January 15, 2006
Blog Mela - Sankranti Edition
Welcome to the Makar Sankranti / Pongal / Lohri / Bhogali Bihu / Bhogi / Sakarat / Kicheri edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela. Isn't that amazing? Seven different names for a festival. It happens only in India.
Apologies for the delay. Blogging has been pretty low this week and I had to spend quite some time scouting for the best and unique ones. Not to mention, that 24x7 blogmela, Desipundit, makes my life more difficult :-). But as anyone can agree, it is all fun in the end. So now that the Sun has begun its northward journey, let's begin our journey into blogistan.
Searching for something
Akshay Mahajan is out on the streets of Mumbai searching for the Byculla Soufflé. And the best samosas in town. Ram talks about his visit to the historic Ajanta & Ellora caves. Varnam writes that the recent discoveries in archaeology may just prove that Indians are the oldest farmers.
Books and related
On what is the one of the firsts in the Indian blogosphere, Sonia Faleiro podcasts an excerpt from her recently launched book The Girl. Amardeep Singh points out the recent additions of Indian-oriented works at Project Gutenberg, the free online ebook project. Vikrum Sequeira reviews his recent read - Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality.
Tech peck
Arnab Nandi lists his reasons for not liking the new Intel Macs. Michael Parekh talks about a non-obvious solution to managing the tons of gadgets and their accesories you have in your drawer. Amit Agarwal has a nice photocasting guide for those unfortunate to not own a Mac (Photocasting is the photo equivalent of podcasting). Veerchand Bothra talks about the mobile industry crying foul over piracy. Notice how they all come up with the same failed solution to counter piracy. And you'll know the losses they project will have a margin of +/- 50%, once you read what Rashmi Bansal has discovered.
On current stuff
Samanth expresses his dissappointment over the Hindu appointing their "internal independent ombudsman". Ashish points out the problem in Tavleen Singh's fallacious arguments in support of free irrigation. Aks analyses the larger trends in how the CAT has evolved.
Naveen Mandava talks about the archaic real estate laws in the country being a major hurdle, rather than politicions, to the boom of the economy. Nitin Pai wonders whether cricket has ever helped India-Pakistan relations. Nandan says it is not the monetary compulsions but maintaining the old lifestyle is the reason why bar girls refuse to go out of news.
Spaceman Spiff proposes an idea for eliminating caste based discrimination, thereby removing the need for reservations. Shivam Vij has an interesting discussion on the possible conflict between labour reforms and reservations in the private sector. Gaurav Sabnis hates the word 'caste' itself.
Society, culture and related
"Objective art is meditative art, subjective art is mind art" - Karamadude attempts to explain these words of Osho. (I'd tend to agree with him.) Neelakantan says Shubh Labh epitomises capitalism more than anything else. Crystal Blur writes about a terrible disease on the loose, especially in the recent times - Sanctimonitis. Curious gawker writes about the irony of Indians celebrating on the inclusion of Hindi as a terrorist spoken language by the US. Sakshi Juneja informs us about celebrities participating in the Mumbai Marathon.
There we are. This week's short and sweet blogmela. Enjoy! The next blogmela will be hosted by Spaceman Spiff.
January 07, 2006
Nominations for Blogmela Vol 4 Issue 2
nilesh.org is happy to host another blog mela, ten months after the last one here. Nominations for 2006's second blogmela are now invited. The usual rules plus one apply:
- All blogs must be written by Indians or must have an Indian connection.
- All blogs must be written between the Saturday 7th January 2006 and Friday 13th January 2006 (ah!). 14th January is when the mela will be published.
- The posts can be of any type except personal journal entries. You can nominate yourself without any guilt.
- Nominations should be the permalinks to the post. Please do not nominate entire blogs. Link the post in the comments section but do not paste the whole post. You can even mail to me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to the post.
- Your site must not contain any pop ups or pop unders.
- Vote for shutterbug.nu at the Indibloggies in the photoblog category. ;)
If you are intrigued by blog melas, visit the previous blog mela published by Harini. And a compilation of recent blog melas. Enjoy!
April 10, 2005
Mid Day Metro
I am on Mid Day Metro Mulund Edition. Nice to see my photos in print. Makes me feel happy that they look so much better than the web. These people have professional equipment to scan photos and slides. No wonder the print medium has so much impact. My former boss called up immediately to congratulate me!
March 25, 2005
Work Bench
If you are a New Age / Electronica fan, if you love to have music at work or if its one of your regular 36 hour work shifts, you are definitely going to love listening to Workbench's albums. I just received my copies of Detour & Antistatic. I previewed the music online and was hooked immediately. Refreshing is the word. Highly Recommended.
March 13, 2005
Celebrating the Indian Blogosphere
Welcome to this week's edition of the BlogMela. I am already in the wee hours of Monday morning for a Sunday issue so let's not waste time with pleasantries. Here we go -
First, the blog news of the week - Mediaah, our best media blog, has been served with a legal notice by a Media biggie. They have been forced to shutdown but they promise to be back online in a different form by the first week of June. We all wish well for your third round, Mediaah! DesiMediaBitch has the story and Nilu has a few suggestions on how we can do our bit for Mediaah. The least you can do is sign this online petition.
Saket Vaidya is peeved by the way Indians worship superstars. He narrates a wierd experience he had in one of the malls in Mumbai when he found some 'champas, chamelis and chamans' walking into the mall amidst heavy security.
Eroteme lets us into his room and reminds us of those days when we clean up our rooms only to discover things we were supposed to do long back. Then what you get is an information overload. Lots and lots of things to do.
Neelakantan is impressed by Deccan's 0.5 grand offer for an air ticket not because of the price but because they are inviting a whole new segment of travellers to flying.
Bollycat or Wobblycat? Gaurav Sabnis points to an Indian site which is supposed to be a database of plagiarisms in Bollywood. Dissapointingly it turns out that the site owner needs to check facts before proclaiming that Lagaan is a copy of Victory.
Saurav Sarkar attracts our attention to the fact that Narendra Modi is about to make an appreance at the Madison Square Garden in NYC on March 20th. He urges NYC Indians to be a part of the CAG protest against the man. Modi sure was the 'chief abettor' in the Gujarat genocide and he should be made to feel shameful about it.
"The Great Ocean Road had a tourist radio frequency that tells tourists about the places while they drive". Sumeet Singh describes his wonderful trip to the 12 Apostles of Port Campbell in the US of A. How I wish I was there!
