Archive for February, 2007

Google guys explain Gmail benefits using puppets
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbmiQhuAhU

Vidipedia is a video encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is similar to Wikipedia and hosts only videos. But it is hard to see how it can replace Youtube or Google videos. But I think Vidipedia can be a great site if it is able to properly categorize and organize videos. It should also be able to filter out the junk videos all too common in Youtube.

Uploading a video or editing a page requires registration. Also the site is in the early stage and there are only a handful of videos available under each category. Just like youtube, vidipedia allows for embedding videos outside the site.

Check out this interesting video about Web 2.0 see on Vidipedia,

Are you too busy to read books? Then here is a perfect solution for you. Read the books as email! We do spent a lot of time reading emails right? So the guys at Dailylit has provided over 250 free books which can be read as emails

You can subscribe to a book in 3 easy steps.

• Find a book you want to read
• Enter your email address
• Click subscribe

Here is a bit of history behind this idea,

We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistenly than read the paper is read email. Bingo! We put together a first version and began reading “War of the Worlds” and “Pride and Prejudice”. We showed it to friends, added more books at their request, and launched the site publicly in September of 2006.

Did you know that www.think.com is the 3rd oldest domain registration that is still active? Well, here is the list of 10 oldest domain registrations. Man, Why didn’t anyone think of registering www.sex.com then?

Rank - Date - Domain
1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM

You can see the complete list of 100 oldest domain registrations here.

Here is a funny Javascript hack I across in digg.

1. Open any Website which contains images. Google image search or a Flickr page is best.

2. In the Address bar, replace URL with the following text.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0);

3. Click on Go!

Don’t get scared if things looks pretty scary This basically rotates all the images in the current Webpage.

Funny interpretation of internet, net neutrality act and the ban on online gambling.

With online gambling people can do it in bathrooms!

If Yahoo doesn’t respect copyright, can you expect bloggers to do the same?

In this case, the localized portal of Yahoo ( based on Malayalam - an indian language) has stolen recipes from a blogger and posted it as their own. To quote from blogger,

Some of the posts from this blog are lifted word by word, without my consent and posted, in Yahoo, Malayalam (beta) , and shown as their copyrighted material. See a screenshot of both the pages, which clearly shows the content lifting (copyright infringement).

If anybody else, lifted content from this blog, and exhibited somewhere else, without my permission, please remove the same.

The blogger (who is known as Su in Malayalam blogging circles) says that he has already mailed Yahoo about the copyright violation. He is yet to get any response. Obviously he is unhappy that his posts are being copied without permission!

I guess this is done by the Yahoo’s Malayalam team who probably is working on tight schedules to generate content!

That is what New York senator, Carl Kruger thinks! He claims that three people in his Brooklyn district have been killed in traffic accident caused by usage of electronic devices.

So he plans to bring a legislation which will make it a crime to use iPod or any portable device while walking on the streets. The plan is to slap a fine of $100 on violating the ban.

What next? Why don’t they ban all the advertising boards displayed in New York? The sexy models on them can distract drivers and can cause loss of life, right?

Via The Scotsman

THG lab in Germany decides to use eight gallons of vegetable oil to cool Athlon Fx-55! Check out how cooking oil can replace all those noise polluting fans!

Original article here.

Wordpress by default provides search functionality out of the box. But instead you may want to use Google site search. The reason is simple, Google search can be monetized. If the user clicks on ads displayed after search you get paid!

Integrating Google site search is simple provided you are OK to have the search results on a different page. Just copy and paste the code generated by Adsense. But if you want to integrate Google search inside Wordpress, things become a bit complicated. Initially I tried creating a Wordpress page and then tried integrating Google search inside it. It didn’t work.

Then I came across this cool plugin called MightySearch. Using it is pretty simple,

Installation: Upload mightysearch.php to wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it. Go into your Google account and get the form & search result code. Paste both code into MightySearch.

How to use it: Just create a new page, for example “Google Search”, so that the post slug will be “google-search”, and reachable at URL for example: http://yourdomain.com/google-search/ . Then type either one of the following text anywhere in your page to call the search form or/and search result;


<!--mightysearch--> - to call both search form and search result on the page <!--mightysearch_form--> - to call only search form on the page <!--mightysearch_result--> - to call only search result on the page.

