SEMINAR TOPIC 6

WinZip

WinZip is a proprietary file archiver and compressor for Microsoft Windows, developed by WinZip Computing (formerly Nico Mak Computing). It natively uses the PKZIP format but also has various levels of support for other archive formats.
WinZip was created in the early 1990s as a shareware GUI front-end for PKZIP. Sometime around 1996 the creators of WinZip incorporated compression code from the Info-ZIP project, thus eliminating the need for the PKZIP executable to be present.
From version 6.0 until version 9.0, registered users could download the newest versions of the software, enter their original registration information, and thereby obtain a free upgrade. As of version 10.0 this upgrade scheme was discontinued.[1] WinZip is available in standard and professional versions. However, the ability of Windows XP and Windows Vista to open .zip files (as "compressed folders") has reduced sales.
In May 2006, Corel Corporation, known for its WordPerfect and CorelDRAW product lines, announced that it has completed acquisition of WinZip Computing.[2]
WinZip has a 45-day free evaluation period. However, in some versions it continues to work even after this period of time.

Features

Creation, addition, extraction from ZIP archives.
Configurable Microsoft Windows Shell integration.
128- and 256-bit key AES encryption.[3] This has replaced the less secure PKZIP 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions. The implementation, using Brian Gladman's code, was FIPS-197 certified, on March 27, 2003.[4]Version 9 also implemented a 64-bit version of the PKZIP file format, eliminating both the maximum limit of 65,535 members for single archive and the 4-gibibyte size limit on either the archive and each member file.
Support of the bzip2 (9.0), PPMd (10.0), WavPack (11.0), allowing smaller archives at the cost of a potential increase in compression and extraction times (especially when using PPMd).
Decompression of .bz2 and .rar files.
Support for ARC, ARJ, LHA archives if suitable external programs are installed.
Direct write of ZIP archives to CD/DVD
Automation of backup jobs
Integrated FTP upload
Email ZIP archives
WinZip prior to 11.2 does not support Unicode characters in filenames.[5] [6] Attempting to add these files to an archive results in the error message "Warning: Could not open for reading: ..."
Unicode support to ensure international characters are displayed for filenames in a Zip file
Integrated support to create, open and extract LHA and LZH archives

WinZip add-ons

WinZip E-Mail Companion: It adds archive processing capabilities on e-mail attachements. Supported software include Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail.
WinZip Self-Extractor: It adds self-extrator modules to ZIP archives. A version called WinZip Self-Extractor Personal Edition is included with WinZip.
WinZip Command Line Add-on: It adds command line processing to WinZip.

History

The ZIP file archive format (PKZIP) was originally invented for MS-DOS in 1989 by Phil Katz and his company PKWare.[7]
Because PKWare did not protect the name by trademark and algorithm of the process by patent, and was slow to realize that the Windows operating systems would eventually dominate the OS market, Nico Mak (then employed by Mansfield Software Group, Inc) eventually seized the opportunity and released the WinZip application for Microsoft Windows.
Allegedly some of the algorithms used by PKWARE were originally copied from a program called ARC, written by Thom Henderson of System Enhancement Associates. This may explain why PKWARE was not able to patent PKZIP (see discussion in topic on Phil_Katz).
WinZip 8.0 is the last major release to officially support Windows 95.
WinZip 9.0 adds support of AES encryption for ZIP archives, BZip2-compressed ZIP archives (extraction only).
WinZip 10 adds support of creating and extracting PPMD-compressed ZIP archives. It is the last major release to officially support Windows 98, ME. WinZip Pro is added in this release, which adds automation and task scheduling features.
WinZip 11 adds support of creating and extracting WavPack-compressed ZIP archives. Installer will still install to Windows 98, ME, but not officially supported. WinZip Pro adds Passive FTP support, FTP transfers, e-mail notification option for Job Wizard, custom jobs selection, full-size image viewer when opening archive.
WinZip 11.1 is certified for Windows Vista with Vista theme support, 64-bit Windows support.
WinZip 11.2 can create LHA archives without external utility. Added Unicode file name support for ZIP archives.
WinZip 12.0 adds support of JPEG, LZMA compression for ZIP files; .ISO, .IMG, 7-Zip archive extractions. Added encryption policies, integrated image thumbnail viewer.

