Friday, December 29, 2006

Stumbleupon !!!

I have taken a leave today and sitting at home I thought of trying stumbleupon.
The site has been in talks for a long time and but its requirement of
adding a plug-in always kept me away. Plug-ins do make things easy for
you but they must not be mandatory.
Getting bored, I just created a log-in and downloaded the plug-in.
Sumbleupon has been quite famous and it was an instant hit for me. Got
me to some interesting sites. It is quite good for one of these days
when you have nothing better to do. But what all it offers in long
term is something to be seen.

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Thursday, December 28, 2006

Log-in problems of Orkut :(

I am not able to log-in into Orkut for quite some time. The web-site
say "under maintainance". Not that this is the first such occurance.
The site always sucks !!!
There are very regular data fetching problems. Google seems to put
little attention and resources to this site. Unfortunately, in spite
of having a number of problems, I am forced to stick to this site. All
my friends are here. And then I just hope google would make some
improvements learning from their very well placed competitors in this
domain.

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check blog

this is just a check blog...

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Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Bloglines

http://www.bloglines.com

Bloglines is quite a famous RSS feed reader. I got to it only after I
have been using Google Reader for months. Just to check I imported my
google reader subscriptions into bloglines. Unfortunately, they have a
html interface. This is quite different from google where reading is
quite a pleasure. They do have some unique features but stand no-where
near the neat look of google reader.

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Sunday, December 24, 2006

Mathematical Challenge

http://mathschallenge.net

Here is a site for some nice mathematical challenges. A good time-pass...

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Thursday, December 21, 2006

del.icos.us -- a good site for bookmarking

I have started using del.icos.us only today and have become an instant fan. They have a cool plug-in to easily bookmark pages and see their ranks getting better. Moreover, I have subscribed to its popular bookmarks which give a list of good sites.
While using it, I found http://workfriendly.net/ -- a site for hiding the site and bypassing firewall for use at workplace. There are many more similar sites for doing such things. Tab-renamiser is another firefox plug-in for hiding tabs. Fortunately, I don't need any of them. My work-place is sort of cool in this respect. Moreover, my employers are not that techno-savvy (:P) to understand even what digg or google reader is. I hope this state will continue for years to come.

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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Zoho has a wiki !!

Zoho has come up with a new product - a wiki : http://www.zohowiki.com/

I have been watching and using the products of Zoho very frequently. It is interesting to note the speed at which they are adding new products to a already rich suite of products. Most of their domains of work intersect with google. They have a online word processor, spreadsheet, now wiki, a presentation tool, form creator and many more. The plug-ins they have make their use easy and seemless.
Here is a page to showcase the power of their wiki: http://raju.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-Wiki-Page.html
Good thing is you can import data from their word or spreadsheet. This data will remain synced with the original file. So, you just need to change the original file to get it reflected at an appropriate place. This is something I always wanted. It also looks to be more powerful than jot in respect that to you can give permissions to edit at some selected locations in the whole file.

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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Online photo editing tools

A number of online photo editing tools have recently come up. Latest in the line is http://www.fauxto.com/
Simple photo editing does not seem to be a very complex method. Googlepages allows some very basic operations for editing image while publishing them. The efforts from these players are much more complex and they seem to bridge the gap between photoshop on desktop.
Other good sites allowing editing are here
http://www.creatingonline.com/online_image_editor/index.html
http://pxn8.com/

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Friday, December 15, 2006

test post

<This is a test post>
<This is a test post>

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Updates with google browser extension

Google browser plug-in has come up with some new cool features for firefox.
I am yet use them but looking forward to using them. One important update is it allows opening doc and spreadsheet on the web using google docs. That's a cool addition. I had to use Zune for that. For now stiking to Zoho looks a better option since they have a online presentation tool which make their office suite more complete.

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

http://web.anurag.googlepages.com

Finally my site has been indexed by google. Not because I requested them to index it, but because of a third party chat application I embedded in my site. Anyway here is my site: http://web.anurag.googlepages.com

Search words : anurag+googlepages was showing it on first page displacing other results from the top. Probably others had never tried to get their site indexed. Anyhow this was just a try. Google seems not to index pages on googlepages -- extending their neutrality far too much. Anyway I am happy with the way, you can create web-pages on googlepages and the amount of storage they provide. There ofcourse are few grievances like they don't allow making folders and don't allow users to download the site.
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Saturday, December 09, 2006

How to use RSS feed!

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=df64h8xp_44d488bh

This is small article on using RSS feeds. I intend to elaborate this topic further.
I was writing this just to see the features of google docs. I find a number of usability updates which can be made. While I would like to share this document with the whole world, I also want them to be allowed to be modified by just anyone. Moreover, not the whole of it, but just a part. There already are some online document applications which allow this. Hopefully such features would get into google docs soon.

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POP access in gmail: access all your mails through your gmail account !!!

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/whatsnew_getmail.html

Gmail has come up with a new update. Now you can get mails from all other accounts. This was one feature which forced me to open a number of accounts. Thankfully, in sometime won't have to do it. POP access is required for accessing the mails. In fact, this is probably the only significant feature which is already present in yahoo and not in Gmail. Now you just dont need to open all your accounts.
Thanks again, Gmail Team!!!

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Friday, December 08, 2006

YouTube has a new feature

Ever since coming into life and now being a part of Google legacy, YouTube is just leading the way.

http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_quick_capture

Only now they have added a new feature allowing users to upload video directly from a web-cam. That needs a lot of heart given the amount of data, video is bound to consume. They have created an online infinite video storage free for just anyone like google did for text message with their gmail.

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Placements at KGP

http://scholarsavenue.org/wordpress/index.php

Placement season has started in KGP and this time things look all the better.
On top of good jobs being offered, students have put in a hard work to re-build the site scholarsavenue.
In our time, some people had taken an initiative (from comp. sc. department) to maintain an updated notice board for placements but only for their department. This time scholarsavenue has taken the initiative to run a similar one for the whole insti.
That's good and interesting. People like us can keep updated to call friends when its time to congratulate them!!

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Use keyboard as mouse


http://www.lifehacker.com/software/mouser/hack-attack-operate-your-mouse-with-your-keyboard-212816.php#c604275

Here is an application for using keyboard instead of mouse.
Works on a very good principle of dividing the screen half in order to move.
This kind of movement is promising since it should effectively decrease the time taken to move by a log order :)
I need that a lot since I hate to use mouse. Just that someone develops it for Linux as well. That's the platform on which I work more.
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Greasemonkey scripts!!

Greasemonkey has changed the way a web-page is rendered and shown at the user end.
A number of applications have developed using it.
Here is a plug-in of to-do list for google calendar:
http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2006/11/add-your-tasks-to-google-calendar.html
Its good only that it is annoying in the sense that it requires you to sign-up.
That's a huge amount of discomfort making it unusable.

Here is another plug-in for adding another inbox to your gmail:
http://www.sitening.com/blog/2006/11/20/add-a-second-inbox-to-your-gmail/
Something which your label in gmail can easily do. Just that it adds a button on the top making it bit easier!!!

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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Sunday, December 03, 2006

blo.gs !!

I had been hearing a lot about blo.gs so thought of trying them myself.
Got to the site, created a log-in, they prompted me to search for a blog and add it....
Alas!! the search result was -- their search is not working for now, they are fixing it.
Why the hell do they think a user  will return after getting such a start.
I no longer remember my user-name.
Typically Yahoo product!!

