Great blogs

Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

2008-09-03T23:49:00.003+05:30

One of the best innovations from Google...Awesome

Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

via Google Blogoscoped by Philipp Lenssen on 9/3/08

The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there's now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.

An interesting new feature is Picasa's face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*. Get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the "Try it" button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I'm getting some results.)

Once faces are found, you can switch to the People tab and tag them with names. In my test photos I tagged Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin and others. I then uploaded more photos containing these persons. Google did not automatically tag them; what they do is find the rectangle within the photo containing a face, and then offer suggestions (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect), so you'll end up semi-manually identifying the remaining faces. All in all a useful feature as this lets you group and find your photos by the persons in them, but it would become even more useful if Google were able to automatically assign matches.

Another addition to Picasa Web Albums is a game called "Where in the World?". Here your job is to try to guess where a given snapshot was taken by clicking on a world map. You'll then see the distance to the actual location and get more points the closer your pick. The game looks neat but it would probably be more fun if they'd more often show you pictures for which there's a realistic chance to know the location (e.g. a picture of a famous monument versus a picture of a more general shore scenery). I wonder if Google has any intentions to get back some data for their AI to mine here, but considering the game already knows the location of each given picture, I'm not so sure.

[Thanks Hebbet!]

*Since some time, Google image results can also be restricted to show just faces.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map ... | Comments]

7 Really Awesome Things About Google Chrome

2008-09-03T23:45:00.002+05:30

7 Really Awesome Things About Google Chrome

via Mashable! by Stan Schroeder on 9/3/08

I didn't expect this. I fired up Google's Web browser, Chrome, expecting very little except a stripped down early beta with a plethora of bugs. After playing with it for a while, it's too early to say that I'm blown away, but I must admit that I've stumbled onto some impressive feats which show that the team that built Chrome was intelligent, mature and forward-thinking. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Blazing fast

Chrome actually uses WebKit for rendering Web pages, the same rendering engine as Safari, which is known to be very fast. Put that in a simple, well optimized, stripped down shell and you get the fastest Web browser around. It loads fast, it displays pages fast, and we're talking noticeable differences here, which really makes it a joy to use. Don't just take my word for it, check out some early benchmarks.

2. Chews code like there's no tomorrow

This one goes hand in hand with being fast, but it's a little different. Today, it's not all that important for a browser to render a lot of HTML quickly; browsers are now platforms in which you run applications: two, three, perhaps even a dozen at a time. Therefore, a good browser can handle dynamic content without stuttering and crashing, and from what I've seen, Chrome passes the test with flying colors.

True, I haven't had enough time to test this thoroughly, but the folks over at scriptNode have put together some benchmarks and it seems that Chrome not only handles good code well, it also excels at handling errors.

3. Incognito mode

Click the control icon in the upper right corner of the browser and you'll get the option to open a new tab, a new window, or a new incognito window. Incognito window will fire up without appearing in browser or search history, and it won't leave cookies or any other traces of your activity, except files you've downloaded or bookmarks. Yes, Safari has it, too, but it's a nice jab at Firefox which skipped some similar privacy features in version 3.0.

4. Easy to switch

When you're entering a saturated market with a new product, you can't change everything. You must carefully balance the features you want to blatantly copy with the ones you want to innovate in. I was pleased to see that Google Chrome was built with this in mind; for example, it's easy to switch from Firefox, but it does bring enough novelties to make you stick around. Importing your bookmarks from Firefox is easy and works well; and other details, like keyboard shortcuts, are the same. Therefore, Chrome's learning curve is virtually non-existent; start it up and you'll be browsing as usual in no time.

5. Intelligent start page

Although not completely original (Opera has got a similar approach to quick bookmarking), Chrome's start page is a pleasant surprise. Besides the ubiquitous search bar, it gives you a list of most commonly visited Web pages to fire up quickly. Granted, I've always hated suggestions of that ilk (for example, I've never, ever used the commonly used programs feature in Windows), but here it just works, because the pages you frequently visit really are the ones you want to open first.

6. Has its own task manager

Chrome treats tabbed windows as separate processes. Nice, we've already seen that in IE8, right? But Chrome also has a nifty way to see what's going on: a task manager. Similar to the task manager in Windows, it lets you see which processes are active (inside Chrome), and how much memory, CPU, and network resources they use. Beautiful. You can access it by right clicking Chrome's title bar.

