a4apphack

FriendPaste is a web application that allows you to share, edit and collaborate your code with your peers in an easy and intuitive way. This application accepts the code and displays in friendly, syntax highlighted format to whoever asks for. The display can completely be customized and then it can be shared with anyone by sending the unique url which identifies shared code… It is that simple…

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Ideally, for creating 3d animated videos one would need an expensive 3d modelling tool and of course knowledge on writing scripts. This might be a laborius process which requires skill and practice which stops from a normal man to create one. But times change, and we have an online 3d animation creator which can be used to create and publish our movies in matter of seconds.

Xtranormal is an online application which turns your imagination to life. Creating animations with Xtranormal is very easy and can be accompolished in four simple steps.

1. Pick your scene (Backgrounds, Music, Actor Skin etc)
2. Type the script (Not the ‘scripts’ in programming terms, here we mean dialogues)
3. Add actions and sounds (Just drag-n-drop)
4. Publish & Share ( In video sharing sites like YouTube or in Xtranormal catalog)

Xtranormal Editor

Sample Video

[Alternate Link : High Quality Version]

Check out more videos at Xtranormal YouTube Channel & Video Catlog

Publishing Video to Youtube

Once you create your animations, it can be easily published in YouTube easily.

Check these videos to understand more…

Xtranormal Version

Video Version

Go to:

“CrossSite Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection problem, in which malicious scripts are injected into the otherwise benign and trusted web sites. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user in the output it generates without validating or encoding it.

An attacker can use XSS to send a malicious script to an unsuspecting user. The end user’s browser has no way to know that the script should not be trusted, and will execute the script. Because it thinks the script came from a trusted source, the malicious script can access any cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by your browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page.” – OWASP

Understanding XSS or to make one understand it ain’t easy. Too much of theory will confuse the person rather than helping him out. The best way of explaining it!; through flash animations and that is how virtualforge guys have done. This animation is intended for both a layman and a security analyst.

They have published two set of flash applications which demonstrates XSS. Here cookie theft and file access are demonstrated.

Screenshot

Check the following links

Example 1 : Car Auction

http://www.virtualforge.de/vmovie/xss_lesson_1/xss_selling_platform_v1.0.swf

Example 2 : Online Application

http://www.virtualforge.de/vmovie/xss_lesson_2/xss_selling_platform_v2.0.swf

Read More about XSS at Wiki and OWASP

See CrossSiteRequestForgery (XSRF) in action, [intlink id="199" type="post"]here[/intlink].

Previously [intlink id="515" type="post"]mentioned[/intlink], free file sharing and syncing application Dropbox is now available in portable version (Only for windows). So no more installation required to sync our files across PC’s, just run Dropbox from your thumb drive…

This attracts more people to try and test dropbox. Nice move…

Download Dropbox Portable : (Size : ~15MB)

More Info at Dropbox Home

“Tell Me Why” – Truely inspiring song from Declan Galbraith

After uninstalling any software which had temporarily installed for testing purpose, will leave some traces in our PC as registry modifications or in the form of flat files in the OS folders. These unwanted files consumes disk space and might ultimately slow down our PC. WhatChanged is a tiny tool which is a must have for people who install and uninstall softwares frequently.

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While trying to extract large files (say in GBs) with 7zip (Or any compression tools) and you don’t have enough space in your C drive (or whereever your OS is installed), you might probably notice something like this….

And what you do is clear the temp files or search for some less important applications which you can uninstall. But you would ultimately fail by not finding the required space. The solution is to change the working folder used by 7zip. By default the working folder will be the root drive where OS is installed.

Change the temp folder is easy, Open Options from Tools Menu and select Plugins tab, now click Options and then Folders tab. Now change the temp folder as shown below.

And commandline options for geeks, the command is

7z x _FiletoExtract_ w_WorkingDir_ o_OutputFolder_

x : Denotes extract
w : Working Folder/Temp Folder (e.g. wD:\tmp\)
o : Output Folder (e.g oD:\Files\)

For more options check here

Note: Changing tempdir is not the feature available only in 7Zip, but its mentioned here because 7Zip is the most popular archivial tools available in the market.

Some of us use Truecrypt for storing our files in an isolated partition and might be less concerned on its security (Update: check the details at the end of this post). For example, my thumbdrive has a single encrypted file created with Truecrypt which I always mount it in W: drive, which helps me to run many of the non-portable apps in portable mode. Another possible reason, to sync various frequently used folders between different PC’s by creating a truecrypt volume and transferring only a single file so that you never missing anything while syncing and the copy can be done whole lot quicker.

But it will be a tedious and boring task to repeatedly follow a sequence of steps to get your volume mounted. But we can find out a simple solution for this…

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Project management is not a easy job which can be accomplished just with paper and a pencil. What we need is an app which helps you to track the issues, display timelines, collaboration and easier access to required information. Any Project Management app will be utilized by all the team members and maximum productivity is ensured only if that app guarantees collaboration. This leaves us with the only option, an online project management tool.

ClockingIt Screenshot

ClockingIt is a web based app which allows users to manage their project online. It has all the features needed for getting things done and to smoothly run the project. Apart from the ‘must have’ features like issue tracking and charts, this app features email notification, forums, chat etc which helps the users to communicate and share the info at a centralized location.

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Zorro is a tiny app (less than 100KB) which blacks out the unwanted portion your screen helping you to remove any distractions from your screen. This can be useful while playing online games or watching YouTube videos where you would want to concentrate only on what you are looking at.

Zorro ScreenMask in Action

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