SPY's Blog

Stylish add-on in FireFox .

2011-06-26T11:56:00.011+05:30

Add-ons are additional features which are developed by open source developers around the world. They create add-ons for a diverse of requirements. Some may be for visual features. Some for security and so on. Firefox has vaguely categorized this load of add-ons. We can browse these add-ns and can install the interested ones without affecting the basic functionality of Firefox.

One of the add-ons of firefox is STYLISH . It's an add-on for Visual performance. The basic capability of the add-on is that it can change the complete outlook of any site.It does not mean that the site will be changed forever and we are hacking it. It's appearance will be changed only inside our browser. We can apply a common setting for all the sites. Or we can apply different setting for each site. It depends upon the individuals taste. We can download styles from a large library. Or we can create our own style. Stylish is basically a CSS application.

Advantages :

We can edit the sites appearance to fit to our taste. One notable advantage I found is this. Most of us will have sensible eyes. Also to our disadvantage, many of the sites will use the basic layout of white background with black fonts. This will itch our eyes and our eyes will become tired soon while browsing. Using stylish, we can change these layouts to fit to our eyes and enjoy browsing.

Disadvantage :

Anything which has an advantage might have some disadvantage. Here in Stylish we have one disadvantage. Some styles might use up your RAM for considerable amounts. There are many styles which use the RAM in a minimal manner. But some styles which look awesome might end up consuming our RAM. The effects are displayed more n sites which have large amounts of videos, social sites. But one can control this problem by creating his own style by using the desired style as his template.

Firefox 5 is awesome !

2011-06-26T11:36:00.002+05:30

Recently Mozilla corporation released Firefox 5. It has all the features of the previous versions but has also included some new features which are wonderful. One of the attractive features introduced is App Tab .

What is App Tab

It is also a tab but distinctive in the way it is represented. A normal tab can be PINNED as App Tab. After doing so, the App Tab will in a minimized fashion. It will not have a cross mark. So it cannot be closed. This marks the feature of App Tab.

Advantage ?

I'll explain the advantage through an example. Everyone of us will use a search engine for the most of our browsing time.So if we pin the tab for the search engine as an app tab, then it will be occupying a lesser space in the Tab area and also one will not accidentally close the tab.

In the similar manner, we can pin our social-site tab (mostly Facebook) so that it will remain in the browser without distracting us from other tasks. In case of Social-sites, the app tab will change its colour when some notification occurs. Ain't it cool ? Try it.

Normalization puzzle solved !

2011-06-16T19:31:00.002+05:30

Everyone of us would have studied Database in our curriculum. Some of us might have worked in some of the DB applications too. But from the beginning , many of us might not have understood the concept of Normalization. Normalization is one of the very important topics in Database Management System. Here I've got a link for a video, which explains the concept of Normalization in an easy manner :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg7r3DgS3rA&feature=related

It explains only up to 3rd Normal Form. Though we will not use Normalization for our normal working , the knowledge about the concept is important.

How to get the new Yahoo! Beta mail.

2011-03-11T20:25:00.005+05:30

Everyone would have created a yahoo mail account and probably left it untouched for years. The main reason for this is the interface and functionality which is irksome in yahoo! when compared to gmail. Gmail have been ruling the email world and is considered the most functional email client.

But yahoo has done a recent breakthrough with its new Yahoo! Mail Beta which is still under testing. But it is tempting the trial user to shift his focus towards it. The interface is simply beautiful and smooth.

But the problem is that many people in India have not got the invite. Only some countries have received the invitation. So now I describe how to get the new yahoo! mail beta without their invitation.

Open your Yahoo! account.
Goto your account inforamtion page (by Clicking Your name hyperlink and then "Account" below it)
Goto "Account Settings " tab and click "Set language, site and timezone "
Set the "Regional Site and Language" to "Yahoo! UK"
Then save the settings and log off.
Log in again and go to the mail page
There an invite to get the new Yahoo! beta will be present next to your name hyperlink
Click it to get the new Yahoo! mail beta.
After all this , set your "Regional Site and Language" to "Yahoo! India"

Now you are all set to enjoy the new yahoo! mail beta. Good luck !

