Microsoft Office 2007 for A$75?

Well, not sure if this shows how desperate Microsoft is, or if they are just being philantrophic towards academia, but you can get a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for A$75 as long as you have an email address at a registered university. Check out http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au/ for more info.

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Posted at 09:49PM Apr 16, 2007 by samktan in IT  |  Comments[2]

Google Developer Days is coming!

Google Developer Days is coming to a city near you, read all about it at http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130672-c,companynews/article.html then sign up now at http://www.google.com/events/developerday/index.html

Hurry, hurry, hurry ! :-D

Posted at 07:48AM Apr 15, 2007 by samktan in IT  |  Comments[0]

Instant Messaging

If you spend anywhere near as much time on the internet that I have, you'll know about instant messaging. Originally started by a small company called Mirabilis, their product "ICQ" (I seek you) was given away to everyone on the internet to enable communities or groups of people to send short messages in chat-like fashion. Understandably, ICQ came to be the most downloaded application on the internet, followed very closely by Winamp.

Since then, there have been many imitators such as AOL Instant Messaging, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, including an open standards instant messaging protocol called Jabber. Most users by now have more than one IM account, and a number of clients such as Trillian for Windows, Pidgin for Linux (formerly called Gaim) and Adium (for Mac OS X) allow users to have one application that connects to multiple IM services.

So I use Adium and I think it works really well, I connect to AIM, Yahoo!, Google, MSN and even Sun's own corporate instant messaging service hosted at im-amer.sun.com. If you do go online with an IM client, drop me a message, it's quite easy to find me. :-)

Posted at 01:54PM Apr 10, 2007 by samktan in IT  |  Comments[0]

Managing Bookmarks

If you're like me, you have more than one computer and they all have different bookmark collections. I've tried various means to keep them synchronised and the latest one is Google Toolbar http://www.google.com/toolbar available for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. I'm going to see if I can get my bookmark-life organized, try it out and tell me what you think. If you have a better idea, I'm interested in hearing about that too. BTW, I use a Mac and the del.icio.us extension doesn't work well for me, so forget about that.

Posted at 04:12PM Apr 04, 2007 by samktan in IT  |  Comments[5]

Linux is dead?

Saw this article on the internet bemoaning the death of Community Linux, makes for a good read, try it.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5306151939.html

Posted at 02:56PM Apr 04, 2007 by samktan in IT  |  Comments[0]

Windows Genuine Advantage

So everyone knows that Microsoft Windows (in all it's incarnations) is the most pirated software on the planet, followed very closely by Microsoft Office. In 2004, Microsoft introduced a new component via the Windows Update service called Windows Genuine Advantage. The WGA was initially designed to inform users if they were using copies of Windows XP that were suspected to be pirated or illegal. Back then WGA didn't do anything other than to pop-up an alert window telling users to check the authenticity of the copy of Windows XP running on that computer.

Three years later, WGA has evolved to the point where if your copy of Windows XP is suspected of being illegal, it will pop-up an alert window to tell you to legalise your copy, otherwise after 30 days, Windows XP will only run in "reduced functionality" mode, where the user cannot launch any applications other than Internet Explorer, and even then IE will only run for one hour, supposedly just enough time for the user to get to the Microsoft update website, type in a credit card number and buy a legal license key to legalise their copy.

Needless to say, the hacker community wouldn't and didn't stand for this, and a whole underground community sprung up to circumvent the WGA mechanism. For every version of WGA that Microsoft released, the hackers release a patch (called a crack) to bypass it, which Microsoft would then fix in an update, which the hackers would then release a new patch, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

If you are interested to know what kind of energy and effort that have been put into this to-and-fro battle, check out this page http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/09/27/remove-bypass-patch-and-disable-microsoft-windows-genuine-advantage-wga-validation-version-157080-with-legitcheckcontroldll-crack/ or go to Google and search for "WGA crack".

NB: Applying any of these patches runs the risk of damaging your copy of Windows XP to the point where you may have to reinstall Windows XP. I am not suggesting you try any of these patches nor to use illegally acquired software, I am only highlighting the high cost of protecting software from piracy and to ask at what point the cost exceeds the "supposed" revenue lost.

Posted at 01:05PM Apr 03, 2007 by samktan in IT  |  Comments[0]