That Reinvention Of The Web Thing Opera Was Talking About? It’s Called Opera Unite

We told you last week that browser maker Opera was generating quite some buzz by being secretive about their plans to ‘reinvent the web’. Well, the company this morning unveiled what it was referring to: technology that essentially turns every computer running the Opera browser into a full-fledged Web server. Behold Opera Unite.

You can use Opera Unite to share documents, music, photos, videos, or use it to run websites or even chat rooms without third-party requirements. The company extended the collaborative technology to a platform that comes with a set of APIs, encouraging developers to create their own applications (known as Opera Unite services) on top of it, directly linking people’s personal computers together, no matter which OS they are running and without the need to download additional software. The company recognizes that the current services are fairly basic, but says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

We’ll take a deeper dive in Opera Unite real soon, but I’m impressed with what it looks like on the surface. This is a really good idea at its core, and I encourage you to read Opera product analyst Lawrence Eng’s blog post on the subject for more background and an idea of where Opera is heading with the concept. A small excerpt:

“Currently, most of us contribute content to the Web (for example by putting our personal information on social networking sites, uploading photos to Flickr, or maybe publishing blog posts), but we don’t contribute to its fabric — the underlying infrastructure that defines the online landscape that we inhabit.

Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations — who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart. We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet.”

Source : www.techcrunch.com

Read Web Articles in a Beautiful & Distraction Free Environment

Distraction-free writing tools transform your cluttered browser in such a fashion that you can focus on writing - everything else on the desktop screen stays hidden so you have nothing else to do but write.

Now something that applies the same concept to reading websites - it removes the clutter from web pages so it becomes easy to focus on reading.

This is possible through Readability - a brilliant browser bookmarklet that can format any web page on the fly without reloading the page.

Readability removes all the distracting elements (like sidebars, graphics, navigation, etc) from a web page and makes reading more enjoyable by changing the background colors, font styles and page margins to match that of an eBook, Novel or a newspaper - these are all documents that are designed for reading purpose only.

Technically, this is like switching the stylesheet of a site but without installing extensions or using any geeky hacks. And while the converted format may sometime resemble a printable version of that page, Readability isn’t using the default print stylesheet as it did turn up a few unexpected results at certain times.

Here are some sample reading layouts as rendered by Readability - it’s a bookmarklet and not an add-on so should work in all browsers including the latest Google Chrome and Safari. Don’t miss it.

How to display your web site logo on the address bar and in the favorites list

Want to make your web site standout in crowded favorites lists in browsers and address bars? How about displaying your logo next to links to your site.

First, you have to create a logo for your site; a very tiny logo to be specific. The size of the logo should be 16x16 pixels and it should be saved as a Windows icon file (logo.ico for example).

Method 1

This is the easiest method to implement and it will work regardless of the particular page on your site users choose to add to their favorites list. Don't worry if you don't have access to your web site root; take a look at the next method.

If you have access to the root of your web site, simply save your icon file as "favicon.ico" there. For example, if your web site is "www.fredyjohn.com", your icon file should be available at "www.fredyjohn.com/favicon.ico". The web browser will look for favicon.ico whenever your site is added to the favorites list and if it is found at the root of your web site, the icon will appear next to the link to your site.

Method 2

If you don't have access to the root of your web site, you have to add the following tag to your web page so that the browser will know where to look for your icon. Unlike before, this time you can save the icon under any name ending with ".ico" We'll use the name "logo.ico" and assume that your web site is under the directory "~your_directory".

<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON"
       HREF="/~your_directory/logo.ico">

Listing #1 : HTML code. Download logo.htm (0.2 KB).

NOTE:
Above tag should be inserted in-between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

By the way, you can specify multiple logos for multiple pages using the second method. Simply save your icons using unique names, such as logo1.ico, logo2.ico, logo3.ico for example, and replace "logo.ico" in the above HTML code with the name of the icon you want to use for any particular page.

Note  For BLOGGER : -

This is very simple, all you have to do is open blogger, then you go to your blog->layout/Template->Edit HTML->Anywhere under head and /head, put this code in it.

link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/~somelocation~/favicon.ico"

A cool fact from gmail which i noticed only today..

1) When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses - one is the regular @gmail.com while the second email address has @googlemail.com in the domain.

