Saturday, January 29, 2005

Google, Gooble, Booble, blush

Are you tired of google's plain interface? In typical nerd tradition, geeks have come up with boogle, google with quotes, the use of which I don't know.
G00g13 is the hacker version of Google, goes to a sub-directory in google.com itself.
If your left bicep is like a 6th grader and your right bicep is like Arnold Schwarzenegger, (vice versa, if you are left handed) booble is built just for you ;)
If you wan't to ask someone who will find it out for you, try foogle. It is sort of an online-offline search engine. Leave your queries here and check back later. My uncle used to talk about punched cards and mainframes and overnight processing, this must be the 21st century version of it.
Oggle is a snoop cam dealer, in the UK, so it goes to oggle.co.uk
Ogle looks like a 3-D Art and Animation website.

(First posted on my pseudo-tech page, Manotechnology)

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Net Nanny

Till a few days back, the speed of the internet here used to be what is best termed as crawling. Some (or many) guys downloading Porn movies and movies all the time, clogging up the big pipe that is brought in here. The IS guys must have got fed up with all the complaints and decided to set up a net nanny software in the central server and closed all ports except one. The beauty of this software is that it filters out anything it deems offensive and all multimedia files.

My class group's photo album is not visible because it has a substring 'girl' in it, the photos uploaded by the girls in my class. Yesterday, when I got overly nostalgic and started searching for a famous tv program that I watched as a kid, 'Ek Do Teen Char', loosely based on Enid Blyton's Famous Five series or Secret Seven. It was blocked because it had 'teen' in the search string. So are URLs that have mp3 in it and some (not all) that have the word 'sex' in it. So does a search for 'rotten vegetables' Apparently this measure is to block pornographic content and prevent clogging up of bandwidth due to downloading music or audio/video files.

The beauty of information flow is that these blocks are just a log around which ants find a path. I have already cracked it just for the heck of it, not in the contemporary sense of hacking, a bad bad word, used by stupidly idiotic movie morons and media block-heads who write ludicrous reports on 'hackers' without an inkling of knowledge of what they are writing about. All without using a naughty word in English that would be filtered, by the best professional software that is available. Muhahaha Muhahaha Muhahaha! (EVIL LAUGH)

http://www.saferinternet.org/ is a website dedicated just for this. Many strict filters are available on its filters page.

Monday, January 24, 2005

Mordac?

So, we had to make this presentation today for a course on e-commerce. It was supposed to be on viral marketing. 'Supposed to be' because the presentation was not related to viral marketing but on email marketing and something about spam and very little about viral marketing. The group was supposed to be 'led' and the project done by someone who is a 'bond' in "computers and IT". Oh, the aura around him! After the presentation, the prof asked, what the use of this presentation was. If it was to start a discussion on viral marketing, then it was OK, but of no use here.

The dude who made the presentation did not send it to the others in the group till the last minute, he emailed it to himself, but did not bother to cc to others. No problem, we can always get it later, but I am still waiting for it. Even if he had sent it to me, it would have been in an unreadable format. He uses outlook (composed as html or something) to send it and any & all attachments are included as winmail.dat which my outlook express or the webmail client cannot read. Not once or twice but atleast 3 times in the last 5 months. Never mind, I use some software to crack it and extract the attachments. It is better than the trouble of asking him to send it, repeated request which he will ignore and will never send it even asked in person. If everyone else is getting it, why couldn't I? Maybe I should start using the exact same software that he is using, so as to prevent any such conflicts with him! Related to the study conducted by discovery? Maybe related to Mordac!