Secure Windows for free.

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Here are 3 free programs that you can download from www.download.com that will go a long way to protecting your data and your computer.

Grisoft AVG free edition – This antivirus program has been around for a number of years now. Its fast and is kind to your system resources allowing you to surf the net or play solitare while it’s running in the background.

Spybot S&D – I can not say enough good things about this lightweight anti malware tool. Originally designed to kill spyware, it has expanded to also hunting trojans and rootkits. The advanced feature also provide tools for cleaning the registry, configuring your start-up programs, and securing your hosts file. The only bad thing I can say about it is that it does not scan automatically.

Comodo Pro firewall – This firewall quickly became my favorite replacement for windows firewall on both XP and Vista machines. It has a pretty intuative interface that allows you to very specifically control what network traffic travels to and from your machine. It also has a nice leaning mode that protects your system while it learns what you use and what programs need to be able to talk to locations on the internet.

These three aplications should block most malware on the internet. Of course there is no substitute for a little caution on your part, so be careful where you visit.

Debugging On Linux – Strace

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A few years ago, I was taking a few classes from a very up and coming computer science university and during the course of one projects class came to discuss with the instructor the differences between the average students and those excelling. We determined the main differences to be, three in number:

  1. Time and dedication
  2. The ability to tinker and figure things out on one’s own
  3. The art of debugging.

The art of debugging is really quite simple, it is mostly knowing the tools available and how to use them. On the linux platform, surely one of the most powerful and certainly most thorough debugging tool one can use is strace.
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2010: R.I.P. IPV4?

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It’s no big secret that our current numbering scheme for internet protocol addressing is limited, but some sources are reporting its demise as soon as 2010. IPV6 has been adopted as the solution for many, many years now because it’s a virtually limitless numbering scheme. The down-side? IPV6 is rather tricky to understand and implement. Instead of receiving an ip address like 69.51.xx.xx, you’ll now be issued one like 2008:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 once ipv6 is implemented. There’s really no need to panic, though, your operating system more than likely supports IPV6 already and IPV4 will not just disappear over night. Instead, I think we’ll see a gradual decline in the use of IPV4 as IPV6 begins to become more and more of an industry standard. I believe by 2010 there will be more of a hybrid use of IPV4 and IPV6 and not just the flat-out demise of IPV4.

Also, don’t forget to grab your copy of Firefox 3 today!

Google Browser sync will no longer be available

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google labsA bit of disappointing news for those of us who use Google browser sync, it will no longer be developed. Google browser sync was a nice plugin for saving and synchronizing bookmarks, passwords and even open web pages across multiple computers. Many users will only discover this when they adopt FireFox 3, due to be released later today. Firefox 3 is incompatible with Google browser sync therefore forcing users to find other means to synchronize their bookmarks. Foxmarks is one such add-on that will synchronize your bookmarks across multiple computers, although it is not the all in one synchronization tool like Google browser sync was.

Watching DVDs in Windows Media Player 11

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This weekend I tried to watch a movie on my computer only to find out it wasn’t working. The reason it wasn’t working was because I did not have the proper Codec installed. So I started hunting around online for a solution. Microsoft recommends these, however I quickly discovered that none of them are free. And since I’m a bit of a freegan when it comes to software applications, I decided to do a bit of hunting around for a better solution. This led me to K-Lite Codec Pack which I downloaded and installed with minimal effort. To learn more about K-lite check out the Wikipedia article.

Roadrunner supercomputer

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IBM has a new supercomputer called Roadrunner. The new computer , which was built to monitor the US nuclear weapons stockpile, can process in excess 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The processing power of this computer is derived from nearly 7,000 AMD Opteron processors and nearly 13,000 cell chips originally designed for use in the PS3. This is the first of such computer systems to break the petaflop barrier.

Firefox Download Day!!

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Mozilla is about to release the 3rd generation of the popular Firefox browser. Tuesday June 17 is the day to mark on your calendar as Mozilla is going to attempt to set a Guiness book of world records for most downloads in a 24 hour period. The new version of Firefox is supposed to use less system resources, while a newly designed rendering engine will load pages faster then previous versions. New security features dubbed “human shield” will offer anti-malware protection and support for Extended Verification SSL.

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