CompuWorld

xxxdisc.net is Google's Look Like By All Means

Labels: fun, google

The Conscience of a Hacker

Labels: fun

Now You Can "Virtually" Afford A House In LA

• Quality test data can be hard to come by, especially with laws (such as HIPAA) preventing use of real data. We can quickly and affordably generate test data to help you develop your application.
• Many websites, such message boards, are poorly designed, making it difficult for visitors from foreign countries to sign up for accounts. Using fake information, you can easily fill out the sign up forms and log in to the site.
• Use fake information when filling out forms to avoid giving out personal information.
• Generate a false identity to use as your pseudonym on the Internet. This allows you to keep your real life and your Internet life separate.
• Get ideas for names to use for characters in a book or story.
• Generated credit cards can be used to test basic client-/server-side validation techniques without accidentally processing a real card.
• Generated national identity numbers can be used to test basic client-/server-side validation techniques without risking disclosure of real information.

Labels: fun, reviewed

BREAKING NEWS - Internet Crashes!

Labels: fun

40Gb/s Internet: And I Thought My ISP Was Improving Quick!

Labels: fun

Want To Type Fast? Use This.

This is the only way available to "utilize" the time which is going to run FAST with the speed with which technology is running!

[via ineedtostopsoon]

Labels: fun

IITk Website Hacked

[Click Images To Enlarge Them]

Indian Institute Of Technology, Kanpur (IITk), which is considered to be the best engineering institute of India and its teaching methodologies are recognized world wide, had its website hacked few days back by probably a McDonald Fan. When you click on the above images to see the enlarged view you will find (marked with red arrows and color) the changes which the hacker made. The hack not only displays the knowledge of hacker but it also shows how innovative the hacker is. IITk website was soon brought back to its normal form as the authorities came to know about it but my classmate Sudhanshu was quick to take its screenshot. Thank You to him.

NOTE: My intention behind posting this article is just to show to Internet users the innovation the hacker used and by no means I am challenging the name of IITs which I know will always remain the best. I love IITs.

Labels: bugs found, fun

The Ultimate Reset Button

As David Bradley, a designer of the original IBM PC said "I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous". Actually before Windows went mainstream computers had fairly small reset buttons, but with the advent of Windows came the practise of frequent resetting. Of course there was Ctrl + Alt + Del combo but for the dreaded Kernel 32 error for Windows 98 you have no option but to bend down and find the puny reset button. Putting an end to the misery is this reset button which looks more like a mushroom straight from Mario land. Connection is very simple as it uses just two wires. The best part is when you have lost your cool with the blue screen of death, just hit the button with your fist to reboot.

Labels: fun

Wave Your Hand To Adjust The Speaker Volume

Volume buttons are compulsory when it comes to building speakers, right? Wrong! e-Revolution’s magic-ball like motion speaker proves it.

Thanks to the devices' built-in motion sensor, you can adjust the volume by moving your hand up and down in front of it. It's not just an ordinary speaker though. The Motion Speaker also doubles as a FM radio. If you want to switch between radio channels, you'll also have to wave your hand. And if the hand waving leads to unpredictable results, maybe you waved the wrong hand (I really don't know, I'm guessing here). Perhaps you should try harder (or read the manual).

Oh, and it can also hypnotize if you really, I mean really-really concentrate and follow the triple color mood light that randomly glows red, green or blue (try harder).

The buttons-free device is probably the best speaker solution for germ-freaks that are to afraid to touch anything without any gloves on. Yeah, wave your gloves, it works too. Right! It would've been a lot nicer if the manufacturer would've included a remote control. That would've surely helped those who inevitably developed nasty shoulder cramps.

