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.

Check out this headline from Times of India! Funny.

A great story about Love and Marriage

Guardian has this article on Bangalore's worsening infrastructure problems.

Yahoo search blog has a list of job postings for Yahoo! Search.

Given all the noise about a Google browser, what will Google name it if they come up with a new browser? They can't name it gBrowser, as somebody has already taken that name.
Any ideas?

Software that lasts 200 years - Must read!

I will be attending the Convergence 2004 at Detroit from Oct 18- Oct 20. Iam mainly interested in
Session 1 : Mobile Digital Entertainment
Session 6: Impact of consumer electronics in automotive electronics
Session 7: Systems Architecture : Software.
Should be an interesting conference with most automotive companies participating. We too are exhibiting there.

And finally Sony decides to add native support for mp3. I can't figure why it took them so long to decide on this one!

Never knew there were so many different ways to make chai!

A case history on Google by Economist. Very well written one. (via Lazy Geek)

Time Asia has an article on India's Olympic Debacle. Interesting read!

A very interesting site with avery detailed comparison of the user interface in OS X and XP. Wonder if there is a similar unbiased comparision between GNOME/KDE and XP somewhere on the web.

Political Compass. And here is where i stand!

I have moved to Microsoft Outlook from Thunderbird. I was happy with Thunderbird for so long, but Lookout has changed my mind to move back. But one thing i dislike about MS Outlook is that i have to open Outlook express to read newsgroups. Is there no way they could have added that functionality to MS Outlook?

Is anyone able to view unicode websites properly with firefox? I have no issues with IE, but firefox just doesn't seem to like any of the settings i have. Single charecters come out fine, while the majority of the two letter combinations are inverted. Has anyone seen and set this right?

iTunes accused of overcharging their UK customers. A track costs 79p in the UK, whereas it costs around 67p in France and Germany. On similar lines, i wonder how much Apple will price its tracks if it opens a India-specific iTunes site.

Just noticed that Google News has added pages for China , Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

Project Rebirth. This website captures the day-to-day activity at the site of the Freedom tower. It has links to the architects, the freedom tower plan, and a live cam for the site too. The basic aim of the project is to capture the rebirth of Ground zero using 6 time-lapse cameras.

Damn frances! My orlando flight is cancelled! :-(

A nice article on Why you Shouldn't Write your Own Kernel Anymore?. As an embedded systems developer, i tend to agree to most of the author's thoughts.

The Perils of Being the Best and the Brightest

HBS Working Knowledge on The Pull Leadership Manifesto

Outsourcing of online game playing. Wired reports that wealthier players outsource tedious parts of the game they are playing for hundreds of dollars!

Yahoo! Search blog. A blog from the search engine team at Yahoo!

The Playboy Google Interview at the Search Engine News Journal

By the Book Leadership: Six leaders recommend the nonbusiness books that influenced them most.

Business Week carries an interview with Rich Templeton, our CEO.

Now a MP3 player for your AK-47

"Nokia Moments"? Nokia trying to be the kodak of the digital age?

Windows Automotive. Interesting to see MS putting a good deal of effort into this market segment.

RFID tags become hacker target. RFID tags can be reprogrammed by thieves or hackers thereby making a new type of shoplifting possible. And with RFID tags being used for various other uses such as Identity cards, it also opens up new avenues for abuse.

Is it a good idea for Microsoft to its Office suite to Linux? Won't that cause more people to switch to Linux? How can that make business sense for Microsoft? Iam not so convinced by the arguments of the article.

Microsoft has put up Lookout 1.2 on their website for download. Unfortunately i cant try this out as i have moved to thunderbird long back.

An interview with RMS. Stallman talks about GNU, the status of Hurd, and the future of GNU projects.

Army rations rehydrated by urine. Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it. Now thats something which i would never ever want to try!

A whitepaper on "New Directions in RTOS Kernels"

Charles Simonyi's Interview on Intentional programming and how to use it?

Older blog entries on Charles Simonyi and his company Intentional Software are here and here

A hard disk car audio player. Uses Linux, allows for upto 36 GB of internal storage and also has voice recognition for hands free access of all audio functions.

These Elecom iPod slim speakers are the sexiest speakers i have seen till date.

Google: The Missing Manual. Saw this book when browsing through Amazon! The book has got quite a number of good reviews!

Business Ethics magazine has come up with the list of 100 best corporate citizens of 2004. Find the list here. TI has the 40th place in the list.

NYTimes has an interesting article on how MSN search is getting more and more similar to Google in its look and feel.

