Pictures of UT!!

I spent the last evening roaming on the campus with a camera with some friends. The photographs have been uploaded on flickr. UT is a beautiful campus and it does not get dark even at 8:00pm in this part of the world.
I also created some web-pages and uploaded them on my ece web-page earlier in the day. It still needs some work but a start page is ready and working.

Grandcentral - Customize everything about your cell

GrandCentral is an exciting application for personalizing a lot of things about phones through the web. Since the google bought it a few days back, I hope it would remain a free service for ever like most other google services. With this, you can choose a number which stays with you for your whole life without having to bothering about mobile service. One can do a lot of things from screening users to blocking them, receive voicemail notification using e-mail and SMS, personalize different things like different Phones using a single number. I have quickly created a number for myself which I hope will remain with me forever: (512) 524-3985

AideRSS -- Filter the RSS

AideRSS is a new service which filters out RSS feeds to present before you only selective good posts. It may be useful for people who are get hunderds of feeds and are not able to spend time reading the most important ones. The idea is important because of the increasing usage of RSS. However, I was not quite satisfied with the results of this site for my blog :(

Feedburner Integration!

Ever since acquisition by Google, Feedburner has made some interesting features free and created some new features. My brand is one such feature allowing feedburners to retain their domain-name in the feed. I used this feature to convert my feed address to
http://feeds.anurag-kumar.com/anurag-kumar from the earlier http://feeds.feedburner.com/anurag-kumar . Blogger has started allowing feed redirect which now allows more accurate estimation of number of subscribers by feedburner. I have activated this feature also, so hopefully I would see some increase in the number of subscribers :)

Create sessions to access terminal on multiple computers on Linux

On a linux machine, nohub command can be used to keep a program running even if a terminal is closed. But if you want to use a session from more than one computer, screen command can be used. Matt Cutts has a good short tutorial on how to use screen for working on a session from more than one computers:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/a-quick-tutorial-on-screen/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/screen-power-tips-screenrc/

Anti mosquito software !

Mosquitoes are a big menace and people keep finding ways of driving them away in different ways. A number of softwares are available now which use different methods for keeping the mosquitoes away.

-  Anti mosquitoes is a unique software which creates a low noise to keep the mosquitoes away. Various parameters need to be adjusted to suit it to the mosquitoes of your home :)
-  Download.com also lists a few of them. They are also simple to use requiring no external devices.

Some of them are even compatible for your mobile devices!

Google spreadsheet accessible with filters!

A very important feature which I find lacking in google spreadsheets is filtering. However, what sets it apart is its capability of collaboration and APIs. A google intern has created a simple and nice application for viewing google spreadsheets with filters using publicly available APIs. This can work as a great filler till spreadsheet starts allowing filters in its main version.

Setting up cron in Linux or Unix using shell script

Setting up cron is an easy way of performing time-scheduled jobs in linux or unix machines. Cyberciti has a good tutorial on how to setup cron.

Sometimes you may want to execute a script on 2nd Monday or 4th Thursday only. A one line shell script can do it for you.

Consider this:

$ date +%a

The output is: Fri
Now to execute a script on first Friday:

$crontab -e

Now, append the following code in script:

# Run a script called myscript.sh on First Friday at 11:30:
30 11 1-7 * Fri [ "$(date '+%a')" == "Fri" ] && /path/to/myscript.sh



Create your own digg like site with coRank!

coRank had started as a digg like social voting platform. But now it has transformed to allow users to create their own digg like social voting platform with a lot of customization! I have recently created a page using corank on my domain: http://news.anurag-kumar.com. I hope to use it in future :)

Zoho creator to have an upgrade!

Zoho keeps coming with nice upgrades and new tools! They are now going to announce an upgrade of Zoho creator. From what I have been told this new upgrade will have following important features:

1. Completely New UI. Ability to creats apps with simple drag & drop.
2. Scripting with no coding. Introduction of 'Deluge Script Builder' which will let users add advanced functionalities into the applications users create.
3. Embedding Form/View in websites, blogs and other Zoho Applications.

A demo is available here: http://www.vimeo.com/clip:210220
Such applications are good time-savers when you don't want to create them yourself. I had once used it for creating form for my web-site. It works well and data filled in forms is stored on zoho server. What irked me then was that there was no notification process for web-site administrator to know when a visitor has filled a form.

Finding longitude and latitude on Google maps

Google maps does not show the longitude and latitude of a place by default. I remember wasting a lot of time finding these data for an application of mine. This small javascript code can solve the purpose!

javascript:void(prompt('', gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

This code when copy-pasted in the location bar of browser and executed, pops up a window showing the longitude and latitude.

Find the neighbors of your domain!

MyIPNeighbors is a good application for finding the sites which are hosted on the same server. Searching for yahoo.com gives all the domains hosted on its server. google and msn search also give such results but they are not as accurate as the results of this site!

Some funny csh/sh command outputs!

Just came across some funny csh/sh command outputs:

% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.

% ar r God
ar: creating God

% "How would you rate Quayle's incompetence?
Unmatched ".

% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].

% ^How did the sex change operation go?
^ Modifier failed.

% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.

% make love
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.

% got a light?
No match.

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% !:say, what is saccharine?
Bad substitute.

/* not csh but sh */
$ PATH=pretending!/usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!

$ drink bottle: cannot open
opener: not found

Some inspiration

Graduation day speeches are meant to be inspirational. Steve Jobs speech at Stanford is probably his most famous one. Just came across this piece by President of NUS:

I see three paths ahead of you – those of the Koi, the Bluefish and the Atlantic Salmon.

