Full Video of Google on the CBS show '60 Minutes'.

India's Odd Couple: Cops and Tech

Six Apart to buy Live Journal. Are we starting to see weblog service consolidation?

Zaptophone has introduced Tsunami Aid Ringtones, which are basically national anthems of the Tsunami affected countries. The proceeds from selling this goes towards the US fund for UNICEF Tsunami relief efforts. National anthems of Thailand, Srilanka, India and Indonesia are available.

Adobe Reader 7.0 is available for download. This version seems to be much faster in startup time when compared to 6.0.

Finally got time to read Camels and Rubber Duckies - Joel's essay on product pricing. Interesting read.

Will Google stay as hot as its lava lamps?

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.

Microsoft Research to open lab in Bangalore

Is our distaste for Bush misplaced? - An Indian viewpoint

Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs

Designing Real-Time Systems with UML

If you use WinXP on your day-2-day work, here is a good list of tweaks that can help you make your machine faster.

Businessworld India has released this year's list of Great places to work in India. We are second in the list. Fedex tops the list.

QNX: The Unexpected Surprise. An article that looks at how good QNX is for the desktop. I have been using QNX as the desktop on one of my office machines for a few months now, and i find it really fun to use.

26,500 Magazines and Newspapers from 200 Countries at allyoucanread.com (via Anil)

Togadia wants the Kanchi seer case shifted out of Tamil Nadu. Mr. Togadia wants the case to be transferred to Gujarat, where he feels there can be a fair trial! He can't get more funnier than this, can he?

You can use this online tool to tune the cleartype font settings for your XP machine. Being a Microsoft website, this tool works only with IE, and not with Firefox!

Things that can happen to your office when you are on vacation!

A huge set of programming contest problems

Here is a cool tip when using MSN search. You can use it to solve algebraic equations, and even higher order polynomials.

Going to Chennai today. Will be there for a day and then to Trivandrum. Its always nice to go home after 5 long months, and that too on a 7 day vacation!

The war between free email services is getting more interesting. Yahoo has rolled out email search, address auto-complete, and a few other enhancements to Yahoo! mail. Gmail already has a very useful search mechanism on archived mails, so this feature addition was expected of Yahoo. Now what will Hotmail do? Anyway great time for end users. Now one question creeps in my mind. Why would anyone want to pay money for email services, when you get all these great features for free?

Howard Stern has listed down the 50 states by their average IQ and how the states voted for the 2004 Presidential election. Out of the top 25 states in average IQ, only 6 states voted for Bush, while the all 25 states at the bottom of the average IQ list voted for Bush. See the trend?

Noticed this while using Firefox 1.0 on Windows and Linux. In the Windows version, browser preferences are under the 'Tools' drop down menu with the name 'Options'. While the Linux version, its called 'Preferences' and is in the 'Edit' Menu. Dont they use the same codebase for Windows and Linux? Or is the GUI code alone totally different? So Firefox on Windows follows where IE places its Options, while Firefox on Linux follows where Netscape/Mozilla used to place the 'Preferences'. Interesting!

Finally was able to try out MSN Beta Search, after a full day after it was announced. It was just spewing out errors yesterday, but now it looks all the initial hiccups have been fixed. Lots of reviews have already flooded the internet. Most seem to a little biased against Microsoft.
Personally i felt it interesting. Most of my searches were spot on, and gave me what i was looking for. The $100 million invested on this looks like well spent. But how much this will be a competition for Google remains to be seen.
Forrester Research has a positive review: MSN Search--just good enough.

Wish you all a happy Diwali. And have a nice and entertaining long weekend too!

Moved to Firefox 1.0 on my linux box as well my windows machine. Both installations rock. One major annoyance i had with each and every firefox upgrade is that my themes just stop working. I had to download the theme again every time i installed a new version. I had guessed that issue would go off with 1.0 , but the problem still persists. This problem is present in both my Linux and Windows machines, so what i doubt whether its my configuration thats the root cause of the problem. May be its just my favourite themes, but still its pretty nasty when i end up everytime having to search and download my favourite theme.

