See what you can do with internet, other than posting pictures of yourself

Must have Firefox tab related add-ons

Make New Firefox Tabs More Useful With These Add-Ons
We all like to customize our things – it’s nice when they feel really ours. This is true for many aspects in life, and naturally, doesn’t skip computers, phones and software. If it’s possible to customize things even a little bit, someone’s going to do it. It doesn’t matter if the default is great – the default is what everyone has. So out go the defaults and in come hundreds of different customizations. Now it’s only a matter of choosing the best, coolest, most useful one. This is not one bit different when it comes to browsers. Back in the days of Netscape 1.0, all browsers looked pretty much the same, but the advent of add-ons brought hundreds of customization options, and these days they look different on every computer. One of the best and most useful ways to customize your browser is through the new tab page. We’ve told you about some great ways to do it with Chrome, but apparently, we’ve turned a blind eye to Firefox. About 4 versions ago, Firefox finally added a default speed dial feature to its new tab page. The speed dial shows 9 of your most visited pages, and while it’s useful, it’s far from perfect. For starters, the thumbnails don’t always load; in addition, you sometimes see duplicate tiles for the same website, which is inconvenient and a waste of space. If you too feel that it’s time for an upgrade,or just want your browser to look different than the rest, read on to find some really great options.
 
New Tab King
 

 
New Tab King is a versatile, multi-featured new tab page that comes with a to-do list, a recently closed tab list and even shortcuts to launch desktop apps. It goes without saying that each element in your new tab page is customizable, collapsible and removable, and the entire left sidebar is collapsible as well, so you only see it when you need to use it. As for the main section of the new tab page, this is a list of your most-used websites, and can be viewed in a list format, as seen above, or a traditional tile format.
 

 
The background image and colors are customizable as well, and you can connect it to an RSS feed, a Picasa community search, your own local images, and more. Bottom line: Has many useful features and works well, but is far from being minimalistic.
FVD Speed Dial

 

 
With a strong focus on the speed dial options, FVD Speed Dial is another solid start page with multiple tile groups you can customize and switch between. Each tile group can also be viewed as a list, and everything from tile size to background and font colors is configurable. By default, FVD Speed Dial comes with 7 speed dial bookmarks (two of them promotional) which you can change and add to. Additionally, you can view your most popular pages and your recently closed tabs in lists or tiles, each with its own custom settings.
 

 
FVS Speed Dial also includes a synchronization feature, so you can access your favorite websites and settings on multiple computers. In order to use this feature, you’ll have to create an account. Bottom line: Slick, fast and useful. With a white background, also quite minimalistic.
Super Start
Super Start
 

 

 
Super Start is a simple, do-it-yourself type of start page, in which nothing comes ready made. Unlike the previous two options I mentioned, opening a new Super Start page for the first time results in a blank page. It’s your job to populate this page with tiles of your favorite websites, including a link, a name, and even an icon – none of these is automatic. The add-on makes it easy to find popular icons online, but if you want to add a more obscure website, you’ll have to find one by yourself. That being said, adding tiles is super easy, and it does feel nice to start from a clean slate. Super Start comes with a built-in notes feature for little to-do lists, a list of recently closed tab page, and four different themes. Bottom line: Perfect for the minimalistic, DIY types. 

Best note taking software CintaNotes

Not sure if ever had any requirement to take notes when you learn something new or want few words as you think and keep those words in secure place for future reference. I been trying to find a tool for doing the same for a very long time and I tried lot of tools like wikidpad, spring pad, microsoft onenote etc. But I found this simple portable tool called CintaNotes and this exactly what I am searching all these days. Few things I like about this tool

- Very simple to use no nonsense in UI.

- Can save your .db( files you save you notes to) files on dropbox, so that you can access from anywhere.

- Fast as-you-type searching

- Clip text from anywhere. Just select it and press the hotkey!

- Portable.

 

Just try this amazing but simple tool and let me know your comments.

What happens to orkut?

Google plus is almost here. It looks almost looks like facebook but has more features when compared to facebook. Now its facebook that need to play catch up game. The one advantage facebook is 750 M user based it already got. But once thing I don’t understand is Google already got Orkut as social network and now they got google plus, what happens to Orkut and its users now?

