Nirlog.com

Go and download a free DivX Pro for Mac by giving your email address. The license will be sent to your email address. No word on why they’re giving it for free, but who cares. It’s a good chance to get an excellent video player worth 20 bucks for free. I’ve already downloaded and installed mine. Act quickly!

Via: macenstein

Macrumors noted, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz announcing that Apple would be making ZFS the default filesystem in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. That’s a great news. So, welcome pooled storage and bye-bye volumes!

ZFS stands for Zettabyte File System and was developed by Sun, it offers many advanced features and can handle much more space than the current filesystems used by Windows, OS X or Linux.

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS will detect it and use another copy to repair it.

ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There’s no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks.

I love Firefox for the huge amount of extensions it offers. Lifehack has suggestion for bloggers — 17 Firefox Extensions That Make Blogging Easy.

Do you want to protect your pictures online? The short answer is: you cannot do it, but you can create technical roadblocks and aesthetic roadblocks. Of Zen and Computing has a nice article on How to Protect Your Pictures and Photos on the Internet.

I have tried most of the RSS Readers available including Google Reader but I’ve come back NetNewsWire for the features and ease of use. After seeing the ProBlogger’s poll result on Which Feed Reader is Best? I’m going to seriously give Google Reader another try. Actually, I’m already using it with Google Gears. Check How Google Gears Will Change Your Life.

Every blogger wants the new visitor to come back to their blog again. Wordpress offers many plugins to help you make your blog sticky, and Aaron Brazell at Technosailor suggests some excellent plugins for Intelligent Design and Stickiness

Many smart people have figured out the importance of domain name quite early, and are now multi-millionaires. They came up with many different (smart and weird) business models with the domain name. Check this fascinating story about The man who owns the Internet. Ok that was for business, but how about the domain name for individuals? There’s no doubt that now it’s becoming critical for individuals too. A recent study showed that one in five employer searches the information about the cantidate in internet and 59 percent of those said it influences recruitment decisions. Fortunately you can have your say in what Google says about you. So, individual’s online presence is more important than ever before.

I remember having a hard time finding an appropriate domain name for this site when I started blogging. Today, I decided to check if there were any leftover domain names for me to nab. All the .com, .net and .org domains with my name were already taken. So, I tried my family name, and was lucky to find kunwar.org free. I’ve registered it and forwarded the domains niranjan.kunwar.org and kunwar.org to this site. Maybe in the future I can provide a sub-domain to each and every member of my family . Also found niranjankunwar.com free, and nabbed that too.

If you’re lucky enough to still get a domain with your first name or family name you should just grab it. I register my domains at Netfirms, it’s pretty cheap — $4.95 for first year and $9.95 per year thereafter.

What do you think about online presence and owning your own domain name?

Microsoft has released a table shaped, multi-touch sensitive computer called the Surface. It looks cool and more than one person can interact with the content through touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard. This 30-inch table computer costs around $10,000 and is targeted towards big hotels, casinos, phone stores, restaurants and public entertainment venues. The Surface runs on Windows Vista and has Ethernet, Wireless and Bluetooth connectivity. Here’s a video of first look at Surface.

MailPlane is a Gmail cient for Mac OS X. I’ve been using it for few weeks, and must say that I’m really loving it. Yesterday it was updated to 1.46, this latest version supports multiple Gmail accounts. Now I can switch between my Gmail accounts with a click. It has a sleek mac look, supports drag and drop attachment, comes with an iphoto plugin and many more… currently it’s in private beta, if you want to try it, go and register here, you’ll have to wait for your turn, they’re sending 100 invitation each day.

WordPress 2.2 is available for download and as always Technosailor has an article on 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.2 . I’m not going to upgrade my blog to 2.2 mainly because my web server is still using MySQL 3.x, but I’ve seen several users downgrading after hasty upgrade due to the widget problem (apparently affecting only IE users). So, if you’re using the widgets and planning to upgrade your blog to Wordpress 2.2, you might consider waiting until the bug is fixed.

I locked myself in for 2 months to prepare for the CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional) exam, and now I’m back triumphant to tell the story. Yes, I just received the Congratulations email from ISC2. I’m sharing my experience here with a hope that it might be helpful to anyone who’s preparing to take the exam. There’s no doubt that it was THE MOST difficult exam I’ve ever taken.

