Gmail security tip - Always use https

Hi all,

I am glad many of you I know use GMail for your personal emails - it is a terrific web mail client. And here is a tip to increase the security of your emails. When you go to gmail, there are 2 types of urls - http://mail.google.com and https://mail.google.com. Note the 's' in https. It stands for secure http and it is the same technology used by web sites accepting credit cards on the web like Amazon, for buying products.

Now here is the reason and the cool part - https secures (encrypted) everything between your computer and gmail servers, so nobody in the middle or around your home network can sniff web traffic. If you are using http, a smart chap can read and find out what you are reading and sending.

To avoid this, there is an excellent feature to secure your gmail so that it always uses https. Go to Gmail -> Settings -> scroll to the bottom and select the option - "always use https".

That's it. Now your gmail experience is secured, nobody except you can see what you are reading or sending. You will thank me for that :)

https is supported in most browsers (up to 99%) you will be using, so do not fret. And it is not supported on some old aunt's one, you shouldn't be reading your email! Remember http and sniffing network traffic and reading others email. Huhhhh scary!

Enjoy.

--
About Vishal

3 new mac ads available from Apple

3 new mac ads available from apple - stay in touch with apple tv ads (mac vs pc, iphone, etc..) by subscribing to this feed or visiting http://apple-tv-ads.blogspot.com/
--
About Vishal

3 new iPhone ads out - Subscribe and get notified of new Apple ads!

Subscribe to this feed or add to iGoogle and get notified of new Apple TV ads (mac vs pc, iphone...) with my pet project - http://apple-tv-ads.blogspot.com/.

3 new iPhone ads available! Check em out.
--
About Vishal

Braid (Xbox 360 Arcade) is awesome and oh, such a charm

Braid is truly amazing, statisfying and complete treasure to own and play. It is Marioesque at first, but the differences soon start to appear and the prince's love story completely makes you run to find his lost princess.

The puzzles are extremely unique and the Prince of Persia Sands of Time, style rewind motion is such a pleasure. It encourages you to try out different things, and leaves off the frustration by restarting the stage or level from the beginning by simply allowing you to rewind and try, or more appropriately explore again.

Braid is a must have Xbox 360 arcade game and Gamespot recently gave them a 9.5/10 - which is their truly elite category - Halo, Gears of War and few others could only make it up there.

Anyway, check out the Braid demo, it is free, solve some multi-dimension puzzles, find missing pieces of jigsaw puzzles by hunting them in obscure locations and using those mushroom-like face animals to spring to higher levels.

Braid - http://braid-game.com/
--
About Vishal

The Spinning Dancer optical illusion

The Spinning Dancer, also known as the silhouette illusion, is a kinetic, bistable optical illusion resembling a pirouetting female dancer. The illusion derives from an inherent ambiguity from the lack of visual cues for depth. There are other optical illusions that originate from the same or similar kind of visual ambiguity.

The Spinning Dancer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spinning_Dancer



--
About Vishal

Suffix Arrays and other string algorithms

My friend Xian sent me a nice paper on "Using suffix arrays to compute term frequency and document frequency for all substrings" [PDF]

That got me learning more about Suffix arrays. I have encountered suffix and occasionally prefix arrays more in my career (ex. palindromes).. And I was glad to run my memory through it and refresh it at the same time.

That led me learning more about some other string algorithms categorized in Wikipedia. Fun stuff.

--
About Vishal