mYpassion » In the news

Shrek + Avatar = Shrevatar

sharath — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:37:22 +0000

Ever wondered how 2 comic charecters would look if morphed together? Here is a pic of Shrek + Avatar morphed together and we call it the SHREVATAR.

A combined hero for fans of Shrek and Avatar. Dowload the Shrevatar wallpaper (1920×1200)

Image credit – Moinid

Nokia Open Sources the Symbian OS Code

sharath — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:25:19 +0000

When Nokia purchased Symbian operating system back in 2008 they had plans to make the platform available as open source… and now they’ve done it.

The transition towards a future of all openness is now all achieved. And that too, few months ahead of schedule says the reports from the official website. For nearly a year, only the kernel was open source. Now the most popular development platform in the world for mobile devices is completely free, under the Eclipse license.

There could now be more decisive and tough competition between Symbian and the Android operating system, developed by Google, since the android code is also open source.

This new change marks and will enable Symbian to enter the U.S. and Asian markets with ease again….

Download 3 Idiots Movie HQ only from Youtube

sharath — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 04:13:40 +0000

Aamir Khan, marketing genius is at work again, one can expect the craziest ways of promoting a film. This time the producers of 3 Idiots have struck a deal with online video sharing and broadcasting portal YouTube for an undisclosed sum.

This legal downloading of films is aimed at people who are unable to go to the cinema. Known that this is the first time an entire movie can be legally downloaded from YouTube, of course it was already possible to download camera prints of the movie as a workaround, this is the first time a HQ DVD was available for download.

Bollywood producer Vinod Chopra has announced:

“The movie will be released on YouTube after eight to ten weeks,” The deal with YouTube will allow viewers to download the entire movie from the Web at a fixed price. “We haven’t decided on the pricing points yet, but we hope this will stop illegal download and video sharing,”

According to a recent report released by Motion Picture Association of America, India ranks eight among countries with the highest incidence of online piracy. I’m sure the only way to maximize revenues is to have multiple launch platform and youtube (the worlds largest and popular video service) is one of them.. .

The film download is not free, there is a certain amount paid before the movie can be downloaded (pay-per-download). How much should be paid is not known yet. It is also not known how big the download will be and whether there are other restrictions. Stay tuned .

Yahoo to say GoodBye to MyBloglog soon

sharath — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:45:04 +0000

Yahoo might shutdown Mybloglog from next month (January). MyBlogLog is a service focused on bloggers to create an own blogger community. It also includes a widget which you can use on your website that displays information about MyBlogLog users who visit your website.

MyBlogLog was launched in January 2005 and in January 2007 acquired by Yahoo for just over 10 million U.S. dollars. Yahoo also closed GeoCities this year despite hosting service and blog system and social network Yahoo 360 °.

From the Yahoo Blog:

Frankly, it’s no secret within Yahoo! that we’re actively discussing the future of MyBlogLog. However, it’s also true that we have not made any final decisions at this point. Is a shutdown on the table? Sure, that’s an option. But there are other options as well. We know this creates some uncertainty for current MyBlogLog users. While we aren’t quite ready to share more details, we promise to keep you posted.

Related: RIP Geo Cities!

Google Offers 20 Million to Charities

sharath — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:18:41 +0000

Google has sent a mail to all users of Google AdSense and Google AdWords that this year the company will donate 20 million U.S. dollars to charity. Google does this instead of the annual gifts that the company normally sends which is talked about worldwide. In the mail there is a link to a special site where the following information is shown:

“Charities couldn’t make more this year, unlike past decades since its the most difficult times. So we have $ 20 million pledged to help those people who help us all. Our gift to you is a gift to them. Happy holidays. ”

An overview of the charities below:

Feeding America
Boys and Girls Clubs
Smile Train
CARE, Mothers Matter
World Wildlife Fund, Natural Capital Project
Mobile Creches
Prajwala
HEAL Africa
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
The Mango Tree
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Harlem Children’s Zone
Save the Children, Latin America focus
Reporters Without Borders
Witness
Loud Against Nazis
Global Voices
Ushahidi
Save the Children, Eurasia and Middle East focus
Grupo Cultural Afro reaggae
Ashesi University College, Ghana
Pratham
Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience
Shin Shin Educational Foundation
Tzu Chi Foundation

Do you need the WHOIS protection?

sharath — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:30:06 +0000

One of my friend who got inspired by my tips started blogging recently. Although, he wasn’t a geek like me and didn’t know more about web hosting\costs\privacy and stuff. His other friend helped him setting up a website for a cheap cost with minimum bandwidth\space and he finally kick started his blog. When I checked the whois information for his domain, I could get all his personal information such as his email address, phone number and his current address. I immediately notified him about this serious privacy hazard and then he chose the hide his ‘who is’ information.

If you are not familiar with the term, ‘whois privacy’, it’s a service offered by most domain name registrars that protects your information as a domain registrant from people performing a “whois” on your domains.

To view the whois information of a particular website, just hit http://whois.domaintools.com/[websiteURL].