Ammani gives a very brief but beautiful description of a woman who lived all her life for her family.
Gaurav Meshram has just discovered that he's been addicted! I had the same feeling some years back. I still haven't been able to shake that off.
Kingdoms of Tomorrow. Sachin Nair has an analogy for multinationals. The bottomline, he says, is that we never really did evolve, nature ensures that we follow the same path but it changes the playing field thus helping us to think that we have evolved overtime. Very interesting!
Satellite townships - do they have a role to play? or are they in existence just to decongest big cities? That's what Patrix is pondering over after his visit to Cresskill in NJ. Hmmm, they are also called counter magnets.
Surya questions the popular notion that NRIs can help India by living in India. She explains how the 'Non-Returning Indian' can be a capable ambassador of India to the world and how NRIs are partly creditable for the changed perceptions of India in the last few years.
Kiruba wants you to know that money from Google Adsense is for real. That's because he's being paid for real. That's great! Now get going and register on Google.
Atul Arora narrates a playground incident about his friend Munna Kabbadi's football adventure. Its really funny - मुन्ना कबाड़ी और पत्थर से टक्कर!
Young and Fearless. Amit Varma observes these qualities in young Pakistani cricketers on their media interactions. On the other hand, Indians lack the burning desire to win. How true!
Xena's with an interesting short story - Ruse x Truce. It ends nicely. As with most of you, I too like stories with nice endings most of the time. Makes you feel good about life.
Finally Nivas reviews Aldous Huxley's The Brave New World. He relates the almost prophetic descriptions to where our world is heading. What catches me about Nivas's description of the novel is the Matrix-like future being presented in it. And that from a book written in the thirties!
Hope you liked the variety of posts for and of Indians this week. Do drop in your comments. Cheers and enjoy your week ahead!
Update: The next Blog Mela will be hosted on Kiruba's weblog.
March 08, 2005
Nominations for the Blog Mela
Update(Sunday evening): Hello there! The mela should be up in a few hours. I am working on it
Hello bloggers! The Great Indian Blogmela is back on nilesh.org. Calling for your nominations on the best and the greatest posts this week in the Indian blogosphere. Most of you know the rules but I'd like to reiterate the guidelines -
- All posts between March 6 and March 12 are eligible, including these days
- All posts should be made by Indians or should focus on India.
- You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries.
- Deadline is by the end of the 12th, Indian time. The Blog Mela will be posted on the 13th.
- The nominated posts can be linked as a comment to this weblog entry. Do not paste your whole post in the comments. Someone actually did that on last week's PHD BlogMela.
- You can even mail me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to your post. Do not mail the link to a whole blog.
And your time starts … now!
February 06, 2005
Amaz(on)ing!
This is what Amazon recommends me in the Camera & Photo section -
January 06, 2005
Bharateeya Blog Mela: Calling for Entries
Sorry for the interruption. Calling for nominations of the Bharateeya Blog Mela! The rules are here again -
- Posts must either be made by Indians or must focus on India or Indians.
- Send in permalinks to the individual blog entries only, not just the URL. If the permalink is not working, send me the title and date of the blog entry.
- You can nominate your own posts or someone else's
- You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries.
- Drop it as a comment to this post.
- The entries have to be dated between January 1-7.
- Please send your nominations to me latest by January 7, 8 pm IST.
If you are new to the mela, here's a brief, albeit dated, FAQ. And here's a dummy's guide too! The last Blogmela was held on Madmanweb and the one before that on AnarCapLib. The next Blog Mela will be hosted at Chaoszone.
Six Apart acquires Livejournal
Hot as it can be, the news is SixApart has acquired Livejournal. Om Malik broke out the news yesterday. Here is Mena's explanation of the acquisition.
December 27, 2004
The nth Bharateeya Blog Mela
Update(21:00): Due to cascading reasons, the nth Blog Mela has been postponed to the (n+1)th Blog Mela. I mean Madhu is hosting the current Blogmela and I'll host the next one on 7th January.
Read More (228 words) »»
December 26, 2004
Now, catch me if you can
Frank William Abagnale [FWA], the real-life "hero" of Catch Me If You Can, has vowed to stay away from all on-line, computer or cyber security conferences. The reason? Some other famous infosec professionals were irked by his presence as the keynote speaker at the CSI's 31st Annual Conference. They boycotted the conference. William Murray had this to say about his boycott -
For most of my forty year career I have systematically and consistently refused to participate on programs with known rogues and felons. At first it was because it was a condition of my employment. As I became more independent, it was to protect my professional reputation. Now it is to protect the profession. Most of the senior members of the profession have followed this policy; I consulted some of them before making my decision.
If you ask me, I'd say these people are simply trying to put up a face of 'professional ethics'. I see no harm in listening to how an actual forger operates. This is very essential today because of the everchanging nature of security threats. Unless you see things from the eyes of the doer, it becomes very difficult for you to keep pace with things in the security world. The use of honeypots essentially means you are seeing attacks from the eyes of a black hat or a potential felon. The Blackhat Briefings are the most informative of any security conferences.
Besides, Abagnale is apologetic about his deeds as a teenager -
When I was 28 years old, I thought it would be great to have a movie about my life, but when I was 28, like when I was 16, I was egotistical and self-centered. We all grow up. Hopefully we get wiser. Age brings wisdom and fatherhood changes one's life completely. I consider my past immoral, unethical and illegal. It is something I am not proud of. I am proud that I have been able to turn my life around and in the past 25 years, helped my government, my clients, thousands of corporations and consumers deal with the problems of white collar crime and fraud.
Now compare that with the self-centered convicted felon, Kevin Mitnick who used similar social engineering techniques to break into systems. But when you read what Mitnick's girlfriend had to say some time back, you know the real difference.
December 11, 2004
Google Suggest BETA
The web is buzzing with the latest news from Google Labs:
This new web search service suggests queries as a user types what he or she is looking for into the search box. By offering more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make searching more convenient and efficient, because it eliminates the need to type the entire text of a query. In addition, the service can connect users with new query suggestions that are useful, intriguing, and fun.
Google Suggest seems to be a very helpful and very interesting approach to web searching. It is similar to the autocomplete feature we see in textboxes in applications. The project developed from an idea by Kevin Gibbs, a software engineer in Google, all in a matter of a few months.
