Branding the Decentralised Me

Loic LeMeur has been posting his ideas about the Decentralised Me; it's much of what I have been blogging about for a long time now - what I have called the Digital Persona. It's a Cloud Computing matter that finally touches upon the very core of software as a service; the notion that personal rich-media publishing (blogs, photos, file-sharing, presence/status updates etc) is valuable to businesses if they can find a way to encourage users to bring-together all those threads under one roof.

Facebook does this more successfully than anyone else (right now). Plug-in "applications" notwithstanding, the out-of-the-box experience on Facebook ticks all the boxes of basic lifestreaming; personal publishing, status/presence updates, visual media sharing, community functionality and the aggregation services necessary to make a single personal relevant data-stream for each user.

Spend enough time beefing-up your profile on Facebook (and enjoying the feedback of friends and communities) and suddenly you realise that even if viable competitors existed, you'd stay loyal to Facebook. After all, your data is there. Your digital persona is centred there. Your lifestream is there. You'd only leave if the competition offered something remarkable.

The only trade-off in this arrangement is that you must live with Facebook's branding. You must accept that it's not a brand you can play with. You can't change the Facebook banner logo with one of your own choosing. You can't customise your profile to appear a seamless extension of your existing website or blog. You can't remove the adverts.

Of course, this will most likely change at some point in the future; imagine an inexpensive monthly subscription service offering Facebook Premium services - we can only speculate at how much customisation would be permitted, and I'm pretty certain the Facebook brand would remain intact and immovable - but the adverts would go in an instant.

An offline version (think Google Docs or any other smart client app you've used in the past) would be a logical next-step and hugely useful for those who use Facebook as part of their communications routine; don't forget that many businesses actively support the use of Facebook, establishing their own personal Networks and Groups. Some companies provide community support services via closed Facebook Groups. When someone describes Facebook as the MySpace for adults, they're doing it a disservice; Facebook has outgrown the University-only social networking vision it started with; it's now a viable extension of everyday business services.

And all we have to do is accept that - however we use it - our digital persona's over on Facebook are appropriately - and indelibly - branded. It might be our data; but it's their brand. And they won't make it easy to for us to leave.

And yet, leave we shall, because there's always a bigger fish. There will be a successor to Facebook (sooner or later) that offers all the same, plus something remarkably different.

How to Create a Password Reset disk for XP

create a password reset disk for XP,and use it if you lose your password

SOLUTION:-

There’s something called the Forgotten Password Wizard, which allows you to create a
password reset disk that can be used to recover password and personalised computer
settings if the password is forgotten. The steps to perform the task differ for domain
and work-group scenarios.

If your computer is on a domain, you can create the Domain Password Reset Disk
as follows. Press [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Delete] to open the Windows Security dialog box.
Click Change Password. Click Backup to open the Forgotten Password Wizard. Click
Next, then follow the on-screen instructions.

If your computer is not part of a domain, you can create a Non-Domain Password
Reset Disk; the procedure here varies depending on whether you have an administrator
account or a limited account.

If you have an administrator account,create an Administrator Password Reset Disk:open
User Accounts in the Control Panel.Select the Administrator. Click Prevent A Forgotten
Password under Related Tasks.Follow the instructions in the Forgotten Password Wizard.
For a Limited Account Password Reset Disk, do the same, but by selecting the Limited
User Account instead of Administrator.

Here’s how to use the Password Reset Disk to log on to a computer: boot through the
disk you created. Click the username whose password is on the recovery disk.
Press [Enter] or the Right Arrow. This causes the “Did You Forget Your Password?”
message to appear. You can click the “?” button to see your password hint. If
you have forgotten this as well, you can useyour Password Reset Disk to reset your
password. This will start the Password Reset Wizard.Follow the instructions and you
will be able to set a new password. The Password Reset Disk is also automatically
updated with the new password information, so you don’t have to create a new password
reset disk.

Note that the disk you create can only be
used with the computer on which it was created.

More Use of Open Source Mobile Web Browsers

It might not be the case that control of a mobile browser necessarily means control of the applications environment. It might, though, mean substantial upside in terms of software customization and enhancement of user experience. So mobile device manufacturers seem to be focusing on use of open-source browser platforms as a way to leverage creation of other applications that can lead to differentiation of user experience.

