Set your Vacation responder OFF

Gladly opened the reply I got for the mailing list to check whether I got what I needed. "Out of office from 19  of March until 5 of April 2010. Back on April, 6th.", someone's vacation responder has mailed me. Too sad to see these vacation responders not being smart enough to differentiate the personal mails from the mails received from the mailing lists. Without knowing what he does, that man is spamming each and everyone one who is sending a mail to the mailing list.

Another annoyance is 'unsubscribe' mail flood. If you want to unsubscribe from a mailing list, mostly you should send a mail to -user-request@ or -dev-request with the word unsubscribe in the message body, or a blank message to -user-unsubscribe@ or -dev-unsubscribe@ depending on the particular list's settings. NOT a mail with the body and/or header 'unsubscribe' to the user/dev list itself. This piece of information is mostly provided as a footer with each mail, still people continue making the same mistake.

Zotero 2.0.2 and word processors

Zotero is a free Firefox extension to collect, manage, cite, and share the research sources, which is also available in the clouds, making our list of references available anywhere. Zotero provides word processor plugins for Ms.Word and OOo Writer (and NeoOffice - A free software port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform). At the moment, it seems OOo is unable to provide the support for the plugin due to the unavailability of the original developer [1]. 

Zotero does not have the Abiword support yet. There are requests for the feature on both Abiword's bugzilla and Zotero's Feature Request. I'd like to see someone from Zotero developers' team considering this request to make this possible. As Zotero and Firefox are portable and are capable of working from a thumb drive, it would be better to have a plugin for Abiword as this would make Zotero package a really portable on with all the three being portable, considering the availability of the Abiword portable application.

Windows Security alert on Ubuntu OS!

I was checking out some cites while preparing for the upcoming ICT seminar of 06CSE that to be held in Jaffna. Suddenly a pop up took me to the site freescanreveals.org. The site was showing a nice screenshot of 'my computer' showing the list of affected files, repeatedly prompting me to install the anti-virus to cure the virus attack. Funny! It has faked a Windows XP OS nicely on my Ubuntu 9.10. [ROFL]

Anyway the fake messagebox was so real that can scare any of the windows operating system user by using "System Security Antivirus" messages. It was a loop, so I had to forcefully shutdown the browser. Finally I confirmed from Spamhaus that freescanreveals.org is a reported attack-site posing as providing an anti-virus software.

Please make sure your virus identifies my operating system and acts accordingly.

Fortnight Reports and Presentations

Fortnight Reports depicting my progress on our Mooshabaya Project can be found below.
Fortnight Reports: FNR17, FNR16, FNR15, FNR14, FNR13, FNR12, FNR11, FNR10, FNR9, FNR8, FNR7,FNR6, FNR5, FNR4, FNR3, FNR2, FNR1

First Formal Presentation: 30/10/2009. Evaluated by Mr.Shantha Fernando. [83/100]
Second Formal Presentation / Viva: [Evaluation of the report and progress]: 10/12/2009. Evaluated by Mr.Shantha Fernando. [90/100]
Draft Report [75/100]
Third Formal Presentation: 24/03/2010. Evaluated by Mr.Shantha Fernando. [78/100]

Overall view of Mooshabaya

References - Mozilla Rhino Host Object
[1] Writing a Custom Host Object
[2] Tutorial: Embedding Rhino
[3] File Host Object

* Special thanks to JetBrains for providing the Open Source License for the Mooshabaya Project; Open Source License concept makes IDEA more FOSS-friendly.

Motivation and Llovizna

ClustrMaps is here being awarded as the biggest motivator for me to blog. Not kidding. It does give a huge encouragement. Isn't it good to see many people from different countries taking a look at our blog posts? But I should accept the sad truth that since they archive the map once a year, all those sweet red dots indicating the visitors will be gone in a few days, making the journey start from zero once more. For my future reference, I have just archived the 'dots' here.
Bookmarks of ClustrMaps or its facebook page is also worth visiting.