alex.moskalyuk

Anthony Dovgal reported on adding open source SQL full-text search engine sphinx to PECL. The documentation is available on the PHP site, the engine is available upon including sphinxapi.php in your application. You know the usual InnoDB vs. the MyISAM trade-offs, where the former is faster, but the latter has the full-text search? Sphinx is a free open-source full-text search engine that works with many RDMBS, and now is pretty easy to incorporate into PHP. A simple example of calling Sphinx is available here:

$s = new SphinxClient;
$s->setServer("localhost", 6712);
$s->setMatchMode(SPH_MATCH_ANY);
$s->setMaxQueryTime(3);
$result = $s->query("test");

Video conversion tools still remains one of the Windows shareware strongholds, where open source tools have not completely taken over. As a result, a regular search engine query for video conversion is filled with “optimized” commercial results, and it’s pretty hard to download anything that doesn’t stick a watermark in your video, or constraints you to converting (or ripping) just the first few minutes until you pay up $29.95 (which also seems to be the going rate). I am not against commercial software, but it nevertheless makes some free links worth savings. DVDVideoSoft provides 10 free Windows tools, mostly video converters.

• YouTube to iPod Converter
• YouTube to iPhone Converter
• YouTube to MP3 Converter
• 3GP Video Converter
• Video to Flash Converter
• Video to iPod Converter
• Video to iPhone Converter
• Video to MP3 Converter
• Fast MPEG Cut
• YouTube Uploader

ExtremeTech reviews online photo editors that run within a Web browser, be it via a Flash interface or Asynchronous JavaScript passing XML back and forth. They review Fauxto (and find it most feature-complete when comparing to Adobe Photoshop capabilities), Picnik (and find its interface one of the most convenient for quick photo retouching), Picture2Life (and find its filter and effects selection one of the best), Pixenate (which doesn’t require registration, at the same time providing pretty decent functionality) and Snipshot (which wins the award for the simplest interface). The review looks forward to Adobe coming up with a browser-based version of PhotoShop, but overall finds Fauxto the closest PhotoShop clone so far, with Picnik being the closest Picasa clone available.

Michael Robertson (of MP3.com, Linspire, SIPPhone, GizmoProject and MP3Tunes.com fame) is launching a Web-only competitor to Microsoft Office by creating a suite of applications replicating Microsoft Office look and feel. From the posting:

But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on ajaxlaunch.com. These programs will push the boundaries of what people believe is possible today with web-delivered software. These programs look and operate much like their traditional software cousins, but are cross-platform, loaded dynamically, and are available to users at no charge. I’m convinced if you try a few of these products you will understand how the software business will fundamentally change.

ajaxWrite is the first launched product. Overall it looks pretty good, with menu options and icons replicating MS Word exactly.

Every once in a while I get a press release forwarded to me from someone who’s interested in blog coverage, pitching a software tool. Generally those go into a designated folder for later review, but this one seemed kinda interesting, especially since I get a question about flash card/drive data recovery every couple of months or so.

Smart Flash Recovery is a free data recovery tool for Windows operating system that supports FAT 16/32 file system. This powerful software easily recovers data from any type of storage media - flash drives, USB drives, digital cameras, memory stick and multimedia card. Smart Flash Recovery can recover any deleted files, including MS Office files, photos, mp3 and zip files, even if the partition table is lost!

Almost everyone has encountered data corruption. The reasons for it range from an accidental mouse click to a virus attack. The recovery of lost data, favorite pictures can become your worst nightmare. Sometimes the recovery isn’t possible at all.

Smart Flash Recovery will come to the rescue! Thanks to the software digital photo recovery is not a problem anymore! You’ll be amazed by a user-friendly interface, the efficiency of the software and the simplicity in its use. Appropriate programs are recommended for the users of FAT and NTFS. The free download is available at http://www.smartpctools.com

Costs $30 for the full version.

…and actually recommends it.

OpenOffice can do just about anything that Microsoft Office can at home, and with no more difficulty. But that’s not enough: OpenOffice, more so than most other programs competing with what comes out of Redmond, has to live in a Microsoft world. It can’t just function on its own, but it also has to read and write Microsoft’s closed, proprietary formats. That’s a challenge OpenOffice can usually meet. Among dozens of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files fed to OpenOffice, most looked the same as they did in Microsoft Office, down to footnotes, custom bullet points, reviewers’ comments and change-tracking marks. A few exhibited only picayune differences, such as lines of text breaking at different points.

They do provide a fair warning that OpenOffice-created documents saved into Microsoft formats are sometimes mangled badly, when the recipient opens them up in Microsoft applications.

