resetting the mysql root password

to reset the mysql root password.

login as the root and follow the steps

service mysql stop

wait until MySQL shuts down. Then run

mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &

then you will be able to login as root with no password.

mysql -uroot mysql

In MySQL command line prompt issue the following command:

UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD("abcd") WHERE user="root";
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

At this time your root password is reset to "abcd" and MySQL will now
know the privileges and you'll be able to login with your new password:

mysql -uroot -pabcd mysql


Enjoy .............

http://a2ztesting.freeforums.org

Hello Everyone....this week I started a forum called a2ztesting hosted by freeforums.org...there are many forums for software testing but I preferred starting a new forum so that I can take lion share responsibility of making the forum to reach every enthusiastic software test engineer. And the rest of the responsibility lies in making this forum a very useful one, by all of you by contributing most valuable things like your knowledge, experience etc.,

here is the site where you all can register http://a2ztesting.freeforums.org

awaiting to see you all there (as members :))

Quick Hack : P2P block on IPCop 1.4.15

I was trying to install P2P block v 2.5 on ipcop version 1.4.15 and it was not allowing me to do so
as p2p block was written to work for the following versions 1.4.8 to 1.4.11 .... and i found a quick hack for this and wanted to share with every one ..

Step 1 : login to ipcop using ssh and #vi /var/ipcop/general-functions.pl

Step 2 : change this line $General::version = '1.4.15'; to $General::version = '1.4.11';

Step 3 : tar xvzf p2pblock_ipcop_1.4.11.tar.gz

Step 4 : cd p2pblock

Step 5 : ./install

Step 6 : after the installation is successful please revert the General version back to 1.4.15
#vi /var/ipcop/general-functions.pl
#$General::version = '1.4.15';

and you are all set .. hope this is helpful :)

--CS

Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, Issue 71, February 8, 2000
German

---

If you're creative, you may be able to come up with a brilliant viral marketing business plan based on my "Six Simple Principlies of Viral Marketing." http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm In the meantime, here are some viral marketing techniques you can deploy immediately that will do some good:

Encourage Links to Your Site

You can do a number of things to encourage links to your site. Register with search engines, of course, and seek reciprocal links. Here are some approaches designed to set up an exponential response to your efforts.

Write articles and encourage other to post them free as content for their site. If you're an expert in a particular area, write an article about an aspect of it. Then offer it to complementary sites to post on their site as free content, so long as the article contains links to your site. Your article could go far and wide, especially if it is carried on the wings of e-mail to others who will distribute the same article to their network of contacts.

Set up an affiliate program to encourage links to your products. Affiliate programs are a form of network marketing that provides financial incentive for other sites to link to yours. Make sure you pay enough to make this attractive to already-saturated siteowners.

Send out news releases concerning a free service or product available on your site. The key here is to have a truly newsworthy event, contest, free service, or digital download. If your news release is carried by just 5% of the media you send it to, you could have your URL in front of tens of thousands of readers quite inexpensively.

Encourage Word-of-Mouth Recommendations

Word-of-mouth (on the Web it's "word-of-mouse") is considered the very best advertising, because it is unsolicited. Here are some ways to encourage friends to share with friends, and use their network to promote your site.

Install a Recommend-It.com referral system. Recommend-It won't save a dismal site, but it will help your visitors promote your site to their network of friends. Read our review at http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/recommend-it.htm

Make it easy to e-mail or fax your webpage to a friend. Encourage readers to e-mail your webpage to a friend. (If you know of some good CGI or JavaScript programs to do this, please e-mail me at mailto:rfwilson@wilsonweb.com) This is similar to recommend your site, but allows your visitor to send specific content as well. This is easier to accomplish without a database-driven site.

Encourage people to forward your newsletter to friends. Always encourage readers to forward your e-mail newsletter to their friends. Do this at the end of a newsletter, and you may jog some readers to do it immediately. It's easy to do.

Offer Desirable Products or Services that Spread Your Message

Finally, you can provide free services or products on your site that help spread your message to an increasing number of people who hear about it. Several companies offer free e-mail addresses using your domain name. But it's too late to repeat Hotmail's phenomenal success, and the free services will likely tack their own ads onto the free e-mail messages. Here are some more likely possibilities. See sources on our Viral Marketing Resources page http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/viral.htm

Enable visitors to e-mail post cards or greeting cards from your website. Such scripts are not very expensive. Though you can't compete with the Web's top card sites, if you have a unique spin on your product or service, you may carve out some real interest and traffic.

Offer a digital game or utility for free download that carries your marketing message. Games carrying your ad or screen savers are just a couple of the possibilities. Others are games or graphic demos that people can e-mail to their friends.

Most important of all, think of unique ways your can build viral marketing techniques into your future marketing programs. Programs that carry a strong viral marketing component get you much more traffic for your investment than straight advertising.

