Vacation Time!

Will be on vacation till next Friday(4th Nov). So expect only occasional posts. Iam planning down to drive down to Madurai tomorrow, but quite unsure how bad the roads are after the heavy rains. Expecting to cover the 460km in about 7.5 hrs. Should be an interesting trip.
And just before i forget, here goes Happy Advance Diwali wishes to all my readers!

I just don't get this ad for Microsoft LiveMeeting.

Indian Express carries the transcript of Narayana Murthy's interview on BBC's HardTalk.

Let us remember 32 per cent of India lives in urban areas. Bangalore contributes to 60 per cent of the taxes. I think it is only proper that we use some of that to make sure that Bangalore becomes better.

There are about 15,000 of us in Infosys who have made decent sums of money and there are another 25,000 who have not made that kind of money. So as somebody who believes in fairness I think we need to work hard so that they too can make some money — that is what motivates me

Looks like Alan Cox will be in Bangalore for speaking at foss.in 2005. Cool!

Hillary Clinton calls for an automotive summit to address the issues faced by the US Auto industry. Good that there is atleast someone who is noting that the US auto industry is in a mess.

"Less" as a competitive advantage.

Google Reader now has an official blog. Surprisingly comments are missing. Only email feedback!

A nice post by Cringely.

My point here is that we're entering another period of Internet exuberance. Yes, a lot has changed since 1999, but it's amazing how many of the ideas being pushed are the SAME ideas, just empowered now by dark fiber, cheap broadband, and six years of Moore's Law. And this time I think it will actually work and the Internet will change even more than it has the ways we live and work. But it isn't going to come easy and it isn't going to come cheap.

Video Ipod dissected!

As i guessed, the rumour of Apple using the Sharp LH7A400 SOC for their video iPod isn't true. Apple is using the Broadcom VideoCore BCM2722 for Video decoding and audio encoding and the Portal player 5021C-TDF for the audio decoding. ArsTechnica has done a very good job of dissecting the ipod with detailed pictures. Another site for more info on BOM for the video ipod(pdf)

Now you can book train tickets through SMS

Kashmir quake - do Indians care? - I have been wondering about this myself.

Due to increased comment spam, Iam enabling word verification for comments. Lets see if it helps reduce spam!

Coffee may actually be good for your health.

Back!

Back in Bangalore after taking a week's vacation. A week with no access to email, blogs and other official stuff. Feels great to be back after a refresh!

Looks like a lot of stuff has happened in the Indian blogosphere over the last week. The IIPM issue seems to be the most discussed topic of the past week. Even though a little bit late, here goes Kudos to all the bloggers who stood up in support of Gaurav and Rashmi. Such high-handedness on the part of institutions such as IIPM should be dealt with in the harshest manner possible.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Google reader!

OK, Google comes up with a Feed reader. Initial impression: Unintuitive to use and is buggy! For now, i guess Bloglines is much better, even though it doesn't have all that Ajax-y goodness of Google Reader. May be we can revisit Google Reader once the initial issues are ironed out.

Apple iPods are being used as vocabulary tools in kindergartens. iPods have surely become a social phenomenon.

Wonder what this could be?

CNN - Where might Google go next?

BigTable

Jeff Dean of Google is giving a talk on BigTable at the University of Washington CS Department. The talk is also available live on the internet! :)

BigTable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of structured data. The system is designed to manage several petabytes of data distributed across thousands of machines, with very high update and read request rates coming from thousands of simultaneous clients. In this talk, Jeff will discuss the basic design of BigTable and its implementation, provide some performance measurements, and outline some current applications of the system. He'll also touch on Google's future goals and directions for the system.

Kam VedBrat on Why Wndows Vista isn't skinnable out of the box.

Hindu RSS Feeds!

Never knew that Hindu had a set of RSS feeds for their various news sections. Wonder why NDTV doesn't have them yet!

Native PDF support in Office 12. Thats cool!