Of all the fishes in the world, the Koi has the most comfortable life. When young, it is carefully selected and bred for its beauty. It then spends its entire life in a sheltered environment, living in order to be admired by others.  The Koi is also fragile – change the water by a bit, and the Koi perishes.  People who are like the Koi play it safe and do not venture out; they thrive in the established system. Then, there is the path of the Bluefish. Some years ago, I went deep sea fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. I caught a bluefish. It was not a large fish, yet it put up a strong fight. And when I reached inside its mouth to take out the hook, it bit right through my thick gloves into my finger, almost biting it off. The captain said to me: "You must be a first-timer at ocean fishing. Ocean fishes like the bluefish are tough and fierce. Have you been fishing only in small ponds?"

People who are like the Bluefish take risks and embrace life, seizing the abundant opportunities of the vast ocean. While others are exhausted by a changing environment, Bluefish types thrive in it. This is the path of the worldly Bluefish. Home can be anywhere – and perhaps, nowhere.

Finally, there is the path of the Atlantic Salmon. Born in freshwater streams, it heads out to the open seas in young adulthood. After maturing in the ocean, the Atlantic Salmon returns to where it was born, to breed, and then heads out again. It makes this journey between its home and the open sea several times over its lifetime.

People who are like the Atlantic Salmon are at ease moving between the old and the new, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between what is comfortable and what is challenging. While they seize opportunities to grow in the global arena, they understand the true meaning of home. Home is not just anywhere. Home is where the heart is. Home is about identification and commitment, about family and nation.

Orkut now allows feed import!

Just found that Orkut is now allowing importing feeds into your profile. To make things easy, blogs of blogger account and pics of picasa web-album are already present in the list of feeds that can be added. This is good improvement, although slow compared to other players in social networking especially facebook. I have added my picture blog and this weblog to my profile!

Google announces Feedburner acquisition

Google has finally announced the acquisition of Feedburner. Feedburner is one of the services I have been using for my blog. With this acquisition, the number of different log-ins that I have to remember will reduce :) Also, if the blogger feed can be directly burned, I can deliver ads directly into the feeds! That's what google wants to do with this acquisition. We can also hope for some nice improvements in the way we consume feeds today (google has recently announced a closed beta of mashup editor, which people are hoping to be something similar to yahoo pipes).

Yahoo rolling out unlimited storage

Yahoo mail has started showing "You now have unlimited storage" in my account! Yahoo has come a long way from providing just 5 MB some five years ago. Although this feature won't bring me back to using yahoo, I would definitely use it as a dumping ground forwarding mails automatically from all other accounts :)

Google goes offline with google gears

Google has announced Google gears which attempts to take browser offline. At present, it supports Google reader and very likely it would start supporting gmail and google docs in near future. This development is in sync with the announcement of mozilla to support offline browsing in firefox 3.0. This application being open source can be used by other developers and soon we would see a number of sites allowing offline access to data. If implemented in google docs, it would be a huge advantage over other competitors providing similar service.

On the results of public examinations

Results of a number of public examinations are being declared. Today, the result of IIT entrance was declared where some 7000+ students were given place in the merit list. This is a huge increase from last times, maybe because some new institutions are added in the list which would use JEE for their student intake.
A few days ago, results of Class-X CBSE results were declared. Intrestingly, more than 3000 students have got more than 95% marks. A Patna boy is the topper this time with 99.4% marks!

Google maps now has street view

Google has announced Google Maps street view.

They had licensed some related technologies and this was a natural addition. Google maps is quite fast with new feature addition and they are bridging the gap between google earth and this online version.

Surface Computer from Microsoft

Microsoft has announced a new product category of surface computers. A surface computer is able to recognize physical objects like cell phone, pen etc. and allows control of content like maps, pictures, files with hand.

Picture a surface that can recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Today at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil Microsoft Surface™, the first in a new category of surface computing products from Microsoft that breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Beginning at the end of this year, consumers will be able to interact with Surface in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.

This is an interesting product and is ground-breaking. Such research was till now limited to universities. Concept of "Hand control of objects in computer" will soon definitely attract a good number of customers!

MyblogLog adds tagging feature

MyBlogLog has added a tagging feature via which you can easily tag blogs and people. MyBlogLog is good service now bought by Yahoo. After a good start, I hardly see any improvement in their services. Moreover, after being acquired by yahoo, it does not encourage Google's blogger platform. High spam is another turn-off which may eventually force me to stop using it.

Zoho notebook coming out of private alpha

Zoho notebook is finally coming out of closed alpha. Its features had impressed me when it came but initially it had some problems with speed and it made my firefox crash. Now in beta, those problems seem to have gone and it looks like a promising application for storing and collecting web content while browsing. A firefox plug-in makes it even more complete.

Its features (as told to me):

• Add text, image, audio, video, RSS feed, HTML content from web, Zoho Writer doc, Zoho Sheet spreadsheet etc
• Share with friends / colleagues, permission settings at object level
• Versioning support to view/revert to any past version
  
• Add comments to pages or to individual objects
  
• URL to access Zoho Notebook Beta : http://notebook.zoho.com (also at http://nb.zoho.com)
  
• Firefox add-on for clipping web pages
  
• Demo Video of Private Alpha
  

Firefox tricks

Firefox is always a great asset. Here is a blog post on some basic Firefox tricks!

Create flickr slideshows for your web-site.

