Must read article for people interested in open source software. Tech firm Coverity has been doing a review of around 250 different open source software for the US Department of Homeland Security, and this is what their report finds at the end of their testing period. Read the full story on Coverity’s open source software review on Yahoo! News.

OK, before anyone flames me in the comments - there are loads of tutorials online and on how to run Linux from your Flash drive; I could write one of mine too. However, Yahoo! News did a story on this recently, and I think it’s quite comprehensive. Covers all possible options, and does a good job of explaining the whole thing. For people who rather like to test Linux out before installing, this is a nice tutorial to go through. Read more on Yahoo! News on how to run Linux from your USB drive.

You know longer need to be a better know-it-all than all your friends if you use Yahoo! Mail these days. Yup, in an announcement on the official Yahoo! Mail blog today, they said that ALL mails sent through Yahoo! Mail - whether they be from free or Mail Plus accounts - will no longer have the advertisement tagline attached to these mails. Those were the ones which promoted other Yahoo! services.

It’s a small step, but a significant one. Frankly, I don’t think it made much of a difference to anyone whether they added it or not, but as time progress Yahoo! Mail certainly is moving faster on the innovation front. More importantly, their Mail Plus offering - and the incentive to upgrade to it - becomes lesser as they turn out more and more features to their 255 million plus mail users.

A video I took while on my way back from Bangalore after giving the NTU entrance exam. I know the resolution is a bit low, but, oh well. Which reminds me, I fucking hate Google. I ran around everywhere on the Web trying to find out whether Google Video / Youtube supported 3GP videos - I later found out, they don’t, you need to convert your video) - and all that because Google’s just gave a smug little ‘we support many formats, including ones like…’. Basically, they didn’t bother to give the actual list of formats they support, and expect people to either waste their time uploading videos by trial-and-error, or sit down and convert videos.

Why didn’t I try uploading to Yahoo! Video in the first place? Because it doesn’t accept videos without an audio track, which my original video did not. This is probably to ensure people don’t upload pr0n, but can affect genuine users at times. I finally said “Screw Google”, added a very low volume white noise audio track, and put it on Yahoo! Video.

Talking of far-away centres, I’ve heard of some people ending up with getting their AIEEE centre in Port Blair (Andaman & Nicobar Islands)!!! Whoa, that’s one CBSE mess even I can’t figure out…