The Web 3.0

Content-Aware Fill in Adobe Creative Suite 5

Arun Vishnu — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:21:10 +0000

Content-Aware Fill is a wonderful feature of Adobe Creative Suite. Check this video, especially last 2min.

Adobe Creative Suite CS 5 will be released on April 12th.

Skipfish – web application security scanner

Arun Vishnu — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:38:07 +0000

Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool from Google.

It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments.

Advantages

Free and open source.
High speed: pure C code, highly optimized HTTP handling, minimal CPU footprint – easily achieving 2000 requests per second with responsive targets.
Ease of use: heuristics to support a variety of quirky web frameworks and mixed-technology sites, with automatic learning capabilities, on-the-fly wordlist creation, and form auto completion.
Automatic wordlist construction based on site content analysis.
Probabilistic scanning features to allow periodic, time-bound assessments of arbitrarily complex sites.
Cutting-edge security logic: high quality, low false positive, differential security checks, capable of spotting a range of subtle flaws, including blind injection vectors.

Tests Implemented

A rough list of the security checks offered by the tool is outlined below.

Server-side SQL injection (including blind vectors, numerical parameters).
Explicit SQL-like syntax in GET or POST parameters.
Server-side shell command injection (including blind vectors).
Server-side XML / XPath injection (including blind vectors).
Format string vulnerabilities.
Integer overflow vulnerabilities.
Stored and reflected XSS vectors in document body (minimal JS XSS support present).
Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP redirects.
Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP header splitting.
Directory traversal (including constrained vectors).
HTTP credentials in URLs.
Self-signed SSL certificates.
Internal warnings like failed resource fetch attempts, exceeded crawl limits, Failed 404 behaviour checks etc.
And many more..

Download skipfish

The following list of products and tools provide web application security scanner functionality.

Commercial Tools

Acunetix WVS by Acunetix
AppScan by IBM
Burp Suite Professional by PortSwigger
Hailstorm by Cenzic
MileScan Web Security Auditor by MileSCAN Technologies
N-Stalker by N-Stalker
Nessus by Tenable Network Security
NetSparker by Mavituna Security
NeXpose by Rapid7
NTOSpider by NTObjectives
Retina Web Security Scanner by eEye Digital Security
WebApp360 by nCircle
WebInspect by HP
WebKing by Parasoft

Software-as-a-Service Providers

AppScan OnDemand by IBM
ClickToSecure by Cenzic
QualysGuard Web Application Scanning by Qualys
Sentinel by WhiteHat
Veracode Web Application Security by Veracode
WebInspect by HP
WebScanService by Elanize KG

Free / Open Source Tools

Grabber by Romain Gaucher
Grendel-Scan by David Byrne and Eric Duprey
Paros by Chinotec
Powerfuzzer by Marcin Kozlowski
SecurityQA Toolbar by iSEC Partners
W3AF by Andres Riancho
Wapiti by Nicolas Surribas

The MVC Pattern

Arun Vishnu — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:45:18 +0000

Several problems can arise when applications contain a mixture of data access code, business logic code, and presentation code. Such applications are difficult to maintain, because interdependencies between all of the components cause strong ripple effects whenever a change is made anywhere. High coupling makes classes difficult or impossible to reuse because they depend on so many other classes. Adding new data views often requires re-implementing or cutting and pasting business logic code, which then requires maintenance in multiple places. Data access code suffers from the same problem, being cut and pasted among business logic methods. Also it is hard to use multiple views of the same data.

The Model-View-Controller design pattern solves these problems by decoupling data access, business logic, and data presentation and user interaction.

Model–View–Controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern used in software engineering. The pattern isolates "domain logic" (the application logic for the user) from input and presentation (GUI), permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each.

The MVC pattern is most commonly used to create interfaces for software applications, and, as the name implies, consists of three elements:

The Model represents your data structures. Typically your model classes will contain functions that help you retrieve, insert, and update information in your database.

The View is the information that is being presented to a user.
The Controller serves as an intermediary between the Model, the View, and any other resources needed to process the HTTP request and generate a web page.

Architecture

View tells to controller handle user inputs
Controller changes model state
Model tells view to update itself
View reads state information from model and updates itself.

