Google reader takes you to the end of the internet

Of all the things that google has to offer, I think it is becoming THE social network. After reading Geemodo: Google reader goes further, I went over to my Google reader page, yes there are changes. I think I like new stuff. But the most fascinating part was that it sent me to "The End of The Internet"
Actually it was a story on digg that sent me to the end of the Internet, by the way of an Easter egg within the google reader. If you want to do the same, here is the link to cybernetnews which has all the information and screen captures.
But I found out that the First Blog had the original article.
The First!: More photos on Google Reader

Tags: google reader, Easter egg, end of the Internet

Go inside Monalisa and find the unknowns. Like the original color of the Painting.

What a painting can tell you if you look hard enough! with 3D scanner and bunch of history research, microscopic analysis and viola! here it is!
Mona Lisa was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine cloth merchant. Records suggest she wasn't pregnant when she posed for Leonardo, but that the painting was commissioned to celebrate the birth of her third child, says Bruno Mottin, curator in the research department of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France. Also known as C2RMF.The Painting was originally painted with Mona Lisa wearing a large transparent overdress made from gauze, they said. Under normal light, part of the garment is visible on the right-hand side of the painting, but appears simply to be part of the background.
"This type of gauze dress ... was typical of the kind worn in early 16th Century Italy by women who were pregnant or who had just given birth," “You can see it when you know what you’re looking for,” said Bruno Mottin, of C2RMF. He spoke at a news conference with researchers from the National Research Council of Canada.

NRC Scientists scanned the painting with a 3D scanner, which is a variation on equipment used by American astronauts earlier this month to check the space shuttle for damage before it returned to Earth. The Canadian research council, which has worked with museums around the world since the 1980’s and with the French for a decade, developed a model able to resolve fine details in artworks.

The NRC team of scientists has now created a 3-D digital model of the "Mona Lisa" — a highly detailed computer scan of what may be the most famous painting in history. They did it in a basement at the Louvre in Paris, where the painting is on display.They have been poring over the results for nearly two years, and reported their first findings today.

They found that the wooden board on which da Vinci painted the portrait is slightly warped, but in surprisingly good shape, considering that the work was done between 1503 and 1506. The oil paint is mottled with fine cracks, as happens to many old paintings, but the paint appears well-bonded to the wood beneath it. Parts of the scan, done in X-rays and other wavelengths, show damage near the top of the painting, and a repair made after a visitor threw a stone at it in 1956.

But if you thought that all mystries about Mona Lisa is resolved, you are wrong, she still holds some information to herself, like the method of Da Vinci's sfumato - or smoky - painting technique which continues to elude experts.

Now to the painting. Click on the link below to go inside the painting. Select the method based on your browser capability.

1. If you have flash capability this is the link for you.

2. Just plain old html link is here.

Enjoy and be amused!

Tags: MONALISA, Mona Lisa, Leonardo, NRC, C2RMF, Lisa Gherardini, Florentine

Mozilla VS Debian

It seems communities like Debian and Mozilla are fighting over OSS products. If we respect each others rights, treat the others with respect, these type of squabbles will not come to be. I like both the products and use them. For the sake of OSS, I hope they will come to terms. read more at geemodo
Geemodo: Firefox playing fox with Debian

Tags: geemodo, firefox, debian, OSS

Myspace educates parents! Protect your own!

With all the negative publicity that it was getting due to young members being under attack by unsavory characters. The site, is said to be one of the largest global social networking site,with more than 100 million profiles created by users that count among them Chief Executive Officers and Fortune 500 companies such as MySpace advertiser General Motors Corp. -- has also made it a destination for child predators from coast to coast in the United States.
It has joined hands with Seventeen magazine, the National School Board Association and the National Association of Independent Schools to offer parents tips on how to protect minors online.
But if you read the whole article on yahoo, I (may be you) get the feeling that it is trying to hand over the plate to parents of these young people. I will just mention few sentences here for your reference but I hope you would read the complete article. One way or other, it is still better than doing nothing to protect the young.

from the article;
"

"MySpace introduced a new technology and created a new world," Atoosa Rubenstein, Seventeen editor in chief, said in an interview. "But it's not their sole responsibility to patrol them."

"My mom was the person who told me not to walk down the dark alley by myself, not the person who created the dark alley."

To download the parents guide, surfers can click on "Safety Tips" at MySpace.com. Brochures will also be distributed to about 55,000 schools representing grades 7 through 12 in the United States in October."

Weseepeople, Diebold and elections!

What a social networking site got to do with Diebold and elections? A lot I guess after reading some article in the press and blog sphere. On of the earliest large peaceful social efforts were elections did not matter whom we elected for what position. All the people were equal, and had the same right as the one next to them. But now somehow it seems that Diebold decides it for you,
like;
You have voted! when you have not!! and let you not vote!!!
Let yo vote again, in the above case!!!! But did you really did not vote? No one will ever know!!!!!