That means if your email address in Gmail is something likebillgates@gmail.com, all email messages that are sent tobillgates@googlemail.com will also be delivered to your own Gmail account. That’s two for the price of one.

2) Gmail allows only one registration for any given username. Once you
sign up for a particular username, any dot or capitalization variations
are made permanently unavailable for new registration. If you created yourusername@gmail.com, no one can ever register your.username@gmail.com, or Your.user.name@gmail.com.
Furthermore, because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within
usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won't change
the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com, your.username@gmail.com, and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your inbox, and only yours.

If you're homerjsimpson@gmail.com, no one owns Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com, except for you. Sending mail to Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com is the same as sending mail to homerjsimpson@gmail.com, or even HOMERJSIMPSON@GMAIL.COM.

NOTE :- For security reasons, when you log in to Gmail, you must enter any dots that were originally defined as part of your username.

Convert Scanned PDF Documents to Text with Google OCR

There are two types of PDF documents – those created by sending Office files, images, etc. to an Acrobat like PDF printer and those created by scanning physical paper like pages of a book, legal documents, etc.

Google could always index PDF documents created by conversion but now they also recognize text from PDFs that are generated by scanning paper documents using OCR software.

This is a scanned document and this is the html text view of that same document converted by Google.

Since scanned PDFs are nothing but images, don’t be surprised if Google adds a "search by text" function to their Image Search engine similar to OneNote or EverNote. That will surely be huge.

Convert Scanned PDFs to Text

Now if you have bunch of scanned PDF files on your hard drive and no OCR software, here’s what you can do to convert them into recognizable text.

Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links to all the PDF files. Wait for the Google bots to spider your stuff.

Once done, type the query "site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf" to see the PDF documents as HTML.

Keystrokes can be recovered remotely

Wired keyboards, like those found on desktop PCs, emit
electromagnetic waves that can be read remotely, according two Swiss
researchers.

Researchers Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini of the Swiss
Security and Cryptography Laboratory at LASEC/EPFL, were able to
recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters
(about 65 feet), even through walls, simply by reading the
electromagnetic emanations of the peripheral device. The experiments
focused on wired keyboards attached to a computer either by PS/2 or USB
connections.

In two videos, Vuagnoux demonstrates the attacks.

In the first video, he shows how only the keyboard was monitored
in the attack. He removed the monitor and the tower. He then attached a
laptop, but powered it by battery to reduce other sources of
electromagnetic emanation from the test site. Then Vuagnoux types in
"Trust no one" on the wired keyboard. A minute later, a program reading
the electromagnetic emanations displays the text string "trust no one"
on the testing system.

In a second video, a battery-powered laptop with a wired
keyboard attached via a PS/2 connection was placed in a second room
several feet away and obscured by a wall. In the original room, the
testing system, using a high powered antenna, was able to recover the
password, in this case "password," and display the word.

Both authors conclude that "a vulnerability on these devices will
definitely kill the security of any computer or ATM." They further
recommend that wired keyboards should not be used to transmit users'
names and passwords.

Sound arcane? The U.S. government doesn't think so. Preventing such a scenario is one of the goals behind a project called "Tempest,"
an acronym for Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from
Emanating Spurious Transmissions. While many think Tempest is an active
eavesdropping operation, it's really a set of government standards
designed to dampen electronic emissions escaping government offices.
Hardware makers are using these standards to create equipment that
doesn't emit strong electronic signals.

A full paper on these observations is under peer review and will be published soon, according to the authors.

Tweaker alert: Greasemonkey coming to Chrome

 

Greasemonkey, a Firefox customization tool popular among high-powered Web surfers, is coming to Google Chrome browser.

Aaron Boodman, a Greasemonkey author and a Google programmer who's active in the Gears project, contributed Greasemonkey support to Chrome, and the Google Operating System blog picked up on the change.

At this stage, enabling Greasemonkey requires people to use a cutting-edge developer version of the open-source browser and to launch it with a "--enable-greasemonkey" option set.

Greasemonkey lets people run scripts that modify Web page appearance. For example, back when Google's Gmail service lacked a "delete" button, people could add one by installing the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox then downloading a particular customization script.

Google wants to improve the Greasemonkey support, for example by confining particular Greasemonkey scripts to particular Web pages and letting the browser update its scripts as it's running.