Two years after the Code Red and Nimda worms spread across the Internet and yahoo faced the Denial of Service (DOS) attack everyone thought that at least big companies must have taken the appropriate action to stop such attacks.
The experts have noticed a poorly programmed MSBlast worm spreading worldwide. It has already affected more than 330,000 computers running Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP. My computer was one of them! I found that only when I followed the instructions mentioned on C|Net.
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6600_7-5063736.html

The site microsoft.com was largely inaccessible for about four hours on friday, August 15. The company said the denial-of-service attack was unrelated to the MSBlast worm. Was it just a co-incidence? or was it a part of MSBlast worm? I have just noticed that windowsupdate.com site isn't working anymore! And microsoft.com homepage has changed its design. There are more than 12 links from its home page referring to the virus. The MSBlast has really shaken the mogul and has changed the net forever.

• The worm, started spreading early Monday, August 11.
• MSBlast does not spread via e-mail.
• It tries to connect a random IP address. If the IP address accepts the connection, it saves a file on the computer and use that computer to connect to a site. When a website receives a million hits per second, it can't handle the load of traffic and has to be shut. (Denial of Service)
• The worm is programmed to cause infected computers to send a flood of data to Microsoft's Windows Update service, (windowsupdate.com) starting August 15.
• The Update service suffered a different kind of denial-of-service attack on August 12 as people rushed to patch their PCs. The increased volume slowed, or prevented, access to the service.
• It scans for computers so widely that an unpatched Windows XP, 2000 or NT computer on the Internet could be infected in as little as 25 minutes. Windows 98 isn't affected by this virus.
• Home users with cable net are the most affected since their computers are always connected to the net and have an IP that doesn't change too frequently.
• MSBlast's first attack will last until the end of the year and in the latter half of each month for the first six months of 2004.
• The worm still hasn't reached the levels of Code Red II, which infected more than 300,000 servers in 10 hours.

What do you expect if you type 5+5 in the google search box?
Yes, you guessed it right. You can use google's built-in calculator function. You can use it for conversions as well, for e.g. 20 yards in feet, 100 miles in kilometers.

Google has just introduced a new operator to search for synonyms. You use it by adding a tilde (~). If you search for "friend" google will look only for the word friend. What if you want google to also consider "friends" and "friendship" and similar words? type ~friend instead of only friend. That's it. Yes, sometimes life is really that simple!

Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. There are limits. It doesn't appear that you can edit an alert, either the query itself or the address to which it goes. Instead you'll need to delete the alert and start over with the new one. (Each alert e-mail comes with instructions for deleting that alert.) You may have a maximum of fifty alerts per e-mail address.
http://www.google.com/newsalerts
You can use the advanced search page on Google News provides a number of ways to fine tune a search to eliminate unwanted results. You can incorporate these techniques in your Google news alert settings by selecting the conditions you want on the Google News advanced search page, then clicking the "Google Search" button. When the results page appears, copy the text that appears in the search box on that page and paste it into the box on the Google News Alerts home page labeled "News search."
So, what kinds of topics make for interesting News Alerts?
Anything that's interesting to you is a good subject for a News Alert. Many News Alerts are set up by people who are:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• tracking medical advances
• getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team

I noticed a few minutes back (2nd August 03 at 2:00 A. M.) that when I type google.com I am automatically taken to google.co.in site. It means google has finally set up an office in India and probably have staff too! (Other than Google robot). But now (after an hour) when I go to google.com I am not redirected, instead I have an link to "Go to Google Australia" on the google home page! Why should I go to Australia to search for Indian Curry? Funny!
Well now after an hour I am finding a link to "Go to Google India" on google page. But it has stopped redirecting me to .co.in site. If I type the address, I can access google pages in Marathi, Hindi, Gujrati etc. I clicked on Marathi. It did not work. What all I see is non readable characters on the screen. If I click on Google in English, I am taken to the main google.com site and not google.co.in where I can change the language.
Ridiculous!

I tried to avoid all type of music on the net since the quality was poor and it required a lot of efforts on both sides, A programmer and the user. Not Any More. Andromeda - is simple and powerful tool to play a full album or folder with a click. If you have a server with ASP or PHP support please click on the following link and download the software in zip format.
http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/step1b.asp
Upload the andromeda.php file in a new folder and also upload all the MP3 files you will like to share with others. Now when the user access the file, he will see the index of all the files, he will click on the file and it will start the song! It is not like any other file download since it takes your MP3 collection and turns it into a fully featured, on-demand, streaming website, one of the slickest looking systems.

The geeks are.... well geeks. They don't answer your emails. They don't have an eye for design. They don't understand humor. and so on...
I met an expert today (ofcourse online) Thomas Tremain, who is really an expert, knows what he can do and can't and delivers. Here is his site....
http://livehost.net
You can but 40 MB server space for a little more than a dollar! The server is pre-installed with a wide array of softwares. Highly recommended!

I think blogs are a great method for recording our times. As such, future historians will have a more balanced view of the past.
-- James Morris, Wales
The great thing about blogs is that anyone can set one up. The only problem is that anyone can set one up.
-- Guy Chapman, UK
"If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV," said Stefan Glanzer, one of the founders of blogging system 20six. "If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. "But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate," he said.
Mr Yates said part of the popularity of blogs was because the software used to create and maintain them was much easier to use than other webpage making tools. "To get yourself set up with a website and put interesting content on it there's a lot of hurdles to go through," he said. "Blogs are the democratisation of publishing," he said.

In the bad old days I used to telnet to the MySQL server and type select * from table; and then try to understand clueless error message. phpMyAdmin was a good solution to end the DOS style disaster But even MyAdmin was lacking something. Here is the miracle of Dadabase front end.
http://www.edatanew.com/
Browsing the database is just like browsing any other website. The no-frills design is easy to understand, fast and it simply works! You can use the demo version to create and learn SQL database.

I have recently written a PHP script to read your favorite RSS Feeds in your browser. You can use this cookie based feed reader that "remembers" your RSS feeds and display the contents everytime you visit this page.
http://shantanuoak.com/sites/simplefeed.php

Make the above mentioned page as your Home page. You can use the Active Desktop to make your desktop act like your own personal Web page. You can display pieces of your favorite RSS feeds directly on your desktop and keep them up-to-date automatically.
To enable the Active Desktop, right-click an empty area on the desktop, Select Properties and choose Web tab. Make sure "Show web content on my active desktop". You may select "My Current Home Page" as your desktop if you have made the above RSS feed reader page as your home page. To disable the Active Desktop, deselect "Show Web content".