Embedding flickr pics in your website or blog is an easy thing. If you are still guessing how to do that, flickrSLiDR provides an easy way. Just enter the flickr address and tags from which you want to create a slideshow and flickSLiDR gives you html code to be embedded into the website.

I am back

For last two weeks I was down with fever and am just back. Everything had come to a standstill and maybe now things will slowly come back to track.

No blogging!!

I am going on leave from 1st to 4th and would be traveling most of the time. So, no blogging!!!

Firebug: Debug html inside firefox!

Firebug is a firefox extension for writing and debugging html, css, javascript (etc.) files. It is a very powerful way of making html files and debugging while being right inside the browser. While being a simple and light extension, it outperforms other competing tools like Microsoft FrontPage. Here is a good post describing some tips and tricks for using firebug!

Reasons why I like Linux

An interesting post for Linux fans:
Things I can do in Linux that I can't do on Windows

Anti mosquito software

Anti mosquitoes is a unique software to keep mosquitoes away from the computer. It creates a sound which is barely audible to the humans and some of its parameters need to be adjusted to get the best performance.

Search feeds in Google Reader!

Its been a long time since Google introduced its own feed reader. Still they haven't integrated their search capability into their reader. I am not sure when they are going to do that. If you still find yourself at loss as to how search old feeds, here is a g reasemonkey script. Details on how to use it is explained here. This works well given that google's own custom search is used. Hopefully, google will start allowing search in Reader sometime soon.

A look at Google's stumbleupon like feature

A few days back google added a new feature to its toolbar something similar to stumbleupon. I was using stumbleupon and found its results great. The relevance of the sites that I stumbled upon really surprised me. I was always wondering if google would do it with the kind of information it collects about its users. Its good to see that they have created this toolbar icon which gives you result according to their relevance. Their recent addition of web history will only make the results returned by them more relevant. While the results of stumbleupon are interesting, google's result are very relevant!

Post your blog posts in twitter!

RSStoFeed is service allows you to post RSS feeds to twitter. Looks like a good way of keeping your twitter friends updated with your posts! So, now my twitter account will get updates of my new blog posts!

Google now stores web history of users!

Google has added a new functionality of storing and searching web history. Such history is already available to users in their browser history for a shorter duration. Now, it can remain online on google servers. This is a good feature although this is bound to raise questions regarding data security. At the end, its a personal choice for users.

Google spreadsheet supports charts/graphs!

Google spreadsheet has just added the feature of drawing charts. This feature was also long anticipated and would add to the utility of this web-based collaboration tool. While people at google are denying any competition with microsoft in this domain, the message is clear!

Google announces presentation tool

Google has announced the acquisition of tonicsystems and confirmed rumors that they would be adding new presentation to their docs and spreadsheets. This new presentation would come sometime in summer. Adding presentation to their docs is a natural move and it would interesting to see how their product differs from that of other players.

Fotowoosh - a service to convert an image into 3-D

Techcrunch reports about Fotowoosh, a new service which turns any image into a 3-D model. This topic has remained a hot area of research for Computer Vision people for a long time. Microsoft is also working on a similar project - Photosynth which tries to create merge different images of same area to create a 3-D feel. However, the output of Fotowoosh looks much more appealing. This kind of research which was confined to academics is now getting the attention of industry and people are developing some interesting products!

Dodgeball founders leave google

Dodgeball founders have left google. The concept behind dodgeball was quite interesting and was developed by college-going enthusiasts. It is a mobile social networking service which started with the service offering SMS whenever your friend is within some distance from you. It was an early concept and could have gone on to become what twitter is today. Unfortunately, the vision of its founders did not match with that of people at Google.

It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. (...) It wasn't worth being that frustrated all the time - it was making us both crazy.

Companies on similar concept are created a lot of media buzz these days. Such concepts can do wonders in India where mobile communication is creating the impact which internet created in developed world.
Leaving google in such a manner also shows Google doesn't allow freedom to its engineers the way it did a few years ago. 

Extension to create vim environment while browsing

Here is an interesting extension for firefox which tries to mimik VIM environment for Firefox!
An interesting idea! Just that I would like to use it while writing text in firefox and not just for browsing. I hope the developers of this extension will bring this feature in a later version making it useful rather than appealing.

Sync up google calendar with desktop!

I use Google calendar for maintaining my schedules and getting timely reminders (both email and SMS). The only thing better than this that I ever wanted was a desktop application having similar functionalities. Thankfully, thunderbird extension -- Lightning is one good desktop calendar. It can be easily synced up with GCal using another extension which keeps both the desktop and online calendar synced up. Here is a detailed tutorial showing how that can be done and where you can find those extensions!

Google acquires double-click

Google has confirmed the rumors of its acquisition of double-click. With this acquisition, Google will have 1200 more employees. Google will be $3.1 billion in cash. This acquisition shows how seriously google takes its advertising business. We can hope to have embedded ads in YouTube in sometime :)

On recent Photobucket saga

Recently, Myspace removed all video links from photobucket. While a number of blogs/people are attacking myspace for this activity, this has created a lot of publicity for photobucket. Photobucket has been the phenomenon that has struck the web-space and is quickly eating into flickr's domain while moving into new arenas like video. It has shown a steady growth and allows a lot of flexibility for the users. Services like this can easily survive such monopolistic attitude of other services like myspace. Instead of what myspace would be hoping, photobucket will only become more popular with this episode.





Update: Myspace and Photobucket have patched up and now photobucket videos can again appear on MySpace.

Google maps adds another dimension to buildings!