December 09, 2004
Defeating CAPTCHAs
If you have commented on Yazad's or Madman's weblogs, you must have noticed the small images with numbers in them. Called CAPTCHAs, they literally expand to Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. As you may have guessed it, they help in keeping software bots at bay, in web applications. In case of weblogs, they help in blocking automated comment spamming tools.
The most popular CAPTCHAs are the ones which display an image with distorted text and expect the human reader to read the text and enter it in a textbox. The assumption is an automated bot wouldn't be in a position to identify distorted text in the image. Then there are those which ask the user to hear to a short audio clip of distorted voice and write what was said in the audio clip.
Aren't they secure enough? No, they are not. Computer researchers at UCB have developed a program which can solve "ez-gimpy" (from captcha.net) with 92% accuracy. Spammers have devised unique ways of cracking CAPTCHAs. Someone designed a software robot that would fill out a registration form and, when confronted with a CAPTCHA test, would post it on a free porn site. Visitors to the porn site would be asked to complete the test before they could view more pornography, and the software robot would use their answer to complete the e-mail registration.
Isn't that incredible? The easiest way to bypass CAPTCHAs — software bots using humans to do their work! So what could be the next solution? The answer is logic puzzles. You can present a simple problem to the user in the form of 3 + 5 = ?. Software bots will have to be very advanced in parsing text and figuring out the problem and then figuring out the solution for the problem.
November 19, 2004
Zoom Quilt
November 17, 2004
Gandhi's Universal Truth
Those famous words of the Mahatma. RedHat seems to have hit the right spot with them. In the latest war of words with some other OS vendors. The response was most probably incited by outburst from Sun and Microsoft recently among all the earlier attempts to malign them.
They go on to say -
Over the years the establishment has claimed Linux wasn't ready, wrote it off as too expensive, and compared open source to cancer and communism. All while they declared it to be enemy number one. We know why. It starts with the open source. This is how we rapidly innovate and provide the levels of reliability and security the establishment can never match. In an open environment, everyone can participate and compete.
Very True.
Fishing out the phishers
Apart from all the standard security features, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 does an incredible job in defeating phishers. As evident from the screenshots on the left, when a regular user visits the Paypal website, Firefox marks the address bar in yellow to show that it is an SSL enabled website. When a phisher tries to imitate Paypal's homepage right down to the last HTML markup tag, the thing that defeats him is the white address bar. A regular user (unlike me; I was almost fooled!) immediately recognizes that this isn't the original Paypal website. The phisher is stopped dead in his tracks. This isn't enough to stop phishing scams. But it goes a long way. In case you are even dumber to differentiate between white and yellow, Spoofstick, an anti-phishing Firefox extension might just be your savior.
In other news, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 gets all the adulation it deserves. Also, here's a step-by-step introduction to Firefox.
November 10, 2004
Ten By Ten
ten by ten is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers.
Quite interesting I must say. Wonder what algorithm they use to find out the most talked about story of the moment.
The Stable Fox is out
Welcome to the world of secure internet surfing. Welcome to Firefox 1.0 - combining the best of browser security, features and cool extension magic. The last few days have been especially good for Firefox. And to top it all, Google has created a custom start page for firefox. This is the default homepage on a standard Firefox installation. As someone said on Slashdot, fire your conspiracy theories...
The Best Indian Business School Blog
Update: This is a sticky post till Nov 25th. Obviously for the contest.
Here comes the Nigritude Ultramarine of the Indian Blogosphere. 
Sponsored by Google, ISB has introduced an online contest to find the first site in Google for the phrase "The Best Indian Business School Blog". That…is not what I would call my weblog. In fact, I am in no b-school either. But, what's the harm? The name of the contest is Searchlight. Now in case, you feel the urge to help me out, add the following code to your weblog post, unless you too are participating -
<a href="http://nilesh.org/weblog/">The Best Indian Business
School Blog</a>
Dhar, is that you? Google, ISB, SEO …?
September 16, 2004
PRA - Purposefully Regressive Algorithm
Microsoft is again doing what it is best at - impeding progress of open Internet standards. The IETF has rejected Microsoft's draft proposal for the SenderID Framework (something to do with anti-spam) because of the patent issues surrounding the PRA algorithm. But does that affect Microsoft's efforts to push forth their agenda? No, not even the Internet's premier body can do that.
Microsoft had released the algorithm under a "non-transferable & non-sublicensable" license which locks out open source implementations of the algorithms since they now cannot sub-license their implementations under the GPL/Apache/BSD licenses. This affects about 60% of the mail relay servers on the Internet! And what do Microsoft have to say on this? "We don't care". If you check the link, the second para tells you all -
…it does not make sense to discuss alternatives to PRA if those alternatives may be reasonably inferred to be covered by the patent application (though not necessarily the license) since this working group does not wish to discount Microsoft's patent application…
Don't forget to read the whole thread. So finally, Microsoft will go ahead with PRA's incorporation and will not use the other alternative MAILFROM method for checking incoming mails. Another quote from the above link -
While Microsoft plans to incorporate both mailfrom and PRA checking information in the records it maintains, it has no plans to use mailfrom to check incoming e-mails, saying PRA is the superior technology.
Pretty roguish attitude!
So what is the SenderID Framework?
The SenderID Framework is a method to authenticate whether a mail server sending mail for say, yahoo.com is indeed yahoo.com server. This is verified by asking the DNS servers of yahoo.com on who are its mail servers and comparing the returned information with the connecting server. If the IP address is listed in the DNS information, the mail is accepted. Now there are two proposals on how this can be implemented. One is SPF and the other is well, PRA. SPF has been freely available for quite sometime, but not PRA.
So does the SenderID Framework kill all spam? The answer has always been NO. Authentication Is Not an Anti-Spam System. Some more links - one, two.
July 23, 2004
Times' Roman
This ubiquitous font, as many know, was developed by The Times newspaper for use in print. We know it as the Times Roman in MacOS and Times New Roman in Windows. Read about the complete history of the font.
Bitoogle
The search for everything on the web starts here and ends here!
June 27, 2004
Gmail Tools
I found some more interesting tools to make your Gmail experience smoother —
- G-Mailto: Sets Gmail as your default mail program in Windows. So when you click on a mailto:// url, your favourite web browser will open up a page with Gmail's Compose window. Pretty nifty.
- GTray: Windows system tray notifier for new Gmail mail.
- GmailCompose: A Mozilla Firefox extension to open the Gmail compose window with the click of a button.