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top 10 programs for linux

http://everythingelse.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/top-10-programs-for-linux/

Here is a blog detailing some good applications for linux.

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Thirty essentials for windows !!

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2006/12/01/30-essential-pieces-of-free-and-open-software-for-windows/
Here is a listing of 30 important things (free) for windows. I use a number of them and found some new and good softwares in the list!!
A good word processing software http://www.abisource.com/ is here although I prefer Microsoft Word and am quickly switching over to some free sources like Google docs and Openoffice.
http://www.rssowl.org/ : rssowl is a RSS feed reader, I would check it although I am a fan of Google Reader for now.

http://keepass.sourceforge.net/ : key password storer for storing passwords scattered over various places.

All in all a very good post which brought to my knowledge a number of new and good applications.

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Friday, November 24, 2006

radiusim

http://www.radiusim.com/

Here is a site which offers service similar to meebo. This is an ajax based application and doesn't need anything to be downloaded. I hope even if I go into environments where meebo is banned by the administrator such sites will be quite useful which are yet to become popular. I need to see if it gives a performance  better than meebo. At least one thing is interesting ... it tells you about the location of the other user.

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Monday, November 20, 2006

track ip-address

http://www.ip-adress.com/

Here is a site for tracking ip-address. A really good one -- which is seeing a fast increase in clicks and is getting up on digg.
The good thing is apart from telling the location they show the place on google maps.

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buzzfeed

http://www.buzzfeed.com/

The site interesting readable material using feeds and displays them. Unlike other such popular sites, the editors of the site manually add some commentary and change the featured articles.

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Sunday, November 19, 2006

Root Canal Treatment

I am undertaking root-canal treatment for one of my teeth. I had got one tooth filled some 3-4 years back and some part of the filling got out. Infection got in and when I met the doctor, I was told that it needs a root-canal treatment. Having no inkling of what it entails, I quickly agreed and asked the doctor to go ahead immediately. My tooth was operated upon after giving a local anesthsia. The process is still continuing. Meanwhile, I have done some search on what this treatment means and am putting up some part of it:

Root canal therapy refers to the process by which a dentist treats the inner aspects of a tooth, specifically that area inside a tooth that is occupied by its "pulp tissue."
Purpose of Root canal treatment: You could say that the purpose of root canal treatment is to create an end result where the tissues that surround a tooth's root will maintain a healthy status despite the fact that the tooth's nerve has undergone degenerative changes. Specifically, we mean that the tissues surrounding a tooth's root are not affected by bacterial infection and/or irritating substances leaking from those inner aspects of the tooth originally occupied by the tooth's nerve tissue.
In a nutshell, the process of root canal treatment first removes (as thoroughly as possible) bacteria, nerve tissue, the organic debris left over from the breakdown of nerve tissue, and bacterial toxins from within the inner aspects of a tooth (the area originally occupied by the tooth's nerve tissue). Each of these items can produce tissue irritants that can cause your body to activate an inflammation reaction.

I was not very convinced with the argument as to why I needed root-canal treatment. But doing my own research, I am quite convinced.
http://www.animated-teeth.com/root_canal/t1_root_canal.htm

The treatment is not a good experience but a necessary one.

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Incident in UCLA

Recently, the incident in UCLA of a student being tasered just for not showing ID has been gaining a lot of momentum. The video of torture was posted on YouTube by a fellow student for the whole world to see. The incident looked horrible at least on video. It only shows the power of such sites in creating public opinions. With the technology getting better everyday, no power-holder can hope to use his powers illegally and get away with it.

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ApnaTube revisited

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/471106.cms

A few days back, I had made a post regarding ApnaTube and its growing popularity. Now, economic times has covered it (and many similar desi sites). It says ApnaTube is getting 600,000 clicks per day. That's an incredibly huge number. Such sites seem to have a huge market potential. These players have ventured in this area early and with a huge entertainment business that India supports they have a long way to go. India is a country where a huge population craves for getting famous. This can be an ideal platform. While in IIT, I remember people sharing a huge amount of data, letting their computer being used as servers, all to be famous in the circle. This is just an extension, just the breadth is just not LAN but whole world.

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Friday, November 17, 2006

www.seraja.com

I have been using and watching SEraja for quite some time now. They help create events easily and effectively. They are fast improving and what makes me more interested in it is the fact that it has been developed in India.
It needs to be seen how successful they become given the fact that they are too specific. There are a number of improvements that can be made like:
- showing the similar events and grouping similar events (like social networking sites)
- showing the number of people visiting such events
- allowing users to create events without having to create a log-in
- allowing visitors to add notes (wiki style)

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Adobe India's son rescued

Anant, son of Adobe India head has returned home. The three year old child was kidnapped from outside his home five days back. As it is turning out, people involved were living around his home and watched his movements with close proximity. The event exposes the potential security threat in this area making everyone of us feel vulnerable. A vendor illegally puts his fruit juice stall just before his house and we find ourselves helpless in removing him. These are the people who note very carefully when you are at home and when not. No administration shows the desire  to remove them. This when in Delhi there is sealing drive going on, this when such people are giving vital information to kidnappers about your movements, this when we live some 100 mts from Adobe India Center.

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Thursday, November 16, 2006

G-mail's space not enough

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/how-to-free-up-space-in-gmail-215191.php

People have started talking about cleaning the gmail and creating space. No longer is 2.7 GB provided by gmail sufficient for people. There was a time when people had to be satisfied with 5MB. Time has changed a lot and so has the concept of data (and how much is good enough). People use email to share more that just plain text -- sharing music and video files are quite common.

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google docs

I was trying to post blogs using google docs. Alas! the tests failed. The blogs did get posted but not to my satisfaction. The heading was missing and a date stamp was involuntarily coming. I don't hope that I would be able to use it as a blogging tool. However, while using docs I found one thing which makes it unique and better than desktop word processors. They have very strong supports for document importing. They support a number of file formats, allow importing by mail, and even by specifying a web-address. That's really cool and handy. This can at times become a strong reason for me using them -- Their power to inter-convert various formats and keeping the data globally accessible. Moreover, this is a focused area of research and new features just keep getting added. So, you can  bet on them. That too, without paying anything !!!

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The last post got blogged finally but not to my satisfaction. I am hoping this time I would be posted in a better way. This is again a checking post!!! Please ignore.
Surprisingly the problem persists.
This is just a check. I am trying to post this blog using google docs(formerly writely). I hope it works. I see that they have only recently started allowing users to upload directly to blogger(beta). Thanks docs team!!!

bugmenot

http://roachfiend.com/
Good site containing tutorials for creating firefox extensions and has some interesting extensions. Particularly good one is BugMeNot. It finds user-name and password for many sites thus saving time and personal information required just for testing a site. bugmenot was a good finding and I hope to benefit from it in future.

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Sitemeter!!

I have just updated my blogger to track visitors using www.sitemeter.com
Now, two independant tracking sites are working on my blog. This one looks better in the sense, it gives a better profiling. Myweblog was not good enough in that respect. Moreover, in the free version, it stores data for just one week. They are charging money in areas where many sites provide free service. In fact, google analytics also does it and does it well, but I don't use it for my blog. I will be comparing the data from the two over the next few weeks before deciding between the two.
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Kidnappings in UP

The news of kidnap of the son of head of Adobe, India has booked the front page of most news-papers these days. It is really saddening to see such things happening to the someone related to such a good company. Adobe's India office happens to be very nearby my home, infact one of the nearest residential buildings near abode some 100mts away. Adobe has brought in some very important changes to the world, the way it is today, the way research is conducted and the way data is shared and protected.
For last few months, we could hear a number of products being launched by Adobe. Moreover, a number of them are being developed in Noida center. It ranks highly among the employee satisfaction surveys. Only recently, new-papers had covered widely the contribution of Adobe India facility. Probably that was one news which made it so vulnerable to the dacoits of UP. Inspite of the request of father for not making this news important, media is covering it widely, telling all minor updates and tracking the movements of police. I hope the boy returns safe without their parents having to cough up ransom and the culprits brought to justice.

