Expiring Domain Names

It is often first come first serve. The early you do the domain name registration the better the chance of getting name of your choice. The domain names are filling so quickly that it has already started becoming difficult to get one word or modular domain names.

If you are looking for some good domain names, chances are that they are already booked, or they were booked and now are on the verge of expiring. There are a lots of domain names that expire everyday and you can choose from them as soon as they expire. This site lists domain names that are expiring with the time left to expire. You can navigate through the list to find some really cool names or make a search for domain names containing words your choice. You can also see the Google trends (to see how often they were searched on Google) for those domain names so that you get domain name that is most sought after. [via Digital Inspiration]

Expiring Domain Names

Do you have a secure password.

A recent phishing attack on MySpace revealed thousands of passwords in public. As the number of passwords revealed were quite large, it provided a thrust for analysing the present trend in passwords. While the most of the MySpace passwords were alphanumeric and did not contain dictionary words, there were some quite common. The point forgotten while keeping these passwords were that these passwords could be familier to anyone, not just you. Below are the few points of the analysis, check whether your's is well protected.

» Top 20 Common Passwords (in order) : password1, abc123, myspace1, password, blink182, qwerty1, fuckyou, 123abc, baseball1, football1, 123456, soccer, monkey1, liverpool1, princess1, jordan23, slipknot1, superman1, iloveyou1 and monkey.

» As expected, English vowels are by far the most frequent occurring password symbols (E, 48 percent; A, 46 percent; I, 34 percent; O, 33 percent). Other high-ranking letters included R (35 percent), S (32 percent), N (31 percent), L (28 percent), T (25 percent), C (21 percent), and M (21 percent).

» Numbers were used in well over half the passwords. The number 1 appeared 45 percent of the time, followed by the numbers 2 (22 percent), 0 (16 percent), and 3 (15 percent). Numbers 4 through 9 appeared roughly 9 to 11 percent of the time.

» When number 1 was used, it appeared 78 percent at the end.

» Cuss or profane words were very popular.

» Words, colors, years, names, sports, hobbies, and music groups were very popular. FYI, your girlfriend or boyfriend’s name isn’t that uncommon in most cases. I, too, luv Brandi, Bob, or Joe.

(Courtesy: infoworld, schneier)

Time : Person of the Year

As a consequence of what the year 2006 was all about, there is no surprise that Time magazine selected YOU as the person of the year. YOU the blogger, the symbol of freedom of expression, the protagonist of world social network. As the article says

"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

The Web 2.0 has really dissolved something in the life vinegar of the Global citizens as apparently now you say what you feel, what you always wanted to , what you have never said. Now you just take out your camcorder, go to streets and and build over your newly found passion and engagement. And to hear you, to support or reject your opinions you have a global audience. No boundaries.

Fun over Telnet

Telnet is a remote login protocol which is primarily used for accessing resources on a remote computer and for various administrative tasks. Some servers around the world have left some ports open to explore whats inside. Lets have a look on them:

For each of the addresses Go to Run ->type telnet followed by address(without quotes) ->Enter. (ex: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl)

♠ Address : "towel.blinkenlights.nl" -- Sit back and enjoy the ASCII Star Wars.
♠ Address : "193.201.201.131 4000" -- You need to register at Shadow-Lands in order to play this game.
♠ Address: " dr.nostrum.com 2000" -- I hear you love scary explorations.

Those were just a little glimplse. There exists a good amount of servers that allow remote login freely.

Educational,Entertainment and Foreign Language Telnets[ link1 ][link2][link3][link4]

Cross Site Chatting

Geesee launched its cross site chat facility a few days back. As reported by Techcrunch : "Geesee is an embedded chat service that lets users communicate across any number of web sites in common chat rooms organized by tags". While this service was continuing to gather applauds from the web community, ChatCreator stepped in to steal the thunder. It provides much similar interface like Geesee but with a better look and feel with its sleek design.

Heres an example:

If and only if -- Passion==Drawing && Creativity+=1

Creativity, a very abstract term for even most creative people, manifests itself through as many acts in the world as possible. The act of doing something gives a vent to the creativity nurturing inside a living being. The act could be anything from a highly applauded painting on canvas to a mere act of thinking, its just that the way of expression doesn't matter.It could even be Online Drawing if you are not biased towards those conventional paintings painted by some bearded weird looking creature.

