Celebrate Technology

The Bing vs Google Story: An interesting analogy

2011-02-04T11:29:00.008+05:30

So its become quite fad these days - discussing the big controversy where Google alleges Bing of using Google search results to improve their own search service.

The Story

So to cut a long story short, Google believed Bing was secretly making use of their search results to improve its own service; and ran a 'sting operation' to prove this behavior. They created an artificial result for a search query ("hiybbprqag") that originally returned no results, and tweaked their index to return a hand crafted result that had no relationship to the original query.

A few days later, searches on Bing for the same keyword returned the same results that Google did (Here's the whole story). As expected, Google claims this is unethical behavior and would like this practice to stop.

Microsoft's Take
Microsoft responded quite strongly, stating that

"To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."
- Harry Shum, Bing Corporate Vice President

Bing - a better way to Google?

But with all this controversy around, the popular opinion indeed is that Bing copies results from Google. This video on College Humor probably says it best:

"Bing helps you Google the best choice, faster. And shows related Googles right there on the results page. Bing knows what you like to Google."

An interesting Analogy

Here is an interesting analogy that I came across, of the events of this entire Bing-Google episode:

The Bing Cafe head chef is waiting at his usual bus stop and overhears someone saying
"Hey, I had unusual dish X with unusual ingredient Y last night, and it was pretty good."

But he doesn't think anything of it, because nobody ever asks for unusual dish X at the Bing Cafe.

Until one day, voila! Someone comes in and orders off-menu: dish X!

The chef has never made dish X before, but he remembers that unusual bus stop conversation and decides to try to make dish X with unusual ingredient Y.

And then the customer peels off his fake moustache and says
"Aha, gotcha! That was *our* idea, at the Google Deli across the street! *We* invented the idea of making dish X with Y!"

And he explains to his dining companion, the local restaurant reviewer, that they sent twenty people to the chef's bus stop to *deliberately* have conversations in front of him, and a whopping *7%* of the time, the chef later made dishes with the unusual ingredients they mentioned. And the local restaurant reviewer, who isn't entirely clear whether 7% of dishes ordered by 20 people is a big or small number, presses his editor to make this "scandal" a front-page story.

And the editor isn't good at math or ethics either, but it's a slow news day in their town, so voila: Front page news.

So then a reporter asks Bing Cafe chef about the article and he says
"Huh? That's ridiculous. I'm not reselling Google Deli food at the Bing Cafe."

And then he reads the article, and he says "You gotta be kidding me. The Google Deli has been deliberately sending spies to my bus stop?"

And the chef tries to respond, but hey, it turns out that today is the opening day of the "Whipped Cream Pie Convention", and soon there are pies flying through the air so that everyone is messy and nobody wins, except for the Keystone Kops Production Company, who have diligently filmed the whole thing for your internet viewing pleasure.

The Nexus One, powered up and flying in Mumbai

2010-04-20T23:59:00.007+05:30

It's been a while since I got the best gadget I've possessed so far.

I was drawn into an internal struggle between the iPhone 3GS and the N1. There are enough people on both sides over the net to confuse, so I looked down into the facts. Here's what tilted me in the favor of this marvelous piece:

Its got a bigger, brighter screen with a higher resolution than the iPhone. ("This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display" - Techcrunch)
Its got multitasking built in bottom up.
5 Megapixel cam with flash - much better picture quality than the 3.2 on iphone without a flash. I've seen both the pics now and can say for sure.
The dual microphone noise cancellation feature - silences out the background noise for crystal clear voice - to the other side of the line. iPhone users have always complained of poor call quality.
Better contact syncing over the net. Any of you change your phone numbers over facebook or twitter, and my phone will update itself in minutes. Ofcourse I can add additional numbers.
Google's own phone - much better and natve Gmail and Gtalk integration, smooth performance. (the best Gmail and gtalk app in the entire phone market)
Google Calendar synced in with full support for all features - multiple calendars, labels, tasks etc. iPhone had clumsy hacks to enable one or more of these.
Openness about the android platform and adobe's promise to release the latest flash for N1. (Didnt we know Steve Jobs thinks nobody uses flash or rather shouldnt? Everyone ofcourse uses quicktime instead).
The promise of Google voice coming to India sometime that will rid us or dependency on mobile carriers. Its already got the app running free in the US.

iPhone?
Tell me how much of that can you do with the iPhone? IMO the iPhone is a fancy iPod with a multimedia computing device and a phone app that serves to be a very highly regarded masterpiece of fashion jewelery in the tech genre.
I would very much like to own it, and when I feel the need for a fashion adornment I'll get one. With N1, I get a lot more power, flexibility and usability.

The Nexus One
Now that I've got the phone and have been using it for a while, I'm not disappointed at all.
the 1GHz snapdragon processor makes this phone run so fast, that experiencing lag is history. I don't think ill be able to adjust with any other phone after this.

The multitasking is smooth, contact syncing is intelligent and I've got lots of apps to do a lot of things.

The Advertised vs the Real
GPS navigation is surprisingly pretty accurate in mumbai - accurate upto 2 metres in the west and varies till around 50m in the east.

The push notifications are handy and realtime for Twitter, Gtalk, Facebook, SMSes and Emails.