Comparison with the Three-tier architecture

The three-tier architecture may seem similar to the MVC concept; however, topologically they are different. A fundamental rule in a three-tier architecture is the client tier never communicates directly with the data tier; in a three-tier model all communication must pass through the middleware tier. Conceptually the three-tier architecture is linear. However, the MVC architecture is triangular.

BSNL Broadband (Dataone) Usage through SMS and E-mail

Arun Vishnu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:41:54 +0000

BSNL Broad Band customers can register their Mobilephone number and E-mail id in http://bbusage.bsnl.in to get Broad Band usage alert.

You have to provide Broadband User Name, Phone No., Alert Mobile No. and Alert Email ID to get the alert. The service will be activated in 24hrs.

I registered for the alert yesterday night and received the 1st weekly alert SMS in the morning, but i didn’t get any email alert.

A small desktop tool is also available from BSNL : http://bbusage.bsnl.in/app/v1.2/bbusage.exe . But your will get the details only after your alert subscription is activated.

Screenshot of usage checker tool from BSNL.

You can also get usage on-demand on your mobile phone. Send SMS to +919447051550 with the keyword BBUSAGE. The service will be available after your above registration has been accepted.

To de-register send email to autosms@bsnl.in. from your registered mail ID.

But my favourite application is BSNL Broadband usage finder from shaplus. It is a 3rd party freeware application.

Some features of this tool

Auto login to BSNL usage checking site
Daily total of non free and free usage( for those having night(2am to 8am) free usage)
Graphic display of daily usage
Summary of usage, daily average used , average usable, estimated bill etc.

2 Cool iPad Videos

Arun Vishnu — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:37:24 +0000

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPad. It’s a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it’s running a custom 1GHz Apple "A4" chip developed by the P.A. Semi team, with a 10-hour battery life and a month of standby. You can find more information about iPad from Apple’s site.

Watch these 2 funny videos.

Hitler Responds to Apple iPad

MadTV iPad video

Android running on Windows Mobile

Arun Vishnu — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:22:09 +0000

Check out the following video, Android running on Windows Mobile- The HTC Touch HD.

WiFi is working and applications are running without much problems. Want to try it yourself? Check the XDA Developers site.

Google Phone – Nexus One

Arun Vishnu — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:07:24 +0000

Blogger Cory O’Brien posted a snapshot of Google Phone- Nexus One. He tweeted about the phone as

“Google Phone = iPhone + a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android.”

Nexus One is thinner than the iPhone 3GS and it is unlocked(so you can you any SIM with Nexus One). Google handed over test units to their employees for testing. Hope we will get more details about the “Nexus One” coming days.

Phone details

Operating System: Android 2.1
Device Name: Google Phone
Manufacturer Branding: Google
Hardware Manufacturer: HTC
Carrier Unlock: Yes (You can use any SIM )
Network: GSM
Chipset: Snapdragon Processor
Launch Date: January/February 2010
Display: High-resolution Capacitive multitouch OLED screen
Keyboard: Onscreen keyboard only.
Hardware Buttons: HTC Hero like Scrolly ball
Size: Thinner than the iPhone 3GS
Other: 2 mics, one in the front for talking and one at the back to reduce background noise.

Photo from – http://theunlockr.com/

Updated – Few more details from @coryobrien tweets

Almost forgot: Google Phone’s interactive backgrounds were AWESOME. Not distracting, but an interesting/unique addition to the phone.
The Google Phone is exactly the same size as the iPhone. Screen is prob 5mm longer(not including the buttons)
Scroll wheel worked well, and the screen was super responsive. Scrolling/sliding felt just like an iPhone
Software was nice, though I haven’t played w/ many Android phones, so I don’t know what was unique to the Google Phone
We’ll see, but it was a nice phone. Definitely going to give some competition
The four buttons at the bottom are always there.
I like my iPhone, but the Google Phone was nice. Will definitely be some strong competition.
Trade-off for no HW keyboard is that it’s super thin and feels really solid though.
Nothing too detailed, but my overall impression was that it was a really nice phone.
Very responsive. Didn’t do any serious testing, but it felt very iPhone like when using the OS.