Tool for creating video

http://www.fliptrack.com

The site provides a tool to make videos out of video, presentation, audio and image. There are a number of applications which do this and I am yet to see how it differentiates itself.

Create extensions in firefox 2.0

http://ginatrapani.org/spun/

Here is a site which provides details for creating extensions for firefox 2.0

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Check who is giving away your e-mail address

When you give your email address to a website, you hope that they don't sell or trade your address to a bunch of spammers. Well if they do, here is a simple way to see what sites are responsible for what particular piece of email. This requires you have a Gmail account.

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a "+" in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all massages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.
I have posted this in an "as is" form. I am not sure if it works but would be good to see it working.

I have posted this on this web-page as well.
http://www.anurag.googlepages.com/checkwhoisgivingawayyoure-mailaddress

Shortcut to adding events in Google calendar

For long, I had been thinking of some utility to add events to calendar easily, without having to open the calendar. I found gmail provides this feature but again not always you have your gmail open. Thankfully, google has provided calendar api which helps create events very easily that too with just a browser. I find an application based on this quite handy and non-bulky ( http://torrez.us/archives/2006/04/18/433/). I am not sure if there are better applications already present but this one is quite helpful.

Onelook.com

This is a site which gives results something like thesaurus. Many a times you have an idea but don't quite remember the right word, such a site can be useful then.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

irows.com

A news broke out a few hours ago that Google has acquired iROWS.com . It provides a similar service google as does in spreadsheets. I could not see any feature that uniquely differentiate them from google. Let's wait and watch what changes this acquisition brings to google.

Monday, November 13, 2006

daily log

The day has been eventful. Not all good ones : -
Got up just in time to reach office in time. Ofcourse without taking the trouble of bathing (temperatures here are lowering fast and it is no longer a good decision from health point of view). Got to office at 10:00. I had to change my seat, no clue some others were also in contention (contending for seats is a very normal situation in our society). A few minutes the other contender gets in only to ask me about it (via media to create more pressure). Anyway I denied and it all rested.
yesterday, was the birthday of a friend also in my group so that creates a good reason for outing. So, we went (such events have never been good for me and leave an odd feeling to my memories. Thankfully, it was not like the other ones). 
I had to meet a dentist and went out early from office (not very early, it was 6:00 then). I won't call it to be a terrible experience , thanks to local anethesia(but it went for an hour or so and would happen again at least two more times)

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Improvements in Google calendar

Just saw some important improvements in google calendar.
1. They have brought in the capability of creating events right in the gmail in the drop-down menu. I wanted that and had created a post on google groups regarding that but I see that it has been integrated for long.
2. The SMS facility to inform about events has been brought to India -- Airtel provides that and I am happy. Airtel has always led the communication market in India and have been providing the best of services at the best of prices.

Daily log

I have been irked by some problems of my feed reader earlier and they keep coming again and again. Very often it shows the read posts as unread ones wasting your substantial time scrutinizing them.
By the way, this has been the first day amongst many which went by without me updating my blog. Not much happened to my life either today. Did not went out!! Watched a movie in the evening. Attended some calls which took up ample amount of time ;)
Mission IMpossible 3 was a long left out movie. Got time only today to watch it. Overall the movie was ok, of the kind you can expect out of this series... but definitely not as good as the last one.
Progress of my work has been satisfactory. I can hope to complete everything now by the end of this month if things go the right way.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Ajax based applications

http://us.ajax13.com/en/

This is another ajax based online writing and publishing site, but has got a step further in bridging the gap between online and offline word processors. One major difference, the File, Menu tabs etc. are added. And then the major advantage, you don't have to depend upon Bill Gates software which are too bulky and can crash at any time, letting you lose your data.

Re: MyBlogLog


Just came across mybloglog.com 
I have been trying to keep track of access to this blog. With mybloglog, I hope this should be easier. They are doing a good job in tracking the blogs and creating blog communities. Let's see how successful they go on to be.

Changes in gmail

Google has recently brought some changes in gmail. Everyday you get up to find something interesting happening at google. I remember the days when gmail was launched. There was no concept of giving away one GB of data for storage to users for free. People started laughing at google's plans. But they went ahead with them. Then there were privacy issues raised. People were troubled by the fact that google will "look" into your data to show ads. That seemed to people as losing privacy. Such concepts have already become obsolete and many business models are developing using this google concept while google is still getting ahead with its new plans. They are taking their search, tag, and data based ads to the offline world of radio and print media. While google is growing at an indiscriminate proportion, they are doing their best to make sure that their start-up model remains intact.
The new changes in gmail have made it easy to reply and forward an entire conversation.

Thinkature

http://thinkature.com/

A huge number of online - collaboration sites are coming up. Here is one -- it looks interesting and better in terms of providing some visual interface. Here you can go beyond writing text and draw or import images.

snap


This is just to check how mailing-in blogs react to file attachments. I would to happy to note them getting posted directly. Let's see!!!

Google -- still not indexing my site :(

Ironically, I still don't find my web-site indexed by google. It has been a long time, since I requested its engine to do so by doing all configurations. Instead, I found google indexing my site link on yubnub where I happened to create a shortcut for my site. So, there crawl engines are crawling the web and indexing but forget to index the sites created by lesser-mortals.

Re: apnatube & pawar





http://apnatube.com/videos/1384/funny_ponting_telling_pawar_to_move_out_of_way/?mode=video

I got this post as a forward. I was hearing a lot about pawar in the news and the mis-behaviour of Australian team but was not able to watch it for quite some time. Here is it!!

Second interesting thing is that Indians have quickly created a quite popular version of YouTube and name it well -- ApnaTube




This blog somehow did not get posted. So, I am posting it again!!

Thursday, November 09, 2006

apnatube & pawar



http://apnatube.com/videos/1384/funny_ponting_telling_pawar_to_move_out_of_way/?mode=video

I got this post as a forward. I was hearing a lot about pawar in the news and the mis-behaviour of Australian team but was not able to watch it for quite some time. Here is it!!

Second interesting thing is that Indians have quickly created a quite popular version of YouTube and name it well -- ApnaTube



Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Orkut with gtalk

I have been testing the orkut integration with gtalk. It's working fine. I hope in near future Orkut will switch over to ajax format which gmail and google reader has adopted and integrate gtalk in their home-page instead of requiring to install g-talk or open gmail.



Wallpapers by flickr

http://www.flickr.com/groups/wallpapers/pool/

Here is a number of wallpapers pooled in by users of flickr

Image search

like.com

The site allows image search using the information from images unlike other image search applications. This seems to be a good move in the direction of image search beyond the realms of using just text.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Orkut integrated with chat

I am finding a new update in Orkut. It is now integrated with g-talk. So, you can scrap, chat or talk with your orkut friends. This is a good improvement. I had been hearing about such rumours but finally Orkut has brought it to its users. Only a few days back, I was wondering why google was not concentrating on improving Orkut and finetuning it with other google products.