Google maps has added another dimension to its maps. Google earth Blog reports that now you can see another dimension of the buildings for some select locations.

Google is yet again adding features to Google Maps which bring it closer to Google Earth. In February Google added building outlines to major cities when you zoom in close. Now Google has added 2.5D buildings to some of those cities for Google Maps. You can't rotate or tilt your view, so it's 2D. But, the buildings have shaded 3D-like projections from an angle so you get an idea of height and shape of the buildings. See an example by going to this Google Map. Looks like about 35 cities have the buildings in the US, and Tokyo.

It certainly brings maps to Google earth. Google is doing everying to stay ahead of its competitors in this arena!

A new page

I was free this evening after the code-freeze, so took up this time to create a new starting page. The page doesn't contain anything new, it's just a new landing place created this time using css (so, growing upon it would be easier).

A look at Indian Design Industry

In-stat reports that Indian design Industry will grow at double digit rate at
least till 2010.

India is one of the fastest growing semiconductor markets in the world. Semiconductor consumption reached US$1.18 billion in 2005, and is expected to reach US$3.09 billion by 2010. Liberalization and globalization of India’s economy has accelerated the development of the electronics industry. The country’s increasing middle class has further propelled the domestic demand for electronics in the country. The exploding demand for mobile handsets and PCs is also affecting semiconductor consumption.
The report gives the five-year forecast for semiconductor consumption
in India and also points out the consumption trends across different
segments. It highlights the drivers in each segment and also gives the
break down of semiconductor products like microprocessors,
microcontrollers, memory, and DSP across each segment. The major
players in various semiconductor segments are discussed to provide an
overview of the market’s direction. The report also analyzes the
semiconductor manufacturing scenario in India and takes a look at
recent developments in this space.

Share-results -- a good service for referring sites!

For some time now, I have been using Google adsense for showing ads on this site. There are a number of players in this domain. Shareresults is an interesting service which allows users to refer sites. For advertisers, it allows a number of methods in which a user may refer a site -- from banner ads to simple text ads. Payment modes are also very convenient. You can easily switch between paypal and check. A quick look showed me a number of sites which I may like to promote!
Link: Shareresults

Widget for free SMS - callwave

Free SMS services have a number of takers. There are a number of sites which provide this service. For a long time, I was not able to find one which provided good service the world over, and specially in India. Only today I discovered the service by callwave. It's service is better than others, it provides the facility for all over the world and its SMS has a very small reference to the originating site. Moreover, it allows widgets for integration in personalized homepages - google, yahoo, vista etc. This makes it a great, easy to use service. I hope it would stay forever on my google personalized homepage!

New version of Thunderbird

Thunderbird 2RC1 is out!
Although a beta release, with its rich feature set, I was compelled to use it. A complete description of its features is here. With tagging and improved searching, its bound to be liked by many. Also, it is easily integrable with gmail, making it the preferred desktop application! The release is still a beta, and may have some bugs. But, for those who were longing to switching from outlook or try a new interface of thunderbird, this is good enough.

New firefox extension from del.icio.us

del.icio.us is one of the most popular bookmarking sites. Today, it gave a good facelift to its widely popular firefox extension. With this now, it is easier than ever to use delicious bookmarks. A number of features are added. Most importantly, now the delicious bookmarks remains nicely synced with your firefox bookmarks. The extension can be downloaded from here.

My maps in google maps !

Taking a cue from Google earth, Google maps has now started My maps where you can placemark, draw a line or figure on the map and make it public. This is a good feature since now you won't have to use maps api for doing such simple tasks. With time, one can hope that they would bring in some more features from google earth.

Google announces Desktop for mac

Google has finally announced desktop for mac. Although I don't use mac and was not looking for something like this, I am sure there are many people out there who would be happy with this announcement. I hope now a Linux version is in the offing.

Firefox to have social networking integrated in the browser!

There is some news coming about mozilla planning to integrate social network into Firefox. If that happens, it would surely give a sharp rise to the popularity of firefox. Youngsters would love it and won't need to log into other services for contacting their friends. That's the primary reason why most people use internet for -- to communicate. It would also give the business model of flock a sharp dent. They have created their own social network on top of browser, but nobody cares anyway. I hope going by the kind of organization mozilla is, they would allow a lot of cross-integration, allowing other players in social networking to use the feature. That would be a step ahead in integration of many profiles created on different web-sites!

Google's pranks for April Fool's day!

Google has always been known for its April Fool's pranks. They launch some product on this occasion. This year has been no exception. People were already anticipating something to come. Google TiSP and Google paper have been two announcements this year! Follow links to know more!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Synopsis, Magma lawsuit comes to an end!

The lawsuit between Magma and Synopsis has finally ended. It was a long battle which was being closely watched my EDA industry. With this, one can hope the two major companies would move forward focusing their energy on consumers. More details of the news is here.

Cartoon from toondoo

Address changed again !

My domain address has changed again! But the bad news is: after changing, I am still finding it difficult to redirect my site visitors to come here. Also, there would be some old links, which I would be removing and it may take more time than I would prefer.

yahoo mail announced its API!

Yahoo mail today announced api for their platform. Only yesterday, they had announced that they would be allowing infinite space for their users. They are already the leader in web-mail service but the interest in this service was on a decline ever since gmail came. With these announcements, yahoo is simply showing they are pretty serious about webmail service. Api announcement is sure to create a lot of buzz and we can hope see a lot of development here to integrate yahoo mail platform with other services. One example of its yahoo mail mashup with flickr is here. In a few days, we would definitely see some other interesting applications!

google notebook has an upgrade!

