Many like to twitter using IM (Instant Messenger) because it is very simple and fast to tweet and simple to get continuous updates on your topics of interest.

In the good old days Twitter used to provide IM support. You could use any Instant Messenger supporting Jabber (XMPP protocol) to connect to Twitter buddy (twitter@twitter.com) on Gooogle GTalk server and twitter to your hearts content. For several months however Twitter has stopped supporting IM. How can we satiate our twitter crush during their downtime? There is a way.

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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) »

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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I was one of the early adopters of Google AdSense section targeting technology for getting more contextual ads. Almost as soon as it came out I implemented them to highlight the key content of the site (or so I thought) for AdSense. However I made a BIG mistake.

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nginx [engine x] is a high quality, light footprint (much ligher than Apache HTTPD), high performance HTTP server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev. nginx is distributed under BSD license unlike its competitor Lighttpd. We are progressively transferring our sites over to nginx. Today when I had to restart the server, I realized (after few hours) with horror that we had forgot to add the script to start nginx automatically after reboot. When you want any command to execute everytime after a reboot you should add it to /etc/rc.local. The commands in rc.local are executed *after* all the other init scripts. To automatically start nginx as well as fastcgi on reboot you should add the following lines to /etc/rc.local at the end -

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IBM today announced new software and services for mobile devices that closely mimic desktop features formerly found only on the PC. The new software & services can help individuals make better business decisions faster, while connecting friends, work colleagues and teams above and beyond PC era.

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You can configure Nginx to stop referrer spam by checking for bad keywords like tramadol, phentermine etc. This reduces the load on your server as well as prevents filling your referrer logs with invalid entries. Here is my nginx configuration to stop referrer spam (feel free to copy it):
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Normally any website that responds to /index.php also responds to /. This has the potential to duplicate content. So how can you re-direct /index.php to / without causing infinite loop in nginx?

Here is a simple solution:

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GoDaddy is a arguably the largest domain name register. Yet it does something which I am not very comfortable with - make profit off your domain names and does that without your explicit permission. Previously when you wanted to register a domain name you had to provide at least two domain name servers. With GoDaddy you can register any domain name without having to specify DNS servers for it. You are not even given the option to specify your own DNS servers. So how does GoDaddy supply the required DNS servers?

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PayDotCom has recently introduced an widget which you can use to promote PayDotCom products on your website. The widget is definitely eye-catching so I thought I would give it a try. I tried it for a week on this blog and here are the results. Read more (193 words) »