Unlike traditional search engine results, the Wolfram output is structured. This means that processing output from it is easy and is extremely useful in large scan data analysis. So an API interface from Wolfram Alpha was eagerly awaited and it was released last week. But the pricing of the API is one of the most ridiculous I have seen in a while. The following is the pricing for personal use (for hobbyists etc.).

What?  $60 dollars for accessing Wolfram API for 1000 times?  I can’t believe that someone in Wolfram could be so retarded to charge almost one dollar for 10  hobbyist requests for the API.  Then you look at companies like Google and think – Man, these are angels from heaven!

Now checkout the terms of use section of API which is worse than many of the free online services(you thought paying through your noise would give you better TOS?). Some examples,

• Wolfram|Alpha reserves the right to terminate this Agreement or discontinue the Wolfram|Alpha API or any portion or feature thereof for any or no reason and at any time without liability to You.
• You are required to provide a hyperlink to www.WolframAlpha.com on every page with Results. All hyperlinks associated with data provided by Wolfram|Alpha must navigate directly to Wolfram|Alpha.
• utilize the Wolfram|Alpha API in association with, or as a component of, any website that in the sole discretion of Wolfram|Alpha is determined to be obscene or otherwise inappropriate.

Here is what I think is reasonable pricing,

• Up to 5000 requests – free
• Up to 25,000 requests – $50
• Up to 100,000 requests – $150
• Up to 500,000 requests – $500
• Additional request pricing – Below $2 per 1000 requests

So here is the one liner verdict – Wolfram Alpha API pricing sucks.

But recently I realized that auto upgrade is not always good. I have been using the SyntaxHighlighter plugin from Erik on my blog and one day it showed that a new upgrade is available. I went ahead and updated the plugin and realized that it no longer worked. The problem was that the new version of SyntaxHighlighter named “SyntaxHighlighter Evolved” was a different version created by someone named Viper007Bond. But since he had the URL http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/, the plugin system of WordPress was identifying it as an upgrade of Erik’s plugin!

So I had two options left. Either update all my posts with the new plugin’s conventions or rollback to the old version by Erik. I prefered the second method(changing posts was too much work).

So if you are a plugin writer, ensure that you have the official WordPress extend entry for your plugin also. Otherwise people can hijack your plugin using auto-upgrade feature!

This is a short film which won the people’s choice awards on the theme food, taste and hunger. Directed by Ferdinand Dimadura, this film reminds me that there are still a lot of people in the world for whom food is still a luxury. The film also reminds us that over 25,000 people die every day due to hunger.

If you steal $100 from someone, you get enough jail sentence to repent all your sins. But if you steal trillions of dollars, you get millions of dollars in bonus as well! – first law of AIG.

The latest version available as of November 11th 2008 is V4.19 and the ISO file is less than 20MB. The distribution is a "live cd" and you can boot into the OS by burning it into a CD. Since LoseThos is a pure 64bit OS, it will work only on those systems or virtual machines which support 64bit. For example, Linux qemu emulator is not supported.

What makes LoseThos interesting is that the whole of the OS is written by Terry over a period of 5 years. It has over 100,000 lines of code. Programmers may find LoseThos as an interesting toy! It allows complete access to all the hardware and there is minimal layering.

LoseThos Hardware Requirements

• IBM PC Compatible (EM64T)
• VGA Graphics
• Minimum 256MB RAM and a maximum of 128GB RAM!
• CD-ROM but no SCSI
• ATA/SATA hard drives
• Gameport Joystick/RS232 serial port but no USB

LoseThos is currently just a hobby OS which can be fun for programmers. But who knows, it might even inspire someone to create an exceptional  64 bit open source operating system in future!

Don’t waste your time trying to get this running on Vmware Workstation. After trying for a few minutes I realized that LoseThos uses non standard stuff and hence Vmware cannot support it.  In fact I was also unable to get this running on my latest machine which is Intel Quad core CPU (Q9300).

1. Xvid – DivX video driver – Xvid is an open source implementation of DivX standard on Windows. It can be used for both encoding and decoding DivX files. The best thing of course is that Xvid is free and there is NO adware packaged along with it.  Once Xvid is installed, video players will automatically use it whenever a DivX file is opened.

2. AC3Filter – DivX audio driver – A large number of DivX movies are encoded with AC3 and DTS soundtracks. In order to play them you need a custom audio decoder. AC3Filter once installed will automatically decode AC3 and DTS soundtracks embedded in a DivX movie file. So if you are not hearing any audio while playing a DivX movie, don’t panic just install AC3Filter.

