Yahoo hosted 24-hour 'hacking' event in India's tech hub

Global search engine Yahoo hosted a non-stop 24-hour "hacking" event on Saturday noon in this tech hub where about 300 whiz-kids used its web tools and services to develop new applications, a company official said Friday.

"About 300 developers across India participated in the 24-hour hacking event, which involved using our web tools, services and application programming interfaces (APIs) to innovate new solutions for our global netizens," Yahoo India Research and Development Head Shouvick Mukherjee said.
Being held for the third consecutive year, the "Open Hack Day" aimed at nurturing the open innovation ecosystem in India and drive domain expertise in the internet space.

"Open Hack Days enable talented developers to create better, more relevant and more social experiences on our network. The spirit is to leverage our open APIs and developer tools to create newer applications," Mukherjee said.

Clarifying that the web portal's hacking concept was different from the popular perception of gaining illegal entry into computers and network resources with a malicious intent, Mukherjee said the developers would get a lifetime opportunity to play with Yahoo! Query Language (YQL).

"Our type of hackers will use the YQL to create and use their own table definitions, enabling the language to bind to any data source through the SQL-like syntax and fetch data," Mukherjee noted.

The language platform also enables developers to query, filter, update and combine data across the web.

Developers can also write new applications using the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) in an open, self service web applications environment.

"Participants allowed to write applications front-end in HTML (hyper text markup language, CSS (cascading styling sheets), Java Script and in the language of their choice," Mukherjee pointed out.

With YAP, a developer can get in front of the largest daily audience on the web.

Yahoo began Hack Days as an internal event 12 years ago to bring its developers together and expanded into regular events in its offices the world over.

The annual event was also held in Sunnyvale in the U.S., London, Brazil and Taiwan during the last decade.

Installing PEAR Mail for PHP On Ubuntu

Follow this command:


>>>sudo apt-get install php-pear

>>>sudo pear install mail

>>>sudo pear install Net_SMTP

>>>sudo pear install Auth_SASL

>>>sudo pear install mail_mime

Youtube and Google Video Tricks

As we all know that none of the video sharing sites provide a link to download their videos. So we will have to do some tweaking and play around to download the videos. Here are some ways to download any video from the internet , they are based on the common hack (Right-click -> "Save Target As" OR copy the link into your download manager, but change the file extension to .flv)

Method 1: For Firefox Users - Install the VideoDownloader Extension from Mozilla Add-ons website - It downloads all embedded objects on a webpage including the video clips. This is very easy for beginners.

Method 2: One of the easiest ways is to copy your video URL and paste it on KeepVid Lite. When you click submit, you will be provided with a link to save the video as an FLV file.Using these tricks you can easily download videos from Youtube or Google Videos or Metacafe.

Now some more questions that arise are:

How do I play FLV files on my computer

- They dont open with windows media player or winamp or itunes or real player ?

You can download free FLV players to watch FLV files locally. A good FLV player has a simple and easy-to-remember name - FLV Player. Another nice alternative is the Riva FLV player. Try them out.

How do I split a large FLV file into smaller playable video clips?

This is the most common question among video enthusiasts - they want to split a large FLV video file into smaller chunks for editing or resharing only the interesting tidbits on the internet. To break an FLV file, get the free FLV Parser - a tiny command-line tool to split FLVs into pieces. Its intended use is to convert a large FLV into a series of shorter FLVs based on a series of millisecond-based timecodes. Using the -s switch will split the audio and video of the outputted files; the audio track will be extracted as a series of MP3 files, and the short FLVs produced will have no audio track at all.

How to convert FLV videos to Windows AVI or Quicktime MOV or 3GP formats ?

The free Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer software from Super can convert FLV files to practically any other video format including MP4, MOV H.264, AVI, ASF or Flash SWF animations. Super video convertor.

How do I convert my AVI, MPEG, MOV, 3GP movie clips back to FLV format ?

Say you complete editing your movie in Windows Movie Maker or Avid and now left with an MOV file that you want to convert to FLV. Just get the free Riva FLV encoder and relax. The Riva encoder even lets you select parts of the video that you want to convert to FLV and crop the rest.

I have three small video clips that I download from Google Videos and now want to join them into one single video -How do I merge FLV files ?
There is no free software that lets you join FLV files other than the expensive Macromedia Flash Professional. However, here's a simple trick to join several flv video files - convert individual flv files to avi using Super [as mentioned above], then join the multiple Avi files into a single avi file using free VirtualDub and finally convert this avi back to FLV using Riva FLV encoder.Its done.

How do I watch Youtube Video on my iPod, PSP or Television ?

Again we'll make use of the Super Video Encoder mentioned above. Just convert the FLV file into a corresponding format (like Apple iPod or Sony PSP or MPG) and transfer it to your gadget

Nokia C5 mobile enters the market at Rs. 7999

Nokia has unveiled its latest handset, Nokia C5, for the Indian market. It comes with the price tag of Rs. 7999. The C5 comes with features like a 3.15 MP camera, 3G connectivity and a 2.2 inch wide color display screen. The phone has an expandable memory up to 16GB . It operates on Symbian S60v3 and also supports OVI map, which is huge navigation application for the mobile devices. For connectivity purposes, Nokia C5 supports USB, Wi-Fi Bluetooth, onboard FM Radio and pre-installed Java. The new phone's vital feature entails Nokia Messaging and undemanding renovation of silhouette on Facebook.
Along with the Nokia Messaging attributes, addicts can approach mails from Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail on the new mobile.

Also users can get the access of mail version from Ovi mail for entree' mails on this new handset. C5 clientele can also update their contour on the social networking site Facebook effortlessly and can check position of the profile of their colleagues and friends on this handset. Further the additional feature in this phone is that it crafts chatting swifter and simple as the Nokia C5 has entrenched Google Talk and Windows Messenger. It remains to be seen how well the consumer takes to the product considering the pricing and features the C5 has to offer.

Apple iPhone 4 catches fire

Apple's latest iPhone 4 caught fire while being attached to a computer through the Apple USB cable. Quite dangerously, the phone's user suffered minor burn injuries on hand.

As if poor reception signals weren't enough to spoil the iPhone 4 party, the iPhone 4 got burned and even melted USB cable.

Reports says that a customer had brought the phone to the store for repair, but the device was in the shape of beyond repair.

A local Apple store clarified that the cause behind fire was a defective USB port. The edge of the device had got unmanageably hot. Apple told the store that it seems the fault is with defective USB port, and not due to any design flaw.

Following complaints, Apple recently admitted that iPhone 4 has been facing poor signal strength and poor reception problems.