Praveen’s Journal

Google is redesigning the search results interface. A set of IPs are chosen for the testing (may be alpha). But anyone can get the new interface by this easy hack.

1. Open Google search page (http://www.google.com)
2. Enter the following string in the browsers URL input box
   javascript:alert(document.cookie="PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:LM=1142683332:
S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com")
   Note: It should be a single line. Also if you use country specific domains like google.co.uk or google.co.in, you need to change the above string accordingly
3. Do the search

Not a major modification of the interface though.

The days Google was relying on Yahoo Finance for online quotes are gone. Google has come up with yet another new service Google Finance. This will put them in direct competition with existing finance services from Yahoo and MSN. A first look at Google Finance is impressing with a scope of few improvements needed here and there. Google’s core theme “Simplicity” is followed in this service also.

Jonathan has a new post on the Sun Grid. Looks like they have finalized with the domain name for Sun Grid and ready to roll out pretty soon. Due to export regulations it seems that Sun Grid will be initially available only for US customers. Well, tons and tons of critics around Sun Grid is going to come to an end!

Ever since my update of Wordpress to 2.0 from 1.5, I was facing more annonyance than any help from the new so called, “Visual rich editor”. I think that it is the same case with most of the Wordpress users. In the view of helping novice Wordpress users, this feature has made the life of a lot of experienced users’ life miserable. After quite some time, I found out the way of disabling it. It is found in the page “Your profile” under “Users” tab. In the above page there is a checkbox labelled “Use the visual rich editor when writing” under “Personal options” category (last section). Once unchecked, I got the old powerful editor interface. Atlast I got rid of this nasty WYSIWIG editor. Thank God!

Fast 50 reports the list of top 50 people (2006) who can change the way we live and work over next ten years.

Now one can start exploring Mars using the new service from Google, The Google Mars. It has three type of images namely Elevation, Visible and Infrared. The coolest thing is that you can search and locate most of the landmarks that are named under the categories Regions, Mountains, Plains, Canyons, Ridges, Dunes, Craters, etc. Coming up with Google Enceladus also won’t be a bad idea. Or Googles rivals like Yahoo and MSN can take this up in their wishlist

NASA have reported yesterday that Cassini may have found evidence of liquid water on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It may be a good start for assumption of existence of life on Enceladus.

Jonathan has written in his blog about the open letter from Scott to Mark Hurd. Can you guess the tone of this mail?

Avalon towers at Peninsula is a heaven of internet.

praveen@aphrodite:/home$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Calculating upgrade...Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
cron debianutils flac gnome-about gnome-desktop-data info libaudio2 libflac7 libgnome-desktop-2 liboggflac3 openssh-client openssh-server reiserfsprogs ssh texinfo
15 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3909kB of archives.
After unpacking 139kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Get: 1 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main debianutils 2.15.3 [56.8kB]
Get: 2 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main cron 3.0pl1-93 [61.2kB]
Get: 3 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main info 4.8-6 [219kB]
Get: 4 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main openssh-server 1:4.2p1-7 [215kB]
Get: 5 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main openssh-client 1:4.2p1-7 [557kB]
Get: 6 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main texinfo 4.8-6 [1220kB]
Get: 7 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main libflac7 1.1.2-3.1 [116kB]
Get: 8 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main liboggflac3 1.1.2-3.1 [31.9kB]
Get: 9 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main flac 1.1.2-3.1 [134kB]
Get: 10 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main gnome-about 2.12.3-1 [228kB]
Get: 11 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main gnome-desktop-data 2.12.3-1 [439kB]
Get: 12 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main libaudio2 1.7-5 [72.4kB]
Get: 13 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main libgnome-desktop-2 2.12.3-1 [72.6kB]
Get: 14 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main reiserfsprogs 1:3.6.19-2 [485kB]
Get: 15 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main ssh 1:4.2p1-7 [1060B]
Fetched 3909kB in 3s (1032kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages …
(Reading database … 127367 files and directories currently installed.)
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