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Saturday, December 22, 2007

Happy Holidays Google Doodle Logo Part 2

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Happy Holidays from Google

Ok, wow. I was totally not expecting this. In case you missed part 1, . Now tell me you had predicted the logo was going to look like this today. The recurring theme this year appears to be two stick figures sporting construction outfits and doing something in general. This time though, they're hard at work instead of just messing about. Suspended by a single wire, one of them is giving the Google logo a good scrub. Its partner appears to be in charge of transforming that red ribbon into a bow. Looks like that red ribbon is in fashion again.

What's coming next?

 

Forbidden Kingdom Teaser Trailer! (Jackie Chan VS Jet Li!)

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The Forbidden Kingdom is where Jackie Chan and Jet Li Expect some awesome ass-kicking! I'm not a big fan of the kid though. He looks a bit too goofy (and out of place) in this action film.

A discovery made by a kung fu obsessed American teen sends him on an adventure to China, where he joins up with a band of martial arts warriors in order to free the imprisoned Monkey King.


 

Friday, December 21, 2007

Happy Holidays Google Doodle Logo Part 1

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Happy Holidays from Google

The first of Google's holiday's doodle logos for 2007 is out. Continuing with previous years' tradition of having multiple celebratory logos, teases us with the as-yet-unknown second logo that will surely be gracing the front page of Google tomorrow. Last year's series began with Google's logo decorated with a bright red ribbon on Google's big blue G and ended up with a happy kangaroo family standing in front of its logo. If you missed the 2006 series, visit to view all 5 logos. For more of previous years logos, go to .

Can you guess what's coming next?

 

Hellboy II: The Golden Army Trailer!

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The short version from :

The mythical world starts a rebellion against humanity in order to rule the Earth, so Hellboy and his team must save the world from the rebellious creatures.

The longer version from :
After an ancient truce existing between humankind and the invisible realm of the fantastic is broken, hell on Earth is ready to erupt. A ruthless leader who treads the world above and the one below defies his bloodline and awakens an unstoppable army of creatures. Now, it’s up to the planet’s toughest, roughest superhero to battle the merciless dictator and his marauders. He may be red. He may be horned. He may be misunderstood. But when you need the job done right, it’s time to call in Hellboy (Ron Perlman).

Saving the world is a HELL of a job!



.

 

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Web Devs Rejoice as IE8 passes Acid2 Test

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One of the biggest news in the tech world today is that Internet Explorer 8 has passed the . From the ,

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.


Smiling for IE8

For those not in the know, the Acid2 Test was written to make it easy to test a browser's compliance with web standards like HTML4 and CSS2. There are 2 types of Acid2 Tests - with and . This was due to the fact that Internet Explorer and some other browsers do not support data URLs.

In a perfect world, browsers would have proper and consistent support for official web standards and you wouldn't need to worry about your users' browsers as long as your pages followed the official guidelines. The reason why this is such a big deal is because Internet Explorer has the largest market share and passing the test means that some time in the distant future, that perfect world may become a reality.

The ironic part about all this is that while internal builds of IE8 have passed the Acid2 Test, the Acid2 Test on The Web Standards Project site is and will fail to render properly even in compliant browsers! For a working alternative, use the one found at the .

 

Howto: Be a real Jackass and Download Jackass 2.5 from BlockBuster (includes non-US workaround!)

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By now, you should have heard that you could (legally) watch Jackass 2.5 in the comfort of your home. Just head over to the (before 2008!), show some ID and success! Paramount Pictures, buffering, Johnny Knoxville, pause, rinse and repeat. Or not.

Tired of the occasional stuttering and frequent pauses, the jackass side of me kicked into motion and came up with an ingenious scheme to download Jackass 2.5 so that I could actually watch it and not wait for it. After I tasted sweet success in this endeavor however, the better part of me came into play once again, which is why you're reading this guide right now.

Tools of the trade

First things first. Let's get ourselves prepared. You'll need to download and install the following tools/programs.
Note: Remember to uncheck the installation of the toolbar for Flashget.

