When Google talk finally came out after much hype and hustle-bustle, everybody was stunned. Everyone's assumption and prediction about Google talk turned out to be rubbish! Its the simplest for of an IM client, with just text and voice and nothing more, not even smilies!

Now would Google really produce an application so lite and simple with not even a single 'extra' feature to boast of, to compete with Yahoo or MSN ? I dont think so. Maybe like people say, it must be google's debut in the VoIP market. Only Google knows!

But is that really it? Just to get a taste of VoIP? I have a strong feeling that Google's upto something fishy with Talk. Now this must be sounding real stupid and you might be even mocking at me. Recently, I read about Google's upcoming voice services. (they say, recording all the sounds on the planet) Does gTalk has to do something with it? I'm not saying that Google's recording all the conversation made via Talk, but does it have anything to do with it? Or is Google studying the voice data and put the results into use in its Voice search program?

Only google knows..

Update
Just as I expected! Overwhelming response! Actually, this post was made to do a 'test' on Digg.com; I wanted to see how it goes, but instead of 'diggs', I see 'comments' Sorry !

Spam blogs have become such a menace. They degrade the quality of the blogosphere and poison it. I've written a small paper (hypthosis actually) demonstrating several steps to determine whether a blog is spam or not. Its somewhat similiar to SpamAssassin, but a lot simpler

The paper
http://www.kailashnadh.name/docs/spam_blog (html,word,pdf)

This is actually a hypothesis (somewhat), that might be prove to be effective..

-----------
Edit:
I see that Blogger introduced a 'Flag button' to report blogs of objectionable content. Is this the result of the long (and somewhat rude) email I sent them last week saying about the amount of spam blogs they farm there! ?
http://buzz.blogger.com/2005/08/flag-as-objectionable.html

Today, Aug15th, we celebrate our 59th Independence day in India (India became independent in 1947)

Ever heard of ducksoup? Well, its my latest work DuckSoup (slang: simple) is an API library for Technorati, written in PHP. What makes it different from other api's is its simplicity, i.e, even a beginner can make it work flawlessly. DuckSoup supports all the Tecnorati apis (search,cosmos..). Ducksoup parses data from Technorati (xml) and formats them into array trees. So the only thing one needs to know to use DuckSoup is array manipulation!

The power of Technorati at your Finger tips lol


Checkout the Ducksoup website:
http://kailashnadh.name/ducksoup

NASA's space shuttle Discovery landed down safely at the Edward's airforce base, California at 5:12 PM PDT on 9 August. NASA's infrared cameras followed discovery's each move, till its landing. Until 7000 feet, the shuttle was under the command of NASA mission control and then the Shuttle commander Eillen Collins took the control. The landing was smooth and the shuttle will be made free of gases and other substances that might have clung onto it during the descend.

Source : BBC NEWS (LIVE TV)

---------------
I just noticed that my news site http://newzpile.com reported this even before Google news did! I still dont see this news on Google! Wow, way to go newzpile!

Today I came across a drawing that I had done atleast three or four years ago. It is a sketch (pencil) of Princess Diana. I produced the drawing on the paper not from my mind, but using a published portrait as reference ! Anyway, here she is, Sweet Princess Diana



(click to enlarge)

Firefox is a good browser (some say its the best) and I personally use it. But there are certain things about Firefox that I don't like. One is it messing with the page contents.

Here is an example. Try putting this somewhere on your page

Notice an major flaw? An unclosed <script> . When viewing such a page on IE, you see nothing after the <script> tag, i.e, "The rest of the page contents" and all go invisible. Seeing that, you can figure out that something is wrong with the page and inturn, debug it. But weird enough, Firefox fixes this by itself and renders the page as normal :S And you never come to know about the flaw. This has happened to me, big time.

Then a second example. Put this code somewhere in your html page.

Open the page in firefox and view the page's source.

You'll see this

See an extra ">", that's the weird firefox's weird act

We have seen virus spread through a number of means, emails, infected programs, via backdoors. But toady I was surprised to see a "new" tactic. I got a mail, disguised to be coming from Kaspersky labs, with the title "Virus Removal Tools". It said "Kaspersky Labs has developed free virus removal tools. If your computer has been infected by any of the viruses listed below, you can download a free removal utility here".

