Adobe has its training centers at Noida and Bangalore (India centers) which employ around 700 employees together, most of them working as product development analysts taking up various jobs related to this area.

This is being done to map the standards of training that Adobe offers to its employees to what Microsoft is giving its trainees. Their aim is to analyze and determine the organization’s product development team and the hierarchy maintained by the people at Adobe India at various levels. This would help Microsoft determine the loopholes in their training and placement methods.

As the cut throat competition related to development of Web development applications and software’s for handheld devices is on its all time rise, monitoring each others intellectual growth is phenomenal.

On this account Microsoft gave a prompt reply by stating that Microsoft India employs people at all levels including evolving fresh graduates, experienced people as well as employs of Microsoft from other parts of the world who are willing to migrate to this country. They offer excellent pay scales with respect to the set of skills and experience an individual possesses. There are various routes to get into their firm that includes on campus recruitment, through employment agencies, though the internet and also by recommendations from the current employees working there. Experienced individuals in the same industry and even from direct competitors are employed by them to gain an extra edge. On the other hand Adobe refused to comment on this issue.

This is truly a smart move on the part of Microsoft to help enhance the output of their employees and make a better position in the field of Web development and handheld software technology.

Named after the Roman Goddess of safe returns, Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party.

What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

How it works?

Upon the installation of Adeona on your laptop, encrypted connections to OpenDHT storage server is established. If a laptop is stolen, one can log into OpenDHT and check the location of the laptop through the IP addresses and the Internet nodes, last known and used to connect the lost gadget. The best and the most distinguishing feature of this software highlights its privacy ideas which do not let the Law enforcement agencies or any external individuals to go through the data in one’s laptop.

Thing to ponder over:

• There still remains a question mark over the security of Open Source Security software as even the thieves could work over it for modifications, owing to the fact that its source code is known to all.
• Its major focus is over the hardware and not the data where a valid point lies that if a thief would steal a laptop for data reasons, he might not wait for the thing to be tracked down. His motive of information theft could be achieved in minutes leading him to discard the machine.

Use it

There are downloadable binaries/installers for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Wordpress 2.6 is out and has some awesome new features. The new features can now make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

WordPress is taking the auto-save feature to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system. This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Press This! Post from wherever you are on the web

Now, Wordpresss sports a “Press This” bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog. For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6;

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Security

Ryan Boren got some more details about the new added security feature in Wordpress 2.6. Now, Wordpress includes better support for visiting the admin over SSL. Part of this support involves making sure authorization cookies are delivered only over SSL-encrypted HTTPS sessions. To accommodate this while still allowing the option of visiting the admin over plain http, 2.6 moves from a single cookie setup to a three cookie setup.

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

You can visit the Secret Wordpress API page to generate unique codes on every visit.

More;

• Read more about the Wordpress 2.6 release.
• Wordpress 2.6 security details.

Google’s YouTube got a dedicated channel to share tips and tricks on using their Mobile Phones — Mobile Tricks.

Carriers and Mobile companies are trying to drive data adoption and educate customers on all the capabilities of today’s cellphones, and with this move Google seems to be helping. Google is asking its legion of mobile users and YouTube fans to make a video clip of the “wackiest, coolest or most useful mobile trick” and submit it to the Mobile Tricks page.

tlbox saves links and organizes them by category so it will be easier to find. You might bookmark with del.icio.us but as your bookmarks grow, it will become cumbersome to manage. For instance, you can instantly look up for CSS or Linux related bookmarks right away with tlbox.

tlbox integrates with Firefox (compatible up to Firefox 3). Once the add-on is installed, it appears as a dropdown menu much like your typical Bookmarks folder, except that it has a fixed set of iconized subfolders, ranging from .net to xml –basically categories that are relevant to computer geeks. There are even corresponding icons for the categories.

Via: Wisdom.

Author Scott Dunn believes that the “best freeware” lists published by Web sites and magazines frequently trumpet dozens of programs, but the results reflect the subjective opinions of just one or two testers. Thus, to find out the best of the lot, he compared roundups of “great” freeware conducted recently by four reputable publications to find the programs that were endorsed by at least three of the reviews. And the result is an awesome list of the Best Windows Freeware.

