May 16, 2006

Google Notebook is Out

Today google released Google Notebook. I liked this service much. Usually i save some important information as drafts in my email. Now i can use this online notebook service. Cool thing about google notebook is, select what ever you want in your browser right click and you can save directly. For this you have to download a plugin for your browser. For firefox you can download the plugin here. For internet explorer you can download it here.

Alternatively the same time of service is there from yahoo long back. But i find google notebook more useful because of its simplicity. More over in yahoo notepad you can not save html pages and images.

Sony today released a beautiful pocket size personal computer called VAIO. You can find photos of it here.


May 14, 2006

Create Your Own News Paper Snippets

Create your own news paper snippet like the following page with "a newspaper snippet generator".


April 24, 2006

Total Eclipse of the Heart !!

Watch this hilarious video in video.google.com. I got this from inside-google.



April 20, 2006

How to hack Xonix game

Xonix32 is an adaptation of the classic X-Windows game "Xonix" for the Win32 platform. You can download the game from http://dl.winsite.com/files/986/ar2/winnt/games/xonix060.zip. It is very interesting game. If you haven't tried till now just try it.

If you observe the directory which it is installed, you will find a file hiscores.dat. In this file it is storing all the high scores. Let start our game. Get any good hex editor. I used Hex workshop. Open the hiscores.dat file in hex editor. If you haven't played the game then by default the file looks as shown in below figure.
If you haven't worked with any hex editor before then continue this para otherwise you can skip it. Left hand portion (selected as red) shows the byte numbers. Middle part shows (selected as blue) the actual data in the file and right hand side shows the ascii value of that data in the file. If the software is storing directly your name and score in the file then you can observe that in the right hand side.

We can't gues any thing from this file. First play the game and make some score. Save the previous file before playing. I played the game and i scored 900 and i entered my name as "AAAAA". Open the file now and the file will look like this. Since it is not directly storing we can't find AAAAA in the right hand side portion. So it is doing some sort of encryption before storing the scores.If you observe three or four such files, you can find that, it is storing the score in the first 40 bytes. Xonix stores only 10 maximum score entries so each entry shoule be 4 bytes long. Now change the first two bytes to "0000". This we are doing to find out the XOR value. (usually they will XOR before storing data. To find the XOR value we are putting 0000). Save the file and open the Xonix and see the high scores. It will show your score as 21845 instead of 900 !. Means it is XORing 900 with 21845 and storing the result. We finally found the XOR value.

Now we will check whether what we found is correct or not. Let say we want to make our score 10000. The hexa decimal of 10000 is 2710. XOR this with 5555 (hexa decimal of 21845 is 5555) and you will get 7245. Since our machines are based on x86 architecture, it will store first low order byte and then it will store the high order byte. (This is called little endian format). So replace first byte with 4572. Now the file will look like this.

Make sure that you first close the Xonix before modifying the file. Otherwise those values will not get updated. Now save the file and open the Xonix. Now it will store your score as 10000!!!. Finally we have done. Similarly with some experimentation you can find out that it is storing the names also in the following portion of the file and each entry is 18 bytes long. Repeat the above procedure for names also.

All these i have done just for fun. Any way Xonix is open source program and you can find out this by seeing the source code. Thanks to Abhijit. With his suggestion only i cracked it.

April 19, 2006

Cool Links


Do you know all the two and three letter domain names are registered ?. Read more about this interesting facts here

Tips how to write resume etc. Read more about this here

Here are tips to fix the "missing Hall.dll, invalid Boot.ini" etc.

April 17, 2006

Oracle is launching its own Linux distribution !

According to Reuters Oracle is going to buy Novell. They want to have own distribution of Linux so that they can provide complete stack of products. Few days back Redhat brought JBoss. Now Redhat becomes Oracle's competitor in middleware segment.

April 13, 2006

Google Calendar Released Finally !

Today google relased much avaited calendar with few bugs and with some new features. Main feature of calendar are
  • You can share events with others
  • You can create multiple calendars and you can control the visibility of these calendars.
  • You can export the events in XML or ICAL format
  • Its ajax based and fast.
  • You can get event notifications though popups or email or even through sms. (but sms is in US only)
  • You can import the public calendars
  • You can get the daily agenda through email.
  • Drag and drop functionality
  • To access calendar with google account !!
You can expect more features in future. The main advantage of google calendar when compared to yahoo or msn is sharing. As it is relased in beta phase, there are lot of bugs in it. It is not saving the preferences some times and it is not well integrated with gmail. Overall it is a good start from google althgouth it suffers from interace glitches, some minor bugs.



