Google has decided that boring (into) the World Wide Web is not enough and it plans to start drilling into the earth's crust.

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1. How can you hack GMail account?
2. How can you protect your GMail account from hackers?
Hackers at Defcon demonstrated a tool to hack into GMail accounts by snooping unencrypted data (man-in-the-middle attack) with cookie which Google GMail uses for everything other than login by default.

Last week Google introduced the ability to optionally encrypt any transmission to / from GMail and not just the login sequence. Previously GMail used to encrypt the login sequence only. All other data was transmitted unencrypted over the wire making such hacking possible. Every email, every article that you are reading on your GMail account is transmitted unencrypted over the web. Read more (596 words) »

Bravo Google AdSense! Every day I am losing my faith in Google technologies. How could any context sensitive technology in the whole wide world think wife sharing guide is relevant to people interested in iPhone 3G? I would rather have no ads than ads for wife sharing on my blog.

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Twitter (you can follow me here) has the annoying habit of shortening your long and meaningful url to a short meaningless jumble using tinyurl, even when the full url and accompanying text fits into their 140 character limit. For example I posted this article on how you can include multiple jar files in a single jar file in Ant build tool. Twitter automatically shortened the url to this meaningless jumble - http://tinyurl.com/5uclnr. So how can you paste meaningfull url's in Twitter without jumbling?

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Vodaphone sent the pricing for iPhone 3G 8GB and 16GB models in India and I have to tell you it is daylight robbery!

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I tried delving into Ruby couple of times in the past. Every time I had this weird feeling of what am I doing here when I am already very well conversant with a simpler language - Java, which gives me everything I need. Ruby just felt very syntax rich, may ways and interesting tricks to do stuff and so on.While these may be appealing to a script-kiddie, nice syntactical sugars do not help much in the long run or help you create robust code (unless you love flying whales and a service which fails every other day).

I am not afraid of developing CRUD interfaces nor do I find it time consuming. What value can I get from RoR? Every time I delve into Ruby & RoR, I come back feeling unsatisfied. What am I missing here?

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Also: How To Flexibly Pass JVM parameters to Apache Ant Java (Runtime) Task

Apache Ant is an excellent Java based build & deployment system using XML configuration file. In Ant properties are extensively used to configure tasks, conditionally run targets and more. In short they are an intergral part of build system. My requirement was simple. I wanted to pass JVM arguments to the Java runtime. However sometime I wanted to invoke it without passing any special runtime arguments. Unfortunately jvmarg element doesn't like it when its value is an empty string or even a string with spaces. Finding no way to fool it, I then tried to find a way to set the property to something when it is initially not set (while invoking). This proved surprisingly hard to do. Here is an elegant (I think) solution I came up with. Read more (231 words) »

Apache Ant is an excellent and popular Java based build system. It has several built-in commands (tasks in Ant lingo) one of which allows you to create Jar file from your existing class file and resources. What if you wanted to include not just class files but selective contents of other jar files too and make a single big jar file?

Ant provides an undocumented way to include the contents of multiple jar files within a single jar file.
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In earlier versions of Db4o we used Db4o.configure() to configure all Db4o database globally (across all ObjectContainer). However in 7.2 (and above) versions of Db4o Db4o.configure() has been deprecated and it is suggested to use Db4o.newConfiguration() instead. Unfortuanately they do not clearly mention anywhere that these two functions are not equivalent. I assumed they are equivalent like Db4o.set()is equivalent Db4o.store() or Db4o.get() is equivalent to Db4o.queryByExample().

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Db4o is an excellent open source object database for Java & .NET platform by Carl Rosenberger's team. I highly recommend it for rapid prototyping and RAD. It transparently handles object storage and retrieval. Today I will talk about the single biggest gotcha in Db4o which is bound to stumble any newcomer as well as pros who haven't been using it in a while.

In Db4o you can create an complex objects with other objects as its member and Db4o will save them all like a champ with a single set() (now store()) method. So intuitively you try to use the same concept for updating the database. This is where you will stumble. Db4o by default doesn't recurse when updating an object.The stranger aspect is that when you save it to the database with a store or set and then retrieve it again it will appear to work fine. However after you close and re-open the database your data will be lost! This is the single most baffling feature I found in Db4o.

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