Here are some specifications:

• Available in white and black
• USB cable, FM antenna, stereo mini-plug cable
• Light Pattern and mood light, changing through red, green and blue
• Auto Scan FM Radio: 87.5-108 Mhz
• Motion sensor: Volume/radio channel control
• Audio in and headphones socket/3.5 mm stereo mini-jacks
• Power supply: USB, batteries (4 x AA) or AC power adapter
• Compatible with PC/MAC/MP3-player, iPods, portable DVD players
• Speaker capacity: 0.7W+0.7W
• USB power cable, Audio-in cable and Antenna
• Dimensions: H260 x W155 x D155 mm
• Wheight: 485 g

Labels: fun, reviewed

5 Minutes "Minisodes" Against 30 Minutes " Episodes"

Labels: fun

$145,000 For Your Living Room Speakers

How much are you really willing to pay for sound? Hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands? How about $140,000 for speaker purposes? And don't you think that “speaker-purposes” refer to a stadium-fit PA... I'm speaking about the speakers in your living room! The collaboration between British exquisite manufacturer KEF and the designer Ross Lovegrove (iMac, Walkman) has given birth to one of the most extreme and expensive loudspeakers so far: Muon.

Muon are about 7 feet tall and weigh a nifty 253 pounds each. Pure aluminium casing and extreme-engineering internal bracing house no less than 8 speakers of which 2 are subwoofers and are rear-mounted. Muon can handle up to 400W so the “metal pillars” will definitely shake your manor and they will output sound ranging between 25Hz and a staggering 60kHz, in 4 Ohms and the 90dB sensitivity drivers being capable to load as much as 118dB SPL.

The speakers powering the KEF Muon are as following: 4 x 250mm bass drivers with ultra low distortion Neodymium magnets, 1 x 250mm low-mid driver with phase tailoring, 1 x 165mm Uni-Q driver array comprising one 165mm midrange and one 25mm high frequency units and finally, 2 x 250 rear mounted bass drivers for better LF directivity.

Since there are only 100 Muon pairs produced I'd say you'd better be going and rob the nearest bank asap. They're aluminium and they're KEF: they'll surely last until you get out of jail...

Labels: fun, reviewed

Want Fame? YouTube Will Give You That

Fitzgerald said he wanted to "be there," for anyone who needed to talk. "I never met you, but I do care," a spiky-haired Fitzgerald said into the camera on his YouTube posting.

He planned to take and return as many calls he could, but on Monday at 5 a.m., his T-Mobile cell phone payment will begin charging him for his generosity when he is no longer eligible for free weekend minutes.

"I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do about it," he said. "Come Monday, no way I'm going to just hang up on people and say, 'I don't have the minutes.'"

Fitzgerald, who said people consider him "easy to talk to," was inspired by Juan Mann. YouTube video clips of Mann offering "Free Hugs" to strangers became wildly popular on the user-controlled Internet site.

"Some people's own mothers won't take the time to sit down and talk with them and have a conversation," Fitzgerald said. "But some stranger on YouTube will. After six seconds, you're not a stranger anymore, you're a new kid I just met."

Its your turn, upload a video. Who knows you may get your future girl/boy friend this way!

Labels: fun, youtube

20 Must Have Firefox Extensions

Google Browser Sync & Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you might be frustrated keeping track of what bookmarks are where. Google Browser Sync to the rescue. Using your existing Google account, Google Browser Sync will sync not only bookmarks, but sessions, persistent cookies, passwords and history among instances of Firefox on different machines. (This is user configurable on a broad scale -- i.e., you can choose to sync cookies, or not to sync cookies, but you can't make the decision based on individual cookies.) In addition to your Google account name and password, you'll assign a PIN to add additional security to the transaction.

Version reviewed: 1.3.20061031.0
www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync

One downside is that the initial sync can take quite a while, and for some folks, Google Browser Sync might be overkill. If all you want to do is sync bookmarks, try Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. You'll have to set up an account with Foxmarks (the same is true of Google, but many of us already have Google accounts), but the initial sync seems much faster.

As a bonus, you can access your bookmarks by navigating to my.foxmarks.com. This could be handy if you're on a borrowed machine somewhere.

Version reviewed: 0.84
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2410

Session Manager
Session Manager is a handy utility to help you manage your Firefox tabs. If you're a Web surfer who habitually visits the same sites every morning, all you need do is open the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session under a name of your choosing. After that, every morning start up Firefox and go to Tools > Session Manager, pick your session and voila, all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them.

You can also choose a saved session as your "Start Session" (instead of just using a start page) that'll open each time you launch Firefox. As an added bonus, Session Manager tracks your sessions as you surf, and if Firefox (or your system) crashes, you can recover the selection of tabs you had open when it crashed.