Get me that Jackass!

Once you're sure you've got everything installed, it's time to get into action.

  1. If you're outside the US, start HotSpot Shield. Next, right-click on its icon in your system tray and click on Connect. A browser window should popup and show Hotspot Shield connecting to its servers. When its icon looks like this Good to go!, you're good to go.

    Connecting...

    Note: HotSpot Shield has a server that seems to be mis-configured in some way. Specifically DNS lookups will fail so your browser will complain about being unable to find sites. If you can't visit any site after Hotspot Shield's icon turns green, simply disconnect and reconnect. Pray that you don't connect to the same server (1/7 probability, a bit lower than ) as these connections are made randomly. If you know how OpenVPN works, you can also edit the config to avoid this.

  2. Next, run Firefox and clear out your cookies. This is to remove the evil jackass_geo_check cookie that you get when you first visited the Jackass site.

    Clear them out!

  3. Surf down to the in Firefox.

  4. Surrender your email address to them or use to get a disposable one. After confirming the email address, login (by entering your email address) to begin viewing Jackass 2.5.

  5. Before it starts however, a short advertisement featuring a spinning globe will get in your way. Ignore it or you could watch it if you really want to. While this advert is playing, click on the arrow beside Download Helper icon (three colored spinning balls) and observe the dropdown menu carefully. You may need to wait a while, but an option called "jackass25_1000k_v1_feature_production.wmv" should appear.

    Download Helper

  6. When that option appears in the dropdown menu, click on it and save it as a text file.

    Save as a text file

  7. Open up the text file you'd just saved and copy the mms link (Ctrl+c) inside of it. It should look similar to the one below.

    Open text file

  8. Now close Hotspot Shield, run Flashget and add a new Flashget download by pressing F4 when the Flashget window appears. Flashget is pretty smart as it'll automatically detect the mms link you just copied (to your clipboard) and paste it into the URL box, so you'll just need to configure the rest of the options as seen below.

    New Flashget download

  9. Begin your download by clicking ok.

    Jackass 2.5 download

  10. Profit!

 

And here's the Duke Nukem Forever Trailer!

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As , 3D Realms has given us a quick glimpse at what Duke Nukem Forever may look like, that is, if it ever appears on the market. It isn't much, but from the looks of it, Duke's been keeping fit all these years. Still, I'd prefer some shots of Duke kicking ass to a couple of aliens screaming at me.

I'm looking for some alien toilet to park my bricks. Who's first?



or .

 

DocSyncer Beta Now Open to Public (refer new members and win an 8GB iPhone!)

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has finally opened their doors to the public. From now until midnight of Christmas Day, the user that refers the most number of new members will win an 8GB iPhone! If you would like to see me win that 8GB iPhone, just click and sign up for DocSyncer.

What's DocSyncer?

Ever had the situation where you can't find the document you want? With DocSyncer, you can simply sync them all into your DocSyncer account and you'll be able to access all of them from one common location. When you install DocSyncer on your computer, it'll scan your computer for documents and upload them to your DocSyncer and Google Docs accounts. If you edit any of them, DocSyncer will detect this and sync the new versions into both your accounts, while retaining the old ones.

Using DocSyncer

There are a couple of things to do when you first log in to DocSyncer. The very first thing you should do is grant DocSyncer access to your Google Docs account. This is simple to do and should be the first thing you see after logging in for the first time.

Granting DocSyncer access

Next, you'll be prompted to change your password. For security reasons, sticking to the password that they generated for you is not a good idea. So go ahead and switch it to a decent password.

Change your password

Finally, you'll be asked to download and install DocSyncer. This is required for syncing your documents to your DocSyncer account and can be installed on as many computers as you want. It currently runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista, with a Mac OS X version in the works.

DocSyncer download

However, one other thing I would recommend is to go into your settings and changing "Always use SSL to view documents" to Yes. For some reason, this was set to No by default.