1) They will automatically migrate all the orkut users to google plus and shut orkut.

2) They shut orkut and redirect all its users to google plus to start a fresh.

 

Not sure what they are going to do, lets wait and see.

Future and Android

Just amazing and fearsome to know one platform having controlling everything around you from mobile to your car and house.

This article I am pasting here is by Marko Gargenta on the website http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/3-android-predictions-home-clothes-car.html

Prediction 1: Android controls the home

Marko Gargenta: Google painted their vision of Android @ Home at the last Google I/O. I think this has huge potential to make Android the de-facto controller for many other devices, from lights to music players to robots and factory machinery. We are seeing the first stage with numerous home security systems being developed using Android, as well as set-top boxes powered by Android. At the moment, many of these devices simply use Android as a replacement for embedded Linux and they're still just self-contained devices.

In the second stage, manufacturers will start exposing libraries so developers can build custom applications for their devices, effectively turning them into platforms. I predict this will happen later this year as manufacturers realize the power of letting users hack their systems. The latest case study with Microsoft Kinect should help pave the way.

In the third stage, various devices will be able to interact with one another — my phone can detect my TV and my TV can communicate with my stereo. This will take a bit longer to get to as we still don't have common protocols for this type of communication. We also run the risk of companies developing their own proprietary protocols, such as a Samsung TV only talking to a Samsung phone, etc. Compatibility may require Google stepping in and using the Compatibility Test Suite(CTS) as a tool to enforce common protocols.

Prediction 2: Wearable Android

Marko Gargenta: The form factor for Android boards is getting to be very small and the price of the actual chipset is approaching the $100 point for a full-featured device. This allows for development of wearable Android-powered devices. Some of them will be for fashion purposes, such as watches. Others will be for medical and safety applications. I predict that toward the end of this year we're going to start seeing high-end fashion accessories based on Android. We may not be aware they are Android-powered, and we may not be able to develop for them. At the same time, early medical devices will emerge, initially for non-critical applications. These will likely be closed, purpose-built systems with little opportunity for development or extension.

Prediction 3: Android and networked cars

Marko Gargenta: This is the next big frontier for Android to seize. The car industry is now at the point where the mobile phone industry was 5-10 years ago. People are going to want more from their car systems as they realize that things like Google Maps beat any stock navigation system. Consumers will want car-based connectivity to the Internet as well as apps.

The first stage of networked car development will involve using Android to build proprietary systems. This is already underway withcommercial systems being built for cars without users even knowing the systems are based on Android. The second stage will involve connecting the cars to the Internet. This can be done in a couple of ways: cars can have radios with their own connections to the Internet or a driver's mobile phone can be tapped for online access.

Whatever approach we take, 4G and LTE network developments will help the process quite a bit. Once the cars are connected, manufactures will have the opportunity to open up kits for developers to build purpose-built applications for those systems. It is likely that manufacturers may tightly control what apps are allowed into what vehicles by running their own proprietary app stores with strict policies and quality control. This is simply the nature of the auto industry to self-police itself and focus heavily on testing the software. It is not very likely that we'll be able to simply download car apps from a major app market right away.

Firefox 4.0 RC2 is out and it has status bar

Just now I have downloaded firefox RC2 and first thing I looked for is status bar and its there :). That’s a very good decision by Mozilla, because like many out there I am missing that dearly since I started Firefox 4.0 Beta 8. Everything else looks normal on UI, need to see what else changed in RC 2.

 

[Edit] I am wrong there is no status bar, its just that my add-on Status-4-Ever started working on RC2 which was not working on RC1. Sorry for this.

Try new Opera 11

I just downloaded Opera 11 and its looks pretty good. The first thing I observed is its looks and the way it loads the we b pages. As usual it has much appreciated feature of blocking images and animations from loading. Also this version introduced concept of extensions and when looking at the developer’s guide I realized developing a extension is pretty simple and no nonsense involved. Just need to know html, css and javascript( Yeah…! no need to learn any fancy XUL).  

There is one more feature Opera Unite which promises a lot of revolutionary additions, yet to try that thing. Will post something on that soon once I explore it. Keep watching this space.

 

But make sure you download and try this, its too good. I have already made this browser my default browser.

