One day I had a dream. I was getting bugged every time I wrote a blog post, every time I sent an email, every time I wanted to host an image online. I had to search for a perfect image host. Photobucket was cool, but required signing in. Tinypic was also good, but I was bugged by the heavy pages, and short image life span. Other image hosts either prevented hotlinking, or were too slow and sluggish. At last, I ended up making my own image host under my own server.

One day I had this dream. I so wanted an image host which was quick, displayed minimal ads, respected my time, allowed embedding in blogs, did not require a hundred fields to get started…

And one day, my dream was realised. Ladies and gentlemen, put your eyes together forrrrr…

fumpr

Fumpr, which claims to be the world’s fastest photo storage, loads in .046 seconds. It has a logo, a file upload field, a button, two huge buttons, a small banner and some text. Its as simple as browse, open, upload, and you get URLs for different purposes (link to share with friends, embed code for forums, blogs etc.)

Fumpr in action! (this image hosted at Fumpr too!)

I tried it out, and I’m fascinated by the performance! Uploading images in no longer a pain! Your images are stored for ever. And the file size limit is a generous 7.5 MB. Your images also remain private - no one will be able to see them unless you share the URL.

Nice combination eh? Fumpr team, if you’re reading this, a few suggestions -

• Multiple image upload
• Firefox plugin
• Wordpress plugin
• Possibly personal galleries?

Waiting to see more innovations from the Fumpr team I recommend that you give it a try Thank you Fumpr!

Technorati Tags: fumpr, image hosting, fast image hosting, worlds fastest image hosting, images, photo hosting, photo storage, photos

Hello there dear pursuer!

I’m kind of nostalgic right now, so I’ll start of in the traditional grade 12 letter writing style…

I’m writing this letter blog to inform you that Spread Firefox, the Mozilla Firefox website, is organising a Download Day in order to achieve a world record by having the maximum number of people download Firefox 3 on that day, and to request you to participate in the same.

Mozilla aims to have 5 million downloads in a single day, when the first stable version of Firefox 3 is completed. Though the exact date is not known, it is expected to be sometime in June 2008. You can pledge your support, and your download, at the Download Day website. The Mozilla team will inform you via email about the exact date of the event. By participating in the event, you will not only be part of a world record, but you’ll also help make the web, and your computer, a safer and secure place. If you’re a bit hyperactive, and if you don’t have much activities to poke your head in to, you can also take up the cause in your school/college/office/locality and make a bash of the entire event (hey, yet another reason to have beer! ) . If you’re on Facebook, go ahead and add the event to your calendar! Mozilla is venturing in to fields yet unraveled through Firefox 3, which boasts of a lot more secure and safer system and interface. (see more below)

I once again hope that you will Pledge your support for this programme, and help make the open source effort a huge success!    

Yours faithfully,    Mohan K.

Well, yes, that a lot more balderdash. But coming back to the point of the post, this is awesome oppurtunity to support the Mozilla Firefox movement. And of course, if you’re not a Firefox user, this is a splendid time to switch!

Why should you choose Firefox 3? Tristan Nitot says it all!

Ten reasons to choose Firefox 3 over your obsolete browser

Safer browsing

• 1 - Proven security track record, with more frequent, transparent updates, so that you use a safer browser
• 2 - malware protection to be protected against unwanted downloads such as viruses and trojan horses

Better browsing, with thousands of improvements

• 3 - Awesome bar, so that you can find places you’ve been before with a couple of keystrokes
• 4 - "Save on exit" so that when you launch Firefox, you’re immediately ready to surf, with last windows and tabs open
• 5 - Remember passwords without a dialog box, so that you decide to save the password after you’ve logged-in
• 6 - New download manager, users can pause a download and resume it later, with a search box to easily retrieve previous downloads
• 7 - Customizable: change the look and feel (themes) and add features (extensions) to Firefox through the built-in add-ons manager. More than 5,000 community-built extensions are available for free!

Better performance

• 8 - Fastest on complex Web applications, such as GMail so you are more comfortable, even on old machines
• 9 - Uses less memory than any other browser, so you’ll get more mileage out of your computer
• 10 - Moving the Web forward by supporting advanced Web standards so that the Web keeps evolving and benefits users in the long term.

