Search Faster with Cooliris

Often search for images with Google Images or look for videos on Youtube? Tired of clicking "next page" when browsing through pages after pages after pages of results? Here's a little something that reduces the boredom and speeds up searching.

Recently I have installed and tried out Cooliris. It is program that runs on your internet browser. You can call it an extension or plugin too. It speeds up the browsing by putting all the results in a 3D wall. This wall lets user to scheme and scan through results almost instantly without the need to click "next page" and wait for the page to load.

It can search through Google Images, Flickr, DeviantArt, Youtube and several others. Other than that, you can browse through your own library of pictures in your own computer too.


In addition to that, you can use it to look through albums in Facebook as well. Perfect for those of you that have friends with hundreds of photos =P. With just a click of a button at bottom left corner of the album/picture, it launches Cooliris to view the album you chosen.


Fun to use as it seems, this thing also eats up your RAM. You will lose 100MB of RAM upon startup and an additional 100MB to 300MB or more depending on how long the wall goes.


Cooliris is available for all major browsers. Check it out at their official site. I'm using it on Chrome 4. For those of you who are using Chrome 4, you can get it from here.


Cheers~

Trip to Royal Selangor

I have visited Royal Selangor about a week ago. It was organised by 1 of my college's club, D'ArtZ Club. Coincidentally I am a committee member XD
We gathered at APIIT at 1030. Then bus took off at 1100. We reached the destination at about 1200 or 1210.

So here's a brief itenary of the trip.


We were given a tour through the history of the company, the founder, those boring things and a few fun activities. Then there's this 1:50 scale model of KLCC made entirely out of pewters.


Next, we visit the factory part of the facility. Before entering, we were given a welcome drink.


After the refreshing drink, we head to visit the factory where various pewter items are produced.

Here the worker pours the pewter into a crocodile shaped mould

After the tour of the factory, we were brought to the final area where pewters are for sale.


Here is the place where rich people are able to spend their extra money.


Here's a RM48K bowl which is perfect for mixing rojak.


Here's a RM54K big plate that is perfect for yee sang during CNY.


Then there's this RM98K piece of silver ornament. Perfect for uhmmm... showing your richness.


I think the ONLY pewter item I can buy at that time is this...


That concludes my trip to Royal Selangor =)

Fake Antivirus and Their Scam

Virus and trojan. These are some of the words that are feared by majority of people that uses computer. In general belief, viruses are closely associated with all the weird and nasty things that happens on one's computer. Even if something happened and it has nothing to do with viruses, most would blame it on viruses.

Through this fear in majority of people, malicious software (malware) creators uses the fear factor as a method to spread their viruses. This type of malware is categorised as scareware. Scareware comes in the form of legit looking antivirus software.

Here I have an actual scareware at work which freaked my friend's dad. Prior of installing an antivirus software called "System Security", the background is changed into this.

This is the scareware's first move, that is to get the victim's attention with something that says their computer is infected. In this case, it changed the background. There are also popup notifications to further enhance the effect of this move.


The victim should be in total fear and would follow the scareware's instruction in order to remove the non-existent threat. It urges the user to run a full system scan. Few minutes elapsed and it would have scanned tonnes of trojans and viruses to scare the crap out of the victim.


After finish scanning, the victim would be asked to download additional things to get rid of those non-existent trojans. In reality, the victim is downloading more malware into their computer. This effectively slows down the computer to a crawl. In addition to that, all the victim's data also risks being stolen.

Rather than asking the victim to download things, the latest trend now requests the victim to purchase a license in order for the fake antivirus to be able to remove the non-existent threats. If not, the victim won't be able to use much of their computer as any program are blocked from running because the fake antivirus says all of them are infected. In simple words, they want the victim to pay money for a useless license or suffer the inability to use their computer. This is yet another category of malware called ransomware.

So in the interest of your computer security, ALWAYS trust the big names. To name a few; Avast, Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky, NOD32, and McAfee. You can't go wrong with them. 

For those of you that don't have any antivirus protection yet, you can try Microsoft's new Security Essentials. Yes, I know several attempts by Microsoft in the field of security is unsuccessful in the past, but things have changed this time round. They seems to have learnt their mistake during the dark times with Vista and OneCare.

That's it for now. Hope it has helped broaden your knowledge in the field of computer security. Cheers!