Finally it happened. Google has agreed to blur sensitive military and goverment buildings in India from Google earth. This follows discussions between Google executives and Indian beaurocrats. Surprisingly, simple blurring of images was acceptable to the Indian side.

BBC report says,

In a statement the search giant said: “Google has been talking and will continue to talk to the Indian government about any security concerns it may have regarding Google Earth.

“We are pleased to have initiated dialogue with the Indian government, the discussions have been substantive and constructive, but no agreements have been made.”

It added: “We have committed to continue the dialogue”.

In fact Google had no other option. They will have to continue with the censorship. Indians are too happy to ban Websites which are considered harmful to national integrity. Last year major blog sites such as blogspot and free hosting providers such as geocities were completely blocked by Indian ISPs on government order. It took sometime before the ban was revoked.

Indian president Abdul Kalam (who considers himself a geek) expressed his displeasure with Google earth many times before. He was of the opinion that Google earth may be used by terrorists to plan and execute attacks on Indian installations!

There are plenty of image hosting sites out there. You need them mainly for posting images to Web forums such as phpBB. The free bandwidth provided by these sites are also increasing all the time. In this post, I will look at some of the best free image hosting Websites. I only consider those sites which allow direct linking.

Flickr! - Yes, this is probably the most widely used service now. There are important terms of use - You are supposed to use it only for personal use and that you must provide a link back to Flickr if the image is hosted on a different site. Also free accounts has a bandwidth limitation of 100MB per month.

Picasa Web Album - Similar to Flickr. The free service provides 250GB of web space.

ImageShack - This is intended for hot linking of images and is quite popular. Allows 100MB of transfer per image for an hour. There is no upload limit.

Photobucket - The free service has a limit on the size of the photo (1024×768). You get 1GB of space and 10GB of total bandwidth per month. If you don’t use your account for 90 days, it gets deleted!

xs.to - If you are looking for quick and dirty image hosting, this is ideal! Allows you to host image instantly without registration. Also allows for hotlinking. Maximum of 500 files per user can be uploaded.

Yeah, I know there are more photo hosting sites. But I think one of the above 5 will suffice. But in case you want to check out more, see the following(I haven’t reviewed all of them!). But I did verify that the sites are up and running!

Alphabetical list of free image hosting sites

http://app02.bonpoo.com/file.htm
http://www.filehost.to
http://www.fotopic.net
http://www.freeimagelibrary.com
http://www.imagecave.com/
http://www.imageheap.com
http://www.imagevenue.com/
http://www.imagexoom.com
http://www.myimagebuddy.com
http://www.myimagehosting.com
http://www.myonlineimages.com/
http://www.photoserver.us
http://www.picsplace.to
http://www.realimagehost.com
http://www.simpload.com
http://www.solisstyle.com/ims/
http://www.thefreeimagehosting.com
http://www.thepicturebin.com
http://www.tinypic.com
http://www.watotron.com/watupload/
http://www.yesalbum.com/
http://www.YourUpload.com (NSFW - damn popups)

I know I might look like a microsoft kid (Click on the link if you are ready to take risk :)) for posting this!

This is a marketing video for Windows Vista and looks impressive. Clearly not made by geeks!

There are 450 million pcs world wide? That means Bill Gates can look at about 450 million * 380 = 171 billion dollars and more. Of course you need to discount all the pirated editions

via istartedsomething.

I have a blog which is hosted on dreamhost and I recently upgraded it to version 2.1. The dreamhost advantage is that you can upgrade Wordpress with a single click (ok, two clicks if you consider database upgrade click also).

Everything went smooth. But when I looked at the blog I saw some database errors on the archives section! Surprisingly everything else on the blog was working. So I thought this must be a problem with the theme I was using. So I changed the theme to one of the defaults and voila! there was no error.

So the moral of the story - Check the codex Wordpress 2.1 theme compatibility list before you upgrade your blog!

Still with all the following cool features, Wordpress 2.1 upgrade is worth the hassle.

• The essential spell checker. This basically means that built in editor is better than using w.bloggar!
• The draft status for pages. This should have been there much earlier!
• Content Management Tool? - Pages can be the front page!
• Switch between plain editing and rich text editing. A must have!
• Auto saving. This is a life saver when you are writing long posts!

So what are you waiting for? Go and download Wordpress 2.1

Windows Vista or iPhone ?