Atlantis in bits

One friend of mine asked me how to clean the typed URLs in IE. We know many toolbars, or Browsers like Maxthon provide such function. But this friend is not allowed to install any software in their machine and has no idea about regedit. So I write a small windows script with just four lines:

   1:  Dim WSHShell

   2:  Set WSHShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

   3:  WSHShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs\", ""

   4:  WSHShell.RegDelete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs\"

You can also download this vbscript file here

Two days ago (Nov 12, 2007), IBM announced the acquisition of Cognos, a well known software company providing business intelligence and performance management solutions. It’s the 23rd acquisition in support of its Information on Demand Strategy announced on 2006.  Although we can treat Cognos as a middleware provider, we may still found that IBM is moving further into the application software arena.

I am working for the Lotus Group, IBM as an intern. We are delivering the products Workplace for Business Control and Reporting (WBCR) and Lotus Connections. When I came to IBM’s China Software Development Labs last year,it really surprised me that IBM even produces software or solutions on this level. WBCR is a risk and control management software and its competitors definitely include SAP, IDS and Oracle. But risk and control management is not the core business of those companies. Lotus Connections was delivered in the first half year of 2007 as an Enterprise 2.0 solutions. With the service provided by its GBS and GES, those kind of large scale solutions can be sold easily and sometimes the software is certainly one part of the service. 

I have to admire IBM’s strategy on software industry. IBM knows which is his competitive advantage. It’s the services he provided and the integration ability he own. Thus, he just focuses on some areas where his services could help to extend and avoid the competition between some large providers, such as SAP and Oracle ( Actually, IBM is the partner of both SAP and Oracle.) But in the same time, IBM works as a propeller for Linux, Eclipse and some other open source software (OSS). I believe with the “disturbing” brought by OSS or even by itself (see below 1), some IBM’s potential competitors (Such as Microsoft) have to slow down their spreading speed. IBM can’t control the whole software market, or even it can’t be ranked as the top 3 software companies ( probably, top 3 should be Microsoft, Oracle and SAP), but he could control the speed of the whole enterprise market and earn money from top levels of software market. We have to confess that the OS market is almost wholly controlled by Microsoft, but we also can’t ignore the impact of various release editions of Linux. It was said several year ago that SAP’s shareholders intended to sold SAP to a big company, and they want the company to be IBM. Probably it was just a rumor, but IBM clarified it with a negative answer clearly. IBM don’t want to be a competitor of some big companies. He prefers a win-win situation. With the innovation on market, service and technology, IBM is able to find the “blue ocean” continually.

1. an alterative for Microsoft Office delivered by Lotus, IBM.

I am a Treo 650 user, and don’t think Palm OS is inconvienient although it’s a single task operation system. But abviously, Palm OS is behind the time comparing to Windows Mobile. A host from CNet cite a report to describe the relationship between the mobile that you are using and your characters. That report does’t includes the Treo 650 or any Treo seriese. But the host are using Treo 680, he said with humor, “If you are using Treo 650 just like me, you are contributing to a dying company”.
But today, I read a news from CNBeta.com, which says Palm annouced a new Linux based operation system. in May and this os will be delievered in 2008 as Palm OS 2.
I really enjoy that, especially because it is linux based. Probably at that time more and more applications will be easilier plant into Palm platform. And also I prefer Palm’s design and consumability(I had a Windows PDA for two or three months).

Now, more and more countries are doing their censorship on internet. In China, many websites such as Wikipedia (Chinese Version) can’t be visited because there’re some sensitive words on them, even you are using proxies.

I am planning to develop a proxy which could wrap connections between clients and proxy into SSL connections, so that words on the websites can’t be censored. The working diagram is shown below:

If you want to visit http://zh.wikipedia.org, just enter https://zh.wikipedia.org in the address bar. So the data transfered through the blue line are encrypted and can’t be filtered by censorship firewalls.

But it still has some problem, if the client request a SSL website, the proxy can’t differentiate them from fake SSL request.

Actually, I even have no idea if squid could do this.