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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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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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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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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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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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!!

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

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.

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 :)

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

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.

times photograph story

http://www.time.com/time/potw/20061103/
Times weekly photographs are always a pleasure to watch. They make you fee