The email consisted of download instructions for a so called virus removal utility "fix_virus.exe" or "fix_virus.zip", with direct download links, complete with ten mirrors ! (Netherlands, Germany, Russia, USA). The email claimed that the virus removal utility could destroys W32.Kelvir ,W32.Mytob.AR@mm , W32.Mytob@mm , W32.Sasser , W32.Mydoom@mm , W32.Reatle@mm , Trojan.Jasbom , W32.Beagle@mm , W32.Kelvir and W32.Bropi.

I am not sure whether it is a virus, a backdoor or even spyware. But the email is for sure, fascinating and amusin. Its fun to see the bad guys changing tracks and trying new and better methods Not to forget the hundreds and hudreds phishing emails i recieve every day.

Here's a screenshot

Domain names have always been my fascination. If I'm right, my first domain name was kailashbn.com, which got FREE from namezero.com in 2002 or something. After that, I have had many a number and most of them disappeared with time.. Let me try to list out the ones i remember

bnsoft.net - (active)
boastology.com - (active)
kailashnadh.name - (active)
newzpile.com - (active)
pingoat.com - (active)
fontgo.com
rentascripter.com
fly2.cc
smswired.com
wiredsms.com
wapfit.com
mmswire.com
milleniumkids.org
kailashbn.com

hm, there were some more.. but i cant recall them

Pingoat Sounds wacky! ? Yep, Pingoat is wacky! Its my latest project, it is a service that pings over fifty blog directories and ping servers with one click! I whipped up the site and the backed software in about four hours and didnt waste any time in registering the domain!

So pingoat is now online : http://pingoat.com
ENJOY!

The Yahoo! photomail is small program that boasts of making sending photos easier. It is The program has a Photo search feature that scans your computer for picture files. The whole concept is simple, a quicker way to send your photos.

Now the story begins. After reading about photomail somewhere, I first logged into my Yahoo mail. What i got was an "Account Deactivated" message. That was obvious because i never log in to yahoo mail, I never even use my yahoo mail id, except for the messenger.

The page gave me two simple choices.

( Pure marketing! By the way, who pays for email these days ? ! )
Reactivate my account without protection
I don't want to risk losing important messages and contact information stored in my mail account. I would like to subscribe to Yahoo! Mail Plus so that my account will not be deactivated again in the future if I don't use it for four months.

Reactivate and protect my Yahoo! Mail account in the future
I know that my account will be deactivated again in the future if I do not log in for a four-month period. I understand that I will risk losing valuable email messages and other important information.

Isn't the second option kind of threatening. It sure creates a slight fear for an average user. The text sounds dumb too

Without any thinking, I moved forward with the second option. Then weird enough, I got a page saying that " Sorry, we cant log you in blah blah... Please try refreshing blah.. blah..". I tried refreshing atleast ten times and I ended up logging in with IE, it worked fine then. Then I again tried with Firefox and it worked this time.

A page full of ads welcomed me, no improvement, same mailbox as before three years Next I went to photomail.yahoo.com and to my surprise, I saw this there ! We're sorry, but your computer doesn't currently meet the system requirements for PhotoMail What in the heavens !! Yeah, it required IE 5.5+ , it even had a link to IE's download site. Nevermind, a user has to bear everything the provider imposes. Anyway, I finally installed the client (it was a browser install).

Now the dumbest thing of all, after a successfull installation, I first looked on my desktop and the programs menu, but could find no traces of the installation. I then went to Yahoo! mail and open the compose page. I then tried the attach files option but could find no signs of the photomail client there.

WHERE in the heavens is this thing! Is it there or am I dumb??

Has anyone heard of the movie ticket bug in PHP 4 ! ? Check it out : http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=27952

Yeah, here's a couple of screen shots from the upcoming Microsoft Windows Longhorn OS. I was fortunate enough to have a beta CD mailed by Bill Gates, personally Naah, just kidding. I found this on the flexbeta.com forum i think, dont quite remember. Anyway, the graphics interface looks pretty cool. I can tell from the screenshots that this OS is gonna be a resource hungry one ! You'll need atleast 1GB of ram to satisfy its thirst

Since last Sunday, my server's being hit hard by hackers :S I had a hard time fixing it. Working on my server hard, I ended up thinking about hacking and security related stuff. The first thing that came to my mind was the hippie trojan i made way back in 2002 That was the time when I learned programming in VB. So with a lot of trial and errors, I whipped out a neat little trojan+keylogger. Being naughty, I sent it to my classmate Jithin Jame's father, Dr.James Poor unsuspecting Dr.James , or Jithin must have opened it, because from the second day, I started receiving huge text files on my mail The trojan would log all the keypresses, passwords, sites they visited.. compile a text file and send it to me every day, evening! It was so cool spying on them and watching all their moves. Made me felt like a top secret agent working at the NSA

After that, I've never spied on anyone

Have you ever seen someone screaming for help because he saw a monkey on his desktop?? My friend JIM did !!