The contact and sync is intelligent and automatically merges duplicates within the phonebook.
The profile pic is also autopicked from facebook / gtalk.

The picture quality is much better than any phone cam I've ever used. The gallery app autosyncs with picasa and shows up those albums beside the camera album.

The phone really is fast. It responds with every touch as fast as it can, except where network speed is a bottleneck.

Offline mode: I can continue to delete, read, write emails, calendar entries offline and they're synced up when the connection is made.

Voice search: voice recognition works 50% of the time for me when i spell it out slow. I guess it'll get better over time because the analysis is done over the net.

Mumbai
Here we dont have 3G yet, and I was doubtful about the EDGE speed and coverage. But the phone works, rather flies fantastic for its capabilities on the Vodafone EDGE network here. But it does lag bad enough to lose motivation when I try viewing youtube videos.
Vodafone has the largest coverage in this part of the country and hopefully with the 3G bidding that has begun, it should be launched by the year end.
Call quality is good and as I mentioned, maps and GPS location work just as advertised.

The few cons
A few minor cons that should look to get fixed:

Multi Touch and pinch-and-zoom work fine, but are not very smooth and sometimes jittery.
high battery usage. I've got learn the skill of turning on and off features as I need them to be able to use it for 24 hours without any recharge.

Most of it is eaten by the display though.

With maximum use (almost constant playing around), it burns out in 12 hours. using just call, sms, and email when necessary makes it last 40 hours without a recharge. so its a play between these limits.

Here's a handy link for battery life on N1.

Haven't rooted the phone yet, and dont plan to until I'm bored of its present state. I'll go for the cyanogenmod route then.

Good Web 2.0 Design Elements

2009-09-02T12:04:00.007+05:30

In the recent days, ive had renewed interest in web 2.0 application development.

Web 2.0 is a vast domain, and a very important (and overemphasized, i must admit) aspect of it is design and layout. There have loads of gurus who've written about the new css standard and clean development methodology. In this post, I choose to document some of the killer tools that are helpful in adding the extra edge to a web 2.0 website with minimal effort.

First off, however, some highly irritating stuff that happens when you go into div alignment for tableless design is that sometimes float:right and float:left dont work correctly. At times they appear one below the other, and at times the outer parent div just doesnt expand to include the child div elements (imagine if you had a background image on the parent div that was supposed to strech all along). Quick fixes learnt after a lot of fishing through the web:

Make a div extend automatically to cover the child elements: use "overflow:visible" and "height:auto" on the parent div and watch it extend smoothly to cover all children inside. "overflow:auto" also works but visible is the safer choice. If you want fixed height and scroll bars on parent div in case the child overflows, use "height:100px; overflow:auto;"
To make sure ur parent div's width is enough to accommodate the child divs which are both floating left and right. instead of manually setting the parent width to greater than the maximum width of float:left and float:right children, a better way is to add a dummy element below all children (but inside the parent div) with a "clear:both" attribute. The dummy element could be a "br" or "div" or anything.
If you're in a situation where all children divs floating left or right, appear one below the other and not stacked side by side or horizontally as needed, you need to add "clear:none" to the style of the child divs.

And now we come to some excellent tools that can be used to enhance display

Photo display cloud:

Photo display: adding a photo display widget that looks like a nice photo cloud. Its released under GPL so you can tinker around as well. <link>

Roy tanck, the original author of this tool, also has a flickr/picasa tool that will import pics for display directly from the flickr / picasa rss for the photos you want to display. But he has decided to keep that project under closed control and hosted on a cloud platform. If you intend to use that, you will have to import the plugin directly from where he has hosted it and provide it with the necessary rss url to load the photos. I personally prefer to use the GPL version as I can download and set it up on my webserver without hassles and can also customize it the way I want. Btw, the flickr / picasa widget details can be found here: <link1, link2>

Word Cloud

A word cloud can be a good way of displaying a set of concepts and not having to clutter up the screen with rows and columns of data at the same time. Not to mention the way it catches your eye as an innovative mode of information display. Originally developed to display a tag cloud on a wordpress blog, it has evolved to support every major blogging software (including blogger and movable type) and now its also available for standalone integration into web pages. You just need to embed the swf and set the flashvars with the data in the correct xml format, and you're done. Of course there are loads of customizations for color combinations and background image etc, but all that is here in the documentation: <link>. You might also want to consider this funky interface if you're looking for something out of the ordinary.

JQuery

If you'd ask me for a single best tool to pick out of the lot for web 2.0 usability, It would be Jquery. It makes very complicated things very easy to do, if you know the underlying concept and want to cut the chase to get what you want the way you want it without hassles. Most of the plugins and display tools that dont rely on flash, depend on jquery. I dont think I need say more. <link>

Tabbed interface

A handy tabbed interface for use on web pages. There are many available, but I personally liked the feel and usability of this one. You can obviously change the color and border styles.

