Grid Computing: Sun Offers 100, 000 in Grid Compute Utility Cool Apps Prize

July 31st, 2009 Security researchers offer caution on smart gridsLAS VEGAS — The race to build a "smarter" electrical grid could have a dark side. Security experts are starting to show the dangers of equipping homes and businesses with new meters that enable two-way communication with utilities.

August 14th, 2007 Simple things should be simple. While starting with ExtJS, I saw a screencast on Grid which used a rather dubious method of making an AJAX call using an actual form element.

August 26th, 2007 The WordPress plugin contest results were just announced by Mark Ghosh. We sponsored a copy of Translator Pro 5.0 plugin for the competition.

July 3rd, 2009 For long, the geeks had discussed of the D-day when the OS would disappear and everything would be accommodated in a cloud. At this day,  Cloud computing is a throwaway word that includes everything from web mail to Facebook.  Amazon had an important role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers after the dot-com bubble.

January 15th, 2005 Much as I try to understand, I think Sun's freeing up of Solaris is a bad bad move. Solaris was their cash cow! If I were in the hot seat I would have kept Solaris up and running as paid-for-software with new innovations (like dtrace) and simultaneously have gone for: 1.

October 18th, 2005 Online self-publishing house Lulu has announced the Blooker Prize - first-ever literary award for "blooks," books based on blogs or Web sites. The Lulu Blooker Prize (www.lulublookerprize.com) is the first contest to honor blooks, a hybrid literary form that has evolved in recent years from web sites, particularly the web sites known as blogs.

October 9th, 2006 X-Prize Foundation is offering $10m for the first private team that can decode 100 human genomes in 10 days. It is said to be the largest medical prize in history.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The next time you surf the internet, you may bump into a Nobel Peace Prize candidate. A US security expert has proposed the honour for micro-blogging site Twitter, which helped protesters in Iran beat censorship and tell their tale to the world.

October 7th, 2005 The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria received Ig Nobel prize this year "for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq." The scams (also known as 419 scams) are notorious for asking people to reveal their private bank information to help fictitious characters transfer large sums of money.

June 28th, 2006 Google announces Google Desktop Gadget contest, with $8,000 in cash prizes. You can use Google Desktop Gadget Designer, a new developer tool for creating, maintaining and debugging gadgets faster than before.

June 14th, 2007 Weblog tools collection has announced a WordPress plugins competition. The competition began on 1st June (2007) and will last till the end of July.

July 29th, 2008 An ex-Google employee and her husband has taken on the task of creating a good competition for Google by the name cuil (pronounced cool). Cuil is a search engine with a difference.

July 13th, 2007 Unicode offers flipped versions of standard English characters. You can use a small javascript based utility to get flipped version of any word or phrase.

November 8th, 2008 Any reasonable (web) application which deals with some subset of web data (rss feeds, web pages, product pricing data etc.), has to use distributed data processing to go anywhere. Unless you have very deep pockets and / or have strong VC funding (which is rarer than a bottle of Mouton Rothschild Pauillac Premier Cru First Growth these days) you will have to opt for consumer grade hardware (instead of big iron which more companies opted during the dotcom era ) and use them in a distributed computing framework like hadoop or GridGain or older (more mature) high throughput computing systems like OpenPBS (ignore the marketing talk to download the free version) or Condor.

January 2nd, 2006 Update: This competition (and Ah Kiong) appears to be fraud. Kcyap (Ah Kiong) announced WordPress 2.0 theme competition with some exciting prizes funded by him like 60GB iPod video.