Take a look at his blog post, I bet you'r gonna laugh hard!
http://www.helpdeskstory.com/?id=33

How fascinating our world is! Just a few hours after NASA's probe hit the comet, a Russian astrologist has come forward claiming that NASA's mission altered his horoscope ! :S How whacky is that!? He is suing the U.S space agency for damages of $300 million

I just couldnt resist myself from posting this!

"SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans."

They stuff dead dogs with some saline solution and preserved the bodies for a few hours and then gave the bodies life by giving a shock ! Where is this science and technology going!! I cant imagine!

Full news here :
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html

Here's a neat piece of PHP code that'll convert an image into its negative..






Download the zip (with the donkey kong pic )

Has anyone ever heard of this ebook, 'Banned Secrets' ? I've read it a few times and its interesting. And you know what, I WAS THE ONE WHO WROTE THIS BOOK ! This book is basically about marketing, business, site promotion Today i was scanning my 'My documents' when I came across this ebook. I clearly remember, it was two years ago, I was at my grand mother's place where I was spending my summer vacation. I was fifteen then And I wrote this ebook thinking that it would be a super seller and make me a millionaire. But things didnt work out well, maybe because of poor marketing. Anyway, when I made the ebook free, lots of people downloaded it and some people even dared to send me a feedback!
If you have some time to spare, do take a look at the book. After all it's the Banned Secrets


This is the front cover of the book which I got designed for $15

Download the ebook

A little late here Actually, I went for 'Kungufu Hustle' the last Monday, 20th along with Azif and his cousin. He had come from Trivandrum for a couple of days, and yes, he wont be coming here anymore. Anyway, the movie was awesome. Lots of special effects. Two hours was worth it. Its not a sensational or a touching one, but no one can deny that its a good one. 50% of the movie is comedy and the rest is action. Stephen Chow starrs in the movie and he's the one who directed it too.

It was raining cats and dogs that day! The whole city was under water. All the roads were atleast one meter under water. Lucky that I had gone in my car..

This is my first greasmonkey script ever and I'm not gonna make it a noobie one
'myAutoFill' is a 3kb user script that autofills webforms with preset data, just like the
google toolbar ! All you have to do is press CTRL+SHIFT+F to fill a webform. Its even more
powerful because you can add as many fields as you want.

Download
Click here to get the script..


For those who dont know what greasemonkey and what a user script is, here's a piece of info.
Greasemonkey is an extension for FireFox that enables to run specially crafted dhtml.javascript snippets
called user scripts to webpages to manipulate their behaviour.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org is its official site and for beginners,
there's a very good available http://diveintogreasemoneky.org

I was skimming through my logs and I came across the useragent logs. Its fascinating. Even with FireFox taking its rounds, IE seems to maintain its position.

MS Internet Explorer - 53.1 %
Firefox - 25.5 %
Unknown - 13.8 %
Opera - 2.7 %
Mozilla - 2.3 %
Safari - 1.3 %
Netscape - 0.4 %
Konqueror - 0.1 %
MultiZilla - 0 %
Lotus Notes web client - 160 0 %



Or has this something to do with my site?

Today I along with my mother and my aunt went to a famous astrologer here. We just wanted to get a glimpse of the future After his calculations and some procedure on a wooden board with tiny sea shells, he finally produced a set of predictions and believe me, they were 100% accurate. He said that my education is a bit dull now and it'll be the same for the coming 5 years or so, but no big deal though.

After five years, my planetary positions change and i enter a different phase. But all these years, i'd be going through normal way, no big troubles and no big deals or anything. But at the age of 34, he said I'd soar in every field. From 34, begins my golden period, success everywhere.

And guess what, I'll get married only at the age of 28 LoL! And if i do it before that, it wont last. Nevermind..

God be with us always..

Oh.. This is a moment of Joy for me! After seven months of hardwork, finally boastMachine v3.1 is out! Its the successor of 3.0 platinum. The whole platform has changed a lot, means A LOT! Millions of new features Bug fixes, a completely new interface, its awesome! You need to try it!