Cumulatelabs displays a fully featured drawing canvas to get your hands dirty, provides a drawing experience much like a drawing software only with a little slower speed.Earlier it was compatible with IE only but Firefox support is also included.

Now, some out of the box creation with ImaginationCubed which has very sleek user interface with great speed and feel of elasticity. Its greatest feature is that the "piece of art" can be created online with two or more artists participating simultaneously in the same drawing. You can send invitation to your friend (or your love) to take part in the creation. Wow, now unlike good old days we will have paintings patented to a bunch of people rather that bearded single guy. After the completion of the grand act, the art can be viewed in an animated fashion -- the pencil moves the same way as you did while drawing, to recreate your piece.

Now in order to add something that people called "professional look" Drawspace can serve as a wonderful mentor online.

Online File Conversion

Zamzar provides a cool service when it comes to converting your image, document, audio, video from one format to another as per your taste or necessity. The interface is simple and sleek, and you get your converted file through email. Now atleast you do not have to download different readers for different formats or conversion tools to your desktop.

Really the world is moving towards better web solutions second by second. Kudos to the realm of Web Services.

Instant Web Calculator

Welcome to hassle free calculation. InstaCalc is an online calculator which provides calculation facility in real time, that means results are displayed as you type. It claims to be faster that windows and easier than excel, which seems true looking at its speed and rich features.

The most interesting part is its graph and chart calculations, it instanly draws charts on your screen as you vary the parameters.

It does'nt take much to explore all its features. A comprehensive reference section is provided.

It also provides codes which can be embedded onto your geeky page to enable on the fly calculations.

Gabbly - Chatting on your Web Page

Enabling a chat application on any web page was never this easy. Gabbly allows us to embed chat application to our webpages which allows all the concurrent visitors to share their viewpoints instantly. In addition you can just Gabbly on any webpage - just precede the site's name with Gabbly.com/, eg gabbly.com/yoursite.com. To start chatting on this page try this.

Audio Blogging

The popular audio blog Audioblogger which provides service for Blogger is going off the air starting november 1st. Audioblogger provided audio blogging services for Blogger by providing an US number which can be used to post directly your audio through phone.

A very good alternative is Gabcast which provides paid as well as free services. For select countries blogging numbers are provided. SipBroker provides good free voip services.In order to record from your machine as it was in my case you can download some VOIP tool. I downloaded Express Talk, a soft VoIP tool from NCH which provides machine dialling facilities. It can be downlaoded from here by providing your email address. Now in order to blog on gabcast you have to dial sip:422@sip.gabcast.com and record your sound. This sound can later be heard from gabcast or its code may be copied to your favourite blog. You can check My Voice section on the right side of this page for sample.

Google Earth Workaround

I found a lot of tiny dots on the most beloved Google Earth (download it here). There are a lot of places marked by other and I am sure you will find one which is near your place of interest. My work started by searching Google. First I searched by keywords like "Google Earth Placename", later started searching with keywords like "site: filetype:kmz" or "site: filetype:kml". But then came up this great site containing a good amount of information on geographical locations. Tageo contains a lot of information about even the smallest of towns of the world alongwith latitude and longitude information, but on top of that it provides a link to KML/KMZ (to be opened with Google Earth) file for each place.

Now that I have located my place on Google Earth, in order to share it I must upload somewhere. In order to accomplish this "this wonderful site" came handy which allows the upload of KMZ and KML files. So finally I am able to share my location with you right here.

Sharing My Bookmarks

Until a month before I used to bookmark on a lot of sites, sometimes dedicate special blogs for it. But as my favorites grew at the speed of light I thought making one the chosen one and full stop. I chose Delicious. And until a day before I used to post links from my bookmarks to my blog. Now in order to increase the effectiveness and decrease the redundancy I got like "why reinventing the wheel" or for that matter why "Reposting the Wheel"(?).

Here's the thing: My Delicious Bookmark

Sure Shot Search Engine for Video,Audio,Torrent etc.

