I knew this site wouldn't be safe from them for very long.

I guess when I got rid of the referrer page, the spam bots decided to hit the comments system instead. I woke up this morning, opened up Outlook and found my Junk Mail box filled with 47 messages. Now I usually don't receive more that 3-4 pieces of junk mail per day, so I knew something was wrong...

I've made a couple of changes to the system that should hopefully prevent another flood. First, I've reset the URL-parsing flag to 0. Any URL's you now post in your comments will no longer be converted to "live" links. This was the quick and easy one, but it's obviously not going to deter the bots completely. So I also coded in a code-verification system similar to the one that's used for forum registrations. For now, the code string that's embedded in the image is static, so if your browser remembers what you type into textboxes, you won't have to re-type the string in everytime. Even then, it's just five characters long. I did this to strike a balance...I didn't want to inconvenience people who are leaving genuine comments by making them type a different string everytime. I might change the string once every month, depending on how effective this system proves to be.

Sorry for the inconvenience, people. It's a step I had to take. :)

So I didn't blog for five whole days again, and the best I could do was to write about spammers? :)

Well, there hasn't been much going on in the tech world in this last week, to be honest - at least nothing that got me very interested. I was also busy catching up with the backlog of coursework that had accumulated because of the Redmond trip. Had a math midterm on Friday (yes, already...and yes, I know that the quarter system sucks), which went pretty well.

For some reason, lots of people have been showing interest in that drive enclosure that I got a couple of weeks ago. Russ sent me an email the other day, hoping he could get it delivered to the UK. I got a couple of phonecalls and IM's from friends who saw the pictures I had put up here, and a few people in the lab asked me about it on Thursday too. It is a nifty little thing, and I think it's the size and design that gets most people interested.

While we were sending emails about the enclosure back and forth, Russ also reminded me about S/MIME certificates. I had read about these a long time ago, and I had toyed with the idea of getting one, but never got around to doing it. Thanks to the nudge from Russ, I now have certs from Thawte for all my email accounts, and I will be sending secure email henceforward. :)

I have this rather strange desire to get pizza for dinner tonight (and to think I was completely sick of pizza while I was in the dorms last year), so that's what I'll be doing. More later.

I had to remove the Referrers page, and we can all thank the spammers for that.

It's disgusting. Two days after I put the page up, the logs started filling up with a bunch of useless links. I tried blocking out the spam bots by banning certain keywords from the referrer, but they just kept mutating. IP banning is useless in this case, since the junk comes from a wide variety of addresses. I even tried Google's new rel="nofollow" tag a day after it was announced, but it still didn't get any better.

I don't have the time to figure out any creative new ways to combat referrer spam, and the page just looked ugly and useless with all the junk in there. The simplest solution was to get rid of it, so that's what I did. I can still check the private logs to find the same information, and that's all that really matters...

Now this is some very interesting stuff I picked up from the OSNews feed...

Novell's Nat Friedman put up a bunch of demos demonstrating Beagle on Linux. Beagle is an indexing & search utility similar to Apple's upcoming Spotlight (both similar to Be's BeFS regarding "live queries" and metadata, but Be's solution could not search inside documents as both Beagle and Spotlight can).

On first glance, it looks and behaves a lot like the desktop search apps we have today, but the key difference here is the inclusion of APIs, which means that developers will be able to leverage the features of Beagle in their own applications. This is huge, and it's what will make Beagle and Spotlight different from current metadata-based "instant" search utilities. Longhorn is currently in the hush-hush phase, so nobody knows what the folks at Redmond have in store for us come 2006 as far as search goes. Maybe WinHEC and/or PDC 2005 will shed some light on it in April/September?

Anyway, on to the demos then. The "live query" one is especially cool.
More information on Beagle can be found here.

Ben Goodger, one of the key figures in the Firefox team, announced today that he now works for Google.

As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general. I'm sure you have many questions. While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises.

Read more...