Here's the link: <link>

There are two good fixes in the comments, one for adding a fade style between change of tabs submitted by Andrew Strachan. Additionally, if you want to fix the lack of support for nested div tags within the master tabs, you need to modify the javascript to as follows:

$(document).ready(function(){
$(’#tabs div’).hide(); // Hide all divs
$(’#tabs div:first’).show(); // Show the first div
$(’#tabs div:first div’).show(); // Show the nested divs
// Set the class of the first link to active
$(’#tabs ul li:first’).addClass(’active’);
$(’#tabs ul li a’).click(function(){ //When any link is clicked
// Remove active class from all links
$(’#tabs ul li’).removeClass(’active’);
//Set clicked link class to active
$(this).parent().addClass(’active’);
// Set variable currentTab to value of href attribute of
// clicked link
var currentTab = $(this).attr(’href’);
$(’#tabs div’).hide(); // Hide all divs
$(currentTab).show(); // Show div with id equal to variable
// currentTab
$(currentTab + ” div”).show(); // Show nested divs
return false;
});
});

EDIT: I'll add to this list more tools that I feel are decent enough to keep in my web 2.0 collection.

Think again... And decide

2009-06-16T07:52:00.006+05:30

Its been quite a while that I've put in anything new here. Ofcourse, as busy as the month(s) have been, it wouldnt all account for this delay as much as a lack of an interesting topic and procrastination. In this post, I decide to bore you with a review of an interesting book that I decided to read the last week.

I just finished reading "Think Again: Why Good Leaders make bad decisions and how to keep it from happening to you". It documents a lot of interesting work done by the authors Finkelstein, Whitehead and Campbell (you can get it here). Finkelstein has been an authority on strategy, leadership and warning signs for corporate disasters; but I didnt know that when I picked this up from my neighbouring colleague at work.

The book has interesting material on how our brain processes information to arrive at decisions and just so that all this doesnt sound too far-fetched, the book is abundant with ample examples to verify each of its findings. Ofcourse the foundation of all of it is that we learn from experience how to handle situations and this experience teaches us to make prudent decisions as we get more and more experienced. However such experiences, the authors have shown very successfully, can also prejudice rather than enlighten and hence bias us towards wrongful decisions that may seem perfectly correct at the time they were made.

They have analyzed a large collection of decisions made by influential people over the past few decades to arrive on bechmarks that qualify good decisions from bad ones. Every decision has an inherent risk factor and no matter how good it may be at the time, they might turn out badly in future: some people may just be plainly unlucky. The authors have done well not to include such decisions, but to limit their research to those that were flawed at the time they were made and could (rather should) have been averted if possible.

The findings result in four sources of errors that include

Misleading Experiences: past experiences that seem similar to the current situation but are actually not because we have underestimated a vital difference between the two scenarios
Misleading Prejudgments: Experience has a strange way of teaching us to think less and less as we gain more and more experience. It seems to become "obvious" to us what the course of action should be without thinking over it. This occurs due to heuristics that are developed and strengthened with age. Most often these heuristics or biases have strange ways of defying reason.
Inapproprate Self-Interest: Every one is selfish. Even those who claim they arent, are selfish for the appreciations that their perceived selflessness would generate. Ofcourse there are exceptions, but one of the major factors blinding us from making objective decisions is an inappropriate self-interest. Sometimese actions in this direction actually work against self interest if thought out carefully. Case in point: in a survey where a random collection of people of people were asked "If you were sued by someone else and they lost the case, should he/she pay your legal costs?", 85% people answered yes. But when asked "If you sue someone and you lost the case, should you pay his/her legal costs?", only 44% answered yes. It is evident that the influence of self interest clouded the objectivity in the decision that was made.
Inappropriate attachments: emotional or other attachments have a way of clouding the judgement with irrational thinking.

Ofcourse there are many other factors that come into play, the most insightful of them being short-term returns which our brain weighs more heavily than a long term return, especially when it comes to matters involving money.

Three good cases in point which I quote from the book:

The Iraq decision and Tony Blair:

Prior to the iraq decision, Tony Blair had 3 relevant but potentially misleading experiences: in the Balkans, in Sierra Leone, and in Afghanistan. In all 3 cases, military intervention or a credible threat of military intervention succeeded or appeared to succeed in resolving the situation. Eg: Tony Blair personally pursuaded a reluctant President Clinton to threaten the Serbian leader, Milosevic, with military invasion if he did not back down over Kosovo. The threat worked. Milosevic backed down and was then overthrown in an internal political coup. The poliy of making a credible threat of military intervention worked. These earlier experiences ecouraged Blair to support military intervention in Iraq. He was certainly more enthusiastic than the British foreign secretary or the chancellor of the exchequer, neither of whom had such personal involvement in these earlier events. Ofcourse, these earlier experiences may not have been misleading, they just turned out to be so because the situation in Iraq was different in some important ways. Most prominently, Iraq was a fractured society which had only been held together by brutal force.