GMail not working in Opera 11

I just downloaded Opera 11 and impressed with its speed and useful options like not loading images and animation to the page. Also impressed with the simplicity of creating extensions for opera. As I said impressed with its speed and looks and I have decided to make it my default browser instead of chrome. Then I found the worst thing, gmail does not work and throws a message Connection closed by remote server. I am not sure whose fault, if its gmail’s fault its worst case blocking a competitor. Its totally unfair. Hope I will figure out a away to make gmail work and keep opera 11 as my default browser on my system.

 

As on update looks like Opera does something with gmail javascript resulting it to fail to load just check this thread

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=6e4ba0f797ec5c55&hl=en

Google going to launch E-book venture

From the first report it looks like google going to offer a platform to buy and sell e-books. Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

"Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. "The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast."

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704369304575632602305759466.html#ixzz16pyAUa6G

Compare cell phone and book prices in India

Now we have two good sites in India to find best deal for cell phones and books.  For cell phones you can use mysmartprice, this site also provides comparison of book prices. There is also one more site(indiabookstore.net) dedicated for comparing book prices which will by default give you the best price but does not really allow you to compare book prices of different stores like in mobile phones.  But one thing I don’t really like is none of the above mentioned stores mentions about e-book and their prices. In this era of e-book readers that’s a major gap that must be filled by these site owners.

Facebook Email

It sounds real fun to me. There are lot of posts in blogs and news sites that facebook at the verge of launching a email service. The first thought comes to me is what are they going to offere new, which is not available in the existing services like gmail etc. I use gmail and find everything I need in that screen from making a phone call using google voice to sending a mail. Just one more thing that makes me wonder is there are lot of arguments in blogs that the email obsolete and the future of communication is using the social media only. But now the same blogs and wait on facebook to release a email service. Lets see what will be the out come. Hope something revolutionary comes out from facebook.

These people got creativity

Google docs supports fonts now

Documents without font choices are like photographs without colors. Just as shades of color can add depth to a picture, smart font choices give your text another dimension.
For a long time, the set of fonts that you’ve seen when you browsed the web has been quite limited. That’s because you could only use a font that’s already been installed on your computer. So if a website designer wanted all her visitors to see the same thing, she could only use fonts that are so ubiquitous that the chances are very high that every computer will have them. And there are only a handful of fonts that fit that bill.

Thankfully, that situation is changing. All modern browsers now support the ability to download web fonts. A web font doesn’t need to be installed on your local computer—it can be read directly from a web server and used immediately on the webpage that you’re loading. In May, we launched the Google Font API, which makes it easy for website developers to include any one of an ever-growing list of web fonts on their pages. We’re already using the new API for the latest themes in Google forms.
As of today, Google documents supports web fonts (using the Google Font API) and we’re excited to announce six new fonts.

Droid Serif and Droid Sans
Android fans will already be familiar with the Droid family of fonts. Droid Serif and Droid Sans both feature strong vertical lines and a neutral, yet friendly appearance. They’re designed specifically for reading on small screens.

Calibri and Cambria
Every day we have many people import documents from Microsoft Word into Google Docs. Today we’re making import fidelity better by adding two of the most popular Microsoft Word fonts. Calibri is a beautiful sans serif font characterized by curves and soft edges. It’s designed to be high impact. Cambria is built with strong vertical serifs and subtle horizontal ones. It’s very legible when printed at small sizes.

Consolas and Corsiva
Consolas joins Courier New as the second monospaced font in Google Docs. It’s a modern monospaced font with character proportions that are similar to normal text. Finally, Corsiva is our first italic font with embellished characters and an elegant style.

Right now our font support covers most Latin and Western European character sets. However, we’ll be adding web fonts for other languages (like Hebrew and Greek) soon. If you don’t see the new fonts in your documents, check that web fonts are supported in your language and that the document language is set correctly from the File -> Language menu.

This is just the beginning of fonts in Google Docs. We added six new fonts today and we’re already testing our next batch. You’ll see many more new fonts over the next few months. And because Google Docs uses web fonts, you’ll never need to install a new font: when you load your document, the latest set of fonts will always be there, ready to use.
Finally, adding web fonts is just one of the challenges that the Google Docs team has been working on. If you’re interested in learning more about the challenges of building a collaborative application, check out the first post of a three-part series on collaboration posted on the Google Docs Blog.

