Batting at number 12: Blog

The famous last lecture

Tue, 06 May 2008 03:28:47 GMT

A truly moving lecture by Prof. Randy Pausch of CMU. This guy has incredible story telling skills. He kept reminding me of of Richard Feynman particularly during the first part of the lecture. Coincidentally Feynman lost his life to cancer too…

Scions of the Thirsty Crow

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 06:55:36 GMT

We all know about Aesop's famous thirsty crow. Scientists seem to have found his descendents lately. Crows not only used tools in daily life but they also saved good tools for later use. Cool ain't it? Check out the video below:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12738-tool-use-by-shy-crows-caught-on-camera.html

Office live workspace on Google

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 20:05:01 GMT

Why am I not surprised that the first news result on Google returns this news? I think it's really difficult. to not do no evil :)

A bit of a Google Guile.

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:21:52 GMT

Installed a new machine and Google was one of the first sites I browsed to. That's when I notice this little box in the right top corner of my browser. "Get a Google-enhanced search box" it said.

Hmmmm... iteresting way to put it. If that's what you want me to get then why are you linking to the Google Toolbar? Shouldn't you link to the Google search provider instead?

I remember when IE7 came out initially, Google used to offer a search provider for IE but no more. Apparently you don't get as good tracking data with it as you get with the Google Toolbar. That's ok Google. Everybody needs that information for tuning search results and Google Toolbar is a great product. But please be open and clear about it. You are the leader of the pack. No need to trick users into installing it.

Google mathematics: Infinity == 1

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:19:22 GMT

Monday, April 2 12:00 AM ET

Google Responds to Yahoo by Increasing Gmail Storage to Infinity Plus One

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2007/04/google-gmail-infinity-plus-one-storage.html

So not long ago: GMail Storage == Infinity + 1

When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way-to-get-more-storage.html

But lately Google says: GMail Storage == 2

Infinity + 1 == 2

So obviously Infinity == 1

Q.E.D.

Somebody obviously miscalculated or at least miscommunicated something. :)

Minnows turn Sharks

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 23:04:59 GMT

2 surprises in the first week of world cup. It's anybody's cup now.

Are you ready for your new wife?

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 03:25:53 GMT

This guy got a new wife the other day. Here's the account of his experience. Totally hilarious. More so if you have alredy got one too :) If not, you might be getting one pretty soon. So be ready for her.

Looks like he's getting used to her but if you are annoyed with her weird fits, there are ways to change her behavior.

Have fun!

So Yahoo! India WAS hacked after all!

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:15:23 GMT

I blogged a bit about it last week. I was hoping that it was a false positive and never analysed it much but today I came across a post that looked at it in more details. Looks like it really was hacked within days of its launch. Yahoo! has started its cleanup act but I wish it was detected and fixed earlier.

Yahoo's got a virus?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 04:48:05 GMT

Yahoo! introduced 6 new Indian language sites yesterday. Pretty excitig I thought and went right away to check those out only to be greeted by a virus there... or at least thats what my AntiVirus likes to think.

Check out the screenshot below. I hope this is a false warning! If you want to test your anti virus software click here. (Be warned though. My AV reported this page as having a virus (HTML/Hinpack and also the VBS/MS06-014!exploit) so click at your own risk)

2 Must watch atom films

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 03:49:11 GMT

That's some creativity there.

If you enjoyed this then this is another one by the same guy.

Have fun!

Stories on Indian Startups

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:55:34 GMT

Recently there has been some talk about immigrant/Indian entrepreneurship and the Indian startup scene. Dharmesh Shah has a couple such articles here and here. As he notes, the scene in India is changing fast and startups are mushrooming around the tech hubs in India. But the so called Silicon Valley of India is still thriving mostly on the outsourced jobs and "off-shore" development centres of major corporations.

When I was working in a well known software services company in India, we tried to push hard into being a product company. The drive went on for about 3 years after which profitability of the whole effort was reviewed by the execs. The initiative was soon cancelled and projects mothballed.

Apart from the reasons Dharmesh highlights for why consumer software products did not take off in India, I think the mother cause of it was the need. A software product is just simply an effort to reduce the manpower requirement in doing things and India has never felt a need to do that thanks to its billion strong population. That's also the reason why the indispensible vacuum cleaner that you find in every home in the western world, is a hard sell in India . If the data entry operator can do the job for me cheaper, then why would I invest in an OCR software and workflow system, which needs some manual intervenation anyways?

