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