·:[ E-Musings On Web Stuff ]:·
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The somewhat esoteric title of this post comes from a cricket bowling action. But it really sums up the (nice) surprises Google offers its clients. But first the good news for all you non-North American readers. GMail has finally gone public and is available for the US/Canada. The service will be rolled-out in phases to other regions.

In a departure from the usual service signup, GMail is currently available only to mobile phone users. The service sends an SMS invitation that you use to sign-up to the service. And your registration too is via SMS. This radical departure from the usual mail invitation process was necessiated to prevent spammer and robots from setting up disposable email IDs that when misused would have lost GMail considerable goodwill.

But Google is not just a search engine. And more recently a free web-based mail service. The company also offers a great software collection. Mostly of which is free with a few commercial versions. But even these often have a feature-limited free version available as well.

But before we snarf our way through the pack, do check out the new Jabber-based GoogleTalk client. The Beta is available for Windows 2000/XP/2003. With Linux and MacOS versions planned. It supports both text-based messaging and very clear VoIP. You need a GMail account ID to login to the service. The interface is simple. But the Beta has an annoying bug that only lets it connect to the Web via a proxy server! So unless you run a proxy, GoogleTalk won’t connect!

The chat interface is quite basic. There is a level meter for microphone and speaker. As well as a VoIP connection quality of service meter similar to a mobile phone’s signal strength display. VoIP seems very dependent on what your connection supports. I was audible to a friend. But his responses appeared to be coming from deep under the sea with lots of latency.

If you have a GMail ID. Don’t want to use VoIP. And are unable to get Google Talk to connect. Try any instant messaging client (Trillian Pro, GAIM) that supports the Jabber protocol. Your server name is talk.google.com. You can also apply command line hacks like /nomutex to open more than one instance including signing in twice using different IDs.

Other command line tips include /forcestart, /autostart, /register, /checkupdate, /nogaiaauth, /plaintextauth, /factoryreset, /gaiaserver and /create_sesion. Or you could try /mailto someiD@mail.com to open a GMail “Compose mail” dialog in your browser.

Equally interesting is Google Earth, a rich mapping application that helps you fly through a global database of Earth imagery. To which I was introduced a few day ago by my friend Jagan P. He’s very interested in old military aircraft (war birds) and runs the high-traffic Warbirds of India web site.

Warbirds of India now features Google Earth-derived imagery of the Indian Air Force Museum big aircraft collection piled together at one end of Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Google Earth needs a 128 kbps or better connection. But I was able to run it using my 115 kbps CDMA wireless connection too. The interface is very easy to use. Just type in the first search layer (e.g. India). Or pan-scan the globe to find your country of choice. Then zoom in slowly using the mouse wheel. Click and grab shifts map focus. You can also change viewing angles to look at 3-dimensional (3D) buildings. The bottom of the screen window displays the map coordinates. I was even able to locate my parents house complete with the 4 large trees that surround it! I then zipped off to Chandigarh and the Himalayan foot hills. Unfortunately the day the image was captured there was low cloud cover. It was hard to view ground features through all those white blobs.

Google Earth’s available in a free version with limited zoom and focus and a $400 Pro edition. Luckily the latter’s available as a 7-day trial that superimposes Trial Mode on the image. You have to register for a license key. Google Earth uses the commercial Keyhole satellite service for maps combined with Google’s native search APIs. Most images were taken over the past 3 years but not all areas are equally well represented. For more on coverage, click here. There’s also a whole site dedicated to Google Earth hacks.

And then there’s Blogger.com which is one of the more famous and widely used blogging services. Not strictly a downloadable application. Its actually a web-based service. Where you can register for free and begin posting your first blog really fast. Blogger offers its own free Blogspot publishing service. Or you can host your blog on your own server; as I did for a while. There’s a very vibrant user community. Which is good because Blogger Support is terrible. Yes, there is an FAQ and a Knowledge base. But unless the problem fits the solution exactly, there’s little hope of issue resolution. Harsh words perhaps, but I’ve been at the receiving end of the stick for a personal blog. Unfortunately spammers seems to have ‘discovered’ Blogger and there are lots of single post Blogs acting as gateway pages.

