News (202)

Why CIOs aren't nuts for Chrome

Google's recently launched web browser, Chrome, will have to overcome a number of major obstacles before it can break the business ubiquity of Internet Explorer and counter the rise of Firefox. Read more »

Creating a 'Facebook for spies'

One might expect James Bond's MySpace page to list shaken martinis, Walther PPKs, and Aston Martins among his interests. Read more »

US subway hackers still gagged

A US judge let stand a temporary restraining order preventing three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from discussing or disclosing their research into security vulnerabilities in the payment system for the local subway system. Read more »

New tools to prevent Microsoft SQL attacks

Microsoft has issued new tools to assist Microsoft ASP and ASP.NET technologies against recent Web-based attacks. Read more »

Google lays open website visitors to advertisers

Google announced a tool called Ad Planner on Tuesday that lets advertisers find websites whose visitors match various demographic attributes. Read more »

Free Google Analytics: A spammer's best friend

Spammers are taking advantage of Google's free Analytics service to track the performance of spam campaigns and boost their business. Read more »

Google's changes rely on guinea pig users

Google is using users as crash test dummies to measure exactly what changes it should make to its main search website — both to its famously Spartan search box and to the results it produces. Read more »

Symantec: Sorry, Flash Player attack not a zero day

After suspecting a zero day exploit was being used to attack the latest version of Flash Player (9.0.124.0), Symantec says the call was a mistake - it was an older version, 9.0.115.0 and prior. Read more »

Is whitelisting the new blacklisting?

The IT security industry has come to a frank realisation that the current approach to preventing malware is simply not working. Is whitelisting, which is the reverse of our current approach, the answer? Read more »

PHP, Python, Samba get security tick of approval

Perl, PHP, Python and Samba have been commended for improving security in a report analysing over 250 open-source projects. Read more »

Features (341)

Microsoft unveils the F# programming language

This article kicks the tyres on the September 2008 Community Technology Preview of F#. Read this brief overview of the programming language's features and environment. Read more »

Move SQL Tuning Sets between Oracle instances

SQL Tuning Sets (STS) capture the workload of an Oracle instance. Starting in Oracle 10g Release 2, these tuning sets can be transported from one instance to another to facilitate testing. Read more »

RIFE with possibilities

Developing a web-based application is never a small undertaking. At the very best it's a lot of work just to develop the code that does whatever it is your application is supposed to do but before you even get to the point of writing your application's code, you have to decide what you going to write it in. Read more »

Inside the Exchange Server Profile Analyzer

The Exchange Server Profile Analyzer is a tool that allows Exchange administrators to get a real-time look at a plethora of statistics surrounding your Exchange servers. The statistics generated by the Profile Analyzer tell the complete story behind the way that your Exchange server is used (or abused!) by your users. Read more »

Manage relational data with the Java Persistence API

The Java Persistence API (JPA) is a Java framework that allows developers to manage relational data in J2SE and J2EE applications. The JPA is defined as part of the EJB 3.0 specification (which is part of the Java EE 5 platform). Read more »

Effective and affordable User testing

At the recent Web Directions South UX conference in Melbourne, Lisa Herrod, the Principal Usability consultant at Scenario Seven offered advice on usability testing with her presentation -- "User testing for the rest of Us". Read more »

Replicating your infrastructure in a lab

This article shows you how to do a test run of Windows Server 2008/Exchange Server 2007 running together in a test environment. Read more »

What's more important to become an IT consultant: education or experience?

What does it take to become an IT consultant? You need a good mix of book smarts and on-the-job knowledge -- with a dash of something else. Read more »

Detect intruders on your network with Snort

Snort is a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS), which can view and analyse packets on a network to determine whether or not a system is being attacked by remote. Read more »

Find blocking processes using recursion in SQL Server 2005

Blocking occurs in SQL Server 2005 when one process has one or more records locked, while another process tries to acquire locks on the same set (or subset) of records. This can create a daisy-chain of processes waiting to complete their work. Read more »

Video (3)

Visio is a waste of time: Holocentric CEO

We sat down with Holocentric CEO John Forrest recently to discuss how process modeling and lifecycle management should be approached. Read more »

Holocentric Modeler Demo

Holocentric CEO John Forrest demonstrates the Holocentric Modeler, which is able to model from requirements analysis through to source code. Read more »

NICTA bug killing tool heads for beta trials

  Read more »

Blog (11)

StartupCamp Melbourne: The review

[blogs:bootstrappr] -- StartupCamp Melbourne looks to have produced just as interesting ideas as the Sydney event which immediately preceded it, but the Victorian start-ups appear to have stumbled during execution. Sydney 1, Melbourne 0. Read more »

MyPerfect.com.au has potential

[blogs:bootstrappr] -- Victorian Web start-up My Perfect has a strong story and rationale for why it will succeed. But it has to overcome some challenges and design flaws first. Read more »

Google's new foray into image search

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Google is developing visual crawling software that can be used for facial recognition and scene analysis. In addition images can be matched with display ads and utilise geotagging information for various applications. Read more »

Where are all of those donated XO laptops going?

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Given all the interest around One Laptop Per Child's "Give One, Get One" program, I've been wondering just where all those laptops that are being donated are actually going. Read more »

Enterprise Architecture has failed in a big way

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- Most EA initiatives failed. My guess is that more than 90% never really resulted in anything useful. Read more »

Blogger declares shenanigans on advertisers -- piracy or plagiarism?

Nick Gibson [blogs:byteclub] -- MIT academic calls notices some suspicious similiarities between a lecture he wrote and an Australian made printer ad. Could this be piracy, or merely plagiarism. I call in the lawyers to find out. Read more »

5 reasons restricting hacking is not like gun control

Nick Gibson [blogs:byteclub] -- Let's get it out of the way: Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people. People with hacking tools can steal your personal data, shut down your system and deface your web site -- but is that any reason to ban them? Read more »

Rational community gets rolling

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- IBM's Rational Software Developer Conference kicked off it's festivities in Orlando, Florida with lights, camera and plenty of action this morning. Read more »

And the crowd goes wild

Chris Duckett [blogs:betaliving] -- In the wash-up of the iPhone announcement, there has been a lack of analysis by way of wrestling metaphors. I seek to fill this void by thinking about it in terms of the browser war. Read more »

The Downside of RAD

David McAmis [blogs:theneteffect] -- Rapid Application Development is all the hype lately, with claims of being able to churn out functional applications in under two weeks. One popular technique is to lock end-users and developers in a conference room for 10 days and build the application on the fly. Read more »

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  • Staff XP stays on life support for longer

    This week's Roundup looks at Microsoft's decision to extend the life of Windows XP, the release of Microsoft Surface SDK, Firefox's new Geode plug-in, Yahoo's new tool -- Smush It and more. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett The good and truly awful celluloid depictions of computers

    Ever wonder why your lawyer uncle leaves the room whenever you turn over to Boston Legal? Or why your forensic science cousin can't stand crime drama? You know the answer: it’s the horrid trivialisation and dumbing down of an occupation to make it appear entertaining. Sometimes it is so unbelievable that it actually hurts and yelling at the screen is the only outlet. Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Brendon Chase Apple's iPhone engineers to tour Sydney, Melbourne

    Aussie developers will be able to get up close and personal with some of the iPhone engineers in November to learn how to build applications for the platform. Read more »

    -- posted by Brendon Chase

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