- Gmail Loader: Import your existing mail into Gmail!
- Other supporting apps to help move to Gmail.
June 18, 2004
The Browser Upgrade Campaign heats up
Its the latest salvo fired against Internet Explorer. Security Focus has joined the widespread campaign exhorting people to move away from the buggy, insecure, dangerous piece of software, and the source of many of the headaches that security pros have to endure. Before them, it was LockerGnome, an MCSE who has been frustrated with IE's security track record, their I-don't-care attitude towards major bug fixes and worst Web Standards support among browsers. Before that was the interview of Scott Collins of mozilla.org on Ars Technica. And then you have the whole Internet community.
Then there are the two discussion threads(one, two) on channel9.msdn.com where everybody is shouting about whether MS cares about web developers and the lack of features in IE. There are ample indications that Microsoft is feeling the heat. You can see Tony Chor answering questions and clarifying in the threads. To summarise the happenings in the forums, after the launch of IE 6.0 in the second half of 2001, MS moved developers from the IE group to the MSN Explorer group. So there was no one in IE to listen to customers' problems. There hasn't been a feature update since then. To believe them, the whole IE group managed only to release security fixes for bugs (and they were quite bad at that too). Now they say, the group is back to work on a newer version of IE including a couple of feature updates in XPSP2. Still the attitude is being non-committal on including complete CSS2 support and PNG alpha transparency. They have managed to put up a wiki for feature requests. I don't know how that is going to help them.
So what is the benchmark? What is everyone recommending to move to? Which browser is high up in terms of security and is standards-complaint better than any other browser? You don't have to take a second guess.
June 17, 2004
MS's Multiple Personality Disorders
In his article on MS and its most important asset - the Windows API, Joel Spolsky talks how, trying to lock people on .NET technologies and at the same time promoting the incompatible Longhorn and Avalon platforms, Microsoft is on a new strategy to keep developers on tethers. Unfortunately for them, developers have started to realize this and have started moving towards Web applications. Developing ‘rich clients’ is suddenly uncool and unprofitable. Joel quotes Paul Graham of Yahoo! Stores on this -
There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
Joel goes on to explain how the ‘Feature’ camp has won over the ‘Backwards Compatibility’ camp inside Microsoft, and in turn caused Microsoft to lose the API war. A very interesting read.
June 16, 2004
Pop Goes the Gmail
So how do you access Gmail? PGtG will definitely change the way you access your Gmail account.
June 11, 2004
Web Home shifted!
Posting from the new web host! If you see this post, it means the scare that my registrar gave me was unfounded. I had called up the customer support to inform about an error I received while changing the DNS servers. The service executive told me I do not have nilesh.org registered in my account!
Hmmm … things seem pretty fast on the new server. Rebuilding my MT 2.661 weblog took less than 30 seconds! Some new comments got posted on the old site. Had to manually post them on the new server. All set! In case you find any errors or missing files, mail me.
June 07, 2004
Webhost Change
I am changing my web host this week. So if you do not get the sites at nilesh.org, wait for a couple of days and try again.
The New MT Developer Network
Its only the developer network that's keeps MT from being relegated to dark corners of the web. For a company which is so heavily dependent on this community, alienating it should be sacrilege. Yet, the Movabletype.org developer forums remain deserted by the company. To actually experience that, try posting a question to the forum and look at the responses you get. You can hardly find a 6A employee on the forum. Its only the community all over the forums. So this time, they are setting up an ‘official’ developer network and giving away free developer licenses in the hope that developers keep working on MT. I might too, if I am ‘accepted’ as a developer. Apart from this, I am really groping for an incentive to develop a plugin or maintain existing plugins on MT. Ok, so does that mean I'll work for MT only if I get it for free? I never said that. Earlier, I was thinking of buying the discounted MT 3.0D. But then how long does that license last? What when I need to buy a newer license? Will it be cheaper? No, I predict. My only issue is the high cost for a basic version of the software, which is still not solved by the free licenses. Beyond my reach and beyond the reach of most Indians. Ok, End of rants on MT3.
The Fox and the open bag
The Firefox visual identity team has decided on changing the default theme of Firefox in preparation of the impending 1.0 release. As often in the open source community, this has caused some furor in the mozilla dev community with people taking sides with the earlier theme author who is equally furious. The fault was his own. He was hesitant in releasing his Qute theme with the same license as MPL. So the team thought of porting the hugely popular Pinstripe OSX Firefox and Thunderbird themes to Windows. They call it Winstripe. Although its only Work In Progress and is basically a mish-mash of the Qute, Pinstripe & XP Luna themes, I am liking it™.
May 29, 2004
Plot Your Own Murder
On an internet chatroom. Sounds unlikely? The Guardian posted a shocking story of a 14-year-old plotting his own murder by a 17-year-old friend recruited by him. The young boy posed as a girl and ‘introduced’ his step brother to the online friend. Who in fact was himself. The friend was thinking all along that he was talking to many people. The ‘girl’ told the friend that if he stabbed her ‘brother’ he would be accepted as a spy in the British secret services. How bizarre, how bizarre!
May 28, 2004
Blogtimes - First Wordpress Plugin
It's so very nice to know that MTBlogtimes, which was ported to b2/cafelog by Sanjay Sheth, has been ported to the Wordpress publishing system by Photo Matt. Yes, Matt, who created the present day Wordpress as a successor to b2/cafelog. Utility-wise it is the first Wordpress plugin!
May 19, 2004
All About Standards
ShutterBug listed on CSS Vault and built for the future +.
May 16, 2004
MovableType Free?
On the 13th of this month, Sixapart announced the launch of Movabletype 3.0 developer edition. And guess what? Personal edition price - USD70! That for a version which yet does not support heirarchical categories. And what about the free version? Yes, that exists, but look at the restrictions - No more than one author and three weblogs. What? I cannot create more than three weblogs on my MT installation? Notice the difference. In the paid personal versions, they talk about 'active weblogs' number limit. In the free version, it is just plain 'weblog'. Now that means I cannot even create a static blog (without any posts. I do that for managing static pages on my site). So much for the commitment to a free version. Hmmm, I have been beginning to like TXP off late.