7. Dragging tabs out and back in again

It's a little thing, but it warms my heart. You can drag a tab out of Chrome into a separate window, and you can drag a separate window back into tab bar, where it'll be happily received by Chrome. Stuff like this turns geeks into converts, and Google's dev team knows that.

Feel free to let us know which are your favorite (or least favorite) features of Chrome in the comments!

[Image credit: Google]

---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Google Chrome: The "GBrowser" Comes to Life
Google Chrome a Killer Browser Already (screencast)
Chrome is Not a Windows-Killer

Belief in the moon landing: An experiment

2008-09-03T23:41:00.002+05:30

Belief in the moon landing: An experiment

via The Museum of Hoaxes on 6/6/08

A science teacher posting on the Bad Astronomy forum describes an experiment in which he polled his students to find out how many of them believed humans had walked on the surface of the moon -- before and after watching the Fox TV documentary "Did We Land on the Moon?"

I began by asking my students (9-12th graders taking earth/space honors) the simple question, "Do you believe that humans have walked on the surface of the Moon?". Initial results were 81.0% "Yes", 7.6% "No" and 11.4% "Not sure" (sample size 105 students).
Then I showed them a DVD I have made of the infamous FOX show (thanks to Jim Oberg who helped me land a copy of the video tape when my own was "mysteriously" partially taped over). I converted to DVD so I could knock out the 18 minutes (!) of advertisements and break the segments up into easily accessible chapters. I showed the video completely through without comment and asked the same question. This year, the "after video" results were 50.8% "Yes", 21.3% "No" and 27.9% "Not sure" (sample size 122 students).

So belief in the moon landing dropped by 30% after watching the Fox documentary. Thankfully, he didn't leave his students in a state of disbelief. The next day he showed them a powerpoint presentation rebutting every point made in the show:

I made sure to cover every single topic and then I asked the question a final time. The final results this year were 92.9% "Yes", 2.0% "No" and 5.1% "Not sure" (sample size 99).

It's no wonder so many people believe in bizarre conspiracy theories and the paranormal. They watch all these shows on TV and never hear a reasoned rebuttal from someone who knows what they're talking about.
(Comments)

India has fewer poor people: World Bank

2008-09-03T23:40:00.002+05:30

India has fewer poor people: World Bank

via www.business-standard.com on 8/28/08

India has fewer poor people: World Bank

Bs Reporter / New Delhi August 27, 2008, 0:36 IST

India has brought down the number of people living below $1 a day by 2 percentage points to 24.3 per cent in three years up to 2005, as Asia's third-largest economy accelerated to 7 per cent plus growth in those years, latest data from the World Bank reveal.

In absolute numbers, 9.6 million people came out of poverty between 2002 and 2005, the largest reduction between two consecutive surveys released by the World Bank since 1981.

If $1.25 per day is taken as a benchmark for defining the poverty line, then 4.7 million came out of poverty in this period.

Since the data reported by the World Bank have a time lag of three years, the effect of increase in food and commodity prices — which disproportionately affect the poor — in the last two years is not known.

Also, the World Bank now says it has upwardly adjusted the cost of living in developing countries to $1.25 per day against $1 per day.

The poverty line of $1.25 is the average poverty line found in the poorest 10-20 countries, the World Bank said in a press statement.

The new study suggested the number of people below the poverty line would have increased by 400 million in three years to 1,399.8 million in 2005 (at $1.25 per day), against 1,090.2 million (at $1 per day) in 2002.

If similar comparison were adopted for India, the number of people in poverty would have increased by 179.1 million between 2002 and 2005. In percentage terms, it would be 41.6 per cent as on 2005 as against 26.3 per cent in 2002. The difference between India's own estimate of poverty and the World Bank's one is because of a difference in how the poverty line is calculated.

The World Bank's calculation is based on the average of the poorest countries, whereas India's estimate is based on how much money is required for an individual to have ideal intake of daily food and expenditure on shelter and other necessities.

GAINS IN POVERTY REDUCTION
(Figures in %)	1990	1993	1996	1999	2002	2005
BELOW $1 A DAY
India	33.3	31.1	28.6	27.0	26.3	24.3
World	29.9	26.9	23.5	22.8	20.8	16.1
BELOW $1.25 A DAY
India	51.3	49.4	46.6	44.8	43.9	41.6
World	41.7	39	34.7	33.7	31.1	25.7
BELOW $2 A DAY
India	82.6	81.7	79.8	78.4	77.5	75.6
World	63.1	61.4	58.3	57.0	53.6	47.6

If India's poverty line is translated in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, it is $ 1.02 per day.