Here are the list;

1. Avira AntiVir Personal: Good malware detection rates and its ability to take on rootkit viruses makes it an ideal Free Personal Anti-virus solution. However, it does not scan incoming e-mail though it can scan it once the attachments are saved. It does detects malware if you open an infected e-mail.
2. Comodo Firewall Pro: Comodo comes with a long whitelist of safe sites, which you can add to as you surf and is regarded to be better than the firewalls built into Windows XP or Vista. Though a little complicated for novice users, this is regarded as one tough and robust software.
3. TrueCrypt: TrueCrypt is an open-source program and can create encrypted files that appear as disk drives. It also lets you encrypt an entire drive (such as a USB flash drive), a drive partition, and — for extra safety — hidden drive volumes.
4. CCleaner: This software scrubs your system by removing temp files, cookies, browsing history, recent-document lists, log files in the Recycle Bin, and a lot of other digital detritus. The utility can also be used to uninstall applications and scan for orphaned and unused Registry entries.
5. Lightning for Thunderbird: Lightning is a plug-in from Mozilla that combines Sunbird calendar program with Thunderbird’s e-mail features.
6. Foxit Reader: A much faster alternative to Adobe PDF Reader, and has more options for viewing, printing, and annotating PDFs. You can even use Foxit to fill out PDF forms.
7. Audacity: An open-source audio editor that supports .mp3, .wav, and other popular audio formats.
8. Wavosaur: A single executable file, making it easier to run from a USB drive, Wavosaur is another free audio-editing software. Note that you may need to download the free Lame Encoder .dll file to allow the program to export to the .mp3 format.
9. Pidgin: One client to rule all Instant Messaging protocols — AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, or another messaging network. This open-source IM client (formerly called “Gaim”) lets you communicate with users of all the above and a dozen other chat networks.

define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

can help you with better encryption for user passwords in the database. So, try to have a rather complex and long “unique phrase”. Wordpress suggest you to try out the perfect Password Generator.

While we’re at the new config settings introduced in Wordpress 2.5, you can have a look at the way to increase the memory allocation to PHP in your Wordpress Installation.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512MB');

Increase PHP Memory to 512MB.

Read all the other settings of Wordpress Config.

UPDATES

• 2008, 25th April: Ryan Boren have a more detailed article on the new SECRET_KEY introduced in Wordpress 2.5.

50 people will be given unprotected Laptops, new email addressees and 250 UK sterling on a credit card to claim the goodies on offer. During week one they will sign up for everything offered free, week two will be for downloading free music and week three will be for the get rich schemes on offer. The idea is called “Super Spam me” and celebrates the sending of the first Spam email 30 years ago by a Californian electronics company.

This sounds a great way of showing what accepting Spam will do to you or your computer although I wonder what will happen if one of the so called scams is actually genuine, if you can earn millions in a few week doing nothing or if you can get free laptops for just clicking here. Its highly unlikely but you never know. Wether they try the numerous viagra offering websites and lose 10 stone in a month sites isn’t made clear.

Personally, I’d think twice before opening Microsoft-Word attachments let alone the ones that aren’t even in English half the time. I tend to leave the dodgy ones in junk or just delete them, I could be throwing away thousands of course but its probably the safest bet. With so many crooks trying to nick your personal details and so many viruses around the experiment will almost certainly tell us what most of us knew all ready, don’t accept or even open anything you aren’t sure of and keep all online protection up to date and running. This is of course why McAfee are doing this as well as it being a good idea to show what is out there at the careless click of a mouse. I will post what happens if it gets published but if I find that one of the make a million scams is for real I may be on a beech somewhere when I send it in.

I’m not even talking about Spam, but those emails that are irritatingly awkward, utterly kiddish –

• SMS-fied text.
• All CAPS.
• Drastic grammatical error.
• Removing any reference to the previous thread.
• Very long Signature, Disclaimer, Notice, Warranty, Guarantee.
• HTML when Plain Text would have been way better.
• Microsoft Word/Powerpoint attachment without asking for acceptance permission.

Before getting to the part about observing some simple email etiquette to get a better response to your email, let’s look at Deepak’s article on

How to create a ‘better’ email ID?