Enable SSL

Me and DocSyncer

After installing DocSyncer on my computer, I created a test text document and waited for the magic to happen. Fortunately for me, it wasn't long before it appeared in my DocSyncer account. However, unlike DocSyncer, syncing to Google Docs is not immediate and took quite a while to occur (about 15 - 20 minutes). This is a known issue and the DocSyncer Team hopes to make Google Docs syncing immediate. (I know the screenshot says otherwise, but that's beacuse I took it after it synced to show you the full range of right-click options.)

Welcome to DocSyncer!

DocSyncer

While waiting for DocSyncer to update the files in my Google Docs, I edited the text document and wondered what would happen. About a minute later, the new version appeared in my DocSyncer account, with the older version available for download! Although I had expected this, it's pretty cool to see it in action.

DocSyncer

With nothing showing up in my Google Docs, I tried renaming the test document. I thought to myself, "surely, DocSyncer wouldn't know what to do now". Sadly, my devious plans to trip up DocSyncer weren't going as planned. DocSyncer handled it easily as you can see below.

DocSyncer

By now the files had appeared in my Google Docs account. Each new revision was uploaded as a separate file and the uploaded files weren't organized into their respective folders. Both are known issues that they're currently working on. However, be aware that if you edit a file in Google Docs, DocSyncer won't know about it unless you save it to your computer and launch DocSyncer for syncing.

DocSyncer

I didn't mention this at the beginning but the very first time I ran DocSyncer, I was wondering why my other documents weren't being synced. As it turns out, syncing is currently limited to the My Documents and Desktop folder. At the moment you can only turn off/on syncing for these folders, although they'll be expanding this to include all folders.

DocSyncer

Despite the minor setbacks I've experienced in DocSyncer, using it was mostly a pleasant experience. Even though it's in beta right now, there are no major show-stoppers, thus making it suitable for daily usage. As it continues to evolve, I'd expect it to improve even further in the future.

 

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Duke Nukem Forever Teaser Trailer Coming Tomorrow!

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Shacknews is reporting that 3D Realms has confirmed on their that a trailer for Duke Nukem Forever will be coming out tomorrow some time around noon Central time!

Tomorrow, Wednesday the 19th, around noon CST, we will release the first teaser trailer from Duke Nukem Forever. To tide you over until then, here is a screen shot taken from the teaser.


Duke Nukem

Download the at Shacknews.

[via ]

 

Launchy goes 2.0!

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A new version of was just launched by the Launchy team! New in this release are awesome skins and icons, cool fading effects, Vista support and well, "it’s just better".

Launchy is a program/shortcut launcher that was

designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Using Launchy

Launchy in action

Need the command prompt? Or did you mean the Control Panel? Launchy's smart auto-suggest is so good, it's like it can read your mind. The default install of Launchy only indexes the start menu and a few other locations, so if you have programs that do not create start menu icons (portable apps comes to mind), you'll need to add them to Launchy.

Need to Google something?

With the Weby plugin in Launchy, it's so easy to Google a term. First you'll need to hit Alt+Space to bring up Launchy. Next type "google". Now hit Tab and you'll see an arrow appear. Key in your search terms, press enter and Lanuchy will do the rest. Other supported web searches include IMDB, Wikipedia, Yahoo and more.

However, that's not all Launchy can do. For example, basic arithmetic is a piece of cake for Launchy. You can also extend Launchy's abilities with custom commands and or theme Launchy by downloading new skins.

.

 

Back to Full Feeds!

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For a few months, I've changed this blog's feed to summary only due to scrappers regurgitating my posts elsewhere. To combat that issue, I decided to add a footer to feed items so that it would be clear to a reader where the article really originated from.

At the time, however, I only looked around for a solution and discovered its summary burner. Other than allowing you to provide a summarized, text-only version of your feed, you can also append a "Teaser" message after each feed item. This wasn't really what I was looking for, but I couldn't find any other Feedburner feature that came close to my original intentions, so I activated it anyway.

Summary Burner

Moron Alert!

