Salamin - Technostuff

Haro, Paro!

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:54:00 -0600

Question: What do we and former Japan Prime Minister Koizumi have in common?

Answer: Except for the obvious observation that we held the same the "Mental Commitment Robot" named "Paro," none.

Of course, there are dozens of these babies, and it's quite unlikely that we held exactly the same Paro unit as PM Koizumi did, but can you tell the difference?

Who or what is Paro, actually?

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Futuristic Shopping

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Mon, 07 May 2007 08:54:27 -0600

Year 1996.
I buy my books from a catalog. I place my orders through the mail. Then wait for a month for my orders to arrive. Afterwards I send a postal money order through the post office to pay for the books.

Year 2007.
I click and pay. The books get delivered the day after.

Ahh, the wonders of today's shopping. It's one of the reasons why I love the internet. It has made shopping more convenient than one can imagine. I've ordered everything from books to furniture to clothes via online shopping.

Who knows how everything would change ten years hence?
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Virtual Machines, Anyone?

nospam@example.com (baggy) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 03:24:17 -0700

Love to simultaneously run any operating system - Windows, Linux, or Unix - on your PC? Then, virtual machine is for you. NO, I don't mean the Java virtual machine which allows you to run Java applications on any operating system (OS). I mean virtual machines that can run unmodified operating systems on top of the existing one.

So what are virtual machines or VMs? According to VMware's website, "A virtual machine is a computer defined in a software. It is like running a PC on your PC." For those who are interested, a more detailed definition and classification of VM can be found here.
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Search Engine Typosquatting

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 06:37:19 -0700

This is a popular trick to lure users to a malicious site. Personally, I seldom make typos when entering words into my favorite search engines; but as they say, there's always a first time for everything! Better check your inputs before hitting that search button!

More details can be found in this article from Websense:

"This lure relies upon the eventuality that a user will make a typo while entering a term into a search engine. There are an endless number of possible typographical errors for any given term, but with a few algorithms and statistics you can significantly narrow down the number of possibilities. Attackers have been doing this for years and have become very good at predicting the most common typos for each keyword.

(snip)

Someone out there is always trying to get you to visit their website and sometimes the simplest tricks work wonders. The next time you are making a search on the Internet, take an extra second to make sure you got the results you expected before you start following links. One letter can mean the difference between arriving at your online banking site or ending up with a desktop of Spyware. "

Detail and screenshots can be found here.

Yahoo Messenger Virus

nospam@example.com (baggy) — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 05:05:50 -0700

The first time I encountered this problem was two weeks ago. I was using my PC when an instant message from my niece suddenly popped up. To my surprise, the message with some clickable link in it was written in Thai! Right there, I knew it didn't come from my niece. Ignoring the message, I closed the YM window. After a few minutes, another message popped up. Then followed by another, and another, and another... Annoyed, I removed my niece from my YM's contact list.

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Blogging With Windows Live Writer

nospam@example.com (baggy) — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 07:28:28 -0700

I was searching for add-ons to our internet explorer 7 installation when I came across Windows Live Writer. It is a free downloadable program provided by Windows Live. According to its description, it provides WYSIWYG editing capability allowing bloggers to know exactly how their blog items will look like before even publishing them to the web. Curious, I checked if it is compatible with Serendipity, our blogging software. Fortunately, Serendipity supports XML-RPC, a remote procedure calling protocol using HTTP (the one you use to access most websites) as the transport and XML (an extension of HTML commonly used in webpages) as the encoding. After setting up a couple of configuration, I had WLW running! And this is my first entry to check if it will work!

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Upgraded to Internet Explorer 7

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:10:13 -0700

I've recently upgraded my browser to IE7 - and admittedly, it's made my browsing experience much more manageable and less worrying (for now). Actually, I wasn't really interested in upgrading until the other day, when one of the websites I opened suddenly spewed popup messages about a certain DriveCleaner software attempting to scan my computer. Said software offered to scan my computer and remove all traces of adult porn sites that I've visited. What porn sites? Hello? Good thing that my Symantec antivirus automatically detected it as a security risk and promptly quarantined the malicious software.

Back to IE7. Here are some of the reasons why users would benefit by upgrading their IE version to 7: first off, streamlined interface. Gone are the menu bars including File, Edit, etc. Next is tabbed browsing - you're gonna love tabbed browsing. With it, you can open multiple websites in a single window. Plus, it allows you to see thumbnail images of all open tabs in a single view! It is also possible to organize multiple tabs into a single tab group and save it as a favorite. Next, there is a new search box which you can customize - you can set a particular search engine (like Yahoo! or Google) to use when doing a search. It has made life much easier for me. I've been using Yahoo! toolbar for quite some time now, but since I am also using Google to do web searches, I had been contemplating on installing a Google toolbar as well. Well, now that I've installed IE7, I don't need either toolbar anymore.

Other features which I haven't tried yet, but are also incorporated into the current IE7 version: RSS feeds, automatically shrinking of text so all webpage content fits on your final printed page. And for those who are concerned about protection against malicious software, fraudulent websites and online phishing scams, IE7 has incorporated various tools against these. In IE7's toolbar, you can set the popup blockers and phishing filters ON in order to protect yourself from these evils. In the Tools menu, you can see enable or disable add-ons for the browser. Imagine our surprise when in our home PC we found out that there is an eXact Advertising add-on in our IE browser, that has been making logs of all our search keywords without our knowledge! As to how we got that malicious software hacking into our browser, we could only guess. It has now been disabled, thanks to IE7.

Well there you have it. Need I say more?