Track Down Your Stolen Laptop

Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Prey helps you locate your missing laptop by sending timed reports with a bunch of information of its whereabouts. This includes the general status of the computer, a list of running programs and active connections, fully-detailed network and wifi information, a screenshot of the running desktop and — in case your laptop has an integrated webcam — a picture of the thief.

Prey uses a remote activation system which means the program sits silently in your computer until you actually want it to run. If so, it gathers all the information and sends it to your Prey web control panel or directly to your mailbox. The thief will never know his movements are being watched.

[Read more: HERE]

My Congratulations to VLC Team

Congratulations VLC team that now is proud to announce that VLC media player 1.x is now available. This is the stable release of VLC media player after 8 years of development and beta testing.

Thanks to the continuous efforts made by the developers and the community, the new version of the award-winning VLC media player, numbered 1.0.0, is approaching the end of development.

Again… Congratulations to VLC Team

The un-lame LAME

LAME originally stood for LAME Ain’t an Mp3 Encoder. LAME development started around mid 1998 by Mike Cheng. It started life as a GPL’d patch against the dist10 ISO demonstration source, and thus was incapable of producing an mp3 stream or even being compiled by itself. Therefore, Mike Cheng decided to start from scratch based on the dist10 sources. His goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. That branch (a patch against the reference sources) became Lame 2.0, and only on Lame 3.81 did we replaced of all dist10 code, making LAME no more only a patch. Now LAME is the source code for a fully LGPL’d MP3 encoder, with speed and quality to rival and often surpass all commercial competitors.

Mike Cheng eventually left leadership and started working on tooLame, an MP2 encoder. Mark Taylor became leader and started pursuing increased quality in addition to better speed. He can be considered the initiator of the LAME project in its current form. He released version 3.0 featuring gpsycho, a new psychoacoustic model he developed. In early 2003 Mark left project leadership, and since then the project has been lead through the cooperation of the active developers (currently 4 individuals).

• Gabriel Bouvigne
• Robert Hegemann
• Alexander Leidinger
• Takehiro Tominaga

Today, LAME is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and at VBR, mostly thanks to the dedicated work of its developers and the open source licensing model that allowed the project to tap into engineering resources from all around the world. Both quality and speed improvements are still happening, probably making LAME the only MP3 encoder still being actively developed.

LAME features:

• Many improvements in quality in speed over ISO reference software. See history.
• MPEG1,2 and 2.5 layer III encoding.
• CBR (constant bitrate) and two types of variable bitrate, VBR and ABR.
• Encoding engine can be compiled as a shared library (Linux/UNIX), DLL , Directshow filter or ACM codec (Windows).
• Free format encoding and decoding.
• GPSYCHO: a GPL’d psycho acoustic and noise shaping model.
• Powerful and easy to use presets.
• Quality better than all other encoders at most bitrates.
• Fast! Encodes faster than real time on a PII 266 at highest quality mode.
• MP3x: a GTK/X-Window MP3 frame analyzer for both .mp3 and unencoded audio files.

Q: What the hack is this? I did involve in MP3 encoding, but why I never heard about this before?
A: Because you are lame. 😛

Among the commercial tools that are using LAME are :

• WinAmp
• UltraISO
• SWiSH Max
• Blaze Media Pro
• … and many more…

Those names that I mentioned above (in bold) are the true hero in open source world especially in MP3 encoding. They are the truly un-lame LAMErs. For the lamers out there who have big dreams but totally have no effort like Mike Cheng, you are the king of lame!:)

Embed Watermark By Adding Message Pattern in C

Post ini adalah respon kepada post si Izel yang bertajuk “Embed Watermark By Adding Message Pattern in C“

Assume that Blind Embedding Algorithm works only in grayscale images. Here we encode only one bit of information, thus m is either 1 or 0. This system employs a single reference pattern, w_r, which is an array of pixel intensities with the same size as the cover image. This pattern might be predefined or it might be generated randomly based on a watermark key. The message pattern, w_m (which encodes one-bit message, m), is equal to either w_r or –w_r, depending on whether m = 1 or m = 0 respectively. In the embedder, the message pattern, w_m, is scaled by an input parameter,a, to yield the added pattern. The value a controls the trade-off between visibility and robustness of the watermark. Thus the blind embedding algorithm computes the following:

W_m = { w_r if m = 1;

{ -w_r if m = 0;

w_a = α w_m;

c_w = c_o + w_a

[Source: Izel]

Adeh… kesian aku tengok bebudak nie… code separuh separuh.. Meh aku bocorkan rahsia penuh code tersebut. Lepas nie setiap kali tutorial… aku nak korang ucap thanks kat aku tau sebab kita dah tak yah buat tutorial utk module-module yang lepas2 nie… Sila lah download source code nye

Another Open Source Project

Have you use Password Manager before?

Last 2 days, I was looking for a password manager.. a web based password manager.. so that it can helps me to organize passwords when ever I’m connected to the internet.

Finally I’ve found W3PW, a web based password wallet manager written in PHP. Users have to enter their key phrase and the information will be encrypted using the key phrase and finally the encrypted information is stored in a MySql Database.

The latest version of the W3PW is 1.40 and the development was stop in April 2005. So, I’ve decided to fork the W3PW into a new project (atas nasihat nzuhdi).

I’ve been working on it for 2 hours and here are the changelogs :-

• Installation script.
• Provide GUI to hash (using SHA1) the key phrase before it is stored in the database.
• Able to directly login to certain website without need to enter username and password over and over again.

But the biggest problem now is… I STILL DON’T HAVE NAME FOR THIS NEW PROJECT! Hahahahah..!

I hope you guys can come out with several suggestions for this new project’s name.

Thank you