Pingdom.com has some awesome statistics of Firefox Browser; Within the first 24 hours, more than 7 million downloads have happened and in 48 hours – the total download count crossed 15 million!

Mozilla has a neat glow page indicating the live downloads, if you haven’t visited yet – please do http://glow.mozilla.org/

Now this title is quite misleading and couldn’t make it any general. I’m not talking about the normal Facebook/Twitter/IM Clients for the droid, the utilities mentioned below help me get the maximum out from an android phone, for the investment I’ve made buying the phone itself.

Home++   FREE

Almost all the android phones now come with UI customization and the looks differ from phone to phone. There are couple of things I like about it; 1. It does have a slick interface and can support multiple screens (can be configured and supports circular scrolling). 2. It does have a power strip and the option I use the most is to see which applications are running. Right from there, you can choose to ignore some of the applications and kill all others if you want – saves some battery power I’d say; if not optimize the device!

Lookout Mobile Security   FREE

It provides more than what it suggests. The free account gives you 1.5GB of space in their sync server. 1. Antivirus for new files/applications. 2. Backup of your important stuff, I’m more interested in the contacts backup. The backup happens to the server at lookout (http://mylookout.com), you can sign up for a free account and you can get the data backup up/restored back even based on dates. Now I know that Google announced this support just yesterday but I’m happy with how it works with lookout and am going to continue. So a good program since it syncs your Smartphone and desktop machines 3. Missing Device – find your missing device based on the location.

EverNote   FREE

Notes application that provides free account option as well. 1. To explain simple, it is a note taking application, works for desktop/android handsets as well. 2. Sync Feature which sync’s the notes between the desktop/android via EverNote servers, if the data is not confidential, then sounds pretty good feature at no cost. 3. You can have multiple notes, email them, print them – very extensive in features (export as html/mht files).

Opera Mini Browser  FREE

Well, doesn’t need much of an explanation. The advantage is; 1. Pretty slick and fast. 2. Will support Flash. 3. Data compression is appreciable and can save on your data costs.

Barcode Scanner  FREE

One of the advantages of being on android platform is, you can install/purchase/download applications from a hell lot of different websites (like appbrain.com etc…) Duly acknowledge that it increases the threat potential as well, but I still prefer to have choices. 1. So the sites having applications or sites which review an application provides a barcode embedded for download URL which may directly lead to Google Android Market or the Developer’s site. This application can be used to scan the barcode and retrieve the URL and go download it. No rocket science here!

DropBox  FREE

Don’t think much of an explanation needed. It is one of the famous online file storage mechanism for access from anywhere with an internet enabled device. 1. DropBox do have a free account where you can save and maintain upto 2 GB of files. I use it for some of my documents/contact backup’s etc.

Astro File Manager  FREE

Always wondered why is that the stock android doesn’t have a file manager included in it! So this is one of the best apps I found to get this done. 1. Browse all your files on the SD Card. 2. View thumbnails, images etc. 3. You can view/create Zip files and open files.

Finance App From Google  FREE

Well, I’m not an avid investor, however I still need to look at the stock news, wouldn’t tell you why of course 1. Pretty normal stuff, lets you look at the indices. 2. Lets you create your own portfolio of stocks that you want to keep an eye on. 3. More importantly, lets you see the afterhours stock price (living in India, I want to be able to see it during US times).

HandyCalc  FREE

Now it depends on your personal taste. 1. I feel, it is a much better calculator with keys spaced aptly. 2. Like the sounds on key press. Else, it is a simple calculator replacement

gReader  FREE

It is not an app from Google, but an Android mobile client for Google Reader. 1. Obviously syncs up with your blog feeds stored in Google Reader account. 2. Provisions for looking up Starred Items, folder-wise, unread only, and sync all facilities. 3. Well on desktop I use FeedDaemon for my feeds which in turn syncs with Google Reader, so where ever I read a subscribed feed, I’m covered.

SwiFTP  FREE

An FTP Server application for Android. 1. Lets me to connect and transfer files to/fro from the device without the hassles of having it connected to my machine.