Hey hold it! I know it sounds cool, but hold on buddy! Don’t download the beta yet… (damn, I just let slip that there is a beta download option! ) Try to hold off until the Download Day, so that you can contribute to creating history!

Talking about history, its time for me to vamoose and be history for the time being, so adios amigo! I’ll catch in a short while, with my next radically interesting (boring) blog post

Technorati Tags: firefox, firefox 3, firefox3, spread firefox, download day, firefox download day, world record, firefox download, firefox world record

Hi all,
There has been a mail circulating with the title “must see slideshow ….world is ending” and the mail body goes like this -

As per Nostradamus world will end in 2012 and the start of the end is march 2008, look at the slide show to unreveal the future events. click on the link below and login with your gmail.
http://www.freewebs.com/venkateshshenoi/index.html
regards

Do not click on the link

Do not provide your email id or password in the fields mention in the site, if at all you open the site

This is a phishing attempt against your Google account. It looks like the popular Google owned social networking website Orkut and asks for your Google account id and password to log in. Even the mail says “login with your gmail”. Once you enter your email and password, you are redirected to a page which looks like the Orkut-About Us page. And the information you provide (email and password) is sent to this guy’s email address.

Since I whole heartedly disagree with such stupid, hopeless and desperate phishing attempts, I hereby declare this phisher’s email address for public abuse

The email id of this phisher is kart_willshire@yahoo.com

This can be obtained by viewing the page source code.

Feel free to hurl abuses at him Also hoping that a few thousand spam bots will gather his email address from here.

Anyway, I’ve already reported this site to a few anti-phishing directories, and Google. Hopefully, his site will be removed in a couple of days. But until then, please spread this message. Stumble and Digg

Technorati Tags: phishing, google phishing, google account, hacking, phishing attempt, must see, slideshow, world ending, nostradamus

Hello all,

A week ago, Wordpress released a patched version of version 2.3, which included a couple of security patches. Its highly recommended that you update to Wordpress 2.3.2 if you’re running on 2.3.1.

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

Go to the Wordpress blog announcing the release for more information. To download, go to the Wordpress download page. Additionally, you can also view the list of fixed bugs, and changes introduced from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2.

Since this is a security release, its highly recommended that you update to the latest version. You might find the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin useful

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress upgrade, security release, wordpress automatic upgrade, wordpress 2.3

Hello all,

I found this rather curious little thing while I was browsing about a week back. I was searching for something in Google, and it was something rather hard to find, so I thought of searching for it in Google Groups and News. So I scrolled to the top of the Google search page, where the little links to Google Images Search, Google News Search, Google Scholar Search and other Google utility searches were displayed.

To my surprise, there was a link to Orkut(Orkut is the social networking website owned by Google)! This particular link took me to an Orkut search page for what I searched. I was logged in to Orkut at that time, and thats why it showed me the search page. When I logged out, and searched, and clicked Orkut again, the usual log in page appeared.

But the interesting point is that, Google either thinks that Orkut has useful material, or it wants to drive traffic to its Social Networking site. It is most probably the latter, since most of the content on Orkut are either highly personal (and useless for a 3rd person, unless he’s studying customer psychology) or extremely spammy. Most of the communities I’ve been to so far, barring a single one on Indian stock exchange updates, are notoriously spam filled, thus presenting nothing search-worthy.

Then we have to question - why is Google going so orkutty?  A few of my observations -

• Information contained in Orkut is highly useless to any person searching for something conrete
• Orkut communities are extremely spam filled - thus leading to incorrect information
• Orkut communities harbour many illegal activities, like hacking/phising attempts
• Thus, presenting Orkut search as an option in Google search destroys the search engine’s credibility by providing highly incorrect search results.
• Google, by putting in the Orkut link, is trying to get more visitors to sign up at Orkut, thereby providing more income to Google

So finally, we have to ask a few questions… Is Google compromising on search quality to drive forward its products? Isn’t Google thus creating an unfair advantage for Orkut over other social networking websites? Isn’t Google misleading people to click on the Orkut search link, and thus making them sign up?

Unfortunately, we do not have answers. Hopefully, a Googler will see this post, and send me a rather flighty email But until then folks, ciao, take care

Technorati Tags: orkut, orkut search, google, google search, decreasing google, google standards, orkut information, google news