Information Entropy of Your Browser and hence your online model

Your Browser is one of your identity card when you are online.
Information Entropy is a quantity depicting the information contained in the given data. Higher the multiplicity, higher the Entropy, better you are hidden in the population. The case is reverse if you want to stand out in the mass.
See some basics of Information Entropy in wikipedia here...

I found this nice article which enumerates the information theoretic basis applied to internet identity...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/primer-information-theory-and-privacy

Using such theories, your uniqueness can be determined. Just like your fingerprint.
Click on the following link to see how trackable you are...
http://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes

For my case, it says:

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.21 bits of identifying information.

Now, relate it to the personally identifiable  info that we put online.
This is quite striking and revealing on how the information we put online makes us more and more uniquely available to the web. I wonder what my online model would look like as stored in Google or Amazon.
Google Model: Given his online presence, what could be his next online purchase?
Amazon Model: Given his book browsing histories and buying habits, what could be his next online purchase?
  
No wonder how serving ads is going to be personally tuned in the near future (For instance, in the movie iROBOT, as Will Smith enters the supermarket, the billboard sign changes which was already personalized for him). That should not be too far :)

Side note:
I dont think that Facebook has deployed this strategy yet. It still displays yahoo/hotmail style fixed ads.  Given all the info available with Facebook, it could be huge!!! They should work on it instead of playing with privacy policy or similar controversial items.

Google Pages Collapse into Google Sites

No kidding!
Googlepages are really going to go!!!

I am terrified by the fact that I had many things on googlepages being hosted as free place. They will all be gone soon!!!
Template components of bloggers and scripts... 
I liked it better than any other place.
:(
They are migrating it to googlesites
I have tried Gooogle sites.
Google Sites, for me,  is not very good as compared to googlepages. With the scripts disabled and fixed templates, I am not sure what is google doing with google sites.

Contest to Win from, Buzz Aldrin, the Moon Man!

. What name did MTV originally give to the Video Music Award statue ‘The Moonman’?
2. What was Buzz’s mother’s maiden name?
3. How many months will it take for the Aldrin Mars Cycler to reach Mars?

If you know the answer and if you are lucky, you  can win  Nike 6.0 Buzz Aldrin Rocket Hero Mavrk Mid 2 shoes.
Head on to...
http://buzzaldrin.com/community/buzzs-newsletter/contests/
 

Local Trends in Twitter: wohooo!

Twitter has no rival in setting the trend of public journalism.
Set your location and get the local trends in twitter.
Here is more...
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/01/now-trending-local-trends.html

Follow Bill Gates on twitter

http://twitter.com/billgates

His first tweet:
"Hello World." Hard at work on my foundation letter - publishing on 1/25. 11:59 AM Jan 19th from web

The twitter account is "verified" with >300K followers.

I hope he does not quit it.


Billgates on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Bill-Gates/502040841

I would say he should create fan page instead of personal page. The first reason he had quit Facebook was unwanted "Friend" invites.

Get updates by Google Reader for news site with no feed

Few weeks back we had conversation in Nepali Blogger's community started by aakar that Nepali News web sites are not publishing the Feed to make people visit their websites and get some hits on their ads or something like that.

One of my favorite News Site Nagarik News has feed... but its little weird. Displays only two recent posts.
http://www.nagariknews.com/index.php?format=feed&type=rss

This problem can now be overcome by the use of Google Reader. Google Reader is a nice tool by Google which can bring you the recent changes made in the site; even if it does not have RSS/Feed by making the "Google Feed".

I have not tried it yet, I am trying the following (as suggested in the reference link below):
I will enter

http://www.nagariknews.com/all-news.html
into the feed subscription of Google Reader, and see if it really works.

Few Screen-shots:

Lets see...

Ref:
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm

SSBkgdupdate.exe Windows Startup process - What is it?

Thanks to annoying Google Update features, I decided to run "msconfig" in my vista.
I was surprised to find that windows defender was already there! Microsoft does take care of every customer as caring mom. :P
Well, I found this SSBkgdupdate.exe lined up for startup entry in msconfig. Doubly surprised, I googled the name to find so many results concerning it. The lesson: It does not need to be lined up for auto start up.