Here's a DEMO
http://boastology.com/demo

Download
http://boastology.com/pages/download.php

Coding can be for fun too I was sitting idle, doing nothing, with a text editor open. So I quickly scribbled some javascript code and came with this really stupid code Its not actually stupid, its a neat effect. You can preview/get the code in the attached file.

PS: Try characters like , : ~ , they produce really neat effects.

Yeah, another template change But this time its big. I upgraded my blog from good old 3.0 to the rocking new 3.1 ! (3.1 has not yet been released). You'll find loads and loads of new features in 3.1

This is cool. I'm making this post from my Nokia 6630 browser. I'm really amazed to see its support for XHTML pages and that too big and heavy pages! But unfortunately, i dont see javascript working.

Now is this what you call 'moBlogging'?

I wrote this code for the ALT+U effect for boastMachine 3.1 . Unlike other similiar scripts, this simple piece of JS code will work on FireFox, IE, NS. And amazingly, it doesn't matter if your page is XHTML1.1 STRICT. I've seen some scripts stop working when DOCTYPE XHTML 1.1 STRICT is used.

Anyway, get the code here : http://code.kailashnadh.name
Sorry, I cant find the zip to upload here

Yeah! The new Pope has been announced. The new pope is Fr. Joseph Ratzinger from Germany. His official name has also been announced, Pope "Benedict 16th".

First, white smoke came out of the Chapel chimney signalling the selection of the new pope. But there were a few minutes of confusion over the colour of the smoke, which seemed to be light grey untill the church bells rang. Then the official announcement came and finally, the new Pope appeared in the balcony and greeted the thousands who had gathered there.

Pope John Paul II served the pontiff for 26 years until he surrendered to his growing illness, this April 2nd

Today's a GREAT day. Today we celebrate 'Vishu' here in Kerala. Its the festival of lights. Crackers, Rockets, Sparkles, BOMBS ... Its fun! The whole Kerala celebrates Vishu for two days. Every single minute, you hear atleast a hundered crackers bursting. This happens nonstop for two complete days. Family's reunite, children play, an atmosphere of fun and frolic and joy everywhere. Oh I love this!

This time, I bought a Carton full of crackers I went to my grandmother's house and celebrated Vishu there with my little cousins. Sad that I could stay there only for a day. But I had a good time there.

Thus another Vishu has gone by.. Why does time move so fast?

I'm sooo proud of myself.. This is the 5th year I've been in the world of computers. If I am right, i got my first computer during my vacation (April) , in 2000. Thats when the story begins..

Congrats to me! Five glorious years of computing and now decades to come..

Yeah! I finally managed to install RH9 on my pc! btw, guess why it failed earlier. Simple, my 2nd HD had bad blocks Silly me, I created a big fuss for no reason

Anyway, RH's installed and I was amazed to see that RH removed the MPEG coded because of licensing problems. Anyway, I found a 3rd party player that works. I love RH

Yep, its been 10 years since Yahoo has been online. I bet there is no single Kid in this world who knows what internet is but not Yahoo. Such Yahoo's popularity. Yahoo emerged as a hobby site and its now one of the biggest companies in the world. From College to Multi Billion $$ company. Phew..

I clearly remember, when I logged on to the internet in 2000, for the first time ever in my life, the first thing I did was visit my ISP's site. And believe it or not, the next thing i did was goto Yahoo.com ! WOW!

Full story here : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4307867.stm

You like Redhat? I used to, but now I HATE IT I lost 14 hours of my precious time trying to install RH 9. Messed with my system, installed a new hard disk, loaded RH's anaconda installer, installation began and when the installation reached 90%, the damn installer produced a 'critical' error. what was it?? I remember, "I/O error blah blah blah..". I thought the installation discs might have got corrupted. But soon I found that they worked perfect on all other systems. Then I thought my hd might have developed a bad sector or something, so did a surface scan, but no problems. Then began the 10 hour battle with Linux Red Hat installation I must have tried not less than a 50 times till I finally gave up. Yes, I GIVE UP I hate you RH (atleast for now). Ok, I got the FC3 DVD now. Am gonna try to install it. Hopefully, it'll make me happy. Lets wait and see..

Grrr....

Yep, the war between the big one's strengthening! Yahoo recently launched a developer portal for their search API. Obviously, this is an attempt to counter Google's developer services

http://developer.yahoo.com is the developer site.

