The Viral Factory has collated clips of 80s porn in a humorous new viral to celebrate Diesel's 30th anniversary and its worldwide Dirty 30 party.

Do you want some more? :)

As some of you may or may not know, the Large Hadron Collider will be fired up in 2 days, on the 10. September 2008. CERN is making final preparations in the test that will, i hope, reveal what makes particles have mass. Once they confirm and isolate the mighty Higgs Bozon particle, in theory it should be possible to remove it making things have no mass, yet be solid objects. Neat stuff, eh? Here is something more on the LHC.

The problem is that on 10. September 2008. the Large Hadron Collider could also generate black holes that will suck up our dear Earth. The CERN is saying that the experiment is safe, and that there is no real danger of destroying earth. However, we have seen way too many movies where scientists say something is safe, and 5 minutes later everything goes to hell. Therefore, we decided why bother working for this 2 days, when on Wednesday it could all be over anyways.

If we survive, see you on Thursday.

Until then, see the LHC Rap:

And check out what we hope will not be the outcome:

Clicky image to download!

Uh-oh, lots of drama today on the intertubes related to the Google's new project, a browser codenamed Google Chrome. The news hit the web, there was a lot of dust in the air, and Google removed the prematurely-put-online site. You can read more about Google Chrome in this nice comic.

And, as with all such hard hitting news people started speculating how will the internet react. Many of those people claim that Google will overtake browser market, and eat up all the rivals. Now, what I want to do here, is get one thing straight:

Everyone in Nivas uses Firefox as a default web browser. And as such we are well aware that Internet Explorer will never in the near future (10 years) be removed from use. Because, you see, Internet Explorer comes preinstalled with the Windows OS. Linux, currently holding about 1% of the desktop computing power, is irrelevant. Mac OS, even tho it shows strong growth, is still far away from making a serious dent in the Windows armor. So basically this means that vast majority of desktop computers have Internet Explorer running. And here is the bit that every zealous Firefox fan frequently forgets - when you install fresh copy of Windows onto a fresh machine, you will most likely use Internet Explorer to download Firefox. Combine that with the fact that of all the internet population only a small fraction are power-users. And regular users will not use their preinstalled browser to download another browser. You can argue all you want how IE is not safe, and it is bloated and whatnot, but my parents, and your parents, and other casual users will simply not use a perfectly valid tool to get to the same tool.

So in conclusion, even though I am looking forward to see this new Google's child, the chances that it will make a significant impact on the market are slim to none.

As an added bonus, if Internet Explorer 8 turns out to be really good browser, I might switch back to it, and use Firefox just for Firebug. Until someone makes Firebug for IE =)

Today colegue of mine showed me crazy feature on his new Sony Ericsson P1I. By a press of a button, he took photo of a business card, OCR-ed it and added contact from business card to his phonebook. Pretty nifty! Well, not really because we all know how OCR needs to be trained, and OCR on mobile phones is noways still light at it can get.

However, I digged around and found another interesting thing. Have you ever heard about mobile codes? This is old stuff really. Originally, bar codes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacings of parallel lines and may be referred to as linear or 1d bar codes. But they also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2d matrix codes. As cameras and mobile phones progressed some phone manufacturers started shipping their phones with build in bar code reader applications - thus words "mobile" and "code" in the name. :)

Two currently most popular open-standard formats for 2D codes in mobile phone applications are Datamatrix (DM - now owned by Siemens and covered by an ISO standard, public domain) and Quick Response (QR - developed, patented and owned by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave initially for car parts management, public domain).

Graphical output of Datamatrix (DM) looks like this:

and Quick Response (QR) open-standard like this:

.

I can't say I understand the whole point behind it. Idea was to use matrix codes to encode URL's, emails and small messages and do what exactly with this? Why would I print unrecognizable encoded picture somewhere and force people to scan it? What's wrong with good old numbers and letters? Barcods are made to automate recognition on a large scale recognition operation (eg. manufacturing, warehousing etc), but I just somehow don't see 1000 people waiting in line with their mobiles to scan our website url encoded on a sticker. Email protection? Scan this to see my email? Are you kidding me? :)

Experts predicted bright future for matrix codes and spread in various applications. Couple of years later, I really can't say I saw much of it. However, couple of days ago this press release made me rethink the whole concept again. NTT DoCoMo announced that they developed the acoustic OFDM (Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) technology, which can be used to embed URLs and text data in broadcast music/audio. Consumers' mobile phones "listen" to the music/audio and extract the embedded URLs/data. About 100 characters can be transmitted in a second.

This sounds really cool compared to scanning codes on a sticker mentioned before. But where are they going with this? If you owned ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 you definetly had tapes. Ever listened to any of these tapes? :) Like 20 years ago I remember a show on local radio station where guys even tried to "send" programs over the air to listeners. They would play C64 tape in the air and tell people to record it. OMG :)

Anyways it's getting pretty late and I have to catch some sleep. If you wanna give mobile codes another go, get readers for your mobile here or here and start playing around. :)

update: I just got contacted by Roger from 2d-code.co.uk. If you are interested in mobile coding, I highly recommend that you check out his web site. It's full of news and interesting mobile coding application. Gooo Roger! :)