Much of it was picked up while browsing dubious file-sharing sites. Some of these fake ad generators are so insidious that a person using an infected computer can do nothing more than buy the fake virus/trojan removal product that is being advertised by the malware.

What I did realize is that only Internet Explorer and Firefox users were typically the victims of these infections. I did not try Safari but Chrome seems impervious to malware such as  “Antivirus XP 2010″ which tries to trick you into buying a fake anti-virus product.

Some research revealed that Chrome’s got a sandbox mode of controlling content within each tab where malicious code on one tab cannot do anything outside that tab.

So, while you may like any particular browser, if you are browsing some strange websites, do use Chrome – even temporarily.  Personally, I like the Firefox interface best.

That was some time ago. Now we have a highly useful plugin for Firefox called “Firebug”. After installing Firebug, just look at any webpage using Firefox and right click anywhere on the webpage to click on an “Inspect Element” option that shows up. Voila! You get a Firebug interface that shows you the code around the area you clicked and the CSS that is reponsible for styling that bit of code that you clicked on.Along with the CSS definitions that are applicable to the area under consideration, you get to know the line number of the CSS code.

This functionality saves substantial time in updating CSS definitions or any JavaScript on a web page. I recommend this free product to any web developer.

Enter Bing. I decided to try Bing for atleast a day and see what the search engine could do.With about 20 searches, my initial reaction is that, the search engine is actually quite effective.

It produces decent results and also classifies information in ways that Google does not yet do.

For example all searches produce an additional reference link. A search for “Antique Cars” brings up results and on the left side a navigation bar with links to Manufacturers, Values, Trading, Parts, Reviews. The old Live.com feature of Cashback is still there with Bing.com. Eligible purchases get you money back.

A cool feature within Bing is the neverending image view function. Searching for images is continuous and you can keep scrolling till there are no more images to display. Images can be sorted by size and various other presentation options.

Now, what’s impressive about searching for images with people in them is that Bing can filter photos with “just faces”, “head and shoulders” and “other”. And this function works quite well.

Another cool feature is the webpage content preview function. A mouse over any of the search results gives you a filtered and condensed view of what the page contains without actually visit the page. This is helpful if you’re into research and need to find documents to read.

From a webmaster point of view, a website I submitted to Bing got indexed in less than 24 hours.

Searches are fast! Search results are clean. Cached version of pages are available. And search key term suggestions works nicely.

From the looks of it – Microsoft’s got a great product with a decent name – finally.

The challenge for Microsoft is to break into people’s Google habit. I am going to try both Google and Bing interchangeably over the next month and get into the habit of trying either engine randomly. Who knows, maybe using two search engines instead of one may actually make my life more interesting.

There is truth in what he said. We all use Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail for email. We’re mostly all used to working in a cloud. So what exactly is new with cloud computing?

The idea of leasing processing and storage space online with a company such as Amazon (Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud) looks like the leased main-frame concept of the 80’s. Except now, the services are internet based and we have a diverse collection of applications and operating systems. Add virtualization to the mix and essentially cloud computing is a new term for an improved version of a concept that’s been around for a long time -  commoditizing computing resources.

Oracle customers for example, especially smaller ones, could benefit substantially from the cloud computing concept where they can be freed from the intricacies of maintaining both software and hardware. But  then, as a customer you lose control. If Oracle makes all their applications software available online using a SaaS model, it could very well attract new customers who are willing to sacrifice control for convenience.

Instances where one is not likely to buy into cloud computing:
Location of Critical Applications
Larger customers may not buy into the concept. Think about this, how much are you willing to trust an outside company to manage your critical applications? Say like AIG or Lehman Brothers a cloud computing
service provider goes belly up rather fast for whatever reason? What exactly are you going to do?

How Many Platforms?
What happens if your company used multiple application platforms and one cloud computing service provider cannot support all platforms? Are you going to use multiple clouds?

VMware has a solution for this and their virtualization technology may very well make then an acquisition candidate (Without virtualization cloud computing is really not possible).

Cost vs. Convenience
Your applications still sit on a server somewhere. If at some point your application usage requirements are such that you really need dedicated ownership of a server’s resources, would you really save money utilizing a cloud computing environment? Would not using a managed server be a better option?

The Internet is not 100% Reliable
How many companies are going to feel comfortable about depending upon their ISP to reach their critical applications/data?

Privact and Legal Requirements
I would assume that most cloud computing data centers are based in the USA. Just yesterday, there was news of UBS handing over confidential tax records to the US tax authorities (not a bad thing in my opinion).

How data contained within cloud computing data centers are governed and made available to government authorities will be of considerable concern to companies that are not American. This is still a legal gray area.

Liability
Does anyone read the fine print about liability? Zoho, GoogleDocs do not guarantee that your data is 100% safe. They are certainly reliable but that’s not the same as a 100% data security guarantee. What happens if a company loses their sales leads to a competitor who hacked into one of their sales accounts available online?