The Bay of Pigs, kennedy and Cuba:

One of the first decisions Kennedy made when he became president was to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. The plan, developed by the CIA called for an invasion by cuban exiles, with US military support including air cover and paratroopers to secure the approaches to the landing beaches. The forces were meant to join up with other cubans opposed to castro. Kennedy wanted the US involvement to be "deniable", and he insisted that operation be undertaken entirely by cubans and landing take place at night in an area with little opposition. The only option was the Bay of Pigs. The operations was launched in April 1961. It was a disaster. The plan had been leaked, and Castro's forces quickly closed in, preventing the invaders from leaving the beaches. Despite US airstrikes, all rebels were captured or killed in 3 days time. Kennedy was forced to negotiate for the release of survivors and it was a political setback. So what was wrong in the decision? The list is long. Kennedy's plan was based on his prejudgment that visible US involvement was unacceptable. His changes made for political reasons and without advice of generals condemned the operation militarily. In addition to that, there was an element of self interest in his decision to go ahead with the plan. While he had personal misgivings about the whole enterprise, kennedy was under domestic political pressure to do something about cuba and was accused by opponents of being weak.

Russian Investment:

A large UK chemical company was considering a major investment in Russia. The chairman was concerned that the CEO and the regional management team had become overcommitted to the project. In this case, the chairman had not done a formal red flags analysis, but if he had, he might have been concerned about prejudgments. For example, he was concerned that local managers had presumed that the market was attractive. He was also concerned about attachments. The local managers had close and difficult to unwind relationships with local partners. the chairman also recognized that his own thinking could be biased. He had previous experience of losing money in Russia and had recently been briefed about deteriorating relationships between Russia and the UK. What later happened as a result of many meetings and exercises, was that the investment plan was wisely dropped.

The safeguards that the authors suggest against bad decisions are Monitoring, Group debates and discussion (there is minimal probability that a bias or prejudice shared by one will be shared by many others, unless it it worthy of an impact in the decision process), data and experience (as against intuition and heuristics) and continous governance.

It has been an enlightening book to read.

The Dream Gadget that we all really want

2009-03-26T21:36:00.013+05:30

Its been a long while and I realized that a post is long due; its been quite a hectic week with a lot of things moving in progression and some things losing out to the more prioritized set of tasks.

What got me intrigued about the gadget that we as users really want is this post by techcrunch. Arrington believes that if you build features that users want, you will never succeed. And that the walkman would never have been made if this were so. The porsche would have been a volvo with user demanded features and horse would have been a camel. I beg to differ and disagree.

The fundamental assumption I'd like to make here is that users are dumb. Yes, marketers would disagree, and users and developers would all go up in arms with the defense "the user is king". But if you notice, just about carefully enough, you will see that the user has certain wants and desires that s/he wants fulfilled; but doesnt know how to go about getting them.

The Xerox machine was never demanded by the users, It literally came into the market and begged everyone to realize that they want it.

Ditto with the ipod. Any many many other products.

The features that users ask for result from their deductions about how to satisfy their wants and desires. And most often than not, these deductions are wrong; and that is why the user is "dumb". If I as a user am uncomfortable in my sitting posture in a porsche and demand more leg space, the designers should be able to see through my discomfort and maybe design an ergonomic or higher seat rather than conceding my demand of more leg space, and other features that would take the porsche to being a volvo.

The point I'm trying to make is that user feedback does matter. But not at superficial level or face value. It matters one further level away. User feedback about features should *ideally* reveal what they really want. And smart organizations would focus on serving those wants / needs / desires rather than blandly conceding to the features that the user demands. (or denying them the way Arrington has argued).

As for the title of this post. Before I talk about the gadget I really want, lets talk about the why I would want something like that.

I have a PC which is powerful but its bulky and un-portable.
I have a laptop but thats bulky too and I'd like to have a simple, fast laptop with a touchscreen interface to browse the net, read ebooks (like kindle), keep me updated with feeds.
I've seen the tablet, but its too cumbersome and expensive. I want reduced specs and usability.
I want something light and portable that i can carry around anywhere. Imagine watching TV on the sofa and querying for the latest discounts on the advertisement you just saw on TV. or maybe read about the reviews of a move that will feature in another 5 minutes. Or maybe verify the facts that Bush / Obama / other leaders are talking about in a live speech; maybe live blog about it?
It should look nice and trendy and be usable and fast and sleek at the same time.

As said in the first post on crunchpad:

I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one.

Crunchpad

Techcrunch went about its own task of making one such gadget. Here is Prototype A and Prototype B. A screen picture:

There are no plans of going into production yet, so lets put this aside as a mere hobby project.

Moroever, it seems a trifle too thick (and maybe bulky?)

Cost: 200$.

Touchbook

Recently I came accross Touchbook.

Until now, all netbooks were engineered the same way: Power-hungry Intel Atom, ugly case, and outdated 90's OS. Our goal: To achieve a breakthrough in both architecture and design. The result: a revolutionary device that works as both a netbook and a standalone tablet thanks to a detachable keyboard and a 3D touchscreen user interface.

Some highlights:

Like a cellphone, it is always-on, so there is no need to reboot each time. And without noisy fans and disk drives, it's completely silent, so it won't intrude on your inner space.
The Touch Book OS has two modes: one for use with keyboard and touchpad, and one for use as a standalone touchscreen tablet. The innovative 3D interface is easy to use and does not require a stylus or a skinny pinky.
The Touch Book also includes Mozilla's upcoming mobile browser, code-named Fennec, which was designed with touchscreens in mind.
400$
The best one in my opinion

Mintpad

A device that is between a phone and a laptop, one notch above a PDA.

