13BIT IT news Blog

GREAT BOOK. Recommended.

From the author:
I'm excitted to finally release the official, and completely free, Foundations of Programming EBook. This essentially contains all 9 Foundation parts including a conclusion and some typical book fluff (table of content, acknowledgement and so on). A number of spelling errors were corrected, along with some small technical changes and clarifications - largely based on feedback, so thanks for everyone who provided it! Otherwise it's exactly the same as what's been posted here over the past several months.

Download it from http://codebetter.com/files/folders/codebetter_downloads/entry179694.aspx

  

If the above link fails, you can also get it from http://www.openmymind.net/FoundationsOfProgramming.pdf

Recently, the need for space has become immense. Files have become increasingly larger, there are more things to download and so on. Personally, I run out of space on multiple drives all the time. Maybe you are trying to get a file sent to someone, but it’s too large for an attachment on your email. Possibly you want to backup some files to download later or multiple times. That is why there are file hosts.

I have found numerous different file hosting companies, many of them that supply users with an extremely small amount of space or limited features. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Filedropper - Filedropper is amazing.   All you need to do to upload a file is click “Upload” and select a file.

Many free file hosting sites give users the option to upload file of up to 100-150MB, yet Filedropper allows users to upload an amazing 5GB!

When you finish uploading a file, Filedropper gives you the link and the source code to add to a website, if you like.

2. Fileqube - Fileqube is another free file hosting site. It has an awesome site design that definitely shows it’s intentions. It is also extremely fast. When you upload a file, a link is provided to download the file, a link to remove the file, and HTML code to add to a website, etc. Unfortunately, Fileqube only allows for uploads of up to only 150MB, yet most certainly one of the best.

3. MyFreeFileHosting- MyFreeFileHosting has an interface similar to MediaFire’s. It includes the option to send an notification email to someone to tell them of the upload, tags to categorize the file, etc. Of course, after one uploads the file, links are given to allow for download and distribution. The maximum file size allowed is 100MB.

4. Fileden - Fileden is one of the most useful file hosting services. Users are allowed to upload files, without an account, of files up to 100MB, yet you are allowed to register an account for free as well and receive unlimited diskspace, unlimited bandwith, the option to create projects, the ability to replace files, file statistics, project statistics, etc.

5. Easyshare - Easyshare adds even more features to file hosting. Registering and uploading files occur quickly, with accounts allowing for downloading files multiple times. Unlike other free file hosts though, Easyshare pays users for their uploads. If your upload gets downloaded 10,000 times, you’ll apparently receive $20. If you have a personalized toolbar on your website, you can receive money from their uploads through that toolbar and if you refer another person to Easyshare you’ll receive 10% of their earnings.

Another neat thing about this site is the upload options. You can upload on the site from your computer, upload using an FTP server, upload using their free software, or use a remote upload from another server. The maximum file size for a free account is 100MB.

6. FileFactory - Filefactory is similar to all of the previous file hosts, except it supports the option to send a notification email to a person of an uploaded file. Unfortunately, Filefactory contains a large amount of ads if you do not receive the premium service. Yet, unlike the other file hosts, the maximum file size is 300MB which is a large amount per file in comparison. Similar to Easyshare, users are paid for each download they receive from a certain file.

7. Badongo - Badongo is an exceptionally neat file host, and I would most certainly rate it as one of the best. As a unregistered user, you are allowed to upload up to 4.8GB a day and as a free, registered user, 12GB a day. To make it similar to Filedropper, Badongo allows users to upload files of a maximum size of 1GB. When you register with Badongo you even receive an account that stores all of your files of course, but also allows users to create picture albums out of the pictures they store. This brings even more wonderful features to this awesome site.

More features include the option to create an MP3 player on your website by pasting code from your account, the ability to create slideshows from pictures with multiple effects, a file widget tool to place on websites, a desktop application for uploading files quickly, etc.

Now that you have seen some of the top web hosts, tell us what you use to upload and store your files online.

