Say the word "CON" in front of Bill Gates and his face is bound to get red because of embarrassment. Apparantely on Windows XP, one cannot create a folder named "CON". Creating a new folder with the name "CON" just renames it to "New Folder". Microsoft team has no answers for this screw-up. Don't belive it, try for yourself!
Cheers!
A ubiquitous question which has been even answered many a times. But for the ignorant junta Jeremy Zawodny lucidy explains why Google badly needs Orkut and how they are banking on the viral fever of social networking sites.
Click here to read the article.
Cheers!
PS: Feels good to be back at the helm after a long hiatus. Lot of good things have happened but lot of confusion has also persisted, but its time to move on!
A practical joke resulting in international tech story.. doesn't get better than this!
[via Stepforth]
15-year old Tom Vandetta, Vandetta found an article that explained how to fool Google's news system by writing fake press releases. Sensing an opportunity to experiment and play a joke on his friends, the self-described "Google fanboy" decided to see what would happen if he submitted a fake Google press release claiming the 15-year old New Jersey student was Google's youngest employee. The press release was issued through the free service I-Newswire and contained a number of spelling mistakes.(I-Newswire) - 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant's offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw's in Google's beta e-mail service, "Gmail". Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student's blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta's expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.
A few hours after posting the fake press release, Vandetta logged into the news search tool Digg after receiving an automated email from MAKEBot (Digg's Spider), to find his practical joke had become a credible international tech story. Google was even displaying reference to the press release in Google News and at in the news results placed above search results relating to Google employment or hiring. According to his confessional blog posting, "At that moment, I felt my stomach knot up and my heart drop. I knew exactly what happened and knew that I would end up regretting posting that."
While the prank was a juvenile as it was creative, Vandetta's fake press release has exposed a credibility problem for Google and might introduce new costs for search marketing firms that use legitimate press releases as a means of promotion. His experiment exposed the fact the automated system that is Google News does not verify press releases before publishing them as factual news pieces.
Its hard to imagine, Google falling prey to this but it all exposes that there is still a long way to go before we say digital age has truly arrived and is away from all the glitches.
Cheers!
March 14 is celebrated as Pi day.. can't get it?!
March 14, written as 3-14 in the United States date format, represents the common three-digit approximation for the mathematical constant π: 3.14. It is often celebrated at 1:59 p.m. in recognition of the six-digit approximation: 3.14159
Iam on a high!
One of the greatest day in history of sport entertainment was recorded today and I witnessed it (on TV that is!).
It began with start of 2006 F1 season and champion Fernando Alonso muscled his way around Ferrari ace Micheal Schumacher in some spectacular driving to win the inaugral Bahrain race.
The world is full of sadist characters and when they turn out to be webmasters, they cook up a perfect recipe to irritate visitors and ensure that they never come back!
Click here to read the top 12 favourite irritants ensuring no returning visitors for your website.
PS: You can combine more than one irritant to gain more pleasure :D
Cheers!
After an unexpected hiatus from my regular activities, Iam back to resume blogging in full glory.
Every now and then, we are seeing new and hot web applications coming up, which are redefining the power of web. Herez a peek into the Best of Web 2.0 sites; these sites are one on which the whole world is going gaga over. Barring couple of websites, I think all are very popular in our college itself.
Cheers!
We often have very long URL and sending them to someone or remembering them is a sort of problem. TinyURL is here to the rescue. An example to show their working:
Turn this URL:
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP
into this tinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/6
Which one would you rather cut and paste into your browser? That's the power of TinyURL!
technophobic takes a break from technology today and is uploaded with a rather personal note.
rediff is 10 years old now, read this effusive message from the founder himself:
A message from Ajit Balakrishnan, Founder, rediff.comTen years ago, on a day like today when Bombay's mild winter was slowly sliding in, a small band of programmers, writers, designers, management specialists got together on a mission.
The mission was to create a platform for people to meet and interact. One that would rival the best in the world.
Ten years later the small original group has grown to include many other like-minded creative spirits.
The platform that we collaboratively created is admired in many countries of the world. Sophisticated investors value us highly; discerning digerati come visit us every morning.
The world admires our creative and independent spirit and expects great things from us.
The journey is just beginning.
It was during my research internship last year that I developed interest in the field of HCI. At that point of time, I found it to be very interesting, innovative and creative. But all of a sudden a lot many people from my college has ventured into this field, not because its creative, but they think HCI gives them the perfect platform to break away from the coding paradigm and still call themselves technocrats. This is kinda irritating (Iam not at all expert but still) because this attitude belittles the importance of this field.
Dr. Dinesh Katre, HCI guru echoes my concern and has written a superb article highlighting the above points in a very lucid manner.
People have a superficial belief that HCI does not require training or special skills (the minimum eligibility crierion is to be born as a human!). Many IT companies perceive that software usability process is a fad like ISO and CMM, which must be complied with because it is the current fashion in developed countries. Some are attracted to it because you can charge the customer more for fancy things like context study and affinity maps. Some feel that it is just a new terminology to be used while discussing user interfaces.
If you do like flickr logo, then unleashing to you flickr logo maker, which allows you to make your own personalised logo in flickr style. I made one for myself:
Take few minutes out, sit back and explore this fantastic design idea from Nokia. Nokia Concept Lounge is a must checkout to understand how creativity can be unleashed in websites.
Cheers!