Does this rekindle the possibility of Google entering the browser-wars with another Gecko-based variant? Speculation galore! :)

(Continued from the previous post)

Two days before interview day - everything is ready, and I'm all set to go. I send out an email to the recruiting coordinator, asking her which product groups I will be interviewing with. The reply blows me away - Avalon and the Microsoft Business Framework. Avalon! Man, this is cutting-edge stuff! And if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I've been following Avalon along very closely through Channel9 videos, MSDN and other sources. And the MBF team creates dev tools for business applications. I can't contain the excitement for the next two days. On January 18th, I'm finally in Redmond, WA, staying in a very nice room at the Courtyard by Marriott. :)

January 19th, 12:00PM - I take a taxi to Building 19, check-in with the receptionist, and wait in the lobby for the technical recruiter to call me in at 12:30. I meet several other intern candidates there. Turns out I'm the only second-year undergrad there...uh oh. :) Everyone gets called in one by one by different recruiters, and I'm the only one left. I pick up another can of orange juice. :D Finally, my recruiter comes along and calls me in. We talk for a little while, and then he asks me a series of general HR questions and notes down whatever I'm saying. After about an hour of that, he points me to the "Recruit Shuttle" that's meant to take candidates to the various buildings around the insanely large campus. During the short trip to the next building, I talk to the shuttle driver, and she tells me that Microsoft is planning to expand the campus even further to make room for 12,000 employees. Wow...

So anyway, my first two interviews are with the Business Framework folks. Very friendly people. Lots and lots of coding on the whiteboard. Some general questions too. The first interviewer points to Bill Gates' office from the window while we're talking after the interview. :) The other two interviews are in a different building, this time with the Avalon team. More questions, still more coding. It's almost 6:00PM by the time everything's done. Yeah, long day, but lots of fun. The last interviewer offers to show me a couple of demos of Avalon. My eyes light up. Then he realizes he doesn't have them readily available. Darn it! :)

Later that evening, my brother (who was with me) and I meet up with one of his friends who works at Microsoft and lives in Seattle, and we go out for dinner and look around the place. The next evening, I fly back and I'm in LA by Wednesday night.

Last night, I checked my mail after I got back from uni and found a message from the recruiter waiting for me - "Microsoft Interview Results." Part of the second paragraph read...

I wish that I had better news for you, but unfortunately we aren't able to extend you an offer at this time.

Ah, pity. Well, there's always next year. I'm still extremely glad that I was given the chance to go up to the final stage of the process. And the all-expenses-paid trip to Redmond, of course. :) It was the first set of technical interviews that I've ever had, and I got a chance to learn a lot about how it works. All in all, the whole process was a lot of fun and very exciting, and although I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't work out, I can definitely say it was worth taking the shot.

So what's next? I'm not sure myself. We'll see...

No posts since last Monday? What have I been up to? The post title should give you a hint. ;) Remember I mentioned that January was going to be a very interesting and important month for me? This was why. :)

So during a Microsoft info-session on campus in October last year, I asked the visiting campus recruiter if Microsoft accepts many second-year undergrad students for summer internships. She told me that they normally accept students who have completed at least two full years, and are currently at least in their third year, but that it's possible and worth a shot. Figuring that I have nothing to lose, I hand over a copy of my resume to her.

In early November, I'm pleasantly surprised by an email from a recruiting coordinator at Microsoft informing me that I have been selected for a 30-minute interview at the Career Center. In mid-November, I go up to the Career Center for an interview with the SDET Technical Lead of Microsoft's Enterprise Management Division. He asks me a few general questions, one design/coding question, and one testing question. Before the actual interview, I fill out an application form that asks me for my preferences. I apply for the Software Design Engineer (SDE), Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET), and Program Manager (PM) positions, in that order. I opt for a position in any of the available product groups/business units, but I make it a point to mention that Windows Client (Longhorn) would be my first choice. *grin*

In early December, I get another, even bigger surprise - this time, an email from a recruiting coordinator informing me that Microsoft would like to schedule on-site interviews with me at the Redmond headquarters in mid-January! I also notice that I've been given a chance to interview for my first choice - a Software Design Engineer (SDE) intern. At this point, I'm extremely excited! According to the documents and emails that I receive, Microsoft will be paying for pretty much everything - the round-trip airfare, hotel charges for two-nights, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and taxi charges to move around in Redmond/Seattle. I obviously accept the invitation, fill out a series of online forms, and wait impatiently for the day to arrive...

