If you are flying with an infant, this is a must read!

India map data

In case you haven't noticed yet, Google maps now has road data for a lot of Indian cities/towns. Most of the cities have information on important landmarks as well. For example, here are the map links for Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Trivandrum etc. Most of the national highways are covered as well. Let me know in case you find any issues with the maps.

Moved this blog to blogger2. It was quite a straight forward move except that i lost all the customizations i had done to the template (like statcounter html snippet etc). The page layout designer looks good. Try it out if you haven't already!

A 2 GB USB Flash drive goes for $27.62 at Buy.com. Now if you use Google checkout for the purchase, you can get it at $7.62. Amazing deal, i should say!

And now, i have added a sidebar item with my link blog items. :)

India 2.0: The new garage culture. Risk takers say now is the right time to get in on the ground floor of the technology boom in India.

The Project Postmortem: An Essential Tool for the Savvy Developer.

Since joining Google, i haven't been able to spend time updating my blog as often i would like to. It has a lot to do with my laziness and a little to do with the lots of nice stuff that Iam doing here at Google. But i have been following quite a number of blogs regularly. So i guessed it would be nice to use the "shared posts" feature of Google reader to let you all know what iam reading :) You can now access my shared blog items (Thanks, Google reader!)

Now, Google it on Airtel phones

Dying declarations must be in the mother tongue - Calcutta High Court. WTF?

Gautham Ghosh mentions that TCS is going for a "disruptive innovation" by hiring science graduates and training them to become software engineers. But isn't this the same thing Wipro has been doing with its WASE program for quite a few years now?

like.com - Visual search. Based on Riya's technology. Looks like a change in direction for Riya.

IEEE Software will have a Special Issue on Test-Driven Development in May/June 2007. Paper submission deadline is Dec 1, 2006

Back!

Back after a long vacation. Feeling refreshed. Hope to get back to blogging regularly.

Two interesting sights today.
- MapMyIndia. Has detailed interactive maps of India and also provides driving directions.
- Guruji Search - India Search. Their "local" search database looks good.

Am i the only one to feel that Scoble's blog has gotten very bland and boring since he left Microsoft? I have around 20 of his unread posts in the list view on Google Reader, but none of the titles are interesting enough for me to click it! (Note: List View is a Google Reader mode in which it shows titles and snippets of posts just like Gmail)

Seriously cool workspaces. 10 cool and innovative workspaces

Netflix has announced a prize money of $1 Million for anyone who improves their movie recommendations engine. One catch though!

The Contest entry period commences on October 2, 2006 (00:00:00 UTC) and continues until the Grand Prize is awarded (the "Contest Term"). No additional registrations or Contest submissions of qualifying set predictions will be accepted after the close of the Contest Term. Netflix reserves the right to cancel the Contest after October 2, 2011 in its sole discretion.

So you might have to wait till 2011 to find the winner! :)

Why is it that most roads develop potholes whenever it even rains lightly? Is it a property inherent to tar roads or is it the specialty of the contractors who handle construction of these roads?

Interesting statistics on Air disasters. They have listed a safety ranking among airlines and flight types. Slightly old info (They list till Dec 2004), but still pretty interesting.

Vettaiyadu Vilaiyadu

Looking at all the hype surrounding the movie, I decided to watch it. Very disappointing film. Seriously folks, why is everybody so excited about this film? It reminds one of Kaakha Kaakha from start to finish. And the suspense is gone half-way into the movie. After that it was just waiting for the movie to end. It almost looks like a badly made Kaakha Kaakha - Part 2. Avoidable film.

Solution to the 8-Queens Problem

I bet you have never ever thought of this! :)

A picture is worth a thousand words. A nice little blog.

Watch computers get shredded..

Google: Doing Good in India

Infosys blogs. There is even a post by Nandan Nilekani.

Watched KANK. Haven't hated any movie so much. :(

On a related note, here is a programmer's review of KANK. :)

If you are trying to conference with multiple people using Google Talk, you can use this tip. Note that this tip is for "talking", not chatting! ;)

Steorn - We have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy. This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all.

Is this a scam?