One thing that was omitted by the reviewer, but perhaps should be brought up is the lack of international version availability of Microsoft Office. Go ahead and try to buy a Russian edition of Microsoft Office, a product thats freely available in Russia or Ukraine, and that has integrated Russian and Ukrainian spellchecking support. The trick is - you can’t. Microsoft, a symbol of commercial software world, is out there helpless when you get your wallet and are ready to punch in those numbers for the Russian edition. They simply cannot sell you that, I was told, for licensing reasons.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, includes great internationalization support right out of the box. Not as good as AbiWord, which allows downloadable packs of spellcheckers the first time the installer runs, but still pretty good. They even maintain a list of international versions of OpenOffice.

The stories about the viruses that encrypt the data and then hold it for ransom recently appeared in lots of publications. StarForce sent me the news about their newest tool coming out to prevent just that.

StarForce has created an elegant solution to save users from the new type of internet fraud, known as “ransom-ware”.

Internet community lately has been struck with a new type of extortion plot: the hacker breaks into the user’s system bypassing or neutralizing security and encrypts vital files, locking them with a password. To open such a file, the owner is requested to transfer a certain amount of money to the attacker, and, naturally, the bigger the value of the stolen data is, the more outrageous is the pricing.

While other antivirus and security firms are updating their protective software for companies and consumers that already suffered from such an attack (dubbed “ransom-ware” by the experts), StarForce, the respected international provider of anti-piracy, DRM and IT security technologies, has come up with a prepared solution to fight this new threat.

Safe’n'Sec, the next generation technology providing intelligent security, is designed to protect users’ systems against hacker intrusions and new viruses, guarding the user’s valuable documents, photographs, spreadsheets, and any other type of data.

When a threat of intrusion is detected, Safe’n’Sec will prohibit all attempts of the extorter to get access to the user’s information. Based on the advanced and clever Intrusion Prevention mechanism, Safe’n’Sec will provide three layers of security, spoiling the criminal’s plan: Safe’n’Sec will block every attempt to install a Trojan software in the system, prevent activation of the data encoding module of the hacker, and then prohibit the access of ransom-ware to the user’s files.

Utilizing the behavioral analysis patterns, Safe’n'Sec represents a revolutionary breakthrough for the protection solutions, it is capable of providing elaborate defense against the newborn viruses, insidious spyware and Trojans, hacker attempts, data theft and even the common mistakes. Anticipating attacks which are yet to come, Safe’n’Sec protects the computer in the most crucial period of time, required for antivirus companies to deliver that critical update.

Password Manager XP is a convenient software application for storing passwords, access codes, social security and credit card numbers and other valuable information that needs protection. The program allows buyers to systemize and encrypt this data to store it safely and securely, while making sure that it can be accessed and processed easily, when needed.

Program’s features include capability to encrypt stored information with several encryption algorithms simultaneously (Blowfish, 3DES, Rijndael, Tea, Cast128, RC4, Serpent, Twofish). Importantly, no temporary files are ever created, guaranteeing the encrypted data will never be intercepted. The blocks of information are cleared from the computer memory as soon as they are no longer needed. And if the program is left idle for a set period of time, it will automatically shut down, making sure no one gets access to any sensible information.

Safe’n'Sec monitors in real time all processes on a PC and immediately blocks any attempt to perform a potentially hazardous action, regardless of the type and origin of the attack. Safe’n'Sec is a security solution to combat unknown viruses, spyware packages, hacker attacks, Trojans, zero day exploits and combined attacks. Thanks to its unique analysis and decision making algorithms, Safe’n'Sec is capable of detecting and stopping hackers’ attacks, viruses, trojans, spyware, adware and other types of malicious applications even in their zero-day, while allowing the legitimate programs to run without problem. Safe’n'Sec 1.1 Plus Antivirus package comes with BitDefender antiviral database to combine two complementary protection principles in one box - and now at a most attractive price. Safe’n'Sec 1.1 is also fully compatible with other antiviral toolkits and firewalls.

Photo Shaman is a handy imaging software utility for creating stylized thumbnail images for image galleries and photo albums. The main difference of Photo Shaman from other thumbnailing software is an ability to create unique thumbnail styles. If you are bored with standard rectangular thumbnails or want to breathe more life into your photos, then here is what you can do: you can add 3D picture frame to your images with various shapes. You can add bevel effect of different shapes to your thumbs. You also can add a mask together with bevel and frame. The program allows you to create your own style and save it for later use or pick an existing style from a great collection of stock styles.