 

• Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:
• Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
• Boot from a USB pen drive
• Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows)
• Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
• Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
• Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
• Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
• Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize  

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

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The Secret History of Star Wars is a new full-length e-book exploring the writing and creation of the Star Wars saga. Culled from over 400 sources and filled with quotes from people such as George Lucas, Gary Kurtz and Mark Hamill, The Secret History of Star Wars traces all the way back to 1973 to examine how the first 14-page treatment that began the series came to be and was slowly built, draft by draft, year by year and movie by movie. Covering a period of over four decades, you will discover how George Lucas got his ideas for the original film, how Darth Vader was made into Luke Skywalker's father in 1978 and forever altered the arc of the story, what happened to the infamous third trilogy in the series and how the prequel stories came to be. The book also reveals the style and method of Lucas himself and how his personal life affected and shaped the story, for better and worse. This is a book which challenges many legends surrounding the series and places the films in a new light. For the more casual fan this will be a mesmerising read and for those who think they know everything about the series, prepare to be surprised!

http://www.secrethistoryofstarwars.com/

When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online. In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. More...

Ulteo today unveiled their Virtual Desktop which is a free, full Linux desktop that runs seamlessly on Windows. It's interesting because it's not running under Xen or VMWare, but instead uses the coLinux patch, which they claim allows the system to achieve 'great performance, close to a native installation on the PC.' No need to reboot the system anymore to switch from Windows to Linux.

http://www.colinux.org/
http://www.ulteo.com/

Declaring digital sales a success, rock veterans Nine Inch Nails have released another online album, The Slip. Unlike their last album, this one is totally free, and, according to front man Trent Reznor, is a thank-you to the band's fans. More...

Slackware 12.1 has been released, with kernel 2.6.24-5. 'Among the many program updates and distribution enhancements, you'll find better support for RAID, LVM, and cryptsetup; a network capable (FTP and HTTP, not only NFS) installer; and two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.4.2, a fast, lightweight, and visually appealing desktop environment, and KDE 3.5.9, the latest 3.x version of the full-featured K Desktop Environment.

http://www.slackware.org/announce/12.1.php

 

Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a version of its tool set for Web and multimedia designers that includes the first native support for its Silverlight technology across all of the products in the suite.

Expression Studio 2 includes five products: Expression Web for Web design; Expression Blend for multimedia and 3-D design; Expression Design for graphic design; Expression Media for storing and sharing multimedia assets; and Expression Encoder for video encoding. The new release marks the first time that Encoder is in the suite as a full-fledged product, said Wayne Smith, Microsoft group product manager for Expression Studio.

In the new release, all of the products now have support for Silverlight, Microsoft's multimedia runtime for running live and streaming video on the Web. Previously, only Expression Web had support for Silverlight, but it was very limited, Smith said. More...

Increasingly, from blogs to marketing materials to online video show production, web workers are working with video. The good things you can do with online video go far beyond YouTube, and there are a number of free applications and utilities–many of them open source–that you can turn to to help with web video tasks. In this post, I’ll round up six of my favorites. More...

Windows XP SP3 been released to manufacturing. It will be available to OEMs and enterprise customers on April 29. Here is a summary of features and changes. The company will wait till "early summer" to enable SP3 downloads through Automatic Updates.

APIFinder is a growing index of various application programming interfaces (APIs). An API provides a set of instructions that you can use to make new software interoperate with existing applications. This site is also a place to share ideas and advice on how to use APIs in your programming. This site grows in part through community contribution so please submit your favorite APIs as well as articles and API-related projects today!

http://www.apifinder.com/

Demonoid torrent was shutdown last fall. For those who don't already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It's almost as if they never left.

Demonoid is an invitation only community. You can only register by invitation. So, we are giving FREE (yes, free, no hidden catch - no strings attach) invites to all our readers. Just add your comment and I will contact you. Hurry, there's no many invites left ;-)

http://www.Demonoid.com/register.php?with_invite=1

Productivity

AbiWord (download)
Tired of expensive, slow, bloated word processors? Download this surprisingly powerful freebie, which includes sophisticated features such as mail merge and advanced layouts. The program handles a wide variety of document formats, including those of Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, OpenOffice.org, and other programs.More...

You just picked up the latest issue of PC World that has a DVD full of trial software, games and shareware stuff. Then you learn about a software that can "predict future" and install it the same day.
Well, there's no harm in installing or trying out new software, the problem is that they occupy tons of space on your computer's hard drive and there are fair chances that you won't ever run these "shareware software".
And not just software, you computer drive is clogged with temp files, duplicate mp3 and images, software installation logs, movie files that are saved at multiple places, etc, etc.
More...

Microsoft today announced the availability of Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update. The company has also posted the upgrade to its download site here.

 

"Today, you can now download Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update," Microsoft Product Manager Nick White wrote on the company's Vista blog Tuesday morning. "For those of you eager to receive the benefits of Windows Vista SP1 -- you can now do so!"