Bug #1 in Ubuntu. :)

Goggles Flight Sim - A nice game using Google Maps.

AT&T Labs has a nice online text to speech tool. It can talk in English, German, French and Spanish!

CIA is a nice tool to get evaluate the contributions made by various folks to the open source world.

Be careful with the sites you visit, even if it happens to be your utility provider's website!

One file that can be compiled fine under C, C++ and interpreted file under Perl/Python, executed as a shell or tcl script, or be run as Haskell. :)

Slashdot gets a makeover!

A copy of Lions' "Commentary on Unix" is up for auction at EBay. Highlight is that it's autographed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Peter Salus and Linus Torvalds. So if you have some spare change (of around 1500$) lying around, do go ahead and bid! :)

Websites as graphs

Getting Married!

The title of this post should hopefully answer questions on why this blog has been dormant for some time now. Yup, Iam getting married on the 8th of June, 2006 at Tirupati. All of you are invited to attend the marriage ceremony. More details.

Read my lips!

Hilarious!

Back in Hyderabad.

Ascii Maps! Fun!!

MI-3

All of us in our team here are going to watch Mission Impossible 3 tomorrow. Should be lots of fun!! Should I also add that the tickets are sponsored by the company? :)

The future certainly looks promising..

A debate session at a school in Lahore, Pakistan.

Please Please vote!

To the folks from TN who read this blog : Please vote! Reading blogs and commenting on the bad state of affairs will not help much unless you go ahead and cast your vote.

It's raining freebies in India polls - A BBC Report. I was ROTFL on reading the following quote by DMK's economic advisor P Naganathan defending the free TV scheme.

TV is not for entertainment. It is for watching educational programmes

Do people really make quotes like these with a straight face?

Truth Happens

Firefox and retarded browsers!

Interesting Trivia

Did you know that Arizona does not observe Daylight savings time, but stays in Standard time all year long?

Solar-powered implant could restore vision. If this indeed works, wouldn't that be awesome?

Microsoft makes Visual Studio Express 2005 free forever! Am i the only one to get the feeling that Microsoft may even make a basic version of Vista free as well?

TN Elections 06

In case you are one of those like me, trying to get every possible info coming out of TN regarding the elections, then the following links should quench your thirst for information :)
Idly Vadai
Sambhar Mafia
Chennai Today
Arasiyal Talk
Hot Machi Hot
All about politics

Do let me know in case there are some other related blogs out there.

Iam now a proud owner of a 30GB white video ipod. :)

AIADMK has an up-to-date website dedicated for the 2006 Assembly Elections. [Doesn't look like an official one though!]

Golden Gate Bridge

That's pretty quick!

Google Calender went live only a day back, and there is already a greasemonkey script which can show the calender details on your gmail page!

Ever heard of beltway bandits?

Davinci Code

http://www.google.com/davincicode

Canon SD450

Last week picked up a Canon SD450. Pretty sleek camera and some nice features as well. Iam loving it. ;)

Switching from Bloglines to Google Reader!

Bloglines has been very sporadic most of today. And its now totally down now. I think the site has been going down quite a bit too often these days. So Iam finally switching to Google Reader. I have always liked the Bloglines UI much better than the Google Reader's "Lens", but may be I'll get used to it after a while.

Anand Sridharan writes about his views on the government planning to raise the caste-based reservation quota for higher education. This is one of the issues that i have a strong opinion about, and i agree 100% with Anand on this.

Stanford on iTunes. Faculty lectures, interviews and more.. And its free!

The Top 100 April Fools Day Hoaxes of All Time

What will India's innovation and booming economy mean for Americans? An ABC News Video

Are Software Patents Evil?

I attended a nice talk given by Paul Graham at Google last week on whether software patents are evil. The transcript is available here. I'll update this post when the talk gets uploaded in Google Video.

All about politics has a decent summary of Jaya's second term.

Compared to her first term (1991-96), Jayalalithaa Jayaram's second term was more reasonable. This term had its own share of controversies, personal vendettas, stupidities, blame games, mismanagement, prostrations and what not. But it also had its own share of constructive elements as well. If Jayalalithaa manages to negotiate the incumbency factor & manages to scrape through, this writer feels that it would be the case of people feeling "give the devil its due".

