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Articles from Wonderful Thoughts

Epay, a PayPal and Google Checkout alternative 2007-09-15 09:20:35 Many people use PayPal and Google Checkout to send and receive payments without the need of having a bank account, these services work as a virtual bank where you can send and receive payments, add funds to them and withdraw funds from them. These services are hugely popular and are widely used by a number of sites and users. The biggest problem with these services is that you cannot withdraw your balances right away, withdrawal can be either done using the cheque facility which they provide or transferring the money to your bank account directly with additional limitations on bank transfers being available in only certain countries. Creating a Epay account is free and you can take advantages of a virtual banking environment immediately. Epay also offers a very high paying referral program where you can refer a friend to Epay and make 150$ or refer a merchant and make $250, this is more than what other referral programs offer. Both the debit cards and credit cards are directly linked t ... Google

Idea Festival: Craig Nevill-Manning and the secrets of Google’s success 2007-09-15 03:15:01 Craig Nevill-Manning is Google’s engineering director and senior research scientist. He’s also a very good computer science teacher. In a talk at Idea Festival about what Google has learned about innovation, he offers an excellent introduction to computer science for non-programmers. His first lesson is “Think Broadly”. He introduces this concept by telling us “computer science is not just programming.” (He writes it as “computer science != programming”, and “computer science programming”, just to satisfy the geeks in the crowd.) Then he invites five volunteers to the stage and gives them cards, each showing 1 through 16 dots on one face, blank on the other. He invites them to sort themselves, then to start displaying numbers in binary. As the group counts from 0-31, Craig invites us to notice patterns - the one bit flips each time, the two every other time, etcetera. He calls this approach “Computer Science Unplugged&r ... Google

Idea Festival: Swarmed by Robots 2007-09-14 20:36:03 James McLurkin’s talk is titled “Dances with Robots”. He’s a researcher at MIT studying distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems, a former engineer with iRobot. He offers the observation that Hollywood portrayals of robots fall into three basic categories - frankenstein (robot alienated from society), the tin man (robot wants to be human) and terminator (giant killer robots. It’s the last scenario that freaks people out. Isaac Asimov suggested a series of laws that should prevent robots from killing humanity, as in Will Smith vehicle “I Robot” - a robot must not injure a human, must obey orders, and may protect it’s own existence so long as that doesn’t conflict with the first two laws. (Yes, I know the laws are significantly more careful than that, but there’s no connectivity in the room right now…) But it’s hard in real life to get these laws to apply because no robot in real life can read these laws, none ...

Auction Ads displays adult ads for tech keywords 2007-09-14 17:12:54 As soon as I receive some response from them I will post it here. I have received a reply from the tech representative of AuctionAds saying that they have escalated the issue to their software development team. The ad in itself did shock me but my recent change to position it promptly led me to think twice on integrating ads from AuctionAds ever again, check the image below and imagine the shock I was in. If you check my positioning, the title says Featured. How would my readers feel that Techie Buzz is promoting such a vulgar product as a featured product, the impact on readers cannot be judged but most of them may never come back to my site again on seeing such ads. What baffles me is that there is no filtering even when I had specified only technology related ads, below is the Firefox view source for the same page where auction ads was positioned. (For anyone who is interested in full page screen shots please contact me) They do not even have a adult filter in place so that I can ...

Idea Festival: Barrington Irving, flying solo 2007-09-14 04:40:49 Barrington Irving has seen a lot more of the world than most college students. What’s more impressive is that he was the one flying. Earlier this year, Barrington completed a round-the-world solo flight, taking 97 days to travel 27,000 miles. He’s (unofficially) the youngest person to make a round the world solo flight and the first person of African descent to do so. The trip involved visits to Newfoundland, the Azores, Spain, Egypt, UAE, Hong Kong and crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Before he could complete his flight, Irving points out, he had experiences of rejection, of ridicule, of disappointment. He keeps these rejection letters as a reminder of what’s required to live your dream, to follow your vision and persist. It’s an impressive achievement and an amazing story to hear from a 23-year old - the work required to make the trip possible is at least as impressive to me as Irving’s stories about landing on a tiny island in the Bering St ...

