Archive for January, 2007

Bill gates talks about Windows Vista on the eve of the biggest Windows launch. At least the Vista box looks sexy

Found via Gizmodo and digg.

This week Microsoft rolled out Windows Vista at retailers in 70 countries. It is 5 years since the last major version of Windows (Windows XP) came out.

Breathing earth shows carbon dioxide emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates. It is an interesting display created using flash by David Bleja. But I don’t think that the death and birth rates are influenced by Carbon dioxide alone!

Yeah, the emission volume looks frightening! What is more interesting is the non stop birth animation on India! This is one area where no one can beat us

The background music, if left on for a few minutes will drive you nuts!

Scobleizer in a post titled “Big gadget sites don’t link to blogs” wrote that increasingly blogs are avoiding linking to other blogs. it is not hard to see the reason - You don’t want to increase another blogger’s pagerank and give him more google juice. Many of us feel jealous when someone else posts an exclusive item on their site!

I am also guilty of the same practise. Many times I had linked to the original source completely ignoring the blog which actually lead me to the original source. Obvously that is a bad thing to do. So next time onwards I will be linking the all the sources to my post.

But it is not wise to link everything. For example, if you are writing about a phishing site or about a spamming site you should avoid linking directly. There are two reasons for this - First you don’t want to increase pageranking for the site and secondly you may also become part of the google’s red list for linking to the spammer!

Recently I got into the 2000 blogger list and found that many guys are using the list as a sort of marketing list. They publish the list on their site and all the 2000 bloggers will see the site as the latest site linking to each of them! So like me, most of the bloggers will end up visiting the linked in site!

Funny expression she got there

Nathan Weinberg has done a detailed post on upcoming Windows home server,

There are three primary purposes of Home Server:

1. Automated Computer Backup - Home Server will sit in the middle of your house and completely backup the entire hard drives of every computer connected to it, automatically. Lose anything, even an entire computer, and you will be able to restore it. You will even be able to restore older versions of files, taking advantage of a valuable feature in Windows Vista.

2. Access Everything From Anywhere - With a Home Server, you will be able to access all of your files from any computer, inside or outside your home, as well as accessing your home computers from outside the home. You will centrally store your files to make them easier to access at all times.

3. Grows With You - Home Server will be designed to make it easier for users to expand its capabilities, especially making it easy to add more hard drives.

Adsense is piloting video ads with a select set of publishers.

This time, we’ll be working with a larger set of content providers, grouping together video content from providers such as Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment together with quality ads and offering them as playlists which publishers can select from and display on their AdSense sites. Participating publishers range from small to large, and cut across many different types of content.

As the bandwidth availability is increasing everywhere, streaming videos is no longer an issue. Google obviously wants to be the first in trying video ads on a large scale! Interestingly this time small publishers are also included in the Adsense video beta testing program.

Small.DAM, a variant of Small, is a Trojan that arrives on the system as attachment file to spam emails. Small.DAM loads a malicious service named “wincom32″ in the affected machine.

Check out the following video on F-Secure’s WorldMap Live showing an outbreak of malware named Small.DAM.

This shows how many people are still ready to click on suspicious attachments in emails!

Having been requested by Jimmy to do so, and having seen a fun rumor of a “search engine optimization world championship” contest targeting WP[1], I’ve gone ahead and switched rel=”nofollow” back onto URLs in en.wikipedia.org’s article namespace.

I love this! All the hard work done by SEO specialists and spammers have gone down the drain in a single stroke! What this decision means is that getting your site on to the wikipedia will no longer help you in search engine rankings.

There are lot of clever SEO guys out there who has managed to get their sites included in Wikipedia articles. Since Wikipedia is a high pagerank site on Google, getting a link to your site will increase your pagerank and you will also get a lot of referral traffic. After this rel=nofollow change, pagerank benefit is no longer available.

Since there is no pagerank benefit, the spamming activity on Wikipedia is bound to come down. I wonder why they haven’t done it in the first place!

Head Honcho Michael is out of town right now, so apparently ANONYMOUS LAZY HAPPY DREAMHOST EMPLOYEE thought it’d be fine to sneak in a little nap on his office couch. And it would have been fine, if he could have only kept his pants on.

Dreamhost guys, This is not fair! Giving your employees too much work and then posting their ‘compromising’ photo is not fair at all..

Conan O’Brien’s late night show explores some of iPhone’s less known features such as bottle opener, mouse trap, hand grenade, etc. etc… Funny they didn’t mention that it had a phone - No, they did mention it

Very funny

Apple annouced financial results for the first quarter yesterday. Total revenue crossed 7 billion and quarterly profit crossed 1 billion US dollars.

Apple shipped 1,606,000 Macintosh® computers and 21,066,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 28 percent growth in Macs and 50 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.

Wow! More than 20 million iPods per quarter! Profits may again jump this year if iPhone sales pick up. If the current iPhone buzz is any indication, crossing 2 billion profits is not far!

OmniNerd is reporting that Apple lawyers are going after bloggers for using iPhone images,

Turns out Apple is not happy about all the publicity. Someone has created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks very similar to the new iPhone user interface. Shortly after Paul O’Brian posted a link on an xda-developer forum to the interface, he got a cease and desist letter from Apple’s lawyers. The lawyers warn, “The icons and screenshot displayed on your website are copyrighted by Apple, and copyright law explicitly prohibits unauthorized display and distribution of copyrighted works. Apple therefore demands that you remove this screenshot from your website…

Well done Apple! Harassing bloggers is an easy way to increase your business. I have a feeling that some of the Apple lawyers are Microsoft employees!

This is an amazing photograph taken by Charles C. Ebbets during construction of the GE Building at Rockefeller Center in 1932. It might look very dangerous, but when you work in such conditions for years, it is nothing!

In India, similar situations can be seen even today!

Via Flickr…

Microsoft has already begun development of Internet Explorer 8.0,

One Microsoft official at CES has told ActiveWin.com that work has already begun for IE 8, the next version of Internet Explorer, and we can expect to see a final product within 18-24 months. In addition, there are reportedly no plans for an interim service pack, but rather focus completely on the next version, which will compete even more directly with Firefox.

Some of the features rumoured to be included in Internet Explorer 8.0 are,

• Full compliance to CSS specifications.
• Ability to move tabs from one IE window to another.
• A “Lock Page” functionality. This will prevent accidental navigation.
• Enhanced support for add-ons (plugins)

I think we can expect IE 8.0 release towards the end of 2008.

Wordpress has released another upgrade within 10 days of 2.0.6 release. They had no choice since 2.0.6 had serious problem with FeedBurner. Also now people are trying hard to find security issues, so I think we can expect fixes frequently like we see Microsoft patches!

Also I recommend waiting atleast a day or two before applying latest Wordpress patches. You never know whether upgrade itself will cause serious issues like the FeedBurner problem!

Wordpress 2.1 release may happen sometime in February 2007. Official site says that 2.0 series will be supported for many years. I doubt that statement since years in the age of internet is like centuries