One last perk: If you accidentally close a tab, you can easily reopen it from the Session Manager menu.

While Firefox 2.0 has incorporated many of Session Manager's functions, I find Session Manager performs its tasks more elegantly and reliably. And if you're still on Firefox 1.5, Session Manager remains your lone option for these features. Note that the most current version of Session Manager requires Firefox 2.0 or later. Earlier, Firefox 1.5-compatible versions can be found on the Web site.

Version reviewed: 0.5.3.1
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2324

All-in-One Gestures
This is one of those extensions that does more than you'll probably ever need, but the core function is to assign commands to "Gestures" made with the mouse. For instance, holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse a bit to the left issues a "Back" command. A right-mouse button/dragging up combo opens a new tab. And so on.

The extension also provides auto-scrolling, as seen in Internet Explorer. This is where you click the middle button, then move the mouse up or down to start the page continuously scrolling. The farther you move the mouse, the faster the page scrolls.

All-in-One offers a wide selection of small navigation improvements like these. It's really one of those "you have to try it to appreciate it" extensions. But the core functionality of accomplishing frequent tasks via a small twitch of the mouse makes this a must-have for its many advocates.

Version reviewed: 0.18.0
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/12

IE Tab
It's a fact of life that there are still Web sites out there that require (or work better with) Internet Explorer. IE Tab to the rescue. Once installed, it places a small icon in your status bar. Clicking this icon swaps out the rendering engine from Firefox's to Internet Explorer's. In my experience, this is particularly helpful with sites that refuse to play video in Firefox.

You can set filters so that certain sites are always displayed in an IE tab. In fact, the extension comes preconfigured with filters for the Microsoft Update site. It also adds an "Open Link in IE Tab" option to the right-click context menu of Firefox.

Since the extension uses IE's engine, this one is for Windows only.

Version reviewed: 1.3.1.20070126
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419

Download Statusbar
You're probably familiar with that sometimes-pesky Downloads window that pops up whenever you download a file in Firefox. Download Statusbar suppresses that window from popping up, and instead provides you the same information in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. (You can still manually open the Downloads window if you find you need it.)

You can roll your mouse over the file name and get a pop-up tool tip with some extra information about your download, too (where it's being download from, and where it's being saved to, the speed of the download, percentage complete and so on).

Additional feature, still in beta, is to automatically run your virus scanner against downloaded files.

Pretty simple, but it helps to "clean up" the browsing experience. By the way, this is from the same developer as Download Sort, below.

Version reviewed: 0.9.4.5.1
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/26

Download Sort
If you find yourself doing a lot of "Save Link As" or "Save Image As" downloading, then Download Sort will be quite a time saver. It allows you to file downloads by extension, or by a keyword or regular expression in the URL.

Here's how it works. After installing the extension, you set up filters. As an example, you might want any file with the extension .jpg to go into a Pictures folder and anything ending in .zip to go into an Archives folder on your drive.

Now when you right-click on a .jpg image and choose Save Image As, the image immediately downloads into your Pictures folder without any prompting. Right-click on a link to a .zip file and choose Save Link As, and again, the file goes right into your Archives folder. You can optionally have the extension create subdirectories according to date, domain and a few other criteria.

The big drawback here is that Download Sort doesn't intercept normal left-click downloads. It'd be great to see the developer add this capability.

Version reviewed: 2.5.7
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/25

Nuke Anything Enhanced
If you find yourself printing a lot of Web pages, this extension will help you save on ink. Once installed, it adds a "Remove this object" option to the right-click context menu. Place your mouse over information you don't need printed (menu bars, big graphical logos and so on) and use "Remove this object" to zap them temporarily. Clean up the page, then print just what you need.

It can be a little fussy, since you don't know exactly what you're hovering over. Images are pretty straightforward, but menus and other page parts can take some trial and error. There's an "Undo Last Remove" option in case you accidentally zap something you need. Or you can just reload the page to restore it to its original state.

One limitation is that you can't easily nuke Flash content, since when you right-click on Flash, you get its context menu, not Firefox's. Sometimes you can find the container tag that holds the Flash, but it can take some trial and error.