3. VLC Media Player – DivX video player – Why should you use a separate media player like VLC when you have Windows media player? Well, VLC Player has advanced features for DivX playback. For example, it is possible to download a subtitle file for your movie and then configure it in VLC player. The subtitle files have the extension .srt (you can search in Google for the subtitle file of a movie). Following screenshot shows how to configure a subtitle file in VLC media player. You can also control the appearance of subtitles.

Now you are all set to play DivX movies and videos on your Windows machine!

The Google Chrome initial installer is under 500kb and rest of the installation is done by downloading other components from the initial installer. On my 2mbps broadband line it took under 5 minutes for complete installation. The configuration took just the following step,

The Chrome user interface is simple, elegant and extremely fast. It is very unobtrusive, just what an ideal browser should look like.

Google Chrome is built from ground up and hence is able to address a lot of issues plaguing current browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Here is a summary of major Chrome features,

1. Single text field for URL and Search – Type in the URL if you know it, else search the Web. The default search engine obviously is Google, but you can easily change it.

2. Browser tabs as separate processes – Instead of threads, Google Chrome uses separate processes and hence provides greater control of each tab and preventing possible crash of the entire browser due to a problem in a Web page in a single tab.

3. Enhanced developer features – This includes JavaScript debugging and control features, a task manager and a JavaScript console. The JavaScript console even provides auto completion. I guess this will be an area where we can find tremendous improvements in coming versions. Firefox Firebug, beware!

Why is Google going after the Browser market?

The majority of Google revenue comes from search and there is a risk that browsers such as Internet Explorer will try to divert users from it. Already IE sets Windows live as default search engine. The best way to fight this is to fight Internet Explorer itself!

Secondly an advanced browser provides an ability to roll out advanced features to Google products. Google can provide a degraded behavior to other browser users for their advanced product features. This enables Google spreadsheet and document editor applications to compete with Microsoft Office etc.  Hence Microsoft can expect intense competition in this area.

My Verdict

I think it is too early to say how Google Chrome will evolve. But one thing is sure, it will soon take up a substantial pie of the browser market. Also I think in the long run, Chrome has the potential to host complex Web applications taking over a lot functionality currently provided by operating system and desktop applications. And for the Web developers, it may become a very good development tool for advanced Ajax based applications.

Further Resources

• Download Google Chrome
• Get Google Chrome Comic (Very Informative)
• Complete Google Chrome feature list

So what is new in Fedora 9 (Sulphur) ?

1. GNOME 2.22 – New version of GNOME brings a number of features which includes performance improvements. UI improvements include an enhanced world clock with multiple time zone displays. This version also includes an updated display manager with features such as power management on login screen.

2. Linux Kernel 2.6.25 – Latest Kernel support means a number of core enhancements such as improved virtualization support, CPU "group scheduling", USB authorization and new wireless configuration interface.

3. Persistent Live USB Support – Live USB support is not something new. Knoppix was one of the early distributions which could run from a Live CD. As USB capacity increased, live distributions started appearing on it. But what makes Fedora 9 unique is that now Live USB can store user preferences! This means that Live USB can be used a sort of portable Fedora 9 machine! Wherever you go, you can plugin in the USB, work on the Fedora 9 and then save data on it!

4. Seamless Upgrade – Fedora 9 features automated and seamless upgrade similar to Windows update. The latest preupgrade software can even be used to upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8!

5. Latest Software (Firefox 3 beta 5, Pidgin, Gimp etc.) – Fedora 9 Sulphur features all the latest software including Firefox 3. It also includes Pidgin, gEDIT, GIMP, Perl 5.10.0 etc.

Other new stuff in Fedora 9 include ext4 support, improved virtual machine support, bluetooth enhancements, PackageIt front-end to yum, Font improvements and built in support for encrypted file system.

Fedora  9 screenshot,

Further Resources

• Download Fedora 9 Sulphur
• Summary of Fedora 9 features

AVG free offers fast scanning since spyware/antivirus engines are integrated. Another good thing is that it has a low load on the system.  It also comes with safe search – each time you search online, Safe Search checks the results on the fly to give you an immediate idea of which websites are safe to visit.

The limitations of the free version are,

• No real time link scanning.
• This cannot be installed on Windows server versions.
• No technical support

AVG anti-virus free 8.0 can be downloaded from here.

Websense is reporting that spammers have finally managed to write captcha decoding programs for Hotmail which takes only few seconds to decode the characters! The success rate is over 10% and is good enough for spammers.  Here is how spammers make money from this,

1. Spammer releases the automatic signup bot as a virus.

2. An unprotected machine on the Internet gets infected by this bot virus.

3. Bot creates multiple hotmail accounts from victim’s machine using captcha decoding logic.

4. Bot sends advertising messages to multiple mail addresses using the newly created hotmail account.

5. When millions for spam messages are sent, fairly good percentage of them brings business and spammer makes money through affiliate cut.