DOODLE for google

http://www.google.co.uk/doodle4google/winners.html

The results for doodle for google are out. some nice creations by young people !!!

[From Google Reader] The Face of Mother Earth

 The Face of Mother Earth A poster over at the keyhole forums has discovered what does look remarkably like a kilometre-wide pair of rather luscious-looking female lips. If this were the face of Mother Earth, I wonder where the rest of her features are? The "lips" are actually in the Sudanese region of West Darfur, site of much of the ongoing Darfur conflict, and although at first they appear to be formed by some sort of small rocky canyon, the terrain data on Google Earth claims otherwise. At over 40 metres high, you could argue these lips were actually pouting. Thanks to atlas1970 and via Gearthblog. Categories: Weirdness and Sudan View in Google Earth ... Source: http://googlesightseeing.com/2006/11/07/the-face-of-mother-earth/

Best inventions of the year: Time's accessment

Time magazine has released the Best inventions of 2006 placing YouTube at number one
http://www.time.com/time/2006/techguide/bestinventions/

Indeed it has changed the way we look at the world and at ourselves. It has made a number of unknown people famous and created a good amount of value for a good number of people

Mathematical proofs (funny)

http://thrillingwonder.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-breakthroughs-in-mathematics.html
An interesting read on mathematics :)

Monday, November 06, 2006

Ganguly's century

In or out of field Ganguly has remained in news for quite a long time. Newspapers are abuzz with the story of ganguly hitting form with an unbeaten century (who cares for the number of bowls he took to did that). Soon, we will see demonstrations in Bengal for inducting him back into the national side, and people will be talking about his heroics. This time again he did not do it without much hue and cry. The match started after a few hours of delay because he felt the security at stadium was not enough. It was only when extra police force and sniffer dogs were brought in, that the match finally started.

google torrent

http://googletorrents.com/
Just came across this site which uses google custom search to find torrents. Although there are speculations that this site may be brought down by google because of the intellectual property right issues, till then it can be handy at finding torrents. I tried it for some queries and saw some really good results!!

reader

Google reader is easy to use and easy to keep track of news, blogs, and change on sites. Unfortunately, I have subscribed to huge number of sites which creates a huge amount of noise and I am not able to keep track of all of them.

Test-post

This is just a test-post to check if the rss feeds are working!!

Music search

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" "last modified" "parent directory" description size (wma|mp3) "Nirvana"
Change Nirvana with any music grp and search easily music

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Organize your calendar

http://www.organizedhome.com/printable/index.php/cat/501

A good site containing a number of printable forms for time-table and other daily organisation related stuff.

Sentence for Saddam Hussain

News channels are abuzz with the news of death sentence given to Saddam Hussain. I never support death sentences more so in this case where the acqused is a political prisoner. It's unfortunate the way he is being charged. They have made sure that a sizable number of Iraqi population will endorse it and they will live and gain by the policy of "Divide and Rule"

weebly!!

I was just trying the web-page creator www.weebly.com something similar to googlepages
Here is my trial page: anurag.weebly.com
Looks cool and simple and allows you to download the site in zip format as well. That's something google is yet to allow.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

times photograph story

http://www.time.com/time/potw/20061103/
Times weekly photographs are always a pleasure to watch. They make you feel how good the photographers are ... capturing a whole story in static reels

Thanks note

While I surf and browse and use the many google products, I can't help stop thanking them for bringing about the many positive changes that they have brought to the perception of internet and its usage. I just searched for feeds for some of my important articles which  I always wanted to keep track of and its search engine brought before me a number of useful ones. Thanks again -- google. The web-alerts that they provides also brings me some interesting and useful items which keep me updated although there are a number of repititions but that's still better than searching them manually on net.

Blogging just too much!!!

Our generation has grown up reading novels and memoirs of writers of fifties and before. As a child when I read those long and very frequent letters (put together in a book) written by people like Gandhi and Nehru, I always wondered why people of our generation don't write as much and how people of that generation got so much of time. That was an age when gadgets like TV were recently introduced and they used to the whole of time. Writing was never a priority with ever increasing costs. Writing on paper never got the visibility and seemed to solve no purpose. Thankfully things are changing now. Internet allows you to write, create opinions, write memoirs and do what-ever. Unlike writing on paper, it gets an immediate recognition. Accessing such online articles, web-spaces, blogs dont need any effort. And that has turned a number of people of our generation into writers -- and people like me into blogger - a persistent one -- I blog more than five posts everyday. Out of this, I can see a number of positive changes in me. I think twice of what I earlier did and have opinions on most of the topics rather than being ignorant.

Thanks to all the free time I get, I can easily afford to manage time enough and my blogs and never descriptive but just informative.

Menaces of yahoo

Unfortunately, google entered into many domains quite late. Because of this, I am still maintaining yahoo and other accounts and have to take the pain keep loging in regularly. Yahoo applications have grown bulky with every new "update" -- that's what they call it. The massenger they provide continues to consume a huge amount of memory and conflicts with some of the softwares that I use. Additionally, they give some "FREE" plug-ins with it which is not obvious to remove for new users. Their new look mail sucks as well, its way too bulky leading to occasional browser crashes. I had got it during its early beta editions but I never used it. Thankfully, applications like meebo allow me to check my messanger and occasionally chat with some friends.

Only today I find meebo updating its site comprehensively to give itself a new look!!! That's good, since I use it very regularly although there are a few other vendors providing similar service but meebo has grown on to be a better and more known brand.

Old memories

I have been with Rahul Bharadwaj since two days. Still I am yet to write anything about him. He was my batchmate in class 11-12. We share some fond memories of old times. For quite some time I was looking forward to meeting. Unfortunately, such feelings don't stay anymore. He has turned out into one guy I won't like to meet after meeting once. Time has changed a lot of us and I can find dramatic changes in a lot of my batchmates.

During college years, I had an opportunity to listen to T N Sesan and I can remember one of his proverbs -- After eighteen people don't change, if they do - they break. I would categorize Rahul into one who is broken by time - and tides of life. True - he is facing a lot of problems of life but everybody else does. People who have smaller problems, start looking at those small problems as large. And then those problems in general make you stronger and responsible. Such terms no longer suit for this guy. A fresh graduate and looking for job - he seems to have a good amount of energy -- something similar to his earlier days. Drinking has brought him down completely. He starts his day with a quarter and remains in a half sense state for the rest of the day. One can very easily understand why he had to leave his last job and why he is still not getting one.

Digg

Digg has always remained in news for quite sometime. Yet I never tried to see what it does and how it works. I just tried it today, and find the articles present here interesting. I am yet to delve into details all the site offers but it presents technology articles something I like to keep updated about. I have subscribed to its feeds and would look forward to the new articles coming up here.

Web-based applications

Recently a number of web-based applications have developed which have changed the concept of browser. The browsers now require to do more that opening some simple web-pages. They need to be capable of executing programs and do almost all that can be done with offline softwares.
I use a number of web-based applications -- however the only problem I find with them is that in general they don't work offline. I would like them to work offline and upload data when I open the browser or get online.

Chat integradable in web-page

http://www.chatcreator.com/chatbox/
Google made web-based chat popular. But there are a number of web-sites providing such services. Here is a site which helps you create a chat box which can be integrated in your web-site.
It can be integrated very smoothly in your site. I was just trying it.
http://web.anurag.googlepages.com/chat
This is the page where I have integrated it. Such applications are cool and still easy to make. I had also tried to make one for LAN.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Plug-in for bit-torrent

http://torrentfreak.com/firefox-extension-for-utorrent-webui/
This cool firefox plug-in is for the many bit-torrent lovers who would like to control the downloads from inside their browser.