HTML 5: Facts and Myths

[via: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/23/html5-the-facts-and-the-myths/]

First, Some Facts

Once upon a time, there was a lovely language called HTML, which was so simple that writing websites with it was very easy. So, everyone did, and the Web transformed from a linked collection of physics papers to what we know and love today.

Most pages didn’t conform to the simple rules of the language (because their authors were rightly concerned more with the message than the medium), so every browser had to be forgiving with bad code and do its best to work out what its author wanted to display.

In 1999, the W3C decided to discontinue work on HTML and move the world toward XHTML. This was all good, until a few people noticed that the work to upgrade the language to XHTML2 had very little to do with the real Web. Being XML, the spec required a browser to stop rendering if it encountered an error. And because the W3C was writing a new language that was better than simple old HTML, it deprecated elements such as <img> and <a>.

A group of developers at Opera and Mozilla disagreed with this approach and presented a paper to the W3C in 2004 arguing that, “We consider Web Applications to be an important area that has not been adequately served by existing technologies… There is a rising threat of single-vendor solutions addressing this problem before jointly-developed specifications.”

The paper suggested seven design principles:

1. Backwards compatibility, and a clear migration path.
2. Well-defined error handling, like CSS (i.e. ignore unknown stuff and move on), compared to XML’s “draconian” error handling.
3. Users should not be exposed to authoring errors.
4. Practical use: every feature that goes into the Web-applications specifications must be justified by a practical use case. The reverse is not necessarily true: every use case does not necessarily warrant a new feature.
5. Scripting is here to stay (but should be avoided where more convenient declarative mark-up can be used).
6. Avoid device-specific profiling.
7. Make the process open. (The Web has benefited from being developed in the open. Mailing lists, archives and draft specifications should continuously be visible to the public.)

The paper was rejected by the W3C, and so Opera and Mozilla, later joined by Apple, continued a mailing list called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), working on their proof-of-concept specification. The spec extended HTML4 forms, until it grew into a spec called Web Applications 1.0, under the continued editorship of Ian Hickson, who left Opera for Google.

In 2006, the W3C realized its mistake and decided to resurrect HTML, asking WHATWG for its spec to use as the basis of what is now called HTML5.

Those are the historical facts. Now, let’s look at some hysterical myths.

The Myths

“I Can’t Use HTML5 Until 2012 (or 2022)”

This is a misconception based on the projected date that HTML5 will reach the stage in the W3C process known as Candidate Recommendation (REC). The WHATWG wiki says this:

For a spec to become a REC today, it requires two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations, which is proven by each successfully passing literally thousands of test cases (20,000 tests for the whole spec would probably be a conservative estimate). When you consider how long it takes to write that many test cases and how long it takes to implement each feature, you’ll begin to understand why the time frame seems so long.

So, by definition, the spec won’t be finished until you can use all of it, and in two browsers.

Of course, what really matters is the bits of HTML5 that are already supported in the browsers. Any list will be out of date within about a week because the browser makers are innovating so quickly. Also, much of the new functionality can be replicated with JavaScript in browsers that don’t yet have support. The <canvas> property is in all modern browsers and will be in Internet Explorer 9, but it can be faked in old versions of IE with the excanvas library. The <video> and <audio> properties can be faked with Flash in old browsers.

HTML5 is designed to degrade gracefully, so with clever JavaScript and some thought, all content should be available on older browsers.

“My Browser Supports HTML5, but Yours Doesn’t”

There’s a myth that HTML5 is some monolithic, indivisible thing. It’s not. It’s a collection of features, as we’ve seen above. So, in the short term, you cannot say that a browser supports everything in the spec. And when some browser or other does, it won’t matter because we’ll all be much too excited about the next iteration of HTML by then.

What a terrible mess, you’re thinking? But consider that CSS 2.1 is not yet a finished spec, and yet we all use it each and every day. We use CSS3, happily adding border-radius, which will soon be supported everywhere, while other aspects of CSS3 aren’t supported anywhere at all.