As consumers increasingly surf the Web on their mobile phones, handset vendors are looking toward open-source browsers such as WebKit – the browser engine at the heart of the iPhone’s Safari browser – as a way to bring it to them. However, despite growing interest in WebKit and Gecko (the engine for the Mozilla Corporation Firefox browser), commercial browser vendors such as Opera and ACCESS continue to see growth in their businesses.

According to ABI Research, overall growth in the mobile browser category will lead to a total pre-installed revenue of $492 million by 2013, driven by the trends of more complex HTML-based browser integration.

“Device manufacturers are interested in open-source solutions where there is a desire for increased control of their software footprint, and where they can bring internal programming resources to bear,” says research director Michael Wolf. “

Open-source offerings such as WebKit are experiencing adoption by vendors such as Apple, Nokia, and others. Google made WebKit its core browser and Web-rendering engine for the Android platform; and application framework vendors such as Trolltech have integrated WebKit into their development framework. Mozilla also continues to develop its version of mobile Firefox, and Nokia has integrated a Gecko-based browser on its N800 Internet tablet.

AT & T to change the Broadband marketing language

At the Federal Communications Commission Pittsburgh broadband hearing, AT&T Senior Federal Regulatory Vice President Robert Quinn is reported by Broadband Reports to have said the company would in the future stop advertising speeds "up to" a specified rate, and would instead "strive to provide service within the speed tier purchased by the customer."

When AT&T finds it is not providing service within the ordered speed tier, AT&T will take action either to bring the customer's service within the ordered tier or give the customer an option to move to a different tier," he said.

Today, customers can order service "up to 7Mbps" tier, while plant conditions limit them to lower real-world bandwidth. Under the new scheme, customers will be offered the expected speed the plant supports, and then supplied with the higher speeds actually possible on their chosen plans.

AT&T also says it will supply customers information about how much bandwidth various applications consume, so they can choose the right plans. To Broadband Reports, that sounds like a precursor to some form of usage-based billing. It may well be. AT&T has been pretty clear that usage will play a bigger role in future access plans. That is an issue many will argue about.

But giving users a better understanding of their bandwidth requirements is a good thing, as is the policy of selling actual service that matches the marketing claims.

How to cancel a printer?

Sometimes we tell our machines to do something (let’s, for the sake of example choose, oh, say, print a 10-page document) and then, being human and somewhat fickle, we change our minds.

Perhaps we notice that we selected the wrong document; or, we have a sudden “inspiration” and there’s now a whole new thought we want to insert into it.. or we notice a major typo that we need to fix. Whatever it is, we want the printer to stop printing NOW.

Now what I am going to say next might comes as a surprise and a shock to some of you folks– but, sometimes in life you just have to grab that band-aid by the corner and rip that sucker off.
Here’s the thing, and I ain’t gonna sugarcoat it– computers are dumb machines. (Maybe, instead of “dumb”, I should say “obedient”..)

Computers follow rigid logic to obey the “commands” you “input”, and they really don’t “multitask” very well. They ‘think’ and act sequentially.. and don’t move on to the next input/command until they have completed the first one.
What this means is: they won’t even see the command to stop printing the 10-page document until they have “processed” the Print command you gave earlier.
(The paper and ink that gets wasted this way is truly your fault, and not the computer’s. You told it to Print, and it merely obeys!)

When you hit the power button on the printer (or yank the power cord out of the wall) you haven’t really stopped the Print job. Oh, no. You have only interrupted it. When you turn it back on, or reconnect the USB cord– your machine is going to everything in its power to complete its assigned task.. and it starts printing the 10-pager from right where it left off.

The correct way to stop the print job (you commanded) is to erase it from your PC’s memory. Remember I told you computers were dumb? Well, they can be forgetful too.

1) Go to Printers in your Control Panel (In XP: Start> Settings> Printers and Faxes. In Vista: Start> Control Panel> Hardware and Sounds> Printers.)
2) Double-click on the printer that is still trying to print the 10-page document.

The window that opens will show all the print jobs scheduled to be sent to the printer for completion, and the 10-page document should appear here.

3) Click on “Printer” from the menu bar, and click “Cancel All Documents”. (Answer “Yes” if you’re asked, “are you sure?”)