An Operating System Bibliography. Has a huge list of conference proceedings and books.

Microsoft search - Technology Preview

We got our new RFID badges today!

Sony unveils HDD Walkman. Looks really cool. I certainly like it more than the iPod.

Is Orkut based on stolen code?

21 Rules of Thumb – How Microsoft develops its Software.

Hacker Bibliography

The Unix-Haters Handbook. It even has an Anti-Forward by Dennis Ritchie. The book is available for free download.

Apple - Mac OS X - Tiger Preview. Steve Jobs has promised that this version will have more than what Longhorn promises to do. Searching seems to be the center of every one's universe now, and Apple doesn't want to lag behind. But the website isn't clear on whether Apple plans to incorporate a broader set of features as WinFS, or do they will just be content with faster search for the contents of the Mac.
Another thing that's interesting is Apple's move to get a RSS reader into Safari.

WindRiver : Embedded Turnaround

Microsoft patents a method to transmit data and power over the human body.

After having used aterm on my linux box, i would like to find a way to make the command prompt on Microsoft Windows also transparent. Basically my would like my cygwin command shell to look transparent. Even after googling for a while, i couldn't figure out a way to get this done. Its possible to create transperancy for any Windows application, by using the SetLayeredWindowAttributes API call, but this does not seem to work well for the command prompt. Ideas Anyone?

Google Plans to Reveal Some of its Code. Discussion on slashdot

Beyond speakers: Bose turns to potholes

Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2

iPod your BMW. Apple claims this is the first seamless integration of an audio player to an automobile.

"Things my girlfriend and i have argued about.com". Highly interesting.

I started using Xfce4 as my window manager. Pretty fast and looks cool. Also dumped xterm and moved to the much cooler aterm. I really like the transparent console feature in aterm!

C++ const Correctness - A nice article.

Monterey Linux - Linux for TI Processors.

Linux at Wimbledon

World's hottest name in electronics

Zhenjiang, China — On a rare day when a journalist succeeds in penetrating the factory gates of the world's fastest-growing consumer electronics company, even the simplest questions are blanketed with a near-obsessive secrecy.
more...

Setting up a wireless lan at home.

Sony introduced three Linux-based in-car navigation and infotainment devices in Japan today. The NV-XYZ 33, 55, and 77 feature 3D map navigation technology, media players, hard drives, GPS, and PC connectivity. And they are based on a Linux 2.4-series kernel.

Google Blogoscoped - Another Google blog!

A Contest to Outwit Google

How AirTunes Works. Its very interesting to note the music streaming is done not using MP3, AAC or any other popular streaming format, but using Apple's own lossless compression scheme.

Riemann hypothesis proved?. A mathematician at Purdue University has claimed that he has the proof for the hypothesis which has remained an unsolvable math problem since 1859.

IBM Shrinks Desktop PC.

IBM has announced a desktop system that is 35 percent smaller than its predecessor with a footprint that takes up less space than some of its laptop machines.

Linux users can steal more bandwidth at wi-fi hotspots just by changing a line of code in the kernel. Advantage of open source?

Microsoft has patented a method to dynamically generate a to-do list from "TODO:" comments in source code. Link to the patent at the USPTO. Doesn't look like this is the first time anyone is doing it. Yet they happen to be the first one to file a patent on it!

The Real World of Software Testing - A software testing blog!

How can you tell if a company is a great place to work?

Declaring Email bankruptcy.

Blog as a new medium of advertising. Gawker Media, a small company which operates weblogs, has started doing paid blog entries for Nike. Another innovative business strategy?

Qonos Scientific PDA. This new device, which is planned for 4th quarter 2004, is a hybrid between a PDA and a scientific calculator. Looks cool!

Haskell - a functional programming language. What is functional programming and why it matters?

A Quick Survey of Open Source Licences.

Finding an open source programming job

Mandrakelinux 10.0 ISO images now available for download!

Programming Contest Problems Archive. Lots of programming problems from a wide range of contests.

UC Berkeley has a set of 3 online books titled Computer Science Logo Style. All three seem interesting books.
Volume 1 : Symbolic Computing
Volume 2 : Advanced Techniques
Volume 3 : Beyond Programming

6 Resume Mistakes to Beware Of

Analysis of google's IPO and their future growth strategy. The analysis centers around the fact that Google's current business model is a risky business proposition as far as future growth prospects are concerned.

Andrew Tanenbaum's reply to the "Who wrote Linux?" study by Alexis de Tocqueville Institution that criticises Linus Torvalds for not giving credit to the sources where Linux was started from.