Slide share

Here is a tool for online collaboration and sharing of powerpoint presentations. Their are a number of similar web-based applications and I will have to see how this distinguishes itself from others.
http://slideshare.net/

Evening

The day ended up in an absolute un-typical manner and while I update this blog I must confess I am out but still in my senses to write this blog. I was not hoping to go out this evening and was just hoping that the day ends finishing the tasks undone. It was then that I got a call from Rahul Bharadwaj. After 5 missed calls, I decided to call him. I was not finding myself to be free enough. I had not imagined he would be coming to Noida today. He had always told me that he would be coming on Saturday, and I had planned accordingly -- including giving him a daaru treat. It just turned out the different way. He told me he was already in Noida and that forced me to move out of office for Spice mall early.
He was in all mood to drink and I could not stop him. Probably this is the first treat I gave voluntarily ever since getting into this job and being in Noida. We took two quarters of whiskey and got into a dhabba  never expecting to get into a broil there. Anyway it did happen -- and I had to use all my negotiating skills to come out of it. We just sat with two similar aged people since there was no space. These guys were already drunk and just started talking -- sometimes calm sometimes making pranks, we listened and maintained our calm with all modesty. One of them was in all mood to fight -- trying to pinch rahul in all possible ways. Luckily I was sitting next to him, I used touch therapy to calm him ;)
Soon he started calling me brother -- but was still in mood to fight. Anyhow we gulped all the liquid as soon as possible and got out as soon as possible. Alchohol got into my blood too soon and too deep. I never felt so much inebriated so soon and so much - but this was a different day. We had bought tickets for the movie - Don and that kept me from sleeping. I am not a frequent drinker and have drunk probably five-six times in the last one year. Watching a whole movie seemed difficult but costs forced me to go for it.
The movie has released last week and ever since it has been criticised a lot in the media. I have seen the original Don but it was during my school days - probably in class ninth. We were shown this movie on a projector -- a large screen and with a lot of pump and show. We died to see a movie on projector then and so I remember that incident clearly but not the movie -- expect for memories of Amitabh Bachhan and other stars present in the movie.
Although a lot has been said about the movie, I must say this is a real good one!! Shahrukh is STAR, and he has lived to the expections. This was a well-told story, with all the actors acting brilliantly. While it was difficult for me to find flaws with acting and direction, one must accept that the director took up a chisa-pita story of yesteryears, and played it in a manner where you never feel the storyline is of eighties.

Lifehacker and Gmail

Lifehacker has always helped me in keeping updated with the latest web based technologies. There are a huge number of posts on its site everyday -- a lot of them very interesting. Here is a small tutorial for using Gmail. Although I have been using most of them, just thought of posting them for my and other's reference at some point of time later.
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/hack-attack-become-a-gmail-master-161399.php

http://evhead.com/hodgepodge/gmail-shortcuts.html
here are some shortcuts for gmail.

Reader

While I use google Reader and appreciate it very much, I find some small problems with it. Sometimes it shows the already items as unread items. I have to waste some time browsing over them. Also, sometimes, the read items are not read often. I am using firefox 2.0 with a number of plugins installed. I don't know if the plug-ins create some problem or it is the firefox 2.0 which has not been dealt properly by the google team as yet. Just hope that such problems will only decrease with time. While myself in a job where you have to spend considerable time doing small fixes, I can understand such problems take time to be identified and fixed.

PAN

I am shocked to note that my PAN no. application has still not been filed. It's probably a month since I submitted and my friends have already got it. I could have filed it myself but they asked me to deposit it in office. Now, on enquiring I found it's still with the office. Let's see when I get it. I can just hope it won't create some problem for me. I am in need of it for several reasons -- only yesterday I could not apply for a credit card since I did not had it.

http://www.zamzar.com : An online file-conversion application

Just came across this interesting online file conversion "web-ware". I am yet to test it, but if works well even if for some of the convertible formats, it should be useful to it. I hate to install a number of softwares which do too till little and are used very rarely. It has a long list of conversion types -- I am not sure if there are other better web-applications available.

http://www.zamzar.com/

Obsolete links on web-page

I am finding that some of the links on my web-page no longer open. They have either shifted or have gone down. I am not sure if there is an application which can check for such links on a web-page and notify if they have become obsolete, so that the web-master can regularly update them. Initial google search yield no results. Can some-one help?

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Alerts!!

Google alerts seems to be working too well. I am getting Comments for my blog-posts within 12 hours. I have also been using it for quite some time. Fortunately, they have provided the option for selecting the frequency with which you would like to get updates. When kept at everyday, I had to spend considerable amount of time cleaning up my mails. Their crawl engines are quick in detecting new blog posts. But I still find that they haven't crawled my web-site although I have set all the settings required using their webmaster service. Just hoping they do it sometime soon (although its quite sometime since I set-up the required settings).

Problems with servers!

I thought of updating my calendar and put in some events. But alas! calendar is not opening. That's one big problem with web-based services. You never know when they won't work. At least in India -- where such companies don't concentrate much. I thought of browsing through some other online collaboration based application. Everytime I look at such applications, I just wonder how much can be done in this space. google still doesn't have its own ToDo list, although they have one for desktop which is not particularly good. I don't intend their desktop since it seriously retards the computer speed. they may work fine on latest machines but mine is not that good.

Credit cards

Today, some people from Standard Charter gave me a call for Credit Cards. My senior friends here tell me that with time such calls will only increase and will become more and more annoying. For me, I need to talk to them to keep updated with what is on offer. It turned out that the man had come to our office and was giving a call from there. Initially, I felt the voice wasn't clear but the guy was just talking what he always talked on first call to a potential client and probably in deliberate not-so-clear language. I went down to meet him. However, I did not had all the documents required and had to ask them to come again. While talking to them, I remembered the words of my brother -- they make sure that people sign without reading everything. They just kept showing that they were in a hurry. I signed the documents -- but now I regret - I should have read them with patience - although a quick glance did not showed me any problem.
Credit cards have become a useful menace. Only today, I was reading an article saying that the interest rates charged by them turns out to be in the region of 30-40% per annum in India. The article was comparing the rates in India and US. It said the rates in US are much lower. That is natural since India has a higher saving interest rate as well.

News reading

Google reader helps me keep updated with the news these days. Earlier I used to surf for hours to find what I am able to do within minutes with the reader. I have also subscribed to blogs which I like to keep track of. One of them is of Ramesh Jain. He keeps updating his space regularly and keeps talking about the trends in Multimedia in his web-space.
Newspaper reading is possible only in the evening (I wake up just in time to get office on time). Just got to come across a piece of article saying Sanjay Kumar (of CA, Inc.) has been sentenced to 12 yrs of prison for corporate fraud. I am sure this news will become a hot story by tomorrow in India. But unlike other famous corporate frauds, I find this still doing good business.

Music downloads!!!

