This made me excited and I started thinking of a lot of things that could be done. But as I looked them up over the web, it turned out that every single one of them was already there. There was nothing new. From gaming to software development to a whole cloud-based OS, almost everything was done already.

Then suddenly, I thought why not oppose him with some valid arguments. I mean there must be a bad side of the cloud. And as I Googled things, I was like heck no! everything you could curse the cloud for had already been put very elegantly by Eben Moglen. There was already a wave of moving away from the cloud (Diaspora). Arghhhh……..

Then, as my eyes wandered around, I saw a Nokia N95… Wait a minute! What if I use my computer’s processing power to make things work on my phone? And with all the idle computers in our labs, we could form a cloud to serve all the smart phones in the campus. Thats a good idea, isn’t it? Please dont tell me this has been done too…?

And returning to the original question, do you think the cloud wave is really over? I mean implementation is obviously not, but is there room for new ideas?

See also

How to make Firefox faster: The easy way
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Security and anonymity over the web cannot be over emphasized. To make your Firefox security solid, and to ensure your privacy, follow these tips

NoScript

Install it from the link above and it will work right out of the box. The all-in-one Guru of security in Firefox, NoScript is an add-on that blocks all active content on a webpage. Javascript, ActiveX, Flash, you name it! Of course this would make YouTube, Gmail etc useless, so you will be adding permissions for websites you want to allow active content on

Blocking scripts and all protects you from cross-site scripting (more popularly XSS), DNS rebinding and clickjacking and that is not all.

Also, NoScript also lets you force websites to use SSL to transfer your data. This encoding makes sure your login information and other private data is secure while in transit.

To force selected websites to always use HTTPS, go to NoScript options > Advanced > HTTPS and add your desired websites.

CookieSafe

Yes, cookies can be used for malicious purposes like tracking your online activities and recording your web behavior or shopping interests. Install CookieSafe from the link above and select deny cookies globally to make sure no undesired cookie is ever downloaded onto your system. But you can do that from Firefox’s own options as well right? The reason you should install CookieSafe is that it lets you add exceptions easily.

Ghostery

While you are surfing through the web, watching videos, reading news or shopping, people are tracing you (not in a very strict sense). Services like Google Analytics record your browsing history and behavior on webpages and sell the statistics for better ad serving. This is annoying for most people once they know its happening. So, if you don’t anyone looking at what you are doing on  the web, install Ghostery from the link above to disable web trackers (also called web bugs). After installing, go to Ghostery options > Blocking and select on and all.

Change your user agent

Every browser has its own specific security weaknesses. So it might not be very wise to tell everyone which browser you are running on what platform. But sadly, browsers do. To change this behavior, to hide your user agent identity, there are two ways. You can do it manually by typing “about:config” in Firefox’s address bar and add a key there named “general.useragent.override” and set its value to “unknown” or anything you want.

You can also install the add-on User Agent Switcher. It lets you easily switch between the Firefox identity, IE or any other custom identity you create.

Hope you find the post helpful.

See also

How to make Firefox secure and anonymous
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To make Firefox load pages substantially faster, here are some tips you can follow:

Fasterfox Lite

Install this addon through the link above to turbo charge your Firefox. Goto Tools>Addons>Fasterfox Lite preferences and select “Turbo charged” preset. Fasterfox does all those about:config hacks for you with no hassel. All you have to do is select one of the presets and restart Firefox. What this addon does:

Firefox by default delays the rendering of webpages by a small amount of time until they are loaded. It disables that delay.
Enables pipelining(make 8 requests to the web server at a time in contrast to one by default).
Increases maximum http connections.
Tweaks use of cache to prevent unnecessary redownload of content. Also caches more DNS query results.
Prefetches selected links on a webpage
Disables ipv6 DNS lookups(will not necessarily make your Firefox load faster)

Adblock Plus

You sure you already don’t have this addon? Well if yes, install it from the link above. Goto Tools>Addons>Adblock Plus preferences and enable “Filter subscription: Easylist (English)”. This will make Firefox load pages faster by eliminating unnecessary traffic (as the name suggests, it blocks advertisements)

If this isn’t enough for you, head to the guide below for a lot many (some difficult and not really helpful) tricks to make Firefox start faster and load pages faster.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-ultimate-guide-to-speeding-up-firefox-3-5/

1. Newtonian Physics

The usual first lessons in physics. Motion, velocity, force, acceleration, Newton’s laws and gravity.

2. Conservation Laws

Deals with topics like work, energy, angular momentum , their conservation laws and thermodynamics.