MyPhoneExplorer  FREE

How does it sound to have a client on your Android handset and have a Windows Application? 1. Well, it connects either through WiFi or through the USB cable and you have access to a lot of features that otherwise you’ll be performing manually on the phone itself. 2. I use it to remove duplicates/updating contacts with additional details etc (for example if you want to add email id, additional phone book entry etc, this works good. How about cleaning your Android by removing some applications – can be done using this application.

Voice Recorder  FREE

The name says it all. 1. How about recording some funny sounds, better still – how about recording your first words of your little ones. I use this one. Never fails on me. 2. My elder one like to sing songs and I get it recorded with this one little application

MixZing  FREE

Now for music/videos – there are hundreds of applications out there, but I prefer this one. 1. Lists me by Artists and Albums (which are basically folder based selection). 2. Builds playlist for me. 3. The UI is pretty neat and offers shuffle option.

NewsHunt  FREE

This one is exclusively for Indians. How about a nifty application that lets you read Daily News in different languages? 1. Different English Dailies. 2. Different Hindi Dailies. 3. Different Malayalam Dailies. 4. Different Tamil Dailies.

3G Watchdog  FREE

3G in India started just couple of months ago and there are different players in the market right now. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to keep up with the data usage on your connection? Makes sense especially since it is newly implemented technology in India and costs dearer on Prepaid/Postpaid. So keep a watch on how much you’re using. As of now I’m using a BSNL 3G Prepaid connection, it gives me 1GB download limit for 352 Rupees (30 days validity).

DroidWall FREE

Basically a front end for IPTABLES of Linux. Let’s you control what is going out and coming in. ATTN# – Rooting is required for this to work. Rooting is not a developer mode stuff anymore, it is as simple as download an application and click on ‘Root’. Try Z4Root (Google it).

Let me know if you guys find these useful or using it already

For almost everyone of us Adobe Reader is a package that is needed without any question, although other PDF readers are available. In fact, whenever the word PDF comes to mind, the first thingy that flashes is the read Adobe Icon for 9 out 10 people, I’m sure.

Last few months, Adobe Reader had gone through some serious exploits and I believe the new ‘Adobe Reader X’, is here to provide some guard from the unknown.

So how does it work?

A sandbox inbuilt for secure PDF reading especially when you don’t know the authenticity of the PDF that you’re reading. It prevents the malicious content, if present; not to do any harm since in the sandboxed environment, a secure area is created and it doesn’t interact with the core functionalities of the Adobe Reader. Now realize this, the sandbox is only as good as the provider of the sandbox – which is normally the operating system.

As per Adobe: Adobe explains, "Adobe Reader Protected Mode represents an exciting new advancement in mitigating the impact of attempted attacks. While sandboxing is not a security silver bullet, it provides a strong additional level of defense against attacks. Even if exploitable security vulnerabilities are found by an attacker, Adobe Reader Protected Mode will help prevent the attacker from writing files or installing malware on potential victims’ computers."

You’re getting it updated right? Get it Here [ 35 MB Download ]

To read the original article, head over to Technibble.

Oh well, if you’re more used to IPTables than any normal firewall software, then of course you’re gonna need that for your Windows machine as well. Nothing wrong about that, the interesting stuff here is about the technology, really and not who made it – if it works well.

Windows IP Firewall (WIPFW) is an open source project that gives you exactly that;

Checkout their page here

WHAT IS WIPFW?

WIPFW is a MS Windows operable version of IPFW for FreeBSD OS. You can use the same functionality and configure it as only you work with IPFW.

IPFW is a packet filtering and accounting system which resides in the kernelmode, and has a user-land control utility, ipfw. Together, they allow you to define and query the rules used by the kernel in its routing decisions.

There are two related parts to ipfw. The firewall section performs packet filtering. There is also an IP accounting section which tracks usage of the router, based on rules similar to those used in the firewall section. This allows the administrator to monitor how much traffic the router is getting from a certain machine, or how much WWW traffic it is forwarding, for example.

As a result of the way that ipfw is designed, you can use ipfw on non-router machines to perform packet filtering on incoming and outgoing connections. This is a special case of the more general use of ipfw, and the same commands and techniques should be used in this situation.

