Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2005.

It's the 'pure entrepreneur' who often leads the way

If some of you have been wondering the infrequent(or lack of) posts for the last week or so, here's the reason: I underwent the LASIK procedure for my eyes to correct my myopia. I had this procedure done at Shankara Netralaya, Chennai. It was just a half-an-hour procedure, and now i no longer need to wear my beloved glasses, which i have been wearing for a little over 18 years now. I still see a slight halo around bright objects, which is supposed to persist for a week or so after the procedure. Other than that iam able to read books and browse the web as ever before. Will be resting for a week more before i head back again to work.

IRCTC has allowed train reservations online starting 4am to 11:30 pm on all days including Sundays. Initially the timings were only during actual booking counter hours. Thats a good start. Iam waiting for the day, when i can just go online, book my tickets, and print out my e-ticket as well.
Update: The new timings are valid from Jan 1, 2005 onwards. I missed mentioning that! Thanks Sudhir, for pointing out the mistake,

What you think is logical, just need not be. Iwas coding this little snippet in C++, in which i was reopening a ifstream. Now however hard i tried, any operations on the reopened stream just wouldn't work. After a good amount of googling, figured out that this is an FAQ!! Now who would have thought that a close after an open wouldn't clear all internal flags, and that we would have to call a clear() on the stream as well?

What's next for Google. A must read for anyone interested in Google.

Microsoft has published this FAQ, in which Bill Gates talks about the secrets for his success.

Snapped the Thiruvalluvar statue at Kanyakumari when i had been there a few months back.

‘‘... there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer makes enemies of all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order...’’
— Nicollo Machiavelli in 'The Prince'

The Science of Second-Guessing. A very interesting interview with Stephen Hawking.

The top 10 software innovations of 2004. I dont agree exactly to the ordering, but its a good list.

Scoble gives an explanation on why WinFS is getting delayed and delayed.
Update: Adam Barr counters Scoble's argument for the delaying schedule. Now this is getting interesting!

The Shlemiel way of software - Salon has done an interview with Joel Spolsky

Unable to reform their wayward son, these parents killed him. Very sad indeed!

Finding the Best Programmer's Font

I seem to be getting lots of spam phone calls at office these days. Mostly from Citibank, StanChartered, and other banks trying to sell you credit cards promising you all sorts of goodies from alarm clocks to life-time free credit card schemes. Initially it used to be just the private banks, but now i constantly get calls from executives of nationalized banks as well. If its not credit cards, then its about home loans. After getting disturbed quite often i have decided to not pick up the phone unless i can recognize the phone number on my phone's display. I have tried this for a week now, but iam still concerned that i might miss some genuine calls. US has a do-not-call registry. I dont think India has such a scheme. Even if they have, iam not sure how many potential spammers will respect such a do-not-call request. And we cannot even install spam filters for phones! Is there no way around this spamming?

Nandan Nilekeni's Guide to sounder sleep.

Yin and Yang - A nice article on desktop security.

Google suggest is damn cool! You just start typing what you want to search. It offers to complete your query. This sure saves a few extra keystrokes, and also avoids typos. Google IS God!
Update: Zef Hemel has a interesting discussion on why web appliation that we write normally suck, and that Google is able to come up with very rich client applications like Gmail and Google Suggest. He also proposes that an opensource community could develop all needed widgets necessary for developing rich web apps. Sounds a very interesting idea.

Laptop Usage Can Lead to Low Sperm Count and Infertility. Now, thats scary!

ZefHemel has collected some good Python Links

What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean - Estimating How Many Books Sold by Amazon

128MB Secure Digital (SD) Card for $1.95!!

My Toshiba 2410 laptop modem(or modem settings) seems to have a problem. I have dual boot on this machine, and the modem works like a charm on Linux. But on WinXP Pro, it just seems to get a busy signal al the time. The modem on this laptop is a software modem(I guess from Agere). As the modem works fine with Linux, i assume that nothings wrong with the modem as such. Have i messed up some setting? Any of you Windows/Modem Gurus out there can help me out on this. Just for Info, i use the Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official distribution.
Update: Finally was able to fix this problem. But had to take my laptop to my Toshiba dealer. He figured out that the audio driver was conflicting with the modem driver. Iam thinking why Windows couldn't figure this out by itself and alert me on how to solve this problem!

Now you can buy a 400GB Seagate hard-disk for your PC. I actually find it difficult to even fill up my 20GB hard disk! (link via Ashesh)

Sun proposes a new open source license, under which Solaris will be opened up. Linus feels it will be tough for Sun to build a open source community based on such a license, as open source developers will never like to play second fiddle to Sun.

Singapore airlines to offer high speed internet on board its long haul flights. Pricing is not cheap though!

Check out this ad for Google's Bangalore office. Looks like it was on Times of India, but i seem to have missed it!

An cybercrime awareness post by Kiruba. If you are a blogger, please read it. And Kiruba has also removed the controversialsensational "video" post from his blog!

Secrets of Firefox 1.0. A nice list of tips for speeding up Firefox and for making it look better.