Instances where one is likely to buy into cloud computing:
Small Companies and Start-ups on a Budget
Smaller companies who wish to provide a world class experience to their application users but with a limited budget, would find cloud computing to be a welcome alternative to huge upfront costs. The idea here would be to start making money first before investing into dedicated hardware and infrastructure.

Scalability
Say you a have a new online service that may become the next big thing overnight. A cloud computing environment can give you the additional computing power seamlessly if you have a surge of new users/customers.

Mobile Applications
If your workforce is geographically dispersed, chances are that your workers are accessing reporting, applications remotely. In such scenarios it may make more sense from an availability point of view to use a cloud computing environment to serve applications.

Lower Cost Hardware
Your workers will have the added advantage of using the new range of sub $300 Netbooks from Acer/Asus/Dell since they will not need substantial localized computing power.

Online office suites like Zoho and GoogleDocs are good examples of online applications that are widely used.

Unlimited Storage Capacity
This is one of those features that can be called a plus but really is not, since most computers today come with atleast a 150GB hard drive. So unless you’re collecting movies or something of that nature, this is not really a huge plus for end-users. From an enterprise point of view, storage only gets cheaper with time.

Native Group Collaboration
If 10 people need to look and comment on a document, it becomes easy to do so with a cloud based application.

In conclusion, I think cloud computing will become an accepted means of delivering software as a service (SaaS). Cloud computing will initially be adopted more by those companies that are starting up and who are keen on saving on tech infrastructure costs and by smaller companies who cannot afford to maintain a dedicated infrastructure to deliver online services. But it will take a certain amount of time for the model to mature to a point where security, reliability and legal issues have been worked out for large corporations to become comfortable.

VMware Cloud Demo Video here (really good intro)
http://download3.vmware.com/vcloud/demos/cloud_demov2.html

Some references:
UBS to ID clients accused of tax evasion
http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/18/news/companies/UBS.reut/index.htm

The usual search criteria such as prices, bedrooms etc. are available also. I have a feeling that map based searches are going to become a standard for multiple listing services (MLS) and pretty much any online database that has entries associated with a zip code and address.

While most property listing show up pretty accurately on HotPads.com there are some quirks (here and there) where some properties from far away show up incorrectly. This is minor and I am sure will get resolved. Overall, I like the service.

Consider this: if you are in the business of providing web development services or in the web design business, you’re likely to have built several applications and data intensive websites over the years. Almost all of these websites/web applications can benefit from qualitative upgrades using Ajax techniques.

For a reasonable charge, boring data entry and retreival applications can be souped up using any number of easily integrated visual interface elements. You are not messing with the internals of an application, just improving the user experience so you’re unlikely to hit  major roadblocks. The resulting ’Ajaxed’ application looks and works much better, the client looks great to their management and its a win situation for everyone.

The easiest way to sell this is to invest the time in re-engineering say one web page/report (with some nice visualization effects) and letting the client see the benefit for themselves.

I did bother to open one of the emails and while I knew instantly that the server they were linking to (beta.wwf.it) could not be sending out a CNN email, I found the copy compelling. Oddly enough the headlines were written by someone who would be quite uniquely aware of the US current affairs and the email template design looked quite like a real CNN email.

Every subsequent email uses a different server to host the content that these emails link to and also a different return email address. Clicking on any link within these emails takes you to an ActiveX download message which I did not bother to mess with.

I would be quite interested in knowing how these people actually make any profits engaging is such an activity. Put into legal use, skills used in spamming could be utilized by almost any corporation reaching out to a large audience. So I fail to understand why someone would take so much creative interest and risk incarceration to spam.

Here are some screenshots:

I did not really care for ReGenesis but so what? I have ‘House’ and ‘King of the Hill’. And that along with news is probably all the TV I watch anyway. Today, I came across TidalTV. This is a service in Beta but looks quite slick. The interface is smooth and fast. I watched a Dilbert animated feature on TidalTV (I’ve never seen Dilbert animations before). The quality again was terrific.

Now what this tells me is that, a substantial chunk of broadband users will adopt online TV for their entertainment needs if they have not already and cut their cable bill. For example, you can watch 5 episodes of ‘House’ back to back in any order. Where does TV come close this this? And who likes recording shows when you can have entertainment on demand?

By the way, Hulu also has a large collection of ‘Sanford and Son’.

The Integrity website claims to have a database of driver’s licenses and government issued IDs from 157 nations.  While this service may not seem to be too useful considering it is easy enough to bypass if you know the full name and zip code of anyone, it does have some appeal in terms of the social responsibility issues of online business. At some point we may see services like Integrity a basic requirement to conduct business to a restricted age group. It also makes me wonder how secure information is with the government of whichever country you belong to.