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.

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.