"High GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth in India has reduced poverty. However, to achieve a higher rate of poverty reduction, India will also need to address inequalities in opportunities that impede the poor from participating in the growth process," the World Bank said.

File format demysified

2007-05-05T16:28:00.002+05:30

Cross platform developers often encounters some problem with file-formats at some point.This article may give them some clue regarding how to procede.
Unix/dos file formats is determined by the type of end-of-line (EOL)
markers used in text files. Unfortunately,different operating system use different tokens to represent the end of a line of text in a file. For example, the usual line ending token used by software on the Windows platform is a pair of ASCII control characters—carriage return
(CR) and line feed (LF). Unix software, however, just uses the LF character to denote the end of a
line.

Not all of the various tools on these operating systems are prepared to understand files that contain line endings in a format that differs from the native line ending style of the operating system on which they are running. Common results are that Unix programs treat the CR character present in Windows files as a regular character (usually rendered as ^M), and that Windows programs combine all of the lines of a Unix file into one giant line because
no carriage return-linefeed (or CRLF) character combination was found to denote the end of
line.

To convert from dos file system to unix ,use dos2unix utility .For reverse conversion use unix2dos

For recursive conversions use the following one liner in most linux platforms

find . -type f \! -exec dos2unix {} \;

execute this from the top level directory. This will do it recursively in all sub folders.

Fake till you make it!!! Ways to improve your body language...

2007-05-02T18:11:00.001+05:30

Some
of these tips might seem like you are faking something. But fake it til
you make it is a useful way to learn something new. And remember,
feelings work backwards too. If you smile a bit more you will feel
happier. If you sit up straight you will feel more energetic and in
control. If you slow down your movements you’ll feel calmer. Your
feelings will actually reinforce your new behaviours and feelings of
weirdness will dissipate.

In
the beginning easy it’s to exaggerate your body language. You might sit
with your legs almost ridiculously far apart or sit up straight in a
tense pose all the time. That’s ok. And people aren’t looking as much
as you think, they are worrying about their own problems. Just play
around a bit, practice and monitor yourself to find a comfortable
balance.

1. Don’t cross your arms or legs – You
have probably already heard you shouldn’t cross your arms as it might
make you seem defensive or guarded. This goes for your legs too. Keep
your arms and legs open.

2. Have eye contact, but don’t stare
– If there are several people you are talking to, give them all some
eye contact to create a better connection and see if they are
listening. Keeping too much eye-contact might creep people out. Giving
no eye-contact might make you seem insecure. If you are not used to
keeping eye-contact it might feel a little hard or scary in the
beginning but keep working on it and you’ll get used to it.

3. Don’t be afraid to take up some space
– Taking up space by for example sitting or standing with your legs
apart a bit signals self-confidence and that you are comfortable in
your own skin.

4. Relax your shoulders
– When you feel tense it’s easily winds up as tension in your
shoulders. They might move up and forward a bit. Try to relax. Try to
loosen up by shaking the shoulders a bit and move them back slightly.

5. Nod when they are talking – nod once in a while to signal that you are listening. But don’t overdo it and peck like Woody Woodpecker.

6. Don’t slouch, sit up straight – but in a relaxed way, not in a too tense manner.

7. Lean, but not too much – If
you want to show that you are interested in what someone is saying,
lean toward the person talking. If you want to show that you’re
confident in yourself and relaxed lean back a bit. But don’t lean in
too much or you might seem needy and desperate for some approval. Or
lean back too much or you might seem arrogant and distant.

8. Smile and laugh
– lighten up, don’t take yourself too seriously. Relax a bit, smile and
laugh when someone says something funny. People will be a lot more
inclined to listen to you if you seem to be a positive person. But
don’t be the first to laugh at your own jokes, it makes you seem
nervous and needy. Smile when you are introduced to someone but don’t
keep a smile plastered on your face, you’ll seem insincere.

9. Don’t touch your face – it might make you seem nervous and can be distracting for the listeners or the people in the conversation.

10. Keep you head up. Don’t
keep your eyes on the ground, it might make you seem insecure and a bit
lost. Keep your head up straight and your eyes towards the horizon.

