March 2005

Searching the invisible web. Comments S Anand 11 Apr 2005 3:42 am: More here

A Flickr related tag browser.

What do you do when your computer crashes? Hit it? Yell? Sweet talk to it? Deep fry it? Take a break?

Clocky. Clocky is, quite simply, for people who have trouble waking up. When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky’s shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day. ...

When I use the URL http://www.geocities.com/root_node/?200531 to view my site, it doesn’t show the Yahoo! ad bar on the right. But when I use any other number, like http://www.geocities.com/root_node/?200530, or load it plain, like http://www.geocities.com/root_node, it doesn’t work. I suspect the 200531 is related to today’s date (2005 Mar 31), that it changes every day, and that this feature is used by one of Firefox’s ad blockers. Comments Jetru 31 Mar 2005 9:15 am: Cool! Jetru 31 Mar 2005 9:25 am: Hey, your search searches the html. S Anand 1 Apr 2005 3:51 am: It does use dates. On April 1, I have to use 20051 instead of 200531 S Anand 1 Apr 2005 3:52 am: Yes, Jetru – the search box does a regular expression search of all HTML

100 Amazon hacks.

Yahoo! Next. It’s a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and coolest projects. Like Google Labs.

Uncyclopedia. As Arnab points out, this is much tougher than Wikipedia. Comments Jetru 30 Mar 2005 6:38 am: what the heck is this? TOUGHER???! S Anand 30 Mar 2005 6:41 am: Yeah. The lies have to be consistent with all previous lies. Jetru 30 Mar 2005 1:21 pm: oh.lol

Transparent laptop screens. Quite clever, actually. via Dhar Comments S Anand 30 Mar 2005 6:15 am: More transparent screens at Flickr

Scientific American gives up. In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. ...

Pirate Bay has been receiving threats from various firms, like Microsoft, EA, SEGA, etc. Their response has been straightforward. via Dhar Hello and thank you for contacting us. We have shut down the website in question. Oh wait, just kidding. We haven’t, since the site in question is fully legal. Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you’re in, we have sane copyright laws here. But we also have polar bears roaming the streets and attacking people :-(. ...

Metafor is a tool that turns English into code. Check out the movie demo and Hugo’s Metafor website.

Maciej Ceglowski invites you to become an Idlewords macropatron by donating $300,000. Only cheques. No Paypal. And smaller amounts won’t be accepted. Comments sathish 29 Mar 2005 12:00 pm: :).

How Yahoo got its Mojo back.

Create a permanent paging file in Windows XP. It speeds up the system when you have lots of applications running. Comments S Anand 30 Mar 2005 9:28 am: More tweaks here Samba 28 Mar 2005 12:00 pm: Want to know more about Paging!!!

Ovid catches his credit card thieves. This morning, I found out that thousands of dollars of charges had been made on two of my credit cards in the past two days. Now, the identity thieves are sitting in jail. This is how it happened. It involves identity theft, a careless thief, one pissed-off Ovid and lots of luck.

Droogle. Drink recipes. Comments Jetru 24 Mar 2005 5:04 pm: Doesnt look like the XML feed is working… Deshi 24 Mar 2005 6:17 pm: This is one lousy blog! Genmys 25 Mar 2005 1:49 am: Lassi features as South Indian drink. Obscure results for Butter Milk ritzkini 25 Mar 2005 8:13 am: Bandwidth Limit Exceeded.The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.droogle.ca Port 80(25/03/2005-at 1:45 PM IST) Shamit 26 Mar 2005 4:41 am: It is getting a bit cluttered … S Anand 28 Mar 2005 3:20 am: Yes, it is, rather. Will see what I can do about that. S Anand 30 Mar 2005 7:23 am: Fixed the XML feed.

code.google.com Comments ritzkini 24 Mar 2005 5:18 am: google rocks !!

Spammer ploys. From the Scientific American.

Bruce Schneier on The Failure of Two-Factor Authentication. Two factor authentication replaces passwords with two things: something you have (e.g. a security token that changes numbers every minute) and something you know (e.g. password). Bruce says this won’t help against two new kinds of attacks we’re seeing: Man-in-the-Middle attack. An attacker puts up a fake bank website and entices user to that website. User types in his password, and the attacker in turn uses it to access the bank’s real website. Done right, the user will never realize that he isn’t at the bank’s website. Then the attacker either disconnects the user and makes any fraudulent transactions he wants, or passes along the user’s banking transactions while making his own transactions at the same time. ...