Update(11:00 PM): Thanks to all for pointing out the error. I really missed out on that post on 6A. Meanwhile kottke also agrees, the new licensing mechanism is really confusing. And yes, I'll wait for the discount code to see how much it works out to. I have been waiting to pay for an MT license since the time they announced the development of MT3.0. But sorry, I am still not going to shell out USD70 for this version. Mark Pilgrim sums it up. All said, Wordpress and TXP are still excellent alternatives to MT, I find, TXP especially for a photolog; not for ShutterBug, as it uses the most complex MT templates I have ever made.
May 04, 2004
Media Matters
Mediamatters.org in the news. Welcome to Media Matters for America, a new Web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. We badly need something like this in India.
April 29, 2004
Seeking Jobs
Found posted on a job site:
Unix Specialist: Ah, Unix. Its cheapass cousin, Linux, is what all Microsoft users turn to just as their sanity reaches a crossroads. Did you know that Microsoft Word stills spellchecks ?Unix? as ?UNIX?? Man, how 80?s does that look? I can imagine something like that flickering on the screen of a computer you assembled yourself from a crystal radio kit.…
…But the point of all that is, Unix is basically a sort of secret society where you either know it, or you don?t. And since most people just really can?t be bothered going through the agonies of learning it, it?s why we have jobs like this: ?Unix Specialist?. Of course that means nothing, or at least it means about as much as ?Car Specialist? or ?Bread Specialist?. Bread Specialist? What the hell is that? What kind of bread? White, multigrain, mixed grain, wholemeal, sourdough? Sliced or unsliced? If sliced, sliced for sandwiches or for toast? Crusty or soft? No matter! Just eat your bread! …
…So, if you?ve got those things, then we?ve got this job. We can explain it in more detail if you want to give us a call or shoot us an email or whatever. You can do that by typing ?pine? at the ?bash?. Freak. 6 month contract, to $500 per day.
Read the complete posting. Not a Unix specialist? So you a SAP Basis admin? Software Engineer? Network Engineer? or a 6 Sigma Performance Process Manager? They've got it all. The exhaustive list of job requirements for the IT Resources Group.
April 22, 2004
New Thunderbird Logo
Following on from the image makeover of Firefox, Thunderbird too has now a new logo. A part of the Mozilla branding effort, the Mozilla Visual Identity Team has done a great job in visualizing and creating the new logo for Thunderbird. Jon Hicks explains on his weblog the logo creation process for Firefox and Thunderbird. Hmmm... now all we want are the "Take back the mail" buttons!
April 08, 2004
Shutterbug.nu
The moment I have been waiting for the last six months has finally arrived! Presenting the all new Shutterbug.nu - A Photoenthusiast's Log (or backlog as some of you would call it).
Planning to put up a redesign for the last six months, I was struggling to give a new face to the old photolog. To come up with a radical change in design, I had to go through at least 3 complete redesigns till I was thoroughly satisfied with this one. Minimalistic design is a principle I have always liked in websites. Its the same reason why my weblog sports a simple yet functional look. It doesn't mean one should not have colorful designs and flashy effects. It does mean that design only that much as necessary. You may not necessarily agree with my viewpoint. Which is why you may not even like Shutterbug's design. Fine with me. Why no colors - because I get bored with a particular colour over a period of time. Black, Grey & white are eternal. The design elements are minimalistic, with clear demarcations .
The photolog is arranged in three clear sections - Features, Panoramas and Archives. Features are collections of photos based on one theme or location. Panoramas need no explanation. Archives contain entries posted individually. The entries are sorted by category and date for easy traversal. Another observation you may make are the easy-to-remember URLs. Note that most of the entries have been made pre-dated to their original dates because of the huge backlog (a year's photos) I had with me. I'll try to maintain continuity while posting all future posts.
Most of the photos I have taken till date are using my SLR (Details here). I recently bought the digital camera so photos from the digital camera might increase in the future. This is another reason why my posts aren't and won't be very frequent, say once a day. Photos taken from the SLR (which is my primary camera) do take time for processing and digitizing.
So browse the new photolog and the comments are available for your feedback. Do put in your comments. Enjoy!
December 13, 2003
P2P in Canada
Canada copyright regulators have declared P2P downloading legal. What they say is that while downloading songs for personal purposes is acceptable, uploading (or sharing) amounts to piracy . The original news release also talks about slapping a $25 levy for all portable audio players which store songs in excess of 10GB. More links - the decision(pdf) and the tariff(pdf).
December 09, 2003
Hello Mumbai!
Mumbaiites, make yourself heard loud and clear! Starting today evening upto the 12th of December, the Hello World project is going to project messages from people around the world on the Air India building on Marine drive using a laser beam. If you wish to send a message also, SMS it to +44.7781.48.40.40! And if you aren't anywhere near Marine drive, you can still see the messages, using this live webcam. It was by chance that I came to know about this when Anisha of the Hello World Project commented on my earlier post asking for more information on the building.
December 06, 2003
Browser on Fire
While my site is no indicator of the real surfing world, I do get some feedback about changing times when I look at my web server statistics. Last five days' stats state that Firebird has overtaken Mozilla at the second place behind severely bugridden Internet Explorer out of 496 visits to the weblog page (1653 total) . Firebird has been my favourite browser since the 0.7 release. The best part about Firebird apart from the listed features is that it doesn't require any installation. Useful if you do not have admin access to your machine in office. So for the rest 59% of the people visiting my site, I recommend that you try out the lean mean standards-compliant Firebird (for Windows). Heck, you can even have an installer. And a newbie's guide too.
September 16, 2003
Zen of MP3 on CIOL
Ok, after a month of silence I have nothing new to say, but thought I would mention - my Jukebox Zen review on CIOL Developer. You can find the original unedited article here. More to come.
August 17, 2003
1.022 Smoots
I am that tall. Chances are if you are not from MIT, you won't understand that. But Google surely understands that. And an MIT guy might feel happy when he knows that Google can compute complex expressions involving smoots such as the distance he travelled from his chair at the library to the door of his home. If you aren't related in any way to MIT like me, feel happy that you have one distance unit less to learn and remember. More about smoots.
May 23, 2003
PNG support in IE
Microsoft claims to have native support for PNG right from IE4.0. However, the truth is that they do not have full native support whereas Mozilla has full native support for all PNG features like alpha transparency and a full range of 8-bit to 48-bit colours. If you feel MS needs to include all the features of PNG into the latest version of IE, sign this petition. This is a community effort to make MS aware of their false claims.
