So to add to my “Just Launched” section, I have been working on Tivo Project for Yahoo!7 that lets the Yahoo!7 TV-Guide users to remotely record the programs onto their tivo boxes and its just been launched a couple of hours ago! Check it out at Yahoo!7 TV-Guide Its an amazing project which has seen lots of team effort and also big support from the top management here!

Tivo lets the users record free to air programs onto their boxes! This can be done directly on the box or by using the tv-guide and I personally think its amazing! The underlying technology is a lot of PHP 5, using webservices and its awesome!

So go get your tivo boxes and enjoy it

Yahoo!7 has just launched the new redesigned News and HomePage

The news has been launched last night and I love it for its nice whitish look now and no flashy colours! Its so much nicer and cleaner when compared to the previous site and is emphasising more on the content! The content is amazing with more than 20 providers and 4 bloggers feeding it with worldclass stories and articles. I just find the interface more user friendly and is easier to find the specific content! With much better navigation and more videos on it I think its definitely one of the best news sites!

And the new homepage!! Have you had a look at it yet? If not you should be jumping straight onto it! Its got loads of personalised and localised content on it! The one-stop for the Australian Users! I personally think its a sign that Yahoo! is improving on its cross-property integration problems! The integration of movies, maps, news, entertainment into home page speaks a lot!

So enjoy the whole new personalised experience!!

So speaking of the ‘Geek Girl’s Dinner’ this time the event was hosted by my office (Yahoo!7) and we had the even happening here in the Millers Point office. It was an amazing event and enjoyed quite a lot and was a good opportunity to meet the new people. I will be doing a kind of a home made video with the slides that I have presented, add more stuff to them as I have no restrictions on time now and will upload it sometime soon.

So while I am writing this post, I have just realised that my last few posts have made this blog appear as a technical blog, which I like anyway but there is no section for me to write just crap So I am creating a new “My Spirit” section where I am going to be categorizing this one! (but no this post is not crap, its just my re-emergence to blogging after a short break!)

Umm, So end of financial year here in Australia! And today kicks off the new financial year. Companies are busy making their new budget, HR in determining new pay scales and individuals waiting for the Group certificates to lodge their tax return claims! The other day I called ATO (Australian tax Office) for confirming something and had to wait for 30 min before I could speak to a consultant! The guy said that they have been busy bees whole of June.

So for me I am thinking of kicking off this new financial year with a movie! So its a movie night tonight! And then am planning to do some redesign on my blog!! I am not that good at HTML and CSS but I have developed the current design and don’t think its bad! So will give a shot again!

Will update you guys abt the details tomorrow!!

So See ya later!

So, to keep ourselves restricted to the scope of this post ‘phishing’ , which the term might have arised from fishing + phreaking, means impersonating something/someone else and tricking customers for financial advantages or to obtain user credentials.

Phishing can be done in different ways, for example the news article that I have referred to in SMH speaks about a technique where the users get an email with some text and a link. The email content usually will give a legitimate impression to the user. The link will be to a site that impersonates the original site (in this case ANZ) and might request the user to login and thus can get the user credentials. In ANZ instance, the email went around to the bank customers and it contained a link to a site whose url, look and feel and content was very similar to the ANZ’s. It had login prompt where the users entered their customer number and their pin. So the phishers now got access to this sensitive data!!

Phishing techniques include using a seemingly legitimate link text or impersonating the look and feel of the site along with its url. After a few anti-phishing techniques have been developed to identify the most common phishing link text, many of the ‘phishers’ started using images to overcome them.

Quite interestingly, there is no effective way to stop phishers. I think it depends mostly on how the financial institution, banks and organisations educate their customers to not use any links from the emails or any other sources. They should be declaring their official sites to the public to avoid any mis-communication.

Apart form that there are also a couple of tools like Google’s SafeBrowsing for Firefox and NetCraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar that can help the users in detecting the possibly phishing sites.

There is also a standard called DKIM, which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail (a merger of two protocols: DomainKeys, which was created by Yahoo!, and Identified Internet Mail, which was created by Cisco), that allows an organization to cryptographically sign outgoing e-mail to verify that it sent the message. Though this standards does not provide a 100% fool-proof solution to phishing, it atleast is working towards enhancing the user’s trust in email due to cryptographic signature in outbound e-mail that is associated with its domain name.

So, be aware of this technique and enter in the data only when you trust the source and you know that it is 100% official.

For those of you who are wondering “what is Cloaking” and “what is SEO”; Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving the search engine related traffic to a site via search results for targeted keywords. Normally, the higher the rank of a site, its displayed in the top results of a related keyword search; which is why it attracts huge amount of traffic. Hence optimizing is important.

There are different ways of optmizing your site for search engines, by using relevant metadata on the webpages etc. Cloaking, many people consider, as one such techniques as well. But in reality its not a legitimate way of optimising.

What is Cloaking? Cloaking is a technique in which the content that is presented to the search engine spider is different to the content that is presented to the user. So a site’s web-master can create two types of content; one for the search engines and the other for the normal users (visitors). When a request for content hits the server, we can programmatically detect the requester and identify if it is a normal user or a search engine spider trying to crawl the site. This can be done from the User-Agent HTTP header. When its detected as a spider then the key-word rich content is returned. So the content presented to the normal users in this case is different.