Confusing? yes exactly what I felt when I ran through those very informative write ups. Did read them not once but twice to get the feel of the idea. My information comes mainly from three articles and misinformation from Diebold. You too will find that the response given to one research by Diebold get debunked very clearly by another research/article.
Here are the three articles that I am referring to;

1.Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine by
Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten

There is a full report in pdf format, and don't forget to read about the PDF troubles at Geemodo.
Also you can download and watch a video of the operation of diebold and the procedure of making a loser a winner. Benedict Arnold VS George Washington. And Benedict Arnold won even though George Washington had more votes! That's where democracy goes to Diebold.
For that read the next blog below, it does a much better job than me.
2. Where democracy goes to Diebold by ZDNET blogs This brings together all the information together and gives you a better view.

3. Avi-Rubin's Blog My day at the polls.
I don't think Avi needs an introduction, he has been working on this issue for a long time is a die hard, Diebold fan.
All three gives a very good assessment on the current state of affairs of Diebold voting whatever.
As usual Dibold has claimed that the Princeton research was done on an old version of the machine. Then Diebold, give the team a new one.

Amazon's New RSS Gig, Product Promotions via API and RSS

The information and the feeds Seems to be working and pretty interesting. They are using Amazon S3 to store the feeds! or the feeds are from S3.

I have enabled the fist feed on meddesktop blog, look at the first right hand column.

The newest release of ECS provides both an API and a set of RSS feeds to allow developers direct access to promotions.

What are promotions? Glad you asked!

Promotions are short-term special deals that help customers to make purchases sooner rather than later, and which allow merchants to provide more attractive offers in a competitive retail environment. A promotion for a particular ASIN could be anyone one of the following:

• Buy 3 items and get a 4th one for free.
• Get 10% off of a purchase.
• Save $20 on a purchase of $100 or more.
• Free shipping.

At Amazon we have found that promotions are a key tool for driving additional sales and for increasing the ever-important conversion ratio (shoppers vs. buyers).

Finally, there are a set of 3 RSS feeds, updated each day, which enumerate the current set of active promotions:

• Dollar Off Promotions
• Percent Off Promotions
• Buy X Get Y Promotions

If you look closely at those URLs, you will see that they are stored, appropriately enough, in Amazon S3.

Tags: amazon, RSS, promotion via RSS, amazon S3, meddesktop

Lonelygirl15 found, and she is an actress!

New York Times reports that "A nearly four-month-old Internet drama in which the cryptic video musings of a fresh-faced teenager became the obsession of millions of devotees — themselves divided over the very authenticity of the videos, or who was behind them or why — appears to be in its final act."
The woman who plays Lonelygirl15 on the video-sharing site YouTube.com has been identified as Jessica Rose, a 20-ish resident of New Zealand and Los Angeles and a graduate of the New York Film Academy. And the whole project appears to be the early serialized version of what eventually will become a movie.
Matt Foremski, the 18-year-old son of Tom Foremski, a reporter for the blog Silicon Valley Watcher, was the first to disinter a trove of photographs of the familiar-looking actress, who portrayed the character named Bree in the videos. The episodes suggested Bree was the home-schooled daughter of strictly religious parents who was able to find the time to upload video blogs of her innermost thoughts.

Tags: lonlygirl15, youtube, jessica rose

Read that Banned book, at google Books!

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week, Google has opened up a whole bunch of banned books. The banned books (banned by various authorities due to various reasons) have kept millions of people away from gaining knowledge or being happy.
Following the threads at /., where I read first about this opportunity, It is fascinating that these books are banned. I had a good childhood and I was not banned from reading any books. Except when I caught up with paperbacks of Louis L'Amour's paper backs, and skipped my school book. Even that was not a ban but a reduction of volume!
It hurts even to hear any one banning a book, where are we? in the middle ages?
Anyway back to /. threads, they have some gems there!
The best was by iamthedave (he mostly writes about beer on his blog), which matches most of my sentiments. Here they are;

It's cool - I've read about 60-70% of the books on the list. It's odd - Call of the Wild has been challenged? It's informative - I've just started reading The Satanic Verses, and now i have a new reading list It's missing? - I can't believe Fahrenheit 451 isn't on that list... It's scary - many people in the world are denied access to these books. It's scarier - many people in this country would have these books banned It's sad - in 100 years, who knows if we'll all still have access to these books. It's encouraging - challenges, even recently, to these books in schools and libraries have failed - let's hope history repeats itself in such a fashion for years to come. The Google books might be giving just previews and fear not, most of the books are on Project Gutenberg.
Thanks to google for being aware of social problems.

