June 2005

Hotbar threatened to sue Symantec over its anti adware software. Symantec filed back a zero dollar lawsuit against Hotbar. “Until yesterday, adware and spyware makers could send out threatening letters with almost no downside,” said Edelman as he put the Symantec court case into perspective. “Nothing bad would happen to them, and maybe something good would happen, maybe the anti-spyware vendor would give in and remove them from their database.” Comments munish 10 Jun 2005 11:42 am: me in amsterdam..could call you up sometimes Amandeep 10 Jun 2005 5:03 pm: lets meet up sometime munish 13 Jun 2005 2:34 pm: give me your number

There was a geek dinner at London yesterday. Pity I didn’t know about it.

Google Sitemaps. …is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Anil Dash links to alternate proposals. via Anders Jacobs

Michael demonstrates an interesting Optical illusion. On the right you see a circle of blue-violettish (=magenta) patches, one of which briefly disappears, circling around. Let your gaze rest on the central fixation cross, but observe with your “inner eye” the patches just when they disappear. With good fixation, you should see a strong greenish colour whenever the violet patch has disappeared. When you are fixating well, after a few cycles you will actually see a rotating green spot! If your gaze is really steady, the magenta patches will disappear, leaving only a rotating green spot! ...

We were looking for houses for rent in the Ilford area. The most striking thing, apart from how old the houses were, was that all of them had just a single bathroom. No separate toilet. I learnt the importance of having multiple toilets several years ago, and was only reiterated early in the morning this weekend where one toilet and one bathroom were shared by six of us at Swindon. ...

Deep Throat is FBI assistant director, Mark Felt. It’s interesting that UIUC carried out a four-year investigation on Deep Throat’s identity, and had concluded that Fred Fielding, Nixon’s deputy counsel, was deep throat. See Deep Throat Uncovered.

Net lettings has an interesting map of London areas classified by how high the rent is. Comments Sashi 2 Jun 2005 1:35 pm: another good site is gumtree.com. where you can also search for flatshare. unlike findproperty.com, this is a site filled with private ads as opposed to real estate agents S Anand 3 Jun 2005 7:19 am: Thanks, Sashi. How’re you doing? Will catch up.

Google Earth = Google + Keyhole.

Here's how expensive London is, in terms of clothing. ItemLondon (GBP)India (Rs)Costlier by Socks51004X T-shirt103502.3X Reversible jacket3020001.2X Formal shoes2515001.3X Cooling glasses101505.3X Suitcase5615003X Nothing's less expensive than in India. Similarly for groceries. ItemLondonIndiaCostlier by Curd 1/2 kg0.45182X Cucumber (one)0.49313.1X Beans (250g)0.99204X Baby corn (125g)0.99184.4X Carrot (kg)0.45241.5X Cabbage (kg)0.52182.3X Cauliflower (one)0.69252.2X Spinach (kg)4.3??0X Onion (kg)0.46103.7X Chilli (kg)4.39843.9X Cashew (kg)15.93603.5X Apple (kg)1.29601.7X Milk (litre)0.6182.7X

Amazon image abuse. How you can change Amazon images in practically every way that Amazon itself can.