Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Shopping for Holidays: Why not checkout google ?

Shopping for this holiday season, do check if you can get something by using the google checkout. Technically it's like old wine in old bottle with new cork. I'm sure this is not going to wipe out Amazon, i go to Amazon 'coz of low price and high quality shipping service, many-a-times free.

Hype or Not, you get $10 to $20 Orders with Google Checkout now, in many participating merchants. If you buy something closely above the set limit, that's some discount, on top of your other discounts and coupons, why waste that, i did that few days ago.

Ok now the scary part, if you had clicked that "Remember me" checkbox when you login for convenience of using any other google feature, say gmail, i see many do that; your payment information is thrown open to anyone using that computer, 'coz you just clicked on that innocent looking checkbox. WTH! With that always signed-on feature, it simply takes me to screen where i just need to click one button to buy, what was google thinking ??? I expected them to authenticate me again before getting into this final order page.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

Happy Thanks giving.

Monday, November 20, 2006

ASP.NET 2.0 Caching - New features

Here is a article that gives you fly-by of new caching features added in asp.net 2.0

Saturday, November 18, 2006

J.P. Vaswani

Like to hear some உபதேசம், here is one which has all J.P. Vaswani's speeches. I got to know about him from my wife, and i should say anyone may like his speeches, no matter whether they try to practice them or not. Ok lets take it like this, how often we get a chance to listen to some wise words / thoughts from an elderly person amidst this fast paced life-style and isolated nuclear family system. The talk is certainly won't be one of those boring seminars; with all those short funny stories sprinkled all along the speech, anyone should enjoy the talks.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Am I Secure - Really ?

One of the colleague was talking to me on security of home computer he has, this becomes a more important topic with all those spy wares, trojans , bots and rootkits out there. Hmm, going back to the discussion with him, i found I'm bit more secure than his setup, but I'd be foolish to think i kept all doors locked, this brings up question, Am I Secure - Really ???

Here is my setup in what i have,

Firewall. No questions, everyone needs it, not that dumb WinXP firewall (looks like finally MSFT ships Vista with decent firewall features). I finally threw out the popular but most resource hogging security suite to a simple firewall, which provides blocking any incoming connection and outgoing connection (all except configured apps) . Firewall also includes Network and Host based Intrusion prevention system.

Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware. In future should be a standard OS feature, still this is more of a after-the-fact solution with signature based detection. Check out a interesting rootkit demo at TechNet Webcast.

Anti-Phishing. This I'm dead serious about, if anti virus takes me down, i may have to
spend some hours cleaning up or re-installing, But i don't want to lose out my bank acct information and i know I'm really screwed by that time. On top of Firefox 2.0 and google toolbar anti-phishing features, i run Netcraft to make sure the bank site I'm accessing is not hosted from Russia or Taiwan. I use a PG open source app to store my sensitive and ultra complex online credentials, just to throw another layer on top.
based
Network Security. Home wireless network uses WPA encryption and locked by MAC address. If you like to learn some tips on this, here is a link.

Few years back learnt how easy to write a keylogger, which later transformed to trojan with payload from a file share, though strictly for fun and knowledge, that still keeps me little bit cynical and hence backup-ed data last week. :-)

Monday, November 06, 2006

Inayithil Tamizh

"தமிழின் மேன்மை அதன் தொன்மையில் இல்லை - தொடர்ச்சியில் உள்ளது"
- long pending blog placeholder on
THE oldest living language.

read books
to blog
to search 1 2 3
listen online radio's,
download tamil songs in mp3, more, more, more, more, ....
daily calendar
காற்றிநிலே வரும் கீதம்... <download>