11. Slow down a bit
– this goes for many things. Walking slower not only makes you seem
more calm and confident, it will also make you feel less stressed. If
someone addresses you, don’t snap you’re neck in their direction, turn
it a bit more slowly instead.

12. Don’t fidget
– try to avoid, phase out or transform fidgety movement and nervous
ticks such as shaking your leg or tapping your fingers against the
table rapidly. You’ll seem nervous and fidgeting can be a distracting
when you try to get something across. Declutter your movements if you
are all over the place. Try to relax, slow down and focus your
movements.

13. Use your hands more confidently
– instead of fidgeting with your hands and scratching your face use
them to communicate what you are trying to say. Use your hands to
describe something or to add weight to a point you are trying to make.
But don’t use them to much or it might become distracting. And don’t
let your hands flail around, use them with some control.

14. Lower your drink
– don’t hold your drink in front of your chest. In fact, don’t hold
anything in front of your heart as it will make you seem guarded and
distant. Lower it and hold it beside your leg instead.

15. Realise where you spine ends
– many people (including me until recently) might sit or stand with a
straight back in a good posture. However, they might think that the
spine ends where the neck begins and therefore crane the neck forward
in a Montgomery Burns-pose. Your spine ends in the back of your head. Keep you whole spine straight and aligned for better posture.

16. Don’t stand too close
–one of the things we learned from Seinfeld is that everybody gets
weirded out by a close-talker. Let people have their personal space,
don’t invade it.

17. Mirror
- Often when you get along with a person, when the two of you get a
good connection, you will start to mirror each other unconsciously.
That means that you mirror the other person’s body language a bit. To
make the connection better you can try a bit of proactive mirroring. If
he leans forward, you might lean forward. If she holds her hands on her
thighs, you might do the same. But don’t react instantly and don’t
mirror every change in body language. Then weirdness will ensue.

18. Keep a good attitude
– last but not least, keep a positive, open and relaxed attitude. How
you feel will come through in your body language and can make a major
difference. For information on how make yourself feel better read 10 ways to change how you feel and for relaxation try A very simple way to feel relaxed for 24 hours.

You
can change your body language but as all new habits it takes a while.
Especially things like keeping you head up might take time to correct
if you have spent thousands of days looking at your feet. And if you
try and change to many things at once it might become confusing and
feel overwhelming.

Take
a couple of these body language bits to work on every day for three to
four weeks. By then they should have developed into new habits and
something you’ll do without even thinking about it. If not, keep on
until it sticks. Then take another couple of things you’d like to
change and work on them.

For more info http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2006/10/27/18-ways-to-improve-your-body-language/

Some useful things to remember about the gcc compiler :MIT tips

2007-04-23T22:18:00.001+05:30

BACKGROUND: THE COMPILATION PROCESS:

Before getting into the options, a little background. When you
compile a program as we've been doing, "gcc" checks the source code
for errors and creates a binary object file of that code (if no errors
exist). It then calls the linker to link your code's object file with
other pre-compiled object files residing in libraries. These linked
object binaries are saved as your newly compiled program. The options
to "gcc" dictate the way in which this process is performed. For example,
you could tell "gcc" to just create the object file and skip the
linking, such as when developing large programs or building your own
libraries -- how to do this is outside the scope of this class.

All of the options of the gcc command are explained in the
"man" pages. Type "man gcc" at the Athena prompt and
the (huge) list of options will be displayed.

OPTIONS IMPORTANT IN 10.001:

The gcc options that are important for 10.001 are as follows:

where

Examples of the options "-I", and "-L" are given below in the
description of "gcnr." The description gives an example of "-l", too.
I explain "-o" and "-l" here.

-Wall: tells the compiler to implement 'all' Warning options.
Warnings are diagnostic messages that report constructions which
are not inherently erroneous but which are risky or suggest
there may have been an error. Very useful for debugging code.
-ansi: tells the compiler to implement the ANSI language option.
This turns off certain "features" of GCC which are incompatible
with the ANSI standard.
-pedantic: used in conjunction with -ansi, this tells the compiler to
be adhere strictly to the ANSI standard, rejecting any code which
is not compliant.
-o: tells the compiler to save the compiled
program under the name . So, typing
"gcc myfile.c -o myfile.x" will take the source code
of file "myfile.c" and create program "myfile.x" rather
than the default program "a.out".
-l: tells the linker to search a standard list of directories
for the library, which is actually a file named
"lib.a". The linker then uses this file as if
it had been specified precisely by name.
The directories searched include several standard system
directories plus any that you specify with "-L".