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005. Originally published 2/1/2000

---

I admit it. The term "viral marketing" is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. "Do they have a vaccine for that yet?" you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don't even have to mate -- he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as "word-of-mouth," "creating a buzz," "leveraging the media," "network marketing." But on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called "viral marketing." While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won't try. The term "viral marketing" has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources

Let's examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

"Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free "cool" buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the "pro" version. Wilson's Second Law of Web Marketing is "The Law of Giving and Selling" (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). "Cheap" or "inexpensive" may generate a wave of interest, but "free" will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives" (with apologies to "Casablanca"). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don't touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they're easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you're okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated "Netscape Now" buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others' resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others' webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else's newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.

Agile Testing

I have been hearing a new word( only new for me...not for many of you though) in my profession as software test engineer.....AGILE TETING.
I really didn't give a try to know what this is all about until today....
Now as i started to explore this concept...i am drowned with the amount of information about this word......a simple search in goolgle with just these two words AGILE TESTING gave me almost 22 lakh reference links.... this PDF doc gave me the useful insight I wanted.....
http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/talks/CAMUG.pdf

Just knowing more...and i'll be back with some useful information from my learning curve about Agile Testing in my next post.....

With YouTube, Student Hits Jackpot Again

Here is another post on yout tube !!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/technology/12tube.html?th&emc=th

A Message From Chad and Steve ( cofounders YouTube )

upload file to https server using perl

... had some trouble initially to post / upload a file to https server
but using lwp::useragent it was easy ..

here is my code

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Data::Dumper;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Cookies;


my $https_login = 'https://192.168.1.3';
my $https_post = 'https://192.168.1.3/upload';


my $https_user = 'xxxxx';
my $https_pass = 'yyyyy';


&postHTTPS();


sub postHTTPS
{
#secure login


my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();


$ua->protocols_allowed( [ 'https'] );


$ua->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies->new(file =>
".cookies.txt",autosave => 1));


my $response = $ua->post($https_login, [ 'user' =>
"$https_user",'password' => "$https_pass" ] );


#print Dumper($response);


if ($response->is_error())
{
printf " %s\n", $response->status_line;
print "https request error!\n";
} else {
my $content = $response->content();
print "$content\n";
}


$response = $ua->post($https_post, [
filename =>['/tmp/abc.txt'],
], );


if ($response->is_error())
{
printf " %s\n", $response->status_line;
print "https request error!\n";
} else {
my $content = $response->content();
print "$content\n";
}

Samsung Demonstrates 4G Wireless Technology

100mbps speeds at 70 miles an hour, and even 1gbps speeds

Today in South Korea, Samsung Electronics demonstrated new 4G mobile phone technology to the press. What's most impressive is that Samsung claims 4G can deliver speeds of up to100Mbps, which is already faster than most consumer high-speed Internet access connections.

The demonstration took place on a bus that was traveling roughly 37 miles per hour and streamed media such as high-definition TV and data network access. Samsung claims that this is even possible traveling at speeds of 70 miles per hour. President of Samsung's telecommunications network business division Lee Ki-Tai told reporters that "we hope to drive development and standardization of 4G mobile technology. Successful commercial launch of mobile WiMAX will lead to another success story of 4G communications."

Samsung said that it had invested more than $100 million to develop and push out 4G mobile technology. The company also claimed that 4G will replace the WiMAX standard being supported by Intel. In actuality, Samsung is also a supporter of the WiMAX standard but believes that 4G will succeed WiMAX in global support and longevity.

During the two day demonstration, Samsung also showed off a 1Gbps wireless technology that it is currently researching. The company claimed that the technology in development could be 50 times faster than WiMAX. Samsung noted that while 4G technology was extremely promising, it would not be in wide use until roughly 2010.

Potential Threat

RSS.... how many of us use it !!

Most of the security analyst claim that worms will begin to utilize RSS to update themselves and spread new malware . Now a days most of our feeds are from sites where some one post a link to another sites . there is a high chance that one can embed malicious code in the feed that can download a worm and start spreading from your machine . This applicable to Desktop agent as well as web based RSS readers.

--CS

Google set to connect its entire home town to Internet for free

Google on Wednesday plans to offer free, high-speed Internet access to everyone in its Silicon Valley home town (San Francisco)— a hospitable gesture that the online search leader hopes to see spread to other parts of the country.

The new wireless, or "Wi-Fi," network, is believed to establish Mountain View, Calif., as the largest U.S. city with totally free Internet access available throughout the entire community, according to both Google and city officials.

St. Cloud, Fla., a suburb of Orlando with a population of about 28,000, had claimed that mantle earlier this year after it launched a free Wi-Fi network.

About 72,000 people reside in Mountain View, an 11.5-square-mile city located about 35 miles south of San Francisco. As the home to major companies like Google and VeriSign, Mountain View's daytime population can swell above 100,000.

"We aren't concerned about being able to handle the load," said Chris Sacca, a Google executive who oversaw the Mountain View project. "We think we have built a pretty cool, robust network."

Similar Wi-Fi networks are under development in many other cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago, but most of those envision charging for Internet access.

Small pockets of free Wi-Fi access — often called "hot spots" — have become increasingly common throughout the United States, often cropping up in downtown districts or by coffee shops and fast-foot restaurants hoping to lure in customers.