Does almost everything on the checklist:

Memo - one of the core functions, vector-based memo engine, advanced technology that mimics the "same feeling of writing on paper," auto-save, detailed drawings
Schedule - calendar, appointments, to do list
Name Card - individual contact cards using photos taken with built-in camera
Camera - still images (JPG) and video recording (AVI)
Life - community feature, daily contests for mintpad users to enter
Blog - community feature, create your own and view others' "mint blogs"
Book Store - community feature, create and share content published as "books"
Chatting - real-time memo exchange, chatrooms, WiFi and ad hoc connections
Music - standard music functions (APE, FLAC, MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA)
Video - internet streaming TV, standard video functions (DiVX, MPEG-4, WMV, XviD)
Pictures - photo album, slideshow, up to 2048 x 2048 resolution
Recording - voice recording (WMA)
Internet - "high-speed full browsing with Flash support" (according to product brochure)
160$

Others

There are couple others trying to build a similar product. the Kindle itself does pretty well on few fronts though falls back on features and capabilities. Apple is roumored to be doing something with touchscreens lately. But as of now the touchbook seems to be the best of the lot.

Only time will tell which of the gadgets takes a lead and provides what we truly want.

Social Media and Microblogging Roundup: What do you do with it?

2009-03-06T17:01:00.008+05:30

We've all heard of the buzz around social media and the hype around the likes of twitter, facebook etc. OK, you've got yourself a twitter account. But what next?

Twitter is not just the next "cool" or "trendy" thing that exists just for you to join and brag about to others. Its more of a connecting tool, where you can share views with others, just like facebook; though twitter is not as much of a sharing tool as a "shout" tool: You're shouting out to the world and you know there are people listening. What you talk about is also a matter of choice and opinion, It could be what you're doing now (status updates), what you think about things (views, opinions) or News (Like the recent earthquake). And how much blogs influence what web surfers buy on the net is not so well understood, but social media is impacting this very quickly. But this is not all. If you're a company or a brand, you can get to build a whole personality around yourself to interact and listen with customers / prospective clients, general public. The interactive nature of the system makes it much more effective at what marketing is all about: engaging the user.

Why brands absolutely DO belong to twitter by mashable discusses exactly this. Its fun to note the ideas they provide if companies like coca cola were to ever have a twitter profile:
"Coca Cola has millions of ways to go with this, from showing old ads, to trivia to history and answering questions about the product. I see many ways that staple brands—ones that people would think would be boring online—can be exciting. Not all brands need to reinvent the wheel with their own Social Networking sites. Some of the best tools like Twitter are out there for free to let people know all this great stuff about you."
For brands and businesses / organizations who want to project themselves using the new social media technologies, mashable has its own list of Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For. They charge a small fee to analyse the company profile and tell you what people think of them and other analytics including brand personality and keyword based searches. Ofcourse, if you want some free tools, there is a short list of them although not all that fancy and maybe requires a bit of effort. An interesting service is filtrbox which does a host of activities related to brand monitoring, but the service seems a bit cluttered in some places, too naive in other places and in general shows a lack of focus IMO. Although these tools (like MyReputation) are centered around SEO, they do have the focus around brand building and engaging with the users / customers / clients. Buzzlogic comes very close to this goal.
I feel this space is still naive and needs lot more innovation to deliver valued services.
For other organizations who have no clue about what they need to do once they've gotten into social media / microblogging, there are these handy "How to Develop a Social Media Plan for Your Business in 5 Steps" which btw apply to individuals as well, because as Reid Hoffman puts it, you are the entrepreneur of a small business: the business of your career.
In case you're an artist or a designer, you might be interested in twitter tips for artists.

Once you've got yourself into the social media space and have become active, there are these handy tools that you can engage in, either for pure fun or for real analysis:

Yacktrack allows you to track conversations accross blogs, bookmarking sites, microblogging sites depending on keywords you provide.
Socialmention is a realtime search aggregator that searches through blogs , microblogs and other social media networks for the keywords you provide (it uses other search services like google blogsearch, technorati search, twitter search etc behind the scenes).
Twinfluence shows you how much of an influence you have over your network and your second level network. some consider it as a metric of popularity or authority, others see it as a metric of reach or visibility (of yourself as an individual or a brand)
Twitter-friends is the best tool according to me. It shows you all kinds of statistics / graphs of your social network, activity, replies, messages etc. And it doesnt require a twitter login, so you can explore safely.
Twittercounter is a tool that shows you how many people follow you and how this number changed over time, along with a graph. Interesting for analysis.
Tweetoclock lets you find out what is the best time to tweet someone or when they're most active.

There are many other tools that I havent yet come accross (or just arent all that interesting to note!). I'll add them here when I do.

All these signify that user generated content is not limited to what we have seen so far. The level of interactivity is just beginning to showcase itself, there is a long way to go.

Update: Found a lot more new stuff since I wrote this post. Here's an update -

Favourite (and good) Twitter Client tools for desktop

Tweetdeck - "The default columns can contain All Tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the live tweet information. "
Feedalizr- "Feedalizr is becoming a way for you to “re-mix” the web and we notice that lots of our users are using the product in the discovery of serendipitous content. Not so much reporting to each other about what they had for breakfast… This is largely a function of how twitter/friendfeed are evolving. I think the facebook status update makes feedalizr the must have web 2.0 killer app (if I may say so myself - and you guys can flame me cause I am wearing kevlar !)." by John Kotsaftis
Twhirl - Very similar to TweetDeck though slightly less in features.

