Hide your tracks at work ???

 

We all spend some of our time at work doing things that have nothing to do with our job. We surf the Web. We play games. Sure, we all need our downtime, and the enlightened manager knows that. But still, we'd rather just surf in private than deal with the raised eyebrows.

That's why we need ways to ensure that when our boss surprises us or sneaks up behind us, she'll think that we're actually working. Here's a list of apps and services that help.

Camouflaged Web services

SpreadTweet If you're a Twitter fanatic, try SpreadTweet. The software hides your Twitter stream in what looks like an Excel window. It displays everything in plain text to make it look like a real spreadsheet. It's sure to fool any boss.

1cup1coffee 1cup1coffee looks like a Windows Explorer pane (so don't use it on a Mac), but all those Word documents and Powerpoint presentations are actually a collection of Flash games. Simply click on one of the "files" and you can play a game in what looks like your Windows Explorer window. If you hear your boss, you can hit the back button and you'll be brought back to the file listing.

Anonymizer If you don't want the IT folks to know what you're up to, spend $30 and get Anonymizer. The software redirects your Web traffic through its servers to not only safeguard your IP from outside sources, but also to get your employer's IT people off your trail.

C.H.I.M.P. Rearview Monitor Mirror While playing a game or doing something you shouldn't, just glance up at the C.H.I.M.P. Rearview Monitor Mirror to see if your boss is approaching from behind. The mirror won't hide what you're doing, but it will give you some time to switch to something more appropriate. And in case you're wondering, C.H.I.M.P. stands for Chimp Has Invincible Monkey Powers. Yeah, I don't get it either. But it is worth the $6.99 price tag.

Don's Boss Page Don's Boss Page (no relation) is full of great boss trickery. If you want to aimlessly browse the Web, but make it sound like you're working, you can keep clicking the site's keyboard audio clips to make others think you're typing.

Quick tip: Resize your windows When I was an accountant, I used Outlook. To make everyone think I was so engrossed in my e-mail, I resized Firefox to fit perfectly in the Outlook preview pane. Anyone who walked by thought I was just reading an e-mail. If they ever got too close, I'd switch to another message. It worked beautifully.

Don't Panic 1.2 If you don't want to get busted by the boss, try installing Don't Panic 1.2 onto your Windows machine. The software will allow you to minimize multiple windows at the same time. You can also maximize multiple windows simultaneously to ensure your boss will be happy when they walk by.

Or just use keyboard shortcuts Brush up on your knowledge of keyboard shortcuts. Whenever you hear someone coming, you can quickly drop a few keys and you'll immediately look like you're working.  

StealthSwitch You'll have to pay $40 to get it, but StealthSwitch is worth the price -- until your boss finds it. Once connected to your computer via USB, StealthSwitch sits on the floor. While playing a game or doing something you shouldn't at work, you can quickly tap the StealthSwitch when you hear your boss approaching. It immediately makes the current window invisible and brings you back to a window that's related to your work. Once your boss walks away, you can tap the StealthSwitch again to get back to your game.

The Last ( and my fav. too )  $25 USB Panic Button is similar, if you're quicker with your hands than your mouse and don't mind a garish missile-launch control button sitting on your desk. Simply push the plastic covering up, press the red button, and the tool will automatically change the screen on your computer to a spreadsheet, your favorite picture, your company's Web site, or anything else you set it to switch to.

from CNET …

Njoy … (your work) …

Access any Hard Drive from internet …

 

PogoPlug, available in North America as of today, is a cheap, straightforward, single-purpose device that aims to transform network-attached storage into an appliance. It combines any old USB hard drive with your existing Internet connection, and then, voila: everything delicious and convenient about network-attached storage is now within reach.

What is network-attached storage, you ask? It's any device that makes a hard drive available on a network and/or the Internet. Having a network-attached storage device means you can: access all your music, movies, and critical documents, no matter where you are; back up your important files to a single location; and share all your photos, media, and anything else with friends -- without the intervening step of uploading them to YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Here's how it works.

The PogoPlug is $99, and no bigger than the wall plate for a light switch. It resembles an oversized wall wart (like the one hanging off the end of your cell phone charger).

