhaps. But the search API is a strong slap in the face of programmers. Now geeks have another reason to scrap content of Google search their own way!

Original source

IE7 optimized for Google released

2006-12-16T17:24:00.001Z

When Microsoft provided the IE7 browser developer APIs, they didn't think Google would actually use it against them. Google have officially released an IE7 version optimized for Google, with Google as the default page, Google Toolbar included, and Google as the default search engine. Interested people can download it from here.

While it might sound like a bad move against Microsoft Live.com, it may be a good one however for IE7 that now Google are promoting it. It all depends on which half of the glass you are talking about.

Google Patent Search released

2006-12-15T07:30:00.000Z

What's best than introducing new service, simply by summing up what services you already have. Google have their search engine, and Google Book Search technologies both applied to come up with the Google Patent Search . The new service allows people to search for the full text of U.S. patents and browse through them just as they do with Google Book Search.

Source: Google Blog

Again, MS Word Code Execution Exploit

2006-12-15T06:40:00.000Z

A third MS Word code execution exploit has been posted that allows code execution on the victim PC by opening the infected word document. While Microsoft have not yet publicly confirmed the vulnerability, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a warning in this regard. More on the story comes from eWeek.

Dark day for PHP

2006-12-14T08:37:00.000Z

Open Source PHP security specialist and member of the PHP Security Response Team, Stefan Esser have had enough, and resigned! The security expert says in his blog

"The reasons for this are many, but the most important one is that I have realised that any attempt to improve the security of PHP from the inside is futile. The PHP Group will jump into your boat as soon you try to blame PHP's security problems on the user but the moment you criticize the security of PHP itself you become persona non grata. I stopped counting the times I was called immoral traitor for disclosing security holes in PHP or for developing Suhosin."Clearly a very strong message sent in public about the spirit going inside the PHP Community. And what makes it worse for them, is that now security holes will no longer be hidden from public, rather security holes will be exposed in advance "For the ordinary PHP user this means that I will no longer hide the slow response time to security holes in my advisories", Stefan says.

This incident however is not the first of its kind. Back in July, PHP lead developer Jani Taskinen also left the team with what's called cryptic message:

"Thank you all for the last 6 years or so. It has been fun
(sometimes) and many times not so much fun. Unfortunately
I have had enough and I don't want to be associated with
this project anymore.

I'm sure most people (the ones who matter) can understand
why. If someone doesn't, I could not care less. Take care.

Please do not reply to this email.

--Jani

p.s. Delete my CVS account. I have no use for it anymore."

The message does not give much details, but its enough to reveal the kind of low spirit and disputes going inside. Open Source is the strongest community if built on honest goals with a united team, but since thats all about it, and its non-profit, disputes like those can quickly break the backbone of it and bring the whole organization down to its knees. Specially with the rise of other alternatives, like Ruby.

Both Sony and Nintendo to release fixes for their consoles...

2006-12-14T08:28:00.000Z

Its been a month almost since the release of the latest two game consoles in the market, and now the two companies, Sony and Nintendo, are already updating their consoles. Nintendo Wii have been report to have weak straps that blowout eventually, as it seems the company underestimated its new controller appeal to the fans.

Sony on the other hand have updated their firmware to address the resolution scaling problem that has many times been reported. Nevertheless, some say the new update does not fix anything.

Slashdot has more on the story.

Google Finance update...

2006-12-13T18:50:00.000Z

Since it's launch, I have been very impressed with the unique way Google Finance have been designed. Specially the dynamic expanding/shrinking graph, associated with the news items so that you can tell what happened to the stock price at the time of the news. I remember also that there was no feedback link in that service in the beginning, which was kind of a let down for me. I thought that means this is the kind of one time practice that's never going to be revisited. Well, apparently I was wrong.

Few days back, Google posted on their official blog about the new and improved Google Finance, which now contains from the main page:

- Section Summary: The ups/downs of each sector as a progress bar, indicating the percentage of change as well.
- Market summary graph for the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500.
- Today's News
- Top Movers
- Recent Quotes: Hint that you can search Google for stock symbols and you are done, e.g. GOOG

Charts are also now more comprehensive with over 40 years of data for US Stocks. Despite being so late in the game, so far I prefer Google Finance over the rest.

