OR several years I have retained one spreadsheet on my Palm handheld. This was, in fact, a crude timesheet which was needed for work. Several months ago I decided to migrate everything to OpenOffice and access that spreadsheet using SSH from virtually any connected Linux box. This sounded reasonable at first, but frequent updates made this rather impractical and cumbersome.

Later on, I decided to export all data from OpenOffice as plain HTML tables and then repeatedly modify the HTML files on my Web server. This was rather time-consuming, so I sought alternatives which I knew existed.

I wound up using a Web-based spreadsheet application that is very light and retains all data as comma-separated values (thus no database needed). That powerful tool was Open Source, as always.

phpWebSheet has powerful and advanced (from a Web-based point-of-view) features such as tabular copy-and-paste, Wiki-styled formatting, and support for formulas/functions. In my perception, it is yet another winning application for PHP. There are many similar free applications at freshmeat.net, but I only investigated two which appeared better-suited for the purpose and rather mature too.

Spreadsheets are of course password-protected, but can still be accessed rapidly from everywhere at any time. All in all, the transition was a rewarding one. I sometimes wonder if I should have just stuck to the Palm PDA rather than make a progressive 3-step transition (as outlined above).

Spreadsheets have been on my Palm for years, virtually seconds away at pocket’s distance. Nonetheless, Being a Web technologies fanatic, I am always enthusiastic about ‘Webward’ transitions. On that same batch of installations, I set up phpshell which enables me to obtain shell access to my shared Web server. I can even see what the administrators are up to. This does not require a cron job hack as I once described.

Access to so many free packages (roughly a dozen of them on my domain already) is why I love Linux and the GNU ideaology.

Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

OMBIE attacks on this site have persisted for over a month and have shown no sign of abatement. In fact, it only gets worse as more diverse locations get targetted for the puspose of referrer spam injection.

I have ultimately grown tired of these attacks rather than become accustomed to them. Each day, over 1,000 attacks are launched against my domain (2 of them actually) by hijacked Windows-powered machines. To remain kind to all genuine visitors, thus far I have re-directed suspicious page requests internally, displaying a forbidden (error 403) page. This has gotten me nowhere as the attackers are not deterred by any of this. Only more and more Windows computer get hijacked and ‘puppeteered’, so brute-force is never an issue.

Yesterday I became slightly more emotional and perhaps courageous enough to forward all of these leeches to microsoft.com/this-is-YOUR-zombie-NOT-mine. Let us wait and see how Microsoft handles nearly 50,000 of these zombie attacks per month. In my defence, all I do is merely pass on the zombies to the domain which I find responsible for their misfortunate existence. I look forward to some form of response from Microsoft with great anticipation.

A week back I enquired in nntp://uk.legal as to whether Microsoft could be held accountable directly for these attacks, which are due to major loopholes in their flagship O/S. Opinions which I received in response were mixed, but no doubt Microsoft’s faulty product, which allows computers to be used as weapons, ought to take at least part of the blame. I previously explained more on that stance of mine and arguments regarding liability.

An older Web-based presentation (April 2005, London)

received some encouraging news last night. My submission to the MIAS-IRC annual symposium has been accepted for an oral presentation. To make matters even better, a paper of my colleague, in which I am among the authors, has been accepted as well.

This maintains a good record of consecutive oral presetations (rather than posters). At the moment I continue working towards two looming deadlines for international conferences. I have also begun to prepare the upcoming presentation, the Ph.D. thesis and I foresee the possibility of supercomputing in the near future.

AST year I praised a habit of posting short blog items which address the main point and then end it. I have come to realise that my blog items are becoming quite long. I get carried away and feel guilty to have pages with little content that makes them unhelpful.

I promise to change that bad habit of mine whenever the story permits it. From now on I will attempt to ensure all posts are fairly short. Pictures are worth a thousand words and I hope they can complement brief sequences of text.

Firefox Web Developer extension (click to enlarge)

OME time in the past I mentioned my ‘Firefox essentials’ and a variety of Firefox toolbars. As it has been many months since then, I would like to list extensions and hacks which I am still pleased with.

• CSS-based ads blocker – get rid of nasty advertisements (even the ones that sometimes appear in my site)
• Mouse Gestures (particularly from Optimoz) – browse using your hand motion
• Flashblock – block Flash and permit its invocation using mouseclicks
• Googlebar – better in many respects than the Google Toolbar
• SearchStatus – highlight rel="nofollow" links in red; display PageRank and Alexa rank in the status bar; check for inclusion in the Google Directory and DMOZ
• Web Developer – the ultimate designer/debugger extension (see picture at top)
• Netcraft Toolbar – detailed and rather technical site information
• AdSense Notifier – little notifier for accumulated earnings – updated merely at real-time in the status bar

Redundant extensions that I no longer use or have disabled over time:

• FlashGot – mass downloads (can use wget instead)
• SpellBound – spellchecker in textareas (does not work consistently)
• PRGoogleBar – Googlebar with PageRank (Googlebar has evolved more though)
• Live HTTP Headers – if you are curious or develop for the Web and delve into headers-level
• A9 Toolbar – good for boosting your Alexa rank (via history log)

Longhorn beta – old screenshot

ICROSOFT are said to offering too much choice in their upcoming Windows Vista. Some would even say that they are bound to failure due to this strategy. 7 editions of Vista are simply too much and customer confusion is foreseen.

As if a dozen editions/versions of Windows¹ was not excessive, Singularity — a research O/S — has recently been introduced by Microsoft. It is probably intended to address the many inherent deficiencies in Windows, primarily security and customisability. Singularity will in fact be built from scratch, which is reminiscent of what was previously said about Vista as words leaked out from Redmond.

If Microsoft pursue a research O/S, then so be it, but researchers are largely not fond of Windows, especially in scientific research domains. Windows is simply too restrictive and insufficiently flexible (unless one pays). The move to Singularity is absurd, in my opinion, as people do not want to completely separate research environments from other activities.

Research involves writing documents and surfing the Web, for example. Having one operating system at home a yet another O/S, which is dedicated to research at work, is utterly confusing and unnecessary. It also support the point regarding confusion in Vista, which will be distributed in 7 editions. To use analogies, it is like having a truck and a motorcycle both for the puspose of transporting one passenger. More so, it is like having completely separate sets of dishes for chicken and ham.

¹ Windows ME, 2000, NT, XP Home+Professional are still supported, but only partially and not for long either.

NE fact which I am fully aware of is that I have typos in my blog. That is much as I expect. I regularly spot these when it is already too late to be worthwhile correcting.

I would like to write a few words on the way I check for the correctness of text. Before publishing an item in the blog, I read the whole message entirely (single proofreading pass), which includes a slack glance at the markup. Having done so, I quickly spellcheck the text and then validate the markup in order to spot structural inconsistencies or typos in the markup. Lastly, I have another quick and sloppy read, which assumes the first read was sufficient for eradication of typos.

¨Life is too short to proofread¨ is a quote/motto that I go by. ‘Typo paranoia’ can be time-consuming and is by no means enjoyable either. I am more lenient and sloppy when it comes to E-mail, mailing lists and newsgroups, with an exception where my bosses are involved. I rely mainly on the spellchecker and sometimes I re-read the text once, at the very end. By worrying less, I increase my capacity for writing, at the expense of quality.