And one more important piece of info would be;

Q: Whats the difference between WIPFW and IPFW?

A: Now WIPFW is unable to change packets content, so it is impossible to redirect packets. Also WIPFW has no traffic shaper. In the future WIPFW will be using ndis driver which will allow all abilities.

Quite often when you’re infected with a Virus, the virus does diligently disable a lot of functions in Windows (Like disable the task manager, Disable registry editor etc).

So either you’re stuck at different Google searches in search for fixes to these individual problems or you really start thinking of re-loading the OS itself. Situations like that can be pretty annoying. This is one nice tool with about 25 quick fixes put together in an UI.

Some of fixes that can be done using this little tool are;

• Enable Command Prompt
• Enable Task Manager
• Enable Folder Options
• Enable Registry Editor
• Restore missing Run dialog box
• Stop My Documents open at startup
• Fix right-click error
• Fix slow network file/shared/remote
• Restore Network icon to system tray
• Fix slow hotkeys
• Fix CD/DVD drive is missing or not recognized
• Fix CD auto play
• Restore My Computer (Computer) properties
• Restore Device Manager
• Fix delay in opening Explorer
• Restore grayed Explorer and Taskbar toolbars
• Restore My Documents properties
• Remove OEM splash and wallpaper
• Restore My Network Places to Desktop
• Enable Recovery Console
• Restore grayed file associations
• Restore “Send To” context menu item
• Restore the native ZIP file integration
• Error when trying to access Add or Remove/ Program and Features program

You can read about & download this awesome little portable lifesaver from HERE

I had moved to Foxit reader from Adobe Reader for the sole reason that I can have a cup of coffee by the time adobe loads the document, not to mention when we’re browsing a PDF document through Internet.

Then I came upon this little tool while I was searching for ‘how to speed up adobe reader’, this utility is Adobe Reader Speedup

It does disabling of some plugin’s and voila PDF’s with adobe loads almost instantaneously now!

You may wanna try it. Download it by clicking the above link.

One of the things in TCP/IP communications is inefficient communication/problems caused by packet fragmentation due to MTU settings along with the PATH. There is one known problem which almost everyone hits especially over IPSEC (Outlook & Exchange) on which I had blogged previously on how to find the optimal MTU value for traffic so that the packet doesn’t get fragmented => [ HERE ]

Finding the optimal MTU is relatively easy procedure along the WAN path, however it has to deal with multiple ping requests with different sized packets manually. Now I stumbled across a utility that’ll do it much efficient MTURoute

It is a free tool and does it nicely and also does have multiple options.

Use it with caution though since it produces a lot of ICMP traffic and your ISP or Network may not like it (more details on the authors page, follow the link, here

Say I own a web server and I want to see if the web server is alive and I’d like to know when the server goes down, one option is to keep an infinite ping loop and keep it outputting to a text file or so, then do a daily look through of the text file to see if it went down or not. Not an efficient way to handle things, as well this doesn’t ensure that you get notified the moment it goes down.

I did spend some time in Google. Well, there are thousands of networking monitoring applications that can do this, but they all come with $$$. I was searching for a rather freeware solution or write a script in Perl or something. Then I stumbled upon this one;

CheckHost by ab-tools.com just developed August 2009.

The tool has amazing capabilities. It does exactly what I wanted and even more. It can check to see if a HOST is alive by ping and when down, give a desktop alert or even send an email to you. Further more to the functionality, it can work on TCP and UDP as well.

So if you have a web server, it can check by actual TCP/80 connections, if you have a public facing RDP server – then check actual TCP/3389 and let you know immediately when it goes down. Check out the configuration options tab below;

This is technology at its best. Simple/low on resources yet still get things done. Wouldn’t people like an admin like this who is always get first to the issue.

Great going guys! Check out their website they have some more cool stuff under development as well.

Some time back I had written on there is no load balancing concept in Windows XP. However with 2 internet connections which is kinda normal for guys like me (I have a broadband connection over WiMAX as well as an EVDO connection from BSNL).