What ever it is, I'm gonna register there

Wondering what this is? Yes, you read it right. I've created the wildest and craziest art gallery in the world! I did all the masterpieces myself in PhotoShop. See the pictures for yourself and then decide. I bet this is going to be extreme! And please dont blame me. I'm talented by birth

Art gallery here : http://kailashnadh.name/art

Ok, now all of my practical (board) exams are over. The computer exam was damn easy. I was asked to write a program to check whether a number is palindrome or not in C++ . Did that in minutes

But there was a small problem. The program wouldn't just work when you input numbers starting with 0, say 0112110. That happened because the stupid C++ thinks that numbers beginning with 0s are HEX values. I hate C++

Anyway, the overall exam was easy and I hope to get 97% to 99%

Now the big ones are coming, my theory exams. I'm scared. March 09th is just 9 days away!

Its high time that I changed my news aggregator's (newzpile.com) primitive layout and coding. So today, I started off from scratch, and came up with a simple and nice xhtml design. In 4 hours, the complete overhaul was done and newzpile.com has a completely new look now.

Take a look at it : http://newzpile.com

Magical Dragon !

Hey, I bet you'll be amazed to see the video attached Its the paper dragon which I created with my own hands The 'MAGIC' is that in what ever direction you move, the dragon head will magicall follow you. If you move to its left, the head will turn left, if you move to the right, the head will move to the right too. Yep, see it to believe! The dragon's eyes keep staring at you where ever you go. Yeah !

In reality, the paper dragon's motion is just an OPTICAL ILLUSION ! But its not one of the kind you've ever seen ! You can make one of your own too. All you have to do is follow the simple instructions given here http://www.grand-illusions.com/dragon.htm

PS: The video was shot on my Nokia 6630, so dont expect it to be of that good quality

Enjoy !

HEY! I GOT A BRAND NEW NOKIA 6630 ! ITS THE WORLD
S BEST 3G PHONE!!!
THIS IS THE COOLEST GADGET I HAVE EVER HAD!

Nokia 6630 has not been released widely yet. I must be
the first person to get one, in my province!

Its a SmartPhone (3G) which is equipped with a 1.3 MEGAPIXEL camera!
3G means 3rd generation which supports WCDMA and UMTS networks, other than the traditional GPRS and EDGE.
It can record video upto 1 hour / clip. Its built in memory is 10 MB and it comes with a 64 MB MMC card. It has a screen size of 176x298 pixels with 65K colours. And it has a BROADBAND modem (384 Kbps, UTMS). It has real player and the phone supports MP3,AMR,AAC,MPEG.. Nokia 6630 has bluetooth support but not an infrared port.
The phone can capture images in 'burst mode', i.e, it takes 6 pictures in 2 seconds successively. Great for professional photographers

It has the Nokia video editor and the Movie director for professional movie creation

The unique new feature of this phone is its 'offline' mode. In this mode, the phone works normally, but the connection with the network will be dropped, i.e, the SIM will go inactive, thus virtually making the phone switched off, but still making all other non-network services available. This feature was specially introduced for use in flights.

Nokia 6630 has improved HTML+Javascript support for browsing and it can read Email and QuickOffice docs. The browser supports Frames,advanced JS,file uploads from html Forms,image maps,background images..

And obviously, it has Handsfree,Alarm,Clock,Vibration,WAP...

This phone supports JAVA MIDP 2.0 apps and also has 3D API

Believe me, the Audio (Sterio),Video,Image,Voice quality is EXCELLENT and I've never seen a phone like this! The price tag is quite OK for this phone. (Very close 7610 which doesn't even come near this phone when you look at the features)

I got the following things in the package.
The phone itself
64 MB MMC card
Sterio headset
Charger
USB DKU-2 cable
CD ROM (Nokia PC suite)
An adapter for MMC

Dont know whether this works for all versions, but I just tried it on PHP 5. PHP produces an easter egg in the phpinfo() output if the system date is April 1. Just try it !

Today I got my exam results. They just SUCK! I messed everything up. Leave that..

While sitting idle, dont know why, suddenly this thought came into my mind. What happened to Netscape ? I haven't heard about it for a long long time. Has netscape fallen ??

During the 1990's , Netscape used to rule the Web. It was the war with MS that almost completely washed out Netscape. Sad indeed.

This article explains everything..
http://www.azcomputerdoctor.com/netscape-browsers-epitaph.htm

Wish you all a very,very happy new year!
HAPPY 2005 !