Turn On, Tune In, Pay Up. MIT Technology Review on how XM and Sirius persuaded millions that paying to listen to a cool technology beats listening to a boring one for free.

The Real THR34T KR3W: The Story of Hacker Connor Hansen

The ten secrets of embedded debugging

Speegle. Search results read out for you. Search results seem to be exactly Google's results, even though the site doesn't mention anything about Google on their webpage.

How to interview a programmer

Twenty Reasons Why You Shouldn't Post Your Picture On The Internet. Absolutely hilarious!

LinuxDevices.com has published the proceedings from the Sixth Real-Time Linux Workshop held in Asia for the first time, November 3-5, 2004, at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Pdf versions of all papers available.

Kerry has lost!
The blogosphere in general, is in a highly depressed mood with the Bush win. Some weblogs are drawing solace on the fact Nixon also got reelected a second term, but he was impeached during that term. I genuinely and honestly hope that would happen soon. One thing that strikes me most though, is the fact while the 70-80% of the blog world wanted Kerry to win, while more than 50% of the American public thought otherwise. God bless America.
The main issue with the Bush win is that, Bush might consider this as an acceptance of his foriegn and domestic policies by the American public, which i believe is far from the truth. This is more of the Democratic party's inability to utilise the momentum against Bush to its advantage. Lets just hope Bush returns to more civilised ways, wins back support of the rest of the world, stop thinking about more invasions, gets Osama, cleans up his Iraq act, revs up the economy, gives better health care to Americans, revitalizes the intelligence community, and starts thinking more about the environment. I know thats a tall ask given Bush's reputation during the last 4 years, but whats wrong in hoping? Its hope that has and will save this world!

Techcentral runs this story about people in Malaysia buying pre-loaded linux boxes from the vendor, only to run pirated versions of Windows when they get home. Same is true here in India, where i have seen multiple instances where people bought a preloaded linux box, which costs less by about Rs 3000 (~$60), when compared to a windows box, and then quickly installing WinXP as soon as they got home. As long as piracy rules and linux does not give a similar out-of-the-box experience as Windows, most of the linux desktop adoption numbers will not make much sense.

Samsung has announced a 6 megapixel camera at 300$. Impressive enough. Two years back, i bought my Canon powershot A40 2 megapixel camera at 300$.

Microsoft's new security initiatives seems to be showing a lot of promise. In a html mangling test conducted by Micheal Zalewski, IE that ships with Windows XP Service Pack 2 was the only one to withstand the test, well..., not completely, but that was the best of the lot!. Coverage at Newsforge.

The story of the creation of the new Ford Escape hybrid car.

GM has a home for blogs , and Ed Koerner has a blog on small block engines. (via Scoble)

In case you haven't yet registered for the Linux Bangalore / 2004, you can do so here. You save Rs.200 by registering early for the event. The event is on Dec 1,2 and 3.

Using Design by Contract in C

After the initial enthusiasm of using Google desktop search, iam now figuring out that i do not have need for such a tool anyway. Let me summarise what i search on my PC on a day-to-day basis.
Source Code
I use cygwin for most of my dev work, and also various IDEs for building and loading code for my various target platforms. Most of these IDEs are good enough for searching source code symbols, and on cygwin, i have built up an useful array of small scripts over the years, which help me search source code without wasting a lot of time.
Documents
I have a huge collection of documents that i have managed to download during the course of my last five years of web surfing, which run into GBs of space now. Long before any of these search tools existed, i have made it a habit to properly organise my document collection into folders that make it pretty straight forward for me reach to a required document. Most of the older pdfs happen to be scanned images, which anyway Google search or the Windows built-in search will not be able help. And i have noticed that mostly i end up knowing whats the document title(or atleast part of the title) that iam trying to find in my collection, so Windows built-in search is fairly fast enough (if you enable the indexing service).

Now the other main feature that Google desktop search provides is the ability to search through my web browsing history. Call me a paranoid, but i have almost made it a habit to clean up my web history. my cookies folder, and my web cache every week or so, and so i dont have much use for a search tool there either. And even though the integration to the Google interface seemed like a cool feature initially, i have found myself too lazy to open up a web browser for just searching for a file. I guess iam too comfortable with locate, find and grep that replacing that with the desktop search doesn't increase my productivity even a little bit!

