W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium has opened it’s office in India.It is hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing at Noida. In case you don’t know what W3C is check this Wikipedia entry.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public, work together to develop standards for the World Wide Web. W3C’s mission is: “To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web”.
Their Indian site is available at http://www.w3cindia.in/ and also Documents of W3C are available now in Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu and Kannada.
Office Furniture

http://www.smileygenerator.us/ is the leading clean smiley sites.It has made few thousand smileys so far.Smileygenerator has all of a sudden it has started blocking Opera and Firefox.
If you try accesing the site with Opera or Firefox you get a message saying :

We have determined that you are using some sort of ad-blocking software or using a leech enabled browser that downloads our site to your machine.

The webmaster (balamm) doesnt stop there.

The banned software currently includes Firefox and Opera browsers

As long as these “compliant browsers” and harvesters developers continue to promote theft and fraud,
or allow blocking banner ads or other advertising which allow me to pay for this site and earn a meager living,
I have no choice but to limit their access or close this site entirely.

For those who complain, keep in mind that this site is designed using “Proprietary Creativity”.
I don’t care about opensource standards or w3c compliance and neither should the average web user! We’re here to have fun!

.

Being stunned on seeing this, I joined their forum to file a complaint and was greeted by the webmaster with the choiciest of words.The following are his grudges against firefox and opera.

Problem is, Firefox now prides itself on being Leech enabled. Even adverstises that it can strip an entire site, harvesting all links. It’s looking less like an opensource alternative and more like a way to bring an end to the free internet.
Banner blockers, ad stoppers, leech extensions, what next? Hacking and password cracking extensions?Oh, right…. It’s already has those doesn’t it.
Opera is just as bad but even worse for the crappy way it handles site layout and “drag and drop”. WTF is that crap?
When IE comes with blanket ad and banner blocking and integrated MS sponsored leech plugins, then I’ll block it too.

Firefox and Opera browsers are both designed to either fake their identity or just not supply it. They are also designed to circumvent site features and block images, banners, text based ads, etc.
Not a very friendly or cooperative software from a webmaster’s point of view.
They are the reason more and more sites are being forced to switch to a subscriber system rather than provide free, ad sponsored content which users just take for granted.
Unfortunately, their designers took a good idea (blocking pop ups) and turned it into an anti webmaster, antisocial, anti “free internet” tool that blocks everything and hurts everyone.

It would be pretty clear to you that his complaints doesnt hold any ground al all.Both Opera and Firefox don’t support ad-blockers inherently.Opera Software has made is very clear that they wont include an adblocker in future either.Hoever there are addons available that can block ads.But, it is exactly the same with Internet Explorer.Actually there are more ad blockers available for IE compared to Firefox and Opera.

Now coming to faking user agents.Opera has been pretty much forced to do it.This is because of all those sites using browser sniffers to send broken code on detecting Opera.Not only that there are many old scripts that dont work if Opera’s ua is detected.Havard - an Opera employee had written a very nice article about this sometime back.You can read it here.And smileygenerator itself has become an example as to why such a feature is needed.If you dont want to edit the ua.ini file manually download this handy addon from myOpera forums.If you are using Firefox you can grab the useragent switcher extension from here.
And even after thinking a lot I just couldnt understand what he meant by a leech browser.

I guess this one beats environmentalchemistry episode by a mile(in case you are wondering what I am talking about please see this and this).I am angry with smileygenerator, but even more than that I am dissapointed to see such immature behaviour from them.Actually now if you want to use smileygenerator you would either have to use ua.ini or else fake your useragent using Proxomitron(whose principal task is to block ads and pop-ups).Not only that Maxthon is a webbrowser that comes with an adblocker included.But you can acces that site without the ads on Maxthon.Ironical.Isnt it?

Visit Smileygenerator
Visit their forums

Update 1 (5/11):It seems that smileygenerator.us is redirecting to a different german site called smileygenerator.com

Update 2 (11/11): Smileygenerator.us is no longer blocking Opera or Firefox.However the webmaster has made the following comment:

pallab.net noise
Pallab.net has been making a lot of noise lately. Seems he’s very desperate to have his site appear on the opera home page so he’s decided to challenge me. He doesn’t want you to know what he’s really about so I’ve asked a friend to ensure there’s an unedited version to keep him honest. When he restores the original, I’ll have this deleted. http://snipurl.com/nquq

It should be pretty obvious to any sensible person that his first accusition holds no ground.Neither am I challenging him.Smileygenerator is his website and he may do whatever he wants.However, this is my blog and I have the right to post my observations and comments on his website.And, in this article wasnt written to challenge him, but I merely pointed out the flaws in his argument for blocking Opera and Firefox.
I have no idea as to what he means by “He doesn’t want you to know what he’s really about”!I dont delete or edit comments posted only blog unless they are blatant comment spams,have abusive/racist comments.Sometimes I edit comments just to correct the formatting.He has put up a copy of this page here.If you scroll down you would notice that there is a comment there by the webmaster which isnt on my blog.It does make it seem like I deleted the comment.But the fact is that the comment was never posted on my blog.If I didn’t delete his earlier comments why would I delete that either?Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
He says:

“Guns don’t kill, people do!”Same with firefox and opera. It’s the people using it that give the software a bad name and a foul smell.

Does that mean that people using internet explorer don’t use adblockers?
The comment he makes in the last paragraph is really hillarious :))

Your fanatacism is very usefull. I didn’t have to do much at all to make it into thousands of sites where other fanatics like yourself plot the overthrow of MSN or Microsoft, or IE.

And yet he calls me a fanatic

Oh, by the way palab,your CSS is NOT valid!

I know it very well.I never claimed to be an expereinced webmaster.I am an ameteur.But even an ameteur like me can tell that with the current design the click through rate at smileygenerator would be lowe than it deserves.Smileygenerator is one of the few sites still using almost extinct frames.But heck, this article wasnt supposed to be about webdesigning.

Yes.Though it sounds unbeliveable but it is true.Google is down currently.I cant open www.google.com currently.Not only that I am having trouble accesing Gmail as well.It is opening sometimes and sometimes it is giving an error.

This is the first time that I have ever seen google going down!

Edit:Everything seems to be working fine now .

All I wanted to say is

शुभ दीपावली

শুভ দীপাবলী

Happy Diwali

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