Have you ever wondered how you can be safe on the net?

If you answered NO, Think again!
If you answered YES, then you know the hazards on the net.

We know that Internet provides immense data to quench any thirst. But, beware there are places on net you might not want to be in but may end up being if you are not alert.

Here are few steps you can take to make sure you are safer on net than before.

Choose the right browser

Safe browsing starts with choosing the right browser. We all know Internet Explorer (‘blue e’ on your desktop) is the browser to surf the net. There are other alternative to it like, Mozilla Firefox (www.getfirefox.com), Opera (www.opera.com), Google Chrome (www.google.com/chrome), Apple Safari (www.apple.com/safari).

You might want to use the alternate browser for few simple reasons. Those browsers work pretty well on all sites, they are faster, they are free, they have low market share when compared to Internet Explorer.

Let me explain why you need to choose browser with lower market share. Lets consider you are the doing a business with a choice to choose a market with ten lakh prospects or few thousand prospect. Which one will you choose? Most of the business men/women will choose market with ten lakh prospects. Same applies to the browsers, if you are using a browser with lower market share, probability of someone writing a software exploit for your browser is less than browser with bigger market share.

Also, make sure you are using latest version of the browser.

Keep your Operating System up-to-date.

Always keep your operating system up-to-date. If you are using Windows then make sure Windows Update is enabled. If you use Linux make sure your distribution is upto date.

Always use user with no administration privilege

As Uncle ben tell in the Spiderman movie “With great power, comes great responsibility”. with a less privileged user, even if you end up in a infected site, you will not affect other users or entire system.

Install Antivirus / Antispyware

Make sure you have installed security software like Antivirus, Antispyware and Windows Firewall is enabled. Let me suggest few free Antivirus, Antispyware.

Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus, atispyware) – (www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/), Avira Antivirus (www.free-av.com/en/download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html – use only for personal use), AVG antivirus (www.avg.com/in-en/homepage). Or you can spend on some paid antivirus/antispyware software.

Never provide personal information

Personal information like home address, phone number, social security number (uniqueid we are going to get soon), passwords, names of family members, credit card numbers, bank account number are something which are not required for operation of any website. Refrain from providing information which you feel are not related to the service provided by the website. Most genuine websites will not ask for these details. If some website is asking for such details then they should be providing service related to them. DON’T TRUST EVERY WEBSITE you visit.

Phishing / Malware sites

Phishing is a fraudulent activity where a site will look like a legitimate site but will have different url. These websites are hosted by cyber criminals to gather private information of the internet users. These links are usually sent through emails or instant messengers.

So, DON’T CLICK ANY LINKS on a email sent by unknown person. Check these links for further information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing, http://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/phishing/symptoms.aspx

Ok, you might want to know which sites are safe. Fortunately, there is solution to your problem. Internet Explorer 8.0 has something called SafeScreen which takes care of identifying a site as trustable or not. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome also has similar feature which identifies whether a site is safe or not and warns you when you visit a page which is suspected to be either fraudulent or is infected and will harm you or your computer.

Always make sure that the url in the address bar is same as the url of the site you think you are in before providing any information. This might save you from sleepless nights and prevent you from giving away your credit card/bank information to phishing sites.

Protecting your kids

There are many parental control software available which can protect your kids from landing into unwanted sites and also lets you to monitor their online activity. Let me suggest you few of them. Windows live family safety (http://download.live.com/familysafety), it is part of windows live essentials package. K9 web protection (http://www1.k9webprotection.com/).

• Determining Browser Market Share
• Japanese company looks to take on Microsoft and Mozilla.
• Firefox 3.5 released
• Apple Announces Safari 4
• Microsoft’s IE8 Beta 2 hogs memory, says researcher

I started my career working in Linux and continue to do so. I recently bought a laptop with Windows 7. I like windows 7 for bringing back the performance which was lost in Vista.

I am so much used to writing code in vim and using shell for doing all development that I felt I need to look around for making windows 7 my development box.

You might argue I should use cygwin, I wanted to use native applications.