Thousands of Hotmail Passwords Leaked

The first website that were aware of this was Neowin.net. They later verified that the accounts compromised are genuine and they immediately alerted Microsoft's Security Response Center. Microsoft has officially confirmed that there are several thousand Windows Live Hotmail users' credentials exposed on a third party site due to phishing scams. Compromised accounts includes email domains of @hotmail.com, @msn.com, and @live.com. Currently, the leaked accounts include usernames in alphabetical order beginning from "ar" to "bl".


So if you suspect your email account has been compromised, be sure to change your password now. For those of you that have filled in your email and password to utilise services similar to what I've discussed previously, you must absolutely change your password as soon as possible.


One last note to you all, technically speaking it is IMPOSSIBLE to tell who has blocked you and MSN will NOT closed down and MSN will NOT charged you money to use and....... hope you get my point. In case you didn't, don't believe everything you see in the world wide web.

Attempt to revive blog

A lot of things had happened since my last post.



But the most important 1 occurred yesterday...



After weeks of eager waiting for free time to do this.... i am finally....

using WINDOWS 7!

^_^

Maths and Science back in BM

The initiative of PPSMI or Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris began in the year 2003. I was the first batch and it goes very well. In fact, there is an increase in the number of As achieved by students. In addition to that, majority of the students opted to answer the entire paper in English.

According to news for PMR 2008,

This year, 51.2% of candidates chose English, compared with 30.8% who answered in Malay and 18% who used a combination of both lan­guages. Last year, only 21.5% of candidates answered the PMR Science paper wholly in English.

Education director-general Datuk Alimuddin Mohd Dom described the increasing trend of candidates using English as “very encouraging”.

The subject that showed the biggest improvement in performance was English — the pass rate increased by 3.6 points from an average of 71.2% from 2003-2007 to 74.8% this year.

The disparity between the performance of urban and rural students was also narrowing. “Each year we see an improvement in the achievements of rural students,” he said.

For 2008's SPM,

Students in the rural areas, including the interior as well as Orang Asli students, who sat the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination last year outshone their peers in the urban areas where Science and Mathematics are concerned. And these two subjects were taught in English.

As such, Education Ministry director-general Datuk Alimuddin Mohd Dom said the arguments that the teaching of these two subjects in English caused the rural students to lag might no longer hold water.

... a whopping 89.1 per cent of students who took up Additional Mathematics, answering the first paper fully in English.

... 76.8 per cent of those who sat for Chemistry Paper 3 writing their subjective answers in English.

"The gap between students in the urban and rural areas has been bridged and this is visible in their (rural students') better performance compared with their peers in towns."

Since the teaching of Science and Mathematics in English was introduced in 2003, there had been a steady improvement in students' performance in the subjects.

If there's such good feedback and result from students, why is there a need to revert back to BM? Just because they felt the national language is threaten by English, they revert it back. In fact, there are quite many BM words that are being derived from English words such as.... *deep breath*.... here goes... aktif, bos, boikot, komplex, komander, etnik, global, suspek, seksyen, abstrak, proses, teknik, aktiviti, mentaliti, personaliti, respirasi, realiti, majoriti, demostrasi, imaginasi, fungsi, misi, visi, aksi, reaksi, seksi... etc etc. All the words had gradually derived from English long before this PPSMI being initiated. Why only now they felt threaten while the use of those words had merged itself in BM long time ago? So much for protecting the national language... Malaysia Boleh!

How can Malaysia improve and develop to be competent in the global market if this continues? Doesn't all the previous students had problem translating terminologies from BM to English upon starting their tertiary studies? It is such a hassle and time consuming process as they need to adapt to the use of English terminologies.

Anyway, since this blog is about technology and IT, I'm going to relate it with that.

ENGLISH :
That server gives a plug and play service to the client using either hardware or software joystick. The joystick goes into the port of the client.

What happens if BM is used?

*hardware = barang keras
*software = barang lembut
*joystick = batang gembira
*plug and play = cucuk dan main
*port = lubang
*server = pelayan
*client = pelanggan

BM :
Pelayan itu memberi pelanggannya layanan cucuk dan main dengan menggunakan batang gembira jenis keras atau lembut. Batang gembira itu dimasukkan ke dalam lubang pelanggan.

Ackward isn't it?

Influenza A(H1N1)

As of the time of writing, there are 196 cases in the country. With H1N1 cases on the rise, what we can do to protect ourselves?
Wear masks like how we went through SARS?

This 2 video sums it up :D

Although this first video is about SARS, the things is still applicable.

For those who likes Korean... this is a parody from Wondergirl's Nobody with H1N1 issue...

Go wash your hands now ^_^