Monday, April 30, 2007

No blogging!!

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

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

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!

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

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.

Monday, April 23, 2007

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!

Friday, April 20, 2007

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!

Thursday, April 19, 2007

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.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

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!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

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.

Monday, April 16, 2007

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. 

Saturday, April 14, 2007

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 :)

Thursday, April 12, 2007

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.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

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

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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!

Monday, April 09, 2007

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.

Friday, April 06, 2007

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.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

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.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

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!

Monday, April 02, 2007

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!





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