Be wary of browser “scoring” websites. They often test for things that have nothing to do with HTML5, such as CSS, SVG and even Web fonts. What matters is what you need to do, what’s supported by the browsers your client’s audience will be using and how much you can fake with JavaScript.

HTML5 Legalizes Tag Soup

HTML5 is a lot more forgiving in its syntax than XHTML: you can write tags in uppercase, lowercase or a mixture of the two. You don’t need to self-close tags such as img, so the following are both legal:

<img src="nice.jpg" />
<img src="nice.jpg">

You don’t need to wrap attributes in quotation marks, so the following are both legal:

<img src="nice.jpg">
<img src=nice.jpg>

You can use uppercase or lowercase (or mix them), so all of these are legal:

<IMG SRC=nice.jpg>
<img src=nice.jpg>
<iMg SrC=nice.jpg>

This isn’t any different from HTML4, but it probably comes as quite a shock if you’re used to XHTML. In reality, if you were serving your pages as a combination of text and HTML, rather than XML (and you probably were, because Internet Explorer 8 and below couldn’t render true XHTML), then it never mattered anyway: the browser never cared about trailing slashes, quoted attributes or case—only the validator did.

So, while the syntax appears to be looser, the actual parsing rules are much tighter. The difference is that there is no more tag soup; the specification describes exactly what to do with invalid mark-up so that all conforming browsers produce the same DOM. If you’ve ever written JavaScript that has to walk the DOM, then you’re aware of the horrors that inconsistent DOMs can bring.

This error correction is no reason to churn out invalid code, though. The DOM that HTML5 creates for you might not be the DOM you want, so ensuring that your HTML5 validates is still essential. With all this new stuff, overlooking a small syntax error that stops your script from working or that makes your CSS unstylish is easy, which is why we have HTML5 validators.

Far from legitimizing tag soup, HTML5 consigns it to history. Souper.

“I Need to Convert My XHTML Website to HTML5”

Is HTML5′s tolerance of looser syntax the death knell for XHTML? After all, the working group to develop XHTML 2 was disbanded, right?

True, the XHTML 2 group was disbanded at the end of 2009; it was working on an unimplemented spec that competed with HTML5, so having two groups was a waste of W3C resources. But XHTML 1 was a finished spec that is widely supported in all browsers and that will continue to work in browsers for as long as needed. Your XHTML websites are therefore safe.

HTML5 Kills XML

Not at all. If you need to use XML rather than HTML, you can use XHTML5, which includes all the wonders of HTML5 but which must be in well-formed XHTML syntax (i.e. quoted attributes, trailing slashes to close some elements, lowercase elements and the like.)

Actually, you can’t use all the wonders of HTML5 in XHTML5: <noscript> won’t work. But you’re not still using that, are you?

HTML5 Will Kill Flash and Plug-Ins

The <canvas> tag allows scripted images and animations that react to the keyboard and that therefore can compete with some simpler uses of Adobe Flash. HTML5 has native capability for playing video and audio.

Just as when CSS Web fonts weren’t widely supported and Flash was used in sIFR to fill the gaps, Flash also saves the day by making HTML5 video backwards-compatible. Because HTML5 is designed to be “fake-able” in older browsers, the mark-up between the video tags is ignored by browsers that understand HTML5 and is rendered by older browsers. Therefore, embedding fall-back video with Flash is possible using the old-school <object> or <embed> tags, as pioneered by Kroc Camen is his article “Video for Everybody!” (see the screenshot below).

But not all of Flash’s use cases are usurped by HTML5. There is no way to do digital rights management in HTML5; browsers such as Opera, Firefox and Chrome allow visitors to save video to their machines with a click of the context menu. If you need to prevent video from being saved, you’ll need to use plug-ins. Capturing input from a user’s microphone or camera is currently only possible with Flash (although a <device> element is being specified for “post-5″ HTML), so if you’re keen to write a Chatroulette killer, HTML5 isn’t for you.

HTML5 Is Bad for Accessibility

A lot of discussion is going on about the accessibility of HTML5. This is good and to be welcomed: with so many changes to the basic language of the Web, ensuring that the Web is accessible to people who cannot see or use a mouse is vital. Also vital is building in the solution, rather than bolting it on as an afterthought: after all, many (most?) authors don’t even add alternate text to images, so out-of-the-box accessibility is much more likely to succeed than relying on people to add it.