So I can’t load balance theoretically, however I was looking for a way to kind of have Windows select both connections randomly or in a round robin fashion. This way I get both connections utilized. So again Google helped me, following is the DWORD that can be used to set Windows to choose internet connections randomly;

Open Registry Editor and go to;

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP]

Create a DWORD entry named ‘RandomAdaptor’ and set the value to 1.

Keeping it to 1 enables random selection of adaptors and keep it to 0 disables it.

Try it out and see for yourselves.

To do this, Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to Dragos Ruiu, the PacSec conference’s organizer.

This is in a way good to know in this way rather than the algorithm broken by the ‘bad guys’. So I welcome it

[Read the Full Story]

I’m sure a lot of enterprise is now looking or in the process of moving to WPA from WEP, this is going to stall some of ‘em.

As Microsoft says;

Account Lockout Status (LockoutStatus.exe) is a combination command-line and graphical tool that displays lockout information about a particular user account.

[Follow it to Microsoft]

Well, there is no support or anything of that sort from M$ on this one, but oh yeah, it works! You can download it from here and unzip it to see the instructions;

[Click Here to Download WinXPVirtualCDControlPanel]

I customize my XP installation which ever PC/laptop I’m going to use and since I’m not a programmer, but a configuration management person, I do use a lot of tools/tweaks to make it looks better, perform better for me. So its been quite some time I wanted to write about it and here they are; I have been using Windows XP since its public BETA and still continue to love it.

Themes for Looks:-

XPize 4.7 Full – This is what I use and is the only thing I’ve been using for a long time.

Browsers:-

Opera 9.60 – The best I’ve seen, there are some compatibility issues but I like to live with that when it comes to performance.

Backup Browsers:- I use this for testing all the time

Firefox 3.1

IE 8.2

Chrome (latest addition!)

System Cleaners:-

CCleaner – An Amazing tool to clean crap files and manage the startup items especially.

Cleanup – Another one but gets some more (backup).

Readers:-

Foxit Reader – This is what I use for PDF documents (Adobe Acrobat Reader is getting heavier and heavier, lot of hanging processes & enhancements which adds no value to me; but that’s just me)

Mails:-

Mozilla Thunderbird – A pretty lightweight for my pop3 multiple mail accounts

Microsoft Outlook – Mails @ Work

Music & Video:-

VLC Player – This is the only player I need, ranging from real-media to wma virtually any format (Personally I do not like Real Player, again a lot of additional stuff attached to it make me not like it).

Format Conversion:-

Format Factory – Pretty much converts any music/video format from any that I could think of (Read it as I need) to the formats I need.

QLC Media Converter:- This is another one for the same (backup)

Blogs:-

Windows Live Writer – I blog using WordPress on my own domain, and use Windows Live Writer to blog.

FeedReader – For the exhaustive list of blogs I read, I like RSS aggregator to be simple and CPU friendly

Compression/Decompression:-

7-zip – Open source and can pretty much decompress/compress into any format, broadly classify as Windows formats & Linux formats

Update Management:-

FileHippo Update Checker – An Awesome tool, was in beta and recently stable. Lets me update a lot of software installed on my machine, once in a while and in one shot

FTP Client:-

Filezilla – Again open source, a great tool

Photo Management for Web:-

JAlbum – I have a 3 year old daughter and I’ve been keeping all her monthly snaps at http://rose.rsivanandan.com  This tool does a great deal of photo management when it comes to web.

File Sync Software:-

SyncToy 2.0 – Simple tool but suits the purpose

Phone Management:-

Motorola Phone Tools – I have a Motorokr E6

Microsoft Active Sync – I have an HTC Touch as well

AntiVirus/AntiMalware:-

AVG – Free and continued support from grisoft

Lavasoft Adaware – For AntiSpyware

Hijacthis – Once in a while quick Check

Instant Messaging:-

Yahoo Messenger – Occasional, I’m not a great IM person

Office Messenger – For office Use

Project Management:-

Microsoft Project – Still the best

Microsoft Visio – Looking at alternatives as of now

Text Files:-

Notepad++ – An excellent tool, no words to describe.