Stay tuned for part 2. :)

Google just released v2.0 of its free Picasa photo management software today.

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you know. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print at home, make gift CDs, instantly share via Hello™, and even put pictures on your own blog.

If you work with lots of photographs/wallpapers and you haven't tried Picasa before, try it out. The new version features a changed interface (remember that Google bought over Picasa) and new one-click fixes and effects, along with some other smaller features like adding captions to your pictures etc.

Go here if you have no idea what I'm talking about.

SyncBack is a powerful freeware program that helps you backup and synchronise your files to: the same drive; a different drive or medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc); an FTP server; a Network; or a Zip archive.

Some of SyncBack's many features include integration with the Windows Task Scheduler, detailed and easy to read log files in HTML format (that can be automatically emailed), simulated backups, file filters, sub-directory selection, copy verification, background backups, auto-close of programs, and more.

Time for another software recommendation - SyncBack. :)
As mentioned in the excerpt above, it's a free backup and synchronization utility, and it's just the app I was looking for this morning.

It sports a nice, clean interface that allows you to switch between a "simple mode" and an "expert mode" depending on how much fine-control you want over the process. I really like the "Simulated Run" feature which basically simulates the backup/sync procedure so that you can see which files will be transferred which way when you actually perform the operation. Of course, like any good backup software should, it also allows you to setup multiple backup/sync jobs, and schedule them to run at specific times during the day. It just works really well with my new external USB 2.0 disk. The FTP server synchronization feature looks very interesting, although I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

If you've been looking for such an app, try out SyncBack and let me know your opinions too. I don't think you'll be disappointed. :)

It's so tiny!

It's powered through the USB port (no clunky power adapters to lug around), and it came with a nice protective leather case. It actually slips into my pocket too. It's so convenient, I'm going to order another one for the second drive.

As an update to the post I made a couple of days ago quoting Thurrott, here's a piece that was posted on Neowin with a more specific and slightly different schedule:

If you're wondering what's happening with Longhorn and whether we'll see Longhorn at WinHEC 2005 then wonder no more.

It's not likely that we will see the first beta of Longhorn at WinHEC 2005, however, Microsoft may release a slimmed down M9 build at the conference. More on that when we hear more

As for dates:

Milestone 9 (platform complete) - 16th March 2005
Beta 1 - 25th May 2005
Beta 2 - 12th October 2005
Release Candidate 0 - 22nd February 2006
Release Candidate 1 - 12th April 2006
Release To Manufacturing - 24th May 2006

Source: Neowin.net

And while on the topic of Longhorn, the Avalon CTP, originally released only to MSDN subscribers is now available as a public download. Time to start playing with XAML!

Paul Thurrott reports:

The release schedule I published in The Road to Windows "Longhorn" 2004 was accurate at the time it was published. However, as is so often the case, Microsoft has revised that schedule. What hasn't changed is the May 2006 release date: While internal discussions at Microsoft recently questioned whether August 2006 would be more viable, the word has come down from on high: May 2006 is non-negotiable. Longhorn will be released to manufacturing in May 2006, according to senior Microsoft executives.

Here's the new schedule:
* Longhorn Beta 1 code complete
March 16, 2005
* Longhorn Beta 1 internal release and domain rollout
April 2005
* Longhorn Beta 2 (and product) code complete
July 1, 2005
* Longhorn Beta 2 internal release
Q3 2005
* Longhorn Beta 2 public release
September 2005 (PDC 2005)
* Longhorn Release Candidate 0 (RC0) internal release
Q4 2005
* Longhorn Release Candidate 1 (RC1) internal release
March 2006
* Longhorn release to manufacturing (RTM)
May 2006

Source: WinSupersite

Given the dates of WinHEC 2005 (April) and PDC 2005 (September), the current schedule makes a lot of sense. Let's hope the period of delays has ended. This should be an exciting year. :)

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo recently decided to switch back to Windows XP from OS X (yeah, I can see the shock on some of your faces already :P).