Whoever wrote this must be pretty good since the Hotmail captcha is pretty difficult interpret even for a human. For example, consider the captach (displayed on the right side) I got when I tried to signup to Hotmail!

Weak captchas have caused havoc earlier. For example, PhpBB forum software captcha was so weak that was hacked in a few days. So if you have a popular forum which is running on PhpBB 2.0, you will soon find majority of new users are from automated signups! It was complicated by the fact that a signed up account can have a live link in the profile.

I think one way to handle the bots will be to have very big set of different captcha styles which will reduce the success rate to below 0.01%. Another way will be to introduce new type of captcha every day so that any decoding program will become obsolete in a day!

But unfortunately if you take an account on rapidshare.com, it WON’T WORK on rapidshare.de and vice versa! Even the account pricing is different between these two sites. For example, rapidshare.de charges 9.90 euro for one month’s service while rapidshare.com charges 6.99 euro for one month.

So before you signup to rapidshare, decide which one you need. If you are looking for a lot of old files, rapidshare.de account is the one you need. But rapidshare.com is where all the new files are added!

Rapidshare claims that they have 220gigabit/s bandwidth and can host upto 5 petabytes of data!

Due to obvious reasons(rapidshare doesn’t support file meta data to avoid copyright issues), rapidshare doesn’t provide any search facility. But there are a couple of third party sites which allows rapidshare search. These sites store the meta data related to rapidshare uploaded files separately. Following are some of the tools you can use to search rapidshare file database.

Rapidshare search engine – This is a web crawler which collects rapidshare links. Not perfect, but useful enough for most searches. Supports ajax search.

RapidLibrary – This is much more precise than rapidshare search engine. Files are indexed from user submissions and also from web crawling.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers is available now in two versions: a stand-alone version for Windows® XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server® 2003; and an enhanced version built to take advantage of the Windows Vista® platform. Support for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is also planned once it reaches final release in early 2008.

Internet Explorer 8 gives more importance to standards compliance and interoperability. Now backward compatibility is taking a back seat. This means that if your site is not standards compliant, it may not render correctly in IE8!! It is possible to switch IE8 to IE7 mode, but it is not on by default.

IE8 aims for full compliance to CSS 2.1 standards and will be working towards HTML 5 standard. IE8 currently passes Acid2 test in default mode.

Major new features in IE8

Activities – These are a set of contextual services provided by browser on any Webpage. Using the context menu, user can send or receive information from external websites.  For example, if you want to add a page to Digg, you can just right click and select "Add to Digg" option. Cool, eh?

Webslices – Portions of a webpage can be marked as Web slices. It is possible for the browser user to subscribe to content inside a slice. Once subscribed it will appear on favorites bar. Whenever content in that slice change, you can preview it without leaving the current page you are viewing! Many popular sites such as Facebook and Ebay has already started using Webslices!

Domain highlighting in address bar – IE8 will highlight the owning domain of the web page you are viewing. This in future should bring down the incidents of phishing by fake sites.

You can download IE 8 beta 1 from here.

Grails boost programmer productivity by eliminating configuration effort using the "coding by convention" paradigm.

Grails eliminates the need for downloading and configuring multiple sets of applications for starting development of a Java Web application. Grails provides a single package which contains test application server, ORM tool (Hibernate) etc. So in a nutshell, Grails is J2EE on steroids.

Books on Groovy

In order to be an expert on Grails, you need to learn Groovy. Groovy is a scripting language based on Java. Following are some of the good books available in Groovy.

Groovy in Action – This takes a detailed look at the Java scripting language Groovy. This is the favorite book on Groovy.

Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java- Groovy recipes one programming problem at a time and explores how it can be done in Groovy. This is a must have book if you want to be quickly productive in Groovy. This book also looks at Grails.

Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer – This book is not yet released. This is intended for new programmers and will contain both Groovy fundamentals and advanced Groovy topics such as meta programming, unit testing and domain specific language creation.

Books on Grails

The Definitive Guide to Grails (Definitive Guide) – This is a comprehensive reference to Grails. It takes you through the complete Grails development lifecycle such as project configuration and automatic ORM mapping. This also contains a quick introduction to Groovy.

Getting Started with Grails – This book is available as a free Grails book download (PDF). This is a quick introduction to Grails platform. It takes you through the framework step by step. It also explores how a Web application is turned into concrete code from abstract code.

From the author’s site,

10xwhois has support for keyboard shortcuts and you can also save your domain searches in a favorite list. This tool is a Java web application and is hosted on a dedicated server. It is designed to handle high volume requests and is probably the fastest domain search service on internet.

I am still working on a couple of enhancements such as domain suggest and 10xwhois widgets…

This tool also is a demonstration of the effectiveness of Ajax Web paradigm.