Month / July 2006

by Nirupam Biswas

Webtop or WebOS. Operating System on Internet.

(The picture at bottom is that of Goowy and the one on top is that of YouOS.)

I recently came to know about goowy.com and www.youos.com. They are online operating systems. Yes, online, web-based OS. This does not mean that you will not require a OS on your computer (yet). You will need atleast an OS, a browser and of course an Internet connection to access it. They are actually web-based application mimicking the user interface of an OS. They have wordprocessor, chatting software, games and more. This is a very novel approach. Now effectively you can take the whole desktop around the world without actually carrying it. So, now you can work on your documents anywhere around the internet and you are safe from any hardware or virus infecting your precious work. What’s more, you can even work on heavy application on your an era old computer.

I must mention that they are still in development stage. Goowy in beta and youos in alpha stage. Both of them have linux like graphical interface. Goowy has a good interface and also has a chat facility for Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, etc. users. YouOS on the other hand probaly allows only IRC chatting. YouOS though have a wordprocessor which I didn’t find in Goowy. Goowy is flash based where as YouOS is javascript based, hence in YouOS you can interact like a real OS and right click on the desktop to bring up a menu to chage wallpaper, whereas in Goowy we get the Flash player’s menu.

This is indeed a good concept. They need to evolve more to be made really usefull. Go to their sites and click on ‘Try a Demo’ to launch the OS right away.

by Nirupam Biswas

The screen billbord. Pixels for Hire!

This is one of the most innovative ad sites ever on the internet. This site has nothing but advertisements, but with a twist. Advertisers are required to hire pixels on the site at $1 per pixel. There are 1 million pixels available. This very much like hiring billboard space; very innovative. Click on the small ads to goto the advertising company. See for yourself. The site is http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com. He has already sold out all his million pixels, that means, he is a millionaire! Hats off; you deserve it for this splendid idea.

Below is a small frame showing the site.

Update: I have now found that this kind of advertising has now come to known as “pixel ad”. Google for this term and you will get so many such sites. I beleive that milliondollarhompage.com is the original pixel advertising site. I read about this in a computer magazine long ago. If you have any more info on this then post a comment.

by Nirupam Biswas

Access banned sites in colleges.

Colleges have the irritating habit of playing god to their students by blocking harmless sites like Orkut, etc. In our college they have blocked the pictures from Orkut! This is simply outrageous. My friend’s college have gone far enough to block Orkut altogether. I think the college administration need to mature up and accept the fact that we ourselves are mature enough.

So, proxy servers are our salvation. Goto wikipedia to know what a proxy server is. Anoymouse.org is a popular one and maybe it is already blocked. Switchproxy.com is one site which lists about 10,000 proxy servers and even notifies whether the site is up and fast or up but slow or status not known by green, yellow and no colour respectively. Just type in the url (include http:// also) and click on the proxy server you want to use. Note that some of these listed servers may ask for money to access some sites. Click on Back and try out any other servers.

In case your college has even blocked switchproxy.com then here are some of the proxies from the list there. I have tested them that they open Orkut successfully.
http://desithoughts.com/
http://irproxy.org/
http://polysolve.com/
w3-secure.com

If you are geeky enough then try TOR with Privoxy. It is a software to setup proxy server on your computer. It is very difficult (if not impossible) to track you on the Internet. To know how to set it up using Firefox and from where to download all the required softwares goto http://www.jgmnet.org/torfaq.html.

For geeks:-
I don’t know specifically if Tor will allow you to access banned sites or not. For this purpose you need tunneling softwares.
1) See a list of free tunneling softwares at http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/proxy_tunneling_info/ .
2) http://theproxyconnection.com/firewallsupport.html
3) http://www.freeproxy.ru/en/programs/httport.htm

by Nirupam Biswas

Free Blender model released.

I held the release of this model for quite a lomg time becuase I wanted to add an armature (rig it) and material to it. Because of my diversion to other things and time limitation I couldn’t complete it. Nevertheless, below is the screenshot of this model I call – Toon Cow.


You can download this from http://www.savefile.com/files/1917654 or http://www.katorlegaz.com/index.php?a=download&c=Blender_3D_Model_Repository. (www.katorlegaz.com has a free Blender 3D Model Repository)

(UPDATE: Direct link to download ToonCow from katorlegaz.com is http://www.katorlegaz.com/downloads/Blender_3D_Model_Repository/characters/Toon-Cow.zip)

Blender is a powerfull, open source 3dModelling and animation software. For more information see this and this.

by Nirupam Biswas

Blogs Blocked!

This is terrible. Very terrible. Our government has made a blanket ban on popular blogger site, including this, in the wake of terrorist attack in Mumbai. This means I or any fellow Indians cannot view this site (actually this can be accessed by hundreds of trick methods). This has been done due to intelligence report that terrorists are using blogs for coordinating attacks. If banning innocent blogs did help in curbing terrorists acts then I would had been with the Government, but, unfortunately this is not the case; bans can be by-passed. Furthermore, there are hundreds of other ways, other than the blogs. This looks like a desperate attempt by the Government. I only hope that they don’t ban the internet altogether.

This is not a good news India.

For news reports on Blog banning goto:-
1) ndtv
2) infoworld.nl
3) www.theinquirer.net

Goto http://www.withinandwithout.com/?p=854 for record of gradual unfolding of this ban drama.

A new forum has been created to protest the banning of innocent blogs by the Indian Government at censorship.wikia.com. (Register your protest here)

Update: If you are accessing this from India using the www.pkblogs.com then you may have problem seeing the pictures. At least I am having problems. Sometimes they show-up sometimes only a blank bar instead of the picture is visible.