This is a really sad day. Not only the organizers of National Conference On Free Software 2008 taking place at CUSAT seem to be utterly misguided when they decided to let Novell be on-board as their main sponsor, they even took the extreme step of bringing in police to silence the lone voices of the Boycott Novell protestors. They seem to be treading on the toes of not just free software but free speech as well, which is against the very ethics of the conference they are holding. I’m not sure whether the conference organizers took this step on their own or in cahoots with Novell-Microsoft “gang” but whatever happened was unfortunate. You can see the pictures on Arky’s Blog.

Given the ignorant lazy bum I am, until a couple of days ago I was unaware of this magical place called “Google Solutions Marketplace”. According to Google:

The Google Solutions Marketplace links customers to vendors whose solutions integrate and extend Google’s communication, collaboration, and enterprise search products.

Basically it is a boon for both, google product users who depend on various search, enterprise, search and apps related Google offerings, and developers who develop products and services based upon these. Google Solutions Marketplace acts as a bridge between the two to offer a one stop shop where you can buy (or even get for free, in many cases) the brilliant ideas that have been developed by many individuals and companies based on google’s services.

“Google Adsense” has been caught in a conflict of interests with its parent company “Google”. Google piad 140k to teh cause of “Say No to Prop 8” but on the other hand people reported that Google Adsense delivered a substantially huge amount of “Say Yes to Prop 8” advertisements all over the internet, even on sites which are completely out of context with this matter. Not only is this conflicting with the interests of the parent company but also with the “Terms of Use” put forward by Adsense that ads should not have any kind of intolerance or advocacy towards an individual or a group. Irate people took out their frustation on the adsense blog.

Creative has finally come to its senses and turned to the open source community to raise its X-Fi series of sound cards from the ashes on the linux platform, which got burnt mostly due to the poor quality of the drivers that Creative was giving out. The announcement for releasing the source code, licensed under GPL v2, was made on their forums. For the announcement and download details, click here.

I guess this is a reason for us to rejoice because of two reasons:

A 404 page is an error page that is displayed when somebody tries to go to a link on your website that doesn’t exist. This could occur when someone linking to your website or typing in his browser address bar mistypes a url, or maybe that page has been moved or deleted by you. Lost opportunity? Maybe. But definitely not, if you follow this advise. Many people don’t have a 404 page altogether, a few implement with an inane message like “Something went wrong”, a few will try to help out the seemingly lost user by giving a few navigation options linking to home page, archives or most popular posts, etc. Definitely the last option among these is quite good to retain the users, but we’ll go one step ahead and turn this into an extra source of cash.