SEMINAR TOPIC 5

Plug-in (computing)

In computing, a plug-in (also: plugin, addin, add-in, addon, add-on, snap-in or snapin; but see also extension) consists of a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function "on demand". Applications support plugins for many reasons. Some of the main reasons include:
to enable third-party developers to create capabilities to extend an application
to support features yet unforeseen
to reduce the size of an application
to separate source code from an application because of incompatible software licenses.
Examples of applications and their plug-ins include:
Rockbox, a firmware for digital audio players, can use plug-ins, for example: play games, use the text editor
Email clients use plug-ins to decrypt and encrypt email (Pretty Good Privacy)
Graphics software use plug-ins to support file formats and process images (Adobe Photoshop)
Media players use plug-ins to support file formats and apply filters (foobar2000, GStreamer, Quintessential, VST, Winamp, XMMS)
Packet sniffers use plug-ins to decode packet formats (OmniPeek)
Remote sensing applications use plug-ins to process data from different sensor types (Opticks)
Software development environments use plug-ins to support programming languages (Eclipse, jEdit, MonoDevelop)
Web browsers use plug-ins to play video and presentation formats (Flash, QuickTime, Microsoft Silverlight, 3DMLW)
Some digital mixing consoles allow plug-ins to extend features such as reverberation effects, equalization and compression.
Some Web content management system use plug-ins to increase functionalities (Joomla, WordPress).

Mechanism

Example Plug-In Framework

The host application provides services which the plug-in can use, including a way for plug-ins to register themselves with the host application and a protocol for the exchange of data with plug-ins. Plug-ins depend on the services provided by the host application and do not usually work by themselves. Conversely, the host application operates independently of the plug-ins, making it possible for end-users to add and update plug-ins dynamically without needing to make changes to the host application.
Open application programming interfaces (APIs) provide a standard interface, allowing third parties to create plug-ins that interact with the host application. A stable API allows third-party plug-ins to continue to function as the original version changes and to extend the life-cycle of obsolete applications. The Adobe Photoshop and After Effects plug-in APIs have become a standard[citation needed] and competing applications[which?] have adopted them to some extent. Other examples of such APIs include Audio Units and VST.
Games and productivity applications often use plug-in architectures which allow original and third-party publishers to add functionality.
The Microsoft Flight Simulator series has become well-known for its aircraft add-ons.
Outside software, a network switch may ship with an unoccupied but non-standard port to accommodate various optional physical-layer connectors.
Outside software again, manufacturers can use plug-ins to create vendor lock-in by limiting upgrade options solely to those available from or endorsed by the original manufacturer. IBM's Micro Channel Architecture, technically superior to Industry Standard Architecture as a way to add components to IBM PCs, largely failed to gain wide support due to the difficulty in getting certification for third-party devices.

Plug-ins and extensions

Plug-ins differ slightly from extensions, which modify or add to existing functionality. Plug-ins generally rely on the host application's user interface and have a well-defined boundary to their possible set of actions. Extensions generally have fewer restrictions on their actions, and may provide their own user-interfaces. They sometimes help to decrease the size of the core host application and to offer optional functions. Mozilla Firefox and related software products use the term "Add-on" as an inclusive category of augmentation modules that consists of plug-ins, themes, search engines and a well-developed system which aims to reduce the feature creep that plagued the Mozilla Application Suite.

History

Plug-ins appeared as early as the mid 1970s, when the EDT text editor running on the Unisys VS/9 operating system using the Univac 90/60 series mainframe computer, provided the ability to run a program from the editor and to allow such program to access the editor buffer, thus allowing an external program to access an edit session in memory. The plug-in program could make calls to the editor to have it perform text-editing services upon the buffer that the editor shared with the plug-in. The Waterloo Fortran compiler used this feature to allow interactive compilation of Fortran programs edited by EDT.
Very early PC software applications to incorporate plug-in functionality included HyperCard and QuarkXPress on the Macintosh, both released in 1987. In 1988, Silicon Beach Software included plug-in functionality in Digital Darkroom and SuperPaint, and Ed Bomke coined the term plug-in.
Currently, programmers typically implement plug-in functionality using shared libraries compulsorily installed in a place prescribed by the host application. HyperCard supported a similar facility, but more commonly included the plug-in code in the HyperCard documents (called stacks) themselves. Thus the HyperCard stack became a self-contained application in its own right, distributable as a single entity that end-users could run without the need for additional installation-steps.

Plug-in frameworks

Software developers can use the following plug-in frameworks (organized here by programming language) to add plug-in capability to their applications:

C++

FxEngine Framework - a dataflow renju Framework
Qt Plug-Ins - part of TrollTech's Qt Framework

Delphi

TMS Plug-in Framework

Java

Java Plug-in Framework (JPF), a plug-in mechanism adapted from Eclipse's plug-in mechanism from its pre-OSGi era.
Rich Client Platform (RCP), platform for applications adapted from Eclipse , applications are written as plugins and may themselves have further plug-ins
OSGi, a standardized dynamic component system suited for plugin programming, used in Eclipse, many commercial J2EE application servers, Spring Framework, and embedded applications.