Some new (and amazing tools) for twitter users:

TweetBurner - Heard of feedburner? This does the same for tweets. You can check out which of your links were clicked how often and manage many other things.
TweetTimer - Need to be reminded of something at some time? Just follow timer and send a message in the format mentioned here
TweetBeep - Twitter alerts by email. (for eg, if anyone tweets your name or id, you get notified).
Quitter - Tells you who stopped following you, and the most likely tweet that lead to that unfollowing. Pretty cool.
TweetLater - lets you time tweets, so that you can tweet them later.

Reid Hoffman: "Every individual is now an Entrepreneur"

2009-03-06T12:08:00.005+05:30

Reid Hoffman shares his views on the his investment successes and most particularly in the vision that he has for web 2.0's next generation user interactivity. This is the charlie rose show featuring him:

An interesting viewpoint and a quote that redefines the difference between individuals today compared to the generation before:

"I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. Because it used to be that you got a job at one company and you were there 20, 30, 40, years. That’s been dead for decades. That’s even dying in Japan. The salary man no longer even exists in Japan. Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders. And so, they’re essentially an entrepreneur. Now, they’re not an entrepreneur a la, I’ll go create, you know, Google, LinkedIn, a business. They’re entrepreneurs in terms of the business of themselves and how they drive that. So it’s how they get, like, their next job opportunity, how they get a promotion. All of that stuff comes from how they manage the network around them. Which is, by the way, what gave me the idea for LinkedIn."

On Risk and investment:

"I think that one of the key things — the reason why I think risk tolerance is important is because what happens is people delude themselves they’re not taking risks. They say, oh, I’m going to get a job at, you know, Hewlett-Packard or I’m going to get a job — and that’s not risky. Well, look at current economic climates. Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.

(On Bad risk:) Yes. Well, there’s a huge difference between intelligent risk taking and stupid risk taking. Now, the trick is to know the difference.

I mean, this is actually one of the things that makes me mildly nervous even on the stimulus package, because if you think about, well, our problem is leverage. What is the stimulus package? Borrow money, spend it.

So I think it’s really…

Well, and therefore, I think to do it successfully, you actually have to make sure that the stimulus that you’re spending it in is actually creating sustainable jobs. So I’m a huge believer in the way that you actually get out of these economic downturns is through entrepreneurship, because that creates new kinds of jobs that actually have longevity and strength to them.

If you’re investing in an industry that has, for example, known problems, you’re just delaying the problem. That’s not necessarily a good thing."

Techcrunch has covered the interview excerpts here.

Barcamp Singapore (Feb 28)

2009-03-02T09:16:00.008+05:30

This is a long overdue post. I attended Barcamp, Singapore last Saturday. Being my first experience of a barcamp, it was a fun filled event with lots and lots of interesting talks (view the slides). Besides interacting with a lot of diverse, enthusiastic people, it was interesting to discuss and come accross new ideas, technologies and methodologies. This is a long post, you may want to skip to my ideas on people and talks I attended, My talk at barcamp, Pictures or links.

The talks

The Barcamp team organized the talks on a 2 tier level. There was a pre-registration online for those willing to present an idea or a talk; and certain slots were left vacant for on the spot presentations after their proposed topics were voted by the public on the whiteboard. (The schedule).

There were 5 tracks going on parallely and barcamp was characterized by the steady movement of people from one track to the other very frequently. Oh, and wifi access made live tweeting possible :)

The talk on virtual worlds by Jeremy Synder was interesting particularly because it focussed on the non-game aspects of the topic, something that is very hard to find since gaming is almost synonymous with 3d or virtual reality. Interesting also, because one of the guys I met earlier at RIAction and here at barcamp again, Gabriel, runs a startup focussed on getting 3D to the web (No, they dont use flash or other plugins, they write their own objective C based plugin).

I met quite a few people over lunch, and it was a bit surprising to see many NTU / NUS students with startup ideas on web 2.0, made for a good discussion. There was a general sentiment that blogging as a phenomenon will soon die in the face of other growing social networks like facebooks(which allows posts of stories) and microblogging. I strongly disagree with that, because a blog allows you to build a brand besides being a publishing platform (not merely where you share stories with friends). And then there were people working in new startup companies with eventual aims of starting their own thing soon. It turned out to be an interesting exchange of ideas, views and concepts.

I was kinda looking forward to the talk on the other google APIs by Vinoaj at Google, but was dissapointed to know that he couldnt make it and the presentation was done in lieu of him. It was an interesting topic because web development now is so focussed on standalone php / aspx / ruby etc development that getting a common task such as creating graphs/charts requires plugins and isntallations and configurations to get working. With google api's its just a matter of calling the right function and letting google do the graph generation for you. The same goes for the Google Web toolkit and other API's. It was amazing to see the demo on live swiss train positions (in real time) overlayed on google maps. Maybe sometime the MRT train positions of Singapore can be seen in real time on google earth as well.

