How to tame Gleeful Barbarians, Oops I meant children.

Frank Gruber over at Somewhat Frank, has written a nice article about Social Networking for Parents. He starts off with "Joseph Morgenstan once said, "Children are gleeful barbarians." So how do parents handle "gleeful barbarians?""
Then he goes on to explain how these guardians of tiny barbarians getting help. Seems web 2.0 is taking part of the credit. Means web 2.0 based social networking sites are providing places for parents to go seek or give help from/to each other.
After going through each link and describing the site a little he ends the article with an Alexa traffic graph. So it seems there are a lot of parents that give and take help. So go ahead and be a parent.
But make sure that you follow some of the links he has provided.

Tags: Social networking, parents, web 2.0

If the world was miniature, would you understand it better?

The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the differences in the world.
There are many types of reports that use the Earth’s population reduced to 100 people, especially in the Internet. Ideas like this should be more often shared, especially nowadays when the world seems to be in need of dialogue and understanding among different cultures, in a way that it has never been before.

The text that originated this webmovie was published on May 29, 1990 with the title “State of the Village Report”, and it was written by Donella Meadows, who passed away in February 2000. Nowadays Sustainability Institute, through Donella’s Foundation, carries on her ideas and projects.
See the world in miniature form here!

Tags: community, earth, population, sustainability

Why Afgan war is so difficult!

One soldier told : "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."
Yes 10 foot marijuana plants hindering war on terror. According to this yahoo news;
General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defence staff, said on Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.

"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices ... and as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa.

"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hillier said dryly.

Tags: afgan, marijuana, war on terror

Social networking goes Indian, Yaari debuts

A new social networking site targeting Indians from around the world to get together and have bananas, martinis and Yaari. (I have no Idea what this means either?)
Idea comes from two Stanford (My rivals) educated (?) Indians, Here is the CEO profile.
Site is getting there and already many a people have joined. I could not find out if non-Indians could join and may be they will update the site about those information. Seems to be a good get together place for Desi (Indians?).

Update:
Later I noticed that there are many a social networks targeting India and this blog does a good comparison those sites.

Tags: yaari, India, Social networking, weseepeople

Networkworld gets it wrong! about Google source search.

I was searching for social networking software and information for weseepeople when I landed on of my favorite news magazines, both in print and online, Got it wrong about Googles source code search engine. At least they posted it directly from IDG without checking out the article. The article is not even a half right in my view.
Article starts off with;
"The company's new source-code search engine, unveiled Thursday as a tool to help simplify life for developers, can also be misused to search for software bugs, password information and even proprietary code that shouldn't have been posted to the Internet, security experts said Friday."

Well the ratio of hackers (crackers) to developers (real hackers) vastly out number the first and there for benefit is higher than the assumed misuse. Also before google code search ever came online, there were many other source code search engines were in use and I do not know about any of the crackers benefiting from those engines. May be they are not telling me.
Here are some sites for the editors, and the writer of the article;
Krugle, my favorite,
Koders is another,
Ruby focused source search,
And you can build your own with this tool, remember hackers and hackers are both resourceful people.
One of the people who gave the ideas to the writer is from source code analysis company (Editor fix those links!) and if people could analyse their own code with tools like the ones above, fortify might not need to fortify any more. But a visit to site and checking out services etc, fortify will have work some time to go! ;).
The other company (another broken link) which gave the information csc, get's it right;
"Skilled hackers may already be able to do this type of search with Google's Web search engine, but Code Search is "another tool that makes it a tad easier for the attacker," says Johnny Long, a security researcher with Computer Sciences Corp"
But still misses the point about other source code search engines.
But think again, about the benefit to the developers, able to find proprietary code in open source software before being used in a project. Or to find out what crackers see before hacking an open source project.
For the record, I did search for the same phrase on all the above engines and came away with almost the same results.
The writers phrase, "this file contains proprietary," was used and on google it found one and on koders it found 9!

Tags: google code search, krugle, hackers, crackers, weseepeople

Networkworld gets it wrong! about Google source search.

I was searching for social networking software and information for weseepeople when I landed on of my favorite news magazines, both in print and online, Got it wrong about Googles source code search engine. At least they posted it directly from IDG without checking out the article. The article is not even a half right in my view.
Article starts off with;
"The company's new source-code search engine, unveiled Thursday as a tool to help simplify life for developers, can also be misused to search for software bugs, password information and even proprietary code that shouldn't have been posted to the Internet, security experts said Friday."

Well the ratio of hackers (crackers) to developers (real hackers) vastly out number the first and there for benefit is higher than the assumed misuse. Also before google code search ever came online, there were many other source code search engines were in use and I do not know about any of the crackers benefiting from those engines. May be they are not telling me.
Here are some sites for the editors, and the writer of the article;
Krugle, my favorite,
Koders is another,
Ruby focused source search,
And you can build your own with this tool, remember hackers and hackers are both resourceful people.
One of the people who gave the ideas to the writer is from source code analysis company (Editor fix those links!) and if people could analyse their own code with tools like the ones above, fortify might not need to fortify any more. But a visit to site and checking out services etc, fortify will have work some time to go! ;).
The other company (another broken link) which gave the information csc, get's it right;
"Skilled hackers may already be able to do this type of search with Google's Web search engine, but Code Search is "another tool that makes it a tad easier for the attacker," says Johnny Long, a security researcher with Computer Sciences Corp"
But still misses the point about other source code search engines.
But think again, about the benefit to the developers, able to find proprietary code in open source software before being used in a project. Or to find out what crackers see before hacking an open source project.
For the record, I did search for the same phrase on all the above engines and came away with almost the same results.
The writers phrase, "this file contains proprietary," was used and on google it found one and on koders it found 9!

Tags: google code search, krugle, hackers, crackers, weseepeople

Now you can see more with Google Vidget(tm)

If you have a personalised Google home page, you can add google videos to it now. Google has released Official Google Video Gadget.
Now you can search for your videos based on tags or what ever you fancy.

Tags: Google video, vidget, google IG

YahooHackday (Hackday06) ends with all girl team winning the top Prize!

I just landed on Techcrunch via DIGG and found out that the winning hardware/software device was created by Diana Eng, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy. The winning device, called Blogging In Motion, combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures.
Techcrunch, did two day coverage of the event and you can find them here and here along with the post I just mentioned.

Tags: hackday06, Blogging In Motion

Google world domination part one, two, oh what ever

Some inf o about googletalk, one good piece of social networking.
VOIP IP Telephony: Google Talk and world domination all without mass destruction

Tags: googletalk, voip ip telephony

A monster list of AJAX resources

I plan to use AJAX in every possible way in bringing up weseepeople website (if I ever find time). So naturally constantly search for AJAX stuff. I have gone through 50 Ajax resources, 60 ajax resources and a quite a few.
But I did not feel they were worth of writting, until I came across this list by ash on windows Live spaces. First I was going to let it go as a just another list. But a closer look made me change my thinking.
So I say that if you are looking AJAX info, I suggest you pay a visit to this list.

Tags: AJAX, AJAX List, Live spaces