As expected, the Apple zealot army marched in and began the flaming. Neil Turner has more on the subject, including a mention of how this plague has now affected the Mozilla/Firefox community as well. Sad, but true...

You might have noticed the lack of updates during the past few days.
If you visit the same forums that I do, you might have noticed that I've barely posted anything since the weekend.
If you've sent me an email, you might have noticed that I haven't responded to it yet, even though I usually reply within an hour (as a friend, Adam, pointed out at yesterday's ACM meeting).

The fact that I'm posting this message should tell you that I'm fine. :P It's just that I have no way of connecting to the net from my room right now. The Co-Op's wireless network that I used to connect to has gone belly-up (possibly due to two weeks of crappy rain?). I'm currently using my cellphone as a Bluetooth modem to establish a dial-up connection, but the cell doesn't even come close to giving me the same speeds as a regular land-line would. It took literally two minutes just to load this page so that I could post. Yeesh...

I'm *sick* of the unreliability of this shitty wireless network, so I'm finally making alternate arrangements this week (should have done it a long time ago). Until then, I'll probably just have to use the university network in the library or the SEASnet labs. :S

Just give me a few days. I'll be back, and I have a lot to post about.
I feel so damn disconnected right now...

I've been using w.bloggar to publish to this blog for a long time. Development had slowed down for a while, but I was happy to see that v4.0 was released two days ago. Lots and lots of new features in this release, and it now supports so many more CMS's/services - Blogger, b2, MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool, BlogWorks XML, Blogalia, Drupal, Xoops, E-Xoops, Upsaid, PostNuke, TheBlog, Blog-City, blojsom, Roller Weblogger, Domino, LiveJournal, EraBlog.NET, pMachine, TypePad and YACS.

If you're looking for a free offline blog publishing app, and w.bloggar supports your CMS/service, I do recommend giving it a shot. :)

Remember the two old laptops that I talked about last July (one of which I wanted to convert to a digital picture-frame)?

Well, the picture-frame mod never worked out for several different reasons, but I went ahead and ordered a 2.5" USB 2.0 aluminium drive enclosure a couple of days ago. I have those two notebook drives lying around that aren't being used, so I thought it would be nice to use them as storage/backup drives. They're not huge (the higher of the two is only 12GB), but they should easily be able to hold backups of all my coursework. The nice thing is that the drive is powered by the USB port too, so there's no need for a separate power adapter. :)

Russell Beattie has a great post entitled "Microsoft's Consumer Electronics Endgame"
Good to know that there are those who saw the big picture. It's a pity so many people don't see where things are going and choose to focus on petty things like an Xbox blue-screening while running an unreleased game.

Russell Beattie thinking of buying a Microsoft Smartphone? Wow, has hell frozen over? Have pigs started to fly? :D

I watched this video almost immediately after it was posted last evening, and I wanted to blog about it, but it was time for dinner (after which I ended up watching four back-to-back episodes of "Who's Line Is It Anyway" on Comedy Central). Anyway, that's beside the point. :P

Daniel [Lehenbauer] is a software design engineer on the Avalon team and he's responsible for the 3D features of Avalon.

Here he gives us a demo of Avalon 3D. Really cool stuff. Originally designed to only run on the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, Avalon is now supported on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. In fact, the demo here is done on XP.

Bear in mind that this video is intended to be viewed from a developer's standpoint, so if all you're expecting is fancy graphics and eye-candy, this is not for you. With that said, I highly recommend watching it if you're interested in seeing what XAML is like, and how convenient it makes things. If you like what you see, head over to Daniel's blog for more info.