This I think has some positive side to it as well. This way the wealth of the new economy is trickling down to the masses. Hopefully reducing the gap of haves and have-nots by some amount.

Book Review: Microserfs

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:14:34 GMT

Generally I'm not much into fiction but when a friend recommended Microserfs as a fun little book about early days at Microsoft, I thought I should give it a shot. The book is an easy read for a layman without any arcane references to the computing terms. The writing style is so immersing that after a while you feel like you have known Karla, Dan, Susan, Michael etc for a while.

There are a couple of gripes though. Since I was reading a fiction I kinda expected something dramatic, *fictional* to happen. Instead this book just went on like a real story and ended without much of a climax. Also the main reason why I wanted to read this was to see if I can get a glimpse of the early Microsoft days but since most of the story happens in the Bay Area, it was a bit of a letdown.

Still I'd recommend it as a comfort read for a geek.

Love Google Hate Ads?

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:47:59 GMT

May be you love the search results Google gets you but don't want to be distracted by the ads they show you
or may be you don't like the idea that a megacorp is making billions off of your search results, your bandwidth and some other person's content. Whatever the reason is but now you have a way around the "evil" stuff that GOOG does.

Try out http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm.

This search engine does things exactly as Google does but it doesnt do ads. Well it's not really a search engine just a layer on top of Google to scrape off their ads and other money making means.

And if having that multicolored logo in left corner gives you some kinda confidance in the search results you see, then try something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&output=googleabout&q=TEST&btnG=Search+our+site

If you already have ie7 then this will add the Google search provider without ads to your search box. So you are all set! Give it a try. You'd love the last century look of Google results. Clean and to the point! Have fun!

The best sorting algorithm ever!

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 01:52:13 GMT

This sorting algorithm sorts in constant time, constant space, in-place and ummm inteliigently :)

Hello I'm an iPod and brrrr I feel cold.

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:16:39 GMT

You'd think walking in freezing cold temperatures with some peppy music might make you feel a bit warmer. Not if the music is playing on your iPod! My iPod froze to death yesterday trying to survive the cold wave in northwest. Ironically the last song it played was from "Garam"(Hot) Masala.

It's rated to operate between a comfy range of 32 to 95 F so keep an eye on the temperature next time you take it out for a ride. As for me, it looks like the rest of the winter is going to be a cold n quiet... <-- That's my diePod nano lying dead singing it's last song...

Hello from HTPC

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:01:34 GMT

So this post comes right from my Vista ultimate HTPC. I finished setting it up just now!!! All that remains now is to hook up the cable and get to watching some TV!

Btw Vista ultimate comes with some preloaded media and two of them are by Karsh Kale. Distance and One step beyond from his album Realize. A nice surprise :)

Zune++

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:09:25 GMT

iPod/iTunes when they came out really changed the game. The best thing that I think the duo did was to liberate a good song from a mediocre album. Thanks to iTunes (and now Zune), I don't have to shell out 10-15 bucks just to get a couple of good songs from an album. I decide what I like and just buy that a lot cheaper. The music lables hated this but they seem to have realized that this is what the music lovers really want.

I think the next big thing would be to liberate mediocre songs from the media hype. A hyped up song is hot for only a few months and there are so many of those in the wild... (IMO almost all the pop music is like that. But then mebbe thats just me) Unlike the classics, most songs fall off of charts (and public memory) in a couple of months or years. Then why do I have to buy those songs for their lifetime? I should be able to "lease" a song for the time I think it will be hot. I know I want to be cool to have shakira's next hot song on my zune but nobody would care about it a year down the line. Heck even I won't want to listen to it next year. So why pay for it for the next year and the years to come? Lease it to me for half the price such that it expires a year from now and you've upped my purchasing power by 100%. Sure the labels won't like this but they'll learn and hey didn't somebody say "the customer is the king"? So better treat him like one ;)

Today though the song costs me only a buck, I make really sure that I like it before I buy it. if it gets even cheaper, I'm likely to experiment even more and buy many more songs. In the context of the type of music that we listen to in India, the bollywood music, this is even better. I can't even recall the hot himmesh reshammiya songs that I was crooning a year ago. Songs come and go and I want my library to have both - the best and the latest. A buck a song gets me my best and my song lease gives me my latest. A scheme like this would really make me buy some music rather than getting it off some illegal bittorrent/P2P site. Zune with its new and fresh image has opportunity to offer it. I hope they come up with some game changing ideas.

