Archive for January, 2006
January 23, 2006 at 8:39 pm · Categorised under Blog
CNet reports that The British Parliament was attacked by Chinese hackers trying to exploit the WMF vulnerability.
The emails were individually tailored and pretended to come from a Governmental organisation. Spammers are trying harder everyday. The more information they gather on us through spyware, the easier they can beat spam filters since most spam filters work on the premise that spam and genuine email read completely differently and can be told apart easily by a human.
Btw..has anyone noticed Gmail’s spam filter faultering lately. Its been letting quite a few spam emails into my inbox and it also produced a false positive the other day.
· Posted by Utills
January 23, 2006 at 8:19 pm · Categorised under Blog
I am starting to experiment with simple one sentence long posts linking to stuff that I have been reading about but doesn’t really deserve sitting down and pouring my thoughts out. I think it will make this blog much fresher as it will be updated on a far more regular basis. The theme will however stay the same, with most topics being about Google, Firefox, gadgets and random tech or comp sci stuff.
I will of course migrate the whole thing to a del.ico.us style linkblog in the future, however, for the time being I want to leave the links open to simple thoughts from myself. In this way I can perhaps maintain the blog even when I am very busy during the week.
· Posted by Utills
January 23, 2006 at 8:15 pm · Categorised under Blog
Wired Magazine’s take on the Google vs DoJ farce.
· Posted by Utills
January 23, 2006 at 8:12 pm · Categorised under Blog
A comprehensive preview from Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle.
· Posted by Utills
January 19, 2006 at 8:30 pm · Categorised under Blog
An interesting concept by one of the people in my year at Uni is the link between Colour and Music. He is doing a final year project based on the link between how we associate different colours to different types of music. He has made a piece of software that plays music just like your average WinAMP, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc with the unique feature that instead of sorting by the usual Artist, Genre or Album classification you can sort by your colour perception of the music. His software available for testing (exe) purposes and I think he welcomes downloads from as many people as possible to download and send back colour information so that he can enrich his database.
So what do I think about the idea? I think that the human brain will very quickly restrict the amount of colour variation of the music when presented with the music in that way. You will get clusters of brown, black, red and blue which really won’t tell you any more than just looking at the Genre of the music. Also since the brain often needs premption the colours will come directly from the Album cover or the genre colour.
What I think would be cool is if all your music was automatically imported for you into the media player and then all the information about the music was retreived from sources on the internet (such as length of song, album covers, free music videos, etc) and this info was used to generate a classification based on some sort of complex formula then you could get some interesting “Party Shuffle” style playlists.
· Posted by Utills
January 17, 2006 at 6:14 pm · Categorised under Blog
And between the music here’s an advert….. “ViAgRa…cheap Viagra”, “Play 3D poker online for Free, Free Las Vegas poker trips, prizes”…
CNet reports that Google is to buy a radio ad company (DMarc Broadcasting) for $102 Million Dollars. They go on to say that with additional payments this may rise to $1.1 Billion Dollars. Ah here’s a quote from Google…
“Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media,” Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales, said in a release.
Personally I don’t think it will work. Sure you can see where this is going. Targeted ads which are analysed through speech recognition and broken down into socio economic status, geography, time of day, etc and then depending on the type of person who listens to the station the correct ad is played back. It all sounds good but the reason why it wont work is because listening to the radio is different than coming across an ad on a website. When you see a Google Ad on a site you are ready to click on the next thing that catches your eye.
When a relevant advert from Google comes across you dont think twice and click on it as if it were a link from the article or from an email itself. However, the same cannot be said for radio stations, TV, etc. It’s not possible in my view to use the advert to start off the long tail effect that Google has created through simple text based ads since Radio and TV advertisement is more of branding and awareness than of putting people through the front door. I’ll prob be proved wrong but this my argument regardless.
· Posted by Utills
January 17, 2006 at 5:55 pm · Categorised under Blog
Ok so many of us have more than one computer. What’s more is that often these computers are on the same desk and come with their own Keyboards, Mice and Screens as computers no doubt should. The combination is often a desktop computer fixed and the laptop that we use around the house.
Synergy is an open source project that allows you to use both computers with ONE set of mice and keyboards. The way it works is pretty simple, you designate one of the computers to be the server (meaning that it’s mouse and keyboard become the ones you use) and the rest of the computers (can have up to 4 I think) to be clients. When you move your mouse to the left hand side of one screen it will reappear on the other screen and that computer will be allowed access to the mouse and keyboard.
It also does some more advanced things such as work across Linux and Windows, synchronise screensavers, lock screens simultaneously and some other stuff I’m sure that I have not discovered yet. All that is required of the user is to provide the machine name of the other computer across the network and the rest is done by running the Synergy service on both computers.
· Posted by Utills
January 17, 2006 at 5:36 pm · Categorised under Blog
One of the problems I have with the Gmail Web Clips is that just the heading of a post is not enough to get you to understand what the post is on about. More often than not the headings are obscure titles that only make sense in the context of the blog’s other posts. What I would like to see is snippets from the post, in the same way that Gmail provides snippets for emails.
Since you provide the RSS feed to google they have at the very least a partial feed from the blog and so providing a one line snippet should represent no extra bandwidth for the blogs themselves.
· Posted by Utills
January 17, 2006 at 5:27 pm · Categorised under Blog
Wouldn’t it be useful if we were able to access the internet on our mobile phones in Wifi Hotspots. My idea is that we have some sort of device (like a wireless router) that takes in bluetooth signals and converts these into wifi and then sends them onto a wireless router. Obviously the process would be easier if the bluetooth convertion occurred within the router itself. If a wireless router had a bluetooth antenna attached then it could also connect with bluetooth phones. The signal would be processed into a web request which would be executed. The result of the request would have to be processed into a bluetooth signal again and transmitted to the device that sent the request.
I think devices that encourage multiple devices to perform the same action are the next in thing for our society. It is slightly different to what we imagine “Convergence” to be since that is about stuffing as much as you can into one device. What I suggest here is a way for these multiple devices to interact, though they may be on completely different technologies/protocols/implementations.
· Posted by Utills
January 16, 2006 at 10:54 pm · Categorised under Blog
If anyone is looking for some cool fonts to use for Logos, Menus, Pictures, etc I would suggest perusing through Vitaly Friedman’s post on the 25 best licence free fonts or through the source of many of these fonts, a site known as DaFont. I used the “Pigiarniq Inuktitut font” for one of the menus I did and I think that the curvy letters look wonderful, especially the “l” in the word Blog.
· Posted by Utills
Next Entry »
