windows

Help for observant Muslims

A modern aid for an ancient tradition, Athan Basic helps Muslims perform daily prayers anywhere in the world. On first start-up, you choose your location from a pull-down list of cities and towns. From there, Athan Basic runs in the background, automatically issuing the call to prayer at the appropriate times each day.

You can choose an Athan from Makkah, Madina, or Al-Aqsa (the for-pay version includes several more); the program supports the Standard and Hanafi juristic methods and a variety of ways to calculate sunrise and sunset. The neatly organized application window displays your latitude and longitude and a … Read more

Internet Explorer DirectX Image Transform Object Denial of Service Vulnerability

This vulnerability creates a denial of service (crash) within Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 after a victim has been tricked into visiting a malicious Web page. Using the DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient ActiveX object with a long (1) StartColorStr or (2) EndColorStr property, an error is generated.

Additional Resources:

French Security Incident Response Team: ADV-2006-2832 BrowserFun: #17 National Institute of Standards and Technology: CVE-2006-3657

Free, fast video encoder

Who said free had to be flimsy, too? This robust video converter ably packs a number of file formats into the Flash video format and is stylish to boot. Riva FLV Encoder works well with the usual suspects: AVI, WMV, MPEG, and MOV files. With a graceful, well-designed interface that shows its developers care about details, this video converter also offers a healthy set of conversion options. Frame rate, bit rate, and audio-compression options all can be set to your preferences. The program can "cut" video files into JPEG images, if needed. We were very impressed with Riva'… Read more

Gordon Freeman and the alien menace

When the original Half-Life appeared in 1998, gamers hailed it as the most gripping and realistic first-person shooter ever. Half-Life 2 is the long-awaited next chapter in the saga of Gordon Freeman and the alien menace from Black Mesa. It brings back the heart-pounding gameplay and engrossing storytelling of its predecessor, and its graphics set a new standard. The textures have never been better. The details are crisp and clear; allowing the characters to express subtle emotion. You'll need a modern DirectX 9 graphics card to take advantage of all the eye candy, but the game scales down surprisingly … Read more

Old-school Messenger

You'll get the most out of MSN Messenger if you're already a member of MSN or have signed up for its free services. Otherwise, there are better chat clients. MSN requires that you create an account with its own Hotmail (or Passport) program to install the messenger client, and entering your demographic information is not optional. You get a standard chat experience, both one-to-one and multiuser, and extra services such as NetMeeting, which is awkwardly focused on the kinds of remote-conferencing tasks handled through standard VPNs these days. One seemingly attractive feature, Browse the Web Together, turns out … Read more

ExamDiff

This program displays two files side by side, highlighting the differences. ExamDiff's handy interface offers several navigation schemes: buttons taking you to the previous or next change, a drop-down list of lines, or mouse functionality going directly to any line. It lets you scroll files in tandem or separately. You can customize the colors the program uses to mark added, deleted, and changed lines. When running a comparison, you can ignore white spaces and case differences. It outputs results as standard Unix DIFF files. Unfortunately, no manual is available. This free tool is mainly useful for developers.