There were a couple of other talks by the folks at CreativeCrew on Adobe products, I attended those on photoshop techniques, fireworks. CreativeCrew also had a presence at the First Rich Internet Applications conference in singapore, and their next upcoming event is this Wednesday.

An interesting topic towards the end was the poor state of funding available for aspiring entrepreneurs in Singapore (Only 600$ pm availability was claimed). There was a discussion on "Fundraising WTF" where stories on fundraising were shared and solutions discussed. There was a sentiment that NUS is very rigid and traditional in its procedures and something needs to be done about that.

All in all, a very interesting experience, that ended in an interesting end with a game of werewolves, a kinda tradition at barcamp (you might want to read the-weirdest-werewolves-game-ever). The next barcamp, according to Preetam over dinner, may just happen this June, if you're interested.

My talk on Microblogging and Ideas

I spoke on how microblogging is the next thing for web 2.0 and what could be future directions that it could potentially take. With facebook's attempted (and failed) acquisition of twitter, Google's acquisition of Jaiku (a twitter alternative), and Facebook's retaliatory move of opening up its LiveFeed (counter twitter?) shows how everyone is scampering into this area.

My presentation:

Micro Blogging Service Idea

View more presentations from abhishek_kr7. (tags: twitter barcampsg3)

I did get quite a good feedback later on, apart from a question on "How do you see microblogging emerging in singaporean culture". That took me offbeat, and I later learnt that commenting and talking freely on topics or arguments is not something that comes freely to native singaporeans. Two months in Singapore, and I'm still learning the culture :)

Pictures

Some snaps of the event. (Disclaimer: All the pics do not belong to me. They have been taken from here and are the copyrights of their respective owners).

Links

The first Rich Internet Applications Conference in Singapore

2009-02-27T22:24:00.001+05:30

I just attended RIAction, the first Rich Internet Applications conference in Singapore.

They had several parallel tracks, most notable ones being occupied by Microsoft (Silverlight, Expressions blind, Azure etc), Adobe (Flex, FlexMonkey, AIR, Flash etc), php (php user group, singapore), Flex User group and other user group communities.

All the 3 big names in this arena were sponsors of the event (Google, Adobe and Microsoft).

Apart from tutorials and workshops / jumpstarts, keynotes, I got myself a cheezy Google Lanyard, and some Microsoft & RIAction goodies. Joined up with the Flex user group, php user group and met a couple of folks at creativecrew as well.

Interestingly, some web 2.0 startups like zopim (Aims to add an intelligent chat agent to any website for clients / customers). There were a couple other companies present, but with the same old USP of software consulting and development.

IMO the RIAction team (one of the organizers is Hu Shunjie) did a pretty good job of a first RIA Conference in Singapore.

Update: Just found this video about RIAction "I love RIAction".

Macbook Pro 17 inch is here. Is it everything that a notebook should be?

2009-02-27T10:59:00.005+05:30

Apple's products have always held a niche position in the computing industry. With a sleek design, great interface, innovative features and the much touted superior OS X, it entered the notebook industry a couple of years ago with the "macbook". At the time, bloggers unanimously rejected its claim of being far superior to existing laptop models. CNet declared in 2006, that bloggers hate the Macbook Pro.

But over the years, constant innovation, ease of use and great design aesthetics have made it one of the must haves. Recently, Apple has announced the New 17" Macbook Pro with the major attractions being

Intel Core2Duo 2.66 to 2.93 GHz processor support
The longest lasting mac notebook battery ever (claimed at 8 hours)
Desktop Graphics experience on the notebook with NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics processor and 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution (133 pixels per inch)

And the all time favourites:

Precision Aluminium unibody thin and sleek build
Multi-touch and trackpad button feature

Of course, its not all eye-candy that attracts me towards the mac. The claim that "It just works" is heavy and well substantiated. I havent ever witnessed a mac crash, and havent experienced performance hogs that PC users are all well aware of. Of course, I could get my standard Dell Laptop well tuned and high on performance as well, but the difference is that it would require knowledge and most importantly, constant effort from my side. Effort that I could otherwise use to get something productive done. Of course, James likes to criticize the Apple folks and their following for their elitist attitude (and I agree with him on that), but I do believe it is a productivity enhancer if I can get more done with less effort and dont have to worry about performance and Crashing all the time. And the great build and interface doesnt hurt either.

So when I was deciding about getting myself a macbook pro, the new 17 inch release with better processor and graphics support. If only they could update the 15 inch version with those specs, but I guess that'll take a lot of time to happen.

Macbook Pro Complaints:

So while I wait, its handy to check out some of the common complaints people have with the macbook pro (and see how many of them have been resolved and will be resolved in subsequent releases). I got most of these from AppleDefects, RedSweater and other complain posts.