Equally well-known is the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and for Firefox. Besides the usual web search, pop-up blocking, page rank display, and search term highlighting within a results page. This toolbar offers an AutoLink feature linking (US addresses only) a favored dining-out or vacation spot to a map of the area. AutoLink can also track consignment numbers to delivery status, VIN numbers (US) to vehicle history and publication ISBN numbers to Amazon.com listings. AutoFill saves form data and let’s you insert it with a single mouse click. Private credit card information are encrypted into a protected container to prevent misuse.

The SpellCheck (derived from GMail’s inline spell-checker) tracks spellings in any web form including web-based email and discussion forums. Did you know that spellers derived from the Google edition are available as plug-ins for the other text area-based editors. As also for blogging tools like the open-source WordPress?

The Toolbar’s WordTranslator feature is meant for non-English speakers. And hovering the mouse cursor over an English word offers its Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, German and Spanish versions. There’s also a web-based version that you can use to translate between 116 different languages, including a few weird one like Bork (Swedish Chef), Elmer Fudd (from Bugs Buggy cartoons who swaps W for R), and Klingon (of Star Trek fame).

The Google Desktop search application offers full text indexing for email, files, music, photos, chat transcripts and web pages viewed. It also helps gather live Web data using its Sidebar feature. This displays new email, weather and stock information, personalized news, RSS/Atom feeds, and more. Quick Find launches applications and displays search results as you type without opening the browser. Beta 2 extends Outlook integration so you can launch the application from within Outlook and view the results immediately. Google Desktop also offers index encryption. And a Developer SDK and plug-ins are available. As is a separate Enterprise Edition.

The Hello service is an extension of the Picasa utility. And lets you connect directly with friends to share digital pictures. Its a sort of instant picture messenger. You select the images to share and click send. And supports exchange of full-resolution, print-quality images.

Picasa is a neat image manager. That’s great if you have a digital camera. Its far more powerful that the free tools included with most cameras. As also Windows XP. Of course this is not Adobe PhotoExpress (which is actually a scaled down version of the Photoshop graphics editing suite). But Picasa is more than adequate for what if offers. Use it find, edit and share pictures stored on your hard disk. Every time Picasa is launched, it auto-locates images and sorts them into albums organized by date with recognizable folder names. Also available is editing tools that let you clean up images. Then email or print photos, burn to a CD-/RVD, post to a blog or share via Hello.

And a quick view of something non-Google. PassMark DiskCheckup (free for personal use) uses SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology) interface between the PC’s BIOS and installed hard disks to monitors possible long term drive failure including Spin Up times, start/stops, hours powered on and temperature. DiskCheckup displays the current SMART values with the Threshold value for a particular attribute. as well as drive serial number, model number, cylinders, tracks and sectors per track.

That’s enough for you to chew on. I’m on a two week hiatus from the column. And the next edition will be on September 19, 2005. Be there.

Change is inevitable. And this column’s frequency on Cyber India Online (CIOL) is changing soon too. My editors have announced beginning September 2005 the Freeloader column ceases publishing. I’m now beginning to understand what fighting soldiers go though mentally when facing impending death (and doom). It’s never been so hard to put together a column as this one. And I think preparing the next (and final) one too will be hard. But I’m not going quietly. More details about what I plan in next week’s edition.

I think the CIOL version’s being axed because it no longer fits my publisher’s strategic publishing goals. And perhaps because I’ve been somewhat difficult in adapting a column with its roots in reviewing free software available on the Internet. To one addressing a narrow developer band interested in programming content!

Readers really interested in staying abreast of open-source should bookmark its Mecca: SourceForge.Net. This portal lists the 10 most popular downloads and 10 most active projects. It also showcases one project every month. And August 2005’s choice is Gourmet Recipe Manager (GRM). Although designed for Linux, GRM also runs on Windows with GTK installed. And makes it “easy to search for recipes, generate shopping lists, and import recipes from other sources, such as MealMaster archives or Web pages. Gourmet’s shopping list generator includes features such as tracking ingredients users already have and sorting their list into categories.” Sourceforge is one of over 10 separate open-source technology focused portals offered by OSTG (Open Source Technology Group).

