The last 2 to 3 years the noise level of security and Virus attacks at Internet Servers have reached an all time high. Every other day, financial dailies carry a news about a new exploit in one software or other. Where are we in this and what is the solution?. Read and enjoy the following articles at PC Mag that I came across in this subject.

If you want to read more about Netsky, its stains and the other recent virus of 2004, PC Mag has this interesting article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1541517,00.asp

John C.Dvorak, the famous PC Mag columnists asks the question Why Are Virus Attacks Getting Worse?. I am sure many of us technologists are thinking about this, but Dvorak hits the nail straight as usual!

Virus becoming worse is one, but what is the solution to this?.

Better laws, No!. Tougher punishments, No!. Better Software, No!. 

Dvorak goes to the extreme and suggests that we License Computer Users, just like we license Car Drivers. License means exams, exams means pass or fail; oh god, now the whole fun world of computers is becoming just like our school work.

I got to go now. Need to study for my computer license

Everywhere you turn now, your hear about Outsourcing, India Shining & India Dreams. Being a election year in USA, you also hear about the backlash, the pros and the cons.

Today Ranga pointed me to an interesting article in Express India titled “Outsourcing: A few years ago nobody in US wanted to talk to Indians, now they are eager”

It is a well written, neutral piece (hard to find these days!). I liked especially the closing quote, given here verbatim:

As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans’ self-image that this tech thing was their private preserve is over. This is a ‘‘wake-up call’’ for US workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do that, he said, it will spur ‘‘a whole new cycle of innovation, and we’ll both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose.’’

This entry is in continuation to my earlier post “World of PDF”. You may to read this first, if you are new to creating PDF files.

Today in the Chennai .NET User Group, Prashanthan K pointed to an interesting link to iTextSharp. This is a  port of the iText open source Java library written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. iText# is a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly.

I am yet to try this out. But the sample is pretty impressive. An “Hello World” file in PDF is generated with the following 5 lines of code!!!.

Document document = new Document();
PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileStream("Chap0101.pdf", FileMode.Create));
document.Open();
document.Add(new Paragraph("Hello World"));
document.Close();

Happy PDFing in .NET

You are bored. You also interested in learning the history of America and got only 3 minutes and 18 seconds to do it. What is your best option?. Check out this funny film clip on the brief history of america from the maker of “Bowling for Columbine”.

Thanks to Harish for forwarding me this link.

எவ்வளவு முறை தினமணி, குமுதம் மற்றும் பலப்பல தமிழ் வலைத்தளங்களில் உள்ள பக்கங்களை Save செய்து பார்க்க முடியாமல் தவித்துள்ளிர்கள்?. இதற்கு காரணம், இன்றும் பல வலைத்தளங்கள் Unicodeற்கு வரவில்லை. They continue to use proprietory or 8-bit encoding.

இந்த பக்கங்கள், மற்றும் இவை தவிர தெரிந்த அல்லது தெரியாத எழுத்துருவாகவிருந்தாலும் அதனை
Unicodeற்கு மாற்றிப் படிக்க வசதி செய்யகூடிய, இரண்டு வழிகளை இங்கு பார்போம்.

ஒன்று, முத்து நெடுமாறன் அவர்களின் அற்புதமான முரசு அஞ்சல் மென்பொருள். இதை Download செய்து, Install செய்து உபயோகிக்க வேண்டும். இதில் உள்ள பலப்பல பயன்பாட்டை, மற்றொரு நாள் பார்ப்போம்.

இன்னொரு முறை உங்கள் browserயை மட்டும் பயன்படுத்தி செய்வது. இதற்கு சுரதா யாழ்வாணன் அவர்களின் Pongku Tamil Reader & Converter  வலைத்தளதில் உள்ள மேல் தட்டில் படிக்க முடியாதவற்றை உள்ளிட்டு கீழே உள்ள ஏதாவதொரு Encoding methodஐ சுட்டுவதன் மூலம் Unicodeற்கு மாற்றிப் படிக்க முடியும்.

Recently on my way back from New Delhi to Chennai by Air Sahara, not knowing what to do for the nearly 4 hours journey (Flight delayed for 15 mins & a scheduled stop over @Bangalore) I started reading the in-flight magazine. You know, this is the magazine that Airlines hide behind the AirSick Bags. Kidding, honestly I find the in-house magazines of Domestic Airlines (Jet and IA) much better than the International Airlines (they suck!) and most of the time, I take a copy home for further reading.  

Air Sahara calls their magazine, XPRESSIONS (all caps?). In the Feb '04 issue, there was an useful article “The Desktop Philanthropist“ by Payal Dhat. Payal points out to lots of sites on the Internet, which we can use to donate/help for worthy causes.

3 sites impressed me a lot, that I made sure to register with them as soon as I reached home.

The first is Hungersite, in this site for every click we do in a button, a new page opens up with sponsor advertisements. Each such click helps feed the hungry with the value of 1.1 cups of staple food. So far they seem to have given 47,919,670 cups of food to the hungry.

The second is Panda P@ssport.  It is your licence to campaign for the environment, no matter where you are in the world, all over the world. Recently,  Norway said no to oil drilling in Lofoten Islands because of the pressure from Passport holders, WWF along with other stake holders.