Firefox 3 Alpha out

2006-12-12T15:12:00.000Z

Firefox, the famous open source web browser that caught the attention of millions, is already out with Firefox 3 Alpha for developers to test and modify. The project, called cairo, is aimed tentatively for launch in May 07, and will be solely based on Gecko 1.9. RegDeveloper have reported earlier on this project with a bit of more details.

Another day, another zero day flaw in Microsoft

2006-12-08T05:09:00.000Z

Just one day after the zero day flaw in Word was announced, another zero day flaw has been discovered in Windows Media Player. The flaw resides in the WMVCORE.DLL library that handles .ASX files. Microsoft have not yet released a fix for the problem, and did not even report it.

Click here for the source and some details on how this flaw works, and how to protect yourself against it.

Google Book Search rival from Microsoft

2006-12-07T20:39:00.000Z

BBC News that Microsoft have launched the Beta release of their Book Search service, currently including book collections from the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto. 3 other institutions are coming in 2007 as well.

All scanned books currently are non-copyrighted, but later on copyrighted material will be added, Microsoft says, and will also be incorporated into the general Live.com Search engine. Looking at the new Live Beta service head to head with Google, I could easily say right now Google search time is much faster and stable. Very often I do encounter Live keeps searching forever, or at least longer than I can tolerate! The dynamic load content on scroll down idea from Live does not seem to be convenient much, at least not with my 256 kbps connection. Browsing the book has been also made easier in Google Book Search, where you can use hot keys to flip pages, and you can open two pages in parallel. Page loading also in Google is faster, however, very often if I do flip too many pages in Google the browser crashes.

Regardless of all the differences now however, the favor will be to the side who has the better book collections, and who succeeds to deal carefully with the copyrights issues involved in it.

IBM on board with XMPP Standards

2006-12-07T09:08:00.000Z

IBM have announced their new IBM Lotus SameTime 7.5 release with the support of XMPP standard, making it now reachable to hundreds of other services that follow the same standard. LiveJournal are among the communities following that standard, and ofcourse most importantly is the Google Talk. Google them selves are so happy with the release as you can see from their blog.

It is worth mentioning that since the introduction of Google Talk, and their attempt to promote the XMPP standard, MSN Messenger and Yahoo one teamed up to enable cross-messaging between the two, and just few months back it was a reality. Now this shows the direction the two instant messaging giants are following, and unless things change, the XMPP standard will never do its purpose. We have seen some light of cooperation however recently, like the Sitemap standards which was an initiative by Google now in collaboration with Microsoft and Yahoo as well. So let's hope they will soon realize, there is no escape of worldwide standards.

Microsoft Issues Word Zero-Day Attack Alert

2006-12-06T05:27:00.000Z

Microsoft have issued a security advisory regarding a newly discovered Word Zero-Day Attack. The attack infects all major Word releases by simply opening unsolicited attachments from both known and unknown source. Best thing to do know is avoid opening any attachments, even from legitimate source. The report came from Eweek with more details.

Microsoft to run Windows on OLPC

2006-12-05T17:03:00.000Z

Few months back, Mr. Bill Gates opened fire on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which is a charity project aimed at providing low cost $99 laptops for the poor children, to allow them access to the technology. Gates attacked the project, which is powered by their rival Google, saying in parts of his speech: "If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” . Very strong comments that have certainly hurt the feelings of all those dedicating their time, effort, and money to that project, and all the poor children who were starving to reach their hands to it. His comments on the crank manual powering mechanism to overcome electricity shortage as a Wind Key made it even worse. The comments Gates made caused major criticism and as some people described it, it shows clearly that "Bill Gates loves the poor, but loves Microsofr more". Details of his previous speech can be found here.

