Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

CNN writes that more than 70 million web domain names have been purchased, and most - if not all - dictionary-word domain names (i.e. house.com, furniture.com) have already been taken. That should not disappoint you since millions of good web domain names are still available, all that’s required is a bit of creative thinking, some permutation-combinations and a good tool for searching free domain names that have never been registered before or the owner failed to renew the expired domain name. 3rdeye, a UK based company, has launched a very useful AJAX based Internet domain search tool called DomJax that instantly check availability of a name across a wide variety of domains. Just type in any word and DomJax would instantly tell you if a .com extension is available or not. It even searches availability across the boutique extensions such as .co.uk, .net, .edu and .info. The most impressive part of DomJax is the whois report that it generates in real time - even if a domain name is not available, you can hover the mouse over the domain name (no click required) and DomJax pops up a neat “thought bubble” which has all the information about that domain like who owns it, when it will expire and how to contact the owner.

THE search engine buys THE video portal … Google + YouTube = Yougle or GooTube or Google Videos. Yes people, the rumors are true and Google has bought out the premier video portal out there and the #2 most visited site on the planet, YouTube for $1.6 Billion in an all stock deal. YouTube investors Sequoia are rumored to take $480 million of this stock portfolio.
According to the Google press release the two companies will continue to work independently and maintain their own brands. “Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.“

So why did Google buy out Youtube. How about 20 million reasons or 20 million regular users, the Top 10 site on the net, and 100 million video views a day. The interesting observation coming out this is Google is trying to buy people/ traffic for the first time in its history. Only time will tell how all of this pans out.

Just look at the graph below from Alexa to see the phenomenal growth of YouTube. If you are not convinced then compare that growth to Google Video.

Google itself is already the 3rd busiest site on the internet, and now that it owns YouTube the company has control over a tremendous number of internet users, probably a higher percentage than anyone else!

It is going to be very interesting to see how this all pans out. Video on the internet is a whole new era and we have seen history in the making with this acquisition. If anyone can do something good with YouTube it will be Google.

Seeing all these guys, I am more than motivated to get a customized plate myself. I am thinkin 31337 or r00t or something on those lines. Meanwhile check out these uber geeks and their licence plates. Sources for the pics include Google Pictures, Flikr, geek24 and one of the best compilation of geeks and their plates including their names, cars and other good stuff at webreference.

My favorite plates ….

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Many of us use the terms programmer and developer interchangebly. Hacknot has an excellent article describing the concept the the terms programmer and developer are indeed as unique as how they are made out to be.

The term programmer has historically referred to a menial, manual input task conducted by an unskilled worker. However since the age of EDIAC and EDVAC have passed on, the modern programmer loves writing code and usually see their sole function in an organization as being the production of code, and view any task that doesn’t involve having their hands on the keyboard as an unwanted distraction.

Developers like to code as well, but they see it as being only a part of their job function. They focus more on delivering value than delivering program text, and know that they can’t create value without having an awareness of the business context into which they will deploy their application, and the organizational factors that impact upon its success once delivered.

Some other differences between programmers and developers according to the article

Programmers like to stay as ignorant as possible of the business within which they work. They consider the problem domain to be the realm of the non-technical, and neither their problem or concern.Developers view the business domain as their “second job.” They work to develop a solid understanding of those aspects of it that impact upon their software, then use that knowledge to determine what the real business problems are.

Programmers crave new technologies the way children crave sweets. They are forever flitting from one programming language, framework, library or IDE to the next. Developers have a much more cautious approach to new technology. They know that a new technology is inevitably hyped through the roof by those with a vested interest in its success, but that the reality of the technology’s performance in the field often falls short of the spectacular claims made by proponents.

Programmers often focus so intently upon the technologies they use that they come to believe that technology is the dominant factor influencing the ultimate success or otherwise of their projects. For developers, the dominant factors influencing the quality of your application, and ultimately its success or otherwise, are the quality of the people doing the development and the work methods that they follow.

Programmers try to solve every problem through coding whereas Developers know that coding effort is best reserved for the application itself. Other differences include Developers seek repeatability, programmers like one-off heroics and Programmers like complexity, developers favor simplicity. Also, developers care about users whereas Programmers often view their user base with disdain or even outright contempt, as if they are the ignorant hordes to whose low technical literacy they must pander and finally

Developers work, programmers play

Read on more at hacknot for the rest of the article

According to the latest news coming out of Redmond, WA, all signs point towards IE7 being part of a cumulative roll out/update automatically via windows update. Most major corporations either use SUS or Big IP or someother media to roll out their patches/ hot-fixes/ updates etc… but for the rest of you, here is how you disable automatic update of IE7 on your machine/servers.

Now don’t get me wrong about IE7. I am loving it and infact it is my default browser right now after 2 1/2 years of Firefox. The UI is very well thought out and having tabbed browsing definitely helps. Above all, my primary OS is Windows Vista right now and IE7 fits snugly into the overall picture. So if everything is all gravy, why are we disabling automatic update of IE7?

There are considerable changes that could cause many headaches. Most administrators would prefer to decide when IE 7 is deployed on their network.

This is why microsoft has released the IE 7 blocking tool. It can be downloaded from here at Microsoft’s website.

Once you download and extract the package you will see that it is a command line tool. You simply call the script with the computer name and /b

Alternatively you can simply create a registry key that will block the install. It is located under this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\7.0

The key name is: DoNotAllowIE70

Setting this to 1 blocks the install, setting to 0 allows the install.

Check this out.. this is how a candle flame looks like in microgravity

All of us have experienced the tremendous pains of spam. Who can remember the glory days of Hotmail 2MB storage where 85% of the inbox was filled with spam. While this plague is going to exist for some more time, here are a few tips we can take to overcome this issue and prevent spam from hitting your inbox.

» Don’t post your email address on message boards or mailing list.

» Maintain two separate email aliases - one for business and important email and other one for subscribing to mailing lists and web forums (called throw away email)

» Don’t publish your email addres directly on the homepage - use Email Obfuscators.

» Provide a fake email address to websites that require mandatory registration before you download software or read their archives.