Version reviewed: 0.54
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951

Forecastfox
Forecastfox puts an up-to-date weather forecast in Firefox's status bar. Just click one of its icons to see the full weather report at AccuWeather.com.

A wide range of options gives you control over how much, or how little, information you want, including a radar image button, severe weather warnings and extended forecasts of up to eight days. You can set up profiles, each with its own set of options. Use these to get the weather in different zip codes if you're a traveler, or create profiles with lots of data for turbulent winter conditions and minimal data for warm, sunny summer days.

The only downside here is that, as with all extensions that rely on data from external Web sites, if the AccuWeather.com site isn't responding, you won't get any weather updates.

Version reviewed: 0.9.3.1
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/398

Answers
This one's simple: Just hold down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) and click on a word, and a window will pop up with information about that word from Answers.com. (You can have the results displayed in a full window if you'd rather.) There's a More button in the pop-up that'll open a new tab with the full Answers.com results page.

For phrases, you still have to highlight, right-click and choose "Look up on Answers.com" to get results in a new tab.

Version reviewed: 2.2.22
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/735

FireFTP
Why bounce between applications when you can use FireFTP and have a full-featured FTP client in one tab, and the page you're working on in another?

FireFTP adds an option to Firefox's Tools menu. Click on it and a new tab opens (you can set this to a new window if you prefer) with a traditional two-panel FTP client: local files on the left, remote on the right. By right-clicking on files you can tweak their permissions and all the other things you'd expect to be able to do via FTP.

One nice feature is "View on the Web," which opens the file on the remote server in a new tab. You can set up each host to "snip" out parts of the directory structure (/public_html, for example) so that you get valid URLs rather than the full "physical" path to the file.

The one disappointment is that the client is FTP only. When asked about SFTP support, the author responds (in a FAQ on his page), "Maybe in Version 2.0." Let's hope.

Warning: The combination of FireFTP and Firefox 2.0.0.1 exposes a regression bug in Firefox, causing high CPU usage. If you're still running 2.0.0.1, you should upgrade to 2.0.0.2 before installing FireFTP.

Version reviewed: 0.94.6
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684

Firebug
Firebug is an essential tool for developers working on Web pages. It allows you to examine and tweak the HTML, CSS and JavaScript contained in a page, all on the fly. Firebug opens either as a panel at the bottom of the page you're inspecting, or in a separate window.

Exploring all that Firebug can do could be a full article of its own. But for a taste of its power, let's look at basic HTML coding. Once Firebug is activated, running your mouse over an HTML tag in the Firebug window causes a highlighted area to appear on the rendered page, showing where that tag is in the display.

For JavaScript development, Firebug finds errors and quickly jumps to where they are in the code. You can change the code and step through a script line by line, set breakpoints and so on. Essentially, it's a full-fledged JavaScript debugging system residing in a browser extension.

Firebug is a great extension and a big topic. If you develop Web pages, you'll want to add this extension to your tool kit. There's plenty of documentation and discussion of what it can do at the GetFirebug Web site.

Version reviewed: 1.01
www.getfirebug.com

Web Developer
Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page.

For instance, you can modify cookies on the fly, examining, deleting and even manually adding them. You can tweak form settings, clear private data and disable the cache -- all kinds of real-time manipulations.

Web Developer's features can be accessed as a tool bar, or as cascading menus under Firefox's Tools menu. The tool bar is particularly handy since you can see all 12 of the top-level categories of features at a glance (and, of course, it can be easily turned off when you're not in the midst of site development).

This extension can even be useful for regular Web users, thanks to features like the ability to turn off background images. If you've ever struggled to read text displayed, for example, over a background image of someone's dog, you'll appreciate this.

Web developers will probably want to run both Firebug and Web Developer, and the two extensions seem to co-exist peacefully.

Version reviewed: 1.1.3
addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60

MeasureIt
So simple and so useful. After installing this extension, you'll have a small ruler icon in your status bar. When you click on this icon, the client area of your browser window will fade out a little, and you'll have a crosshair cursor.