The release was not unexpected; text on Amazon.com discovered this weekend implied the download would be available March 18, with the retail product being released March 19, although the mention of the download has since been removed from the shopping site.

Microsoft has released Vista SP1 for five languages: English, Spanish, German, French and Japanese. Updates for other languages are expected to start rolling out in April.

SP1 releases are typical milestones for Microsoft products as many IT shops wait until the first update before deploying. Vista's update comes a little more than a year after its initial release.

According to Microsoft, the SP1 update is designed to improve Vista's reliability and application compatibility, among other changes.

In his post, White also commented on the driver issue that initially delayed the early release of SP1 to IT professionals. "We've completed our analysis and are happy to report that many of these issues were fixed between the release candidate (RC) and the final version," he wrote. "We identified a small number of device drivers that may be problematic after an update from Windows Vista to Windows Vista SP1."

A list of drivers that may still cause problems with the upgrade is available here (scroll down). White also recommends reading Knowledge Base article 948187 before installing the upgrade.

For now, Vista SP1 is an optional download; it will become a forced upgrade starting in "mid-April" on any computers that have Windows Update set to automatic download.

Microsoft's Singularity operating system is now open to the public for download, under a Microsoft academic, non-commercial license. Inside is a fully compilable and bootable version of what could be the basis for the future of Windows, or maybe simply an experiment to demonstrate .NET's capabilities. Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena. The
project is available on CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

The Cult of the Dead Cow hacking group has released a free tool that turns Google into a point-and-click vulnerability scanner.

Cult of the Dead Cow, or cDc, an old-school hacking crew famous for its anti-censorship stance, has shipped a new tool that turns the Google search engine into an easy-to-use vulnerability scanner.
Taking its cue from Johnny Long's Google Dorks—search queries that reveal sensitive information—cDc's new Goolag Scan pushes the envelope even more, offering a stand-alone Windows GUI-based application to power the searchers.
The open-source program comes with about 1,500 custom Google search queries embedded by default to run searches for vulnerable Web applications, misconfigured Web servers with open backdoors, sensitive user names and passwords, and other documents accidentally exposed on the Internet.
"It's no big secret that the Web is the platform," said Oxblood Ruffin, a spokesperson for the hacker think tank. "This platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective. Goolag Scanner provides one more tool for Web site owners to patch up their online properties.
"We've seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a large Web site, I'd be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday. The vulnerabilities are that serious," Ruffin said.
The utility ships as a .Net program that can be manually configured to power Google queries for specific servers or for an entire set of domains.
For example, a business can ask Goolag Scan to search for vulnerable servers or "files containing juicy information" on all its Web sites, turning the scanner into a useful auditing tool.

Windows Vista SP1, which began rolling out via Automatic Update, has left some users' machines unbootable. The update loops forever on "Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3 0%
complete. Do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down"... restart and loop. Echostorm notes having found traces of what sounds like the same bug in early beta releases of SP1. It's unclear how many users are affected. So far there is no word on a fix from Microsoft.

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=2848906&siteid=17

Project Dakota is a easy way to update Windows XP.
It is a CD that contains all the updates found on the Windows Update Website, including Service Pack 2, with a small standalone programs that run the updates in the order specified by Microsoft according to the order set by Microsoft.
It also includes common programs found on most computers such as Adobe reader, Spybot S&D and Quicktime.

http://www.theatticnetwork.net/dakota.php

There's a growing revolt among Microsoft TechNet & MSDN subscribers who are frustrated that they can't yet get Vista SP1 and test their software on it. This can't be good news for anyone hoping that SP1 will have better compatibility. While SP1 has been released to manufacturing, and pirate copies are easy to find, Microsoft is withholding it from subscribers until early March. According to the article, some frustrated users are upset enough that they plan to abandon TechNet entirely and turn to piracy.According to the Technet blog, they have pushed up the date to before the end of February, though no exact date is mentioned.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9061838
http://www.google.com/search?q=vista+sp1+tpb
http://blogs.technet.com/technetplussubscriptions/archive/2008/02/11/technet-plus-sp1-availability-update.aspx

You may have seen reports of Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 floating on the net by now. I stumbled a couple of links and torrents on several discussion boards but most of them are either RC1 (Refresh 1), Fakes or just plain old Trojans. Surely, a lot of people doesn’t want to wait several days to get a hold of their own copy and install it on there system.
For couple of days, the only people who can get a valid Vista Service Pack 1 are some beta testers and people who have an MSDN accounts. Luckily, several people made this available to the general public, so you don’t need to wait until March to get a hold of Vista Service Pack 1. You have two ways on getting the Service Pack.