Search is ON

Command Shell:

I looked around for possible shell for windows. Windows comes packaged with cmd.exe and powershell. Powershell seemed like it will fit the bill for my requirement. My major requirement is to run python, vim, mercurial and any other software needed for development.

Editor:

I have been using vim for past 7 years and could not think of using any other editor for development. I searched whether I can get vim for windows. There are multiple versions available for Windows and found vim for win32 console, just what I wanted (http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc).

Add the editor to the PATH.

If you use some other editor, I am sure it would have been ported.

Other utilities:

Other unix utilities like grep, awk, sed, less, tee, tar and more are used in day to day work. I thought basic development environment will be complete only after I have those in my laptop. Fortunately, most everything is ported to windows and is available @ gnuwin32.sourceforge.net. If you are lazy to download packages one by one, there is another project in sourceforge which takes care of automating the download process (http://getgnuwin32.sourceforge.net/). All you need to do is download one package, extract it and run download.bat and install.bat found. Voila, all command line utilities are in your system. Check readme file for further information.

Thanks to everyone who worked on porting these software to windows, I have a workable environment in windows!

I am not claiming that this setup can replace a development environment setup on linux. This setup helps me do what i wanted to do. I feel at home if i use shell thats all .

• Fedora on a stick
• OpenVZ Tutorial – Installation, Setup and Running your first program inside container.
• Sun readies Web stack featuring choice of OSes
• Open Sourcing Browser Sync
• Mozilla Labs : Bespin a code editing tool

IBM presented at December 2009 the Solution Edition for Cloud Computing, a solution offering for large enterprise customers providing the automation and management framework necessary to get started with cloud computing. This solution provides the key components for cloud computing:

# A foundation for the cloud offering massive virtualization, resiliency and security capability provided by IBM System z
#  Automation and management capability for the lifecycle of cloud computing services provided by IBM Tivoli software

This solution offers customers a framework for cloud computing, but in order to realize true value a cloud computing workload is desirable.

• IBM Runs Into Stormy Weather with Cloud Computing
• Steve Ballmer’s interview to CIO about Microsoft Cloud, Zune, Microsoft’s answer to Google docs etc
• Microsoft to highlight Silverlight 3 technology
• Vibook: USB-DVI graphics solution for adding multiple display to PC/MAC
• Mobile Wifi aka MiFi from Novatel

Ring°Wall: World Largest Multi-Touch and Multi-User Wall

The World’s Biggest / Largest / Longest Multi-Touch (and evidently Multi-User) Wall [sensory-minds.com, click Projects then choose 19.07.2009) seems to be installed in Nürburgring, a famous motorsport race track around the village of Nürburg, Germany The two-piece wall consists of a huge LED media facade (at the top), and a multitouch information-wall (at the bottom), and impresses by its physical size, as it totals a surface of about 425 square meters, equaling more than 6000 computer displays.

The interactive interface emerges out of 34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers. The multitouch capturing itself is based on laser technology, also called Laser Light Plane Illumination (LLP). This means more than 80 users can simultaneously get informed about news and activities around the ringworld. Now imagine the sorts of sparklines this device could display…

You can watch a documentary movie below.

• Multitouch comes to Android (T-Mobile G1)
• Triggering Lighting using Laser
• Worlds largest water fountain in Dubai
• Quanta’s Optical Touch: touchscreen technology using camera
• Panasonic 103 inch plasma with multitouch air hockey goodness

Fedora 12 is out in few mirrors.

one of the mirror

http://fedora.c3sl.ufpr.br/linux/releases/12/

Full mirror list

Few new features of fedora 12 are

• Dracut is a replacement for nash/mkinitrd
• Set Empathy as the default IM client
• Re-base to GNOME 2.28
• Rebase to KDE 4.3 and offer new features such as DeviceKit support
• Lots of new virtualization features
• Add support to Fedora for the Moblin Core NetBook/NetTop/MID desktop environment
• Rakudo is an implementation of the Perl 6 specification for the Parrot virtual machine
• Update libtheora to the 1.1 release
• Changing the base architecture to i686 and optimizing for current 32-bit processors

Complete feature list here

• Feature list & review of OpenSuse 11, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04
• Fedora 10 goes live. get your copy now
• Fedora 9 Beta released
• Fedora on a stick
• KDE 4.2 Beta 1 is out

With Sony reducing its PS3 price to $299 and Microsoft reducing XBOX 360 price to $299 (+$50 mail-in-rebate). now its Big N’s turn to reduce the price of its console Wii. This price drop come into effect from September 27th.