Project SIKULI: Evolutionary approach to computing

How do you know what to do when you have GUI?
Visual cues are key to navigating and doing things which has made computer experience so easy for general public.
Sikuli Script is an innovative approach developed at MIT to program and control any GUI applications.

Well, let me quote some more:

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API's support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

Head on to Project SIKULI:

http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/documentation.shtml#doc/pythondoc-python.edu.mit.csail.uid.Sikuli.html

Upload your files in Googleclouds thru' Google docs

I noticed that Google documents now allow a new feature of uploading the files into their cloud to access it later.
Moreover, it can also be converted into open-office format.

This feature is handy because I used to send the required documents to myself by Email in previous cases.  This way, I do not have to. Moreover, I can place them in folders. Easy!

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html

Adam Lambert - Whataya Want From Me

American Idol is a strange place. Remarkably, Idol may  or may not reach to the top of the pop but some of its top tens do reach there.
Adam Lambert is one of the example. Who was the last year's winner?


While his songs have been buried like a signal in white noise, Adam Lambert has been matter of talk throughout the year.
I like this one by Lambert. "Whataya Want From Me"

How to un-friend and report fake profile in Facebook

Recently, I found a fake profile on Facebook. 
Few months back I thought it was not an issue because s/he had only few friends made from the fake profile, pretending to be someone else. But, at this moment I can see that more than 12 dozen people have fallen into it.  I talked with many of them... so far no one knows who is this guy on Facebook whom they are friend with. I am quite surprised to see how lightly people take making online friends. No wonder why scams happen all the time!

No one seems to have evaluated the risk factor in making friend with a fake person. The most interesting factor seems to be the "Mutual friend". They accepted this fake guy because they thought this has mutual friend with their friend whom they personally knew!  So, the effect propagated. I had also fallen into the trap of making friend with this fake guy. But once alarmed by some random post, I withdrew it.
Now, the fake profile is talk of the town.  
So the current question is how to report or block the fake profile.

Facebook policy does not allow you to be the friend and yet report it.
So, one has to un-friend first and then report. Here are the screenshots.

Beware of fake profiles!
Once they are under your skin, you can be under trouble!

Everybody Tweets: Who reads then?

 
We need to have a mechanism or code where a "140 character section" can be devoted to tweeting!
Every blogger at this moment may have access to services like twitterfeed to syndicate the feed to twitter and facebook and hope a bit of publicity. Yes we do it with 140 characters :) . That is not bad if you eventually get a click through visitor. But so many tweets... what do I do with it?

Have you ever sat under a tree in the evening time?
The tweets are overwhelming like that.
When Sparkfun 100K Sale ended, I had posted some screenshots (http://bit.ly/818o5U) of the pain I was going thru, google and twitter quickly poured visitors. In that case it worked. However, in general, not all of my posts are interesting.  The pain is added in reading tweets by half cut words lik...
Somebody Please develop a plug in or script for bloggers so that bloggers can add the useful highlight in "tweet" section.

Captcha: What?

Comment moderation through Captcha is sometimes strange...

Normally it presents letters that are hard to be read even by human. Sometime like this...

American Idol Season 9: Voices and News Trends

American Idol season 9 starts tonight. The news has been hyped by the news about Simon's possible exit after season 9.  It is a fun show. Some regard that it has been accepted as some sort of culture by now. At the least, the twitter trends has been set for today for "American Idol". Google trend shows it to be top 50 topic for today.

In the past it has been successful to bring many talented artists into the spot light. Surely, this year will be no exception.
May the best artist win!

Follow American Idol on twitter:
http://twitter.com/americanidol/

Google Alert for your site per it gets link love

Google Alert can be used to obtain the Email/Feed Update as per your site gets new link.

For example, if I want to create an alert to receive Email/Feed update whenever my site gets external link, I need to go to google alert site (http://www.google.com/alerts) and create the alert.
link:www.ajabgajab.blogspot.com

Doing so gives you notification and you can review the site who linked to you or may be link back as courtesy.

Sparkfun Free Day Saga

Some pictures from the Sparkfun Free day sale! Within 1h : 44m : 50s they got 100 K mark passed. Some pictures from freeday sale presented below. To those who have been there it should simulate something exciting.

Yea, I was there. Not lucky though!
I think they got their well deserved flux.