I would like to see a reverse auction website, a reverse eBay, if you will. Let’s say, if you want a copy of used book “Chemistry explained”, you just start a reverse auction of it, people with the book may compete to sell you the book. Maybe.

It all started when I have finished a child education eBook
Mind Games for the Math-Challenged. I want to have a native English speaker to proofread it and as
I was able to auction it off at eBay, It occurred naturally to me that I would like to find the service at eBay. However, as the bid always go up at eBay, it does not looks like that is what I really wanted. After some thought, I come up with a what I thought to be a smart hack to get it auctioned on eBay. I included the eBay list below. I had more than 500

The boys over at haxademix.net never cease to amaze me, this time rolling out a web based and virtually anonymous SQL injection tool (it's FREE to).

http://evil.hackademix.net/sqlit/

** For those of you who do not know what an SQL injection is...

SQL injection is a technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application. The vulnerability is present when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and thereby unexpectedly executed. It is in fact an instance of a more general class of vulnerabilities that can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

have fun and remember it's for EDUCATIONAL purposes :)

Picasa is a new web application brought to us by Google which lets you upload images to a locations on a map.  This would be a perfect way to journal about your travels and maybe suggest cool sites to friends and family.

[via meshly]

Homestar Runner creators Matt and Mike Chapman are staying true to the web and rejecting TV series offers by both Cartoon Network and Comedy Central. 

"There was a brief flirtation with Comedy Central and Adult Swim," Matt said. "The whole TV thing seemed creepy. They wanted to plug it into their model -- that all comedy was gag-related, not character-driven. They left the door open, but we liked what we were doing and kept doing it online."

With Time Warner's Cartoon Network and Adult Swim also headquartered in Atlanta, it seemed natural for Homestar to jump in with them. But a deal has failed to materialize, and the Chapmans are in no hurry to strike up conversations again.

[full article]

The nominees and winners for the 11th annual Webby Awards are up.  Check 'em out!

Review from Jay is Games:

Ayiti: the Cost of Life is one of the best political web games released this year, right up there with The McGame and the comic genius of Airport Security. You control the activities of a Haitian family trying to get by, the experience is like Oregon Trail meets Wyclef Jean ("if I was president..."). Health, education, community service and just making ends add up to a compelling strategy game thats easy to play but hard to beat.

Unlike most games with a political message, such as September 12th or 3rd World Farmer, Cost of Life actually has a strategy that works, but it's buried in a heap of revealingly faulty approaches. The balance of the game's randomized elements shows the designers subtly imbued their message; where health risks can be marginalized and hurricane disasters rare, unlike 3rd World Farmer's frustratingly even spread of bad luck that ensured you'd lose it all every few turns.

(Thanks, Jason!)

Previously:
'Dying for Darfur' Online Game

BlogCadre just made the upgrade from Media Temple's shared server platform to their new "Grid Server" system.

New GS Features
Instead of a shared server, the GS system places all your data on an NFS server. There are apparantly several load-balanced front end web servers that then access this data from the common data location. Ben over at cuddletech has some more details on the Grid Server set up.

Read on for more info about the transition, including migration notes and my skepticism as to whether or not this service is even a good move. If you want the 5 second version: the transition is frightening with no staging process or backout plan, and the "upgrade" leaves us with half the bandwidth and the real potential for expensive new mystery charges.

Has anyone else noticed the new search results layout on Google? Go ahead, search for something and have a look-see for yourself:



The whole left side of the page is now taken up by a column with links to the other search services, such as image search, group search, etc.  These links used to sit in a much more real-estate friendly location above the search bar.  Here's a screenshot of how it used to look (from the Google help page):


I know it's not a super big difference, but it does seem like a waste of screen space and, more importantly, it's unfamiliar.  Google, what are you guys up to?  Did you run out of space above the search bar for all the cool new search features you'll be releasing soon?

Here is an article from PingMag, a Tokyo-based magazine about design and howtos, about the trends of web design that were short-lived:

Trends rule the web design world. More so than with other areas of design, the web is very transparent and in a matter of hours I can click my way through the work of maybe hundreds of individual web designers, without even realising it. This ease of access makes “trend osmosis” something of an unfortunate inevitability amongst web designers. However, trends come and go. Here is a small collection of web design trends that I predict we will all be completely sick of in about 6 months. The advent of social and accessible web design (to the uninformed, social and accessible web design means “big fonts ‘n’ gradient fills”) has brought with it a curious gang of design trends and gimmicks - lets take a look at who’s going to snuff it first.

Once you are finished reading the article be sure to check out the rest of the website.

DiggLicious gives you live updates of what's going on both digg and del.icio.us. 

...you can observe a live view of the action on these two sites without having to reload your browser. If a site interests you click on it to check it out, then return here and use the handy links to go directly to del.icio.us to bookmark it or digg.com to digg it!

It gives a nice snapshot of the action going on within both sites, but of course, doesn't replace either of them.  Nice tool.