Creating PDF documents using PHP

Arun Vishnu — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:34:07 +0000

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

PDF is a commonly accepted document format and so we might need to create PDF documents dynamically. We can create PDF documents with PHP. Lots of PDF generation PHP libraries are available. TCPDF and EZPDF are the two good opensource libraries which allow us to create PDF documents dynamically.

1) EZPDF

EZPDF is a fast and easy to use library developed by R&OS Ltd.

1.1) Creating a PDF document using EZPDF

We need 2 php files “class.ezpdf”, “class.pdf” and a font(in .afm) format. You can get these files from http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/

1.2) Steps

1) Download the files from http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/ and extract to our web application’s directory.

2) Include “class.ezpdf.php” in to our page.

3) Create an object of Cezpdf by $pdf =& new Cezpdf();

4) Set the required font.

5) Print our content of the document using the eZpdf functions.

6) Output/Save the PDF file.

Sample program


selectFont('/assets/libraries/pdf/fonts/Helvetica.afm');
$pdf->ezText('Hello!..This is a sameple PDF file',50);
$pdf->ezStream();
?>

We can format/design the document using the Ezpdf class’s methods. You can set margin, font, font size, colour, position etc using functions. We add images,links, draw shapes like line, curve, polygon etc to the document and we can set the border style also. Another good feature of this class is the support for creating tables, we can set the orientation, width, colour, row gap, column gap etc. We can encrypt the document and write to the disk if we want.

Ezpdf is a very simple to use PHP library for creating PDF files dynamically. Since it is opensource, you can extend the baseclass to change/add methods.

1.3) Features

Lightweight
Easy and simple
Fast
Opensource
Automatic page break
Support for adding/setting tables, images, links, shapes, fize, colour etc.

1.4) Limitations

Doesnot supports UTF-8 Unicode and Right-To-Left languages.
No methods to publish (x)HTML code

2) TcPDF

TCPDF is a popular Free and open source software PHP class for generating PDF documents. TCPDF is currently the only PHP-based library that includes complete support for UTF-8 Unicode and Right-To-Left languages

TCPDF supports all ISO page formats and custom page formats, custom margins and units of measure, UTF-8 Unicode, RTL languages, HTML, barcodes, TrueTypeUnicode, TrueType, OpenType, Type1, and CID-0 fonts, images, graphic functions, clipping, bookmarks, JavaScript, forms, page compression, digital signatures, and encryption.

2.1) Steps for creating a PDF files using TCPDF

Include the configaration file and the class file to the page.
Set the font, margin etc
Print the content to the pdf file
Output the pdf file.

Sample program


        setPrintHeader(false);
	$pdf->setPrintFooter(false);
	// set default monospaced font
	$pdf->SetDefaultMonospacedFont(PDF_FONT_MONOSPACED);
	//set margins
	$pdf->SetMargins(15, 15, 15);
	//set auto page breaks
	$pdf->SetAutoPageBreak(TRUE, PDF_MARGIN_BOTTOM);
	//set some language-dependent strings
	$pdf->setLanguageArray($l);
	// set font
	$pdf->SetFont('times', 'BI', 16);
	// add a page
	$pdf->AddPage();
	$htmlcontent .='Hello!..This is a sameple PDF file';
	$pdf->writeHTML($htmlcontent, true, 0, true, 0);
	$pdf->Output('myPdfExample.pdf', 'I');
	exit;
?>;

2.2) Features

supports all ISO page formats;
supports UTF-8 Unicode and Right-To-Left languages;
supports TrueTypeUnicode, OpenTypeUnicode, TrueType, OpenType, Type1 and CID-0 fonts;
supports document encryption;
includes methods to publish (x)HTML code;
includes graphic (geometric) and transformation methods;
includes Javascript and forms support;
includes a method to print various barcode formats: CODE 39, ANSI MH10.8M-1983, USD-3, 3 of 9, CODE 93, USS-93, Standard 2 of 5, Interleaved 2 of 5, CODE 128 A/B/C, 2 and 5 Digits UPC-Based Extention, EAN 8, EAN 13, UPC-A, UPC-E, MSI, POSTNET, PLANET, RMS4CC (Royal Mail 4-state Customer Code), CBC (Customer Bar Code), KIX (Klant index – Customer index), Intelligent Mail Barcode, Onecode, USPS-B-3200, CODABAR, CODE 11, PHARMACODE, PHARMACODE TWO-TRACKS;
includes methods to set Bookmarks and print a Table of Content;
includes a method to move pages;
includes methods for automatic page header and footer management;
supports automatic page break;
supports automatic page numbering and page groups;
supports JPEG and PNG images natively, all images supported by GD
supports stroke and clipping mode for text;
supports clipping masks;
supports Grayscale, RGB, CMYK, Spot Colors and Transparencies;
supports several annotations, including links, text and file attachments;
supports transactions to UNDO commands;
supports digital signatures

Tips & Tricks

I used following 2 tricks in my project, hope it will help you.