Wikipedia terms cloaking as a black hat search engine optimization technique and I would call it a search engine cheating technique. Since the content returned to the spiders is keyword rich, the site would automatically get a higher rank and hence would be displayed in the first pages of the search results for the particular keyword.

Many Search engines have blacked out this technique and big search engines like Google ban such sites which use it and I think they should.

So best thing would be to follow the best and legitimate SEO techniques to increase the page rank and thus increase the traffic. If you think anyone is cloaking, then please do complain to the relevant search engine company to take an action and they should be able to verify and thus remove the site from the index.

I am pretty sure people are well aware of the Yahoo!’s good old Babelfish that translates the given block of text into a particular language. It also translates an entire webpage into the specified language. Google has also launched something similar to it called Google Translate which has the same functionality like Babelfish.

But somehow, a little bit different concept has been applied to Google Indic Transliteration. Now as the name suggests this is only available for Indic languages - Indian and Iranian languages. But the concept that has been used here is called transliteration which means it transliterates word by word.

I know that would sound a bit confusing but imagine typing a block to text english and then translate it to a particular language is Translation.

Whereas, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word. So basically you would be using an english keyboard and typing words of your own language. So it works in the same concept of phonetic keyboard. Now I think that it is pretty cool.

Google has also integrated this in Blogspot and hence people can turn this option on and write blogs in any of the transindic languages. I hope they would release it soon for other languages as well.

Though this is of not much use in the english speaking countries, it could prove to be a powerful tool in other countries and lift up the usage of Google applications like mail, google docs, blogspot etc enormously.

Now if this blog does not make any sense to you then have a go at Google Indic Transliteration and Yahoo! Babel Fish and you will notice the difference.

As most of you might already know, we here in Australia, are fighting inflation which is why Reserve Bank Of Australia has been constantly increasing interest rates. If people or workers want a high pay-rise to fight inflation then they are forgetting that this would add more to inflation. I just think that people have got used to the high standard of living which is why its being so hard for them (I would include myself as well) to swallow the after-math of the rising interest rates by RBA to fight it.

But one thing that always gets on to my mind when I think about inflation is, why dint RBA react to it when it first noticed its signs in the Australian economy? And now, its just too harsh for people to cope with the effects. What a chaos!!

As a note, I would add that, I am not an economist. I have just done some reading on the news and a bit of individual research. Please consider this post as my personal opinion and I am not responsible for any of the practical outcomes of this discussion (just to be on the safe-side)

‘Spriting‘ is a process where 2 or more images are merged to form a single image. Now I can see you all looking at my post and thinking”How the hell does this help in page optimization?” Have a look at the following url: http://nz.finance.yahoo.com/ Now in that if you have a look at the following image Sprited Image is a combination of 3 images. Now when required to show the calculator symbol using CSS this is shown and when required to show the graph symbol you can show it by CSS and hide the rest.

What is happening behind the scenes? If you had 3 different images instead of 1 then you would be doing 3 http requests to load these images. But because its only one image, the browser does only one http request the first time and later on it displays the image from the browser cache. So in this case instead of 3 http requests we have got only 1. And imagine if a page has some 24 images and instead these can be merged into 8 big images. So only 8 http calls instead of 24!! So your page can load 3 times faster!! (well technically it is faster, though not as fast as 3X)

Now this does have some limitations like if you are displaying a list and the images for the <li> are sprited, if the text in <li> is more than the width specified then you see the list is broken. Umm but it should be working well in most cases.

I also hear that there are some public (free) tools to sprite the images (accept 2 or more images, merge them into 1), but I could not find any in the first glance. If any of you have come across any such tools or have got previous experiences in this then feel free to share it here

Cheers

So, I thought I would share some of my launch experiences with you here and talk a bit abt my product (oh well I am not the Product manager for this, but since I engineered it I think I would dare call it my product).

NZ Business site keeps you updated on the shares, funds prices, latest news from a wide-range of providers, discussion boards to discuss everything about finance, Opinions which are the expert blogs from the experts in the industry. I like the sleek design of it which is using no funky colours but instead is giving more emphasis on the content of it. If I had a wish list, I would like to make the entire site wider like how the home page is. But to keep it inline with AU we kept the investing and quotes section narrow.

You can also create your own portfolios and add watches on the quotes. The content is all NZ oriented and the news is very frequently updated with a wide range of providers.

So have a look at it and feel free to throw any comments but do remember that this is my personal blog, so I can take in your advice but no promises made!

The statements that are worth a read:

• Organisations have to reward risk and not penalise failure
• Innovation is about new and interesting things. Innovation ends up being about risk, and thinking that risk and failure are good things.
• If you know it’s going to work, it’s probably boring. You’ve got to learn to trust crazy people. It’s the people on the edge that have the most interesting insightful comments.
• A lot of innovation is about ignoring past failures, which can become obstacles. Innovation is a fearlessness about risk; a lack of concern about imagined negative consequences. Whatever goes wrong will be OK; it’s a positive learning experience.
• The trick is to listen and try to figure out what the problem is to solve.
• Have confidence in yourself. People you think are oracles of wisdom - they’re just making it up.

Now dont ask me how much practically is this being done in the real world

Click here for a full read of Gosling’s interview