Techie Buzz is a top 10K blog 2007-09-14 04:24:46 A few months ago I had written about how to lose your Google page rank and Alexa rankings and ironically it’s on the first page for quite a few search term. In that post I had explained how I lost my rankings due to my negligence. I let the blog rankings slip and also lost a lot of readers. However its been 4 months since then and I have made up for my mistakes and tried hard to make this blog popular. Today I am proud to say that Techie Buzz is amongst the top 10000 blogs as ranked by Technorati. The blog has also been going quite well in terms of ranking in Alexa and it ranks inside the top 100000 web sites in terms of traffic. The current Alexa ranking for the blog is 81,439. Though it is predicted to go up I am quite happy to be inside the top 100000 web sites. Traffic Traffic has also doubled in past few months and am now getting more than 1000 unique visitors per day, and more than 270 feed subscribers. How I Rectified My Mistakes Blogging is not easy and rebuilding a blo ...

Idea Festival: Woz. Wow. 2007-09-14 02:57:20 Steve Wozniak is the featured speaker at the second night of the Idea Festival. After a long introduction, he takes the stage and tries to debunk a small part of the Woz myth, saying, “I wasn’t a college dropout. I was just broke, and had to take a work year, which turned into Apple and to so many other things.” He explains that he returned to college post-Apple, under a fake name: “Rocky Raccoon Clark”. Woz was “an electronics kid”. “I was lucky. Electronics was my passion, and I was living in the Santa Clara valley, which became the Silicon valley.” He and other electronics kids wired their houses, builing intercoms that they could use to signal each other in the middle of the night. They’d do yardwork for neighbors and ask to be paid, not in money, but by being given the opportunity to search their garages for interesting electronics. This spirit of exploration in the valley turned into the spirit of starting your own compa ...

Idea Festival: Tiffany Shlain’s web of ideas 2007-09-14 02:46:52 While Idea Festival isn’t quite the blogger gathering that many tech conferences are, there are a couple of us liveblogging here. Check out Evgeny Morozov, who just posted a great summary of Craig Nevill-Manning’s talk, and Wayne Hall, who’s done a great job blogging both the Festival and the run-up to the event on the official IF blog. Tiffany Shlain, an independent filmmaker, titles her talk “A Declaration of Interdependence”. She notes that American history is built in part on a declaration of independence, but that the 21st century is going to require us to recognize our interdependence. “The 21st century will be about linking the dots”. She suggests that we might need more than carbon offsets - “we may need to think about karmic offsets”. As she moved into adulthood, she turned to filmmaking, and to interactive media. She built an early CDRom for Sting and a website associated with it. This led her towards building the Webby a ...

I Know Where Coors Light Is Going 2007-09-14 00:28:59 OK, this is just speculation, but hear me out … this sort of makes sense. We all know that Coors has pulled its sponsorship of Coors Light from Ganasi/Sabates Racing for next year, and can you blame them? The Coors car has had a less than steller success rate since Sterling Marlin drove it, he even was in contention for the Championship - until he broke his neck in a crash, and that was the beginning of the decline for the Coors car.It is strongly believed that the ‘up-for-grabs-sponsorship’ of Budweiser has signed with Evernham Motorsports and have Kasey Kahne as the new Bud Beer Bandit. This announcement should come Tuesday (if I remember correctly). So where can Coors go and get a significantly higher profile? Richard Childress Racing.Don’t see it? I do. RCR is a good choice for Coors. AT&T is leaving the 31 car at the end of the year. Sure they have been granted a reprieve until the end of the year, but realistically they are done in Cup as a sponsor un ...

Idea festival: Pictures of peace 2007-09-13 23:50:12 Idea Festival had invited Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights lawyer, writer and Nobel Peace prize winner, to speak at the conference. Unfortunately, the Iranian government wasn’t willing to provide her with a visa to speak at this event, or other events in the US. With Ebadi not able to appear, Idea Festival has organized a conversation, titled “Peace”, which invites New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, University of Kentucky professor John Stempel, and Global Voices Middle East and North Africa editor Amira Al Hussaini to discuss issues of peace, freedom and cultural understanding. Kris Kimel, the organizer of Idea Festival and moderator of this panel, pushes the panelists on the question of “freedom” - should the US be pushing freedom in the Middle East. Stempel wonders who gets to define freedom - if freedom is defined very differently in the Middle East, are we pushing for freedom or for some uniquely American view of freedom? Kristof gently ...

