Chrome Web Store

The Chrome Web Store is an online marketplace where you can discover
thousands of apps, extensions and themes for Google Chrome. Once
you’re in the store, you can search or browse through different
categories. Every item in the store has its own page, where you can
read and contribute reviews and ratings. If you use multiple
computers, synchronize your apps, extensions and theme across all your
computers with browser sync.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore

Virtual dive!!

Skydive anywhere in this world right from this Jap dudes play home!! They created a virtual room for skydiving using google earth, projector, fire extinguisher for clouds and few fans!!

Phone calls from Gmail

This is one feature most of you might be waiting for sometime now... I think it will take another decade before it comes to India but for now this news is for US & Canada gmail users... You can call any phone right from within Gmail. Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone—just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list, and dial a number or enter a contact’s name. At the moment, this feature is only for Gmail users in the U.S. Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of 2010, and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. http://www.gmail.com/call.

Here is the international rate comparision chart: http://www.google.com/chat/voice/compare.html

Ronald Reagan > The Modern Little Red Hen

Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat. She called her neighbors and said, "If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me to plant it?"

"Not I," said the cow.
"Not I," said the duck.
"Not I," said the pig.
"Not I," said the goose.

"Then I will," said the little red hen, and she did. The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain.
"Who will help me reap my wheat?" asked the little red hen.

"Not I," said the Duck.
"Out of my classification," said the pig.
"I'd lose my seniority," said the cow.
"I'd lose my unemployment compensation," said the goose.

"Then I will," said the little red hen, and she did.
At last it came time to bake the bread. "Who will help me bake the bread?" asked the little red hen.

"That would be overtime for me ," said the cow.
"I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck.
"I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig.
"If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the goose.

"Then I will," said the little red hen. She baked five loaves and held them up for her neighbors to see.
They all wanted some - in fact demanded a share. But the little red hen said, "No, I can eat the five loaves myself."

"Excess profits!" yelled the cow.
"Capitalist leech!" cried the duck.
"I demand equal rights!" shouted the Goose.

The pig just grunted. Then they hurriedly painted "unfair" picket signs and marched around, shouting obscenities.

The government agent came and said to the little red hen, "You must not be greedy."

"But I earned the bread," said the little red hen.

"Exactly," said the agent. "That is the wonderful free-enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But, under government regulations, the productive workers must divide their product with the idle."

And they lived happily ever after. But the little red hen's neighbors wondered why she never again baked bread.

Source: http://www.ckls.org/~sthomas/articles/Modern.html

Google releases skipfish, internally used tool for scanning apps

Skipfish by Google is an internally developed tool used as an active web application security reconnaissance tool. It prepares an interactive sitemap for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes. The resulting map is then annotated with the output from a number of active (but hopefully non-disruptive) security checks. The final report generated by the tool is meant to serve as a foundation for professional web application security assessments. The tool is meant to provide accurate and meaningful results.

Installing Wordpress Multi User on localhost

Installing Wordpress multi user? encountered the following error..

Installing to http://localhost/ is not supported. Please use http://localhost.localdomain/ instead.

Just use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost

Google launches marketplace for Apps

An online store for third party developers to sell applications they develope for apps. Google apps has 20+ million users and there are atleast 1000+ companies who would want to invest into selling at such market place. The apps are going to focused... there aren't many products in apps, so it would be easy for the developer to choose a product to develope an app. There is a screening process to become a vendor on google apps.. and a fee of $100. Google collects 20% of the revenue earned by third parties.

GBuzz - GMails new feature!

Google Buzz!! (GBuzz) Yes thats a new Gmail feature or shall I say google's new product... This is one feature, if done the right way, I think Google can put social networks like facebook, myspace (is this still around??), Orkut (I still get a message once in a while.. like say once in 3 months :P) out of market. But of course there are quite a few challenges... this can be used only by gmail users until Google plans to role it out of Gmail, but again... Gmail gets 170million unique hits every month... that’s huge!!

GBuzz lets you communicate not just your status with your friends, customers and public but also share information, links, photos, videos all from gmail with a single click... No more do you have to go to picasa, youtube to share your videos.. you can do all that very much from your Gmail.

GBuzz has more to it, you can add your twitter, facebook and few other apps to GBuzz... you no more have to visit to check your wall posts on facebook or twitter for tweets... you can see all of them from your Gmail and even reply to them right from your Gmail... you can also write a new one!!

The option to communicate either privatly or publicly adds to the security of your data,  I see it as a new Google Product rather than just a feature.

Lets be nice to non-vegetarians

After writing about giving back the energy in a easily usable form basing Avatar as its backdrop... I got a chance to write on a similar but specific topic to BoSF when a member of BoSF shared their views on animal cruelty and why we should stop eating in joints like kfc, mcdonalds etc.., I would like to start by sharing an interesting quote made by one of the members of BoSF... "Lets respect food...eat simple!!! and LESS." My thought process related to this subject is little different... I will try to put forward my views and see how they shape out. The subject itself is so vast... so, let me start by picking up the essence of the quote "Lets respect food...eat simple!!! and LESS".