Python

Setuptools
Hive ERP Framework, a plugin-in framework that takes inspiration from OSGi and Eclipse RCP simplifying the concepts of both and adapting them to the pythonic philosophy
The Twisted Plug-in System
Sprinkles
Envisage

.NET

AL Platform
Mono Add-ins - an add-in framework for .NET and Mono
Code Project .NET Based Plug-in Framework
.NET Add-In Team Blog
Plux.NET - A Platform for Building Plug-in Systems Under .NET
Visual Assist

SEMINAR TOPIC4

RAR

In computing, RAR is an archive file format that supports data compression, error recovery, and file spanning. It was developed by a Russian software engineer, Eugene Roshal (hence the name RAR, from his initials), and is currently licensed by Win.RAR GmbH.[1]
The filename extension used by RAR is .rar for the data volume set and .rev for the recovery volume set. In previous versions, if a RAR-archive was broken into many smaller files (a "multi-volume archive"), then the smaller files used the extensions .rar, .r00, .r01, .r02 etc.
Version 1 and 2 archive files were often used in conjunction with a parchive file archiver to create parity files for error recovery when using less-than-perfect file transmission and storage media such as newsgroups, satellite transmission, and optical discs. Version 3 has eliminated the need for third party post-processing.

Versions

Several versions of the RAR format have been noted by third party developers:
RAR (original)
RAR2
RAR3 (current) – implemented by developers of Rarlab WinRAR version 2.9 and released in WinRAR version 3.00.[3] Many changes including:
File extensions changed from {volume name}.rar, {volume name}.r00, {volume name}.r01, etc. to {volume name}.part001.rar, {volume name}.part002.rar, etc.
Encryption algorithm is changed to AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 128 bit key length.
Encryption of both file data and file headers.
Improved compression algorithm using 4MB dictionary size, Dmitry Shkarin's PPMII algorithm for text data, selective preprocessing algorithms based on platform and source file type.
Option of creation of "recovery volumes" (.rev files) with redundancy data which can be used to reconstruct missing files in a volume set.
Support for archive files larger than 4 GB and Unicode names.

Software

WinRAR is the only graphical tool for Microsoft Windows which can read and write modern RAR files. Its command line equivalent, RAR, is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, MS-DOS, OS/2 and FreeBSD. Additionally, the unrar tool from the same distributor can be used on the aforementioned platforms to extract RAR files but not to write them.
Third party programs for Windows which can read RAR files include 7-Zip, IZArc, PeaZip and Zipeg, along with the free version of unrar (which is also available for Linux and FreeBSD). Mac OS X readers include Stuffit Expander, The Unarchiver and Zipeg.

WinRAR

Roshal created the RAR file format and developed programs for packing and unpacking RAR files, originally for DOS,[citation needed] which were later ported to other platforms. The main Windows version of the archiver, known as WinRAR, is distributed as trialware, requiring payment after 40 days (although it can still be used after this period, albeit with nags); shareware versions of this program are also available for Linux, Mac OS X, DOS, OS/2, and FreeBSD, though they are all called simply "RAR". Stuffit Expander (freeware associated with the paid-for Stuffit compression program) also decodes RAR files.
RARLAB distributes the source code and binaries for a freeware command-line "unrar" program,although it is not under a free software license. There is a free software decompression library called "unrarlib", licensed under the GPL, based on an old version of unrar with permission from the author Eugene Roshal, but it can only decompress archives created by RAR versions up to 2.x. Archives created by RAR 2.9 and later (which are most RAR archives found today) use a different format which is not supported by the free library.
The mostly free software archiver 7-Zip uses a proprietary plugin under the non-free "unRAR license" for decompression of newer RAR files.

Comparison to other compression algorithms

RAR compression operations are typically slower than compressing the same data with early compression algorithms like ZIP and gzip, but with a moderately better rate of compression.
7z's LZMA algorithm is quite similar to RAR in providing extremely high compression efficiency at the cost of computing time to compress and decompress. Both provide among the highest compression efficiency of any popular scheme, with the question of which algorithm is the more efficient compression scheme strongly depending on the files being compressed. Both formats are still being actively developed.