EXAMPLES FROM gcnr:

An example of using the above options is the little file named "gcnr",
which we use to compile programs that use Numerical Recipes in C
functions. The file "gcnr" is a one-line Unix script that issues the
following command:

(Note that the above is a long command and may word wrap in your browser.)
The numbers in this list mark each part of the command:

/mit/cygnus/`machtype`bin/gcc
-I/mit/recipes/src/recipes_c-ansi/include
-L/mit/recipes/`machtype`lib
$*
-lrecipes_c-ansi
-lm
|& grep -v nrutil

where

Tells Unix where to find the gcc program (`machtype`
is needed to make sure that the correct version of gcc
is used for the machine type you are using).
Tells gcc that it should look in the Num. Rec. in C
include directory to find nr.h and nrutil.h when it
encounters #include "nr.h" and #include "nrutil.h" in your code.
Tells gcc to look in the Num. Rec. in C library directory to
find the pre-compiled binaries for all Num. Rec. in C
functions used in your code.
Is the Unix script notation for the command line argument to
the script. In other words, when you type "gcnr myfile.c",
"myfile.c" will be substituted in place of "$*".
Specifies the name of the library of pre-compiled binaries for
all Num. Rec. in C functions. It resides in the directory mentioned
under (4). This option tells the linker to link in the
Num. Rec. in C functions when building your program.
Tells the linker to link in the math library. The name of the math
library (i.e., file of pre-compiled binaries for all math functions)
is "libm.a". (See explanation of "-l" above.)
Pushes the output through a parsing program called grep. This looks
through the output for lines containing "nrutil" and ignores them.
This removes a number of error messages that do not prevent the
executable from functioning.

CONCLUSION:

There are MANY options to gcc which can be used to make programming
easier and faster. These are only a few of the more common ones. As
mentioned above, the man pages for gcc list them all.

Google Print Hack

2007-04-23T20:11:00.001+05:30

Hacking Google Print || kuro5hin.org

Introduction

Many people are interested in how Google works, and Google is mostly interested in keeping it a secret. I'm going to tell you a few things I've learned about Google by playing around with their software . It's not terribly advanced, but I think it's interesting nonetheless. The first thing I will cover is Google's cookie, and then I will explain how I used this information to exploit Google Print.

Google's Cookie

Most web browsers allow small text files, called cookies, to be stored on behalf of web servers ... this allows a persistent state to be associated with a user. After a cookie is created, it will be sent back to the web server every time you request a page (but only when you request a page from the server that originally requested the cookie). For example, when you set your SafeSearch preferences on the Google web site it stores your choice in the Google cookie. Then, whenever you request a page from Google it can see what you set your preference to earlier and use it without having to ask you again. If you delete your cookie, you'll just get a new cookie the next time you visit ... but you'll have to set your preference again. Pretty useful, huh?

Google does some more interesting things with its cookie, though. Some of them are hard to figure out. The first thing to notice is that your cookie will store some preferences locally, like SafeSearch, because Google probably doesn't care if you see that information (it won't bother you to see that they are storing your preferences). Otherwise, they probably have a server side system that uses the following characteristics of the cookie to store more .. ahem .. personalized information about you.

Here is an example of a Google cookie:

GPREF=ID=26b2149fe108b391:TM=1109736400:LM=1109736400:S=pbbDWyL8tVmJrILc

You can see that after "GPREF=", there are name-value pairs ID, TM, LM, and S (separated by colons). In this case, our ID is 26b2149fe108b391. This is a (hopefully) unique ID, and it is most likely generated randomly. Google probably doesn't worry about "collisions" (two users getting the same ID) because this is a 16-digit hexadecimal number, and there are 16^16 = 18446744073709551616 = 18.44674 x 10^18 possible IDs that could be assigned. Even if everyone on the planet used Google, the chance of collision would be very low. Google's cookie has an expiration date of January 17, 2038. Essentially, unless you purposely clear your cookies, format your hard drive, etc. this means it will be with you for a very long time.

The TM value is a timestamp of the moment (to the second) that Google generated your cookie. Here it is 1109736400, measured in seconds since January 1, 1970, or March 1, 2005 at 10:06:40 PM (CST).