In EZPDF you can set the colour of the text, shapes, lines etc., the colour needs to be specified in RGB triplet, each in the range 0 to 1. Most of the tools(eg:- Colour picker, Adobe Photoshop) shows the colour in the range of 0-255 or in Hexadecimal format. If you want the colour values in the range of 0-1, divide the colour values by 255. For example Blue is rgb(0, 155, 255). You can convert it in to 0-1 range by dividing each values by 255. So the blue is rgb(0, 0.61, 1) in 0-1 range.

Specifying background colur for the document: When you add a new page, draw a rectangle in the size of that document and write all the content above that rectangle, so it will be like background colour for that page.

Conclusion

Both EZPDF and TCPDF are easy and powerful libraries, TCPDF has more features than EZPDF and it is still maintained by the developers where as EZPDF last updated on 17 June 2006. I used both EZPDF and TCPDF; for creating simple documents, I suggest EZPDF and if you want many features like UTF-8 / RTL support, HTML support etc. go for TCPDF.

You can find more details from the following sites.

TCPDF: http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf
EZPDF: http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/
Dynamically Generating PDF Files with PHP and Haru: http://devzone.zend.com/article/4044
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

Windows 7 licensing

Arun Vishnu — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:24:25 +0000

Windows 7 licensing

Read detailed report

Microsoft Community Tech Day

Arun Vishnu — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:23:00 +0000

Kerala Microsoft Users Group organized the Microsoft Community Tech Day in Technopark Park Canter, Trivandrum on 24th Oct 2009. I reached Park Canter by 8.25am and the registration started at 8.30. I was so excited because I am attending a MS Community Tech Day or a program conducted by K-MUG for the first time. I was little worried because I do not have much experience in .Net or other MS technologies. I have done my B.Tech mini project and main project in .Net but in my company, I work in PHP and I am not in touch with .Net for last 2yrs. Now I want to learn MS Technologies and this is a part of it. The registration completed by 9.30 and the program started.

The first session was by Rama (Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu). He works with Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist. His topic was “Windows Azure & Clouds”. He started with “Clouds”, what is cloud technology and its importance. After discussing about Cloud Computing, he moved to Windows Azure.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters.
Windows Azure is an open platform that supports Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

I had only a small idea about Cloud Computing and Windows Azure but after that session I got a good knowledge. The session was very interactive, audience asked many doubts during his session. He showed a sample program using Windows Azure.

Mr. Vinod Kumar came to stage to give “SQL Server – Tips and Tricks”. He works as a Technology Evangelist (Databases and BI) with Microsoft India specializing primarily on SQL Server. He said he has 45minutes and he will give 45 tips and tricks. The first tip was how we can open SQL Server Management studio using windows authentication in a single click, then SQL commands to save our production time etc. I do not understand some advanced tips since I have only a small experience in MSSQL but I am sure all the tips were very useful and if you know those tips, you can save a lot of time.

You can get more tips and information from his website: http://extremeexperts.com/

Tea Break : Had Coffee and Cookies

After a 10minut break, program resumed with Shobhan on stage. Shoban Kumar is a Microsoft MVP working as a Senior Software Engineer for Allianz Cornhill, Technopark. I know him before from his tweets and blogs. Yes, we are twitter friend and meeting for the first time. He actively writes .net articles in his blog www.codegeeks.net and www.dotnetcurry.com. His topic was “Coding for fun”. He explained how we can communicate with famous WEB 2.0 applications like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc. He showed some sample demos also. One was a GTalk chat responder and the other one was his famous TweetMy PC. Yes, we had fun.

He also gave a lot of Visyal Studio tips and tricks and information about useful VS utilities.