Live writer post

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 05:24:50 GMT

First post with Live writer...

Trying to insert a map.

and some tags...

Technorati tags: live writer, windows

del.icio.us tags: Zune

Some interesting plugins here

Pretty simple to use for for a non-techy user. Sorry that's not me :)

HTPC: Getting there

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:18:16 GMT

2 Months since I started out with my HTPC and am still getting there... :( The Dimension 9150 that I ordered a couple of months ago turned out to be a dud. Motherboard died in just over a month. The friendly guys at Dell Customer service agreed to give me a full refund and I ordered another one from them. A Dell dimension E520 this time.

So the current config looks like this:

Dell dimension E520
        Intel Core 2 Duo E6300

        1 GB RAM

        160 GB SATA

        Intel G965 Chipset with Intel GMA X3000 graphics

        Sigmatel 9227 onboard audio
ATI TV Wonder Elite with THEATER™ 550 PRO
Microsoft MCE remote
MCE 2005.

I think the machine has enough horsepower even if I decide to throw in another TV Tuner in there. I'd probably add the new 650 based card to this mix in the future. Have heard good reviews regarding the X3000 and it should be enough to drive my modest HDTV. The audio seems to be a bit low end but I'd deal with that later.

The only thing that's mising is Vista Ultimate to drive all this. Getting it all setup tommorow. Can't wait to get it all up and running...

Negotiations and Emotions

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:40:36 GMT

Negotiation is an art. I heard a talk by Dan Shapiro recently on using emotions for effective negotiations. Dan, an entertaining orator, is a researcher at the Harvard Negotiation Project and author of the book beyond reason. He boiled down the art to a simple 5 key formula.

Appreciate your counterpart, appreciate his participation and efforts
Respect his autonomy, make sure you don't tell him what to do and certainly not something that is his domain
Build affiliation with him so that you are comfortable negotiating
Acnowledge his status
Shape a fulfilling role in the whole process. Both for yourself and your counterpart.

In my everyday life that I mostly spend coding away behind closed door, I doubt that I'd need a tehnique to handle any discussions and negotiations but I liked the approach... something to keep handy for the annual review meeting :)

Bach ke rehna re baba...

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 17:42:09 GMT

When in Rome, you might get away not speaking Roman (ok Latin...) but American folks don't seem to be as accommodating. Last week an Indian man was interrogated at the Seattle airport. Apparently he was heard talking something non-English (Tamil) that sounded suspicious. Well you cannot really blame the poor security fellow here. He was just doing his job.

May be we should all speak English when in public places. But hey even if a desi was speaking his heavily desi accented fast English, that security dude couldn't have figured out the language anyways ;) I guess next time I travel I am going to pretend to be a mute or just mime. :p

Power efficiency and Google? huh?

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 02:18:54 GMT

Google is pushing for electric efficieny. What? I never heard yahoo or microsoft do that. Why of all companies Google would care so much for PCs to be power efficient? Ah! the data centres! That must be a part of their running costs! No wonder the newest data centre is being constructed close to a power source. So for a cash rich company like Google, how much the electricity bill should be to sound an alarm?

Let's calculate.

Electricity charges: 5 cente per kwh

power for a server = 100 w (60 w machine consumption + 40 w for cooling + operating etc)

power per year: 100 w * 24 h * 365 days = 876 kwh

cost per server = $43.80 per year

So if you assume Google runs a million such servers, their power costs are over 40 million dollars per year!!! I know I made lots of assumptions here but the figure should be in ballpark. Just Google around and you should be able to validate most of the assumptions. 43 million for a company that spends around 800 million in cap ex is 5% of their expenses. No wonder they want efficient PCs

Blogdigger can't count.

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:36:07 GMT

Numerous sites out there with small obvious bugs. Just came across this blog search engine called Blogdigger. I think its easy to miss testing in the excitement to release a new product ;) Check out the screen capture below.