The last if  http://www.fightaidsathome.org. This is the first biomedical distributed computing project that uses your idle CPU time to do drug compounds computations against detailed models of evolving AIDS viruses —an accomplishment previously impossible without expensive supercomputers. It does this by installing on your Windows machine a Screensaver software that wakes up when your PC is idle, doing nothing other than painting beautiful Windows with no one to see it. It then downloads compounds over the Internet and then tries to solve them. Once done, it uploads the results and gets the new set.

All these are worthy causes right?. Now when my wife says, “What are you doing in front of PC for hours, are you saving the world?”. I can reply confidently “Yes, I am saving the world!”.

When reading mails in Hotmail, I dislike the idea of hyperlinks in the message opening up in a framed browser window. One problem is that it eats up browser space and the other being I cannot add it to my favourties or email the URL.

Look at this, a simple hyperlink to www.venkatarangan.com in a hotmail message, is turned into a URL beast:

http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=09127ba509d5e08eae29a46ded62cadd&lat=1075044828&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2evenkatarangan%2ecom%2f

On an evening where I had nothing else to do, no India Cricket Match, no calls, no reading; I sat down to write this tiny program that solves this problem. 

Just right click and copy shortcut on the Hyperlink in Hotmail,  switch to this application, press Decode button. The decoded (Simple) URL is copied into your clipboard. Now you can launch IE and paste the simple URL.

Download v1.0.0.1:

• Application - URLDecode1001.zip (5.42 KB)
• Source Code - URLDecode_Source_1001.zip (33.67 KB)

The application is written using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 to execute.

If you wish to run this with .NET Framework 1.0, then download this Configuration Zip file and unzip it into the same folder as the main application.

• Configuration: urldecode_config.zip (.82 KB)

I have been always curious on how these IM's work. My favourite IM being MSN Messenger. I was searching for documentation and code-snippets to understand on what goes back and forth over the wire when we use Messenger. I came across the following

The official documentation from Microsoft for Windows Messenger (the poor cousin of MSN Messenger) is found here. This lists the Messenger Client APIs, the Service APIs and more. Though not updated recently it is the only official source. The most active, single source of information about MSN Messenger is the site appropriately called MSNFanatics. The site has discussion forums about the Messenger API, security concerns, add-ons and more. Recently it has a tool called TabMgr that allows you to write your own Tabs in MSN Messenger.

The website that I found with well written documentation and example sessions for a developer is from Mike Mintz. Check this out at http://www.hypothetic.org/docs/msn/index.php, you will love it.

If you like Java (I like the coffee) then you can get the JMSN client source from Sourceforge, that shows a working Java client that uses MSN Messenger protocol.

As usual, this post comes with the disclaimer that I don't support or endorse in any way, any of the above sites and you are on your own; your individual mileages may vary . MSN, MSN Messenger are copyright and/or Trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

I always believed if not for sweeping waves of HTML in mid 90's, the document management world today will only be of Adobe Acrobat (PDF). PDF supports lots of interesting features, but not limited to Cross-Platform, wide availability, Ability to Embed Fonts (People who view the document need not have the fonts in their machines), Hyperlink, Form Input, Accurate Layout/Alignment (Unlike HTML), Zooming, Index, Search, OCR and more.

PDF viewers (Software like your browser that is needed to open PDF files) is available on all major Operating Systems and Platforms. This includes official Acrobat Reader from Adobe for free in Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, HP Unix, IBM AIX & OS/2 (do you remember this) . Adobe also has free pocket viewers for Pocket PC, Palm & now Symbian OS (your right, it is the OS that powers you new Nokia phones like 3650, 7650s and Sony Ericsson Phones like P800/900) . Of course there are tons of open source/third party viewers as well.

PDF Creators (Software like your MS Word to create the PDF files in the first place). Officially (i.e. Adobe) Adobe Acrobat is the way to create PDF files. This is a commerical software that allows you create intelligent PDF files that have content stored in their native formats of text, images, tables, etc. This allows you to search the document, index them and zoom to near infinite levels. MS Office is yet to support export/save as to PDF (as of version 2003). Though the latest versions of Star Office 7.0 and the Open Office 1.1 support export to PDF.

3rd Party PDF Creators, if you just want to create PDF files on the fly for simple sharing with friends and collegues, then you can turn to the scores of free PDF creators. Most of them install a printer driver in Windows. Then from any Windows Application that supports printing (are there apps that don't???) , you can print into this driver. This driver captures the input binary print stream and saves it as a PDF file. My favourite out of these free PDF creators is PDF 995 from www.pdf995.com.

There are scores of components (ActiveX, Java) from 3rd parties that allow you to create PDF files from your applications natively. Most popular is ActivePDF, though I feel theIr pricing is high for independent developers and Small & Medium ISVs. I am searching for a good free/affordable component that supports creation of PDF files. Let me come back and post here, once I find one. Till then happy PDFing.

About 6 months during a chat with my mobile Project Manager I was predicting that the days of proprietory Ringtones formats in Mobile phones are ending. Phones will become smarter, powerful and start supporting WAV files. Once WAV files are supported by phones, I can convert few seconds of my favourite movie song from a CD into WAV and move it to my phone. I don't need to pay exorbitant Ringtone download charges. 

Though this seemed very distanced at that time as Nokia always favored a locked-in approach. Today with the new Nokia 3660 phone, it has come true. This beauty now supports WAV Ringtone format, apart from Bluetooth and other goodies. Check it out.

Microsoft Smartphones and Microsoft Pocket PC phone editions, have always supported WAV formats. This is natural for them as they have their parentage in the Windows world where WAV originated