Archive for November, 2006

Wired in an article titled “The treasure of Mumbai” is calling the Indian drug manufacturer Cipla a pirate. Reason?, they sell generic copies of patented drugs. Wired goes on to say,

What Hamied does is legal in India and the countries where Cipla sells drugs. But the company is still making copies largely without permission of the people who hold the patents on the compounds. So to most of the international pharmaceutical industry, Hamied is a pirate.

The problem now is that medical field is now controlled by big and greedy companies (that includes cipla). A person must die if he doesn’t have the money to buy a drug. Even when it is possible to manufacture and sell the drug at a lower price affordable to him. Why? because we should preserve intellectual property rights! That seems pretty nasty to me.

The wired article starts with the following lines. I agree with what Hamied has said (except the skin color part, I would reword it as “just because originator wants to make more money?”).

Forty years ago, a british company called ICI Pharmaceuticals developed a potent high blood pressure medication called propranolol. It was the first beta blocker, a class of drugs that inhibits fight-or-flight hormones like adrenaline. But it was expensive. So Yusuf Hamied, a 34-year-old chemist at an Indian drugmaker, got his company to start manufacturing a cheaper version. ICI protested to the Indian government, and Hamied found himself face to face with prime minister Indira Gandhi. “Should millions of Indians be denied the use of a lifesaving drug just because the originator doesn’t like the color of our skin?” he asked her.

Samsung NV10 is probably the world’s smallest 10 Mega Pixel camera.

The European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) named Samsung’s NV10 digital camera, officially launched on last July, the European Compact Camera 2006-2007. Samsung NV10’s Smart Touch interface has been highly praised by a lot of reviewers.

This is probably an ideal gift for a geek this christmas! Check out the impressive set of specifications below!

Further Reading
Samsung official NV 10 site
Dpreview Review of NV 10
Stuff Magazine Review

Specifications

There are a lot of spyware and malware out there. If you do a lot of browsing (especially with Internet Explorer) there is a very high risk of getting infected with one of these. Also some programs contain embedded software called adware. Adware displays advertisement banners and gets annoying very soon. Spyware/malware/adware etc. use some standard techniques to get itself installed permanently on to your sytem.

Some of the techniques used by spyware/adware include,

Adding the spyware as a windows service.
Adding the spyware as a browser helper object which has unlimited access to system.
Adding the program into the startup program list.

One of the best tools to fix a spyware/adware infection quickly is the HijackThis tool. This is a lightweight freeware software which is only 220KB! Using this you can inspect the programs that are running as a service, the programs that are attached as a browser helper object etc. But be careful that you don’t delete the required programs!

This wallpaper collection by Brajeshwar contains 92 high quality photos.

Other Collections
This is another set of 23 photos from Vista build 5381.
A nice set of wallpapers by Peaches Lexicon.
Jim Frazier’s wallpaper collection.
A good and small set of wallpapers via pbase.
Another wallpaper collection via pbase.

If you have Google search on your site, you can now customize its behavior! You can specify a list of sites to search and a list of keywords that is of high priority to your sites. This means that search users in your site will see what you want them to see! This also should help in getting more targeted ads and more adsense revenue.

From the Google adsense blog,

1. Visit http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ and select the websites you’d like to include in your search index.

2. Then choose to restrict search results to include only those pages and sites, or you can give those pages and sites higher priority and ranking within the larger Google index when people search on your search engine.

3. From the CSE site, you can generate the code to place on your site and make the search engine, through an IFRAME, look and feel like your own. If you choose, you can easily link to your current AdSense account so you have a centralized place to manage your Google AdSense relationships.

4. Last but certainly not least, you can invite members of your community to contribute to your search engine index, in real time. Simply enter email addresses of people you’d like to contribute and an invitation along with Google Marker will be sent to your invitees.

More Reading
Custom seach engine featured sites

Today when I went to Google suddenly a new link appeared after the news tab - scholar. This service is still in beta and provides a search on scholarly material.

Features of Google scholar

Search diverse sources from one convenient place.
Find papers, abstracts and citations.
Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web.
Learn about key papers in any area of research.

This is the results I got for relativity. Pretty impressive.

As per Google, articles are ranked based on the text of the article, author, publication in which it appeared and how many times it is featured in scholarly material.

Google provides scholar integration services to publishers and librarians. Librarians can add their resources to Google scholar and hence Google scholar can in future become the ultimate catalog of all the libraries!