More...

Officially, only a few thousand lucky Microsoft Windows beta testers have their hands on Windows Vista SP1 today. However, somebody leaked the script used by the beta testers to enable their systems to install Vista SP1, so now you can download it (or create it) and use it to get your own copy of Vista SP1 beta via Windows Update.

Overview of the Process

The process includes the following steps:

1. 1. Download or create a script that adds two registry keys to your Windows Vista system. If you don't want to download the script, the folks at Softpedia provide the script code in plain text so you can see what it does. Copy the text and save it to a command file (.cmd) with Notepad or another text editor.
2. 2. Open a command prompt with administrative privileges on a system you use for Windows Vista testing (remember, you're going to install a beta of a service pack, so be smart and don't risk breaking your everyday system). To do this, right-click the command prompt shortcut (by default, it's in Accessories), select Run as Administrator, and provide the needed credentials.
3. 3. Run the script you downloaded or created in Step 1.
4. 4. Run Windows Update and install the KB935509 update.
5. 5. Reboot.
6. 6. Run Windows Update again and install the KB937287 update.
7. 7. Reboot.
8. 8. Run Windows Update again and install the KB938371 update.
9. 9. Reboot.
10. 10. Run Windows Update again and install the Vista SP1 beta. Keep in mind that according to some users at My Digital Life, you might need to wait an hour or so before the Vista SP1 beta shows up in your list of available updates.

You Can Get Vista SP1 Beta Now, But Should You?

After working with (and being worked over by) Windows Vista betas during the writing of Maximum PC Microsoft Windows Vista Exposed and other Vista books I have contributed to, I'm not personally keen on spending time with another Windows Vista beta. Users around the web report wildly different impressions - some report better performance, but others report a mixed bag of results. As with any beta, your mileage may vary. And keep in mind that just in case you're tempted to forget you're running a beta, installing the SP1 beta puts a removable evaluation version number stamp on your desktop.

A wave of bugs in the plug-in technology used by Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser has some security experts, including those at US-CERT, recommending that users disable all ActiveX controls.
The U. S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, put it bluntly in advisories posted in the last two days: "US-CERT encourages users to disable ActiveX controls as described in the Securing Your Web Browser document," the organization recommended.
US-CERT's advice was prompted by multiple vulnerabilities in high-profile ActiveX components used by members of Facebook and MySpace and by users of Yahoo Inc.'s music services.
Three new vulnerabilities in the photo uploader software used by both Facebook and MySpace were disclosed yesterday by researcher Elezar Broad, who on Monday also posted sample attack code for a pair of critical bugs in Yahoo's Music Jukebox. Last week, Broad had pinned the Facebook and MySpace ActiveX controls with two other flaws. All five of the Facebook/MySpace vulnerabilities originated with an ActiveX control developed by Aurigma Inc.
As the number of vulnerabilities mounted, security professionals began ringing the alarm. On Monday, for instance, Symantec analysts urged users to "use caution when browsing the Web" and told IT administrators to disable the relevant ActiveX controls by setting several "kill bits" in the Windows registry.

US-CERT, however, offered up more aggressive advice as it recommended users move IE's security level to the "High" setting, which completely disables all ActiveX controls. Setting IE's security level to 'High' disables all ActiveX controls. To get here, select Internet Options from the Tools menu, then click on the Security tab. Click Internet at the top for the zone, then move the slider up to the maximum.
"That's the easiest way to protect yourself," agreed Oliver Friedrichs, director of Symantec Corp.'s security response group. "But it can also have an adverse impact on your browsing experience." A compromise, said Friedrichs, would be to disable "only those plug-ins that pose a current and imminent threat," such as the flawed ActiveX controls used by Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo.
Disabling individual ActiveX controls, however, requires editing the Windows registry. That's too scary for most home users to contemplate, but business users are another matter. "That approach is hard to argue against in the enterprise," said Friedrichs, who noted that there are tools available that let corporate IT administrators push registry changes -- including new keys that disable specific ActiveX controls -- to all users.

The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center acknowledged that setting kill bits is beyond the ken of most users; one of its researchers came up with a graphical interface-based tool that sets and clears the kill bits of six ActiveX controls that have been tagged with bugs in the past week. The free tool can be downloaded at the ISC's Web site. The SANS Institute's free 'kill bit' tool provides checkbox-simple settings to disable half a dozen ActiveX controls. It's much easier than monkeying with the Windows registry.

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