Google Calendar main screen


You can set the notification option whether you want to receive notification though mail or sms



You can create multiple calendars

Interface Glitches !

Not aligning to the cells properly


No body can notice notice the scroll bar at the right hand top end.


Don't get suprised when you see this kind of errors !. These kind of errors are quite common !!

April 6, 2006

The Top 10 weirdest keyboards ever

Have look at this top 10 weirdest Keyboards. Except Rollup keyboard and Virtual laser keyboard i do not find any use of other keyboards.

http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-keyboards-ever

April 1, 2006

New version of Google Talk released !!


According to Googling Goolge, new version of google Talk is released. No official announcement yet. you can download new version from here.

March 26, 2006

How to peel potatos !








March 23, 2006

Microsoft sponsoring Firefox campaign !!!

Microsoft is sponsoring firefox campaign. Checkout this screenshot from cnet. I got this when I follow this link. http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6052611.html?part=rss&tag=6052611&subj=news


March 19, 2006

Windows on Mac

Now you can run windows on Intel Macs directly without any Virtualization software. The procedure to do this is explained in http://onmac.net/ site. Web site owners conducted a competition and prize money is over $13,000. Two guys from California won the prize money. You might wondered how the website owners will make money !. Very easy, by donations, Till now the web site owners received over $15,500 through donations. (This money is calculated from that website itself). Wow nice business !.

March 13, 2006

Google landed on Mars

Today google released http://mars.google.com/. See the stunning pictures of mars in your browser.

March 2, 2006

Interactive Street-side browsing

Microsoft Live labs today released Interactive Street-side browsing. Its really cool. It takes online maps into next level. Now they put only San Francisco and Seattle cities. Try out this new cool feature from microsoft. http://preview.local.live.com/


March 1, 2006

what if microsoft redesigned the ipod packaging?

Watch this funny video in You tube.


February 23, 2006

Google Pages

Today google released new service Google Pages. It is free online web page creator tool. Even you can publish your pages online !. It will be published under
http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com. The main disadvantage with this is your screen resolution should be 1152 x 864 otherwise you will loose some of the editing tools. They may fix this small bug in due time. On the good side it has good number of templates, nice inituitive user interface and ample space to start with (100 mb).

There's a new blog from google "Official Google Research Blog".


February 16, 2006

Is it a Bug or Easter Egg ??

When i search for visual c++ tutorials in msn search, i found suggestion like visual c#++ tutorials and i clicked visual c#++ tutorials it then gave visual c##++ tutorials and when you click on it is giving suggestion with one more #. Finally i fed up after clicking 33 times !. This is not happening when i search for c# tutorials. This is only happening when i put visual in front of it. Nice Feature in msn !!. what is it ?. is it bug or easter egg ??. Here are screen shots of it.




One more # !


Finally i fed up after 33 # !!


February 15, 2006

New Yahoo! Interface


If you double click the message, it will be opened in new tab.



One more cool feature is, RSS Feeds are integrated into the mail itself. And if you subscribed to any in MyYahoo! All get imported automatically into the mail.




Drag and Drop messages to different folders.




New Hotmail Interface


If you double click the message it will get maximized.



You can even right click on the message

Drag and Drop Feature.





One of the feature i liked most while composing messages, the error checking is done similar to word.


January 22, 2006

Google News Updated !!

As anticipated, finally google added personalization to Google News (New section called Recommended). Along with personalized news, it also added Most Popular section and custom section. In the custom section you can specify some terms and google news will show the news that contains all the terms you specified. Try this new feature !!!. If you do not find Recommended section, login and personalize your page. Here's how it works (from help page)

Here's how it works: By signing in to personalized news and keeping personalized Search enabled, you allow Google to track and save your news selections. Then, Google News can automatically recommend relevant stories just for you by using smart algorithms that analyze your selections. The algorithms compare your tastes to the aggregate tastes of other groups of similar Google News users. Simply put, we recommend news stories to you that have been read by many other users who've also read similar stories as you in the past.

January 19, 2006

This is my first blog !!. As name of blog suggests, i will post all the things i like. Finally i also started blogging !!. The following site allow you to search for a song, by tapping the rhythm of its words. I likes its thought. But its accuracy is not good.

http://www.songtapper.com/s/tappingmain.bin