Archive for the 'Website Scan' Category

I bumped into Plaxo from one of the official mails I got. The mail I got had a rather big signature with the following line, “Add me to your address book… Want a signature like this?” and this was linked to Plaxo.

Plaxo is a service to stay connected with your contacts. If you update your info, all your friends address book also gets updated and vice versa. It can also automatically update outlook address book if outlook integration is enabled.

Following is the Plaxo feature list,

• Update your address book when friends change their contact info
• Update friends’ address books when your contact info changes
• Sync your contacts, calendar, tasks, notes across Plaxo-enabled applications
• Get reminded of a friend’s birthday just a few days before
• Receive a Plaxo alert whenever a contact’s info has changed

Plaxo integration with Outlook is pretty neat. Check out the following screenshots of outlook after integration and the useless but jazzy e-mail signature creator.

Plaxo offers a premium service also. The main attaction of the premium service is the ability to send e-cards.

But I am yet to find Plaxo attractive enough (eCards is cool, but only with premium) to sign up!

Are you looking for a software to run a site like digg? Pligg is a CMS which has digg like features out of the box. Pligg is a free and open source software which requires PHP and MySQL.

Some interesting Pligg features are,

• All the main features are Ajax enabled.Â
• Automatic preview of the site linked.
• Color schemes for categories.
• Automatic tag cloud.
• Avatars and Gavatar support.

Unfortunately Pligg (beta8 ) still requires considerable modification before it can be used on a production site. Also pligg is yet to implement email activation, so you will end up fighting spammers or implementing activation features yourself. On my server, Pligg was damn slow sometimes taking almost 10 seconds for submission!

Check out the Pligg demo which is based on the latest beta 9! Â

Further Reading
Download Pligg
How to install Pligg?

Gmail offers more than 2GB of storage space and the limit is increased by almost 3.5MB per day. I am currently using 82 MB (3%) of allotted 2794 MB. Yeah, 82MB is too low and I achieve the low usage by deleting all useless mails. Ever since I started this blog I have been keeping a backup of the site contents (I run 3 websites in total) in a pen drive. Then I thought why don’t I backup the files on Gmail since so much space is free!

Sending a mail to myself everyday became tedious soon. Hence I was looking for tools which could upload files easily instead of going through the Gmail interface. I found two services - Xmail hard drive (which is still in beta) and Gmail drive shell extension. In this post I will look at Xmail harddrive. I will explore Gmail drive shell extension in the next post.

Xmail hard drive offers an online interface to upload and maintain files in a Gmail account. But to be frank I am not confident in entering my Gmail Id and password on a third party account. So I suggest you to get an alternate gmail account if you plan to use Xmail hard drive. Also you never know when Gmail will block this! So use it only as a backup to your backup

Following screenshot shows the Xmail hard drive interface. Pretty simple, select your file and upload it. For images, it offers thumbnail functionality. As can be seen in the next screenshot, all your files will end up in your inbox and hence one more reason to use an alternate mail id.

Xmail screenshot

Gmail inbox after Xmail usage

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Today I came across a stunning photo gallery by Gil Azouri on China. These photos were taken by him in 2005. Everything that a great photograph needs (subject, lighting, composition etc.) can be seen in his photos. Rarely you find such powerful photographs.

I don’t know whether there is any better photo collection on China! So when are you getting your air ticket to China?

Enjoy the collection…

Remember Alex Tew who created milliondollarhomepage and made a million dollars by selling pixels on his Web page? It was a cool idea and soon thousands of sites tried to make money in a similar way. Few even succeeded in getting some money!

After all the interviews and TV shows, Alex is now back with a new venture called pixelotto. This time he is offering the Web site visitors a million dollars! Here is how it works - Advertisers can place ads for 2$ per pixel and there are a million pixels available. Now the visitors must click on the ads if they want to get the million dollars prize!

Man, that is one clever idea! It is sure to generate a lot of Web traffic on to the advertised pages. Also Alex is going to get the other million dollars generated

Pixelotto has already generated over $130K in ad revenue. The site was down today (13th Dec) for sometime. It appears that the site is unable to handle the traffic.

SimplyHeadlines is a free, customized newspaper that is delivered to the subscribers via email. You can choose your news sources, format of the newspaper (graphics or text), special features (daily photo, comics, stock quotes etc) and delivery time.