CD/DVD Authoring Software:-

CDBurnerXP – The name says it all

ImageBurn – For burning images onto CD

I have 2 laptops (one work and one home), both having 2 GB of RAM and both boxes have similar softwares running on it. I’ve never crossed 1.2 Gig of RAM with this set of applications. Now that includes Microsoft Outlook as well! Not sure if I’ve missed any, if so will add/modify

Advantage ???

Low system resource usage and to the point Applications and oh yeah not even a single pirated software compromises my productivity

Not an option visible in XP by default; Somebody had a question regarding this and I found out a comprehensive answer (better than what I’d have written), so here it is;

• Make sure you’re logged onto your PC as Administrator or as a user with Administrator rights.
• You can check the status of your user account by going to Start | Control Panel and selecting the User Account icon.
• Your account should be listed there.
• If it says Computer Administrator you have the rights to make this change.
• To show the Hibernate option under shutdown, select Start | Control Panel, and select the Performance and Maintenance icon.
• Select the Power Options icon under "or pick a Control Panel Icon."
• Select the Hibernate tab, and click on the Enable Hibernation box.
• If Hibernate still doesn’t appear, it may be because your PC is fairly new and supports the Stand By low-power shut-down option.
• To make Hibernate appear in the Turn Off Your Computer dialogue, simply hold down the Shift key and Stand By will switch to Hibernate.
• You need to hold down the Shift key to see and use the Hibernate shut-down option

Source :: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2554,00.asp

Google’s passive web security assessment tool is made available – open source.

A semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool, optimized for an accurate and sensitive detection, and automatic annotation, of potential problems and security-relevant design patterns based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments.

Detects and prioritizes broad classes of security problems, such as dynamic cross-site trust model considerations, script inclusion issues, content serving problems, insufficient XSRF and XSS defenses, and much more.

Ratproxy is currently believed to support Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, and Windows (Cygwin) environments.

Download Page…

So I recently found in one of the blogs on how you put your machine to automatically defragment when your machine is idle. So here is how you do it;

Note : Incorrect editing on registry may render your machine unusable and so should be at your own risk.

1. Open Registry Editor (Start->Run->regedit.exe)

2. Go to the node HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ OptimalLayout

3. See if you have a Dword entry named ‘EnableAutoLayout’, if it is not there create a new DWORD and set it to “1″ (watch the capital letters)

Done, that should take care of defragmenting your machine when it is idle.

Regardless of the technique you use, the tendency in project estimation is to provide one number for each estimate. In other words, if you have 100 activities on your schedule, each activity would have one estimate associated with it. This is generally viewed as the ?most likely? estimate.In many cases you can be more accurate by applying a simple PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) model. PERT is an estimating technique that uses a weighted average of three numbers (see below) to come up with a final estimate.
The most pessimistic (P) case when everything goes wrong
The most optimistic (O) case where everything goes right
The most likely (M) case given normal problems and opportunities

The resulting PERT estimate is calculated as (O + 4M + P)/6. This is called a ?weighted average? since the most likely estimate is weighted four times as much as the other two values. You?ll notice that the final PERT estimate is moved slightly toward either the optimistic or pessimistic value – depending on which one is furthest from the most likely. Generally this ends up moving the final estimate toward the worst case, since the worst case value tends to be further out from the most likely that the optimistic number.

For example, let?s say you estimate a piece of work to most likely take 10 hours. The best case (everything goes right) is six hours. The worst case (everything goes wrong) is 26 hours. The PERT estimate is (6 + 4(10) + 26)/6. The answer is 72/6, or 12 hours. Notice that the number was pulled a little toward the far extreme of the pessimistic estimate, but not by much, since the result is still weighted heavily toward the most likely value.

You can use the PERT estimates two ways. You can provide these three estimates for all activities in your schedule or you can only use the PERT formula for those activities that are of high risk. These are the ones where you?re not really sure of the estimate so there?s a wide variation between the optimistic and pessimistic values.

Speaking of variation – if you subtract your pessimistic value from the optimistic value and divide the result by six, you would have the standard deviation, which is a measure of the volatility of the estimate. In our example above, the standard deviation would be 3.34 ((26 – 6) / 6). The larger this standard deviation is, the less confidence you have in your estimate, since it would mean you have a large range between the optimistic and pessimistic estimates. If the standard deviation was small, it would mean you were pretty confident in your estimate, since the optimistic and pessimistic estimates would be close.