LimeWire simply rocks!!!
Since evening I have been able to download a good number of songs and small video clips (Vinay helped me with that). And that too when my net speed was a bit choky initially. Although now its working fine. Probably the traffic in the evening is highest when people normally return from their offices. Anyways, its time to sleep now. With this job, I can't hope to stay awake late. But then the good thing is that tomorrow is the last working day. Yippee!!!!

scanR

Another good application scanr.com which I have just came across.
Just mail your data photographs here and you get back a pdf version. This can be helpful for a number of applications.
Unfortunately, for some reason the net has gone slow for some unknown reason. Although Limewire is running and consuming a sizable amount of bandwidth, but I still expect the net speed to be better. I could not open my web-page completely, thanks to this slow speed. I hadn't thought air-tel connection won't perform this way. Anyway, I just can hope this improves in some time -- as night descends

A new product from gmail

Google has introduced yet another product for mobile -- a Java based Gmail for mobile. Although the initial reviews haven't been great, you can always trust them for improving their products. Anyhow this has always been their policy -- throw the product in the market and see how it goes. I also find that their custom search results have improved, that's is something good to see. A few days ago I read an article indicating that google would be adding some more new cool features to gmail like ToDo tag. It's a long time since I saw something new happening to the traditional gmail.
Just now I came across a site Points.com which intends to keep track of your bonus points with every service. This may be helpful to me in future.

Daily log

The day has passed without much a-do. This was probably a day with some more progress towards my goals. Today's mail will sort out my future directions. There's a huge amount of ambiguity and I am still unclear about how I would be proceeding about things. I never wanted to do things where I have to attach my hopes on someone. Anyway that's life.
I am surprised to not have found out something interesting today. If something comes across I would definitely blog about it. Work in office won't be the same from tomorrow with my position poised to change. I hope I would feel easy in the new environment. This place is bit choking with no-one around to talk to.
And here while I write this blog, I found something interesting. I guy Vaibhav from priority-one (http://www.priorityoneindia.com/) contacted me in the evening. I was hoping him to be thakur but was surprised when he gave details. I have delibrately kept this blog out of preview of search engines and still google is advertising about it on net. More-so with its alerts. It's also interesting to see people spending so much of time finding potential candidates -- that too at odd times of the day. Good amount of professionalism has crept into India :).

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Put a check on blogs!!

I have decided to drop making a number of blogs and keep them limited and focused. In the last few days, I was blogging a bit too much -- clocking an average of five everyday. Now that a big number - given the tight schedule that I follow in office. It's quite difficult to write on any topic there. You must be passionate about your work. I have started liking EDA -- but the people here don't share my level of energy. I want to be fast and would prefer creating better applications than just fixing the existing bugs. And you don't an expert to tell you the software sucks -- and in a big way. Its not obvious to use, is bulky, gives a huge amount of noise, coding methods used won't be used by even the beginners. They sell (if they do) because of probably their competitive pricing. A complete India-centric R&D allows them to keep their engineering costs at rock bottom and offer products at much better rates. In sectors where compititors are few, such technique can easily win a few customers -- and for the company its bread and butter.

Daily log

And here passes another day without much done. Tried watching a movie -- Machinist in the evening but soon got fed up. Movies of this class always irritate me. Its a story of a man who hasn't slept for around a year. His hallucinations led to many a accidents - including one where a lost his arm to a machine which this guy was driving -- all because of his callousness. It seemed so deplorable that I had to shut it down in half. That's bad since download takes a full day unlike days in IIT. So, not watching a movie after downloading is a huge loss. By the way, we came across LimeWire, its a nice application for downloads -- peer to peer. We tried downloading some files - and found the speed amazing. Search options make it a favorite for me -- at least ahead of Bit-torrent where you have to follow a bit complex process for downloading. I had a chat with pradeep after a long time. Chats have became very rare recently (with everyone and not just him). It's good to note that he is doing well with his job. He is currently doing a post-doc in univ. of Ottawa

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Networking sites

I am surprised to see the number of social networking sites that keep coming up.
Everyone with a new set of features. But I am still not able to comprehend what google is doing in this area. Orkut doesn't see to be that professional. They click for me but lack a number of features that I would like to see on a good networking site. It seems it has got caught in the beaurocracy -- of who owns what. Unless they scale it up to support important features like blogging, uploading infinite pics and videos and a better networking set-up, they just cannot beat the compitition. They are not a late entrant into this area but still lag far behind mySpace. The only reason I use it because of the number of indian users using it.

Random notes`

I have still not been able to see for myself how google webtoolkit works. I hope I would be able to do that by tommorow. It's not getting downloaded at a speed I would love to see but that's what I have to live with. There are other things getting downloaded and I understand it cannot get better even if I take a better connection. I would put something else for download and bandwidth  for more essential things will remain the same ;)
I could not start my works even today. Probably I will have to create in myself a new determination to get it done anyhow. this is the last chance -- now or never.

Copyright and easy downloads

Downloaded a movie last night. The connection from airtel is really cool with downloads of 800mb possible overnight. With so much fuss around YouTube and copyright issues, I am surprised as to why people are overlooking so many sites which offer pirated versions of cds for free on net - at no cost.
Days ahead seem to be better with such downloads everyday ;)

Browser sync

Browser sync helped me yet again significantly. I was reading a article and left it midway to home. Switched on lap-top and hey browser sync brought it here for me. That's real cool. Now no hassles which leaving office with undone pieces of work!!!

Daily log

The day went in a normal way. Fixed a VI and I am happy about that. Met Satish in the evening and had a few chat sessions with Rahul Bharadwaj. Then went to meet Deepak at his home. Reason was to deliver him Windows XP cd. Normal working days can't have anything better to offer. Unfortunately Deepak's comp has gone out of order. Maybe I am the reason, maybe the poor look after.
And here I am doing the normal daily browsing. This used to happen in office normally. thanks to the new internet connection I can do it from home now. The news of Jot getting sold out to google has just got out. That is really surprising especially since google offers similar and better services in all its domains. May be they are looking at expanding their user base or employee base whom they won't have to train now. In  fact Zoho offers remarkably better services. And I am particularly impressed with them since they operate from India.
Another interesting application that I have got across is FindMeOn.com
It tries to integrate various usernames something I am very keen about using. Let's see how much useful its going to be for me.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Weekend Movie

Last weekend, I saw a movie of salman Khan -- Jaaneman. Incidently, a class-12 friend of mine -Rahul Bhardwaj came in contact this weekend as well (I hope to meet him over the next weekend - venue is Akshardham temple and reason - a treat from Naveen Bhartiya for his new job - that's interesting - I haven't given them any as yet).
I am not a great friend of Salman Khan - and I ended up liking the role of Akshay Kumar. He is a real scene stealer (far ahead of Salman - girls may disagree). And had improved a lot over the years. A forgetable story but still the movie was worth its money - with laugh bites every now and then and typical hindi movie love triangle maasalaa.

Blogs not getting posted again

Its disappointing to see some of my earlier blogs still not published. This error keeps troubling blogger. I won't like see some of my blogs getting lost due to server/technical errors. Hope they will find remedy to it soon.

At 1:00

Got the internet at home today...
Its 1:00 now and I am yet to think of sleeping. I have gotten net-alchoholic. Hopefully this situation won't change for the next one month or so. I have been using a number of google products - one of them being Browser sync. I was syncing my office browser using it but was yet to test it on another computer. The amount of syncing done by this application is simply incredible!! I saved a  huge amount of time googling and finding out the sites, the user-names, pass-words -- thanks to this application. I am sure there must be many other players in the market doing such syncing but google is ahead simply because I don't have to use another user name and the visiblity that google products get.