How to make a video from a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation :

2010-10-13T15:16:00.008+05:30

Many of us will not be having acute Graphics and Animation handling skills. But most of us know very well how to use the Microsoft Powerpoint tool. It is as easy as using MS word. Once we open the tool, it is very much user-friendly and we come to know the features which can be implemented in our presentation. Other such tools would be very complicated to use and has a lot of abstruse widgets to confuse us.
Suppose you need to create a presentation for a department level function. Instead using GREAT tools like Adobe After-Effects, Flash, Maya, 3DS, Blender you surely would prefer MS Powerpoint. But consider you have some technical problem in the host machine. To start with , the mouse will not work properly , your host has other version of MS Office, finally your college does not have MS Office itself (this would sometimes happen in my college). What is the use of all your creativity hidden in your presentation ? TO save your valuable work at situations like this you can convert your presentation into a video file and keep a back-up. In case of emergency, you could use your video.
Now , to convert your presentation into a video you don't have any in-built capabilities in your MS Powerpoint. For that you have many tools.

One of the tools I have used here is E M Powerpoint video converter.Open the tool. The home page looks like this :

Now click "Add Files". After selecting the file the next window is this:

This explains why I chose this tool. It has a lot of format support and so is very rich in features.After selecting the corresponding format you reach this window :

Here you can set other options like output folder, video quality and others.Then you click the "Convert" button.It gives the finished video.I also give you a sample video for your satisfaction:

The important things to remember is that in the presentation, you must have done "Rehearse Timings".
The advantage of using this tool is that you can use Windows Movie maker to join all the videos of presentations done with different templates into a single video. Because you cannot join two presentations done with different templates into a single presentation.

Opera is vulnerable

2010-04-30T18:34:00.002+05:30

Vulnerability intelligence vendor Secunia warns that a highly critical remotely exploitable vulnerability has been identified in the recently released Opera 10.52. The browser developer has patched the potential arbitrary code execution flaw in Opera 10.53.

The issue was identified by a programmer named Mathias Karlsson, who was investigating a stack exhaustion bug in WebKit, the popular rendering engine used by Safari, Chrome and other browsers. "The script simply fills the DOM document with tags and within seconds, causes both Safari and Opera to crash. […] Opera does not run WebKit but it turned out that the exploit made it crash for other reasons," the researcher writes on his blog, where an exploit is also available.

"The vulnerability is caused due to an error when e.g. continuously writing content to a page using document.write() and results in a function call using uninitialised memory when a user visits a specially crafted web page," explains Secunia. The company attributed a severity level of "highly critical" to the vulnerability, because successful exploitation may allow for arbitrary code to be executed on the system.

Opera acknowledged the existence of an issue in the release notes accompanying Opera 10.53 RC1, which became available to users yesterday. However, the browser developer does not confirm the critical impact of the bug and only refer to it as a "possible" vulnerability. "A crash was reported as a security issue yesterday, and we are still investigating the issue. However, we do have a fix ready for testing already," the company said.

Even though at the time of writing this article, there was no official announcement yet, the final builds of Opera 10.53 for Windows and Mac have appeared on the official FTP servers. In addition, Karlsson advises Safari users to stop using the browser until the problem is thoroughly investigated and points out that this WebKit bug cannot be exploited in Chrome, due to its sandboxing model.

Taken from : http://news.softpedia.com/news/Highly-Critical-Vulnerability-Discovered-in-Opera-140962.shtml

Facebook not a SECURED site!?

2010-04-18T18:55:00.004+05:30

Social sites are becoming one of the best ways to become popular these days.We try to keep in touch with our friends through these social networking sites these.They might be our friends with whom we have contact everyday or they might be the oldies.So we try to live a virtual life in this virtually large space so that we can be happy with our friends (virtually).
What we actually do in these sites? We add more and more friends, expose our identity (like sharing our e-mail ids,photos, and all other personals) and keep in touch with our friends.Since it is a social site anyone can view anyone's details unless they have given the right protection options.Many of us still don't know how to be secure on the net.So usually many of the security options were implemented by the sites themselves.The main target of the hackers will be the passwords and similar details. The password is the main component which is used to control many features in our profile.Understanding the importance of passwords, a protocol is developed. It is SSL.The techincal details of SSL can be found in this link:
SSL
Among the social networking sites are the most famous Google,Hi5,Facebook and all others.And in the recent days Facebook is gaining a great popularity.But people always didn't check for there security and get drowned in the available facilites.One of the main features needed for the Social networking sites, the SSL, is not present in Facebook.

*If you try to connect through https:// , the following page will be displayed in the web browsers

This means that the chances to break one's password gets increased.
Many of us would have uploaded our personal details like photos in our profile. If one's password is vulnerable for attack so is their profile.Also there has been a buzz that Facebook retains the photos even after one deletes his account.This is another serious issue which leads to our photos being present on the web without our knowledge.
It is high-time that we understand life on the net is becoming more vulnerable these days and learn more about security in the web.