May 15, 2003
Interplanetary Internet
It isn't a dream. It isn't a reality as yet. But the IPN may soon be real given that Vinc Cert too is backing the idea. As soon as 2005. It will connect the various space ships and planets of our solar system. IP address ranges have already been assigned to all the planets and spaceships in our solar system. The IPN will have a lot of latency because of the large distances. Even light takes 8 minutes to reach the earth from the sun. So IPN would be more suited for email-like applications, atleast initially, till we think of better ways to transmit information.
April 02, 2003
SPICMACAY
After about five years, today I visited my first web creation - SPICMACAY Mumbai, although somewhat broken now. And I am pleasantly surprised to know that it still ranks top in google third only to UIUC and spicmacay.org. The site kind of rekindled the energy in me that was present in us when we used to help arrange the mini-concerts and demonstrations. Unfortunately some of us had to leave the Mumbai chapter abruptly because of some politics developing internally. But I still feel, given the chance, I would want to contribute more to SPICMACAY. The magic of classical/fusion still leaves me spellbound.
April 01, 2003
Let that job be f*ed
Anyone interested in a job whose requirements run into 29 dazzling lines of justified text? This site F*** That Job lists some more insane job ads you might want to enjoy reading about. Like the ad which says you pay fifty nine bucks to attend a job fair with employers offering ESOPs. Ya, any caveman would be interested.
March 11, 2003
Probably mind reader
I am sure you may have seen this `Flash Mind Reader' floating around in lots of mails. Basically, you chose a 2 digit number, add the digits and subtract the sum from the number itself. The symbol corresponding to the answer is also displayed by the program. And no matter how random you are at selecting numbers, you always end up with symbols (they being random enough) that are also guessed by the program. But then I am pretty sure, it is just a matter of probability, although it seems hard. I tried not to think logically while picking symbols and found that some of them repeated from time to time. Can somebody try to work out an explanation? Dhar, can you? I'll try myself too.
January 27, 2003
Another Pirate, this time in my backyard
When I read yesterday's post, I just remembered that there was another pirate who took my work and put it up on the web without credits. Some crackpot who saw the Quadrangle panaroma that I made for the college magazine long back, took it, modified the image to remove my copyright and name and put it on the VJTI homepage. I intend to pursue this with the college authorities.
January 26, 2003
Non-innovative copycats
The mission statement of a new generation post graduate school in Bangalore -
To build on the track record set by India in general and Bangalore in particular, to enable India to play a key role in the global IT scenario through a world-class Institute with a focus on Education & Research, Entreprenuership and Innovation.
Mark the last word of the statement - Innovation. Now go to their site and see their innovative site design. :\ Don't they have a single student who can create a simple & functional design something like say IITB ?
Update(04-May-2004): The IIITB design has since long been updated and they now sport a crisp fresh `academic look'!
January 04, 2003
Swarming, KM and Reliance
Although I am not a KM buff, I discovered today that Swarming is a very interesting concept in KM(via Smart Mobs). There is a programming paradigm similar to this - Swarm programming, what my friend Selvin seems to be doing.
Much has been talked about the Reliance way of management. Not having figured that out from the day I joined, I often wondered how such a huge company with all its internal chaos, petty squabbles and inflated egos manages to keep posting profits year after year, blowing away all myths and defying all market predictions.
What am I talking about? Why am I relating Swarming with Reliance's management? I swear there seems to be a relation between the two. Here are some of my observations (Well, even if you don't give a damn about Reliance) »
Read More (1456 words) »»
December 19, 2002
What The...Remix
Wthremix(W3 remix)is a design challenge for coders, and a coding challenge for designers. The idea is - create a redesign of the W3C homepage. I am game. Don't be surprised if you find my entry in there. The deadline of February 17th means lot of time for exercising the creative part of my brain.
December 17, 2002
Article on Evolt
Since this is my first article to be published on web, I am pretty excited about it. Super Ragged Floats on Evolt.Org. Go check. There's more to come. My hands have been itching for a long time, to share my knowledge(however miniscule it might be) with people. :-)
December 13, 2002
Domblog.nsf
There you are. Probably the first neatly and professionally done weblog template for Lotus Domino. Well done, Jake! And it doesn't really need the blogger to know HTML very well. Hmmm. Lets see what we would like in the next major version - multiple authors & weblogs, trackbacks, XML-RPC and so on... Wait wait, there's another domblog template too. This one is from Freedom Blog. :-) Update: As I found out from Anthony Connell, Freedomblog is the first Domino weblog template
December 11, 2002
User, I let thee control thy fonts
Probably, this is the earliest reference I have seen, of letting the user change fonts size on a page using JS & CSS[Jul'99]. If you are aware of Wired and are aware of their new design, they allow font changes using JS & CSS. But it isn't new. There are hundreds of sites already allowing font size changes. Mine isn't and I don't feel good about it. Linux users see the site in tiny fonts(Although they can use Ctrl+ in Mozilla to increase font size). If you are feeling really bad about the font sizes on your site, ALA comes to the rescue.
Do you design for colour blinds?
I do. Ok, I admit, I don't exactly design my site for colour blind people. Nevertheless, the homepage is just as visible to color-blind people. See how people with red/green deficit(Deuteranope) will see my site as. That includes the link colours as well. You can check yours too, at visicheck.com. And can you imagine? I have just found another source for excellent colour combinations. :-)
December 10, 2002
Super Ragged Floats
First
there was slantastic
and then curvelicious.
Then came ragged
floats and then finally here is Super Ragged Floats, advanced
CSS for your viewing pleasure. If you have used Eric Meyer's method
to wrap around images, you will like this too. Here is a simple
tutorial on how to use CSS for wrapping text, but not by slicing.
An alternative to Eric Meyer's ragged floats. And a live example
can be seen here. »
Read More (762 words) »»
December 07, 2002
Wiki
I had read long back about Wiki and its possible uses on websites. It didn't excite at that time because I found weblogs uninteresting(!). But when I started blogging, I felt the need for keyword-based browsing on a weblog. Everything2 was the perfect thing to happen, I thought. And then I happened to see PikiePikie the wiki software and WikiWiki, the wiki weblog tool. Well, they are good, but very primitive. And that's the reason for the low popularity. They are too confusing. Even I took sometime understanding what is going on. But still, I feel, weblogs using Wiki would be the future. Even Erik Benson thinks so. He has a page on Wiki. There is still a need for the killer app for Wiki. Or probably I haven't found one. Probably I should make one for myself. It should be something between the extremely liberal WikiWiki and Everything2. WikiWiki allows you to edit any page and add as many keywords as you like. For example, I just created my homepage here. E2 instead needs you to login and then allows creation of keywords and pages.
