Most of us have spent hours playing Mario. But believe it or not a guy called Trevor Seguin has completed it in a little more than 5 minutes(5 minutes and 6 seconds to be exact)! You can download the video of it from here. Can you beat him?
Dont forget to check out the full list available here.
Mario Bros. fans dont forget to check out this remake of the Mario Bros background music in full symphony glory. Also download the Mushroom Kingdom series from here.They are the coolest flash movies I have ever seen.

NASA has published a rather interesting article discussing the possibilities of Einstein being a Space Alien!
You can listen to it here or read it here.

Another new google subdomain has been found.It is base.google.com
According to Tony Ruscoe

“Google Base is Google’s latest project in an effort to organize the world’s information. It isn’t in Beta or Alpha yet. They are still developing it. I wasn’t able to get much information from my sources at Google, but I’ll tell you what they told me. Basically, Google Base will present feed results on the results page. The feeds will probably be anywhere from 1-3 results, and either presented above or below the horizontal sponsored ads.”

Read his post here

It was alive briefly,but Google quickly removed it.Here is the text that was on it

“Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.
Examples of items you can find in Google Base:
Description of your party planning service
Articles on current events from your website
Listing of your used car for sale
Database of protein structures
You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.”

You can view the screenshots here and here.

Update: Google responds.

It’s almost three months now since the announcement of Kahuna-the new interface for Msn/Hotmail.Finally I got an invite from Microsoft.With yahoo also announcing that they are going to update their interface and gmail’s continuous splurge in popularity Microsoft has some competition.Lets see how it fares.Here is a short graphical review of it(Click on the thumnails for full size images).

The welcome screen:
MSN Today

The Inbox
The new 3 pane inbox certainly looks a lot less cluttered now.But there is one major functionality issue for me.Suppose you want to trash some of the message.You have to do them one by one.They have removed the checkbox.

However a very handy addition is that you can drag and drop your messages.

Also Kahuna features a customized right click menu just like in Outlook.

Now you can create your own folders and group your messages.This is somewhat similar to Gmail’s idea of labeling emails.Microsoft has clearly taken a leaf out of Google’s book.Now you can search your emails in Kahuna too.


Hotmail is optimised for viewing at 1024×768 resolution.However even at that resolution a Kahuna cropped away the edges of some mails.

Microsoft claims that Kahuna would be able to alert you about suspicious phishing emails.It did correctly pick out one fake Paypal email that I had received.

Composing emails

Nothing special here.Standard rich text formatting options are available along with the familiar MSN Messenger smileys.Kahuna also looks up addresses from your buddy list and suggests it as you type.

Calendar

The calendar sports a neat and tidy look.You have the option of being alerted on via MSN Messenger, email as well as Mobile.

All in all I think it is definitely a major improvement.Microsoft says that it is going to provide you upto 2gb space.However I am not sure about the maximum attachement size.However I dont think that there is any limit on the total size of attachements.However Kahuna now supports Internet Explorer 6 more later.Hopefully in future it would add support for Firefox and Opera also.

In case you are interested in trying out Kahuna you can enroll yourself here

There is a bad news as well as a good news.

Lets start with the bad news first.
Macworld has done a review of various Macbrowsers.The scores were as follows
Firefox : 4.5/5
Safari : 4/5
Opera : 3.5/5
Omniweb : 4/5
Camino : 3/5

The review was appaling to say they least.Tim Luoma has written an excellent review of the Macworld review.You can read it here

The good news is that the leading German technology news site Chip Online has written an article comparing the features of three different browsers and Opera emerged as the clear winner here.More details available at my.opera.com

It may seem that I am calling the Macworld article as appaling only because Opera looses out in the review.It is not true.If you read Tim’s article then it would become clear to you how biased the author was.

Channel Register also wrote an interesting article titled Opera tunes up to overtake Firefox.Check that out too.

Taken from Boingboing.net

Daniel Cuthbert of Whitechapel in London, has been reportedly busted for using a non-standard browser (Lynx) while making a donation to an online tsunami relief fund.The had browser triggered the donor’s intrusion detection system.A part from that he had also probed the system as he suspected that it may be a phishing scam.

What Daniel actually did to ‘knock on the door’ was to insert a ../../../ character sequence into the web address and a single quote into the credit card field - THROUGH HIS BROWSER. He did not use any attack ‘tools’ or ‘probes’ other than Internet Explorer. Furthermore, typing these sequences into a browser does not an attack make - it only proves that a website may be vulnerable. It takes a hell of a lot more effort to actually gain any form of unauthorized access to the site. Daniel did none of this, he only typed the sequences and watched the responses - and don’t forget, he actually donated the 30 p towards the fund using his real credit card and personal details.

Judge Purdy accepted that Cuthbert had not intended to cause any damage, and also pointed out there was almost no case law in this area.He was fined 400 plus 600 costs.An online pole carried out by ZDnet shows that more than 92% people disagree with this ruling.

Read the full article here

Yes.This is a shocker.Today when I updated my Anti-spam black list from b2evolution’s centralised list I was shocked to see download.com in the list!When I checked in b2evo’s official forum I found that download.com was reported by a min of 20 users for spamming!One of the forum members had received 4 hits from them in 5 seconds,and there was no link to his blog on download.com.You can find the discussion here

Download.com is already very popular and they get a huge number of hits everyday.It is beyond me why they would need to do this.One thing that comes to my mind is that may be it is a conspiracy.But again I dont see any reason why any one would be mad enough to do that.

What do you think?Anyway I have decided to remove download.com from my black list.

Yes.You read it correctly.Recently there were a lot of reports that the screen of the super sexy and sleek looking iPod Nano gets scratched or damaged easily.Apple has acknowledged that they have received several complaints regarding this issue, however at the same time they claimed that it was not a designing flaw.Apple’s SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller said today in a press release that this issue has has more to do with obese Americans in tight pants putting the nano in their front jeans pocket, and then sitting for extended periods of time.
Apple has offered to replace the “defective” nanos. However, they are insisting that all customers weighing over 230 Pounds also agree to sign a form stating they will carry their nano in an altoids case for protection.”

Well, I think this may be blessing in disguise for American parents.This may finally prompt their kids to become more health conscious.