Let me give you a general idea about this certification. CISSP is a security certification carried out by (ISC)², which is a globally recognized, vendor neutral organization for certifying information security professionals. To pass the CISSP exam you’ll have to be competent in 10 Domains of the Common Body of Knowledge (CBK):

• Access Control
• Application Security
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
• Cryptography
• Information Security and Risk Management
• Legal, Regulations, Compliance and Investigations
• Operations Security
• Physical (Environmental) Security
• Security Architecture and Design
• Telecommunications and Network Security

To qualify to sit for the exams you need to:

Subscribe to the (ISC)² Code of Ethics.
Have a minimum of four years of direct full-time security professional work experience in one or more of the ten domains of the (ISC)² CISSP® CBK® or three years of direct full-time security professional work experience in one or more of the ten domains of the CISSP® CBK® with a college degree. Additionally, a Master’s Degree in Information Security from a National Center of Excellence can substitute for one year toward the four-year requirement.

Update: Effective 1 October 2007, professional work experience requirements for the CISSP will increase from four to five years, and direct full-time security professional work experience will be required in two or more of the ten CISSP CBK domains. A new endorsement policy will also be in effect, requiring anyone who passes a CISSP, CAP, or SSCP exam to have their qualifications endorsed by another (ISC)² credential holder. These changes will not affect those who sit for an examination on or before 30 September 2007. For more information, please refer to the Experience Requirement Change FAQs.

The exam itself is 6 hours long, with 250 questions based on the 10 domains. 25 out of 250 questions are for research, but you’ll have to answer all of them, and there’s no way of knowing which one is which. So, 225 questions will be scored, and you’ll have to get 700 out of a possible 1000 points on the grading scale to pass. Different questions carry different weight (marks) and there’s no way to know which question carries how much marks. As of writing this, the exam costs US$ 499 if you register 16 days ahead of exam date or US$ 599 if you register later.

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There’s been a lot of buzz around the OpenDNS lately. OpenDNS is a DNS provider that offers free service, with safer and faster browsing experience. This is how it works.

1. You register an account in OpenDNS site.
2. Login to your account.
3. Change your DNS Setting pointing to OpenDNS Servers.

That’s it, you’re good to go. The only difference from your normal environment is that now you’re using the OpenDNS DNS Servers.

The Advantages of using OpenDNS Server

You’ll be protected from Phishing attacks because OpenDNS keeps the database of phishing sites, so it can identify and stop sites trying to phish (cheat or trick) you. It claims to be faster than your ISPs DNS with large cache but I didn’t notice any change in my browsing speed after the change, but this could definitely be an advantage if your ISPs DNS is slow. It can correct the typos for you. For example, if you type nirlog.cmo instead of nirlog.com, it’ll correct your mistake and point you to the right site. The latest feature called Shortcuts allows you to type something easy-to-remember into your address bar for those web sites you visit often. For example, I can just type short “gmail” to visit Gmail, instead of typing the full url “http://www.gmail.com/“. This, I think is a very handy feature. Network admins can configure the full office networks too.

You can map short names for your favorite web sites

The Down side of using OpenDNS Server

You need to be always logged in to the Open DNS web site to use the service. They make money from the advertisement. It works like this, when there’s a typo OpenDNS cannot fix, it’ll redirect you to a yahoo search result with advertisement. I think that’s ok, but in some cases they’ll redirect you to a site that’s nothing to do with the web site you intended to visit. For example if you type http://nirlog.cm then it’ll redirect you to http://agoga.com/. It’s clearly not the site I intended to visit, the best thing OpenDNS could have done is to redirect to nirlog.com since there’s no nirlog.cm or at least it could have redirected to an organic search in Yahoo, the search engine they’re using. So, I think OpenDNS’s decision on what’s a typo, what’s wrong and right could be questionable. Actually the redirection has nothing to do with OpenDNS, it’s due to registrar for Cameroon, who has created parked pages with Agoga for every unregistered .cm domain.

When I typed http://nirlog.cm it redirected me to http://agoga.com

I think OpenDNS has a clear advantage over your ISPs DNS, with it’s phishing protection and speed in some cases. The shortcut is a very handy feature too. So for my personal machine I’ll keep the OpenDNS setting.

Update: John Roberts from OpenDNS has cleared the point about .cm domain in his comment, apparently registrar for Cameroon has created parked pages with Agoga for every unregistered .cm domain. So, it has nothing to do with OpenDNS. And also if you’ve setup OpenDNS on your networks, then you don’t need to login to the web site.