2008 Olympics LIVE Stream

Num key restarts/kills Gnome session

If you have upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, and are facing this annoying issue where you press a num key and it restarts/kills your gnome session - you will have to do the following steps to get rid of the issue

In Gnome Menu -

1) System
2) Preferences
3) Keyboard (Tab: Mouse Keys)
4) Uncheck (Allow to control pointer using the keyboard).

Via Ubuntu Bugs

Shops track customers via mobile phone

Here is an interesting item developed by a company called "Path Intelligence" where shops could track customer movements based on their mobile phone signals

More here

Click fraud is high and keeps rising

• The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That's up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That’s up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.
• The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.
• Q4 2007 click fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3 2007.
• In Q4 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3 percent) Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).

Via ClickForensics and Techcrunch

Yahoo's new boss ...

Kontera pays with PayPal

Indeed. Kontera does pay via Paypal since end of December 2007

To activate your payment through PayPal - mail with your request to support@kontera.com

Sling Hi-Def Slingbox

The Slingbox Pro HD attaches to your TV and sends high-definition, 1080i format video to PCs or TVs around your house or around the world.

HD-DVD gets knocked out

Toshiba's HD DVD got a big blow before the International CES event when Warner Bros Entertainment announced that they would exclusively support Sony backed Blu-ray

Why Digg sucks

Consider the recent news of AOL stopping development of the Netscape Browser

See this on Digg and the pointless comments there

and see Slashdot - Now which one do you prefer

Digg sucks , most of its users are dumb who pretend to be elitist and the front page is a bunch of shit stories and each one of them having many useless comments

PDF Split and Merge

pdfsam is an open source tool (GPL license) designed to handle pdf files. It requires JVM 1.4.2 or higher and it’s released in 2 versions, basic and enhanced.

pdfsam basic can split and merge pdf files -

* split your pdf documents (into chapters, single pages, etc.).
* merge many pdf documents or subsections of them.
* exctract sections of your document into a single pdf document.
* save and load your environment to automatize your recurrent jobs.
* manage pdfsam settings and set an environment to load at start up.

pdfsam enhanced also lets you encrypt your pdf files (RC40 bits, RC128 bits, AES128 bits) and set permissions on them. It also lets you add a pdf cover or footer (or both) to your pdf documents.

Get it here for Windows

Here comes another bubble

Here Comes Another Bubble - Free videos are just a click away

Paypal supports Indian Banks

Paypal now supports Indian Banks! This would be cheered by web publishers who want to receive their payments instantly via Paypal

Paypal supports the following Banks

State Bank of India

Bank of India

Canara Bank

Union Bank of India

HDFC Bank

ICICI Bank

ING Vysya Bank

Axis Bank

Standard Chartered

HSBC

Citibank

You will have to provide the IFS Code which is usually on your Cheque Book and your account details

Charges for withdrawal are Rs 50 for amount less than 7000 and free for greater amounts!

In-car GPS Navigation Device

CE Infosystems, India has launched a in-car GPS navigation device.

The device lets you enter any destination in India and you will be guided, turn by turn with voice prompts. It would be interesting to see how this works with the entirely unplanned road infrastructure India has.

The device is powered by mapmyindia.com which is not too bad except the search!

See the demo video below


Go to the Site

Gmail integrates AIM

Check your gmail and see if its enabled!

Enable Video Acceleration on Linux

These are Debian/Ubuntu specific steps

1. In your terminal, execute lspci -v and check for the manufacturer of your video card. You are likely to find either nvidia or ATI
2. To install Nvidia drivers
   
1. Check for your kernel version using uname -r which might return a output like 2.6.22-14-generic
2. Install the restricted drivers package - sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
3. Install nvidia-glx module - sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
4. Make a backup of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the string Driver "nv" with Driver "nvidia"
5. Exit Gnome and you should see the nvidia Logo. See the difference in framerate!
3. To install ATI drivers
1. Install the fglrx driver - sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
2. Make a back up of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and replace the string Driver "ati" with Driver "fglrx"
3. If you want to install ATI's own driver, you might have to check their site for the procedure
   

Microsoft Office Mobile

Microsoft has released a updated version of Microsoft Office Mobile.

It's priced at $50 and you can pick it up here

Cross domain XHR

W3C has proposed a draft that allows cross domain XHR

To facilitate clear and controlled read access to resources, this specification defines a read access control mechanism that enables a Web resource to permit access to its content from external domains when such access would otherwise be prohibited by a same origin policy. The defined mechanism only works in conjunction with other specifications that are using the read access control mechanism to enable read access.

Read more

Difference between URI, URL

A URI identifies a resource either by location or name. More often than not, most of us use URIs that defines a location to a resource. However, a URI does not have to specify the location of a specific representation. Citing and example of a W3C URI for their home image, they use the following URI: http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home. Note the absence of a file extension. The URI for the w3c_home image is still universally unique, but it does not specify the specific representation of the image (either a GIF, PNG, or JPG). The selection of the representation can be determined by the web server through HTTP content negotiation. The Apache HTTPD server has had excellent support for content negotiation for many years. Oddly, few sites take advantage of HTTP content negotiation. The W3C is one web application that makes heavy use of URIs and content negotiation.

URL

A URL is a URI but a URI is not a URL. A URL is a specialization of URI that defines the network location of a specific representation for a given resource. Taking the same W3C example, there are actually 2 representations available for the w3c_home resource:

* http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.gif
* http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home.png

These URIs also define the file extension that indicates what content type is available at the URL. Through content negotiation, the web server will forward the user agent to the proper type, depending on the client’s capabilities, when the URI http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home is accessed.

More often than not, URI is the correct term to use when referring to the location of resources on the WWW.

Via Ajaxian

iTunes Alternatives

Looking for iTunes alternatives ?

DownloadSquad has compiled a nice list of the options you have to overcome the buggy and memory hog iTunes

Demonoid Dead ?

Demonoid - the popular Bittorrent sharing site may be gone forever

Currently the site displays this message

"The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding."