Gmail woes..

Srijith has a bad experience with Gmail and decides to switch to Yahoo! As he puts it

What I look for in an email account is reliability more than coolness.

Another Firefox vs IE story

This time in IE's favour. ComputerWeekly has an article which says Firefox had more flaws in 2005 so far than IE. As Firefox becomes more widespread, I expect such news stories to rise.

Video iPod rumours!

Looks like Apple will be going with the Sharp LH7A400 SOC initially for its Video iPod, with a future switch to a Intel XScale processor. My only doubt about this rumour is because Video iPod should be able to transfer huge amounts of content quickly, but the SOC's spec shows only a USB 2.0 Full speed Device, and no Firewire!

Bomb Hoax!

We had a anonymous bomb threat call at Bagmane Tech Park today. No, we didn't evacuate, but we had a huge posse of policemen with sniffer dogs searching the length and breadth of the tech park. Fortunately they didn't find anything. Wonder what satisfaction people get by making such anonymous hoax calls!

2005 IDEA design award winners. Browsing through all 158 products is sure to take lot of your time, but there are quite a few cute products!

A programmer's view of a baby. Joe Beda writes about his new baby, Anne.

Currently Reading...

The Code book by Simon Singh

Seminar on Recent Advances in Coding Theory

Seminar by Krishna R. Narayanan
Associate Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Texas A&M University, College Station

Title: Recent Advances in Coding Theory
Date: 25-7-2005 (Monday)
Time: 4.00 to 5.00 PM; Tea after the talk
VENUE: Auditorium, Texas Instruments India
Bagmane Tech Park, CV Raman Nagar, Bangalore

Prof. Krishna Narayanan is a well known expert in the area of coding theory. His research interests are in
-Modulation and coding (Turbo codes, Low density parity check codes) for wireless communications
-Iterative Processing - Iterative equalization, demodulation etc
-Equalization and coding for Magnetic recording and wireless communications
-Joint source-channel coding
-Hardware implementation of LDPC decoders

Prof. Narayanan will provide an overview of the recent advances in coding theory in this talk. The talk is open to all.

Sleeping in Airports!

The Budget Traveller's Guide to Sleeping in Airports. Singapore is the 2005 Golden Pillow Winner and Bombay is the 2005 Poopy Award Winner! Having been to both airports, i tend to agree! :)

Google China!

Google goes to China. Google opens up a R&D center in China which will be headed by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, who joins Google from Microsoft. [Microsoft has sued Google on this hire]

Links..

• A list of tech podcasts


• Flickr Architecture


• Thinking machine. Interesting looking chess game!


• Cryptographic Curiosities in Python.

Watch Tower!

Karnataka.com has a watch tower where they track stuff making news in Karnataka. The Bangalore International Airport watch and Bangalore Metro rail watch are very informative. If you need a one-stop information on what has caused these projects to slip so badly, then go read! Heights of red-tapism.

Visitor Browser stats!

Just had a look at my visitor stats and the browser stats showed this.
50.00% MSIE
40.00% Firefox
4.00% Safari
2.00% Konqueror
2.00% Mozilla
1.00% Opera
1.00% Galeon

I remember seeing almost 90% for IE almost a year back!

Weekend Links!

• BusinessWeek on blog search. Finding a blog in a Haystack.


• Google's MasterPlan. O'Reilly Radar has done a good job of compiling the list by browsing through google job postings! The comments are funny!


• In case you didn't know yet, Charles Simonyi's company Intentional Software has a nice blog!


• PeeGoals! Where the heck do people get these product ideas?(via)

HP to restructure?

HP may be announcing huge layoffs come Monday. Analysts are expecting more than 15000 people to be laid off! Oops. More here and here

Well said!

Varnam : Blair is following the Nut-War Terrorism Fighting Design Pattern in which even though we know there is a problem, we just wait till actual humans die

Today's Links [13 July 2005]

• Luxist.com - A weblog obsessively covering luxury products.


• PressDisplay - Displays Newspapers as in the print format. Has a few Indian newspapers as well.(via)


• The world's smallest mp3 player!

Today's Links [12-July-2005]

• Bjarne Stroustrup on the future of C++ (pdf)


• Wesner Moise has all the recently popular entrepreneurial posts linked to in one single post.


• All things automotive at Amazon Automotive Beta


• The Contiki Operating System


• Estimating Realistic Project Deadlines. I had learnt that Project Duration Formula in one of the PMP courses i took last year. Haven't yet tried out whether it works for my projects, though!


• What is/is not considered to be good OO programming

Corporate blogging in India

Even though blogging is popular in India, there is a noted scarcity of corporate weblogs. One would expect at least the IT sector to pitch in with some blogs that offer an industry perspective. Wouldn't it be interesting to have Nandan Nilekani or Azim Premji blogging? Or atleast some of the junior executives out there? It's not just in the Indian-owned companies that we see this huge absence, but also in the MNCs that have set shop here in India. Take Microsoft for example, where Scoble has been trying to get every possible product/test group to start blogging. Yet we do not see any groups blogging from the Microsoft India development center. Even Channel9 India is almost non-existent. There may be some Indian companies that encourage blogging and are supportive of it, but i haven't atleast heard of any. Have you?

BangaloreWALKS - Exploring Bangalore by foot.