That’s it. Your computer has now “forgotten” your command to print, and when you turn your printer on again, it will not start printing something you no longer want.

Quick tweak to improve the speed of ur monitor.

In just a few clicks, you can improve the appearance of items on your screen, make things easier for your eyes, and get peppier performance out of your PC.

Making adjustments to settings, and turning various things on or off, is known as “tweaking”, and sometimes “optimizing”. And being a Geek, I love to tweak my machines until they’re running like a Indy 500 car. Today’s quick tip will take you all of 45 seconds to do, and it will give you noticeable results. Turn on font smoothing, and turn off special effects.
The settings we’re going to tweak are all found on the Appearance tab of your Display Properties: right-click on a blank area of your Desktop and select “Properties”

On the “Appearance” tab, click on the “Effects” button.

Here we’re going to turn one item on, and three off, by placing or removing checkmarks.
1) Turn on the ClearType font smoothing feature by placing a check in its checkbox, and using the drop-down arrow to set it to ClearType. This will make reading easier, and reduce headache-causing eye strain.
2) Turn off the “bells-and-whistles” special effects that, while ‘modern’ and ‘cool’, really only slow things down quite unnecessarily. (aka “waste system resources”)
* uncheck “transition effects”
* uncheck “shadows”
* uncheck “show windows contents while dragging”
3) Click OK, and OK again.

That’s it. You’re done. Easy, right? Right. Should you change your mind someday, undoing these changes is just as easy.. just place a check again. (But I very much doubt you will!)

A Personal Screen Saver in Win XP!.txt

This isnt a tweak, but a great little feature! For a great way to put your digital photos to work, try creating a slide show presentation for use as a screen saver. Here's how:

1. Right-click an empty spot on your desktop and then click Properties.

2. Click the Screen Saver tab.

3. In the Screen saver list, click My Pictures Slideshow.

4. Click Settings to make any adjustments, such as how often the pictures should change, what size they should be, and whether you'll use transition effects between pictures, and then click OK.

Now your screen saver is a random display of the pictures taken from your My Pictures folder.

Nortel Adds Web 2.0 Software

Nortel's new Adaptive Application Engine software, built around Session Initiation Protocol, allows Nortel customers to create Web 2.0 applications like social networking, blogs, and wikis with IP voice and multimedia.

Operators can choose to run the software on hundreds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux compliant servers.

The Adaptive Application Engine software provides an open programmability environment and web service Application Program Interfaces which allow third-party software developers to easily develop new applications which use call routing, presence and federated IM.

The software is designed to support both smaller service providers as well as tier one providers as well.

The Adaptive Application Engine software can be deployed as a SIP Application Server, as an IMS application server or as advanced capabilities on the Communication Server 2000.

Nortel says the new software will allow service providers to create unified communications services, federated instant messaging and IP communications integrated with Web applications.

The software also supports features such as using TVs to control calls or send instant messages.

The software also will allow service providers to create fixed mobile convergence services such as making mobile phones into office extensions and allowing calls to be moved back and forth across tethered and mobile devices.

Nortel is first among the large traditional switch vendors to make such tools available as a "bolt on" to its existing architecture. Depending on how the software is received, it could be an important step for service providers on the Nortel platform.

Up to this point there has been some skepticism that smaller service providers, in particular, would be able to create these sorts of applications on their own. The software is half the solution. Now Nortel has to pull together a developer community and make those apps available to its customers.

Exploit In Google That Turning It Into ‘Spammers Tool’

Gmails “security flaw is turning it into a spamming machine” , As Insert (Information Security Research Team) reports.

This report by INSERT, the Information Security Research Team, has created a proof of concept that said that by exploiting the flaw that forwords messege by SMTP port spammers can send thousands of messeges. But for this they are supposed to exploit the restriction of 500 bulk emails doe by Gmail. This report also state that there is kind of “trust hierarchy” established between mail providers.
You dont need very special knowldge of hacking for this , INSERT states “anyone can do this”
This document by INSERT presents a vulnerability report and a proof of concept attack that demonstrate how anyone with no special internet access privileges can access this vulnerability and send send spams through this flaw.
The report notes that with the rising volume of spam, e-mailservice providers have made black listing and white listing system for mails by which you can send spams to black lists. Through this they can block IP address of mail sender. But Gmail is spread everywhere as a whitelist member so threat level can be high.
Gmail team has no. official comment on this yet.
In past also through google calender spammers used to spam. Let us see what Google will do this time.

