Making a list this Christmas
By Harendra Alwis
Did you tell Santa about these?
So have you mailed your letters to Santa yet? Well, there are few gadgets you may want to add to your wish list this Christmas. First the Linux-powered Sharp Zaurus PDAs are worth checking out. The C700 model comes with a landscape display and small QWERTY keyboard with .44 inch keypitch, which means typing is possible. The display has 640-by-480 pixel (VGA) resolution, which means less scrolling. The C700 runs on a 400-MHz Intel XScale processor, and comes with 64MB of flash memory and 32MB of synchronous dynamic RAM. The device is equipped with slots for Secure Digital and Compact Flash cards. It carries a price tag of about Rs. 50,000 and is scheduled to be released in January.

The latest digital music player from Panasonic combines support for MP3 with Advanced Audio Coding and Windows Media Audio in a tiny 1.5 ounce package. The SV-SD50 has no internal memory but accepts Secure Digital memory cards, which are available in sizes of up to 512MB. That means hours of music can be carried in your pocket. The player runs off an AAA size battery which should provide enough power for 31 hours of music. It will be available from early December for around Rs. 12,500.

Sony's latest portable optical disc player is just as comfortable helping you burn your songs, as well as other files onto CDs and playing your favourite DVD movie or CD while you are on the move. With headphones, the MPD-AP20U looks like a conventional portable CD player; if not for the USB cable that retracts from its body. The drive will write CD-R at 24X, CD-RW at 10X, read CD-ROM at 24X and DVD at 8X, and the interface supports USB 2.0. There's also a MemoryStick slot. It is available now and could cost about Rs. 30,000.
From Techpicks

Multimedia confusion
Recently published results from independent usability tests show that consumer test subjects were unsure of what the term MMS meant. They were so confused by the menu systems of MMS-enabled phones that they were unwilling to send photos via MMS to other phones, painting a grim picture for the numbers of operators who have been launching MMS in their networks.

Whilst testers have found taking a photo with either phone relatively easy, sending the image to another phone was a much more difficult task, because menu systems on the phones did not tally with the consumers' expectations.

Picture messaging is set to be a major part of operators' revenue streams for the next few years, but usability tests show that consumers are baffled by the terminology and design of today's MMS-enabled handsets. These results suggest that handset manufacturers and operators need to work hard to make MMS easier to use if they are to start building decent revenues.

Infoseek

A virus that adds insult to injury
Antivirus vendors are warning users about a new E-mail worm that has the potential to wreak havoc on computer systems and call the user "foolish" while it does its damage, possibly even deleting every file on an infected hard drive. Most antivirus vendors have updated their software to stop the worm and have made removal tools available for those already infected.

Winevar takes advantage of a well-known Iframe vulnerability which is Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook E-mail clients. The flaw makes it possible for such worms and viruses to open HTML formatted messages and execute them without user activation.

When an infected computer is booted, a dialogue box titled "Make a fool of oneself" appears with the text "What a foolish thing you have done". If the "OK" button is pushed, all files on the computer system that are not open will be deleted. Users are urged to update their antivirus software for the latest signatures. Also, users may want to ensure that their systems have been updated to include Microsoft's critical updates and patch the ActiveX vulnerability used by this worm.

FTP search by email
Archie servers could be thought of as a database of all the anonymous FTP sites in the world, allowing you to find the site and/or name of a file to be retrieved. This function has been taken over by a web-based FTP search engine.

To use FTP Search by e-mail, simply send an e-mail message to one of the webmail servers (see WWW section) with this line in the message

send http://ftpsearch.lycos.com/cgi-bin/search?form=lycosnet\ &query=[file name or keyword] &filetype=All+files

Now you've learned enough to locate that UUDECODE utility mentioned in the last section. Replace [file name or keyword] with uudecode.bas to find Basic source code, so our e-mail request looks like this:

send http://ftpsearch.lycos.com/cgi-bin/search?form=lycosnet\ &query=uudecode.bas&filetype=All+files

Note: You'll be looking for the uudecode Basic source code, not the executable version, which would of course be a binary file. This will be uuencoded - a Catch 22! The output of your ftp query will contain lots of information like this:

2 /.2/simtelnet/msdos/00_start/uudecode.bas 5.4K - 1996 Feb 24 00:00

FTP Site: ftp.cdrom.com

3 /.3/msdos/00_start/uudecode.bas 5.4K - 1996 Feb 24 00:00

FTP Site: ftp.eunet.cz 4 /.4/cpm/starter-kit/uudecode.bas 1.9K - 1986 Oct 11 00:32

FTP Site: ftp.southcom.com.au

Now you can use a ftpmail server to request "uudecode.bas" (if you have BASIC available) from the ftp.cdrom.com site or one of the others.

Reading Usenet Newsgroups
You can also get Usenet postings from several webmail servers listed in the WORLD-WIDE WEB BY EMAIL section later in this document. There are four approaches:

1) Look for an Agora server with a "Y" in the "Usenet Access" column and send a command like this in the message body: send news:<newsgroup>

2) Use a webmail server to retrieve specified web pages to search at Google (was Deja.com) which archives Usenet groups daily.

Search Newsgroups: http://groups.google.com/

Usenet Advanced Search: http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search

3) Use a webmail server to retrieve specified web pages to read Usenet at Mailgate: http://www.mailgate.org/

4) Use the Relcom Usenet News mailserver. Send the word "help" in the body of a message to newsserv@litech.net

With a little luck, you'll get a list of recent postings to the newsgroup, and then you can retrieve the individual postings by replying to the message from the Agora server. Make sure not to change the subject line of the reply message, and just put the number of the posting you want in the message body.

Sent in by Sennan Constantine

(To be continued...)

By the way, does anybody happen to know Santa's email address? Please... it is kind of urgent!

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