Brand spanking new screenshot of Master Chief from an actual campaign level of Halo 3
November 17, 2006
Bungie is marking the fifth year anniversary of Halo and have released some tantalizing announcements for fans of the franchise. But first things first….
To celebrate this special occasion, Bungie presented to us a brand spankin’ new screenshot from Halo 3. This is an actual screenshot taken from the actual game within an actual campaign level of Halo 3. This gives us a glimpse of the latest Master Chief model with artist Frank Capezutto providing a great backdrop. Click the picture for the big version in its full hi-res glory!
The other major news released from Microsoft and Bungie… Halo 3 commercial and …
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Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! team up on web crawling, agree to a common sitemaps protocol
November 17, 2006
A sitemap is a simple XML file which webmasters place in the root of their site to submit their pages for spidering and indexing by search engines. A sitemap is not just restricted to information about the URL’s and the frequently changing pages at web sites, but also could include meta information about those URLs such as when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important a particular URL is , releative to other URLs in the site and also geo-location data, so that these search engines can more intelligently crawl and index the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.
Google was the first of the search engines to release Sitemaps almost a year ago. Now, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, in an encouraging act of parternship announced today that they will begin to use the same sitemap protocol to index websites around the world. The new parternship is based out of sitemaps.org, which has lots of instructions for web masters on how to generate a standards compliant XML file on their servers which all three engines can then use to track updates to webpages.
The protocol is offered under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, so it can be used by any search engine, derivative variations using the same license can be created and it can be used for commercial purposes.
Any time competitors agree on open standards, that’s an enabler of further innovation and something to celebrate. It’s also great to see Creative Commons receiving all the more validation.
Search engine guru Danny Sullivan wrote the following tonight about the move.
Overall, I’m thrilled. It took nearly a decade for the search engines to go from unifying around standards for blocking spidering and making page description to agreeing on the nofollow attribute for links in January 2005. A wait of nearly two years for the next unified move is a long time, but far less than 10 and progress that’s very welcomed. I applaud the three search engines for all coming together and look forward to more to come.
Several people have made early public statements indicating that the next move will be to develop meaningful standards support for robots.txt files. Imagine a future when these players agree on standards for user control of data, microformats or truly neutral party click-fraud tracking and prevention.
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Microsoft releases Windows PowerShell, a powerful replacement for cmd.exe
November 14, 2006
Microsoft released a new and more powerful command line shell and task based scripting technology called Windows PowerShell today. Powershell brings in Unix style shell scripting to Windows Vista as well as Windows XP and Windows 2003 platforms.
Powershell supports features like pipelines(dir | more), allows you to quickly solve storage problems for instance how many 700MB cds are needed to backup 11GB? (11GBMB/700MB) Alex of Windows Vista blog has a more simple definition of Powershell. He describes Powershell as “If you haven’t heard of Windows PowerShell before, think of it as an integrated version of the Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and VBScript.”
You can use it to unleash the power of wildcards and working objects too. Say you wanted to get all the services that start with “a” and then get all the dependent services associated with it, simply typing “PS> get-service w* | format-list DisplayName, DependentServices” should do the job.
History: Before being released as Windows Powershell, it was previously known as Windows “Monad” Shell and MSH or Microsoft Command Shell.
Prerequisites: Windows PowerShell requires the .Net Framework 2.0. You can download Framework 2.0 here
Cool New Features/ can do with Win PowerShell …. I think I will call it Win Pow
1. You can test your commands before committing to them(use feature called Whatif )
2. You can start and stop transcripts of all your commands
3. Can use Win Pow to access applications such as Windows Media Player 11
4. Can configure the much hated User Account Control (set-itemproperty -path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CurrentVersion\Policies\System -name ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin -value 0) where a 0 will turn of UAC and 2 will turn it back on.
Look at the example below where I display the services and use powershell as a calender calculator
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!The best software developer resume
November 14, 2006
Alexandre Gueniot: This is a fantastic resume
How many resumes does one recruiter receives over a day? At the best time during the dotcom, companies like Cisco received about 20,000 resumes a month, I think. Unsolicited.
Wow.
How to stand out amongst all of those resumes, this is the big question on everybody’s mind. There are plenty of tricks, of course.
Here is one that is being circulated on the web - another buzz, but for once, this is a real one.
Click to check out the cool flash animation resume
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How a Paypal phishing email looks like and how to detect it
November 13, 2006
In computing, phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.
The first recorded mention of phishing is on the alt.online-service.america-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996, although the term may have appeared even earlier in the print edition of the hacker magazine 2600. The term phishing is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to “fish” for users’ financial information and passwords. The word may also be linked to leetspeak, in which ph is a common substitution for f.
Shown below is a sample email message I received from PayPal
If you dissect this email digging into its header and the content code, you will see two things jump out
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!$100 rebate on MS Xbox 360 consoles
November 13, 2006
Microcenter stores (B&M) are offering $100 rebates on Microsoft Xbox 360 Consoles from now until 12/3/06. That means you can get the Premium Bundle (wireless controller, 20GB hard drive, etc) for just $299 after rebate and the Core System for just $199. In-store only, your mileage may vary.
So,what is Micro Center?
Great, it appears there a total of 19 locations across America.
http://www.microcenter.com/at_the_stores/index.html
The rebate for your xbox 360 100 is in store only. However, it is one hell of a deal for those people near these Microcenter stores. So make sure you watch out for the Micro Center Xbox 360 deal.
If you liked this article, click here to buy me a beer!Microsoft designs the iPod and its casing spoof
November 13, 2006
This is an awesome video made by none other than Microsoft itself. As hard as it is to believe this Microsoft made this internal video mocking itself. Check out the pictures and the video at the end of this article.
Round # 1: Make sure it’s on Brand and has something expressively Human
ex. Microsoft iPod 2006 Human Ear Edition or MS i-Pod Pro 2006 Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription
Round # 2: FOB stands for Full of Bullets
Round # 3: Stars and Stripes
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