Future of Web Apps Summit!

Social networking usually revolve around web apps. Blogger where this site resides is one of them and who have not flicked on flickr? And I am sure you have bumped into technorati, and Odeo, techcrunch yahoo, google are all web apps that have revolutionised the web sphere. If you are interested in these services, how would you like to here the people who implemented or were involved in implementing these technologies? Get into web 2.0? Then sign for the two-day Future of Web Apps Summit! You can sign up at summit website. Speakers include Evan Williams formerly of Blogger and now of Odeo, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, Tantek Celik of Technorati, and Steve Olechowski of Feedburner. The conference is put on by UK based Carson Systems, a company focused on enterprise web applications that is led by Ryan and Gillian Carson.
The cost is $295 for two days. And if you are lucky, click here to go to Shoutblog and you might get a 25% discount.
By the way Shoutblog is the blog of BuzzShout. BuzzShout is a democratic reviews and listings site for modern web 2.0 companies. Check out the front page for the latest companies and reviews as per description on the site.

If mobile Phone is your way of keeping touch, Blakberry gives you Blackberry Pearl!

Geemodo reports that New blackberry device, Blackberry Pearl is out. BlackBerry users I know do keep in touch with people using this device and it is wonder to see how they use it. For me, it is hard to type on that tiny keyboard with my chubby fingers but I have seen people typing faster on BlackBerry than I type on a regular keyboard! Anyway if that interests you head over to Geemodo and read the article;
Geemodo: BlackBerry Pearl or Blackberry 8100, You can have it now!

Crikey! No more, Croc hunter killed while documenting Sting rays!

Australian television star Steve Irwin, known as the ``Crocodile Hunter,'' died after a stingray's barb pierced his heart during the filming of a documentary, police said. The 44-year-old collapsed and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. He was filming at Batt Reef, near Port Douglas, a popular tourist resort, when the incident occurred about 11 a.m. today.

The freak accident happened while Mr Irwin, 44, was filming an underwater documentary off Port Douglas on the far north east coast of Australia, according to witnesses and emergency officials.

He was stung at about 11am (0100 GMT), according to a statement by his wildlife park Australia Zoo. The crew on the naturalist's boat, Croc One, called emergency services in the nearest city, Cairns, and tried to resuscitate him en route to nearby Low Isle to meet a rescue helicopter.

Born on February 22 1962 in the southern Australian city of Melbourne, Mr Irwin moved to tropical Queensland where his parents ran a small reptile and fauna park.

He grew up near crocodiles, trapping and removing them from populated areas and releasing them in his parents' park. He took over the park in 1991 and renamed it the Australia Zoo.

Mr Irwin met his US-born wife Terri at the zoo and footage of their honeymoon, which they spent trapping crocodiles, formed the basis of his first Crocodile Hunter documentary.

Social Networking get WIPped by WIPConnector

With a statement like ""Wireless is an industry that will explode, not a bubble that will burst", WIP (Wireless Industry Partnership), plans to bring together all who are involved in the Wi-Fi industry. The site is known as WIPCONNECTOR.

Caroline Lewko, founder and chief executive of WIP, said: "The wireless industry is approaching a tipping point, and will impact the lives of virtually everyone who uses technology of some kind."

"All around the world there are entrepreneurs that not only create new wireless technologies and applications, but change the way entire industries solve problems, deliver goods and services and enhance life." added Lewko.

Wireless markets are growing much faster than the overall telecoms industry, according to analyst predictions.

With funding available for wireless companies, and waves of hype surrounding technologies such as 3G, wi-fi and WiMax, the site - which costs $300 for full membership - sounds similar to efforts during the dot-com boom to pair up entrepreneurs with venture capitalists. But WIP is keen to dispel the comparison.

Membership is available to companies and individuals at an introductory rate of $300 (US) per year. WIP has also signed collaboration agreements with industry associations around the world such as the MX Alliance based in the UK and the Ottawa Wireless Cluster in Canada, and is negotiating with others. Members of these organizations are able to join WIP at a reduced rate.

A key benefit for WIP members is the ability to create a WIPConnector profile a virtual billboard advertisement that gives even the smallest wireless companies exposure to a vast array of potential partners, customers, distribution channels, investors and other strategic relationships.

The Wireless Industry Partnership (WIP) announced today that it has retained Mobility Public Relations as its agency of record for worldwide communications. Mobility Public Relations (www.mobilitypr.com) was selected because of the expertise and experience of the principals in the wireless industry having managed media and analyst relations programs for such companies as Cisco Systems, HP Mobile Bazaar and iPass.

If you are the wi-fi type, visit WIPConnector here.