Now that the door is open, and Microsoft received their sample units of the project, they are trying to get Windows, which is hungry for resources on the laptop. Bill doesn't know when to stop taking everything as a game that he has to win, even when it comes to serving the poor. When he wasn't a participant, it was a total cranking machine, and now he wants to have his brand on it. More on the story here.

Ask.com awakes with AskCity

2006-12-04T19:40:00.000Z

Long ago, Ask.com was a major way for searching the internet, being the only search engine to accept human like language questions. Years later, the site could not keep up with the competition and started to get abandoned. Today however we see them coming back with new ideas in mind. Their new compelling design now includes AskCity, a new service for local city search, with the use of extensive Java and AJAX technology keeps the user at the same browser window while moving around the city looking for business locations, events, map, directions and services. Search Engine Journal has a very nice article about it for interested readers.

Windows Vista finally released...

2006-12-03T18:31:00.000Z

It was 2002 when Bill Gates started talking about his vision for Windows Vista briefly, and the Widows File System WinFS that organizes the whole file system as database related files. Ofcourse it was 4 years later they realized they hava to give that major feature up, or else they will keep pushing the release date for ever.

Nevertheless, now that Vista is released for business mainly, geeks have already started playing, hacking, and comparing. For interested readers, I suggest you go by this comparison between Windows XP and Vista. It briefly touches on different areas of performance and security.

Now before moving on, you should be ware if you are planning to find a cracked Windows Vista version, as hackers have already started distributing a download that is supposed to be an activation for Windows Vista, being called "Windows Vista All Versions Activation 21.11.06". The download however is actually a trojan carrier, Trojan-PSW.Win32.LdPinch.aze, that will install itself in the client PC. What makes the case worse is Microsoft's official statement that Windows Vista is designed to allow third-party software to be easily included into the Vista installation DVD, and thus have warned that pirated copies could easily come with malware preloaded inside. apcmag has more on this.

Like.com: Search for the likeness of items...

2006-12-02T17:52:00.000Z

To be successful in business, they say, you either do different things, or do the same things differently. Like.com is an excellent example of the latter. An image recognition powered search engine, where you specify the portion of the image you are looking for, say celebrity shoes, and then search for similar items. Your search can be based on both color and shape, with an adjustable meter for color, shape, and pattern relevancy importance. You can also specify the color you want, and price range. The site will automatically reorder the items based on your criteria.

While there are many shopping and price comparison sites, this one (still in alpha) is going into a different approach to deliver a unique service. Image recognition is a hot field that's been under going researches for years, and this so far is the best real application of the technology I've came across. What could be more interesting is if the site allows users to upload their own images and search for likeness inside. Right now you can only do this search for images and products that are already provided by sellers. Imagine how wonderful it would be, although costly for the husband, if the wife can photo the necklace she likes and search for it in Like.com for similar items. I am just talking technically here and wouldn't really enjoy the price of it so much!

Amazon launches aStore for associates...

2006-12-01T17:55:00.000Z

Another new service that keeps putting Amazon upfront all other associate networks is the aStore. An easy way to create a professional online Amazon store in minutes, that you can embed as an inner FRAME inside your site, or point your customers to it and start making money.

I haven't wasted much time and have given it a try already. You can feel free to browse my Amazon store here. If you like it, and you are a site owner, you can become an Amazon associate and create one yourself.

Having tested it however, the product is still new and in some occasions not so flexible. For example, I have to either pick every item I want to show, or provide keywords for a specific category. You cannot have the two, which is really a shame. You would normally want to post your favorite 10 items, and expect 10 more to come as recommendation from Amazon itself. aStore does provide a section for similar items, but its limited size only and does not fulfill the above situation. The store administration side response time and usability also have a great area for improvement, with some proper AJAX implementation in place. Creating my store took so much idle time waiting for server response and refresh pages. This whole waiting time could get eliminated by applying AJAX to add items and delete them dynamically without requiring any refreshes.

Google Answers Falls as Yahoo one rise!

2006-12-01T06:06:00.000Z

The project that started as an idea from Larry Page more than 4 years back, Google Answers, is now closing down for new questions, and at the end of the year, for any new answers as well. This decision comes just few months after Yahoo launched their own Yahoo Answers, which is turning out pretty well.

