The heat is on: The Google Summer of Code 2009

Thanks to Adriano Monteiro Marques for the video!

This year I’m going to be mentoring under the Drupal organization again for the second time since last-year’s project Embed Widgets module was a great success. So we would like to invite students to participate again this year too for another awesome SoC.

A peek into OpenSocial Sandbox

Google just approved my request to access the Orkut sandbox for development with OpenSocial API. As expected it works the same as FaceBook except for the lack of widget placement customization. After the application is added, a link shows up on the left panel to access the application's full page view.



However one must be cautioned that the API is still in the works and there are many security holes still unplugged and as the development speeds up with the involvement of the open source community; we will see more and more of these holes.

Fedora 5 boosts desktop features

Red Hat released its Fedora Core 5 version of Linux Monday, giving enthusiasts new graphics and virtualization abilities, as well as some desktop utilities based on a software framework from Microsoft.

read more | digg story

Fedora Core 5 Final Screencast

Although not officially announced yet Fedora Core 5 is available. LinClips has a screencast (video) of the release!

read more | digg story

Root Kit

I was being infested by adwares so i decided to run the old-trusty Spybot to clean it up.

Spybot and adware clashed in a mortal kombat!

The counter started from 0.. 50.. 1000.. 3000.. until it ends somewhere at 30,000+ checks. Damn, why does it always takes so long to scan for adwares?

A slight freeze as Spybot finishes then it reports that New Dot Net and Cydoor trojans were found on my fuc*** pc, well it's my fault because I used a P2P application to download Manny's epic fight last time (you can't really blame me and it was worth it!). So I opted to remove them but New Dot Net persisted, I tried to schedule it for removal on boot then restarted my PC. I re-scanned but its still there; the fuc*** trojan is still there! Time for some drastic measures.

The only time you can't clean up a trojan is when it's rooted (it means it installed a "rookit" to stealth it totally), so i fired-up my "not-so-recommended for noob" Autorun and Rootkit Revealer from Sysinternals.com. I found that it has installed to .sys file called cert32 and cert64 including some other files that high-jacked some legit image entries in the registry, so all i needed to do was delete the entries then reboot.

* deleting..

I have just deleted the entries and the files, im going to reboot now. If you don't hear from me it means i fuc*** up my OS and I have to spend an entire day fixing it. Oh well, ill just boot Linux for a while until its fixed, too bad that some of my tools runs on MS Windows only, if not i would totaly junk MS.

Pray for me, im going to say hi first to some people online since it's going to be a long silent day for me if this doesn't work :((

Before I-Robot, there was C-Robot

Mike Perez has an interesting blog post about jabberwacky chat bot. I too have an interest on chat bots about since year ago and I have stockpiled a lot of bots raging from Alice bots to voice enabled bots like pandorabots. After much tinkering around with lines and lines of botscripts and downloading the massive knowledge base, I found pandorabots the most suitable for all my needs. Pandora bot's basically runs as a webservice so you can use any of your favorite scripting language such as PHP, Perl, and Ruby to directly post user queries to the bot's URL. The interface was kept plain and simple so you can use screen-scraping methods to capture the bot's response. Pandora bots has a web interface that you can use to add new knowledge using AI Markup Language (AIML) or train using question and response (in which you can change the bot's response to some question if you don't like it).

You can visit my bot at using normal chat mode or with voice. Please be polite and you can ask the bot about our company Finger Apps (our company) too!

Advance pandorabots.

You can use pandorabots in tandem with kannel and glue it up with a simple script as I mentioned above, this will give you an SMS based chatbot. If you like to use pandorabot with IM's then you can hook it up a jabber server, I used the PHP jabber API to hook my pandorabot to my Yahoo messenger :))

Service bots!

If you like bots that "do things" other than chat with you then try our smarter child. You can command the bot ranging from taking down notes to search google. Smarter child is also available for chat in AOL, MSN, and ICQ messenger.