By design, it's dead easy. You plug it into the wall, and into your home router via an ethernet cable, and then into an external USB 2.0-compatible hard drive (or even USB thumb drive) which you've probably got sitting around anyway (and if you don't, they can be had very cheaply).

Go online, register your PogoPlug, and voila --  the drive connected to the PogoPlug is now accessible via my.pogoplug.com. No setting up IP addresses for your home server, or tunneling through your firewall, or needing a spare computer to use as a media server --  all of that is taken care of by a combination of firmware in the PogoPlug and an independent back-end service running on Cloud Engine's own servers.

And this is what it does.

Aside from all the things that any network-attached storage device is capable of, the PogoPlug does a number of nifty things, including automatically generating thumbnails for your media and transcoding video on the fly so that it can be streamed to remote devices without you having to wait for the whole thing to download first.

There's even an iPhone application in case you want to, say, access to every vacation photo you've ever taken, ever. Or swap out your tired playlist for some new music, even if you're in Aruba and your hard drive is in Saskatchewan.

Sharing files with friends is even easier --  you just punch in their email address and the PogoPlug software emails them a link; they don't even have to register. There's no backup software specific to the PogoPlug, though, which, unfortunately, means backing up is still a drag-and-drop operation.

Because it's based on the ultra-low-power Marvell chipset (Marvell works with the same ARM chips that show up in cell phones and portable gaming devices like the Nintendo DS), the PogoPlug draws fewer than 5 watts of power. Most external hard drives are smart enough to turn themselves off after a pre-set period of inactivity, so together the two devices aren't going to draw a lot of power unless you're hitting the server all day long --  even then, it's a lot less than the 20-100 watts that would be required to run a full-blown laptop or tower-based server.

If you want to get really crazy, Cloud Engine's engineers have apparently created an API for the PogoPlug. This means you could access it from any other website, thus making it a DIY media server. However, that would mean that your home or apartment would then be a DIY colocation facility, which is fine if you're sharing baby pictures but not so great if you're hosting business-critical files. Either way, it's nice to have the versatility, and it probably means hackers will come up with a number of cool, off-label uses for the device. 

Njoy …

China's Challenge to Intel !!!

Most of the people like me , know that there is only one major brand of processors are widely used and that is INTEL ... right ?? then then got AMD as their competitor .... and now, like every other markets , china is trying to get in this processor business too !!!

In California last week, Chinese researchers unveiled details of a microprocessor that they hope will bring personal computing to most ordinary people in China by 2010. The chip, code-named Godson-3, was developed with government funding by more than 200 researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology (ICT).

China is making a late entry into chip making, admits Zhiwei Xu, deputy director of ICT. "Twenty years ago in China, we didn't support R&D for microprocessors," he said during a presentation last week at the Hot Chips conference, in Palo Alto. "The decision makers and [Chinese] IT community have come to realize that CPUs [central processing units] are important." Tom Halfhill, an analyst at research firm In-Stat, says that the objective for China is to take control of the design and manufacture of vital technology. "Like America wants to be energy independent, China wants to be technology independent," Halfhill says. "They don't want to be dependent on outside countries for critical technologies like microprocessors, which are, nowadays, a fundamental commodity." Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West !!!

Despite its late start, China is making rapid progress. The ICT group began designing a single-core CPU in 2001, and by the following year had developed Godson-1, China's first general-purpose CPU. In 2003, 2004, and 2006, the team introduced ever faster versions of a second chip--Godson-2--based on the original design. According to Xu, each new chip tripled the performance of the previous one. Godson chips are manufactured in China by a Swiss company called ST Microelectronics and are available commercially under the brand name Loongson, meaning "dragon chip." Loongson chips already power some personal computers and servers on the Chinese market, which come with the Linux operating system and other open-source software. "They use a lot of open-source software because it's free," says Halfhill. "The Chinese government wants to get as many PCs into schools and as many workplaces as they can." The latest Godson chips will also have a number of advanced features. Godson-3, a chip with four cores--processing units that work in parallel--will appear in 2009, according to Xu, and an eight-core version is also under development !!! ( ... ya , you read it right .. its eight core processor !!! ) , Both versions will be built using 65-nanometer lithography processes, which are a generation older than Intel's current 45-nanometer processes.