Then there are some things I fear about Wiki weblogs. Too much of automatic linking between pages might drive search engines crazy. And real information may get hidden beneath a sea of links. A bad example can be this one. And unless there is some authentication mechanism, anyone can edit or delete text from your page. Unlike that, Everything2 seems more organised and lesser `link-crazy`. Also, creation of keywords is a bit restricted. There is moderation.
For more on Wiki - Google Directory. And I was pleased to know that there is one Indian site using wiki.
December 02, 2002
CSS Filters
Another of those useful CSS matrices - CSS filters. This one compares all browser versions on how they handle specific rules of CSS. Useful, if you want to know how to hide new CSS tags from old browsers, still ensure the page degradation properly.
VDXtoSVG
If you use MS Visio extensively, and wish to share your visio files on the web, you know how MS has extended XML for Visio. They are impossible to display without special parsing. VDX is not a standard. And nothing would be worse than rasterising a vector drawing. Don't worry, there is a better solution. Save your visio drawing as a VDX file. Use VDXtoSVG to convert the file to SVG. And it produces excellent results. As you can see from the sample files posted on their site.
December 01, 2002
Site Navigation Bar
If you are using Mozilla, and have shut off the site navigation bar (View Menu » Show/Hide » Site Navigation Bar » Show Only As Needed) you are missing a lot both as a reader as well as a blogger. If you visit my site, on the site navigation bar on clicking More, you'll get quick access to various links on my site. There are links for help, search and author page. Additionally there are bookmarks for various sections on the site. If you go to the archives, the previous and next buttons get enabled for easy browsing of archives. The site structure is such that moving vertically and horizontally becomes easier. For more information of the actual semantics, see the header section source of this page (<link> tags).
Now, you'll ask, what is the advantage of doing this? People using a standards compliant browser will have ease moving around the site and also it is beneficial for search engines when they are crawling the site. 
If it is good for search engines, it is good for the webmaster as well. Mozilla uses these tags to pre-fetch the next and previous documents. You can use them to specify a different language version of the page, or a printed version(PS) or the RSS version. Movabletype templates have <link> tags in their basic form. But you can do a lot more with them - like Slashdot does.
November 30, 2002
BlogDex under spam attack
There is yet another bout of URL spam attacks on Blogdex. This time the culprit is a site called Premium Domains. The links are like this - "PremiumDomains - www.site.domain - DOMAINS FOR SALE". The Top Links page of Blogdex has been peppered with these links (almost 21 in number). Someone has got to do something. :(
Update(Dec 02): Read Cameron's reply to this on Blogdex.
I use PNG do you?
Couple of days back, me and Michael, while going to lunch, saw a billboard on a bus stop saying something like `I use PNG, do you?' in bold letters. Wah! we colletively thought, when did PNG become so popular and why are common people suddenly becoming pro-standards? On scanning the billboard further, we found the answer - Piped Natural Gas. :-) Meanwhile I still haven't removed those last bits of GIF from my site, waiting for good PNG transparency support in IE.
November 26, 2002
Where is TBTF?
Tasty Bits from the Technology Front was the definitive technology source for a long time. Right from the nascent days of the Internet. I was a regular visitor to the site as well as subscriber to the TBTF list. But somehow at the beginning of last year I lost contact with the site. Recently, when I found a link to TBTF on Doc Searls' weblog, I suddenly felt that I was missing something all this time. I decided to visit the site to catch up and what do I find? The site has frozen in time. Sometime last year, Keith Dawson shut the TBTF shop. Why did he do it? Why did he kill such a popular website? I am unable to find any answers to these questions. I do not find a single link talking about this, not even Dawson. Can anybody provide an insight?
November 25, 2002
Pheonix or Mozilla
If you are divided over whether to use Pheonix or Mozilla, Dave Hyatt will try solve your problem if you take this mini quiz he has put up. If you find Mozilla UI acceptable, you don't need a switch to Pheonix. As far as I am concerned, I am for Pheonix for daily surfing, although I do test the bleeding edge Mozilla versions regularly.
XHTML Syndication?
Anil Dash proposes to use XHTML itself for content syndication. He calls for a standardised way of posting entries to a weblog - "All that would be needed is standardization of names and classes for page elements like DIVs and headers. A post/entry title would always be an H3, with a class set to "title", for example. Permanent links would always be P tags with their classes set to "permalink". Simple". I do not think it would be so simple. By doing so, although we are reducing our work of maintaining a seperate file for syndication( RSS/RDF), we are locked in the names & styles that we use on a page. I personally feel RSS is better. His argument is weak because given the automation of creating syndicated content, it is easier and cleaner to maintain seperate files for content and syndication. As Timothy Appnel says - RSS is for machine processing while XHTML is designed for display. We should not forget that. I think we should concentrate on improving the RSS standard rather than thinking about new formats. All this and my RSS file is still not perfect.
November 22, 2002
NMMC online
Take a look at the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation website.[via Mahesh]. As Mahesh says, NMMC is one of the most responsive Municipalities in India. Ya, I can see that from the website. On first glance, it is one of the best designed and organised governemnt sites I have ever seen. And they have active feedback sections too.
November 20, 2002
Eat on This
Look how simple it is to be listed on the top of EatonWeb's blog list. All you need to do is insert a few dots at the beginning of your blog title. More the number of dots, more the precedence you have. I did a little bit of research and found that the order of precedence is
dots(.) > colons(:) > semicolons(;) > alphanumeric chars > underscore(_) > pipe(|)
This is only to demonstrate the problem in EatonWeb's listing. I will restore my title back to its original position in a few days. Now don't rush to EatonWeb.
Pop Under & Indian Bloggers
It is sad to know that Kribs ended his PopUnder project too fast[Kribs, please, please bring up your archives]. I think Kribs had the right spirit. We Indians need to network better on our blogs. For that we need to know each other better. Probably pop-under was not the best approach. Maybe we can look at a better approach. I had heard about a portal that Mahesh is planning. I think instead of a huge portal, we should concentrate on smaller projects. Big things start small. PopUnder was the right start towards this.
