Foxmarks: A bookmark synching tool

While playing around with Mozilla's FireFox, I came across Foxmarks, one of the recommended Firefox add-ons. The main advantage of the tool, apart from the fact that it is free, is that it allows the synchronization of Firefox stored book marks on different machines. I find option to be a pretty useful feature in the consultancy world, where we move from one system to another and sometimes have to do so at a pretty quick notice. While exporting bookmarks and importing them is an option, it requires a third party medium to transport the bookmarks from one system to another. Foxmarks allows you to perform this operation using an intermediate server. The server also acts as a backup device for the storage of the bookmarks.

Two major advantages of Foxmarks are that the installation process is very light and that the tool is easy to use. Foxmarks has one main button "Synchronize now" which pretty much does what it says. It synchronizes the bookmarks on the local machine with a master copy, that is stored on the Foxmarks server. The master copy on the server is created when the user synchronizes for the very first time.Of course , you need to create a user id to use the service. After the first synchronization, the user has the option to synch the local copy with the server or vice-versa.

While the tool is pretty handy and efficient, it has a few annoyances. Why, for example do I need to manually install the tool on every computer before synchronizing my bookmarks. I feel that Foxmarks should offer to self-install, if a user logs into the Foxmarks account from a non-Foxmarks installed browser. Further, the tool does not allow the synchronization of selective folders. This feature would be handy and would definitely speed up the syncing process.

In the world of online bookmarking (delicious), I find Foxmarks to be an interesting and useful application for someone who is constantly on the move.

A camping experience and a message of Hope

This weekend, I was blessed to hear an amazing and inspiring message at OCF Caulfield's Annual July camp, held at Lyrebird camp site, located 300 kms south-east of Melbourne. The camp in itself was an exhilarating experience and it was one of the few instances in the year when I managed to keep myself away from a laptop for over 24 hours.

The camp offered excellent lodging facilities and it gave the perfect opportunity for a group of 35 odd young university students and one software guy to bond. Over the last three days, two nights, we all came one step closer to experiencing the magnificent love of Christ, the Lord.

The highlight of the camp, for me was the awe inspiring, immensely practical and throughly relevant message given by Pastor Ted Fabiyanic, from CityLife church, Hobsons Bay.

Pastor Ted spoke on the need and the importance of Hope in our lives. He explained how we were living in an imperfect world and were susceptible to the everyday frailties of life. Even if we believed that we are living according to God's will, misfortune will befall us at times. We may lose money in a business deal, fail an examination, lose a loved one and feel that we have been betrayed and cheated by God.

At such moments, it may not be possible to think clearly and understand God's plan but what we need to do is understand that God does not cause these events to give us pain but 'uses' them to remove our imperfections. HE uses them and give us a choice, a choice to choose and change our life for the better. The past is gone, the future is here.

Living in the past and dwelling on negative moments, bad choices, depressing events will only keep us in the past. What is required is to make a choice, to move forward in the right direction. We have several examples of successful people in our world, who have repeatedly failed before succeeding and when they did succeed, they succeeded big time.

Pastor Ted explained that God has forgotten and forgiven us for all our past mistakes and now only two people remembered them. We, ourselves and Satan.And by continuing to remember our mistakes, we were living in the past and refusing to move forward.

In our journey of life, God is a constant companion. HE is walking not behind or in front of us but alongside us. HE has given us the tools to succeed and to live in Hope and the most significant expression of this promise has been His son, Jesus Christ. God prepared Christ for His mission of giving Hope to the teeming millions. As a part of this mission preparation, Christ suffered on the cross physically and mentally but His worst moment of anguish and suffering came when God left Him alone and lonely on the cross for a moment. For that one instant that Christ was alone,He experienced utter hopelessness and despair.

The reason that God led Christ into this suffering was that He would know and understand the meaning of not having hope before He could become the fountain of Hope himself. After all, one cannot under stand the suffering and pain of another human being, unless one has experienced it first hand.

Pastor Ted used the life giving words of Psalm 23 to recite the promise of Hope that had been given to us by the LORD. He reiterated that God had a plan for us all (Jeremiah 29:11). To implement this plan and succeed in life, we are required to Act and not live in a world of wishful thinking. An important step towards achieving our goals is surround ourself with positive people and shun negativity. It is the will of God that our past doesn't define our future, if we choose it not too.

The choice is ours. We have to make it, starting now.

The FedEx gets one over Rafa, but only just...

Wimbledon 2007: The FedEx equaled Bjorn's record of five championships at the All England Club by overwhelming the challenger in Rafa but only just.Rafa made the FedEx run for every point. The FedEx had to bring out his best tennis before he could get pass..It was a good match up and for a change, the rankings (No 1 and 2) appeared befitting to the two players.

I guess, we can look forward to some interesting duels in the future.

Sometimes you have to lose, to find what it takes to win

The scoreline 6-4,6-1 doesn't really say it but I just saw one of the toughest fights by an under dog.Marion Bartoli won the crowd over at Wimbledon but could not win the championship. It was not the lack of effort that killed her chances but the lack of chances that the experience of Venus Williams fed her with. Marion fought hard, taking serves at 200 kmph well inside the base-line but there wasn't much she could give that Venus had not seen.

But all said and done, I feel that this defeat will make Marion a better player. She took out world number 1 and world number 3 on her way to the finals and lost to a player who had won the championships 3 times before. There is no shame in this loss , after all sometimes you have to lose to find what it needs to win.

In the men's, Rafa is playing the FedEx again and Wimbledon is not a clay surface.Can Rafa stop the FedEx from equaling Bjorn Borg's five championship titles? Maybe..

Jumping Folders : A new security paradigm

I believe that

• 'Every object should be able to secure itself against malicious access by another object.'
• 'Randomness in object behavior can be an effective approach in securing themselves against malicious manipulation'

Jumping Folders is a proposal to secure folders and thereby contained Files from malicious access by introducing a default security behavior at creation time. The 'security behaviour'proposed is based on the premise that all objects exhibit a set of repeatable patterns in response to certain pre-defined stimuli. For example : If you double-click on windows based file or folder, it is 'normally' expected to open up.

What if I want to secure the folder or a file? The 'normal' (I keep emphasizing the term 'normal' for a specific reason,

which I will make clear shortly) options available to me could be :
1. Hiding the folder.
2. Preventing access to the folder by encrypting it with a password or even better encrypting the contents of the folder.

But what are we doing here:
We are using some well known and defined services available to us to 'seemingly' secure the contents of the folder. These services are provided by the OS (windows) and can be configured at different levels (users, groups, roles and all that)

Perhaps you must be thinking.Is there an option? The OS is the RingMaster. He or She cracks the whip and the performers jump but what if someone kills the RingMaster or even worse uses the identity of the RingMaster to manipulate the performers. You would perhaps say "Too bad" or "who cares about petty performers, get another one" and that is how Life goes on. An object is destroyed and we create another one to replace it.

Isn't that just what humans do.People are born, they multiply and then they die and sometimes die due to unnatural causes.

Jumping Folders is a proposal to inject a security element within an object (in this case, a folder) at creation time. The security element enables the folder to 'use' the services offered by the OS and behave 'abnormally' on certain stimuli.
Services in this case is refers to the windows cut and paste operations. stimuli is a mouse double-click. The 'abnormal' behaviour in this case would be 'cutting and pasting itself' at a different location on the file system.

Ahh..now we know, the reason for my stress on normal and abnormal behavior of objects.

Thus, we have an object (the folder) that is intelligent enough to recognize a malicious intent (double-click) and protect itself by copying itself to another location.

So what if you want to see the contents of the folder.

Well, you could use a combination of a certain sequence of mouse-clicks and key-strokes to override the abnormal behavior. Why mouse-clicks? so you can get over a key-logger that is monitoring your keyboard operations.

In conclusion, Nothing is secure and we don't really need to be paranoid about security. Jumping Folders is a project proposal that give secures objects based on their randomness, so now don't let anyone tell you that randomness is bad :-)

The Lord of Hosts is With Us

I was watching the 1964 classic Zulu last night and as the story goes 4000 Zulu warriors attack a post manned by 149 British soldiers. One of the Christian missionaries living with the soldiers asks the sergeant to call upon the Lord for his own salvation and the sergeant responds with a rendering of the Psalms 46:8-11.

8 Come, behold the works of the LORD,
what desolations he hath made in the earth.

9 He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;
he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;
he burneth the chariot in the fire.

10 Be still, and know that I am God:
I will be exalted among the heathen,
I will be exalted in the earth.

11 The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge

Some very strong verses indeed.

The sergeant remarks, 'it might have been written for a soldier'. Very true and as I feel, very relevant to our times even though they were probably written " on the occasion of the invasion of Israel by the Assyrian King Sennacherib and his 185,000 veteran troops." [Ref]

The first line of every verse in the section is fascinating and has a message.
Come and behold the works of the LORD.
He maketh wars to cease unto the ends of the Earth.
Be still and know that I am God.
The LORD of hosts is with us.

The verses call unto us to leave what is holding our attention and to focus upon the works of the mighty One. He has the power to stop wars, He has the power to give us what we need, He has the power to lead us from a falling World Trade Center tower to safety [Ref]. He is the God of Hosts and He is with US.

There is only one question and it can be asked in many ways. Do we really want to be led unto safety? Do we really want to experience real life? Do we really want to know God?

According to 2007 Australian census data [Ref], one in every five people is an atheist and the fastest growing religion in Australia is not Christianity.

Makes me wonder.

The question that bothers me is not the number of people that are atheist but the number of people who have not yet bothered to find out about God through the Holy Bible and claim to be atheists, because they are the ones losing out when the answers are so close and so near.