3.  Vibrations and Waves

Covers waves, free waves, resonance and sound. Typically hard to comprehend topics made easy.

4. Electricity and Magnetism

Models of the atom, nucleus, electric current, circuits, capacitance and electromagnetism.

5. Optics

Covers theories on the nature of light, reflection, refraction and wave optics.

6. The Modern Revolution in Physics

The book that inspired this post. This is the only book of Light and Matter I have read and I was amazed at the ability of Crowell to write about difficult topics in a manner easy to grasp and still fun. Beautifully describes special relativity, randomness in nature, particle nature of light and wave nature of matter. Strongly recommended

Others by Crowell

Simple Nature

Conceptual Physics

Calculus

General Relativity

His website

This is an account of what came through the lenses of my binoculars and held me in total speechlessness.

The Moon

First comes the most obvious first target; the moon. You all know what it is and where to look for it. Before I actually saw the moon with the lenses, I thought it would be boring. But hell no! it was not. The craters and the shadows cast by sunlight were amazing. The pleasure lies in knowing that you are looking at an object about four hundred thousand kilometres away and you are still able to see such minute detail. This image is exactly what I saw through the binoculars.

The Pleiades Star Cluster

Pleiades is a cluster of stars visible to the naked eye throughout winter. It appeares to the eye as about seven stars close together. Binoculars reveal much more detail. You can see tens of dimmer stars squeezed in a small space. Actually, the stars are light years far from each other in three dimensional space. They appear as they would appear on a screen, mutual distances not accounted for. The sight is awesome. This image is exactly what I saw through the binoculars.

Saturn

Saturn is the fifth planet of the solar system. It is visible as a tiny yellowish-orange disk in the night sky. Saturn is the most breathtaking sight the sky has to offer. Other great-looking objects require high magnifications or computer graphics to appreciate them fully. But Saturn is one of the very few objects you can fall in love with using even a modest backyard telescope at 50x. Its beautiful collosal rings are just awe-inspiring. I wasn’t lucky enough to get a telescope to look at the mighty planet. It appeared in my binoculars as a small disk with tiny but distinguishable rings.

The Orion Nebula

Nebulae are clouds of hot glowing gas where stars are born (or die). Colors and patterns of gas make them look beautiful. Orion Nebula is the easiest of them all  to spot since it is visible to naked eye as a tiny fuzz in the Orion constellation. The amazement of looking at a birthplace of stars is beyond words. Binoculars separate the two patches and give a view similar to this image if you remove color.

Jupiter

The largest planet of the solar system, Jupiter, is the easiest to spot after Venus. The planet itself is not a great sight through small scopes. The four visible moons of Jupiter make it appealing. They appear as tiny disks around the planet’s comparatively larger disk. If you have a powerful scope and a keen eye, you can even see shadows of moons cast over the planet. I saw through my binoculars, Jupiter’s small disk with two of its moons. Nothing like the image.

The Andromeda Galaxy

The most jaw-dropping sight I have had is the nearest galaxy, Andromeda. It is invisible to the naked eye under normal skies (exceptionally dark skies reveal it as a small fuzz). Even with the binoculars, it looked like two millimeters of haze but you can imagine the bewilderment I experienced looking at a huge family of stars and planets two and a half million light years away from me. I was looking at the galaxy as it was two and a half million years ago. We dont know if it even exists anymore. I was speechless.

The story begins with the murder of a prominent Parisian, Jacques Sauniere. In his last minutes, the man does a strange thing to himself. He strips naked and positions himself to resemble a painting and writes some code as well. The Friench Judicial Police call in a famous symbologist Robert Langdon who, along with Agent Neveu, follows Sauniere’s crypted instructions to reveal a secret so powerful that it is capable to shake the very foundations of the Catholic Church. Trouble arises when they realize that they are not alone in the pursuit of the secret.

The novel is a controversy in itself. Its fiction in which the author believes and so do many. It had me researching Da Vinci’s work and the Magdalene story. And I have found that everything that sounds real in the book is either real or controversial except the role of the Priory of Sion. Before I read the book, I never noticed logos, flags and sorts. I see now that symbols are powerful. They represent, at the same time, a history and a culture along with an intention. I do not bother whether what the story implies is true or false. But it gave me a lot of knowledge. Knowledge I wasn’t going to get from school. And besides that, it offered me a new perspective to look at things. A minor one, but still, new.

To all idiots who have not yet been able to see the the power of literature, I suggest go ahead. The Da Vinci Code is worth it

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