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/

 More...

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Popular Mechanics shows step by step guide on how to install Ubuntu Linux on a PlayStation 3 and still keep the PS3 gaming functionality. Now I just need to get my hands on a PS3." Not bad specs for the price, either, since Blu-Ray players still aren't cheap. And though the article calls the procedure "somewhat complicated," it's a lot simpler than was installing Linux from floppies not so many years ago.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4263321.html

This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe, this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator. The person who discovered this security hole claims that XP, 2000, 2003 and NT are not vulnerable to it; only Windows Vista is.

http://www.offensive-security.com/movies/vistahack/vistahack.html

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

 

Writing things down, on paper or on-screen, is the best way to make sure you remember important info and tasks, but sometimes you've got to rely on your plain old brain to keep essential data sorted and handy. Whether it's a client's name, a password or combination you want stored only in your head, or answers for an upcoming test, there are plenty of techniques and tools to help you lock in important stuff and pull it out when needed. After the jump, we round up some memorable memory-boosting hacks. Photo by furryscaly. More...

On this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0501
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET
http://realbasic.com/
http://www.calormen.com/Applesoft/

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...

Just in case you think Adobe’s Flash Player (which powers YouTube and an enormous number of other sites) isn’t ubiquitous enough, Adobe is pushing for even greater adoption from developers and designers. Through an initiative the company is calling the Open Screen Project, Adobe will lift a number of restrictions on Flash in the hopes creating even greater usage, especially on web-enabled devices.

Adobe’s goal, says Standards and Open Source Director Dave McAllister, is to create a consistent runtime environment for applications running on computers, televisions, mobile devices and consumer electronics. Right now, if companies want to build apps that run on multiple devices, they need multiple development teams — one for the regular web version, one for the mobile version and so on. As more and more devices get connected to the web, the situation will just get more complicated. But if Adobe succeeds, developers can just create one app that’s compatible across the board — and, naturally, those applications will run on Flash (or AIR, Adobe’s player for hybrid web-desktop applications).

“This is the first true step into making sure that the extended web of desktops and devices is also an open web,” McAllister says.

One component of the Open Screen Project is financial. Right now, the Flash Player is distributed for free online, but Adobe charges licensing fees for the mobile version. As of the next release of Flash and AIR, those licensing fees will be eliminated. (To be clear, this doesn’t cover Flash Player 10, which is already in private testing mode, but the version of Flash that comes out afterwards.) Of course, that means one of Adobe’s revenue streams will disappear. But if it leads to greater Flash usage, McAllister thinks Adobe can more than make up for that on the developer side by charging for tools. More...

Researchers at Penn State have developed a patent-pending image-based CAPTCHA technology for next-generation computer authentication. A user is asked to pass two tests: (1) click the geometric center of an image within a composite image, and (2) annotate an image using a word selected from a list. These images shown to the users have fake colors, textures, and edges, based on a sequence of randomly-generated parameters. Computer vision and recognition algorithms, such as alipr, rely on original colors, textures, and shapes in order to interpret the semantic content of an image. Because of the endowed power of imagination, even without the correct color, texture, and shape information, humans can still pass the tests with ease. Until computers can 'imagine' what is missing from an image, robotic programs will be unable to pass these tests. The system is called IMAGINATION and you can try it out." This sounds promising given how broken current CAPTCHA technology is.

http://alipr.com/captcha
http://alipr.com/
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/15/1941236&tid=172

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.

Yahoo! Finance has a story about the defunct Soviet Union's .su TLD. 'Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080419/soviet_union_online.html?.v=1

Linux users worry that Sun's purchase of MySQL will mean a de-emphasis of Linux and the LAMP stack in favor of Sun's Solaris ecosystem. More...

Miguel de Icaza, who heads up the open-source Mono project, has provided an update on a project to create Silverlight applications that run out of the browser, moving a small step toward what Adobe Systems offers with AIR. More...

Don't look now, but Microsoft is finally working to tune up its Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) site. The effort promises to resolve long-running frustrations developers have encountered working with the online library and resource.

http://reddevnews.com/news/print.aspx?editorialsid=9773

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/

In their ever continuing battle to 'free the Internet', The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want.

http://torrentfreak.com/baywords-pirate-bay-blog-080416/
http://baywords.com/