Speaking of GTK, GAIM’s another great application that also uses this ‘Kit. GAIM’s an excellent multi-service, and platform, open-source messaging application. You can access AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Zephyr and Gadu-Gadu messaging services simultaneously. Even while using more than one subscription for each service. Gaim 1.0.5 release offers several major security fixes. As well as privacy improvements like requiring authorization for Yahoo! buddy requests. And a new ability to define an on-quit message for IRC channels.

Another application I use a lot is WinRAR. This file archiving utility backs up data and can reduce the size of email attachments. It decompresses its native RAR format, as well as ZIP, ARJ, LZH, 7z (7-zip), ACE, GZ2 (Gzip2) and BZ2 archive file formats. However you can only create new archives in RAR and ZIP formats. You can customize the application using special themes. WinRAR 3.50 now supports Microsoft’s multi-volume .CAB archive format. And integrates with Windows 64-bit edition shell. An updated archive wizard lets users add a password when updating an archive. Typically you can only set passwords when creating a new archive file. WinRAR 3.50 is available as a 30-day trial.

Or if you want more power for almost nothing consider its free alternative: 7-Zip. This open-source utility can browse, decompress and archive to its native 7z format as well as ZIP (including Deflate64), GZIP, TAR and BZIP2. It can only browse and extract files from RAR, CAB, ARJ, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB, and SPLIT. But I don’t really miss not having RAR compression (a proprietary format). And to see just what I was missing (if anything), I decided on a test. I used a 42 kB Word (.DOC) file as the source. Then applied various archive formats to it. 7z emerged the clear winner at 8,750 bytes. Runner-up was RAR at 9,828 bytes. Followed by .GZ (9,875 bytes) and .ZIP (9,996 bytes). BZip2 was the least efficient at 10 kB.

Subsequent to last week’s review of Nostrum AudioManage, now available in v1.20f, the developer clarified that you could add MP3 CD-ROMs to your library. And while their contents would be listed as duplicates (assuming the identical track exists on your hard drive), there is a tiny CD overlay icon to indicate the duplicate source is a CD. And as a responsible AudioManage fan I also recommend an immediate upgrade to the latest 1.20f release as this includes several bug fixes that improve usability.

And while on the topic of updates, if you still haven’t installed Microsoft’s August patches. There’s no time like the present. Updates released are:

• Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (MS05-038) to prevent an attacker from assuming complete control of an affected system.
• Vulnerability in Plug and Play Could Allow Remote Code Execution and Elevation of Privilege (MS05-039) to fix a remote code execution vulnerability in Plug and Play (PnP) that could allow an attacker take complete control of an affected system.
• Vulnerability in Print Spooler Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (MS05-043).
• Vulnerability in Telephony Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (MS05-040).
• Vulnerability in Remote Desktop Protocol Could Allow Denial of Service (MS05-041) to fix a issue where an attacker could cause a system to stop responding.
• Vulnerabilities in Kerberos Could Allow Denial of Service, Information Disclosure and Spoofing (MS05-042).

I was unable to install (and test) a copy of Microsoft’s OneCare service as the Beta is limited to US and Canada. But The Flexbeta site has a very extensive review of the service. Read Beta Testing Windows OneCare. And in case you missed the news, Microsoft’s clarified its Anti-Spyware product Beta won’t end any time soon. Windows AntiSpyware (will be) available at no charge to licensed users who validate their Windows install through Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). Microsoft plans a separate paid enterprise version for companies wanting to centrally manage their AntiSpyware infrastructure.

If you use Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 be advised of a newly discovered flaw that could allow attack through arbitrary code execution. The French Security Incident Response Team that discovered the flaw published full disclosure to the Internet! The hole is created by a memory corruption error when executing msdds.dll object as an ActiveX control. Theoretically this DLL can be used to take control after a Web page designed to exploit the vulnerability is opened. However the problem DLL has only been traced to computers with Microsoft’s Visual Studio installed.

And if you were wondering why no news, or advance on combating the Zotob worm. Its because none is really needed. As the code suffers an internal flaw that cause it to self-destruct! A key mistake was in causing infected computer to continuously reboot instead of more productively spreading the virus. Zotob lacks a destructive pay load but includes backdoor capabilities using an IRC chat channel. And if you have applied the patches listed earlier in this column, Zotob won’t infect you as the vulnerability has been closed by Microsoft. f you want to see how Zotob affects computers, Trend Micro has a very nice process map.

Stay safe until the next time we meet!