Update: Read the comments for an interesting short discussion. :)

Marc Orchant of "The Office Weblog" looks at another one of the all-too-common misleading "reviews" that portray Thunderbird 1.0 as an "Outlook-killer"

From the new PCMag review:

The program is highly efficient, occupying less than 20MB when installed—pretty good for an e-mail client that, with the right extensions, competes more with Outlook than with Outlook Express.

Hahaha, yeah right. Thanks for my laugh of the day. :)
Remember this post I made back in December?

As a follow-up to an earlier post, I just wanted to remind everyone that CES 2005 begins today at Las Vegas.

Obviously, not all of us can attend, so what can you do to get a glimpse of all the cool stuff that'll be unveiled? Keep checking Engadget, of course (better yet, subscribe to their feed if you haven't already)! And don't forget to watch the live video broadcast of Bill Gates' keynote presentation this evening at 6:30PM PST.

Two very cool pieces of news caught my eye this morning while going through my feeds.

The first is the Age of Empires III announcement. Some of my friends in Bombay and I used to play AOE, and it was a very fun game. Now Ensemble Studios is back with the AOE III announcement, and the graphics really look stunning for a game belonging to this genre. Check out some screenshots and info at IGN and GameSpy.
Update: More screenshots here. Wow, look at the detail!

The second is Neowin's exclusive look at "Magneto" - the codename for Microsoft's Windows Mobile 2005 platform. As some of you already know, I've been hoping to get my hands on the Audiovox SMT5600 which runs WM 2003 SE, and 2005 looks even better. When someone like Russell Beattie, who is a huge proponent of Nokia's Series60 platform and a very knowledgable person in these matters, admits that "[Microsoft] has passed Nokia in terms of power and flexibility," you know it has to be good. He says, "if you want a great smartphone with video, camera, and music support, the Audivox is a smaller, more functional phone to buy." I'm still envious of AT&T customers who can get the SMT5600 for $25 on Amazon with a one-year contract, while the best T-Mobile can offer is the Nokia 6600 which has been out for ages. Anyone want to buy it for me at full price as a late Christmas gift? :P
Maybe T-Mo will offer a WM2005-based phone later this year? Heh, I'm not keeping my hopes up...

The results are now available.
Funnily enough, many of the "Engadget Picks" are the ones I actually voted for. :)

January should prove to be a very interesting month. Techies that keep up with the news should know that there are a couple of big events coming up this month.

The first is the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at Las Vegas this Wednesday (Jan 5th), where the big names in the world of electronics showcase some of their latest products. The fact that Bill Gates is one of the keynote speakers at this year's CES has led to speculations that Microsoft may announce the successor to the Xbox this week! Since there has been no official word from Microsoft, it's obviously still just a rumour, but one that could very well be true. If you remember, the original Xbox was first announced at the 2001 CES. ;) Of course, it'll also be fun to see what other cool new gadgets other companies have in store for us.
Find out more about CES 2005.

The second event this month is the Mac World Expo in San Fransisco (MWSF). And we have even more speculation - a $500 "headless" iMac? An Apple cellphone? The iPod Flash? Upgrades to the current Macintosh lineup? The first would be an unprecedented move on Apple's part, and it'll be interesting to see if Steve Jobs has finally succumbed to the fact that lowering prices is the only way Apple can hope to pull up it's market share to a respectable number. :P Expect a lot of the usual hype during the coming weeks. It should be an interesting event, in any case. :)
Find out more about MWSF 2005.

Finally, there's something else happening later this month. I may or may not talk about it (I'll decide later) towards the end of January but that's all I'm going to say about it at this point. Don't ask. :)

The new quarter starts on Thursday, so I'll be heading back to uni this week. Would have loved a longer break (damn you, Berkeley people), but this is the price we have to pay for starting Fall quarter so late in September. Just going to relax and enjoy the last couple of days before getting back to the hectic life...

Two new site themes to choose from - Sunshine and Aurora, both very different from each other and the Winter theme. :)