While looking through my Blogger settings today, I clicked on Site feed and noticed that Blogger had already provided an option to attach a HTML footer! It has probably been there since the beginning of time, so now I feel like an idiot. :) Great, and now you know what a moron I am. :P

If you've caught the scrapper bug and have no intention of looking stupid in front of your readers, look for Post Feed Footer under Site Feed in your Blogger Settings. From there, you can insert whatever you want, including HTML into that tiny box and it'll automatically appear at the end of each post in your feed.

And yes, I've resumed the full syndication of this blog with a small author acknowledgment at the bottom of each item.

 

Orkut under Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attack

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Right at this very moment, a cross-site script has been spreading like wildfire in Orkut communities due to a flaw in Google's Orkut.

If you've read the following scrapbook entry in Orkut

2008 vem ai... que ele comece mto bem para vc

from one of your friends, you're infected. Simply viewing the message alone is sufficient for your Orkut account to be added a new community named "Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut" and be an unwilling new host for the worm. At the time of this writing, the number of Orkut members in Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut is already at the 400K mark.

According to a posting made by the author of this worm, Rodrigo Lacerda, this script is not malicious in any way, well except for making you an unwitting participant of his experiment. You can verify this for yourself as someone has posted the decoded javascript source of the script at . The original is located at . Still, changing your password isn't terribly difficult.

From what I can grasp from scanning through the script, it appears to work this way. First, it'll add you to http://www.orkut.com/CommunityJoin.aspx?cmm=44001818. Next, it'll load and extract your entire friends list and send itself to them, thus completing the infection cycle. It is able to do this because of the fact that Orkut allows HTML to be inserted into scraps.

Apparently "2008 vem ai... que ele comece mto bem para vc" is roughly translated into 2008 is coming... that it begins is really good for you. It doesn't seem to look that way for Orkut engineers.

Edit: Btw, the excessive traffic generated by this script is partly due to the fact that it will continually attempt to contact Orkut's servers if it fails to do what it wants on the first try (force you into the above-mentioned community and load your friend's list).

Update: The original script location now returns an empty file. That should prevent any new infections from now on. Note that while many folks think that the flash file is somehow malicious, I'm quite sure that it isn't because http://www.orkut.com/LoL.aspx (source of the flash) doesn't even exist!

The embed code is simply the vector through which the malicious script is loaded. This is because it is crafted in such a way that your browser will parse and execute the javascript contained in the embed code. Hence the best way to mitigate this would be to use the rather than , since javascript is the real culprit here.

Btw, you should thank Rodrigo Lacerda for highlighting this vulnerability in such a manner.

Sources:
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The Latest Wall-E Trailer!

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Here's the second Wall-E trailer that isn't even on yet. Like the , there's no dialogue, only wonderful lively background music. The plot goes a bit like this -

On an abandoned Earth where trash has taken over, a robot named WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) accidentally finds the means for humans to return to their planet. Another machine, EVE, leaves to tell humanity the good news, and WALL-E follows her into space. (rottentomatoes.com)

Download the high and ultra high quality versions at .



[via ]

 

Ulteo launches Online OpenOffice.org Beta

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has squeezed the entire suite online, which allows you to bring along your favorite open source office programs together with you, even if you don't possess a thumbdrive.

Online OpenOffice

According to Ulteo, all you'll need is

a modern web-browser with Javascript and the Sun Java Runtime 1.4+ Environment plugin enabled. It's been successfully tested on Firefox 1.5+, IE6/IE7, and Safari.


Ulteo's online OpenOffice provides a fairly generous 1GB of free storage upon registration of an account, comes with support for PDF output and the OpenDocument Format as well as collaboration features. Unfortunately, their OpenOffice servers are currently overwhelmed by enthusiastic users, so you can only register for an account and wait for the traffic to ease off.

For a quick preview of what it's like, check out . Strangely, the Ars writer could not find any of the collaboration features that . Like the Ars guy, I'm gonna attribute this omission to its beta status.