HTPC: 2b||!2b

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:51:26 GMT

So I'm thinking of building an HTPC. Or rather I'm so addicted to TV these days that I feel its worth spending a grand to not miss a show. Surprising given that not a too long ago we didn't even have a TV at our place and never missed it. But then, since I'm wasted anyways, I thought I should atleast get to decide the brand of addiction. :)

There are two choices to get the PVR functionality. You get it from your cable/satellite provider or build it yourself with windows MCE. I've chosen to build it myself primarily because it's more flexible that way. I took an easy way to build it and decided to use an off the shelf PC as a base system. Last week I ordered Dell dimension 9150 and ATI TV wonder RCE. I'm excited to get it all hooked up so that I can watch all those Friends reruns without having to miss any of chandler's wisecracks

Track your Georges, Abrahams and Benjamins

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:07:40 GMT

Wonder how far a dollar bill travels to come to you? See if you can find it out at http://www.wheresgeorge.com. A site I stumbled upon yesterday. Enter the serial number of the bill and see if anybody has seen it before. Just some fun for a lazy day. See the most seen bills here: http://www.wheresgeorge.com/wrapper.php?page=top10bills_d0

So here's a brain teaser for you: What are the chaces that you'd see a bill more than once in your lifetime? Well if you are in India trying to get rid of a torn out one then the answer is kinda trivial but lets leave that case out for the time being. :)

Apple - The King of hype!

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 06:26:17 GMT

Apple is the King when it comes to drumming up hype. Back in the limelight with its ubiquitous iPod and metrosexual imacs, Apple is all set to announce some new products tomorrow. Word is out that it includes a movie store, an update to ipod and a wireless media streaming solution. Nothing really ground breaking but gadget sites such as gizmodo and engadget were teeming with news and rumours about this for past week or so. As if there was going to be some earth shattering coming out of today's announcement...

Microsoft's UMPC had generated a bit of a hype recently and the windows marketplace caused a beep on the gadgeteers' radars but nothing comparable to what Apple has generated. Microsoft has at least two consumer product launches coming up, Vista and Zune I hope they learn some tricks from apple :)

5 minutes of fame for Browzar

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 03:29:21 GMT

Newsblogging sites such as digg and reddit have the power to make an instant hit out of any mildly interesting topic or website. Yesterday Browzar must've experienced a roller coaster ride of the blogsphere with the digg effect. Hailed as a solution to all those adwares and spywares, this super slim browser became an instant hit in blogsphere.

Today it turned out to be an uber adware itself! By the time people realize this and kick it off their machines it would have made a few grand already through it's spyware search. Now that's how you make quick money in web 2.0 ;)

Zune Preloaded

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 07:36:30 GMT

Looks like Zune will come with some preloaded content. I like that idea. Another thing that I thought to be cool was that it would let you loan tracks to your friends for a day.

I say why not combine those and let me add whatever music I want to my zune before I order it. The tracks will only last for a day after I hear them for the fist time or for 2-3 listenings. This gives me a great opportunity to try out new music before I decide to buy it. In fact why not let me downoad any track for listening once in full... may be at lower quality. If I like it I buy it. This 30 second try out on most music sites is just a joke. I hope they change that model... I'm waiting...

IISER off to a humble start!

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 04:25:38 GMT

India created lot of technical geniuses through IIT's, the institute that has the repute to be the toughest school to get in. Now We are aspring to do the same thing in the field of pure sciences with IISER. The two schools started in Pune and Kolkata recently.

I hope the Government adopts the same hands off approach for IISER that it used in case of IIT to let them grow organically to be amongst the best in the world. Redirecting some of India's new found corporate wealth to these institutes might also help them jump start on infrastructure and facilities.

Kudos to the eduation ministry for this and I'm looking forward to some great research coming out of IISER.

New Google video layout is a copy!

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 05:25:11 GMT

New layout of Google video is a youtube ripoff. So finally they seem to have realized that watching a flash optimized video in large window does look crappy. :)

Kris Angel magic trick

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:46:21 GMT

An amazing magic trick I saw today thanks to digg. Watch it here. There's also this other one that might not be as stunning but check out the background score. That should give you some surprise.

edit: Btw his name is Criss Angel. He runs a poular show on A&E called MindFreak

How much Google do you use?

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:56:06 GMT

Take part in this survey and see how many of the Google services are used by the world. No surprising results here. Though it's interesting to note that just a couple of hits can fetch you 8 billion in annual revenue.

Google Philosophy

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 23:24:02 GMT

Did you read this? Looks like while trying to settle click fraud, Google went above and beyond to take a peek at the mailboxes of some of its clients! The intentions were probably good but the practice is scary. Privacy freas would never approve of that.

