smritiweb.com

Cat smileys

Check out these new smileys.

Yahoo! Pipes: drag-n-drop mashups for the web

From the O’Reilly Radar:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Israeli spa offers “snake massages”

No comment!!

Why Windows is less secure than Linux

Here is a graphical representation of the various system calls that occur when the Apache webserver is running on Linux:

Now, let us look at a similar picture for IIS running on a Windows server:

The blogger who created these thinks this is clearly shows why a Microsoft webserver is inherently less secure.

Also check out the related slashdot discussion

Recording your kid’s promises with a digital camera: Parent Hacks | Parenting tips

If your kids tend to forget their promises, this might help:

My husband came up with the idea of using the video function on our digital camera to record her promising not to get upset when we say “no” to candy later because we’re letting her have a piece early. It worked! We’ve started doing it other times, too. She loves the digital camera, and it reminds her about the whole “delayed gratification” thing.

Educate your kids with Google Video

Kim’s husband introduced their toddler to the wonders of Google Video:

My husband was searching Google Video for different animal videos (child-friendly ones - hence no SHARK ATTACKS SURFER ones). Our son was in a trance, and he learned the difference between a shark, a whale and a dolphin, he got to see deer, penguins, brown bears, etc. — it was like watching National Geographic personalized and up close.

Our son’s absolute favorite was Matrix Cow - very funny rendition of a cow in a Matrix-style fight - he laughs so hard from the moment the cow snorts and jumps on his back two legs. I have to agree it was pretty funny the first time or two - but he got a bit too attached to this one… “AGAIN, do cow AGAIN”.

The 7 deadly sins - and the 21 secondary sins

If you plot the 7 deadly sins as 7 nodes in a graph, and then convert it to a fully connected graph, each edge in the graph will represent a secondary deadly sin consisting of a pair of the original deadly sins. Then you get this fascinating diagram from:

Using web-2.0 to look for missing scientist (Jim Gray)

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Now, Amazon has created a novel effort to help find him. They have put up satellite images of that area from the appropriate time frame on the into the Amazon S3 storage service. Then, they created tasks on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service to search for the missing boat in those pictures.

Examples of the object to look for in various orientations. The size of the boat in the sample images is the size of the object you are looking for, even though the images you are scanning are much larger.

See related post on Werner Vogel’s blog. (Werner is the CTO of Amazon.)

How This Blog Attracted 100,000 Visitors in the First 30 Days | steve-olson.com

This blog post is filled with links to other blog posts and websites about how to blog successfully. I haven’t gone through them myself, but plan to do so slowly as and when I have time.

23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for Your Blog

See
this blog post for a bunch of ideas on how to increase the readership of your blog.