Lawsuits P2P’d

This is about Skype and Zennstrom being sued by Streamcast (Morpheus maker). Om Malik tells -

At the core of the complaint is the FastTrack P2P technology, which went from Kazaa to Sharman and eventually ending up in Skype.

TechDirt has some background and details here.

memeorandum worth $500?

Apparently memeorandum is worth just $500 if we go by this list of bids to clone memeorandum. Gabe Rivera (the memeorandum creator) is tempted to bid himself, but doesn’t – as he lacks the killer 10 star feedback, but that doesn’t stop Matthew Chen of megite to bid. $10k for megite license looks lame in front of all those $500 bids though. I bet Gabe can’t compete with $500 bids . By the way, I love megite for sending all that traffic to this blog.

I can see so many Indian bidders there. One bid by someone who shares his first name with me.

Not showing ‘friendly’ HTTP error messages

Ever wondered how Internet Explorer shows the same “The page cannot be found” when it doesn’t find the requested page, while Firefox doesn’t. I found this little comment in one source page.

<--
- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
- "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of
- an error's message is "too small", specifically
- less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
- its own error message. You can turn that off,
- but it's pretty tricky to find switch called
- "smart error messages". That means, of course,
- that short error messages are censored by default.
- IIS always returns error messages that are long
- enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
- workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
- message with a big comment like this to push it
- over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum.
- Of course, that's exactly what you're reading
- right now.
-->

Apparently, IE comes configured to “Show friendly HTTP error messages” which replace the server’s normal error messages. Nothing profound about it, just a little eureka.

wget for Windows

It does feel good to use wget on Windows for downloading. It lets me get rid of some windowing/visual overheads.

The link –
http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/#download

move the file to C:\windows after downloading, and type wget -h for options.

[Thanks Scott]

Humour two-dot-oh

1. Official Web 2.0 Certifyr ^beta
2. isolatr ^beta

(via Steve Rubel and TechCrunch)

Google Soccer

Soccer World cup is around the corner. In time for the world cup, Joga.com* is a collaboration between Nike and Google to create an online community for soccer fans. It's invite-only as of now, and apparently Orkut-powered. I'm queued up.

*The site says – "Joga bonito"? means "play beautiful"? in Portuguese.

For Traffic Rank Junkies

Though I usually just type the Alexa URL directly in browser, Alexaholic is just a fine tool to compare site traffic rankings. Its neat, simple, AJAXy and fast. While I’m on that, check out Alexadex.

[Update] – TechCrunch is getting Alexaholic too.

Super Hero

From Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

Um..okay! I should be relieved now.

Writely Google

So there wasn’t smoke without fire. Google has acquired Writely.

Sam at Writely had responded to some of the doubts I expressed in one of my earlier posts. Writely has grown much after that. Congratulations Writely.

Live Clipboard for the Web

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie has come up with the idea of live clipboard for the web. I started watching screencasts skeptically thinking the idea to be another creation of the MS hype machine, but eventually I ended up watching all five of them.

The live clipboard idea looks appealing, implementable and probably the way to go. All it would need is that structured metadata is understood across websites, applications and operating systems. I guess that’s too much to ask, considering the inhibitions against everything Microsoft does with respect to standards. But the idea in itself is compelling, and it’ll be useful even if it can just be implemented across websites (watch #1). And we can expect at least Windows OS support if the idea gains some ground. Dave Winer has a mention of this too.

Standards these days are tricky things. We don’t even have a standard for syndication as yet.