Remember the PERT formula and use it to make estimates when you have a high level of uncertainly.

Track back : PERT Explained

So here is the solution for creating a FAT32 partition in Windows XP which is greater than 32GB.

Thanks to Tom@RidgeCrop who created a tool for the community to do this;

So how to you proceed doing this;

1. Install XP on a partition of your choice.

2. Go to DiskManagement snap-in, and create a Primary or Extended partition of the size you want (but do not format it there).

3. Then download the tool at link [ Tom@RidgeCrop ], open command prompt and just run the tool as ‘fat32format <driveletter>;

Voila, there you go!

So I finally found one which offers free stuff, Jodix.com

They have different tools for the job;

WMA to MP3 converter

RealMedia to MP3 converter

DVD MP3 Ripper

Free iPod Video Converter

All of them are free, go grab it :-)

So I’ll share my experience about 3 browsers.

I’ve been using 3 browsers (Well, I don’t like Internet Explorer )

• Avant Internet Browser
• Firefox 2.x
• Opera 9.x

I liked all the three of them for the normal day to day operations I do, but however the way things work, I love Opera the best.

The aspects that got me into it and conclude to it is the speed of launching pages using Opera, it supports the multiple tabs, an RSS aggregation facility as well as the add-on support. While firefox is fast enough, one thing I’ve noticed is that the more and more plugins/extensions you add, the more it becomes slow. As well, at one point (may be even now), the only browser that had ZERO bugs was Opera.

Now you also need to consider the fact that I am an avid lover of Windows Operating System and do not have much experience with Linux. So these products how do they perform while on Linux is something I do not know.

 A tool that is released for changing the mac address of Network Interface Cards which would facilitate both the good guys and the bad guys

So taste it here

Now, all around the world there are so many REGISTRARS and you need different servers
to find the information. First of all that could take some time;

So here is a tip;

www.allwhois.com -> This is a site, you can check the information regardless where/whom it is registered…

Good one for the bookmarking.

Well, windows NTFS has a feature called Alternate Data Stream. In simple words, if I have

a file that I want to hide, how would I do it?

Well, hackers do it pretty well :-)

Scenario:

1. Hacker wants to use somebody else’s machine for storing his huge files. Now if he access it

and store it in there, the owner at some point would delete it for sure. Without Owner even

noticing that, how do they do it? -> You have alternate data stream as your answer :-)

So say there is a text file (Owner’s file) called Personal.txt of size 32 kb and the huge file that needs to be hidden is Movie.mov, then this is how you do it on an NTFS partition;

type Movie.mov > Personal.txt:Movie.mov

Then delete the file Movie.mov; Done

If the owner/administrator looks at that file, it will show the file size as 32kb itself.

Now, how does the hacker take it when he wants? Say he wants to play that file, then;

start Personal.txt:Movie.mov

Done, his movie file will be launched.

How is this done? Well, the data is stored in streams and you basically redirect the ’wrong’

stream to the ’Personal.txt’….

There were pandamonium created by this some time back on ISP’s servers or so I heard.

How do you detect it as a Network administrator ? Because you have 1 file of 32kb size and

your whole disk of 10 GB is full :-(

Even the ’dir’ command will show only the parent file’s size.

There is a command line tool called ’LADS‘ which will list it!

Not just that, Microsoft realized it and now has a provision to do it; { Read }

How do you recover access to the Cisco PIX firewall ? { Click Here }

Now for Juniper Firewalls, you really don’t have a procedure, it will wipe all the configuration on it. It is considered to be a security threat and thus no feature as such.

So may it be Cisco OR Juniper, it would be suggested to have a backup copy of your most recent configuration. I would rather say, if you enter a single CLI, backup then and there.

Tools:

The only TFTP server tool I like so far is SolarWinds TFTP Server No rocket science and a simple interface to deal with. You need to register there and can download it for free. Give it a whirl and you’ll know what I’m talking about…