Win 512 MB MP3 Player from Blog about your blog 2007-09-13 21:41:38 Blog about my blog is running a contest and is giving away a 512 MB mp3 player, a 125 x 125 banner spot on their blog and a full review of your blog as prizes. They are carrying out the contest in order to increase their technorati ranking. To enter the contest you simply have to link back to the contest page and also link to the which writes about blogging tips and more. So you know what has to be done in order to get the prizes. Also am introducing the new category which will focus on all such contests going on across the blogosphere so you can keep your eyes on this category for more such contests. Copyright © 2007 Techie Buzz From:Techie Buzz ...

Craig Nevill-Manning and the secrets of Google’s success 2007-09-13 21:27:07 Craig Nevill-Manning is Google’s engineering director and senior research scientist. He’s also a very good computer science teacher. In a talk at Idea Festival about what Google has learned about innovation, he offers an excellent introduction to computer science for non-programmers. His first lesson is “Think Broadly”. He introduces this concept by telling us “computer science is not just programming.” (He writes it as “computer science != programming”, and “computer science programming”, just to satisfy the geeks in the crowd.) Then he invites five volunteers to the stage and gives them cards, each showing 1 through 16 dots on one face, blank on the other. He invites them to sort themselves, then to start displaying numbers in binary. As the group counts from 0-31, Craig invites us to notice patterns - the one bit flips each time, the two every other time, etcetera. He calls this approach “Computer Science Unplugged&r ... Google

Idea Festival: Dollar bills and epidemeology 2007-09-13 20:30:02 Dirk Brockmann is a physicist at the Department of Non-Linear Dynamics (or maybe the Dynamics and Self Organization… or maybe the Institute for Fluid Dynamics) at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany. No one is doing fluid dynamics at Max Planck anymore, but the basic philosophy of the institute is the same - take the methods of theoretical physics and apply them to a very different field. In Brockmann’s case, this means looking at currency circulation as a proxy for human travel, which ends up being a way to study epidemeology. The data Brockmann uses is from WhereIsGeorge.com, a long-running web experiment that tracks currency. Studying this data statistically gives insight into ways that people travel around the world, which is critical to understand in figuring out how SARS and other diseases spread around the world. When you think of space, time and disease, Brockmann begins, the first disease most people study is the Black Death pandemic of the 14th cent ...

Idea Festival: Kristof on Darfur 2007-09-13 17:26:14 Nicholas Kristof has turned his column with the New York Times into a powerful tool to advocate for disadvantaged people around the world, especially in Africa. In introducing him to the Idea Festival stage, the moderator mentions that Kristoff has travelled to every American state, every Chinese province, 120 countries and every member of the axis of evil. Kristof takes the stage and, almost immediately, tells us that we have a “moral obligation to stand up to the ultimate human crime: genocide”. We would expect moral leadership to come from Washington… but throughout the 20th century, leadership has come from the street, not from government. President Wilson looked the other way during the Armenian genocide; FDR ignored pleas to bomb the train lines leading to Auschwitz; the Clinton administration avoided even using the word “genocide” in Rwanda. There was hope that George W. Bush might change this model - reading a report on Clinton’s inaction in ...

Dale Jr Set To Announce Sponsor and Number Next Week 2007-09-13 12:49:57 On Wed. Sept 19th to be exact. The announcement will take place in Dallas and Dale will be announcing what his primary sponsor and car number are for next year’s Sprint Cup. So what do you think his number and sponsor will be? David Poole tried to get the scoop on the number thing by checking recently filed trademarks made by Rick Hendrick and found that he had filed trademarks for the numbers 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 08, and 38 - I also heard, but as of yet confirmed, that a trademark has been filed for the number 88 as well. So I think the number selection has been narrowed down a bit, heh. In any event it appears that the new number will definitely have an 8 in it. My vote? 08, 80, 38, 88 in that order. Sponsor? A lot of people are still saying Mountain Dew or AMP ( a Mtn Dew variant I believe). I even had some one email me weeks ago claiming they had ‘inside’ info that it is AMP - but they wouldn’t give me any hint of who that source might be. I still thi ...