Airtel: A frontline service provider

Finally I have a net connection at home. It seems like it has been a long time. I had been waiting for this for quite some time.
Probably things would start for me at a speed much faster than what it has been till now. I hope I would be able to complete my works by 15th. Now with all tech requirements almost fulfilled, I cannot complain any longer. Its the time to  act.
Getting a net connection was a  memorable experience especially after long years  of getting used to the beaurocratic ways of things. Airtel had ushered India into an internet age, in line with the best in the world. They offer some incredibly good services that too in Indian circumstances. Getting unprofessional and untrained people do such professional work is a feat in itself. Airtel provides some of the frontline services like mobile ticket bookings at quite manageable rates. Such experiences are a real pleasure to see happening in India.

Net at Home !!!

And I have  got net at home!!
Would be blogging details  later.
For now, its time to install important things....

Friday, October 27, 2006

Integrating greasemonkey: A nice experience

I was trying Greasemonkey this evening. It is an interesting platform to change some particular web-pages in the way you like them to display. Thats an interesting application. You can play with any web-page and even display some contents of one web site on another. I tried some famous scripts for gmail. It is good to see how flexible gmail can be with this platform. Although, none of the applications that I was testing were worth keeping, I enjoyed using it. Probably in future, I need arises, I can revert to it for making confortable changes in the frequently visited web-sites.

Movies

Ever since I came to noida, I have been watching hell lot of films in multiplexes here. Unfortunately, thats the best pass time here. Week end at home made me miss some of them last week. Hopefully, I would be making up for them this week. I would be having a net connection at home by this week-end and that would only compliment things. There is little to do when outside office. I tried reading novels but that did not went quite long especially because of disturbances at home

Google custom search

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012261214304761821105%3Axmb5r2yeata

I had created this search engine to see the effictiveness of google custom search. Prima-facie it works well and brings results not just from the sites which you want to search but from the whole web. But weightage of results from the given sites are more making initial results effective. A number of other things are also customizable.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Time Pass

I was just going through my old blogs. And I realised how important they are for recollecting old memories. I had started bloging when I was in Singapore. I remember those days as one of the best in my life. Blogs and pictures have kept the memories fresh. Although I am no longer in touch with the people. Had a small chat with Divya one day and that was it. Maybe in the next few days, I would be getting back in contact with a few of them. Time is also running out for me and I need to plan very meticulously for the next few days to fruitfy certain goals. And I don't want to be loser yet again.
I have just returned from home and probably wont be going back for next three months. Contacts are getting weaker and I am learning some facts of life the hard way. Again this is not the ideal place to explain which ones.
I will be returning home into a calm environment especially after Satnam was there for around a month. Life should be easier that way.

Official blog

Atrenta has created a web-space for its employees to blog.
So would I be using it? Definitely not now, particularly when I a big google fan and my technical knowlegde is not good enough to blog on such issues.
http://web.noida.atrenta.com/wp/wp-admin/

Back to office

I am back to my workplace !!
It was short journey home and I know for sure it's not going to be any longer in future.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Just keep moving

Sometimes you are not in a frame of mind you would love to be and you can't do anything about it. Today is one such day for me. Unfortunately, this is not the best place to talk about it. In the next fews hours, I have to get on the move. Let's see what life has in store for me next. For now, I am just in a sorry mode :(

Illumination pics

here is the pics of nehru hall illu
I would try to upload the ones of Atrenta in a few days.
 

Custom search from google

Its good to see yet another google product -- a customisable google search engine, I tried one from another site and always wondered if google is going to provide one sometime. It has done that finally and the outcome is quite good. A lot of customization is possible and I would love to use it for so many personal search needs that I have. http://google.com/notebook/cse
 

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Help the lost usb drive

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/windows/make-your-lost-usb-drive-call-for-help-209086.php
This seems to be a good application. Would be something really useful. Especially since I have bought a new usb drive .

Rubic's cube

Rubic's cube is an interesting puzzle and a timepass. I just came across this article showing how to solve a Rubic's cube. I would make an interesting read for people who have tried their hands on it and are still to find a methodical way to solve it. http://www.lifehacker.com/software/fun/how-to-solve-a-rubiks-cube-208227.php

Got the firefox

I installed a firefox and things are better now... But the big problem if I log out, all data stored by me will go and I will have to install it everytime I log-in. But that's the best compromise available

Finally at home!!

Last few days have passed in an interesting manner. I have a lot to write but unfortunately this cyber cafe doesn't have the facilities to do it now. Only explorer is present here and that too sucks in a big way.
My journey to home began in the worst possible way. I had choose a very bad train since reservations were not available in other trains. The train typically takes 24 hours to cover a distance which other trains cover in 12 hours. On the top of it, the engine got fire (thankfully while on a platform). That forced us to change train but that too did not changed things for better. The other train a passanger too 3 hours to cover 40 kms. any way after two nights journey, I am finally at home and enjoying the good ambience and weather here. It was long time since I came to home and its seems such times will become rare in future.
I came here for doing some of my works but unfortunately that cannot happen. That's to adam's explorer. It sucks !!!
 

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Configuring firefox 2.0

In firefox type: -  about:config
Almost all the variables can be configured in firefox 2.0 here including the tab size and way you scroll.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

hiding files in jpeg!!!

Just another thing to blog about. A good way to hide your files in jpeg. http://www.thetechtray.net/videos/rar/

I had come across this article previously, but this one is much better in showing more clearly. :)

Daily chores

The days pass off without much ado. Today, I had my lunch outside. That has become a more regular thing these days with outings on atleast four occasions in last five working days.  The times are not particularly pleasant  although you get good food. "Company" matters!!

Greasemonkey: a new platform for creating extensions

Greasemonkey is providing some interesting add-ons for firefox including a gmail extension for google reader. Ever since the upgradation of google reader, I want that kind of embedding. Unfortunately, I cannot use it just now since I have switched over to firefox 2.0
At this moment, it won't be a good idea to migrate back although I am facing a number of problems with my firefox (I am not able to add a number of extensions which I dearly need). Let's just wait and see when people will start supporting firefox 2.0
I have switched over to the new version much before time!!

Remote logging over internet

An interesting web-based application is here for remotely logging into a computer, although I have not yet tested it and am just not sure about the security aspect : http://www.logmein.com/

But if the security aspect is taken care of properly, it can be really helpful in working across computers.

Spam free googling

I just came across a site which uses the results of google to give results which are spam free. It's quite revealing to note the amount of spam that comes in with google http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

Friday, October 13, 2006

Daily chores

The day went off with not much to do and with a headache. Probably I need to see an eye-specialist. I met one today, who came to office for a free eye-checkup. He just confirmed that the problem with my eyes have not reduced. Head-ache has only become regular with long hours before computer.
Did not do much of reading or search and could not grab anything else to write. I tried signing up for Adsense, in a hope that it brings some money for me as well. Let's see!!

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Got it back!!

And here the lost post got blogged. That's probably a fault of servers. Might have lost somewhere in between ;)
Anyway its good to see I am not actually losing it!!

Losing blog-posts while posting by mail

I was just wondering if the e-mail blogging works the right way. I have lost one of my blog-posts, and I don't see that I typed in a wrong address. Blogging by e-mail never seems to be a safe method anyways, you never know where your post is going and if it is getting filtered. Anyway, you just have to trust google on that. I still prefer this method since you don't have to log-in into another site. That's a bit teasing. More so when you keep blogging on different blog-titles.

Yubnub: shortcut for browsing!!

I just came across yubnub.com That's another cool application. It allows users to create command lines for browsing. That's really COOL!! As yet, it does not ask users to create their log-in. So, if someone somewhere has created a short-cut, it becomes a bit difficult. However, they do allow aliases and overwriting. I hope other people will come up with such an idea and something much better and much more usable will come up soon. Anyway, it looks to be a very simple and good beginning.

