VeriSign acquires GeoTrust

VeriSign Inc., a provider of infrastructure services for Internet and telecom networks, said Wednesday it agreed to buy privately held GeoTrust Inc. for about $125 million in cash. Check out more on this here.

StumbleUpon - A cool site

I was going through my daily dose of Biz-Tech news on RedHerring, when I stumbled upon this. StumbleUpon offers a cool Firefox extension. Although this has been there for a long time, I stumbled upon it very late. Wish I had it long back :(. The founders have rejected funding from VCs and have instead gone in for Angel funding from the likes of Ram Shriram, Mitch Kapor, Josh Kopelman, Rajeev Motwani, etc. In my personal opinion it was indeed a very smart move from them. Leveraging the experience and guidance of such high profile angel investors will definitely see them scaling greater heights. With such large user base and going by the acquisition spree of all the biggies out there, this one may be somewhere on top of their list. We never know what's cooking in the acquisition space ;). Here is a snippet that I am pasting from their site which quotes the difference between the regular search and their offering.

"Search vs. Stumble: Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences."

There is more to it. Check it out, it is really cool. It already has more users than digg.

New Linux shortcut learnt

My Technical Architect showed me a shortcut today. I never knew such a thing existed, albeit I had always longed for it. Whenever you want to replace a character from the previous command with a new character, you would have pressed an "Up Arrow", then use the "Right Arrow/Left Arrow" and reach the character you want to replace, delete it and add the new character. Here's a shortcut that can be used effectively to avoid you the pain!!!

Example : Suppose you had created a file called "abc1002100.txt" in previous command.

$vi abc1002100.txt

Now suppose you want to create a file abc1003100.txt, why go to previous command till "2" is reached and replace it with"3". An easier and effective way is :

$ ^2^3

The above command will do the replacement for you and opens the file you requested for.

Note: It will replace all occurence of first character with the second character. For e.g, if you want to replace just the first "0" with "5", it is not possible with the shortcut mentioned. This shortcut will replace all occurence of first character with the second character. So the command that gets executed will be "vi abc1552155.txt "

Microsoft may aim for Yahoo! acquisition

Why am I not surprised, with all the interop talks and extremely close collaboration with Yahoo!? CNNMoney.com has a post on this. No surprises if Google buys Sun Microsystems.