• Xbox 360 to cost $199 from sept. 7th?
• Reviewed & Compared: Sony Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
• Some of the Interesting +ve & -ve pointers of the budget
• Cisco buys PostPath, targets Microsoft Exchange
• Zimbra officially embraced by Ubuntu

Google has released a plugin called “Google Chrome Frame” for Internet Explorer which converts IE into Google Chrome. It makes sense for Google to target IE, because it is browser with huge market share.

Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:

* Start using open web technologies – like the HTML5 canvas tag – right away, even technologies that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
* Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.

But, what is Google telling Microsoft by releasing this plugin?

get your copy here

• Google set to introduce its own Web browser
• Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 released
• Google Chrome Operating System
• Review and Download Google Chrome Browser
• Firefox 3 is released

Autoblog has reviewed the Lightweight goodness from British automotive company Lotus. Lotus Exige S 260 is a car which follows the companies policy to use the loopholes of the physics.

Lotus Exige

Lotus Engineering has a policy to make cars which are very light weight making even the car producing decent 200+ bhp car to compete with large hearted machines.

Lets come back to the specs of Exige S 260:

• 1.8-liter Toyota-sourced four-cylinder engine
• 257 horsepower
• 174 pound-feet torque
• Weighs 935kg
• 20 mpg in the city
• 26 mpg on the highway
• Y-Type 8-spoke lightweight alloy wheels in black F: 6.5Jx16 & R: 7.5Jx17
• Yokohama Advan A048 LTS F: 195/50 R16 & R: 225/45 R17
• Servo-assisted, track tuned 4-channel Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) with Lotus/AP-Racing twin-piston fixed aluminium alloy front brake calipers. Brembo single-piston sliding rear calipers and 288 mm diameter, 26 mm thick front and rear cast-iron ventilated & cross-drilled discs.
• 0-100 km/h – 4.7 seconds

Lotus Exige Rear

Lotus Exige Rear

“”"Lotus manages to achieve such a low mass (while meeting modern regulatory standards) by using a novel architecture built from a collection of aluminum extrusions riveted and glued together. The issue of ingress and egress stems from this: the chassis was originally designed for a convertible. The side beams are large enough to support most of the structure, meaning they’re both tall and wide. In an Elise sans roof, no big deal. You just step over the sill and plop your backside into the seat. With the roof bolted in place, the experience is closer to sliding through the window of a race car or, more appropriately, down the barrel of a cannon.”"”

“”"Once you’ve wiggled your way inside (helpful hint: place your right foot in the well, sit on the sill, grab the wheel and tug yourself through), you’re ensconced in a carbon fiber shell with a minimal amount of padding. The driver’s seat moves fore and aft (the passenger seat is fixed) and both thrones benefit from cut-outs to accommodate a five-point racing harness and HANS device. As the seats are solid pieces of carbon fiber, there’s no lateral give, so you’ll want to start shopping for diet books on Amazon… yesterday.”"”

“”"Climbing up the Exige’s graduated tachometer towards 9,000 RPM, you’ll notice there’s no marked redline. Instead, a series of three red LEDs illuminate on the dash when it’s time to shift. When the engine is cold, the indicators come on between 5,000 and 6,000 RPM. Once the coolant and oil are up to temperature, you can throttle down, spin the 2ZZ past 4,000 RPM – where the VVTi kicks in – all the way to its 8,500 RPM redline and enjoy the mechanical duet of the engine and supercharger ricocheting around the undampened cabin.