Wish you were here, virtually

Linuxville is such an interesting place, every knook and kranny has details and depths to explore. Besides being able to take it with you (live-CD's), you can as if you had a computer in your computer, run a second OS to see if the grass is greener. It is called a virtual machine and it is all the rage. There are realities in running virtual machines called sharing resources.

So, if you only have 512MB of memory, you would use 256MB of it to run the other operating system. That other operating system would appear to be just another application running but would "Virtually" be another computer (with less resources) running at the same time as your main OS. The effect is that things respond slower depending upon the load. It is not that bad if you have a lot of memory and a higher CPU speed. So, why on earth would you want to do this madness? What is the reason you might want more than one OS anyway?? Well, if the Wine emulator isn't working for you, you could install MS Windows as a virtual machine and run window's apps. Or like I said you could see if other Linux distros are better than what you have now. It is actually more cool because you don't have to burn a CD, just download the ISO file and run it virtually.
Virtual Machine software comes in various packages and depends upon your distro if you can easily use them. VMware is probably the oldest, most well known, then there is VirtualBox which is new and very nice to use. It is a wrestling match to install Virtualbox in Mepis but I will make the effort and tell you all about it. What I am using now is Qemu and it is so slow as I only have 512MB of memory and using KDE eats up a lot of that. But, Qemu is very easy to use. OK, here is one thing in Linux I really want and virtual machines is a big part of it. I want one application that allows me to play or view all the media files on my system. The separate programs are wonderful, but one "front-end" to manage and view it all would be great. I have raved before about Elisa Media Center as being a good looking application for this purpose. I have had terrible luck installing and getting it to run on my Mepis system, no problem in Xubuntu. I have discovered a few more apps that will do the job. They happen to be mini-Linux distros. The first one is called Geexbox. It has quirks but works on my system. Then there is LIMP which also works and Womp which works too. These distros are tiny and are just meant for playing media. I will have to see if they are fit for my needs as I don't need them to stream video or drive a TV tuner card, just view and play what I already have on my computer. Then to have the ability to use or play with all those small Linux distros is great fun. DSL or Damn Small Linux, Wolvix and Puppy Linux and several more are all great to explore. I can save my CD's for permanent collections. Those big distros I'd rather just use the live-CD, they seem to run better. The bottom line is that having as much system memory as you can afford is useful for any OS. Use older hardware if you must but realize how hard it is to support it. You will end up running older versions of Linux to do the job. Please let go of your 8088 and your 386, even 486 cpu's are a trial to support! I would consider a serious upgrade if your stuff is hitting 6 to 8 years old. Then you can enjoy all the modern gadgets and widgets.

Here is another edition of "Linux Truths", this time with a question attached. There is no one Linux that does it all because developer groups tend to focus on certain out comes, so that you can have an out-of-the-box experience. Which Linux distros seems to have the most extensive assortment of popular applications in their repositories, allow app installation without extra steps and have all this without resorting to a DVD size ISO? I ask this because .deb's compiled for one distro might not work in another. Is there a distro that has the depth and breath? Don't say Debian because I know of many applications I can't find in Debian, you have to compile them from source yourself to run in Debian. Ultimately compiling source code allows you to have custom distros. That is the very mechanism that makes software run in your distro, on your computer, specifically. To have software compiled to the "Debian" standard is a general specification. If Ubuntu, based on Debian, is designed differently than Debian, you can't actually expect all software compiled for Ubuntu to run on Debian and vice-versa. The differences might be small, but are just enough for stuff to not install or run. This is why distros usually stock repositories with software compiled to run in their distro. Same source but compiled to run in a different situation. I want to tell all you standardization cheerleaders that it is not a Linux flaw, it's a feature. This is why the same "Linux" can run on so many different types of hardware.

Does this take the fun out of Linux, no, we just see what other folks are using and experiencing. Then we try it, if we have problems or success we share it, voice it, blog it for others to be warned or encouraged. In Linuxville we call that community!!