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Omegle is a website used to communicate with random, anonymous people across the Internet. While its catchy slogan encourages you to “talk to strangers,” I felt that talking to one stranger at a time might be slightly limiting. Hence, the Group Chat extension was born. If you have been using Omegle lately, you might have come across this introductory message:

You have been randomly selected to join an exclusive Omegle group chat…

The fundamental rules are the same: there is no need to reveal your identity and you may leave at any time. I hope Group Chat has been an enjoyable experience for you. Please feel free to post your comments/complaints/suggestions below, or just leave a message

Since you’re here, I might as well answer some common questions:

• Group Chat is neither part of nor endorsed by Omegle
• Yes, this is real, and this is a chat room on Omegle
• Up to around 20 people are in the chat room at once
• The chat room is powered by a proxy bot written in Python
• No, this does not use Twisted but is threaded

I was just on the checkout line at Morton Williams when the guy in front of me greeted a passing woman. She turned around, gave the guy a really surprised look, and exclaimed,

Oh my gosh, you know my name! None of the other guys I had sex with remember my name.

Free shipping! Only on eBay.

It is now less than an hour until 16:00 UTC, but a couple of Google Wave invitations are already being passed around on Twitter. One of these has found its way onto eBay, where the highest bid was $2000 and rising. What would you do to “be the one of the 1st to sink your teeth into the beta”?

Check here for more Google Wave merchandise, including invitations and fan gear. As for me… I’ll just wait patiently for a few more hours.

Now’s just three days before Google Wave’s beta launch, or that’s what they say. There has been quite a bit of development going on, with Google polishing the interface and third-party developers pushing out exciting gadgets using the Wave API. I myself have been playing around with a small image editing gadget known as Imagine (link to gadget), though development has slowed substantially due to classes and such. Anyhow, I have a wave embedded into this post after the break, so be sure to interact with it if you have a sandbox account. If you don’t, well, here’s a screenshot.

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As we speed into the 21st century, online social networking is becoming an increasingly popular mode of communication. Since the rise of Twitter three years ago, it has been easier than ever, especially for professionals, to take advantage of this Internet phenomenon. Celebrities and athletes are not the only ones who embrace such technology: healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses are also beginning to open accounts on services such as Twitter and Facebook. Early this week, for example, a hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery was broadcast on Twitter at the Cedar Rapids St. Luke’s Hospital in a series of 126 short updates (from bottom to top):

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I used to rely almost exclusively on SSH for remote administration, but I recently added an OpenVPN server to my toolkit. I was interested in the performance of OpenVPN compared to OpenSSH, so I ran several tests using iperf:

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Early this month I heard about the ECCERobot, or Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. While standard humanoid robots mimic humans in appearance, ECCE copies the internal structures and mechanisms. The anthropomimetic design incorporates such elements as bones, joints, muscles, and tendons, allowing for the potential for human-like activity. ECCE’s drive system of elastic cables and drill motors may be complicated and inefficient, but it provides insight into our own design.

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Recently, I rewrote from scratch a two-year-old project of mine. Imagine, a browser-based image editor, had been sitting around collecting dust, so I figured I’d delete all the legacy code (almost all of it) and create something better. I’ve also been evaluating the possibility of integrating Imagine into Google Wave.

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