WebCards News and Updates

Saw III: Review

I went to see Saw III at the weekend and thought it was a great film. This is my review of it. There are a few spoilers here so I wouldn’t recommend reading it if you don’t want to know the ending.

At the end of Saw II Jigsaw (John) is very ill and has taken Amanda under his wing to continue his work. In Saw III he is in an even worse, bed-ridden, state. Amanda kidnaps a doctor (chosen for a special reason, of course) and forces her to keep Jigsaw alive while they watch another of their games played out on the cameras in their lair. Their victim Jeff has to complete some puzzles and make some tough decisions in order to reach the end where he is promised he will come face to face with the man who killed his son.

The traps and torture devices are even more elaborate than before and include a kind of twisting crucifix, an ice shower and death by pigswill. While not as jumpy as Saw I the torture scenes are particularly gruesome including a hand burned by acid and a close up shot of a leg being snapped.

Throughout the film we are following two storylines – Jeff’s race to have vengeance on his son’s killer and the challenge to keep Jigsaw alive. The two plots come together at the end in a typically Saw-like excellent plot twist.

Another thing that was excellent about this film was the way it answered many questions from the first two parts. I was impressed by this. They also introduced flash backs to Jigsaw’s early life, leaving other avenues open for exploration in the inevitable sequels (or prequels as I have been hearing rumours about). It also helped our understanding of the original films when we found out that Amanda had been working with John since the beginning of Saw I.

Overall I would say Saw III is an excellent film and is essential viewing for anybody who has seen the previous two. I think it would be a nice ending to the story to leave it how it is but there are a few unanswered questions in the film and the flashbacks to John’s earlier life make a sequel inescapable.

New Google Webmaster Tools

Google has added some new webmaster tools to its sitemaps console. The first gives you information on Googlebot’s activity on your site. It lists number of pages crawled per day, number of kilobytes downloaded each day and the average time spent downloading a page. Click the thumbnail to see a larger view. You can see that this site has few pages but it is growing a little each day.

The next new feature allows you to take control of how often Googlebot crawls your site. Googlebot places some load on your server and you can set the crawl rate to “slower” to reduce this load or if your pages change less often and don’t need crawling as frequently. If Google think your site can handle the bandwidth and Googlebot has the ability to crawl your site faster then the “faster” option becomes available. This increases how often the bot visits your site.

There are also a couple of additional features. The first is the ability to opt in to Google Image Labeler. This allows people to label the images on your website. The final addition is a URL count in the sitemaps tab. This tells you how many of your sitemap URLs Googlebot is crawling.

Save the World in a Year

I was reading a newspaper the other day and I came across an article plugging a new book “365 Ways To Change The World”. That’s one for every day of the year.

There are some good things in there that are easy to do and the author claims they can make a real difference to the world.

Here are some of the best ones:

• Stop eating prawns – More than four million tonnes of prawns are shipped every year. For every 1000 people who stop eating them, 5.4 tonnes of marine life can be saved. More information
• Join in the beautiful game – Buy three footballs. Keep one for yourself to play with, kick the second into a school ground as an act of generosity and donate the third to a youth football project in an African slum. Send it to the National Youth Organisation (Bidii Foundation) PO Box 28838, 00200 Nairobi, Kenya
• Stamp out junk mail – Contact the Mail Preference Service via the Post Office and tell them you don’t want unsolicited mail. You will be removed from mailing list for five years.
• Share your car – The average UK commuter drives 19 miles a day. Cutting that by half through car sharing would save 648kg of carbon dioxide over a year – the same as that absorbed by 216 trees.
• Don’t use plastic bags – There are 46000 pieces of plastic waste in every square mile of sea. Bags kill 100000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year.
• Recycle your mobile phone – Fonebank is a scheme which lets you take your old phone to a collection point or put it in an envelope and post it to them for free. They distribute the phones all over the world. www.fonebank.com
• Save enery in the home – Replace three standard bulbs with low-energy alternatives and prevent 136kg of carbon being released into the atmosphere each year. If you turn your thermostat down two degrees you can save a further 272kg of carbon.
• Turn a loved one into a diamond – LifeGem in Chicago, Illinois, will take a few grains of your cremated remains and subject them to high temperature and pressure. After 18 weeks you emerge as a sparkling one-carat diamond.
• Ride a bike naked – The World Naked Bike Ride in June is an annual event where cyclists protest against oil dependancy and celebrate the power of the human body – naked.

Text from the Sunday Mirror

Hiding a File Inside a JPEG

I came across this article today that shows you how to hide a file inside a jpeg image using WinRar. It’s very cool but you can’t use it for top secret stuff as the information is stored in plain text and the large file size of the image looks a bit suspicious. However, if you want to keep something secret this is a good way of doing it.

First of all create your jpeg picture and your text file that you want to hide. I have a picture of Frank Lampard and a text file containing some secrets I never want anybody to see. Create a rar archive containing the files you want to hide.

Open up the Windows Command Prompt. Navigate to the folder where your files are stored and type: 'copy /b lampard.jpg + secret.rar football.jpg' where lampard.jpg is the original picture, secret.rar is the file to be hidden, and football.jpg is the file which contains both.

Open up the newly created jpeg image to see if it displays the original image. Then open it with WinRar and look at the files contained inside. There you have it. Your secret text file is hidden inside an innocent looking jpeg.

Take a look at the original article for more details.

Googles Merges Spreadsheets and Writely

Google has launched a service called “Google Docs and Spreadsheets” (they have kept away from “Google Office” for some reason. Maybe we will see this when new services are added). It’s not really new but is a merger of Writely and Google Spreadsheets.

It places a lot of emphasis on collaboration and you can share your documents and spreadsheets and allow other people to edit them. Each file is given a unique URL that you can send to firends and colleagues. People who you invite to collaborate can also invite other people to collaborateand you can alter this on a file-by-file basis.

The interface is consistent between both applications for people who had problems with Writely. I also like the feature where you can send an email which is then converted into a document. I don’t know whether this was already a feature with Writely but I really like it.

A Bit About Google Code Search

A few days ago Google launched Google Code Search. If you haven’t heard of it yet it allows you to search publicly available source code in many different programming languages. You can also search using regular expressions. You can also do some cool things with it such as find acronyms

It all sounds great but in the days since it launched I have been reading a lot of stories about the possible misuse of it. The main worry seems to be the potential to locate bugs in software and exploit them. There is also the potential to track down passwords and look at propriatery source code that should not have been made available according to this NetworkWorld article, although they didn’t point out any specific examples.

I did come across this article containing a good list of dark and dangerous things to find. Some of my favourites include:

• The Winzip Keygen which, interestingly, points out that you cannot register Winzip to the name Murad Meraly.
• WordPress usernames and passwords. These are allegedly as a result of people zipping/tarring their Wordpress installations and putting them in a publicly accessible directory. Not sure why.
• Backdoor passwords

Read the full article to see them all. There are some really good ones there.

Welcome to the WebCards Blog

Welcome (back) to the WebCards Blog. I have recently re-installed this blog to keep you up to date with WebCards development.
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