Use this to drag out a box over a section of the screen. Next to the box is its height and width, measured in pixels. No more guessing as to how wide a sidebar really is, or if the footer is really rendering 150 pixels deep like your style sheet says it should. When you're done, a tap of the Escape key turns off MeasureIt and gives your Web page back to you.

ColorZilla
Another quick and simple tool, this one more for designers than developers. ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you'll get a crosshair cursor. As you run this over a Web page, the RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair will display in the status bar, both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 | #FFFFFF).

Additionally, you'll get a border around the style container you're hovering over, an indicator of what the container is and what style it is using (e.g., h2.posttitle or div#content).

ColorZilla also offers a color picker, color palettes and easy access to DOM Inspector, a Mozilla tool for examining a page's Document Object Module.

Huh!!!

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Labels: firefox, firefox tips, fun, google, ie, security, yahoo, youtube

Life Cycle Of A Blog Post

The image says it all, in technical terms though!
[click to enlarge via NY times]

Labels: blogging, fun

Fantastic Freebies

It's no wonder that the PC World readers surveyed rate Gmail as their favorite e-mail service. Says Chuck McNevich of Lexington Park, Maryland, "The interface is considerably faster than Hotmail, Yahoo, and the like. I don't have to pay for the huge storage it gives me."

PC World readers also love Blogger, with one reader noting the service's "easy-to-use features [and] nice themes."

One surveyed PC World reader explains his vote for YouTube succinctly: "Billions of videos. Loads fast." Another cites the service's sizable storage space. And yet another reader speaks directly about why people like video sites in general -- it's a "decent source of diversions," he says. We couldn't agree more.

Labels: blogging, fun, google, microsoft, tips tricks and hacks, youtube

Mom! Playing Games Will Improve My Eyesight

Labels: announcements, fun, games, tips tricks and hacks

Awesome Microsoft Ad For MS Outlook 2007 Customers In India

[Click here to be taken to the flash ad web page]

Microsoft is busy collecting data for Windows Vista performance and has been very serious for MS Office 2007. The ad which they have prepared (only for its Indian customers) is par excellence!

Labels: fun, microsoft

Future President In Your Friend List

Labels: announcements, fun, myspace

Google's Most Luring Perk - Buses

[The comfort - Googled]

The shuttles, which carry up to 37 passengers each and display no sign suggesting they carry Googlers, have become a fixture of local freeways. They run 132 trips every day to some 40 pickup and drop-off locations in more than a dozen cities, crisscrossing six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and logging some 4,400 miles.

They pick up workers as far away as Concord, 54 miles northeast of the Googleplex, as the company’s sprawling Mountain View headquarters are known, and Santa Cruz, 38 miles to the south. The system’s routes cover in excess of 230 miles of freeways, more than twice the extent of the region’s BART commuter train system, which has 104 miles of tracks.

Google is famous for its exciting perks (you are missing something if you do not know about those) which it offers to its employers around the world. It's university style of environment in its campuses gave it the top place in 100 best companies to work with in 2007. Even Microsoft was no where near Google in that list.

Now to add to the list Google has launched its own transport system, which it operates through Bauer’s Limousine, a private transportation company in San Francisco. An interesting article in NY Times shows how in Silicon Valley, a region known for some of the worst traffic in the nation, Google, the Internet search engine giant and online advertising behemoth, has turned itself into Google, the mass transit operator. Its aim is to make commuting painless for its pampered workers — and keep attracting new recruits in a notoriously competitive market for top engineering talent.

• 32 shuttle buses equipped with comfortable leather seats and wireless Internet access.
• Bicycles are allowed on exterior racks.
• Dogs on forward seats, or on their owners’ laps if the buses run full.
• Riders can sign up to receive alerts on their computers and cellphones when buses run late.
• They also get to burnish their green credentials, not just for ditching their cars, but because all Google shuttles run on biodiesel.
• At Google headquarters, a small team of transportation specialists monitors regional traffic patterns, maps out the residences of new hires and plots new routes — sometimes as many as 10 in a three-month period — to keep up with ever surging demand.
• And ofcourse, just like other cool Google perks, this is also FREE!

Labels: fun, google, uncategorized