The difference however is in the concept between the two. Google Answers was for people to post questions, and bit how much they are welling to pay for an answer. Then a group of researchers would look for an answer to your question. Not anyone could answer the question, and you have to pay to get the answer. This is kind of awkward in the rich forum world, and where Google users are used to the free search services.

Yahoo Answers however is more of an open community, where you have points deducted for asking, and rewarded for answering. This have turned Yahoo Answers into a wide fast growing community, where you post the question, and only have to wait few seconds before you start getting answers. Pretty good isn't it? But the draw back of this is the nature of people using it. Usually they are the people looking for fun rather than real answers, so pretty often you would read "What's your favorite color?" or "What's the price of HD Drive?" when they could actually search any shopping site for the best prices. The answers also don't come much as you hope for, if you are looking for a professional answer. One time only I remember getting professional answer for a technical question, otherwise, the service would do you just good if you want to have some fun or know the answer to a general question like "What's the name of the movie that was shown last year about alien invasion?" Those kind of questions, you expect to get answers to them.

All in all, it is numbers that count, and Yahoo are taking this round.

Arabs outdo Google???

2006-11-28T09:17:00.000Z

Recently I have been reading about a new search engine that is developed by a saudi young guy. The claims are that the new engine, Amamk.com outperforms Google in all aspects. Being a Google competitor by it self is a huge word to be said, while countries are paying millions to outdo Google with no luck. Now that does not mean its not possible, but to hear it all of a sudden, and to come from the Arab world is surely another shock. The site has been growing in popularity in the middle-east, probably more because they feel loyal to it.

Being a search engine fan, I thought of giving it a test. I knew the comments are exaggerating, but perhaps the guy is on the right track. So i had in mind the two main factors of assessing the search engine. 1) Response time, 2) Result relevancy. The first one favored Google with less than 1 second response time, while the second took around 8 seconds for the same word "test". Now going on to the relevancy, searching Google for "test" gave results that seemed more desirable and focused than Amamk, according to several people who have tested it with me as well. But this comparison is judgmental, so I thought of doing the test for images instead. Here are the results I found for searching the word "dog" on Amamk.com and here are the same results from Yahoo . As you can see for yourself, its a perfect match. I have tried other several queries for images and videos as well, and they mostly always match. For Web and Audio, the results were different, and I have read reviews saying Web was powered by Google at a time.

All in all, this site, for image and video at least seems to be powered by Yahoo, but the site doesnt mention anything about it. I have also contacted the site owner by email, when his whole site was down and took the chance to ask whether it is powered by Yahoo and what is the reason behind the results relevancy, but I got no reply.

This is not the only thing that's weird however. Most search engines, if you go to the About Us section, you will see details about their search and ranking criteria, the spider names they have registered, the range of IPs in use to index the web, and how you can submit your site to their engine. Amamk does not even have About Us section or anything else like that. The site instead, urges visitors at the end of the page to click the sponsored ads links to keep powering the site, and offers a client program that reviewers claim allow you to search the net offline! Now who can cache the whole web offline? I think what they meant was without using a web browser.

I know of some good old search engines that emerged out of the middle-east, didnt test them well at the time. But the famous one was Ajeeb.com, and sadly it has scraped its search functionality, and now turning more into a fee based service.

Domino's Pizza Hotline down...

2006-11-27T12:44:00.000Z

Who would have thought about it? Could the company hotline go down? Theoretically, ofcourse yes. But practically, I never encountered it. This is what happened to Domino's Pizza in Kuwait last Wednesday when their hotline stopped functioning for some reason, and being the type of take away pizza restaurants, this basically meant that they are out of customers for that day! Most people tend to call for delivery, so can you imagine the loss this failure have caused them?

The funny thing about it is that the company started taking some reverse engineering approach by calling its saved customer numbers asking whether they would like to order pizza or not :)

I wonder how could a company be prepared for such an incident, and whether there could be something like a backup server.