Features

Apart from the rate of compression, RAR has several other original features:
It is able to efficiently handle split volumes. Before the advent of RAR the most notable such format was ARJ. Built-in support for multi-volume files enables the unpacking program to simply prompt the user for the next .partXXX RAR file, without the need to manually copy and then rejoin the pieces, or for extracting a file from a single piece without needing all pieces. RAR does not support tapes, as it uses seek and rename operations on its files.
Variable amounts of redundancy (“recovery record”) can be added to an archive, making it more resistant to corruption. Even if parts of an archive are damaged, it is possible to fully recover the stored data if a large enough recovery record exists.
RAR archives can be of a solid format, in which all of the compressed files are treated as a single data block. Most currently used compression formats (with the exception of the older ZIP) allow solid structuring.
It features strong encryption capabilities. Older versions of the file format used a proprietary algorithm; newer versions use the AES encryption algorithm, a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government. The only known ways to recover an encrypted file are via dictionary or brute force attacks.
In newer versions, password protection can optionally protect filenames too, so that the filenames contained within the archive will not be displayed without the right password.
In Windows environments, it has the capability of storing NTFS streams and security information within the archive – information that is not stored in many other compression formats
In OS/2 environments, RAR can handle extended attributes.
RAR files can be embedded in other file types, probably the most common being JPEG. Image handling programs, browsers, and other utilities usually ignore any additional data after the end of the image, while RAR ignores anything before the RAR header. The procedure to create such a file is to append a RAR file to a JPEG. (e.g.: in DOS/Windows command-line: copy /b image1.jpg+something.rar image2.jpg, other variant: type something.rar >> image.jpg, in UNIX: cat something.rar >> image.jpg). [5][dead link]

Internet media type

Apache lists the default Internet media type for RAR files as application/x-rar-compressed.

SEMINAR TOPIC 1

Chat room
****************
The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology ranging from real-time online chat over instant messaging and online forums to fully immersive graphical social environments.

Text-based chat
*****************
Online chat is a way of communicating by sending text messages to people in the same chat-room in real-time. Some chat rooms such as Yahoo! use both text and voice simultaneously. The oldest form of true chat rooms are the text-based variety. Talkomatic, developed on the PLATO System around 1974, has a strong claim to have been the prototype of the text-only chat room. The most popular of this kind is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The popularity of these kinds of chat rooms has waned over the years, and IRC's popularity has rapidly given way to instant messaging. Also a notable number of people were introduced to chat rooms from AOL and web chat sites.
There are also graphical user interface (GUI) text-based chat rooms which allow users to select an identifying icon and modify the look of their chat environment.
Graphical multi-user environments
**************************************
Visual chat rooms add graphics to the chat experience, in either 2D or 3D (employing virtual reality technology). These are characterized by using a graphic representation of the user (avatar) that can be moved about a graphic background or in a graphic environment. These virtual worlds are capable of incorporating elements such as games (in particular massively multiplayer online games) and educational material most often developed by individual site owners, who in general are simply more advanced users of the systems. The most popular environments also allow users to create or build their own spaces.
Some visual chat rooms also incorporate audio and video communications, so that users may actually see and hear each other. However, some find these types of environments cumbersome to use and actually an impediment to chatting.
Chat room activities
*********************
The primary use of a chat room is to share information via text with a group of other users. New technology has enabled the use of file sharing and webcams to be included in some programs and almost all Internet chat or messaging services allow users to display or send to each other photos of themselves.
Some people who visit chat rooms use them as a place to experience online sex, also known as cybersex or computer love. While not physically able to see their partner, cyber-ers get stimulation by reading x-rated quotes. While many in the media focus on this aspect of chat rooms as it certainly boosts their ratings, it is by no means the only thing chat rooms are used for. While many people engage in "cybersex" for many reasons, it is also true that sexual predators use cybersex conversations as a means of identifying potential victims.
Games are also often played in chat rooms. Historic examples are initgame or Hunt the Wumpus on IRC.
Rules of behavior
*******************
Chat rooms usually have stringent rules that they require users to follow in order to maintain integrity and safety for their users. Particularly in rooms for children, rules usually do not allow users to use offensive language, or to promote hate mail, violence and other negative issues. Also chat rooms often do not allow advertising in their rooms or flooding, which is continually filling the screen with repetitive text. Typing with caps lock on is usually considered shouting and is discouraged.
Sometimes chat room venues are moderated either by limiting who is allowed to speak (not common), or by having moderation volunteers patrol the venue watching for disruptive or otherwise undesirable behaviour.
Yet, most commonly used chat rooms are not moderated and users may type what they personally choose to send.
Language issues
******************
Even today, relatively little is known about the discourse produced in on-line communication contexts. While there is a growing body of literature on sociolinguistic variation in French chat for example, other forms of computer mediated communication (e.g. discussion fora, weblogs, etc.) have received less attention.
Perceived dangers
*******************
As chat rooms are often frequented by minors, they can facilitate illegal sexual contact though studies have shown that this is not common, with the American Psychologist journal calling many of the fears 'myths'. **************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

AQS class

The maths classes in crest are very useful&helpful for us.............

Experience from Crest

The CCPD classes started on 16th september.Ms Lekhamenon a well known coperate trainer from Chennai came on 17th september.Its a very interesting session.

First IT lab @ CREST

we started our IT lab today.Wrote some notes about OS,Commonly used search engines.Created a blog.