Google's community-wide network has had Mountain View buzzing in anticipation, said City Manager Kevin Duggan.

"There's a lot of excitement," he said. "It's something we could have never anticipated a few years ago when we were just excited to be able to pay for dial-up access to the Internet. Now our entire town is a hot spot."

Google invested about $1 million to build the Mountain View Network and expects to have to spend far less than that each year to keep it running. The financial commitment represents a pittance for Google, which has nearly $10 billion in cash.

Powered by 380 radio antennae, the Mountain View Network is supposed to surf the Web at speeds comparable to the Internet connections delivered by digital subscriber, or DSL lines. It will be slightly slower than a high-speed cable connection.

Still, Google believes the free service will be fast enough to prompt some Mountain View residents to stop paying DSL and cable providers for Internet access. People who take that step will probably want to spend $30 to $170 for a Wi-Fi modem to improve the connection to Google's free service, Sacca said.

Web surfers using the Google service will have to log on, but once they're connected they will be able to sign off without losing access, Sacca said. The network is "very naive," so it won't track people's online activities when they aren't on a Google site, Sacca said.

Like many Internet companies, Google has an incentive to ensure people have easy and cheap access to the Internet because its profits depend on Web surfers navigating through waves of online ads.

Toward that end, Google last year decided to help develop free Wi-Fi networks in Mountain View, the company's home since 1999, and San Francisco, where many of its employees live. Google doesn't expect to undertake similar projects elsewhere, partly because so many other companies are angling to build Wi-Fi networks in hundreds of other cities, Sacca said.

In contrast to the Mountain View network, Google decided to team up with another company, EarthLink Inc., to build San Francisco's Wi-Fi network. The San Francisco plan envisions EarthLink charging roughly $20 per month to surf at the top available speed while Google will offer a free service that transmits data at a much slower rate.

Negotiations on the San Francisco network still haven't been completed, making it unlikely it will be switched on until next year.

The US Gets RFID e-Passports

According to reports, the US Department of State has started issuing electronic passports (e-passports) that are equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The RFID chips in the new passports store all the information typically contained in conventional passports, besides they can be scanned by chip readers at airports and other locales. The information held by the chips is the same as that on the first page of a traditional passport, viz name, date-of-birth, gender, place-of-birth, date-of-issue and expiry, passport number, plus digital image of owner.

The State Department says that "metallic anti-skimming material" in the front cover and spine of the book prevent information from being read from a distance, provided the book is fully closed. The new passport also deploys a cryptographic technique called "Basic Access Control," whereby the RFID chip reveals its contents only after a reader has authenticated itself as being authorized to receive information.

Although RFID-enabled e-passports are around 14 percent pricier than their predecessors, the State Department claims they carry added security benefits, as also offer advantages such as speedier processing.

The State Department is confident that despite certain problems associated with RFID chips - including the possibility of them being copied, the new e-passports will take security and travel facilitation to an altogether new level.

Besides, to prevent alteration/modification of data on RFID chips, the information on these chips will also include an electronic signature.
Meanwhile, the new e-passports are available for around $85 plus a security fee of $12. However, not all new passports issued will contain RFID chips, until the project is fully completed, which is expected to happen within a year's time.

Reportedly, the State Department's Colorado Passport Agency has started producing these passports, with the production facilities slated to be expanded in the coming few months.

Voip is going higher !!

First skype .. and now its gizmo
PC-to-PC calls have always been free, but now we can make calls to 60 countries using gizmo . India is not in the list though ;(

Today gizmo has announced No cost Landline/Mobile calls to 60 countries

--CS

BulletProof Startup

Hi geeks

Giri had already sent a link which refers to the basic steps in eastablishing a bullet proof startup

This is a link for a PDF format of this.....nice colors... and interesting too...

http://i.cnn.net/money/magazines/business2/startups/bulletproof.pdf

Kalyan:)

Another moral in the line

There was a little boy named Johnny who used to hang out at the local corner market. The owner didn't know what Johnny's problem was, but the boys would constantly tease him. They would always comment that he was two bricks shy of a load, or two pickles short of a barrel. To prove it, sometimes they would offer Johnny his choice between a nickel (5 cents) and a dime (10 cents) and John would always take the nickel ... they said, because it was bigger.

One day after Little Johnny grabbed the nickel, the store owner took him aside and said "Johnny, those boys are making fun of you. They think you don't know the dime is worth more than the nickel. Are you grabbing the nickel because it's bigger, or what?"

Slowly, Little Johnny turned toward the store owner and a big grin appeared on his face and he said, "Well, if I took the dime, they'd stop doing it, and so far I have saved $20!"

Moral: Behave ignorant sometimes where the ultimate result is indeed a profit to you.......
Hope u all got the point geeks........

Lets all start with funny post

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C.

The Russians used a pencil.

Moral: Think Smartly.........

Welcome to the party

Hi Geeks,

This should be a platform for all of us to discuss and share our thoughts. Not project related though..!!ok? Any kinda articles and info may be shared in this way. Make it a regular kinda excercise to visit this blog ok..

bye for now,
Kalyan