The Danesh Project

Torrentspy shuts down

Torrentpy, once the most popular torrent site on the net has finally decided to shut it’s doors and pack up permanently. Why? Well as usual MPAA is the culprit, 2 years of battling the the MPAA proved to be too much for Justin Bundell, the fonder of Torrentspy.

“We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the TorrentSpy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.�

Those were Justin’s last words for Torrentspy.

Torrentspy was directed by the courts to log all user activities and have them submitted to the MPAA. Torrentspy came back by locking out US based users but that was not enough for the MPPA hence the decision to close it’s door. Protecting their user’s privacy was more important to Torrentpy and I respect them of that.

I’ve always used Torrespy as one of my main source for torrents and wish there was something I could have done to help.

WordPress 2.5 RC2 Released

WordPress 2.5 missed it’s initial release date but not for a bad reason. There’s quite a bit of work being put into the new version especially in the dashboard area.

The editor is receiving a much needed face lift and feature boost. The media manager now supports multiple uploads like flickr and support for embedding videos is being added as a standard feature.

Other new features include a image gallery, faster load times, gravatar support, one-click plugin upgrades, full text feeds and improved tags management.

There’s a screencast of 2.5 rc2 available for you to get a glimpse of what in 2.5. Watch it here.

Looking good eh?

The WordPress 2.5 plugin compatibility list will help you decide if your favorite plugins are ready for 2.5.

Source: WordPress Dev

Linux Commands: tee

Not many people I know use the tee command but I find it quite useful. I tend to use it quite often in my scripts actually.

So what does it do?

The tee command has the ability to take the standard input and redirected it to multiple outputs. For example, the ls command would normally just return file names on your screen but what if you also need to keep a log of those file names in a text file.

Using the tee command you could simply write something like this “ls * | tee -a output.txt“. The command will return the file names on screen and also append them to the output.txt file. Screenshot below,

A lightly more complex use of the command. I have a file with duplicate entries. Combining the tee command with the uniq and sort commands I am able print the desired output on screen and also dump it into the file output_sorted.txt. Screenshot below,

There are way more usages for the tee command but for today I stuck to the basic. I’ll try to post more about it in the future.

Firefox 2.0.0.13 released

Firefox 2.0.0.13 has just been released. It fixes a few security issues.

XUL popup spoofing variant (cross-tab popups)
Java socket connection to any local port via LiveConnect 2008-17
Privacy issue with SSL Client Authentication
HTTP Referrer spoofing with malformed URLs
Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.13)
JavaScript privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution

If the auto update does not work for you, download the latest Firefox.

Source: Mozilla | Mozilla Security Advisories

Speech: Inside the Black Box, Technological Innovation at Google

A cool lecture by Google’s Senior Vice President of Product Management, Mr.  Jonathan Rosenberg.

He talks about building the right workplace, hiring the right people, inspiring them by trusting them and providing them opportunities to channel their ideas, and most importantly innovate, share and remember to always keep the users/consumer as the priority and not only focus on money making.

“Don’t fight for the bigger pie, fight for a small piece of a larger pie instead” quoted from Mr. Jonathan.

Really cool lecture, is your company even close to this? Mine’s not.