Google notebook is an application from google to essentially jot down all that you get while browsing the web. I use it extensively to note down the sites and some data that I find while surfing. It is not as good as other competing products but still I trust google for developing its applications over time. Thankfully they have updated its interface making it easy to sort as well as add new notes! The new interface it slick and is a lot more usable. I hope in future they will work towards integrating it well with other google products!

ToonDoo - create comic strips on web!

ToonDoo is a new site which allows users to create cartoon strips very easily. This is yet another web product from Zoho. Here is the TechCrunch coverage . Zoho is pretty serious about developing web-based products. They have some very good ones which stand out against similar products from Google. But with this new application, they have shown that they want to create products for large variety of users. ToonDoo works fairly well, you can easily integrate your own picture with the body of a cartoon :) , easily create comic strips with a lot of choice! Although having some speed issues, this product will definitely capture another group of audience for Zoho.

Twitthis - a widget to announce your site/blog among twitter users!

twitthis is a new application/widget for your blog/web-site for users to announce it among their community. This just reinforces the way twitter is growing! After the recent blog hype that twitter created, such widgets would only sustain it!

Tumblr: A great way integrating all your blogs, flickr, del.icio.us tags!!

Tumblr is great way of maintaining your blogs. Here you can write your own posts, or import posts from other blogs, flickr, del.icio.us , or other places. All in all, great way to combine all your blogs, flickr, public del.icio.us tags etc. Even if you don't post regularly on your blogs, it always seeks updates from all the sources you have allowed and keeps itself updated. It is in a primitive stage where it does allow users to play with its interface as much as normal blogging sites allow you but just one feature of integrating several accounts brings it apart. Even if you don't have much to write you can post something here. Here is my tumblr site: http://tumblr.kumar-anurag.com/
You can configure tumblr to point it to your site, as I have done for mine. So, that's an added advantage!
So, whether I post on http://blog.kumar-anurag.com or http://picture.kumar-anurag.com or http://www.flickr.com/photos/anruagkumar , it imports it all and shows them on http://tumblr.kumar-anurag.com

Spotback: A nice widget for blogs!

Widgets are a great way to add third party content to your site. Spotback is a new one in this arena which works great for rating the posts. I had added the widget some time back and ever since it has been working great for me! It allows users to rate your site and tag them to use in future. Moreover, they can easily read posts which have been rated high by viewing the recommendations or the ones recommended by the site owner. You can also view the tagged items. Simply a lot of good nice features in a small widget which adds a lot of interactivity for the end users! It is still in beta, so one can hope to see more features coming with time!

Google chat for personalized homepage!

Google has launched a widget for chatting from personalized homepage. This is a great feature since such widgets can also be plugged into blogs and personal websites. It would go a long way in making g-chat all the more popular. Also, while chatting I can see a calling link. Although this feature is not working for me now, I hope something like this is coming in future. Does this mean google would make happen allowing talking from the browser itself?

Refresh tag on Google Reader!

It was always a pain to refresh the "subscriptions/inbox" in Google Reader. Thankfully they have now included a refresh link to update the links being shown. Thats a good improvement and shows that they are constantly working on enhancing the user experience and are listening to their users!!

Code insertion in a blog!

Here is the code which can be used in blogger to publish a piece of code.
Simply paste your code before </div> ofcourse after removing "insert your code here!".

<div style="width: 400px; height: 400px; background-color: 000000; color: ffffff; overflow: auto; padding: 4px;">
insert your code here!
</div>




Customize gmail with greasemonkey !

Greasemonkey is powerful way of customizing web-pages in your own way. You can create your own scripts on top of greasemonkey to do wonderful things with the web-pages. userscripts.org provides an online database of such scripts. For testing, I have brought some changes in the already available script for customizing gmail. The script is here. Using this script, you can give a whole new look to gmail. You may try it if you have greasemonkey already installed on your firefox!! A number of other scripts are available on userscripts.org

site24x7 : A site tracking website from Zoho !

http://site24x7.com is another product from Zoho which has come out of beta. The product checks how your site is performing, its response time, changes in the look of the site etc. It gives some good reports. This is a good application which can work help webmasters well along with traditional site tracking applications.  I have configured my blog to work with this product and would update this post about its performance. Although the concept is useful, the site has unnecessary and clumsy javascript where a more simple look was easily possible.


Update March 11: The configuration had not went well. The default 15min. is pinging not available to free users. I have again configured it and will see how it performs!

Create a Favicon for your blog!

As you would notice, my blog now displays my picture in the title bar (not visible in old versions of Internet explorer), shown in this post. Such images are called Favicons. To create your own image in the title bar (favicon), here is what you can do:

Upload .ico and .png formats of the image you what to show up in title bar to some website.
I have uploaded them here:
http://favatar.myfavatar.com/anurag.png
http://favatar.myfavatar.com/anurag.ico

Copy paste the following code between head and /head in the template of your blog:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df64h8xp_82hb4tqd

To do it easily, use http://www.myfavatar.com !!

Translate your blog-post!!

I have added a new feature to the side bar to translate the web-page to a language of your choice. You can easily do it by adding the following code:

Code has been moved here!

Don't forget to replace my web-page with yours :)
Hope it works well! When your audience is global, you should ensure that they view the site in a language of their comfort!




via: chen

Tumblr making quick improvements!

