Alphabet – from known to the unknown

By now you probably know that Google the company has a parent company, Alphabet. I know you know because your Facebook feed, or twitter feed or Google+ feed would be filled with multiple articles about it from various magazines announcing the announcement Google made.

The quick deal of it is, since Google has been acquiring various companies for sometime now and has its feet in many Business Lines, it has created an umbrella company Alphabet which will oversee work, importance of work, and funds for each company. The biggest company under Alphabet is of course Google, but there are many smaller ones like Next, Calico, Fiber, Google Ventures and Google Capital amongst others. Some of these companies are working in such varied fields that they were actually not fit to come directly under the brand of Google. Like Calico which is studying biology to understand how a person’s lifespan is controlled to enable healthier and longer lives to humans.

Well that was the regular news for you from me, which has been covered in detail on RevealTheTech already as it was announced.

From the news on Official Google Blog, the things that hit me most was why the XYZ domain? I have an amateur interest in domain industry and most of the time I’ve read only bad things about .xyz TLD. It was one of the earliest newTLD to be launched, and amongst other things it was said they bloated the numbers of registrations to show good performance of the TLD.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has its website at http://abc.xyz very nonsensical domain to my eyes at first. It was the last article I read. As I laid down for the night, it hit it. Hit me big time! Larry Page showed his brilliance with the domain too.

ABC are the first 3 alphabets and XYZ the last 3 alphabets. A child learns A, B, C and then moves on from there. If you ask a toddler who’s learning alphabets you might ask him to ‘recite his ABC’s’. Similarly when a child moves from simple calculations in mathematics to where he needs to assume variable and for equations they’re invariably taught to assume the unknown variables as X or Y or Z.

Larry Page actually just told the world that they are moving from known ABCs to find the unknown XYZs of the world.

¬ Announcemnt for Alphabet.
¬ The confusion Alphabet’s creation has caused on social media.

Wunderlist gets cleverer for you Mac and Apple Watch

If you followed our article a while back where we talked about Microsoft OneNote acquiring Wunderlist, you’d know we love our share of quick note taking apps and have quite a liking for Wunderlist specially. We wished that Microsoft purchasing it doesn’t destroy it, and today it makes me happy to say they not only not-destroy it but actually improved it.

The app just got cleverer for use on Mac and Apple Watch. The creators have added shortcuts to quickly add a new to-do in your list, quickly search your to-do list and create smart due dates to lists & reminders for you Mac.

Quick Add, lets you add a new item in your list by hitting the combination CTRL+Option(Alt)+W after installing Wunderlist on your Mac or updating to the latest version. This combination works from anywhere while you’re working. You don’t have to be using Wunderlist to make it work for you. Pretty much like “Spotlight Search” already on your Mac. After calling Quick Add to your service, just press the ‘+’ to add a new to-do. This makes me believe that there are at least some people in the world who think like me that an idea or a task can come to your mind anytime, you shouldn’t have to fire up an app to note it.

Unsend your emails

Have you ever wanted to undo something in life?
I agree, that’s a big question! So, have you ever wanted to undo an email you’ve sent?
Sure, you have.

There are times when you’re forced to think if the email you sent should have been proofread by another colleague? If you work in an Office and report to someone, that’s bound to happen sometime.
Then there are times when an email shouldn’t have been sent to a particular person, but it inadvertently was.
Sometimes, you miss out on a spelling mistake, even though the English-lover in you checked the content twice.
If your drink quite often, you probably have sent your share of emails you shouldn’t have written and texts you shouldn’t have replied to.
Hey it happens to the best of us!

Outlook on desktop has had a “recall” email feature for a long time which recalls mails from those recipients who haven’t read it. But it doesn’t mostly work.
If you use GMail, there’s a “lab” feature where you can enable recall-ability of your mails, but for it to work you’ve to act within a few seconds of sending the mail.

These are some methods which don’t actually work flawlessly. They don’t work at all if you realise the mistake a bit late!
That one person who wasn’t supposed to know about the project or discussion now knows.
That word for which you’ve berated quite a few people, you spelled it incorrectly yourself. You know you’re never going to hear the end of it.
That drunken email! What you share with your drinking buddies should remain with them and not shared with your workmates. You might not even remember what hit you when your boss fires you the next morning.

There’s a solution to it now.

Enter Criptext.

Open Source

I have been a WordPress user for some years now. I run a few blogs on this amazing Open Source Software. Well ok, all my blogs run on it! Finding WordPress, is the best thing that happened to my online self. It did 2 things for me,

1. Enabled me to create great websites with ease, without me having to meddle with HTML, js, css, php or any other web language.
2. Introduced me to the world of Open Source Software.