Following screenshot shows the options available for simplyheadlines subscription. For stock quotes etc. you have further options such as the companies you want to track.

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But I soon got bored. I think Google news is good enough for me!

There are a lot of last pages and first pages on internet. But how can there be multiple last and first pages on the Web? :). I must admit that none of them looks very interesting. Some are maintaining domains just to host the last and first pages!

Here are some last and first pages of Internet I found out.

The first page of the Internet

The very first page of the InternetÂ

The end of the internetÂ

The last page of the Internet

The last page of the Internet (yes another one!)

The last page of the Internet (no! not again!)

The very last page of the internetÂ

Want to turn off the Internet?Â

Some guy has even setup the middle page of the Internet!

Further Reading
Wikipedia on last page of the internet

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Is instant messengers blocked at your office or school? Are you unable to access yahoo messenger, google talk or msn messenger at work? You may find Meebo site very useful.

Meebo (instant messaging everywhere) is a browser based instant messenger client which uses Ajax. You can login to aim, yahoo, msn or google instant messenger accounts from the Meebo homepage. You can also register at meebo at then configure all your instant messenger accounts at one go!

Good, now what happens if your network admin finds meebo also and blocks it? Obviously meebo wants to address this problem as well. So they have released something called Meebo repeater. This is a kind of proxy server which can be downloaded and installed on your home computer. After installation, it will give a URL which can be used from office! Pretty neat:)

The best and the promising product from Meebo is the Meebo me widget. This allows you to embedd an Ajax based widget on your Web site. You can chat with your Web site visitors if you are logged on to Meebo. Your visitors need not register, they can straight away talk to you!

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Further Reading
Meebo home
Get your Meebo me widget

Here are some interesting facts about www.ebay.com, the leading internet auction site. Being in the Web application development industry, these figures appear mind boggling to me. I knew they must be having heavy traffic and used wonder how they manage it…

• eBay manages over 212,000,000 registered users!
• eBay contains over 1 billion photos!
• eBay manages over 26 billion SQL executions per day!!
• eBay gets over 1 billion page views per day!!
• eBay stores over 2 petabytes of data!!

If you want to read more on eBay’s architecture evolution, click here (PDF). This is a presentation on eBay architecture by Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett at the SD forum.
eBay’s growth chart

Following are the key architecture decisions which helped eBay to achieve such scalability.

Scaling the data tier
1. The database load is spread by segmenting the data by function (user, item, account etc.)
2. Horizontal split of databases by access path.
3. Minimization of database resources (no stored procedure, no sorting, extensive use of prepared statements)
4. Minimize database transactions (This is achieved by careful ordering of database operations, running of reconciliation batch in case of failure etc.)
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Scaling the application tier
1. Again spreading the load by segmentation (segmentation by function and further horizontal segmentation inside functions)
2. Everything is stateless (state maintained in cookies or scratch database), no EJB, minimal J2EE and maximum use of cache.
3. Tiered application and eBay’s own pure Java OR mapping.
4. Maximum code partitioning with minimum dependencies.

Further Reading
Presentation on eBay’s architecture evolution

If you are in London and roam around at late night, one of the familiar sights is the public urination by male drinkers. This has been a major headache for the police and shop owners in many European countries. Even closed circuit TVs haven’t been much of a use. What drinkers want is a quick way to pee!

So there you go, you have a business opportunity. A company called Urilift is capitalizing on this opportunity by bringing out a high tech Urinal system. This will be installed underground and will be lifted up during night. There will not be any doors and 3 guys can use it at a time. Man, the price tag for this urinal system is $75000!

Check out the following video for complete details. It is hilarious!

More Resources
Urilift International Products

Missing persons, persons in need for urgent money etc. are favorite scam and spam subjects. I am getting a lot of spam mail is generated on these topics. Recently I came across a mail which pointed to help Pooja find her parents Website. Interestingly this is for real!

Someone has put up help Pooja find her parents website for a missing girl. She is 4 years old and was kidnapped by a beggar. She was rescued by police in Kerala, India. She is now in Nirmala Bhavan, an orphanage run by Sisters of Charity. But unfortunately police is unable to find her parents.

The above site has spread through email forwards across India. It has even been picked up by some of the local newspapers. Unfortunately no success so far. I think success is possible only if main Indian newspapers also pick up the story.

[Update on Nov 22, 2006 - Pooja was handed over to foster parents in Trivandrum. She will remain with them till her parents are found.]