As in Google no special keywords, no special signatures and you most of the times direct links when it comes to audio, video, torrent, documents or manual. Thats what Briefli is all about. What is beautiful is that you get links from both Amazon and the good old sites who share everything for free , direct links in the later case. Its upto you to choose from legal or illegal. One more thing, it is built upon the Azaxian Technology, so no more getting blanks between page loads.

Google's New Customized Search Engine

Google released its customized search engine facility called Google Co-op that allows to perform customized search limited to few chosen websites. This search engine can be owned by anyone with Google Account. Moreover you can customize it so that other users of your search engine can add relevant links/sites. More details on Techcrunch.

Check out my search engine Latest Tech Search Engine which I have customized to search only a few good tech sites such as cnet, slashdot, techcrunch, digg etc.

Firefox 2.0 Released

Mozilla just released its much hyped version of firefox. It can be downloaded from its FTP Server.

• For Windows 5.6MB
• For Linux 9.2MB
• For Mac 18 MB

Well, later I found that Mozilla still has not announced the release officially which is scheduled on Tuesday even though it is in its FTP server. Probably it's because Mozilla don't want heavy traffic building upon the FTP server ahead of time that could cost it a large amount of bandwidth charge.

Maps and Maps

Find from a single channel how Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, NASA locate your home !! FlashEarth provides a single interface to access maps as shown by different vendors.

Virtual World

The world, initially a vast stretch of never-ending terrains,seas and deserts, started evolving slowly but with a very fast pace. The whole of the world is now at your finger-tips, thanks to the virtual revolution brought by digitals. Here is a collection of virual realities which have changed our way of life in recent past.

• Maps and satellite and Ariel Imagery:
  
  While the baton is carried by Google Earth and Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth(combines MapPoint and Local Live Search) and Yahoo maps are making the competition tougher.OpenLayers ( an Open Source venture) and Ask.Com are also catching the race. Most of these include local search with GPS functionality which helps giving driving directions and lots more. There are also freely availabe APIs for these maps, so that they can be embedded in your site at your disposal and convenience.
  
  
• Virtual Computers/Platforms
  
  The virtual computers or platform helps to test all varieties of application to check for compatiblity different hardwares and platforms. Gone are the days when one used to acquire a lot of hardwares to test a single software.VMWare provides players for virtualization over windows and linux systems. Microsoft's Virtual Server provides a virtualization platform that runs most major x86 operating systems in a guest environment, and is supported by Microsoft as a host for Windows Server operating systems and Windows Server System applications. Microsofts Virtual PC also provides a similar though slightly depreceted facillty.PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers.
  
  
• Virtual Keyboard
  
  Tired of typing SMS or emails on your Cell or Handheld? The solution is in the virtual world where you can project a virtual qwerty keyboard from your handheld onto any flat surface and could experience a real keyboard typing. Shown here is an example of I-Techs's Virtual Kbd which both infrared and laser technology to generate an invisible field and project a full-size virtual QWERTY keyboard on any surface.


• Chat Bots
  
  Chat bots are chat robots, who are such programmed through artificial intelligence that they give very human like answers in a chat session and they learn more and more as they go through the length of chat with wide variety of people. Here is a good list of these online artificial nerds.
  
  

Web Pages That Suck

Once in a while we come across a site that does nothing but sucks, the site's layout,patterns, user interactivity everything is enough to drive you nuts. Well, now before anyone sees your site and start advertising it as the Uggliest Site, in order to take a precautionary measure check www.webpagesthatsuck.com. This site has some good articles on the topic and they even list real world examples of real sucking sites (Hope they have not already listed your site !!!).

Final release of Internet Explorer 7

Yesterday microsoft release final and stable version of IE7 which is more secure and employs many cool features (such as tabs etc) which makes ones browsing experience more pleasant.
Grab your copy now http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx.
You can also download it from here. Remember you gotta have Windows XP with sp2 to install it.

Meanwhile its interesting to know these "20 things you don't know about death".

Orkut open to all

The orkut, google's online community portal (very popular in India,Brazil,Pakistan and Iran) finally opened its door to all. It means that now you do not need an invitation from others to open account with orkut. Orkut has added some extra features like instant reply of scraps , deleting multiple scraps etc. More details can be found at Dreamchaser's blog.

Meanwhile, final results are out for the "Most uggliest vegetable in Britain" contest and the winner is a parsnip grown by Mrs Hillary Nellist.