This is why it’s great that HTML5 adds native controls for things like sliders (<input type=range>, currently supported in Opera and Webkit browsers) and date pickers (<input type=date>, Opera only)—see Bruce’s HTML5 forms demo)—because previously we had to fake these with JavaScript and images and then add keyboard support and WAI-ARIA roles and attributes.

The <canvas> tag is a different story. It is an Apple invention that was reverse-engineered by other browser makers and then retrospectively specified as part of HTML5, so there is no built-in accessibility. If you’re just using it for eye-candy, that’s fine; think of it as an image, but without any possibility of alternate text (some additions to the spec have been suggested, but nothing certain yet). So, ensure that any information you deliver via <canvas> supplements more accessible information elsewhere.

Text between <canvas> tags simply becomes pixels, just like text in images, and so is invisible to assistive technology and screen readers. Consider using the W3C graphics technology Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) instead, especially for things such as dynamic graphs and animating text. SVG is supported in all the major browsers, including IE9 (but not IE8 or below, although the SVGweb library can fake SVG with Flash in older browsers).

The situation with <video> and <audio> is promising. Although not fully specified (and so not yet implemented in any browsers), a new <track> element has been included in the HTML5 spec that allows timed transcripts (or karaoke lyrics or captions for the deaf or subtitles for foreign-language media) to be associated with multimedia. It can be faked in JavaScript. Alternatively (and better for search engines), you could include transcripts directly on the page below the video and use JavaScript to overlay captions, synchronized with the video.

“An HTML5 Guru Will Hold My Hand as I Do It the First Time”

If only this were true. However, the charming Paul Irish and lovely Divya Manian will be as good as there for you, with their HTML5 Boilerplate, which is a set of files you can use as templates for your projects. Boilerplate brings in the JavaScript you need to style the new elements in IE; pulls in jQuery from the Google Content Distribution Network (CDN), but with fall-back links to your server in case the CDN server is down.

It adds mark-up that is adaptable to iOS, Android and Opera Mobile; and adds a CSS skeleton with a comprehensive reset style sheet. There’s even an .htaccess file that serves your HTML5 video with the right MIME types. You won’t need all of it, and you’re encouraged to delete the stuff that’s unnecessary to your project to avoid bloat.

Further Resources

HTML5 is a massive topic. Here are a few hand-picked links. Disclosure: the authors have their fingers in some of these pies.

• W3C Specification: HTML5 (Edition for Web Authors)
  
  
  Just the stuff for those who write websites (as opposed to those who write browsers).



• HTML5 Demos and Examples
  
  
  Demos of the HTML5 APIs that are implemented in browsers.



• HTML5 Doctor
  
  
  Short, focused articles, “helping you implement HTML5 today.”



• html5-shims
  
  
  Scripts that fake HTML5 functionality in older browsers.

Computational Knowledge Engine

Not sure if ever come across this search engine called www.wolframalpha.com this is not a replacement for google or any normal search engines we use for doing searches, this is basically a answer engine that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would.

How this works?

Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and provides answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. Wolfram Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one. In this way it has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed since the 1980s at developing a common-sense inference engine.

Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, a complete functional-programming package which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. With Mathematica running in the background, it is suited to answer mathematical questions. The answer usually presents a human-readable solution. Alpha also incorporates elements of webMathematica in delivering its content.

What this service can do for you?

The following are examples of queries using Wolfram Alpha. They are accompanied by links to the results of each search to illustrate the variety of answers that Wolfram Alpha provides to non-specific queries.

• mortgage 6%, 25 year, $140000 displays, among other things, repayment rates and graphs that represent capital vs. interest over time.
• life expectancy france 25 year old male which gives a survival analysis for a person of the given demographic.
• boiling point of water at 6 atm which returns a phase diagram alongside the result of 432.6 Kelvins.
• lim(x->0) x/sin x yields the expected result, 1, a plot, and the series expansion. The button "show steps" provides a possible derivation of the result using L'Hôpital's rule.