With the engine rocketing towards redline, the Exige’s gearbox is ready to deliver six perfectly spaced ratios to keep the supercharged four in its meaty sweet spot. The aluminum shift lever benefits from short throws, although the linkage on our (likely abused) press car could have been slightly more precise. The narrow footwell – a minor annoyance earlier – became an asset, with closely spaced pedals that made heel-and-toe action a breeze.”"”

“”"It’s no wonder automakers around the world tap Lotus Engineering to sort out their suspensions – the Exige is the perfect case study. Simply put, the roads in southeast Michigan suck. They’re loaded with bumps, cracks and heaves. But even though the Exige is clearly not tuned for comfort, the suspension does a remarkable job of dealing with Michigan’s worst. “”

””‘Another benefit of the Exige’s small engine and featherweight design is decent fuel economy. The EPA rates the Exige S260 at 20/26 mpg city and highway and we averaged 19 mpg on two fill ups of the 10.6 gallon tank. The Exige and its carbon fiber doesn’t come cheap though. The S 260 adds $9,000 to the starting price of the S240 and the out-the-door tab affixed to our example came to $77,115. That’s more than $30,000 less than a Tesla Roadster, which shares its lineage with the Lotus Elise. Given that most drivers of either this or the Tesla are likely to put on far fewer miles than on an average car, we’d opt for the 2-3 minute fill ups of the Lotus if it were our own money – assuming, of course, that we wedge ourselves inside.”"”

more here and here

• Electric Lotus Elise – Tested
• Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte revealed
• GYM concept car: workout on the road
• Hyundai i20: Review, Specification and Features
• Fiat Linea Features

Linus torvalds in an interview has told that Linux is increasingly becoming bloated.

“We’re getting bloated, yes it’s a problem,” Torvalds said. “I’d love to say we have a plan. I mean, sometimes it’s a bit sad and we’re definitely not the streamlined hyper-efficient kernel that I had envisioned 15 years ago. The kernel is huge and bloated.”

more here

• Feature list & review of OpenSuse 11, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04
• IBM continues to feed Novell with Cognos roll-out on SUSE Linux
• V12 Designs Dual-Touchscreen Notebook
• How to fix cloud computing storage problems
• Fedora 9 Beta released

Edmunds Insideline has pitched Honda Fit (Honda Jazz for us Indian) against the Ford Fiesta to find how they compare.

“”"The Squeeze Lime green Fiesta you see here is a Euro-spec four-door hatchback in range-topping Titanium trim, equipped with leather upholstery, keyless entry, rain-sensing wipers and automatic climate control.”"”

2009 Ford Fiesta vs Honda Fit/Jazz

“”"From the size of its shadow to its low-impact $18,820 blow to the wallet, the 2009 Honda Fit matches up very well to the Fiesta. Although our Fit is equipped with no options per se, Honda crafts its model lineup such that options are bundled together and offered as trim levels. Hence the navigation system and upsized 16-inch wheels found on our top-of-the-line Fit Sport.”"”

“”"Performance numbers don’t tell you much about the way these cars drive in day-to-day use, though. The Fit’s comically low-effort shift linkage could have come straight out of an arcade, and its steering needs constant subtle corrections to keep the car traveling in a straight line. It’s nervous where the Fiesta is confident. The bottom line is that the Fiesta has moved the needle of small-car dynamics and in doing so has made the Fit feel more toylike by comparison.”"”

“”"If the 2009 Ford Fiesta has the Fit beat in terms of dynamics, the tables turn when it comes to utility. The Honda Fit is simply a small miracle of packaging. This is a small car that doesn’t fall victim to the usual small-car compromises. Its unusually large door apertures and low floor ease ingress, practically presenting the driver seat to your bum.”"”

for more check out here

• 2009 Ford Fiesta – Preview
• Ford’s bobcat: ethanol boost technology for improving fuel economy
• Everything about Ford Fiesta 1.6 Duratec Exi, Zxi, Sxi and 1.6 S
• Honda To Unveil Prius Fighter in Paris
• MSI Titan Ultra small PC