ThansCorner

¡ʎɐqǝ uo pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ ʎnq ı ǝɯıʇ ƃuı…ɟ ʇsɐן ǝɥʇ sı sıɥʇ

It’s stupid but cute.  In the extended alphabet sets of, there is a vast selection of letters.  Among these are those that can be used to model normal english characters upside-down.  This site has a script for converting text and a key of each character’s representation.

How to type upside down text and letters in HTML

Ever wonder what’s going on in a particular place?  I’m home for a few weeks over Christmas but thought it’d be interesting to see what’s going on back on St. Olaf campus in Northfield, MN.  This mashup from UUorld.com shows real-time tweets from any location in the world via live ajax requests.

Word on the Tweet

This comes from Techflock.  There are a bunch of tricks available in gmail for finding certain types of messages such as unread, those from a specific user, date, label, or those accompanied by attachments.

Enjoy!
There are a few keywords that you can use in the search box at the top of the page

from:
to:
subject:
label:
after:
before:
in:
is:
has:

For the above, you could provide the following options as below

from:

from: {email address}
from: {name}

to:

to : {email address}
to : {name}

subject:

subject: {subject}

after:

after: {date in any known format} – For example : March 25, 10/10/2006, etc

before:

before: {date in any known format} – For example : March 25, 10/10/2006, etc

in:

in: inbox (Searches Inbox)
in: chat (Searches Chat)
in: drafts (Searches Drafts)
in: spam (Searches spam)
in: trash (Searches Trash)
in: anywhere (Searches All the Mail including Trash & Spam)
is:

is: starred (Searches Starred Mail)
is: sent (Searches Sent Mail)
is:read (Searches Read Mail)
is:unread (Searches Unread Mail)

has:

has:attachment (Checks for mail with Attachment)

label:

label: {label_name} (Checks in mail with Label name)

Other general options include

{search_keyword} and – {search_keyword} which means search for {search_keyword} or doesn’t have {search_keyword} in your mail
Example:

Find all mail which was addressed to techflock before 19th Dec 2006 and After 1st November 2006 and has networking but not basic in the mail with IMP as label

Your search query would be

before:2006/12/19 after:2006/11/01 to:techflock label:IMP in:anywhere networking -basic

The age of Web 2.0 has been dominating more clearly with every successfully integrated web app out there. Facebook apps dominate hours of time in the lives of people from all walks of life. The iPhone’s webapp integration is familiar to way more people than it should be, and high-speed internet has steadily grown in accessibility allowing more and more powerful web projects that are more application than web site.

Bungee Connect aims to provide a powerful portal to the design of highly integrated and exciting applications on the web. Now, I’ve just recently started an internship with the company Bungee Lab so I’m somewhat biased. That bias comes, however, in the form only of one who has had the opportunity to really see what this is all about.

The builder requires no downloaded software, relying on a browser-based interface. Developers can build AJAX-driven applications without the complicated and unpleasant detail management of the low-level message-passing involved.

In my opinion, however, the biggest feature offered by this development environment is its focus on integration with existing web services. Bungee Connect provides interfaces for handling the low-level communication between a Bungee app and other information sources on the web. This allows developers to automate the integrate of information like Google Calendar events, local weather details, RSS feeds or Facebook friend details without sorting through the nasty details of coding these connections by hand.

This is an entirely new way of approaching web design that opens doors to powerful applications. The novelty comes with a relatively steep learning curve, but the Bungee Connect team is committed to helping developers overcome difficulties along the way. Anyone is welcome to register and try out the service and I highly recommend taking advantage of this opportunity. The internet is an exciting place to be these days.

Bungee Connect

In an effort to create a model of evolutionary processes researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have turned to robots. The robots were placed in an “environment” with a “food” and a “poison” station. Robots were given two minutes to find the food resource while successfully avoiding the poison. Robots that failed this task were removed from the population while robots that succeeded had their programming merged with other successful robots to create new programming routines.

In under 500 generations the robots evolved a method of communication using lights. Lights often signaled that the food resource had been found, but in trials where the robots were set to compete with each other (where only the top performers of a subset of the population were allowed to mate their programming with another robot and continue into the next generation) some of the robots developed an ability to trick the others by using the light signals to tell the others that the poison was food instead. Even more surprising, the robots were less likely to practice deception when communicating with robots that had programming more similar to their own, effectively contributing to the survival of kin.