More Reading
Google Scholar
Google Scholar search tips

All men are evil! - Fox news reports that airlines are increasingly viewing all men as a danger to children. I think soon the day will come when fathers will be banned from seeing their children. sigh!

Is advising a girl sexual harassment? - WorldNetDaily reports that a man has been convicted as a sex offender for holding a girl’s arm when she jumped in front of his car! He will be added to the state’s sex offender list. Talk about nonsense law!

May times we need to download part of a Web site for offline reading. In this article I will look at HTTrack tool which can be used for this.
HTTrack is a free (GPL) offline browser utility. This allows you to download an entire Web site or a part of a Web site including html pages, images and other files. Check out the step-by-step guide on how to use this tool.

Various options available for download include,

Configuring access through a proxy.
Selectively including or excluding file names or paths.
Specifying a browser user agent (this is required for some Web sites).
Limiting the files downloaded. You can limit the download to a domain, a path, size of file, or depth of links.

HTTrack options screenshot


Typical uses
Downloading an entire Web site for offline reading or as a backup.
You can use HTTrack to save a Flash file or other embedded content from a Web page.

Looking for a free tool to generate cool logos for your site? The Gimp is the best tool for this. Gimp is free and open source. It has a nice extension called script-Fu which allows you to generate logos in various forms. Lot of variations are possible for each type of logo.Tip: When you design your logo, choose your font first!

Here are some cool Gimp generated samples

Don’t want to install Gimp? You can generate your logo online! CoolText site offers a subset of script-Fu logo formats.

Nowadays many software service providers have dedicated testing teams to carry out software testing. One problem with this is that the testing team becomes disconnected from the developer team. It also brings inter team politics as a new issue in software development.

Here is a list of top 10 programmer excuses I hear almost regularly at my workplace. This happens when a tester reports a defect or bug to the programmer.

1. “It works on my machine!”
2. “It is not in the software spec.”
3. “It is not in my test plan.”
4. “It worked yesterday.”
5. “There is something wrong with your data.”
6. “Is it deployed or is the server restarted?”
7. “I can’t reproduce the problem.”
8. “You have the wrong version.”
9. “There was no time to test it.”
10. “Somebody must have changed my code.”

It was three years back that I came across geek code. You answer a set of questions and then the site generates unreadable code. This code can be used as your signature. So in order to know more about your geek level, anyone can paste it in a decoder and see the actual meaning of the code. It was a craze once but died down now. Check out the sample code below.

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GCS d++@ s: a C++$ UL*>$ P++ L+>$ !E– W+++$ N- o–? K-? w++$ !O— !M- !V PS@ !PE- Y PGP t 5 X R tv b DI D G e h r z
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——

Now recently I came across blogger code (!) The idea is similar to geek code. Answer a set of questions and then generate a code. Following is a sample blogger code about me.

B1 D+++ T+ K+ S+ F+ I O+ X– E- L- C++ Y4 R+ W- P- M1 N- H

More Reading
Wikipedia on Geek Code
Blogger code 2.0

What prompted me to write this is the recent Digg story on 450GB paper drive. This talks about a 450GB storage device on paper invented by an Indian. Looking at the discussion page of the Digg is enough to laugh for many days. Many are discussing how he might have done it. No wonder, many Indian Gurus and Yogis are able to cheat millions out of Americans and Europeans (Even now!)

For Indians, frauds are part of their daily life. Every minute they are on guard against possible fraudsters. Indians are not alone in this case, in fact Indians are nowhere near the Nigerians. Some Nigerians have perfected the art of cheating (see 419 scam). They even try to cheat Indians!, but gets caught most of the time. It is estimated that millions of dollars are cheated out of innocent westerners through 419 related scams.

Recent frauds or related stuff from India

NASA exam (Saurabh Singh) - This guy claimed he cleared NASA’s International Scientist Discovery exam and is waiting a call from NASA. Prime minister of India was going to congratulate him personally! But unfortunately the cat was out of the bag at the last minute.

450GB on paper (Sainul Abideen) - An active scam which has many takers, for now.

Gasoline from leaves (Ramar Pillai) - He invented altenative fuel for petrol and was even marketing it! He was later arrested for fraud. It turns out that it contained other petroleum products and was not herbal.