Ex. http://whois.domaintools.com/thesharath.com would give you the ‘whois’ of mypassion and since I have chosen the hide my who is info and if you want to find out more, you would have to contact PrivacyProtect.org and they in-turn will email me.

Until some years ago many people would recommend you to use a whois privacy service. It would protect your contact information, after all, and given the privacy issues on the web this could only be a good thing. I still believe this is valid, although the World Wide Web has evolved so much from the past years.

This is really handy to safely shop online, and one of the points used to verify the credibility of an online store was to check the whois information for the domain.

If you are creating a website as a hobby and prefer to keep your contact information private, then using a whois privacy service is fine.

Finally, if your reasoning for using the privacy protection is the fear of getting spam on that email address buckle up people, make sure you have added whois privacy to your domain to protect yourself from spammers.

What are you opinions on WHOIS privacy? Post your comments below!

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh joins Facebook

sharath — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:31:21 +0000

Prime Minister of India, Mr. Manmohan Singh is not Net-savvy, he does not use cell phone, unlike Obama, who uses a Blackberry but he is on Facebook. . Regular updates, videos of speeches and links to media clippings. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is the latest among India’s to get plugged in the generation to join social networking site Facebook.

Singh’s profile on Facebook is regularly updated and has a picture of him in his trademark blue turban.

Politicians in a newly-wired India are increasingly making use of social networking sites and weblogs to connect with the country’s growing young and computer-literate generation.

The internet celebrates 40 years this week! Young politicians like Rahul Gandhi maintain profiles on Facebook. India’s Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor has a Twitter page and his regular ‘Tweets’ have aroused the curiosity of fellow politicians. In fact the Prime Minister asked me what this is all about… He wanted to know what Twitter was. So there is a lot of curiosity,” reported NDTV.

Happy 40th Birthday, Dear internet!!

sharath — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:44:08 +0000

It all began when only a few were paying attention on September 2, 1969, when 20 people gathered in Kleinrock’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch as two computers passed meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable, 40 years from now.

When they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online.

The internet didn’t become a household word until the ’90s, though, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the web, a subset of the internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers like America Online connected millions of people for the first time.

That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free from regulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or even prohibit experimentation. The free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.

Here is a quick journey of the internet from 1961 – 2008:

1969 | On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network

1972 | Ray Tomlinson brings email to the network, choosing @ as a way to specify email addresses belonging to other systems

1973 | Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway

1974 | Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true internet

1983 | Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ‘.com’, ‘.gov’ and ‘.edu’ comes a year later

1988 | One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers

1990 | Tim Berners- Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely

1993 | Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page

1994 | Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services

1998 | Google forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. US government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN

1999 | Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry

2000 | The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide

2004 | Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook at Harvard University

2005 | Launch of YouTube video-sharing site

2007 | Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access.

World internet population surpasses 250 million in 1999, 500 million in 2002, 1 billion in 2006 & 1.5 billion in 2008. Happy birthday, dear internet!

Bangalore: Find out if your vehicle has any registered Traffic Violations

sharath — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:19:15 +0000

The Bangalore city traffic police have started a new service where you can check if your vehicle has been registered for any traffic violations.

Usually when you break a traffic rule and get caught, the cops give a printed ticket\invoice from their brand new Blackberry which comes with a Bluetooth printer. Here’s how you can find out if you’re vehicle has been registered for any traffic violations:

Go to www.bangaloretrafficpolice.gov.in/BPSFineDetails/BPSFineDetails.aspx
Enter your vehicle number (e.g. KA05-MF-4144)
If you been caught before and been given a ticket you should see your name

This service is also very useful if you’re planning on buying an old\used vehicle… make sure you check if there are any registered complaints and be sure if it has a clean chit from the Bangalore traffic police..

And if you liked this post, to get FREE updates via RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter.

Top 13 Bollywood Celebrities to follow on Twitter

sharath — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:34:18 +0000

Preity zinta is promoting Kings XI punjab, Mallika is talking about the movie hangover, rakhi sawant is all happy about the marriage, ayesha takia is loving all the good things people are saying about her new movie, priyanka is thinking about her brother that’s the synopsis about some top celebs on twitter!! Here is a list of Top 13 Bollywood celebrities on twitter. Follow them if you like them\admire them\whatever

@preityzinta – Preity Zinta
@mallikaLA - Mallika Sherawat
@rakhisawant - Rakhi sawant
@ayeshatakia – Ayesha Takia
@arrahman – AR Rahman
@priyankachopra – Priyanka Chopra
@gulpanag – Gulpanag
@DinoMorea9 – Dino Morea
@MallyaMan – Mallya
@udaychopra – Uday Chopra
@kjohar25 – Karaj johar (our famous K man)
@Akki67 – Akshay kumar
@Kailashkher – kailash kher

And Mallika Sherawatt has got herself verified on twitter… maybe its time we educate them all the celebs about the power of validating and getting a verified twitter account And if you liked this post or if it helped you follow your favorite bollywood celebrities, please follow me on twitter too or subscribe to our feeds.