Technology – Page 30

My rating of Yahoo! PhotoSoup: 9.5 / 10

I’m down with viral fever right now, missing out all the action at OSSCamp Delhi happening at IIT Delhi. I surfing aimlessly at Yahoo! Research stumbled across insanely fun and addictive game they’ve made called PhotoSoup.

The concept is childishly simple. You go to the PhotoSoup page and choose between one of two options – ‘playing’ with photos from a user you know (or your own), or enter a tag. PhotoSoup then throws up fourteen Creative Commons Attribution licensed photos (from Flickr) tagged with that tag. Your task is to find tags other than the one you specified in a word grid and which are also used in at least one of the images. For example, if the tag you search for is ‘color’ then you’ll be shown photos tagged ‘color’. Now one of those photos may be using the tag ‘red’ or ‘orange’ too, and that’s what you have to find in the word grid. Click, drag and release across letters to select them. As and when you pick out correctly tags which are used in the shown images they get grayed out. But hurry! You’ve only 60 seconds from the time of the puzzle loading to solve it.

Yahoo! PhotoSoup — Hey, I only chose this tag for writing this post because I knew the photos thrown up would be interesting.

While solving the puzzle if you want a better look at a picture to guess what tag might have been used with it, mouse your cursor over the photo. Once the game is over you can click on any photo to see it properly on its Flickr page. You can enable ‘hints’, which will show the word / tag you need to search for beneath the photo. The grid can be quite challenging, because words may be placed horizontally, vertically or diagonally – and even backwards in any of the orientations.

The only flaw I found was that searching for the same tag shows the same photos again (that explains the .5 points less than a perfect 10 in the review score), so replay value for the same tag is low. It would have been more fun if the photos served in PhotoSoup were randmized. And it’s an amazing way to discover exquisite photos while playing word games! Besides, this certainly has potential as an educational tool given that work is done for adapting it for a school enviroment.

Downloading made easy at G2P.org

Disclaimer: The information given below is intended for informational purposes only and not to encourage piracy of copyrighted material.

In the world of BitTorrent networks, P2P networks and music download sites are almost dead. IMO though nothing beats the speed of transferring files directly from a server. You don’t have to bother about share ratios, finding seeders, uploading yourself, etc. Especially for those one off downloads. BitTorrent is extremely efficient at transferring large files but not so much at small files. Maybe not due to technical reasons but because of the fact that torrent trackers mostly list large files.

G2P.org (a take on P2P – stands for Google-to-peer) allows you to search the web (via Google) for files you want. The concept behind it is simplicity itself – it uses special search operators to search Google for files you want in openly listed directories on Apache servers. (On Apache, if you don’t disable directory listing everyone can browse the directory structure – including Googlebot.) G2P offers predefined categories (see its sidebar) to narrow down your search. Once you hit search it opens Google results in a frame. If the results don’t match what you want, you can modify the search expression yourself (although you’ll need to be fairly well acquainted with the syntax used).

G2P is not a search engine but simply a frontend to one which makes searching for ‘stuff’ easier. The data is hosted on by others listed in open directories; you may or may not find what you’re looking for. But for one off cases where you need to download something quickly without bothering about finding seeds it’s a great idea.

For webmasters: If you are a webmaster and own a site, it’s generally not a good idea to keep open directory listings (where directories / folders are shown when the ‘default’ files as specified in your Apache config are not present). Sure, if you’re in a philanthrophic mood and want Google to index ‘stuff’ you put up it’s OK but in other cases it’s quite often a no-no for privacy / security. Rectifying this issue is trivial. Open your .htaccess file and this one line to it:

Options -Indexes

..and that’s it. This will turn off directory listing for all folders and child subfolders. Trying to access a directory root should return a ‘403 Forbidden’ error. Using this option does not prevent you in using any files yourself listed under any of those directories – if you enter the full path to a file it will still be accessible.

The other option is to use a robots.txt exclusion, but I’ll drop that for the moment because although it will prevent compliant (this is important) search engines from indexing that directory it will not actually prevent the listing in case a user tries to browse using a web browser.