This is the sky of the Earth. The vault of heaven, which in reality envelops us in a dark velvet sphere spotted with stars, is seen here projected onto a plane.

This improbable 360-degree panoramic image, covering the whole of the vault of heaven, embodies thus the cosmic landscape in which our small blue planet is immersed.

I have gone mad looking at the videos and pictures this guy has, SERGE BURNIER’s GALLERY.

This guy paints himself, no kidding, no trick photography.. he just paints himself.

Check the last two pics.. they are amazing..

ISRO , Indian space & research organization has launched Bhuvan, a satellite mapping tool similar to Google Earth and Wikimapia on 12th August 2009. Bhuvan gives you an easy way to experience, explore and visualize IRS images over Indian region.

Bhuvan is a geoportal that provides medium to high resolution satellite imagery of  virtually the entire India over the internet. You can “fly” around using mouse and keyboard on a simple desktop computer with virtual globe in front draped with IRS images over Indian region. Many other features are built in, including 3D terrain and information on many thematic data.

Bhuvan is a free web based image portal. Most Image visualization programs are very expensive and complex. Bhuvan provides a fast and friendly way to look at IRS satellite data and thematic information in geographic context, which is invaluable for management, planning and visualization.

“With Bhuvan we will be able to produce very local information which will be specific to only to our own country. This information available from this mapping system will be useful in addressing very local problems like floods, famines, infrastructure development, education and much more,” said ISRO chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair.

Multi-resolution images from multi-sensor IRS satellites of India is seamlessly depicted through the Bhuvan web portal by enabling a common man to zoom into specific area of interest at high resolution. Bhuvan brings a whole lot  of uniqueness in understanding our own natural resources whilst presenting beautiful images and thematic vectors generated from varieties of geospatial information. Bhuvan will also attempt to bring out the importance of multi-temporal data and to highlight the changes taking place to our natural resources, which will serve as a general awareness on our changing planet.  There are lot more special value added services which will be enabled onto the web portal in due course of time and each one of those services are going to be unique to preserving and conserving our precious natural resources through public participation.  We are sure the common man will get rich benefits from these Indian geospatial data services in days to come.

Bhuvan can take closer pictures of the Indian Subcontinent as compared to the Google Earth. Bhuvan is capable of taking a zoom level of up to 10 meters, while Google Earth features a zoom level of up to 200 meters.

Unlike Google Earth, however the Bhuvan application will not be downloadable and will not allow users to host content in the near future. It is not yet ready for Mac OS and Linux. But, at the moment Bhuvan can run only on windows system and is optimised for IE 6. or higher with 1280×1024 resolution.

One will be able to see the following data using Bhuvan:

• Satellite imagery (LISS III , LISS IV along with metadata and  Multi- temporal Data from OCM & AWiFS)
• Value added information (NADAMS – National Agricultural Drought Monitoring System), Output of flood studies for certain areas
• Thematic information  (Wastelands, Soils, watershed,water resources related maps)
• Base layers ( administrative boundaries, transport layers, water bodies, etc)
• Census information
• Metadata

Advanced functionalities to be provided in future versions

• Urban Design Tools (to build roads, junctions and traffic lights in an urban setting)
• Contour map ( Displays a colorized terrain map and contour lines)
• Terrain profile ( Displays the terrain elevation profile along a path)
• Draw tools (Creates simples markers, free hand lines, urban designs)
• Navigation map (to jump to and view locations in the 3D India)

It is mandatory to register to use Bhuvan. The basic version of Bhuvan is free. Once you register and you login, you will be asked to download the Bhuvan plug-in. Accept the installation of the plug-in and you are ready to use the full features of Bhuvan.

4th annual e-book fair is going on World eBook Fair from July 4 to August 4. About 2 million pdf books are available for free download.

Project Gutenberg has been joined by The World Public Library and Digital Pulp Publishing, Internet Archive, along with Jim Baen [R.I.P.], in the creation of The World eBook Fair which hopes to bring you, and everyone else, a downloadable collection of 1/2 million eBooks in October, in honor of, what else, International Book Fair Month. Most of these eBooks are to be given away free of charge, but as requested by readers of The First World eBook Fair, more modern, and thus commercial, eBooks are to be a feature of The Second World eBook Fair.