If we go back to few centuries, we (human race) all lived purely on non-veg and occasionally on fruits... what ever cast, religion we all may belong to, our great(to the power of n) grand fathers were non-vegetarians and back then things were balanced. Hunting used to be balanced, they used to hunt mostly the week and made sure they never ran out of animals to hunt. Though humans may have moved away from the concept of balance, animals still follow that concept. We always respected our food, did not eat less but we never used to overeat. Over centuries something went really wrong, some how our fathers forgot to follow the balance in our own race... we grew in numbers, stopped thinking about future, we had to feed the hungry, so we killed more and more animals and one day realized that the animals are no more an option to live on and invented agriculture!!

There started the doom of this planet, if only we all still lived on meat, if only we never cut down the trees to do agriculture, this would have been a totally different planet all together. Agriculture is the main reason for cutting down forests, not buildings, neither is animal farming! Agriculture is the main reason for building dams not for drinking water!  Imagine, if there were less non-vegetarians or absolutely no non-vegetarians at all...by now this planet would have been a hot barren land. Yes, its complex and arguable.

Speaking of cruelty, which is evident now, growth in population and thus agriculture has caused great pain not just to our race alone but the whole planet. Sometimes I feel meat is simple. How about all non-vegetarians start protesting against eating green and agriculture in first place... sounds insane isn't it!!... damn! this sounds insane to me too!

Anyways, I am just trying to bring in a different dimension altogether... animal cruelty is not going to stop because 25% (that's the maximum change, an unimaginable percentage of success rate these kind of protests can bring) of this worlds population stops eating non-veg. I strongly believe that people who would like to work against animal cruelty should stop asking people to quit eating non-veg and should start investigating the issue, try to use the law to bring change in animal farming... set few guidelines and make sure that the animal farmers follow them.

It is really not going to stop animal cruelty by making people to stop going to any of these joints... and scientifically speaking not all which looks green is good for health nor all meat is bad for health.

Btw, most of you might already know... in 98% of poultry farms, chicken is not allowed to move more than 5feet in its lifetime... cruel!! Why don't we start working towards setting few guidelines for poultry in order to reduce or eradicate animal cruelty in poultry.

Is Communist Chinese govt. afraid of the Pandorian revolution

The movie "Avatar" is being pulled off from 1,628 2D-screens in China, in favour of a biography of the ancient philosopher Confucius starring Chow-Yun Fat.

According to a report in the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, the move was made at the urging of propaganda officials who are concerned that Avatar is taking too much market share from Chinese films and drawing unwanted attention to the sensitive issue of forced evictions.

Too much market share is never acceptable in a communist nation, after all thats the basis of marxisim. Anyways, what I am interested is the second point "drawing unwanted attention to the sensitive issue of forced evictions".

Millions of chinese have been forcibly relocated to make way for the skylines and govt. infrastructure projects. In Pandora, thousands were threatened to be relocated for the precious mines. Everyone knows what happened in Pandora - pandorians fought back and won the battle.

Now the chinese govt. seems to be afriad of the popularity pandorians are getting, they are afriad that their  people might fight back if not for those who are already affected but for those who might be relocated in future. This is what happens when you live under a communist govt, you dont have freedom to watch the movie you want to... you are forced to watch what they want to... (its about freedom, its not about the movie).

Whatever it may be, the distrubuters are going to be hit badly - I hope at least the distrubuters watched this movie before it is pulled out - I hope they learned at least something from the pandorians.

But can the chinese govt. stop the pirated DVDs!!

All energy is borrowed and someday you have to give it back

I have decided my imagination, my dreams are no more going to be black & white, lack spectacular design or have scientific boundaries, from now on they are going to be wild, they are going to be so wild that it will be hard for others even imagine. Its just so hard to even imagine Pandora - the imagination of James Cameron.

Avatar, the story is very simple - it is kept simple so that we don't concentrate too much to understand the story, instead sit back and enjoy the special effects, I did just that!

The wild & beautiful touch-me-not plants, the territorial titanothere when threatened of its territory - lowers its head and charges against the threat (wow, what a display it is), the baneesh, toruk makto (I wish I had one to ride it) oh but only 5 people rode it till now - with Jake its 6... I can go on and on... Everything looks Pandorian to me now!!

Though the story is simple - I am amazed how easily Cameron made us all take the side of a race against our own race, we all (the audience) wanted our own race to be defeated!! Isn't it just against the law of nature!! But Cameron did it so easily... you might even argue that you are taking the side of good, but belive me - when you are in such situation, its almost impossible for you take a side against your own race - thats the basics of racial growth! and genocide is known only to humans... I would be surprised if you show me the concept of genocide in any other species of course other than virus.

This reminds me of a excellent dailouge by "Agent Smit" in the movie Matrix... quote Agent Smit... which is a computer program talking to a human "Morpheous" -- "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

The movie shows us how much we have distanced ourselves with mother nature, thats something we should learn from this movie. The whole natural networking concept existed on our planet too (not in the exact same way) but over generations we sucessfully killed that instinct. We have to learn and rage a war against the destruction of this nature... thats the only we can let our race exist and thats the only way we can provide a better future for our children.

The wait continues for the leader Jake to come for our rescue! I hope he comes to lead us before its too late!