Shobhan has also published many open source applications which can be found in CodePlex : http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/shobankr

Next session was by Uday M. Shankar about “Rapid Prototyping”. He is a Principal Engineer in Yahoo User Experience team. He has been into UI development and Ux activities for around 10 years. Prior to Yahoo, he was with Nokia R&D Center. He started with “What is prototyping”. I had no much idea about prototyping and its use. He explained all those basic things.

Prototyping is the process of building a model of a system. In terms of an information system, prototypes are employed to help system designers build an information system that intuitive and easy to manipulate for end users. Prototyping is an iterative process that is part of the analysis phase of the systems development life cycle.

Then he talked about Microsoft Expression Blend

Microsoft Expression Blend is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. It is an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight applications. It is one of the applications in the Microsoft Expression Studio suite.

He showed us how a designer can create a prototype very easily with MS Expression Blend. That was a nice demo and he showed us a tutorial video also.

After Uday’s session. we had lunch break. We got lunch coupon to use in Rangoli restaurant for South Indian meals.

After lunch, the 1st session was about Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) by Praseed Pai. He is a .net consultant and a solutions architect associated with Envestnet ,Trivandrum.

LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.

I had attend his session before about “Compilers” in BarCamp, so I was expecting another wonderful session. Yes, his session was really interesting and we all got a better idea bout LINQ.

After Pai’s session, Renuka Alex came to stage to talk about “WPF Customization and Interoperability”. She is working as a Technical Evangelist at Infosys, Trivandrum. She has around 10 years of varied training experiences ranging from colleges to management schools and IT industry. Her session was like teaching us something, started from the basic and I am sure everybody understand what is WPF, its uses and how we can create a WPF based application. I liked that session because I am studying Adobe AIR and WPF is like Adobe AIR. She also created a small demo application from the scratch and so we get a better idea.

The Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF) is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0. Designed to remove dependencies on the aging GDI subsystem, WPF is built on DirectX, which provides hardware acceleration and enables modern UI features like transparency, gradients and transforms. WPF provides a consistent programming model for building applications and provides a clear separation between the user interface and the business logic.
WPF also offers a new markup language, known as XAML which is an alternative means for defining UI elements and relationships with other UI elements. A WPF application can be deployed on the desktop or hosted in a web browser. It also enables rich control, design, and development of the visual aspects of Windows programs. It aims to unify a number of application services: user interface, 2D and 3D drawing, fixed and adaptive documents, advanced typography, vector graphics, raster graphics, animation, data binding, audio and video.

Last session was “Writing Secure Code” by Jairam Ramesh, Security Research Consultant with Microsoft Corporation for the last 2 years. He talked about Desktop application security, Network security and Web application security. “Writing Secure Code”, the name itself is interesting. First he described Desktop application security. He showed an example of small C program, which demonstrates Buffer-overflow attacks. Since that was the last session, he got only a less time and it was not enough . He mentioned some hacking tools like Poision, Tamper data, Blue Pill, Fiddler etc to try. His session was very interesting and I felt sad because we didn’t get enough time.

At last they gave some cool gifts like Thumb Drive and CD/DVD’s to few lucky audiences and I thought I will get one, but I didn’t get any gift- unlucky .

I really liked all the sessions, met a lot of great developers and I learned a lot from them. The CTD 09 was really inspiring and I will try my level best to attend upcoming CTD’s or the events like this.

Thanks to Microsoft and K-MUG.

Join

The Web 3.0

Content-Aware Fill in Adobe Creative Suite 5

Related posts

Skipfish – web application security scanner

Advantages

Tests Implemented

Download skipfish

Related posts

The MVC Pattern

Architecture

Comparison with the Three-tier architecture

Most Commented Posts

BSNL Broadband (Dataone) Usage through SMS and E-mail

Most Commented Posts

2 Cool iPad Videos

Hitler Responds to Apple iPad

MadTV iPad video

Most Commented Posts

Android running on Windows Mobile

Related posts

Google Phone – Nexus One

Phone details

Related posts

Creating PDF documents using PHP

1) EZPDF

1.1) Creating a PDF document using EZPDF

2) TcPDF

Related posts

Windows 7 licensing

Related posts

Microsoft Community Tech Day

Related posts