Star Trek Art Car - from Greece?

Here is one of the first Star Trek art cars I have ever seen out of Greece and I commend him for doing it. It's the first art car period that I have ever seen out of Greece and having lived there my self, I can't imagine anyone driving around in them, yet. It will take sometime before its more accepted, but someone had to be the first. To you my bold friend I say, Yiassoo.

Sausalito Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Heather Wilcoxon is better known as an artist from Sausalito Cailfornia who now lives on a decorated house boat called the "Delta Queen". I was honored to meet Heather last Saturday who came to my garage sale while visiting here sister who happens to live down the street from my house. We started talking about art cars and told me about her Gremlin art car that no longer works but has taken a

[How to] Run Android apps on Windows

I have written earlier about installing Android market on the emulator and running Android apps on it. Here is a much simpler way of running Android apps from your PC. BlueStacks is a cool app which lets you run Android apps on your Windows PC. The application is available for free and it supports only Windows as of now. There is also an Android app which facilitates syncing of apps between your smartphone and the PC.

Features:

• Full screen mode for apps.
• Sync apps between Android smartphone and PC using BlueStacks Cloud Connect.
• Install up to a maximum of 26 apps. (Unlimited in the case of yet to be released Pro version).

Try it out here. Mac version of BlueStacks will be available soon.

-- Varun

The Fin Car by Bill Lockner

the fin carBill Lockner’s car is a 1979 Volvo that has been enhanced and rebuilt using scrap yard metal, and car parts that were bound for the landfill.“It started out stock,” Lockner explains, “and as time went by, things got added to it.” These things include truck fenders, the back end of a Rambler, and a fin.“[The Fin Car] was an idea to use up and change a car that to me represented soccer

Per-Element FullScreen API

I have been following the developments on Chromium channel and one thing which caught my attention last week is the fullscreen API. As the name suggests, the API supports “per-element” fullscreen on the browser. Traditionally browsers have been supporting fullscreen mode for the entire page but not for the elements on the page. This API will be handy if you want to focus on a particular piece of information on the page. Most of the analytics application can make use of this API to show more detailed information. I have worked on applications which spans across two monitors as it displays huge amount of information. With this API, I can utilize the real estate effectively. Multimedia contents can also be shown on fullscreen. The API, which is based on the Mozilla’s proposal, has two JavaScript methods: requestFullScreen() and cancelFullScreen(). Check out the demo here.

How do we use it?

The API includes the following methods to all the elements in the DOM:

• requestFullScreen(): Requesting the browser to render the current element in fullscreen. On using this method, the keys will be disabled and the element will not receive any keyboard events. This is to protect the users from potential phishing attacks in fullscreen mode. 
• requestFullScreenWithKeys(): Same as requestFullScreen() but with access to keyboard events.
• cancelFullScreen(): Use this method to return back to the normal mode.

These methods have been added to all the elements in the DOM. Apart of this, a new attribute allowfullscreen has been added for the iframe element. You can also listen to the event fullscreenchange to know the state of the element. Three CSS pseudo elements have also been added: :full-screen, :full-screen-doc and :full-screen-root-with-target. Using these pseudo elements, you can control how you want your elements to appear in fullscreen mode.

Criticism:

The proposal received many criticism from the security experts. Some of the concerns are:

• Attackers can request fullscreen and pre-empt keyboard focus. Your security credentials could possibly be stolen.
• Increased chances for phishing attacks.
• One could open up fullscreen mode without user interaction (which in my opinion is very bad). 

The aforementioned concerns can be addressed if control is given to the users to allow / deny fullscreen mode. Also, plug-ins should be disabled in the fullscreen mode.

Browser Support:

• Safari 5+ (with webkit prefix)
• Chrome 14+ (with webkit prefix). Chrome 14 requires the flag: –enable-fullscreen. It has been enabled by default in Chrome 15 (not yet released at the time of this post)
• Implementation of the API is in progress for Firefox. It is expected to be available as part of Firefox 10.

Check out this page for demo. More details can be found here. 

-- Varun