This is a very good opportunity to download as many e-Books as you want.

Our goal is to provide Free public access for a month to 2 Million eBooks. During the rest of the year you may continue to download your selection of about 500,000 PDF eBooks by joining the World Public Library. Annual membership is only $8.95 per year.

The first half of 2009 is over and after your summer vacation, you might want to start gearing up for the new distro releases. Once again open source proved that developers collaborating all over the world deliver constant platform improvement. Let’s see what they have in store for us this time.

USB 3.0

This new bus specification promises a speed of 5 Gigabits per second, about 10 times faster than USB 2.0. And the first operating system to get a USB 3.0 driver is GNU/Linux, specifically, kernel 2.6.31 (scheduled for September).

Ubuntu to support Google Android applications

With a user base of roughly 2 million and more than 20 Android-powered  devices coming this year, Google’s mobile operating system may become a force to be reckoned with. Developers will embrace the platform and given time, Android’s Market will contain hundreds of thousands of applications. Well, at least that is the direction in which the Ubuntu dev team is thinking. They plan to introduce an easy way to port Android apps over to their flagship Linux distribution. While most applications will be useless on a desktop machine, there might be some apps that, with their small size and modest memory consumption, might do a certain task much better than its Ubuntu-native equivalent.

Source: Internetling

Secunia reports of a new, unpatched, and highly critical security hole in Firefox 3.5 (possibly in other versions, too) that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the victim’s computer.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error when processing JavaScript code handling; for example, one could use simple HTML “font” tags to cause a memory corruption and then run arbitrary code.

Until Mozilla addresses this vulnerability, here’s a temporary fix: Type about:config in Firefox‘ address bar, and set “javascript.options.jit.content” to “false.”

Read the details about this security issue here.

Highly Critical Security Vulnerability Found in Firefox 3.5

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Now you can. NASA now gives anyone the opportunity to send their name to Mars. Just enter your name, country and zipcode into the form, and your name – along with many others – will be included in a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover which will be heading to Mars in 2011.I just did and this is the “Certificate of Participation”.

But there is one problem. There is no data validation of the form. First of all, there’s no captcha, and the form accepts nearly anything, even very long entries. Check out some cool examples here and here, and hurry up if you really want your name to be on the Mars, because I suspect that the form might stop accepting new entries soon.

Google Voice, previously called Grand Central, is rolling out the first mobile apps for the service this evening. The main function of the apps is to make it easier to use your Google Voice phone number by automatically routing outbound calls through Google and to the recipient. We first mentioned they were coming last month when we broke the news that Google would start letting users port their phone numbers over to the Voice product sometime this year.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life. As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers.

Google Voice users get a phone number that should be the only number you give out to people. You route calls to mobile, home and other phones based on who’s calling and when.

Two apps are being released this morning, for Blackberry and Android phones. The Android app is the most complete and takes over the native dialer, address book and call log. Users won’t be bothered with accidentally dialing numbers through the device phone number. The Blackberry app is less integrated, accessing only the native address book, and uses its own dialer. Users can’t simply go into the call log and return missed calls. They need to go back to the address book and select Google Voice to make the call. Still, it solves a big problem.

The apps also allow users to access the core features of Google Voice. Listen to/read voicemails and text messages (all voicemails are automatically transcribed as well), access call history, send SMS messages and place international calls at low rates.

Google Voice Apps For Android And Blackberry Are Here

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Google announced on their blog that they’re releasing an operating system: Google Chrome OS. While the company already has a mobile operating system in Android (Android), this new one will be based off of Chrome (Chrome), Google’s web browser.

According to Google, the open source OS will available later next year and is primarily targeted at netbooks to start. From the Google blog:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”

It is designed to be a lightweight system, just like the Chrome browser. Google promised that the user interface will be minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips.

“The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.”

Clearly though, Google’s setting the stage for a major battle with Microsoft. Just as Microsoft is trying to break Google’s stranglehold on the search engine market, Google may be trying to do the same with the Windows-controlled market.