I recently addressed this question in a presentation to prospective Computer Engineers at the University of Florida.
Continue reading ‘What is Web 2.0?’

Have you ever wanted to add a specialty Google search box for your website that only found mp3, xls, doc, or other files of specific extensions? Well using a little JavaScript and tweaking Google's code, it's very simple to add a specialty Google search box to your website.

Here's an example of a search box that only finds mp3 files.
Try searching for Daft Punk

Amazing, so how did I do this? Here's the original JavaScript from Google to add a standard web search box to your website:

Here's a little JavaScript you need to find only mp3 files. Notice, I am just using the "intitle" and "-" syntax to narrow the search results.

In the above code, document.gs.query.value is just what the user originally typed.
Here's the revised Google search code that implements the above JavaScript to make a specialty Google search happen:

If you wanted to make some money, you could modify Google's Adsense Search Box to search for only mp3, mp4, mpeg, etc... However, that would violate the Google's Adsense Terms of Service.

Flixya is a start-up video sharing service, much like YouTube and Google Video. However, unlike its competitors, Flixya offers users incentives to share and upload videos: a Rewards Program and Revenue Sharing Program. The Revenue Sharing program offers a 50/50 split of all revenue earned from Adsense, Google's Pay-Per-Click advertising program. The more video links you provide to Flixya, the greater your chances of making PPC revenue on the site.
Google's Program Policies, however, state the following rules regarding incentives,

Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads (ads=referals too). This includes encouraging users to click on the ads ... as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads.

Google's Policy also states the following about labeling ads,

Publishers may not label the ads with text other than "sponsored links" or "advertisements.

And for purposes of these program policies, “referral buttons are considered to be 'Google ads'". Nevertheless, before and after a user signs up for an account with Flixya, they are shown several advertisements that direct them to sign up for an account with Google Adsense with an incentive to make money.
It seems readily apparent that instructing users to "Sign up for Google's Ads to Share In Flixya's Revenue Sharing Program" and labeling referral ads with the phrase "Sign Up" are blatant violations of Adsense TOS. Adsense users should also be concerned that using Flixya's Revenue Sharing Program and viewing videos on Flixya will cause an increase in page impressions with Google Adsense, which is most definately a violation of Google's TOS. This will lead to a user's Adsense account being suspended.

This past weekend saw the 9th Annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition in San Diego. Twenty-one collegiate teams pitted against each other to complete three tasks: finding a docking station, inspecting a pipeline, and surfacing in a recovery zone. The University of Florida's SubjuGator Team retained the top title for the second consecutive year in this prestigious international competition sponsored by the United States Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). The University of Florida (UF) defeated teams from MIT, Cornell University, as well as international contenders from Japan and Canada.

Before the AUV Final Round, Dr. Eric Schwartz, advisor of Team SubjuGator, updates UF students via e-mail from San Diego, "We are doing pretty well so far...We are the only team to dock with the docking station. It is apparent that ETS (Ecole de Technologie Superieure, from Canada) is our biggest threat...There are several other teams with very well built subs that could sneak up and beat us, but I believe the [SubjuGator] team is feeling good about our chances." And Dr. Schwartz was right. Team members Carlo Francis, James Greco, Kevin Claycomb, Matthew Koenn, Sean Cohen, Sean Matthews, Michael Gregg, Jacob Collumns, Gene Shokes, Greg Cieslewski, and Adam Barnett walked away victorious.

The SubjuGator is designed to operate underwater at depths in excess of 15 feet and weighs about 40 lbs. The mission behavior of SubjuGator is controlled by a network of I2C modules. This system includes sensors, motor controllers, more than 10 microcontrollers, and vision systems. A single-board Pentium M based computer running Microsoft Windows XP Embedded provides processing power for the vision system and advanced signal processing.

Hawking and Hertog call their theory 'top-down' cosmology, because instead of looking for some fundamental set of initial physical laws under which our Universe unfolded, it starts 'at the top', with what we see today, and works backwards to see what the initial set of possibilities might have been. In effect the present 'selects' the past.

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TheLinuxStore.ca has started a new project. A project that will give away free Linux disks of your favorite distribution (SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Gentoo, Debian, Knoppix). Have a look, give feedback, donate to the cause, and request a disk.

According to the latest news from auctionBytes,

eBay is banning sellers from requesting payment through Google Checkout. The online auction giant updated its Safe Payments policy this week to add Google's new payment service, Google Checkout to its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay.

From eBay's standpoint, they are probably doing the right thing. Why not try to quash Google before Google destroys eBay's online monopoly? Why should eBay spend more money trying to compete in the marketplace with Google, when they could just ban them?

The answer is simple: because it hurts the consumer. Instead of making the shopping experience better for the online community, eBay is only looking out for eBay. Instead of offering choice and welcoming competition in the marketplace, eBay is bent on quashing the competition. Here's a reality check, eBay: You can't quash Google. Now you've made yourself vulnerable to a company who has enough capital to waste on legal fees to file an anti-trust lawsuit. Your stock and public image is going to suffer.

Currently, eBay controls the entire online auction experience and controls who participates in it. They can automatically suspend users' PayPal account if their eBay account has been suspended and vice-versa. Therefore, having another popular payment service, such as Google Checkout, puts a huge thorn into eBay's business model. With a real marketplace competitor, they would have to spend more money on customer service (an area in which PayPal & eBay are significantly lacking), or else they will lose a vast number of PayPal users to Google.

Smaller companies, such as StormPay, have been incapable of shelling out the necessary legal fees to stop eBay's underhanded tactics of banning them from their marketplace. Now, Google, who's motto has always been "Do No Evil" will hopefully step up to the plate and put eBay in its place. When that day comes, it will be a victory for the consumer.

Thought your Windows password was safe? Well, think again. As processors are getting faster and more powerful, password cracking is becoming much easier. Ophcrack is a free, open source hash cracker (similar to brute force cracking but uses precomputed tables). Ophcrack uses RainbowTables, an implementation of Philippe Oechslin's faster time-memory trade-off technique, to compute hash tables and crack your password in about 30 minutes (depending on your processor).