Low cost Multi-Touch project

Since there is too much hype of Multi-Touch products from different companies, its worth checking out Johnny Lee's cheaper version of Multi-Touch screen. I bought a LED flashlight for 18$ and ever since having fun with my WII.

Here is a introduction video from Johnny Lee:


Johnny Lee’s page has more info and is worth checking out.

Also Wiimote Whiteboard has a good Java API that worked fairly well for me (Tried only on my Mac):

Yahoo: Nicely Done

Google and Yahoo both offer Ability to add RSS feeds to users personalized home page. While checking my personal server's access log, I noticed a nice little information that Yahoo sends with each request. It sends you data on how many users added your feed and how many times a feed has been loaded on users homepages. Here is a snippet from from yahoo and google requests from Apache access logs:

216.39.58.78 - - [28/Aug/2008:13:19:43 -0700] "GET /personalfeed.rss HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 1; views 247)"
209.85.238.24 - - [28/Aug/2008:13:27:11 -0700] "GET /personalfeed.rss HTTP/1.1" 200 2173 "-" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)"

Nicely done Yahoo.

Making Div Clickable

Here is a simple trick to make entire div clickable which is needed when you want to make a banner clickable for a site:


<div id="banner" style="cursor: pointer;" onclick="location.href='http://javaswamy.blogspot.com/';">
</div>

The best part is inside the Div you can have other links redirecting user to a different page.

Google: Are you kidding me?

That's the related search that World No 1 Search engine could come up for Java?

Yahoo seems to be better in this case:


I guess there is still need for multiple search engines.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video

Forefox Mobile concept video by Aza Raskin:


Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

A Clever Hack

Once in a while you see things and think "Seems so simple, Why didn't I think of that?". This Hack by Aza Raskin belongs to that Category. He created a simple and smart way to read user browser history. In the example here, Aza is maintaining an array all the social networking sites he is aware of and checking which of those site the user has visited. How can he do that? By checking the color of link referring the Site. In his own words:

By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.

Why we need to care for Net neutrality