Importantly, Godson-3 is scalable, meaning that more cores can be added to future generations without significant redesign. Additionally, the architecture allows engineers to precisely control the amount of power that it uses. For instance, parts of the chip can be shut down when they aren't in use, and cores can operate at various frequencies, depending on the tasks that they need to perform. The four-core Godson-3 will consume 10 watts of power, and the eight-core chip will consume 20 watts, says Xu. This latest chip will also be fundamentally different from those made before. Neither Godson-1 nor -2 is compatible with Intel's so-called x86 architecture, meaning that most commercial software will not run on them. But engineers have added 200 additional instructions to Godson-3 to simulate an x86 chip, which allows Godson-3 to run more software, including the Windows operating system. And because the chip architecture is only simulated, there is no need to obtain a license from Intel.

Erik Metzger, a patent attorney at Intel, says that the chip will only perform at about 80 percent of the speed of an actual x86 chip. "That implies that [the Chinese government] is going after a low-end market," he says. This is the same market that Intel is targeting with its classmate PC and low-power atom microprocessor. Metzger adds that the inner workings of the chip, known as its instruction set, have not yet been disclosed, making it difficult to know if or how any x86 patents may have been breeched. The Chinese team hopes to further boost its chip program through collaboration with other companies and researchers. "We still lag behind the international partners a lot," says Xu. "But we are doing our best to join the international community."


njoy ....

MEWU - Scene 2 ... Need some Wine !!!

Well , like many other tools of Ubuntu ... Wine is one very useful application ... basically Wine is an emulator which simulates Windows environment ... In common man .. err .. and woman's language , with help of Wine you can run windows application in Ubuntu ... but i don't think its more advanced then VMware ... but still oki to work around with it for basic applications ...

to Install WINE ....

open synaptic manager and find for WINE ... and make for installation ...

or if you are lazy to find out .. then simply open terminal and ...type ..

sudo apt-get install wine


and it will install it ... then just like installing in windows environment ... double click on exe file that you want to install program .. and its installed ... you can access that installed program via Wine menu that is created in Applications menu ... for example here , i have installed Winamp in UBUNTU ..




njoy ....

Protect your data in Bond Way !!!

well, True Crypt is an open source disk encryption software for all Operating Systems , including Windows / Linux / Mac OS ...

• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
  
  
• Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.
  
  
• Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (Pre-boot authentication)
  
  
• Encryption is automatic , real-time and transparent .
  
  
• Provides two levels of plausible deniability , in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password:
  
  1) Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system .
  
  2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data)

• Encryption algorithms : AES-256, Serpent and Twofish . Mode of operation: XTS.
  

check it out here ...



njoy ....

Want to Help mankind when you are not using your Machine ??

Do you ever wish to help our society to develop cure of new and unknown diseases ?? or wanted to help to solve space mysteries ?? how about studying global warming ?? or something else ??

Well , you can do it when you are not using your piece of old junk !!! its with help of a one open source software "BONIC" which is used for grid computing with help of volunteers spread world wide ... the logic is simple, with help of grid computing , you use 1000s of CPU power to analysis and research in various field including SETI or Malaria control .. ( well, you will be surprised to hear that , even though we have many advancements in medical technology ,still there are 1000s of people die due to malaria every year !!! ) ...

More, it can be used under any Operating Systems ... here you can find more information ..

lets make a better world ...

njoy ....

"Cross Loop" - Help is a click away ...

CrossLoop is a free, secure screen-sharing utility designed for people of all technical skill levels. CrossLoop extends the boundaries of traditional screen sharing by enabling non-technical users to get connected from anywhere on the Internet in seconds without changing any firewall or router settings. It only takes a few minutes to setup and no sign up is required. Security is built into all aspects of CrossLoop.

Session data is encrypted at the end-points before being sent using a 128-bit encryption algorithm and a randomly generated 12-digit access code. CrossLoop includes file transfer support, and switch control feature. Adds creation of a free CrossLoop accounts to create a dynamic public profile page, reserve your custom CrossLoop URL, view your session history, as well as widgets to promote yourself as a tech support specialist.

njoy ....