Aliens in Kerala - I live in Kerala. Yeah, some do behave like aliens, but so far I haven’t found a real one! Jokes apart, there was red rain, possibly due to the high pollution in that area.

Airport frauds - An Indian airport is one of the favorite places for a fraudster. He knows that the guy coming by plane will have some money to spare! Fraudsters can appear in the form of a Taxi driver, customs official(!), in fact in any form. It is a big topic, so I will provide some links - Delhi airport | Mumbai airport

Divine statues - Spiritual frauds are rampant in India. A recent case was when statues started drinking milk (due to capillary action). The amount of excitement it generated is unbelievable.

Divine water - Somewhere along the Mumbai coast (I don’t have the news source now), sea water color changed due to chemical pollution. Can you guess what happened? People started diving and drinking it (Many assumed it has divine powers and ended up in hospital).

Big scale scams - There are too many to write here - Hawala scam | Fodder scam | Coffin scam(!) | Stamp paper scam | Bofors scam | Oil for food scam

Further Reading
India is great if you are not a tourist!

Email turned 35 this month. Email had its origin somewhere near 1965 in MIT. It was in 1971 that the first email in today’s form (user@machine) was sent by programmer Ray Tomlinson. From there it had grown to an unimaginable level. Recently other forms such as instant messaging and orkutting is becoming popular, but as an official communication mechanism email is still on top.

Even after getting into middle age, nothing much has changed for email. It still uses old protocols which are unencrypted (means no privacy at all, unless you use PGP keys for encryption). Also many people are not aware that it is easy to spoof email. Anyone with an SMTP server can spoof any address and can send message on somebody else’s behalf. Recently some attempts were made to combat this using domain keys by various email providers such as Yahoo and Google.

Domain key verifies that the sender’s domain name is same as what is specified in email. Hence if you get a mail from Yahoo  account to your Yahoo account (or any Domain keys enabled account), it will display that domain keys verify this to be sent from Yahoo. Check out the screenshot of Yahoo mail header on the left.

As email became popular, frauds involving email is also on the rise. Email spam has reached gigantic proportions and laws are passed to fight spam! Email spam is used to market various products (Viagra drugs being the favorite!), manipulate stock market by increasing interest in penny stocks and other scams such as the Nigerian scam (also known as 419 scam or advance fee scam).

Still, Happy birthday Email !

Further Reading
History of email
Wikipedia on email
All about domain keys
E-Mail Etiquette
Advance fee fraud on email
Worst emails - article by The Sun

Google videos is one of the most popular sites to find free video content. There is a lot good stuff in there, but finding it is not easy. Also sometimes you want to download these videos or convert them to other formats. In this article I will look at some of the tools and Websites based on Google videos. Do let me know if I have missed out anything good.

Downloading Google videos

1. Google Videos - Google videos site allows you to download the videos. But you need to have Google player installed.

2. Use bookmarklets - This is one of the best ways to download videos. Bookmark the provided link. Then whenever you are on a video page, click the bookmark. You get various options (avi, flv and mp4 formats) for download.

3. KeepVid - Similar to bookmarklet and supports 3 formats (avi, flv and mp4). You can also download from other sources such as youtube.

4. Leech Video - Allows you to search and download flv files from Google, youtube etc. Videos are organized in various categories.

5. Video Downloader - Supports a wide variety of video sites including Google videos. A Firefox extension is also available which allows video download by clicking an icon on the status bar.

Sites featuring Google video collections

1. Best of Google videos - A good list of best Google videos. Well maintained, my favorite is #2 - Indecent proposal (A parody on master card ad).

2. Google video rankings - Videos ranked by Google Videos.

3. Indextube - A Wiki containing Google videos and others. Videos are categorized.

4. Vidspedia - Best of Google videos (and youtube), videos are categorized.

5. The WorldTV Internet charts - Auto compiled top videos with some manual editing (contains youtube and Digg rated videos as well).

Other tools for Google videos

1. Super converter - A good converter supporting a wide variety of formats. Can be used convert flv files to other formats.

2. Embed Google video in Wordpress

3. Customizing embedded Google video - Changing the look and feel of the embedded video in your blog.

Did I miss anything good?

Ms Dewey search engine - Where you forget what you have searched for! Interactive flash based search with audio and video. Try searching these words - strip, microsoft, google.

Check your broadband speed - This is a jazzy broadband speed tester using flash and Javascript. Allows you to select a server near you. You can also share the results as an image. Check out mine!