It is better to create/change your email ID right now than doing it later, when people have already added/used your emails. If you’re changing your ID, make sure your old one is re-directed to the new one, preferably with a one-time-notice that your mail ID have changed and that you’re using your new ID. Keep the re-direction as long as you can or at least long enough time for people to forget your old ID.

• If you’ve your own domain — please use it. Perhaps, use Google Apps for domain and you’ll never need to worry about tying your email to your web host. It is also one of the best Spam Filter for your email.
• Get those common denominator - Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail/MSN. You’ll need them at many places, services.
• For public domain emails (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!), use something related to your name — JohnDoe, JaneDoe — and not those strange ones — lovelyJill, sweetJack, Hardick. Underscore, an alphanumeric character(s) prepended or appended is considered OK.

Simple Email Etiquette that can save your emails from being un-answered, un-noticed and ignored.

These days, many companies enforces and encourages Email Etiquette which is a very good initiative; here I’ll be talking more about Email Etiquette from a personal usage perspective.

• Short, sweet and sharp — Try to hit the point right on, make your email short and sweet.
• Answer to Questions in a sequence — Every email client’s got that feature which allows you to mark quoted text with a symbol, like “>” or “|”, use it to make a conversation effective. Separate questions out and answer them one by one in a sequence. It is hard to related your answers if you have shoved the Questions I asked at the bottom of your email.
• Spell Check — It is fine to left out some spelling un-checked in a hurry (everybody is in a hurry) but don’t make it drastically bad. Let your mail client do the checking and change the ones that are glaring at you for a correction.
• Grammar — Now, we communicate across the globe and not all are English speakers. It is fine to have grammatical error but not beyond the point that your sentences makes no sense, worst when they begin to make an alternate meaning.
• Be careful with your attachments — I’ve seen people sending me attachments of images of their “certified instructor logo”, “certified developer logo”, every time they emailed me. That is OK for the first email, it is irritating after that. Keep your credentials on your website or just a text link in your signature should be enough.
• ALL CAPS — Of course, this is a real NO-NO unless you are in military and your email is sent from the battle-field in Iraq.
• Don’t delete the previous thread — I like clean, simple mails but don’t delete that previous thread. How do you expect me to remember your emails amongst all others when you left me with no clue what we were talking about.
• Shorten your Signature — One should avoid those looooooong disclaimers, signature, what-so-ever. Why don’t you just link us to your TOS or your policy. We’ll read if need be. Or make your disclaimer twitterable - 140 characters! That should be short enough to bear.
• No HTML Please — Will you please leave that to companies that sends out newsletter where a HTML one serves OK. An email that can be best viewed with Plain ASCII should never be done in HTML.
• No Word/Powerpoint attachments — Please don’t send me word or powerpoint attachments right away. Ask me! Are we already talking about something that needs Word Docs and Powerpoint files, if not, don’t just shove it up my email.
• Not those SMS text — SMS text are best left to Mobile Phones, please don’t bring them to email.
• No forwards Please — Please update yourself; people no longer want those forwards of Virus Hoaxes and other ‘funny forwards’.
• ‘Request Delivery’ is cliche.

I know that most of the points covered above are well known to people who’ve been online for quite a while. I hope this makes the new users learn the tricks faster and be more useful to people around them.

To see what a computer could do or not you probably need to try something very basic or something very complicated. The most basic human action is to procreate, or basically have sex. The actual act is probably still beyond a computer although they do get involved in certain ways, 1 way sex is possible between humans and computer controlled prosthetics or 2 people can have sex with out being together with a prosthetic each, why you would do this except to keep a relationship going is another matter altogether. It is debatable if computers could go much further in this but they can get part of the way so a partial victory for computers again.

Now to head to the other extreme, they can fly planes, guide missiles and drive cars, but the old adage is that they are only as good as the programmer still applies. To win the war totally computers have to think independently and also they have to learn. They can do this up to a point but not on a practical level yet. The ideal is to create a fully independent human form robot that works fully independently. There are many projects which have had limited success and are probably on the way to this but not there yet To win this war fully we want thinking, walking and talking metal people.