More on this at:
The Biological Research Information Center

Well I’m a bit slow on this one, but I finally noticed that mozilla labs has been working on the project previously known as Webrunner. For those who don’t know, Webrunner was a ‘browser’ of sorts that allows a web application (gmail, google reader, meebo, etc.) to be run as if it were a desktop application. More here (Read: Mozilla WebRunner 0.7).

Prism makes strides to simplify the process of harnessing this web application -> desktop application capability. Once installed, opening Prism prompts for a web url and options to create Desktop, Quick Launch, or Start Menu icons. This new version also gives the users options allowing them to display a location bar, status messages, and navigation keys, should they so desire.

Mozilla Labs: Prism

Lifehacker features a pretty interesting list of ways to find information about anyone online. Anything from employment info, to social network connections, to press mentions, to phone numbers and addresses for an individual could be turned up with a quick search of these sites.

I see this as a good chance to check out my online image and to screen what others can see about me. Employers and contacts do check these kind of things to get a feel for what has done or what he or she is like. This is definitely something to take a look at.

• Pipl – personal sites, social networks, press releases, et.
• Zabasearch – phone numbers, addresses (often both unlisted and listed)
• Wink – Many social networking sites, including Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and Xanga
• Zoominfo – employment history and job titles
• Facebook – there are so many people on facebook.  This one goes without saying
• Who is this Person Firefox Extension – brings up people search engines from the right-click menu within firefox when clicking on a person’s name
• Google search tricks:

* Enclose the first and last name of the person you’re searching for in quotes when you enter it into the search box (like “John Smith”).
* Include other relevant words, like the person’s profession, employer, location, or screen name, too (like banker or Austin, Texas.)
* If the person you’re searching for is likely to appear on a particular web site–like a school–search only that site using the site:URL operator (like site:ucla.edu “John Smith”).
* To look up people by face, search for them on Google Images to get a quick visual–especially useful for people with common names, or to determine the gender of a name you never heard before.

Lifehacker: How to Track Anyone Down Online

Say you’re working along in firefox on a research project, or christmas shopping, or just a bunch of blogs and emails in various tabs. Chances are, you’ve mistakenly closed a tab without meaning to and regetted it.

Quick Firefox tip: The key combingation “Control-Shift-T” will restore the most recently closed tab.

Here are a few rules that would go a long way to clean things up:

1. Ask yourself: If I ran across this post without knowing the author, would I care?
2. Is this adding value to the wealth of information or the organization of the web?
3. No personal, isolated stories included simply for the sake of telling
4. Did some thought and effort go into the composition and actual text of this entry?
5. Are any scientific or concrete claims/statistics cited? You may have a great point, but if it’s based on stats that, for all I know, you arbitrarily dreamed up yourself, I don’t care.
6. Make connections between your article and other related or available info online. Nothing exists in isolation and every story benefits from some context. Even quote related material from other sources.
7. Copying someone else’s work, however, without a citation is not okay. Period.
8. Avoid personal isolated stories or anecdotes about personal life.
9. When commenting on the contributions of someone else, do so in a constructive manner. Far too often do we experience a battle of words between conflicting voices, which does nothing for the readership but polarize and interrupt valuable discussion.
10. Finally, seek out stories from less popular sources. There is so much interesting stuff out there that gets lost in the shuffle. These things deserve a little extra publicity and will break up the monotony of alternating links to Lifehacker and Engadget.

Consider each of your contributions not as a soapbox from which to rant about trivial things in your own life, or selfish goals, but rather a contribution for the benefit of others around you. Try not to pollute this thing we all depend on and love so much.

There are a few classes of web pages on the web:

1. Those from which I can glean some value from, as an anonymous visitor, and
2. Those about which I couldn’t really care less, essentially consisting of a glorified journal entry by someone, somewhere, who assumes the rest of us care.

The web is the “wild, wild west” of information; a haven for free speech and expression as an open medium for the exploration and sharing of ideas and knowledge…

…But come on people. Those billions of “articles” from category 2 are hurting the greater good and dragging us all down into the shady realm of shoddy writing.

If you want a centralized place for friends to catch up on your recent activities, that’s fine. Just don’t publish to directories, and remove yourself from google. Believe it or not, most of us don’t actually care about your fender-bender this afternoon or the lousy guy you just spent the evening with.

We need an internet filter designed to cut through the crap and intercept the masses of junk floating around on the web before it can distract us from what we’re actually seeking.

The team working on the StupidFilter have a good start on this problem in the context of comments:

…an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in
written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or
similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam
detection engines.

Drop a note in the comments with any ideas on how to clean this all up.