Wolfram Alpha is also capable of responding to increasingly complex, natural-language fact-based questions such as:

• "Where was Mary Robinson born?"
• "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?"
• "What is the forty-eighth smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Senegal, $1090 per year^.
• "What is the speed of a swallow?" yields the assumption, "Assuming estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow", and the result, "there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)." This is a reference to a joke from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• When asked "What is the meaning of life?", it replies 42. This is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel, in which a supercomputer is told to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, and it finds the answer to be 42. These and all other "humorous" queries are individually written by programmers and not "understood" by the software on a deeper cognitive level.

Also, one can input the name of a website, and it will return relevant information about the site, including its hosting location, site rank, number of visitors and more.

The database currently includes hundreds of datasets, including current and historical weather, drug data, star charts, currency conversion, and many others. The datasets have been accumulated over approximately two years, and are expected to continue to grow. The range of questions that can be answered is also expected to grow with the expansion of the datasets.

How it works?

Wolfram Alpha is written in about five million lines of Mathematica (using webMathematica and gridMathematica) code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (though the number was upgraded for the launch).

As well as being a web site, Wolfram Alpha provides an API(for a fee) that delivers computational answers to other applications. One such application is the Bing search engine.

 

Try this and I am sure you will not be disappointed.

Epic the new browser from India

Well to start with this is one more mozilla based browser like flock, the difference is that it comes up with some Indianized features like local language typing. Also comes with a side bar built in to allow users to connect to different social networking sites like twitter, facebook and orkut. This browser also boosts of having a inbuilt anivirus mechanism, but not sure how it works, but I guess it good to have feature. At first look I am not very impressed with this browser as I could not find anything unique and useful with this browser but its the first version and it has a long way to go and hopefully evolves into something unique and useful. Below is the list some of the feature of this browser.

• Built-in Antivirus Scanner: Scan downloads automatically. Scan your system manually. Free.
• Malicious Website Warnings: We'll warn you if you're about to visit a website known to host viruses or malware.
• Anti-Phishing Protection: A big, bolded domain so you know if you're at citibank.com or citiphishingsite.com.
• Type in Indian Languages. Easily. Everywhere.
• Blazing Fast.
• Sidebar Applications. 1500+ Apps. All Free.Have more fun. Be more productive. Or both.
• 1500+ Indian Themes and Wallpapers.
• India. Instantly.
  • Latest Film Songs. Live Cricket Scores.News from a Dozen+ Leading Sources.Regional and Hindi Language News. Live TV. Stock Quotes. Events. Videos. Even a Daily Joke.

Google is going launch social platform “me”

There a rumor going around in internet blogs is that Big G is going to launch a new social platform “me”, which uses all the google’s social endeavors like Google voice, Google Buzz, and Google Wave. This new platform could challenge Facebook if rightly planned and used. But the only problem would be how many users of 500 million facebook users want to leave and going this new Google me. May be this too much to ponder on a rumor. Forgot to mention google is also looking for “Head of Social” and the ad reads like this

“This is a new and very strategic position, as Google knows it is late on this front and is appropriately humble about it. In Google's view, conceptually, there are two ways to tackle social, each impacting who may be successful in this senior post: 1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google's existing portfolio.”

Interested may be you want to post your resume to Google :)

Sid in Office cartoon series

The well knows technology site pluGGd( I hope I got the GGs in the name right) launched a cartoon series by Ali Baqri. Sid is a Indian techie and the cartoons are about his work and personal like. I am giving the first cartoon here if you find it interesting please go to http://www.pluggd.in and find a new cartoon every day.

Firefox 4 roadmap

Yes people are already talking about Firefox 4 and its features. As per the Firefox Director Mike Beltzner's blog post, they are concentrating on

Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast

Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),

Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

ScribeFire for Chrome Available for Alpha Testing

The very first alpha version of ScribeFire for Google Chrome is now available for testing. If you are running Google Chrome and would like to test this bleeding-edge version of ScribeFire, you can install it by clicking on the scribefire-0.1.0.0.crx link here.

After you install ScribeFire for Chrome, you'll see a ScribeFire icon in your toolbar. When clicked, that icon will open a new tab that contains the ScribeFire editor.

You can log bugs by going to this page. Also you can request for some new feature here.