Raymond Chen has this interesting information on where windows applications were minimized to in the pre-taskbar versions of Windows.

Google acquires KeyHole, a satellite mapping firm. Unlike Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps, Keyhole also provides a 3D interface for the map details.

Finally, after 2 months in Houston, iam back to Bangalore. To a nicer and cooler climate, i should say! On the work front, it was two glorious months. Convergence 2004 was a high point of the trip. Will update the blog with convergence snaps as soon as i get back to Bangalore. Till then, see ya.

Simple Is Beautiful. A great article on writing simple and readable code.

Chasing digital music's 'codec killers'. news.com is reporting that a list of CD Audio tracks are creating problems for any encoding process. When you end up encoding these tracks you will either get a blurry sound, or will hear a very unpleasent sound. Iam not sure whether this has been verified with every encoder out there, so thats a good exercise for me.

Real Video of Karan Thapar's interview with J. Jayalalitha

We had a pretty impressive showing at Convergence 2004. Press coverage here, here , here and here

Choose Your Competition. A nice and interesting article. The more i read Eric Sink, the more i become a fan of him!

Stumbled upon this website which allows Kerry supporters in safe states to exchange their votes with Ralph Nader supporters in the battleground states. So it works like this. A Kerry supporter in a 'safe' state will be paired up with a Nader supporter in a battleground state, and each will vote for the other in their respective states. Thus in battleground states, Kerry gets the Nader votes, and in the 'safe' states, Nader gets Kerry votes. So Nader can be happy that his overall vote doesn't get affected and Kerry is with a higher chance of winning the battleground states. Nice idea, but people wont have to go to this extremes if the US president is elected just based on popular vote!

Wooing the Geeks

The problem with Google desktop search that i mentioned in the previous post, is slashdotted. Some more interesting thoughts there.

Installed the Google Desktop search! Excellent tool. It finds strings from test files, word, excel, powerpoint, AOL IMs, and much much more. And the Google integration makes much more easier to access as one of the tabs when we launch the google website.
But iam already seeing a potential problem. As i try searching for some term, it shows up files from all the normally unreachable folders of my machine, ie, web cache and other files which i wouldn't like someone else using my PC to look at! Sure using preferences, you can specify which folders shouldn't be searched, but if you know all the folders that well on your PC, you wouldn't need a search, right? But i cant stop using this wonderful tool, just because of this minor concern, i just have to make sure no one else accesses my PCs in my absence from now on! :-)
Iam not sure when Google will get this on Linux as well.

The Many Hats of Software Development

Google Bangalore to be 'ideas' centre. Sounds interesting!

Microsoft is offering Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 for a 45 day trial download. This is a full feature time-out version.

Coverage of Sergey Brin and Larry Page's visit to India.

Economic Times
International Herald Tribune
The Hindu
Hindustan Times

A font primer for Linux

Another interview with Linus

A very interesting article on the recent acquisition spree of most of the large companies.

Now, Windows users can also use Gmail's 1 GB space as a filesystem to read/write files. The Gmail space will appear as a seperate drive on your PC. Its still in Beta, but well worth a try!

Alan Cox on writing better software

Listening to songs from 7G Rainbow Colony. Really love "Ninaithu Ninaithu" and "Kanaa Kaanum Kaalangal". Nice songs!

Gary Kasparov on the need for courage in chess and business.

Sandisk cruzer mini

Just bought a Sandisk Cruzer mini 256 MB. Had been forced to write CDs everytime i want to copy something between my PCs. This works great and pretty small too.

On the lines of Google labs, Yahoo! has this website for the future projects they are working on.

A good set of free online tech books

Today's print edition of the Wall Street Journal carries 4 full pages of advertisement for TamilNadu. Mostly about why Tamilnadu is a very attractive destination for foriegn investment. As has been the ritual for every advertisement from the Tamilnadu government, it carries a few pictures of J. Jayalalitha and a full page interview with her. The interview is worth a read. Couldn't find any links on this, though.