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.

Happy New Year!

Wish you all a great 2006!

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers. Nice Read.

You call this "stupidity"?

Iam trying to understand what the BJP is trying to gain by arguing against the expulsion of all the parliament members who were involved in the cash-for-question scandal.

Advani, terming the MPs' action as "stupidity", argued that the expulsion was not "commensurate" with the offence. "It's like inflicting capital punishment for unbecoming conduct," he said while leading the walkout.

Mr. Advani, When we elect people like you to the parliament, we don't expect you to get involved in "stupid" acts like taking bribes just for doing your job. As a party president, you should have asked these guys to resign on day one of the expose. By walking out of parliament protesting against the expulsion, you have just made sure that i never vote for your party in the future. And be sure that iam not the only one taking this decision today.

Guido van Rossum is now working at Google!!

Iam still trying to figure out whether to go buy a white iPod Nano or a regular 30GB iPod. Somehow the iPod Nano looks too small and fragile to me.

After Operation Duryodhana its now Operation Chakravyuh. Iam loving this!

How Google woos the best and brightest. - More on Google's hiring methods.

Colgate introduces toothpaste aimed at children in the agegroup 3-8. What's special you ask? According to them "the toothpaste cap plays music for 70 seconds, encouraging kids to brush longer". (Link via Prabu)

Has been a pretty busy two weeks. Have been just managing to keep up with reading blogs. Still the number of posts i have marked "Keep New" in Bloglines has crossed 200. Hope to get back in sync pretty soon.

Linus encourages people to switch to KDE. I liked KDE far better than GNOME anyway (but not for the reasons he is mentioning)!

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Please, just tell people to use KDE.

Do read the Follow-ups to the mail too.

Google: Ten Golden Rules - Eric Schmidt on how Google manages its "knowledge workers"

Sachin eyes Sunny's Record. He has been eyeing it for quite some time now. :)
Update: He makes it this time!

A Random Thought!

Most of the general purpose languages like C, C++, Java start their array index from 0. Isn't it more natural to start from 1? Now the last index of the array is also the size of the array, thus avoiding subtraction of 1 to get to the last index. Also 0 could have been used to represent an invalid index in the array. What could have been the reason to start indexing from 0?

ESPN considering offering programs on Apple iTunes. Wonder how long it will be before we can download Cricket classic videos from iTunes.

One of the interesting data points provided by Google Analytics is the connection speed of users visiting your site. I was surprised to know that only 6% of the visitors to this blog use dialup. Rest of the folks are all from corporate/home broadband.

This is one of the funniest articles i have read in the Onion in the recent past.

Worried about scratches on your CDs and DVDs? You can now buy Scratch-Less Discs

Xooglers

If you aren't yet reading Xooglers, you should sure check it out. Two Ex-Googlers are posting their experiences while they were at Google.

Gmail name change?

Google seems to have changed Gmail to Google Mail. All instances where "Gmail" was found is now Google Mail.

Even the logo has undergone change.

Update: Looks like it is back to Gmail again as far as the main page is concerned. But the Gmail Help mentions Google Mail all over the place, and still holds the new logo! :)

The latest BusinessWeek has two nice articles on Google.

• Googling for Gold
• Filthy Rich, but Froogle

Must Read!

Microsoft Research India has a blog on MSN Spaces. Doesn't look like a frequently updated blog though. But they have some nice photos of their office in Bangalore.

Some time back i had the mentioned the need for multiple tabs in your chat windows, so that you can use a single window to chat with all your buddies. Looks like the new AIM Triton has this now. I don't use AOL, so will have to wait till either Yahoo/MSN/Google Talk can get this implemented.

NDTV.com has now added rss feeds. But surprisingly you have to register at the site to view the RSS feed links!

Back in Bangalore, but still waking up on US time. :(

Looks like Sony is getting into more trouble with its rootkit music CDs. Now its been found that the music player that ships with the CDs uses components of the open source LAME music player without acknowledging its use!

Refrigerator Code - It’s code that you’re so proud of that you want to take it home and hang it on the refrigerator, right alongside of your children’s drawings.

• Google opens London development centre.
• Photo shots of Google's new 311,000 sqft NYC Office.

Do check out the repository of potholes in Bangalore, the BangalorePothole.com

One thing iam noticing here in Houston is that there are a lot more Hyundais on the road than a year back! And my rental car is also a brand new Hyundai Sonata.

Wired has a list of the 10 worst software bugs of all time.

Amazon creates artificial artificial intelligence - a program called Amazon Mechanical Turk. [Wikipedia link for Mechanical Turk]

Travelling!

I will be on travel for the next three weeks to Houston, Texas. A vacation followed by a business travel is always tough, but hope to have some fun anyways!

Back in Bangalore!

Back after a very nice vacation. Most of the time was spent in playing with my sister's son, who is just 6 months old. Its really fun to see a kid grow up!

Vacation Time!

Will be on vacation till next Friday(4th Nov). So expect only occasional posts. Iam planning down to drive down to Madurai tomorrow, but quite unsure how bad the roads are after the heavy rains. Expecting to cover the 460km in about 7.5 hrs. Should be an interesting trip.
And just before i forget, here goes Happy Advance Diwali wishes to all my readers!

I just don't get this ad for Microsoft LiveMeeting.

Indian Express carries the transcript of Narayana Murthy's interview on BBC's HardTalk.

Let us remember 32 per cent of India lives in urban areas. Bangalore contributes to 60 per cent of the taxes. I think it is only proper that we use some of that to make sure that Bangalore becomes better.