A few days back I gave a look into tumblr. Initially, it did not impress me and I rejected it as yet another blogging site. But as I see, it is making quick updates. I started using it when I saw them allowing configure tumblr for my domain. Here it is! Now, they have added another feature to import RSS from your other blogs, flickr, or del.icio.us . This makes the page more lively and tumblr a good destination for blogging small/casual posts. I hope to use it in future!!

Feedblendr: another feed blending/piping site!

Feedblendr is another feed blending site, something similar to Yahoo pipes. Although there are some good reviews for the site, I could not find anything which could distinguish them from other players in the market.

Online notebooks revisited!

A number of companies have been working on developing online notebook. Notably, Google notebook is a good application for joting down data found while browsing. Zoho has also announced a notebook. Although not released, it's features look promising. Now, a new website skrbl has also come up with something similar. It does come with some difference -- you can scribble on the editable page. Unless they collaborate with some major web player, their applicability looks limited.

Results of my name search !

I have always been curious about the way search results show my name. I was always disappointed the results of google. I never found their results showing me. Interestingly, yahoo fairs better on this count. search for www.anurag.com shows links to my blog and mybloglog profile very prominently. Now, that is not fair since they are giving a lot of priority to their services like myBlogLog, but in this case, I need not worry :)

Taking it easy!

DSCN6553
Originally uploaded by Anurag Kumar.

Having some rest !

Rishikesh

DSCN6579
Originally uploaded by Anurag Kumar.

Ready for rafting !

Rishikesh

DSCN6560
Originally uploaded by Anurag Kumar.

Here are some pics from my Rishikesh trip last weekend...

10 most beautiful Indian Roads!!

http://www.indiculture.com/fashion/?p=357&akst_action=share-this

A tour!

I had been to Rishikesh last weekend and had a good time there. Here are some pics. A video is here. You can get the other videos by going to my profile!
It was a small tour with friends of my workplace. Main attraction was water riding!

Interesting ways of using Gmail!!

IMified is an interesting
application developed around Instant Messanger to keep in sync your
Google Calendar, To Do lists etc. in Sync. With IMified its easy to
create new time-lines in GCal, BackPackit, or Remember the milk. An
interesting post describing all this is here
. This post details some interesting ways in which gmail can be
used. If you are a fan of Gmail and want to increase its usefulness,
this post is for you!!

It's All Text!

Here is a cool
add-on for firefox for using your favorite text editor when you need to
post something on a web-page. A small link appears next to the text-box
on the web-page, clicking it opens your favorite text editor. It's going
to work great for me, since I can use the power of VI editor alongside
not being recognized blogging in office :P
What's better is that you won't lose any unsaved text if posts don't
happen the way you want it!!

Word source: A web 2.0 dictionary !

The social networking abilities have crawled into dictionaries too!
Word source is a new site providing definitions of words in web 2.0 format. What's better is that you need not search for the word, instead simply type http://word.sc/your-word. With a simple look and tagging, networking features in place, it's sure to gain some attention.

Word source: A web 2.0 dictionary!

The social networking abilities have crawled into dictionaries too!
Word source is a new site providing definitions of words in web 2.0 format. What's better is that you need not search for the word, instead simply type http://word.sc/your-word. With a simple look and tagging, networking features in place, it's sure to gain some attention.

RSS mash-up !

Positive reviews for Yahoo pipes has helped gaining attention for RSS mashup. A number of sites are providing good mashups of RSS feeds. xFruits is another step in that direction. With xFruits, you can do a lot more, like convert RSS to pdf. I hope to see lot more work in this direction!

Easy preview of links present on web-pages !

Being able to preview sites is an interesting technology. A number of good applications have been developed around this technology - noteworthy is Snap which has a considerable presence on the web. Another new development in this domain has been from Syntactica.
Their plug-in - iReader allows users to see a quick snap of the site by moving the mouse over it. The good thing is they show semantic content of the site. A good review is here.

Updates in my blog!

I have brought in a lot of updates in my blog in the last few hours. You can find a completely new look with different web-page, feed site and some ads!
Along with this, I have added a few widgets from myBlogLog. Only now do I realize the reasons for so much of attention that myBlogLog has always got. A search box has been added only to make things complete. Feedburner has been used for subscribing to feeds from my site. I have also added a link to subscribe using e-mail (for those who are still unaware of RSS readers). A few ads have been placed at places where they would be least disturbing to the readers. I would keep updating it in the next few days to ensure a tidy look of the interface. Let see how it goes!

My new domain: http://www.kumar-anurag.com

For the last one hour or so, I was busy creating and setting up my own domain space.
With Google apps for your domain, it is a really simple process. The reason I got interested in doing so was because of the enterprise launch of Google apps. Web media is abuzz with the news of this new service google is providing. I hope to see a number of new features getting added up to the present services provided by google in a few days. By the way, my new domain is www.kumar-anurag.com. I have also set up my new blog address to blog.kumar-anurag.com. With this, I hope my web-page and blog won't shift any longer.

A timely price cut!

I am going home today. Just noticed that air-tel is slashing its roaming charges today. I am really lucky this time!!

On yahoo pipes: part 2

Here is a tutorial/insight into what can be done with Yahoo Pipes. People have been working on effectively using RSS feeds and some good applications are quickly developing. With the attention that Yahoo Pipes has generated, I hope this trend to continue. This is only the start of something really interesting. Google may also be taking interest in this aspect, since it is an example of information assimilation after collection over web.