I haven’t stopped raving about Open Source since then. It has become a mindset that if a software is not Open sourced it is not in the best state it can be.

Yes, we’re dependent on certain software like Windows, or Mac OS X for example, but even that dependency can be removed by use of UNIX or one of its distributions. Other than this dependency on OS, there’s not much which cannot be done using an Open Source Software. Some are in fact done better with Open Source, like creating a website with WordPress, finding photos on Flickr,

The power of Open Source

Believe me, I am not the alone in believing the power of Open source. An example closest to home for us at Morpho is Atlassian. We use their JIRA on a daily basis. Using JIRA costs the company, and it surely doesn’t come cheap. But it is free for Open Source projects which are under an approved license by the Open Source Initiative, and their source code is available for download to user via a public website.

Opening up our code for others to use, modify and improve upon is really what the web needs to do. Having so much faith in the system I have asked even my brother, who freelances to write code to make Robots do what he wills, to Open Source at least some of his code for the world. Making your code open source is not always the way, sometimes there are certain restrictions that are implied on you. But when you’re writing it for yourself, do not hesitate.

I once edited a tumblr theme for a site. Wasn’t being web savvy! Just tried some fixes to get it to work properly. It was expected to do some simple things, but just wasn’t doing them correctly. Though I didn’t do much to it, but after making it workable, gave it a name and shared the working theme on my blog. I felt and still feel proud and happy for doing that.

A man can only do what his knowledge allows him to. To go beyond is fulfilment.

Plan to go beyond. We all should.

I hope to contribute to the Open Source movement. How? Making a WordPress theme, for starters. Beyond that, Sky is the limit.

You should go beyond too!

Open source software (OSS) and open source definition (OSD) are rising stars of technology today. The term “open source” was coined in 1998, and is now a media buzzword. Today if a Web 2.0 company doesn’t have or use an Open Source product or project, it cannot be counted as a successful venture.

Software has historically been property of its owner; the rights of its development are with the Developer, until specified in the license with software. Licenses and initiatives like ‘GNU General Public License’, ‘Free Open Source Software’, ‘Open Source Initiative’ etc. help in defining the openness of software code to other developers, defining the terms & conditions of its allowed usage.

An open-source license is a license for computer software that makes the source code available for everyone to use & modify. This allows end user to review and modify the source code for their customizations and/or troubleshooting needs. Open-source licences are also commonly free, allowing for modification, redistribution, and commercial use without having to pay the original author.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Protesting against SOPA – Black Out!

Fake Asininity against SOPA/PIPA - Blackout

The internet has been blacked out for January 18, 2012 to protest against the SOPA/PIPA legislations that are set for hearings in the US.

I didn’t pay much heed to SOPA for long time, since I have aware of its happenings for quite some time now. But when companies which you look up-to like Wikipedia, WordPress, Reddit take a stand on it, and so strongly as to protest and go blacking themselves, you have to sit up and look!

Related articles

• Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout – Nirr Mohi Baalak
• Blackout protesting SOPA/PIPA – Nirr Mohi Baalak
• SOPA/PIPA BlackedOut – Nirr Mohi Baalak
• Stop SOPA/PIPA (angelaquarles.com)
• Protest Against SOPA/PIPA (waldina.com)
• WordPress.com Blacks Out Homepage and Allows Users to Protest SOPA (linearfix.wordpress.com)
• This Site Will Blackout Against SOPA and PIPA (lorelle.wordpress.com)
• WordPress.com joins SOPA Blackout (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)

WordAds by WordPress.com

WordPress.com recently announced that they have left behind AdSense, and have recently partnered with Federated Media to run ads on WordPress.com blogs which would be eligible for them though they have not defined the criteria that they will use to decided which blogs the ads will run on. Though a prerequisite has been defined as a Custom Domain via the Domain Mapping Upgrade.

I have been tinkering with the idea of getting a custom domain with the upgrade for sometime now but I am not sure of which domain to finalize, as I already have ManveetSingh.com up and running, which would turn out to be quite costly than if I buy the domain from WordPress.com Still thinking and planning though 😉

So just fill out this form, keep your fingers crossed and get started.

Related articles

• WordPress.com Announces WordAds for Making Money with Your Blog (blogworld.com)
• WordPress.com Now Lets (Some) Bloggers Monetize Their Sites with Ads (siliconfilter.com)
• Federated Media Lands WordPress.com Deal (sascho.wordpress.com)
• Federated Media Lands WordPress.com Deal (slashdot.org)
• Why I moved back from self-hosted to WordPress.com (billbennett.co.nz)