There are about 15,000 of us in Infosys who have made decent sums of money and there are another 25,000 who have not made that kind of money. So as somebody who believes in fairness I think we need to work hard so that they too can make some money — that is what motivates me

Looks like Alan Cox will be in Bangalore for speaking at foss.in 2005. Cool!

Hillary Clinton calls for an automotive summit to address the issues faced by the US Auto industry. Good that there is atleast someone who is noting that the US auto industry is in a mess.

"Less" as a competitive advantage.

Google Reader now has an official blog. Surprisingly comments are missing. Only email feedback!

A nice post by Cringely.

My point here is that we're entering another period of Internet exuberance. Yes, a lot has changed since 1999, but it's amazing how many of the ideas being pushed are the SAME ideas, just empowered now by dark fiber, cheap broadband, and six years of Moore's Law. And this time I think it will actually work and the Internet will change even more than it has the ways we live and work. But it isn't going to come easy and it isn't going to come cheap.

Video Ipod dissected!

As i guessed, the rumour of Apple using the Sharp LH7A400 SOC for their video iPod isn't true. Apple is using the Broadcom VideoCore BCM2722 for Video decoding and audio encoding and the Portal player 5021C-TDF for the audio decoding. ArsTechnica has done a very good job of dissecting the ipod with detailed pictures. Another site for more info on BOM for the video ipod(pdf)

Now you can book train tickets through SMS

Kashmir quake - do Indians care? - I have been wondering about this myself.

Due to increased comment spam, Iam enabling word verification for comments. Lets see if it helps reduce spam!

Coffee may actually be good for your health.

Back!

Back in Bangalore after taking a week's vacation. A week with no access to email, blogs and other official stuff. Feels great to be back after a refresh!

Looks like a lot of stuff has happened in the Indian blogosphere over the last week. The IIPM issue seems to be the most discussed topic of the past week. Even though a little bit late, here goes Kudos to all the bloggers who stood up in support of Gaurav and Rashmi. Such high-handedness on the part of institutions such as IIPM should be dealt with in the harshest manner possible.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Google reader!

OK, Google comes up with a Feed reader. Initial impression: Unintuitive to use and is buggy! For now, i guess Bloglines is much better, even though it doesn't have all that Ajax-y goodness of Google Reader. May be we can revisit Google Reader once the initial issues are ironed out.

Apple iPods are being used as vocabulary tools in kindergartens. iPods have surely become a social phenomenon.

Wonder what this could be?

CNN - Where might Google go next?

BigTable

Jeff Dean of Google is giving a talk on BigTable at the University of Washington CS Department. The talk is also available live on the internet! :)

BigTable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of structured data. The system is designed to manage several petabytes of data distributed across thousands of machines, with very high update and read request rates coming from thousands of simultaneous clients. In this talk, Jeff will discuss the basic design of BigTable and its implementation, provide some performance measurements, and outline some current applications of the system. He'll also touch on Google's future goals and directions for the system.

Kam VedBrat on Why Wndows Vista isn't skinnable out of the box.

Hindu RSS Feeds!

Never knew that Hindu had a set of RSS feeds for their various news sections. Wonder why NDTV doesn't have them yet!

Native PDF support in Office 12. Thats cool!

Blogbot goes opensource!

Need info!

Does anyone know where John Battelle's book "The Search" is available in Bangalore? Sapna Book House doesn't have it. Any other pointers?
Update: Found that the book is available online from FirstandSecond.com. Now the long wait for the book begins!!

Forbes has a list of the world's most expensive cars

Asian Age quotes a study by ACNielson which mentions that Google is second only to Microsoft in the preferred employers list selected by Indian engineering students.

Links!

• BusinessWeek - Managing Google's Idea Factory
• An interesting interview with Michael Schrage - On Innovation (via)
• Unix is dead, Linux's the future.
• Sramana Mitra's popular blog posts. Some are very interesting.

One wishlist item!

Participate in this atleast next year!

Note to job seekers!

This post goes to those folks who have been sending me resumes and mails with queries on whether TI India is recruiting, and what positions are available etc etc... Yes, TI India is recruiting. The current open positions are mentioned here. You can either directly apply online or you can opt to send it to me(There is no advantage you gain by sending it to me, as i will just put your resume into an internal database. But in case you get hired, i might get a bonus!). One note: Please also mention which job opening you are interested in when sending me your resume. You cant expect me to figure out a proper job profile for you!

Back online from home!

After more than a month of shifting my house, we have finally managed to get BSNL to provide us the long disconnected landline! It has taken so long even though the phone shift was supposed to be within the same telephone exchange. Next time i have to take a new telephone connection, iam sure i wont be going for a BSNL one! Wonder if Touchtel, Reliance or Tata Indicom are any better as far as quality of service is concerned!

Monday morning links!

• The Ramifications of Google Talk
• In case you haven't yet seen the Office 12 UI, please go ahead and see Julie Larson-Green's video. Pretty interesting video with a few "wow" moments as well!
• Now, a five blade Gillette Razor! :)
• What's up at Microsoft! asks Om Malik. Interesting Read
• Microsoft/Amazon Web services Developer Contest
• Overcoming procrastination

• Jacob Nielsen on product usability testing.
• The Art of Nerd Herding

Google blog search!

Great!!! Google blog search is unveiled. I was getting really irritated with Technorati.

Software Freedom Day!

Today is Software Freedom Day. Coincidentally today happens to be my birthday as well! :)

iPod Nano disassembled!

Google Hires Vint Cerf!

Google hires Vinton Cerf! Thats a cool hire! Wonder what all these high profile folks are doing out there in Google!
Update:
1) Vinton Cerf has posted a blog entry at Google blog!
2) SiliconBeat On Vint Cerf, Google, dark fiber and video