 

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Lokuloku, the Immortal Toy Pig

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Tired of waiting for your to arrive? Or are you still in the six month long line? How about getting lokulokus for the time being? Squash the lokulokus and watch them regain their form. Not enough? Do it over and over again and be amazed as the pigs fatten up for your perverted pleasure. I've always wanted to squeeze the fat out of a pig. :)



Visit the .

[via ]

 

Hilarious Hancock Teaser Trailer

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Will Smith's upcoming film, , is about him starring as a super-laid-back superhero. How much of a bum is he, you ask. Well, just click play to find out. Don't miss the wicked ending!



After laughing my way through it, I'm sensing that Hancock = the movie version of What if Superman was one of us (song: by Joan Osborne).

 

Monday, December 17, 2007

The Dark Knight IMAX Prologue (6 and a half min preview) + Official HD Trailer

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I'm a bit late on this one but here's the crappy 6:30 minutes in-film cam footage of the Dark Knight aka the IMAX Prologue (I'm sure you can guess why). This short clip is all about the Joker and his crew, so fans of the Dark Knight himself may be quite disappointed. Not a problem for me though, although I'd prefer the rest of it as well. :D



As for the official high-res trailer (Death trap), you can also watch and download it at .

 

iNdependence 1.3.1 and iPhones' NCK Length (aka master unlock code)

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iNdependence 1.3.1

Over the weekend, the 0perator updated the Mac jailbreaking software, , to version 1.3 and finally to 1.3.1. The most important features in these releases were the introduction of proper 1.1.2 and 7.5 compatibility, instead of the hacky workaround in older releases. See the changelog below or read the . A recently prepared also provides answers and hints on carrying out several tricky but common iPhone scenarios.


v1.3.1 (Hacker-Pschorr) - 12/15/07

- Added instructions for upgrading from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2
- Made UI look proper on Leopard (all text should have been black)
- Fixed a major bug in setting the correct file permissions for anySIM
- Added more credits for anySIM
- Added serial number to Info tab


v1.3 (Velvet Fog) - 12/14/07

- Added 1.1.2 compatibility
- Added iTunes 7.5 compatibility (no need for for the MobDev tool I created earlier) -- thanks to planetbeing for this
- Removed previous ringtone syncing code (not needed with 1.1.2 or MeCCA patched 1.1.1)
- Added anySIM 1.2 (in addition to 1.1) and baseband version detection so that the correct version of anySIM is installed
- Updated the documentation for firmware 1.1.2 and SIM unlocking
- Added Info tab which contains detailed status information


Download .

NCK Length of iPhones

Geohot has discovered that the master unlock code (NCK) of the iPhone is . This key is unique to each iPhone and allows the iPhone to be permanently unlocked, which makes it very interesting as a long term unlock solution. Attempting a brute force attack (trying all possible combinations) on such a long key length is neither feasible nor practical, and as such, he hopes to identify similarities between these NCKs in order to cut down on the time required to look through the entire key space.

However, as the iPhone allows only 5 tries of the NCK, the only sane way to carry out a brute force is outside the iPhone environment. This was made possible recently with the . Other folks are now looking into retrieving NCK codes for iPhones with the 3.9 bootloader so that they can stay unlocked forever. No luck for iPhones on the 4.6 bootloader though, an update from Apple is still required for this method to succeed.

Relevant Hackint0sh threads -


 

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Watch Full-Length Movies on Hulu as Well!

2 comments

Ever since I received my Hulu invite 2 weeks back, I haven't really taken much time to browse through the site (mainly because I was under the impression that Hulu = TV shows and after a quick glance I concluded that they haven't got any new shows to offer me). However, this weekend I took some time to look around Hulu and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

OMG111!!! Movies too‽

Contrary to popular belief (by popular I really mean my own), Hulu does not focus solely on TV. It appears that a very small section of the site is home to full-length streaming movies as well.

Full length streaming movies on Hulu

Full length streaming movies on Hulu

And like everything else on Hulu, you can take it and embed it anywhere you want.



If you're in the Hulu beta, check out and for the 10 movies shown above.

 
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