Hard Disk failing?

If your hard disk is making strange noises and you are worried that the hard disk may be failing, just check out this set of hard disk noises to make sure what's actually wrong with yours :) (via)

Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, is joining Google.

Google Finance is live today. It has a few pretty nice features. Give it a try.

I like Godwin's Law. It seems to holds true most of the time ;)

Law : As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Barkha Dutt has written a nice column at ndtv.com titled "Will middle India speak up?"

Fifty-nine years after India was born, in a country where there are more Muslims than there are in Pakistan, we are still asking Muslims to wear their nationalism like an identity card; we are still asking for proof of loyalty. This is not their failure. It is ours.

I couldn't agree more.

And now, GoogleIdol! :)

I like the idea of the infinite scrollbar...

Visiting the Googleplex!

I will be moving to MountainView for about 2-3 months. I will be leaving by tomorrow evening. Do ping me in case you would like to meetup when iam at MountainView.

Google India Code Jam 2006 has been announced. Registration starts today. Being a Google Employee iam not eligible to participate :(

listid operator

Just noticed today that gmail supports an operator called listid which can be used to filter mails belonging to any specific mailing list. Just key in "listid:<listname>" to filter all mails sent to or recieved from that mailing list. (Of course, replace <listname> with your mailing list name)

Google Pages

Just made a page for myself at GooglePages.

Time has a photo essay on life in the Googleplex

Multi touch screens. Amazing Technology.

IE Tab!

One of the coolest extensions for firefox that i have noticed recently is IE Tab. It allows you to use the IE rendering engine to render any firefox tab. So you can actually view how a webpage looks like in both IE and firefox using different tabs of the same firefox window.

That's a "open dialog" that i got on RedHat Linux when i tried to open a tar.gz file. Note the first line in the dialog! :)

Hyd Notes - 1

• Hyd seems to be filled with police all the time. They seem to be pretty strict as well. As helmets in two wheelers and seat belts in four wheelers are compulsory here, i guess the police squads will be making quite a good amount of revenue.
• Roads are very wide compared to the ones from Bangalore. Traffic also is a bit light compared to Bangalore. So its not that tough to stay >10Kms from your office.
• Traffic sense of people here is really pathetic. And most drivers are pretty rash. And almost every vehicle here has atleast a few dents.
• Its pretty hot out here, even though it's not yet summer.

Guido sums up his role at Google in his blogpost.

And did I mention that I get to spend 50% of my time on Python? No strings attached. Of course I get to spend the other 50% on Python too, but that's in a corporate setting. Fortunately it's easy to separate the two. If it uses two-space indents, it's corporate code; if it uses four-space indents, it's open source. (If it uses tabs, I didn't write it! :-)

Overheard in Newyork.

TI -> Google

After six years at TI, I have decided to move on. Tomorrow will be my last day here at TI. It has been an excellent six years here, having had the opportunity to work with some great, nice and friendly people. It will be very hard to be away from all of them. Thanks to all the folks, especially the arattai gang, for the great time I had here.
Iam joining Google on Monday, the 16th of Jan. Regular readers of this weblog will know that I have been an ardent fan of Google and its produts for quite a few years now. So it would be interesting to be actually working on some of those products. As part of the move to Google, i will also be moving from Bangalore to Hyderabad. As it will take me a while for me to get settled with my new job in a new city, blogging here will be light atleast till the month end. My next post will be as a Googler(or Noogler, as the newly hired googlers are called).

Wish me all the best!

Microsoft Research India to work on cryptography

Guy Kawasaki on The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

CNET has the streaming video of Larry Page's CES keynote.(Duration: 9min 8sec)

Tatkal Booking!

IRCTC has introduced online booking of Tatkal train tickets. But the extra premium charged for these online tatkal tickets is pretty high, especially for short distance trains. But isn't this still better than waking up early for those long tatkal counter queues?

Teekada's take on the events of 2005 is hilarious

Lenovo to embed cellular connections in laptops. Looks like a very interesting idea.

BBC - 100 interesting things we didn't know this time last year.