On yahoo pipes

Yahoo pipes had got incredible online media focus when it launched. In spite of some initial hiccups with their bandwidth, they are working fine now. People are playing with the pipes and a huge list is already created. I found this method great, but it can still be made better with better filtering tools. I would love to have something which can take as input some feed and search over those links to take out the really relevant one. Currently, I take feed from digg which directs me to the digg site. I would like to create a filter to take these as input and give me as feed the actual site so that I can bypass the slow and heavy digg page. I hope such improvements are in the pipeline - coming either from yahoo or its competitors. By the way, after a long time I have seen something really good coming out of Yahoo directly and not through an acquisition (I am not sure if it is created by a team acquired by Yahoo).

Predicting the news trend

I just came across a news prediction site trendio.
Research in this area has been hot with sites like digg and reddit getting popular. It would be interesting to see how news prediction can be integrated with user generated news as is done by digg. As of now, I could not find anything in trendio which could keep me stuck to the site for some time, but maybe with time the site will evolve to give better and well formatted information.

Filtering the web with pipes.yahoo.com !

pipes.yahoo.com is alive! It tries to capture the philosophy very commonly used in UNIX. pipe is used for using data of one process by some other process. The same concept is used by yahoo Pipes -- it captures data on web and provides an interface to use it for some other purpose.
Ever since I started using RSS feeds and recently Google Reader, I have been overwhelmed by the amount of articles I get to read everyday. I would like to read a much smaller number and wondered if there can be some filter. With applications like pipe, filtering out the right news for me would become easy! Although I am finding the interface of yahoo pipes not very intuitive and fast, I hope it would solve some of my problems.

An excellent video on web 2.0 by a prof.

Watch this nice video on how the web has emerged as it is today.

Buzz around new google products

Blogs have been abuzz with indications of google launching their online presentation tool soon. Not something which would have taken their competitors by surprise. The way they have been launching products, buying companies and hiring people shows that they indent to have a strong presence here.
Apart from a presentation tool and wiki, I hope they would come up with an online cabinet system for maintaining such files similar to what is already provided by jot. Moreover, they need to plug in some key features into their spreadsheet and docs to make them handy. Not allowing graphs in their spreadsheets irk me a lot. Their were small issues as well with copy-pasting jobs also the last time I checked it.

Zoho has a new product: Notebook

Zoho has added another product to its already rich web-based products suite -- A notebook.
Its launch has already covered by techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb .

Zoho notebook is a web-based application for collecting data (unlike its competitors it allows importing many formats: audio, video, text, html, RSS). Tweaking in these formats is easy.
It looks far better than other notebooks available.

The reason why I use a notebook (for me its google notebook) is to collect information while browsing. Without a firefox extension, that won't be easy. But as pointed out by ReadWriteWeb, an extension would be released with their public release sometime in March.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/v/Xabm8hRyXrk

On RSS feeds

You can do a number of things with RSS feeds beyond news feeds.
Here is a list:
http://www.basement.org/archives/2006/01/taking_rss_beyond_headlines_pa.html

A nice read...

Wikipedia search engine launched

There was a lot of buzz regarding the search engine creators of
wikipedia were going to launch. Finally, it has launched today:
http://www.wikiseek.com/

At present, they allow search in wikipedia and the sites linked to it.
Their strategy has been to search using people's perception rather
than automated search. It is interesting to note that they have
provided a link for digg (digg has become the most important site for
news and information dissemination).

Jot: an upgrade is necessary

There have been talks of jot having an upgrade.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/11/will-jotspot-relaunch-next-week/

I have an account of jot but don't see an upgrade yet. In its present
form, jot is not something which I tend to use. There are better
wiki's available. Only thing which keeps me glued to it is that google
has acquired it. Maybe some day, it will be integrated with other
google products and will become better.

Hack to get the referrer site on Google analytics

Google analytics is a good product for tracking traffic on your site.
It shows some good data/graphs which none other service gives.
However, it does not show the referrer sites, which limit its usage a
lot. I prefer to know which sites are linking to my sites/blogs and
make updates accordingly. Therefore, I have shifted to mybloglog and
sitemeter.
Here is a hack for finding the site referrer:

http://www.reubenyau.com/google-analytics-hack-obtaining-full-referring-url/

Yahoo: some cool acquisitions

Although Yahoo services have not been competent and have not been able
to match up with times, they have been good with their acquisitions.
Now, I use their acquired products more than their front line products
- especially the ones acquired recently.
A good article is here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_acquisition_pattern.php

However, they will have to think of ways to integrate these products
into their other services to make it more streamline or their problems
will only increase.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116379821933826657-0mbjXoHnQwDMFH_PVeb_jqe3Chk_20061125.html?mod=blogs

On the events in Lucknow University

There are fresh news reports of Dr. R. P. Singh taking action against
goons and gangsters operating from Lucknow University.
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/lucknow-univ-sacks-goons-with-phds/top/31117-3.html?xml

Dr. R. P. Singh's effort to clean the campus of gangsters who intend
to make a political career from University Campus (taking head on the
politicians), has attracted national and international attention and
won him Indian of the year 2006 (by Times of India).

While politicians keep criticizing him for not letting Lucknow
University be used as their den, media has been reluctant in
highlighting his past accomplishments. I got a very rare opportunity
of having a very close interaction with him during Indo-German Winter
Academy 2004. During his tenure at IIT Kharagpur, he had a fruitful
research career and was among the foremost researchers in his domains.
He had more than 200 publications and was author/co-author of a number
of books. He research interests spanned a number of domains very
relevant to India. During the academy, he talked about his works on
preservatives for Indian foods like Mangoes and agro-friendly
materials.