LM seems unimportant because it is a timestamp of when the user last changed their preferences. Many other name-value pairs can appear, but the only others that I have seen represent more preferences. Having the unique ID means they are most definitely storing *something* on the server side, but don't worry it's probably only analyzed in aggregate unless you are one of Sergey's ex-girlfriends :-p.

Now, S is the most interesting value in the cookie. Some have hypothesized that it is a checksum of some sort. It could be a hash, for instance. In my experience, the signature only varies with different ID and/or TM values. Thus, Google is assured that THEY generated the cookie at a given time by doing a simple calculation of the hash. But relying on a pure hash would be security through obscurity, i.e. Google would basically be relying on the secrecy of the hash function. Instead, I think that Google probably uses a digital signature algorithm of some kind to generate it. So, maybe S stands for signature. It appears that the signature is 16 characters long, case-sensitive, and alpha-numeric only, giving (10+26+26)^16 possibilities or roughly the equivalent of a 93-bit hash (not incredibly strong by today's standards, but definitely a good chunk of hash). I tried my luck at guessing a hash function and mapping parts to base 62 numbers, but I just don't think that they are stupid enough to do it that way. Sucks for me, because I'm no Bruce Schneier when it comes to cryptography. My instinct is that an attack against the signature would be futile.

Now, the payoff. Well, after another explanation that is :) What are some reasons that Google needs to know you by an ID and when your cookie was created?

Google Print

Google Print URLs are of the form:

http://print.google.com/print?id=VvBRboW2icUC&pg=1&sig=hoLj_9Ot12vG6mSjZ vK547vbP3E

Anything look familiar here? Another signature! Maybe this one is generated in a similar manner (then again, maybe not ... they are probably different teams). The ID in the URL points to the book that you are viewing, and PG points to the page number. Now click the "Next Page" arrow. You'll get a URL like:

http://print.google.com/print?id=VvBRboW2icUC&lpg=1&pg=2&sig=gBBbI6T 0FzHxgVeJJQKQqmZ_MNk

The signature changes when you change pages, and LPG points to the page you started from! Eventually, you will not be able to advance through the pages any more. Google wants to limit you on the amount of pages you can scroll just so you can't read an entire book for free (that would make the publishers very unhappy, and here's my sad face for it :(). Try removing LPG and going to the resulting URL. You'll get a "page not found". So, apparently, the signature depends on the page you entered on, the page you are at, and the book you are viewing. This allows Google to impose their "page lookahead/lookbehind" limit.

You may see a search box on the side of the Google Print page to search within the book. Funny enough, you can use this to search for page numbers and skip through parts of the book. However, it will eventually hit a hard limit based on your unique ID ... i.e. you've viewed too many pages overall in this book; nothing to see here, please move along. Google probably already knows you can skip around pages like this because the search box doesn't appear unless your cookie is 24 hours old or more! Try it, if you have the search box now delete your cookie and refresh the page. The box will disappear! If you saved some of the URLs for the search results of the search-in-book feature, they will also not work! Wait 24 hours or so and try again. Now it works. Here's where the timestamped cookie comes to play. This way, if a user hits the hard limit they cannot clear their cookie and come back instantaneously to leech more pages.

So recently I wrote some software to grab and store up a bunch of cookies, keep them for more than 24 hours, and then automate searching for pages by this method. If I wanted to view page 100, the software would search for it and attempt to extract the image with a regular expression. If that doesn't work, it will search for page 99 and extract the "next page" link to get to page 100. It will continue doing this for page 101, 98, and 102 until it finds the correct page. Whenever a cookie would hit the hard limit, I'd replace it with a new cookie from the queue. By grabbing the "next" and "previous" links automatically in this "inductive" fashion and using the search for skipping, I could view an entire book on Google Print with one click every time. I later modified the software to spit out a PDF of the book. I used simple components like GoogleCookie (cookie with accessible properties), GoogleCookieOven (queue with "baking time", i.e. it only pops when the head of the queue is old enough to get the ability to search), and GoogleCookieBaker (thread that keeps the oven full of baking cookies by querying Google for new ones when the number drops below a certain threshold). Theoretically, if you set the cookie limit to a high enough number, the new cookies being fed in will have aged enough by the time you need them. This is a lot simpler than breaking an unknown digital signature algorithm, but of course that solution *would* be a lot more elegant. Oh well.

I sent a link to this software (web-based) to Google, and I actually got a response! I think they actually changed up some things because the software broke now and then, but it seemed to work consistently after many algorithm improvements. 