Yahoo Hack Day India

Hi,

On 23rd and 24 Aug 2007, I was in IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007. This was so boring.



Now on last Friday and Saturday, (5th and 6th Oct 2007): I was in Yahoo Open Hack Day (India) conference. This turned out a gr8 event of my life. Had lots of learning, fun and enjoyed hacking.



Even I met several very important personalities like David Filo (Yahoo co-founder),Christian Heilmann,Philip Tellis,Parashuram Narasimhan and many more.

Google Docs

It is really hard to say that Google docs can replace Microsoft office. There are several office products are available in the market like Open Office Org etc, all these are free but still Microsoft Office has more number of users compared to all these.

Now Google docs… Google docs is one of the office product which.. as of now has a very basic editing functionality.The only reason which attracts me is the web based editing, sharing and collaboration feature of Google Docs.

I love Google Docs because

· Has strong collaboration feature

· We can store and edit from any computer where we will find the Internet.

· Spreadsheet has additional function related to GoogleFinance and GoogleLookup.

· Presentation has functionality like online audience…which is really stunning.

PhotoSynth

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live
Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos."
I think photosynth is really a technology that will change the world of digital computing.
Good Work Microsoft.

Nivio on attack

Here I am describing one of the hacking incidents that happened with me. On 15th June 2007, several news sites posted news that Nivio is going to launch first windows based online desktop.
The news was attractive so I rushed to the site and registered myself to its free service. But soon I got a mail that the service will be available to me in few weeks as there are lots of registered users.

Mail reads some like this

“Nivio is in beta and we have had thousands of applications waiting to be activated. We need to ensure that the performance you get is mind blowing and therefore are controlling the number of users we let onto the system at a given moment. This also allows us to fine tune the service.”


But see what happens this mail was set to a special group mail id nivians@nivio.com whose permission is open to all…

So First person named Lucas Fontes replied to all next was me to test the flaw. Then think what happens, whole lot of mails with reply to all.

This shows how technically sound Nivio People are.

I am surprised that what will happen when they will start windows based desktop. I think people will never excuse, they will try to exploit it also.

It’s a good future of Nivio.

Unix Or WindowsNT

Today I read a nearly 8 years old article about "which operating system is better?". The article was written by one of the famous and my favorite technologist, Mark Russinovich. Russinovich is the man behind the famous Sony Rootkit Controversy. He is the only man who wrote many tools for windows, which you can find on http://www.sysinternals.com/.
Even 8 years ago it was the fight that whether the Unix (Lets include Linux also here) or Windows is better operating system. Russinovich wrote in his article that the OS is all about the application availability, initial cost, cost of support and maintenance, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and ease of use. The things are clear now still today the windows has more than 60% of market penetration and now when Windows Vista has come into the market with better security and look & feel, there is no way that the *nix OS will come into the market in next 10 years.
I like to quote these two paragraph in this post which was written in the article…do not miss these

A major difference between UNIX's and NT's: architecture is that UNIX does not
incorporate its windowing system--the subsystem that manages GUI resources for
applications--into kernel mode, as does NT 4.0. Instead, the UNIX windowing
system is an add-on user-mode application that its developers wrote using
publicly defined UNIX APIs; consequently, third-party products can replace
UNIX's windowing system. However, the majority of the UNIX community has adopted
MIT's X-Windows as a de facto, if not official, graphical interface standard.
Before NT 4.0, the NT windowing system was a user-mode implementation, but
Microsoft found that the performance of graphics-intensive applications improved
when the windowing system operated in kernel mode.

Namespace and object management:In the NT object model, device drivers can easily implement
objects in the namespace that represent nonstandard resources. For example, a
device driver can create an object called \Proc that, after an application reads
it, returns information about the active processes in the system.