After retirement, he could have chosen to join any institution at some
cosy position. He choose to join Lucknow University, probably because
he wanted to change the system there. While it is really heartening to
see him taking some bold decisions, it is also unfortunate to see how
the system bullies such bravehearts of society.

Reference:
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/up-mlas-unite-against-lucknow-univ-vc/28193-4.html
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Lucknow/Worldwide_support_for_LU_VC/articleshow/1086641.cms

IITkgp web-page has a new look

I just bumped into the web-page of IIT KGP.
Unlike our days, it looks like people are devoting some time on it.
It has got a new clean look.

Link: www.iitkgp.ac.in

Attach keywords to web-sites

Firefox allows you to configure your browser to attach keywords for
quickly opening the web-sites by just typing in keywords.

Some details are here:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-fifteen-firefox-quick-searches-129658.php
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/bookmarks/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-art-of-keyword-bookmarking-196779.php

Openbook firefox extension allows you to easily manage these bookmarks.

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milage calculator using Google Calendar and Google maps

http://www.mileagecalc.com/

Here is another mash up of Google Calendar and Google maps. Just enter
the xml of Google calendar and start address and it creates the
milage.

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Google Co-op search engine for del.icio.us bookmarks!

http://zooie.wordpress.com/2007/01/03/google-co-op-just-got-delicious/

Here is a blog describing a method to create a google custom search
engine for del.icio.us bookmarks. Vik has integrated two very good
services in a wonderful way although I am yet to use it. This looks
interesting since you can do this without knowing anything about XML !

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Google tool-bar

After a lot of hassle, I was finally able to install the new Google
toolbar for firefox on my Linux machine. Installing it was really
difficult. The suggestion given by google on its site was just not
working. Probably, this tool-bar is still beta and they are working on
it.
It was really pleasing to see the many features that have been
provided by this new version. Now, I can get rid of a number of
plug-ins/extensions and have just one -- google toolbar.
It has small buttons for calendar, gmail, video etc. Previously, I had
to use different extensions for doing all this. Then bookmarking can
become seemless with this. There is a send to button for sending a
page to gmail, blogger or even SMS. Moreover, it allows opening docs
and spreadsheets present online in Google docs. With so many features,
it sure is a winner. I can choose to forget all the heavy extensions
and all the trouble taken for downloading this toolbar :)

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dodgeball: mobile social networking

http://www.dodgeball.com

Dodgeball is one of the services which google is sponsoring while not
showing on its web-sites. The company is based on mobile social
networking, and has a very interesting idea. I am sure something like
this will be very popular among young people. At this time, they are
offering services in a few US cities. The concept of finding friends
in a given range can be very useful for tracing friends. It can also
cross check people telling lie about their locations (:P)

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http://shuzak.com A social network for techies

Social networking sites have been rising like anything and come across
one almost everyday. It is interesting to note the attention they are
getting. People don't love to create different log-ins and they will
soon get fed up. I have stopped signing into such sites and want to
remain limited to Orkut and myspace. However, I found an interesting
one here: http://shuzak.com
Its good especially since its creator promotes it by saying it is for
geeks. I am one :P
It seems to be akin to be similar to the forums which have been famous
among niche audience. In our college days, one such forum, mutter was
very famous and was being maintained by a friend of mine. Probably,
the rise of social networks like facebook has been because of its
institution centric approach.

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http://anurag.vox.com Secondary site for blogging and for OpenID

For last couple of days, I have been using vox along with blogger as
my blogging site. http://anurag.vox.com
This is just to compare the best services present in the internet
space for blogging and compare them against blogger. I find vox quite
flexible in allowing me which blogs to keep public and which ones to
keep private. They allow easy posting using a number of different
unique e-mail IDs. Alongwith this, vox ID is an OpenID. I hope OpenID
would become famous with time making services like vox more famous.

Note: OpenID allows users to maintain a single ID for logging into
many web-sites. Although, currently few sites support it, but this
number is expected to increase with time or at least they should help
in the development of something similar to this concept.

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google's security flaws

Gmail's security flaw has bugged me quite a lot. I find gmail opening
even if I close a browser without logging out. Moreover, I use google
browser sync. Using this, you can synchronize the many browsers across
many computers you keep using. I found that if I log into my office
machine, some one accessing my home machine can also log-in into my
google accounts although I log out of it at home.
Now, people have been able to find a easy way of hacking your contact
information. Google tried to fix it immediately, but the problem still
exists after having been reported more than 24 hours ago. They tried
to do some quick fix, but people are still reporting flaws:
http://harshdeep.wordpress.com/

I am sure by now, many spam sites would have used this flaw to get
some mails. Although people may perceive contact list as less
vulnerable, I find it a huge security risk. I use a number of unique
e-mail IDs for blogging, sending data to some sites which are as
critical as passwords.

Just going on the below mentioned site using firefox after logging
into gmail will show you your contact list:
http://docs.google.com/data/contacts?out=xml&show=ALL&psort=Affinity&callback=google&max=99999

It's good that this flaw has been exposed. I can now hope that the
security issues will be dealt with strongly by the google team,
although it may come up as a pain since at present, by logging into
one of google's product, you can automatically get into other sites.
But security must be given adequate importance.

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Blogging to slow down

I have been blogging a lot for last few months. To keep a check, I
have decided to remove internet from my home. Hopefully, this will
bring down the rate of my blogging while I will be able to put time in
some more important things.

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