More Blogetories
Apart from what Kribs has been discovering lately, I found some more blog directories, namely GlobeofBlogs.com, Pepys Project and the Weblogs Compendium. And then some topic/area specific directories like LABlogs, DFWBlogs, YULblog, Xenoblogs, Blogs4God, Cruel Sites. Looks like we need a directory to maintain a list of these directories. Nice project to start with. :-)
Flash & XHTML
Now have your cake and eat it too. Use flash on your page and still validate it as XHTML. Here's a nice article on ALA on how to make your flash-enabled pages XHTML compliant. This week, they have tips on how your site can still look good on both a 1024x768 screen as well as a 160x160 PDA screen. All this using CSS.
November 19, 2002
The Review
Here's the review of my weblog on theweblogreview.com. Well, what can I say?... err... hmm... go check for yourself, 5/5. Please put your vote if you feel like doing so.
November 18, 2002
Interaction Design
Have you ever taken, as they say, a holistic approach towards interaction design?...apart from the usual goody-looking stuff that we make while designing web applications, apart from the usual workflow techniques that we deploy. Take a look at how information architecture and interface design are closely linked to each other, contrary to our belief that they have different focus areas. Here's a 12 part article on Interaction Design, from boxesandarrows.com. This site is one of the few peer weblog sites that I have started to like very much.
November 17, 2002
SVG 1.1
The SVG standard has advanced to version 1.1 on the 15th. The most important change being creating modular blocks so that they can be reused in other SVGs. SVG is an XML specification for creating Vector graphics. Learn more about the language here. If you want a plain English language primer on SVG, read this article I have written on SVG basics.
w.bloggar
With Arnab and Kribs praising about w.bloggar 3.0 and Anita using it since long, I couldn't resist giving it a try. And guess what, even I am hooked :). I faced some hiccups, given the long list of dependencies that the SOAP & XMLRPC perl modules have. But I managed to get it work. This post is using w.bloggar. And I will keep doing so.
November 15, 2002
Domain Surf
I was surprised to find out that there are 94 domains on the Internet with the string nilesh in them. Of all, these two domains deserve special mention - nileshlovers.com & nileshwars.com. :-D
November 13, 2002
Burn CPU Burn
Yet another Distributed Computing App - Folding@Home [via Netahoy]. Since 1997, when Distributed.net made available for download the first distributed client app, there have been lots of distributed computing apps floating around on the Net, requesting for idle CPU cycles from users' computers. Perhaps the first application which captured the imaginations of people was SETI@Home, which is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. Folding@Home is a distributed client computing effort by Stanford University intended to help understand how proteins assemble or "fold." Exactly how proteins assemble themselves is a mystery, and why the proteins sometimes fold improperly or "misfold" is also a mystery. Quite a few serious diseases are related to the misfolding of proteins, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, to name two. By donating your CPU's spare cycles, you are contributing to the effort to understand how the proteins fold, which is the first step to understanding how basic proteins work and how we might treat these diseases. This project is supported by Google and you can also use the Google Compute app to do the number crunching.
If you think that a distributed app is going to eat up your frame rate while playing UT2003, here's a benchmark to clear your apprehension. While I am far from downloading the app for my already preoccupied and overclocked CPU, this article was an unlikely source for me to find a very decent piece of software, FireDaemon to daemonise my thousand perl scripts. BTW, a good introduction to Distributed Computing can be found in this extremetech.com article.
November 10, 2002
P3P Not PET
With reference to my query on Ask Slashdot, a fellow /.er put up a nice link to an article on why P3P is not a Privacy Enhancing Technology. Get the article from here [pdf]. To quote some points -
Read More (309 words) »»
November 09, 2002
Pigs can fly
Literally! So can simple pages be the top hits on google. You may want to try out a small search on google. Try searching for flypig. Take a look at the first hit - Flypig's Musings. Click and lo behold! ... How did that happen? Did you expect that? Flypig (a.k.a Michael Kohli) was teaching me the other day, the power of simplicity, how one can be the first page on a google search without a fraction of the effort that we all do to stay in the good books of Google. P.S. Another secret, Flypig hasn't updated his page for the last six months.
KISS Yahoo!
We all know that Yahoo! Mail was an epitome of simplicity since the time Yahoo took over Rocketmail to start its free webmail services. They have always followed the KISS principle. Get to know the Yahoo! Mail architecture from here. This was all till they came up with the new beta interface. It is good in features, but is heavy, pretending to be the awful hotmail.com. Hopefully, they will streamline it in due course.
November 08, 2002
Tech Women
Who is Abha Ahuja? No, she was no great person, nor was she the best Bollywood debutant of the year! She was just another PhD student at UMich. But then, NANOG has a scholarship fund in her name! Abha is respected in the Internet Engineering circles and was active in IETF, The Internet Society, ARIN, RIPE, APNIC and a host of other networking groups. It is heartening to know that a woman of Indian origin has achieved so much respect, especially at such a young age!
November 07, 2002
P3 Good Privacy
A very important development in recent times with regards to website users' privacy has happened with the W3C introducing the Platform for Privacy Preferences(P3P). P3P allows websites to create and maintain XML-based privacy policies for the entire website or sub sections of the site. These machine readable policies document what information is collected from users and how it is going to be used. Today, a few browsers like Mozilla/Netscape & Internet Explorer are commited to giving support for P3P (Mozilla here, IE here) . Although that support seems only skin-deep. I also find very few big sites adopting P3P seriously. Isn't it like the classic chicken-and-egg situation? Websites wait for full P3P support on browsers, browsers go slow on development because there isn't much feature demand happening on this front. Meanwhile, I am off trying to understand P3P. Here are a few links for reading - P3P Implementation Guide, P3P Privacy Primer, P3P Validator, a P3P Editor and MS P3P HowTo
October 27, 2002
Referrer Rats
After all those email spams, pop-up, click-thru, pop-under campaigns, all those 468x160px banners, the <center>400x400px</center> screaming ads, those spamming rats have come out with two new innovative ways of marketing on the Net: Comment Spamming - Spamming a weblogger's post with unrelated comments more so for advertising or marketing. Examples: Waxy.org, Kiruba(Kribs, your archives, get them up!). And Referral Marketing - publicising your site thru referrer logs. And both these are targeted more towards webloggers than anyone else. That's the matter of concern. We already had the Weblogs.com directory spamming incident. And now this. Referrer logs are getting blasted with links to unknown urls. The poor weblogger tries to find out who visited his site by visiting the url, only to find a porn-site popup. Spammers are actually minting