Haven’t seen the fail whale in a while, this is probably old news to loads of people, but the fail whale is gone and is replaced by a bunch of clouds, a robot, a pigeon and shell fish?

Twitter

Interfaith conversations my arse…

Arabs are just sad.

ikbis is now more browsable; thanks to a newly added and much needed navigation panel!

They’ve also added EXIF information to photos; ah the shame of owning an Eastman Kodak DX4900! Hey it was a hot item back in 2002!

On the downside; iKbis Picks still do not have an RSS feed, nor do comments (you still have to logon to see new comments on your photos). The “recent comments” page does not display what it claims (unless the comments are still new). All comments are sorted oldest to newest instead of the other way around. The “Comments I’ve made” page includes those resulting from a flickr import (arrrrrrrrrgh!).

Adding contacts is one hell of a bugger as well. You still cannot search for contacts via email (you type Mohammad I type Muhammed, email makes it much easier). And incase you do find Muhammed, you still have to assign him to a “contact category”, bad idea, very bad idea!

Don’t get me started on search, clicking a tag in a search result should return all photos with that specific tag, not just the user’s (on who’s tag I clicked).

Downsides aside, good job! Looking forward to seeing those resolved

Apple.com online store is now offline. Exciting!

With less than 10 minutes seperating us from Steve Job’s keynote, everybody is speculating what could be in store. My guess are; the cell phone that won’t be called iPhone, an iPod with better video playback capabilities, and possibly a Mac Tablet. We’ll find out in a few

I love it how a multi billion dollar such as google is still able to retain its sense of humor. Google launched a secret subsite where everything is written just how Elmer Fudd would say it.

Check it here, Wabbit!

Heads Up: The video below is not Work/Family safe

A Brazilian court has ordered the closure of YouTube following the site’s failure to completely remove a video showing Ronaldo’s ex-missus and her new boyf indulging in a bit a of beach rumpy-pumpy, Reuters reports.

Daniela Cicarelli and boyfriend Tato Malzoni enjoy a dipModel Daniela Cicarelli sued YouTube after the offending film proved a smash hit among Brazilian YouTubers. She and squeeze Tato Malzoni last year “filed to force YouTube to take the video down and demanded $116,000 in damages for each day the video remains up”. Although YouTube did indeed remove some copies, other users reposted it and the whole sorry exposure dragged on for months.

Finally, Cicarelli and Malzoni filed another suit in December “requesting that YouTube be shut down as long as the video is available to users”. A Brazilian court agreed and a judicial clerk today said that it had “ordered the popular video sharing service … to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site”.

This is likely to prove difficult to enforce, Reuters notes, since YouTube is based the US. No-one from owner Google was available to speak to the agency today.

You’d think with all the sun, thong bikinis and hot babes, people would be a little less uptight over there! You all remember the time when the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism attempted suing The Simpsons’ producers for the episode “Blame it on Lisa“? Note to Daniela: next time, to save yourself some headaches, save the “rumpy-pumpy” till you get home.. then again, maybe not
Via The Register

For a person who’s photo editing arsenal comprises of Microsoft Paint (Vista’s version which saves to JPEG by default, finally!) comes an online photo editor that allows you to rotate, crop, fix red eye in addition to sharpening and fixing the exposure of your photos; in addition to a few artistic special effects that didn’t impress me much.

At the present time Picnik can only integrate with Flickr (other services are to come). It allows you to upload photos from your computer; snap one right off your webcam, or just upload one off the web (using yahoo or flickr search).

The interface is intuitive and very easy to use, what was once this is now this. I’m not sure if that’s better but it was done in less than a minute (including the upload), very convenient for a guy who doesn’t want to spend time editing photos.  However, the lack of Vista search in the upload dialog box is irritating; as I rely on metadata rather than structured folders to search for stuff, needless to say it was tedious.

Give it a try at http://picnik.com/  seats are limited so hurry up.

Despite all the IT spending in the region some major news websites still do not offer RSS feeds to their readers; making it a hassle to track updates and forcing news junkies to visit their sites at least a couple of times.

This is where Page2RSS comes in handy. Page2RSS is a service that parses websites for changes at set intervals and creates an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

While it’s not perfect, as it tracks all changes including banner ads! And doesn’t separate the changes into separate posts. It’s still much more convenient than browsing on to websites and checking if anything changed.

Give it a try at http://www.page2rss.com

And I totally agree. Enjoy the 2006 Year in Review Video by JibJab

One of my very favorite things about Google is how they take their time to honor various artists and intellectuals with a few additions to the Google logo every now and then.

Yesterday, the 20th of April, was the birthday of the Spanish painter Joan Miro. Google, being their usual self, replaced their usual logo with a logo influenced by the famous Miro style as a tribute to this artist.

Yesterday morning, the family of Joan Miró was upset to discover this and The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, asked Google to remove the image early, saying that there are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró.

What do I think? Booooooooooo!

During his lifetime, Miró had expressed contempt for conventional painting methods and his desire to abandon them (in his words “murder” and “assassinate” and or “rape” them) in favour of more contemporary means of expression, and perhaps it’s just me, but I would think that he would have appreciated this little contemporary move from Google’s side memoralizing his fame and artistic genius.

Oh, well. You can check out the Google logo gallery here.