Tech notes

I would like to see google starting a service wherein any update in writely is reflected on my web-site. It is very easily possible by feed. I hope google does it soon. Zoho has this service already!! Infact, it has many more of them. Only problem with it - the servers are not capable of handling the traffic it gets.
Only today has google launched a google educator has nothing new, but looks good to see google interested in promoting its products among educators.

I came across jot.com and writebot.com both working in the area of online text processing and collaboration. See them the work done by google seems far more impressive. Zoho is quite good as well. Probably these are some of those new player and may take some time before catching up. Another thing which these ppl try out is chat service. They have made their log-in's really simple. You don't have to write too much and fill big forms to see how these applications work. One good thing about jot was the page customization that it allows. Such an option can help users decide between simple look and bulky but good look.

Tech notes

I would like to see google starting a service wherein any update in writely is reflected on my web-site. It is very easily possible by feed. I hope google does it soon. Zoho has this service already!! Infact, it has many more of them. Only problem with it - the servers are not capable of handling the traffic it gets.
Only today has google launched a google educator has nothing new, but looks good to see google interested in promoting its products among educators.

I came across jot.com and writebot.com both working in the area of online text processing and collaboration. See them the work done by google seems far more impressive. Zoho is quite good as well. Probably these are some of those new player and may take some time before catching up. Another thing which these ppl try out is chat service. They have made their log-in's really simple. You don't have to write too much and fill big forms to see how these applications work. One good thing about jot was the page customization that it allows. Such an option can help users decide between simple look and bulky but good look.


Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Tech: AJAX solutions

Like everyday, I came across a number of cool Web-based products today!!
The day started with the news of writely and Spreadsheet collaborating to docs.google.com. Such a thing is better for user perspective. Now users can access both using a single login.
The second thing was I came across a web based application site: zoho.com
It is interesting to find such a wide suite of products from a company which has a center in India. AJAX (asynchronous java and xml) technology is taking web documenting by storm. Looking at the kind of products that zoho has on offer, one can easily guess what Google can do about its products and what new areas can be ventured. Soon after I read about a google board member talking about scarcity of people in India. He was especially talking of dearth of people with knowledge of AJAX. His anxiety is very valid, and with the government still not thinking about education seriously, things will only get worse.
I don't need to surf the internet a lot these days, Google reader brings everything which interests me to me. Thats another good thing about RSS.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Google Web toolkit

Almost everyday I come across something interesting from google. Newspapers are abuzz with the news of google buying YouTube. Thats interesting - it seems text internet will be a talk of history.

Another interesting thing I came across was Google Web tool - http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/gettingstarted.html
I would like to use it in future and learn making some interesting applications. I am already in love with the way Google handles web-pages. It would be interesting to use them on my web-pages.

Emotional ambivalence

Emotionally unsure people are more creative. This is what I came across while reading a article on research by a Prof. of Washington Business School. I tend to draw inspirations from such articles thesedays ;)
It is even more interesting to find so many people interested in doing such research. Seems like topic to think about has declined a lot. At the end of day, reading such an article gives you a lot peace of mind. This situation of not much to do has forced me to spend a good amount of time reading. Recently, I finished Alchemist - another classic inspiring story of a young guy searching for his goals. These days I am reading "Who killed Daniel Pearl" (got nothing better :( ). That again is an interesting story. although only one perspective is highlighted.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Daily Updates

Was busy working since morning. Today was supposedly the code freeze date. So, I was working on last minute testings. At the very last moment, the code freeze date shifted. A huge relief for the day. And the server got down as well!! The only worry- why it did not happen in the morning :(

Sunday, October 08, 2006

A record number of blogs

This is the seventh post today. I am becoming a [chronic] blogger. Writing nothing interesting!! and still managing so many updates.

checking again!!

Just a check again. This time it should get published without going into the draft mode. If that happens, it eases me of another small task of converting draft to post

check

check if it works. I am trying to blog by sending mail to *.noida@blogger.com

Blog by sending mail

hey I just noticed blogging is possible just by sending mails. I just discovered it while editing a post. That's a good thing. I had lost hope of blogging in an offline mode. That's a much better way. This service brings gmail nearer to blogging. I can just mail and get it blogged with a little more effort of converting the draft to published post.

Daily chores

Unfortunately, there is hardly anything happening which differentiates one day of my life from other. And I don't hope this situation will change in the next few weeks. This is probably the first week-end going without watching a movie in theatre. That business was gettting increasingly boring. Although almost everyday we visit the mall - Spice which nearby our home - a time well spent. The stay in my new home is atleast better than the last one, where I got bored most of the time. Most of them were nowhere around whenever and if ever you need them. And everybody moved to the cosiness of his room when in. Although in my new house, things are not in the normal mode these days. I hope things would get back in a few days.

A slow progression

I have started working towards applying again. Although the progress is rather slow. Life is quite active and I love such a situation. And I am able to update this blog even if it is just a sentence!!!

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Missing Tech

I am missing electronic gadgets that I wish I should have. I dont have a personal computer here. And that's unfortunate! I hope I will be having one in a few months. The other thing that I need dearly is a camera. Its a long time since I posted my pictures on web. And my mobile, its too obsolete. Changing them would take at least a year.

Daily chores

These days I very rarely forget to wish people on their birthdays. Thanks to a lot of technologies which send me timely alerts. It's also the outcome of the fact that I have got used to the place and people. Its important to be in a good shape mentally. Unfortunately, it took 9 long months to get back. Only today, I called Anjan to wish him. I hope this trend will continue in future.

Google gadgets for your webpage!!!

http://web.anurag.googlepages.com/googlereader

I was just trying out some random things with Google Gadgets. Google has recently extended its gadgets capability to be added to googlepages. I would love to develop some new gadgets for me in future, for my web-page. It works well and adds a lot of usability easily to your page.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Google APIs

I was just trying the Google APIs provided for search customization and linking maps to your site. The features provided by google are really exciting. It helps integrate the google features into your website. Such features bring programmers nearer to google!

Google Code Search

Google comes up with something new every other day. Today it has released Code search. That's a very good thing for me, just that it has not included Verilog and VHDL search for now. May be it follows later. The other good thing was google bookmark. I just discovered you can directly bookmark it using a firefox extension.

check

this is just a check for a feature of blogger.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Blogging has started!!

hey I just noticed after a long long time, I am back to my ways. Blogging a lot!! Three in just last half an hour. And this because I am still waiting for Naveen. Although I know he is not coming.

Google Bookmark

Although a good idea to keep bookmarks online, still its in a very primitive stage. I am using it going by the google's reputation of improving upon its products. In some time, I hope when it becomes more handy to use, I will be able to use it in a better way!!

Google Reader: in a new look

Just today, Google reader has changed its look. I hope with this my long standing quest for a single reader is fulfilled, now no more browsing for hours to get a single piece of information. And I can remain updated with blogs updates aswell !!
RSS feeds are truly a new information revolution

Monday, September 11, 2006

Waiting

Waiting for a change....
for the day when this deadlock in life will change...
life is moving and still a lot is missing...

Monday, August 14, 2006

In Noida --- A new inning

Blogging has finally started again. And I hope it continues....
A new blog since the priorities in life have changed, A new one since I am trying to give a new definition to myself, a new one which would be a witness of new chapters of life unfolding.
For now, I intend to use this blog space as an online archive of day to day happenings. Days have remained no longer so happening though....