Batting at number 12

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 :)

Book List: Currently reading

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:11:53 GMT

Currently reading