Do no evil is Google's philosophy... it doesn't say anything about not being stupid :)

Tuning Tabla and Western notes

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:27:17 GMT

Tabla tuning, Indian sur and Western notes all use different notations. When it comes to tuning tabla, you'd hear things like kali 1, kali 4 etc. Indian sur are represented by sa, re ga, ma, pa, dha, ni and for western notes its C#, D#, F and so on... Of course there are the Solfege Syllables which go Do, Re, Me, Fa... to add to the complexity. I have been confused by all these notations for quite some time now.

So recently I decided to get it all cleared up and this is a table that I came up with. It maps all these different notations together. This is my first attempt so if there are any mistakes, please let me know and I'd correct it.

Indian Sur Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni
Western Notes C# D# F F# G# A# C
Solfege Syllables Do Re Me Fa So La Ti
Tabla Tuning Kali 1 Kali 2 Safed 4 Kali 3 Kali 4 Kali 5 Safed 7

Concurrent programming

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:26:04 GMT

Came across this nice article by Vance Morrison an Architect in .Net CLR team.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/08/Concurrency/default.aspx

Simple to read and very well written.

Future!

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:30:30 GMT

Ray Kurzweil is a well respected name in the field of AI. But I only recently came across his work as a futurist. More about it at singularity.com. His predictions, straight out of sci-fi movies, are so futuristic that they are hard to believe for a common guy like me.

Images written directly to our retinas
Ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times
Electronics so tiny it's embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses
Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface

And that's all coming in next 5 years!!! Well credible or not I can't wait to wear my monitor like a contact lens and talk to my dad sitting half way across the globe. Particularly when he's stuck at home due to rains and me due to a storm ;)

NerdTV: finally a TV for me :)

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:44:25 GMT

Check out NerdTV. Yup that's what I am going to watch for next few months at least. Check out their 2005 schedule and you'd agree with me that this is some programming you shouldn't miss online or otherwise :)

Thank you PBS!

DTV!!!

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 22:17:05 GMT

Watch out for this app released by Participatory Culture Foundation! (What a dull name for such a cool idea). You are soon going to download it and I'm hoping that one of its cousins will bring a well deserved end to the television as we know it. Too bad it's not available on Windows yet... but microsoft is sure gunning for this domain with full throttle. Long time since TV was as exciting :)

Cyborg...made in Japan

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 02:03:56 GMT

Came across an interesting article about the two most successful consumer robots, Roomba and Aibo. Jeff Yang does a nice analysis of the cultures that created them concluding the robotic revolution is more likely to take place in Japan than in US. The reason?? Quoted from the article...

Deep in its heart, America finds the idea of technology with personalities to be
... spooky. After all, the notion of objects with minds of their own runs
counter to deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian values -- creating devices that
can move and think without human intervention veers a little too close to
playing God. And what if we do manage to create machines that are smarter,
stronger or more capable than humans? Our subconscious paranoia about
machines has prompted us to create dystopian visions like "Blade Runner" and
"The Matrix." If asked, many Americans would no doubt admit to being
concerned that evil humanoid robots might "take over civilization" (beginning, of course, with the California governor's office).

Maybe the author hasn't yet seen this

What's in store?

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 23:01:41 GMT

Along with the Beta 1 release of the new Filesystem, WinFS, Microsoft also launched a blog that you can track to see what's in store! for this new kid on the block.

कट्टी फ़ू...

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:33:53 GMT

Google is not talking to CNET! Read the controversial story here.

Funny that people are willing to post what they had for breakfast on their blogs but when google indexes that, they find it objectionable... I think thats because Google makes it so acccessible... so easily accessible... Even funnier was the stand that Google took. I thought it was childish. C'mon guys stand by what you have developed! ;)

Yahoooooo!!!

Wed, 18 May 2005 23:09:11 GMT

Yahoo released a new beta of its messenger this week. Some of the new features are *inspired* by msn messenger :) It's nice to see the leader in the segment borrwing ideas from a follower

Heartbreak Hotel

Sun, 01 May 2005 17:22:20 GMT

Looks like finally Aish is marrying Vivek next year. http://www.presstrust.com/article435509.htm

Wonder who broke her the news that I'm no longer available... man things people do in desparation...

That's a toe crusher!

Indian Sur	Sa	Re	Ga	Ma	Pa	Dha	Ni
Western Notes	C#	D#	F	F#	G#	A#	C
Solfege Syllables	Do	Re	Me	Fa	So	La	Ti
Tabla Tuning	Kali 1	Kali 2	Safed 4	Kali 3	Kali 4	Kali 5	Safed 7