Mind.random()

This is a site hosted by Google for educators.  As of today, Ajax and Distributed computing tutorials are available.

Time is in IST

On the other hand, at the same timestamp, look at my del.icio.us.

A few days back i posted a few  Google search hacks. But i recently got this two-page cheat sheet for Google. I am sure it will useful to everybody.

Download Google cheat sheet

Did you notice this feature of gmail. Google had silently added this feature into our mail ids. With his Mail Fetcher feature, you can just fetch mails from other mail-ids (from yahoo, msn or whatever) and just view it in your gmail. You just need to know the POP settings of them.

Google quotes that this feature is still to get functional. Just wait for a few more days.

Wish you had that Sign up link in Gmail instead of asking your friends to give an invitation? Very soon that will happen. Google has already given up its invite-only policy in certain countries.What i see is that US, Australia, Newzealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, some European countries and Brazil are already availing this offer.

And Google terms this move as a step in the “ongoing growth strategy”. As if they had not grown enough !!!

Here is the list of popular google search operators.

site: Usage “jsf site: java.sun.com” — will return results for jsf from java.sun.com alone

filetype: Usage “linux filetype: ppt” — will return powerpoint presentations on the topic linux. Try with any filetype.

info: Usage “java info” — the first result will be a Wiki page.

“xxx money in xxx money” Usage : “20 singapore money in indian rupee” / “20 Malaysian money in US money”

time Usage “time India” — gives the current time

define Usage “define convergence” — gives the dictionary meaning of the word.

Thirsty still?? Visit search operators home page.

We know that Open Document Format or simply ODF is a widely used XML based document representation format to which Sun is the key contributor. OpenOffice, KOffice and a lot other office suites stores its documents in any one of the following OpenDocument formats by default

• odt for word processing (text) documents
• ods for spreadsheets
• odp for presentations
• odg for graphics
• odf for formula, mathematical equations

Though, these suites support the proprietory and popular .doc, .xls, .ppt formats, Microsoft had, for a long time gave a deaf ear to what happened on the “other” side. It never even cared to support these formats for a long time.

But after a biiiiiiigggggggggggggg annoucement by the State of Massachusetts that “we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access”, Microsoft started financing the ODF plugin for Word last year (under BSD license, of course). A lot of third parties, even before Microsoft, announced that they are developing plugins for ODF in Office course). A lot of third parties, even before Microsoft, announced that they are developing plugins for ODF in Office environment.

All this happened last year. So, why this blog now? The popular open document format has just been approved as an ISO standard. And the Open Document Foundation Inc has annouced complete development of ODF plugins for Office suite. With it, every 32-bit Windows user can use ODF. They are planning to distribute the plugin bundled with the Google Pack. Oops !!! (Google always gives me that heart attack).

Now that we see a huge migration of windows users to Linux flavours, this plugin surely gives an extended life to MS Office. But then this should really have given Gates a taste of his bitter future.

Edwards, co-founder and president of Open Document Foundation Inc, says that he’s now waiting for the  “Microsoft ODF plugin to show up. Microsoft has said that if the demand is out there, they will produce it. If Bill Gates holds up a finger to judge the wind for ODF demand today, he’ll get his arm ripped off.”

In a patent filing Google has revealed that it is looking into entering the physical advertising industry. The patent filing itself alludes to placing adverts on billboards, with the primary innovation being that they’re interactive and connected to the internet — what, you didn’t really believe that Google would go in for static ads did you?
read more…