Hissing / whining noise
The problem on the MacBook Pro is generating a lot of discussion on the web. I think it’s worse now because the laptop sits closer to and relatively level to your ears, while the G5 tower often rests somewhere around the corner of your desk and closer to the floor. Annoying whine from an Apple product? (more)
High Pitched Squeal
Swollen Battery
Growing Crystal Failure
Loose lid hinges
Wifi Signal Drops
MBP: Customer Sensory Issues
Screen Display problem
Build and Repair problem (Apple care and repair problem)
Heat up problem (Intel Mac temperature Database; how to monitor)
MacBook Pro's Magsafe adapter melted down (flickr pics)

Most of these problems are specific and not general (except the noise and wifi issue), they can arguably be blamed on the ignorance of the user.

Those who are really picky about specifications and features may want to compare macbook with competing laptops like acer's travelmate and the latest Dell releases. You will get more specifications and features than the macbook for a lesser cost. But the Apple product has unique features that enhance usability and experience even if its a compromise on the specs. It does work for some, for the others there are always unlimited options.

The mac does make for a good user experience, but its not without its drawbacks.

The Changing face of Public Opinion and its neutrality

2009-02-21T12:58:00.010+05:30

In the current era, there is a big hype surrounding user generated content. Everything that the web 2.0 is praised about involves enabling the average user to generate content and influence global opinions.

Think about it. Ten or fifteen years ago, the only people who controlled influence, impressions and perceptions, were the big media companies. The News Corporations. TV Channels. Radio Stations. Newspaper Publications. Magazines. To some extent, books and popular authors. To a lesser extent, public rallies. And to a greater extent, huge political movements involving all forms of mass media and public communications.

If you don't get the gravity of that, consider this: these Forms of Expression became so popular in controlling public opinion, that in all forms of societies some form of control was brought in to keep a check on their functioning. In countries like China and USSR / Russia, censorship was commonplace. In the US and other Free Capitalist nations, a more subtler regime was enabled (No corporations or organizations, for example, receiving funds from the Bush Administration would dare speak against them. No reporting agencies would contradict the views of their sponsors, and even if they did it would be confined to constructive criticism. Tiger Woods dare not speak anything against Accenture lest they discontinue their esteemed sponsorship.) The influence of these mediums of expressions was so deeply yet unobtrusively intertwined in the system that it makes me wonder why people couldn't see through what they were being made to believe.

(Image courtesy MessageInAMatrix)

Getting back to now. There are blogs written by users accross the world that everyone is free to read. News websites that are not so tightly regulated and need much less funds to survive (than are necessary for bigger agencies to use as leverage for censorship). There is user generated wikipedia which beats every other encyclopedia I've come across in terms of size, depth, information and content. And it survives on user donations. Not on the charity trusts of influential corps who would dig their tentacles everywhere to control public perception. There's YouTube replacing the big and dominant role of the TV. Remember the big tsunami? or Hurricane katrina? When no reporter dared to venture into dangerous territory, the native people blogged and uploaded videos of the event and thats how the word spread. Even news sites like CNN relied on youtube for most of their coverage. People now collaborate for Open Source Projects to develop everthing from the next Kernel for your PC to a financial accounting Services. And these open source softwares do not suffer from the drawbacks of big corporate software developments - "Manipulation for personal Benefit" as is explained by Sam . That's the prime source of distrust in adopting anything new and Proprietary (apart from the lack of freedom).

Social Media

Today I can freely upload my own videos. Write my opinions on a blog (no matter who I may contradict in the process). Report an event (or experience) I've witnessed. Collaborate to develop Software I want and need. In essence I am free in principle and in action. And I know there are a lot of you like me. That's why I can navigate to youtube and experience the Olympics in beijing (and discover that the TV News video of the fireworks had been artificially generated for greater sensationalization as against what really happened) or a view of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Or read about stock valuations and their behaviour; know about the future direction of technology and protocols for emerging systems. And I know what I'm reading is genuine; not filtered through a moral sieve, because you know what? The moral sieve is often an excuse for censorship so that bigger organizations can get away with their nefarious activities. It may be an over-hyped concern, I agree, but I feel secure in a free world, not a restrictive one (no matter what excuse you provide). And I'm sure you do too. And I'm glad this happened . User generated content is the best source of Information I have. And I fully support it.

But while we accept that, we must do it with a grain of salt; because here is something to ponder about: We regard Wikipedia as largely neutral compared to any other encyclopedia. Obviously, since Wikipedia is written by millions of users like us; and so in effect we are informing ourselves without a mode of bias. Quite unlike corporations like Brittanica, Webster, encarta and the like who can never guarantee you complete neutrality. (Of course, they do guarantee, but we all know how information can be twisted to favour certain viewpoints as against others and yet remain within the legal definition of 'neutral'). XKCD points out an interesting incident that outlines that the very assumption of public neutrality can be compromised:

Notifications - a new direction for developers

2009-02-11T09:14:00.005+05:30

Notifications is a common phenomenon. A lot of us have Gtalk as our IM client, even those on Pidgin would have noticed notifications like these:

You get the point. Every other application has their own notifications for users (btw, the notification on the right is from feedalizr, a great tool for updating you on twitter, facebook, friendfeed and other alerts all in one place). Imagine what happens when each of them are unaware of the other application and serve the user as though they were the only software using notifications

Each application would have a differently styled notification popup, confusing the user
The scheduling of notifications would be nonexistant.
The user could be bombarded with multiple overlapping notifications from different applications at the same time ("low battery" , "Mystifier is online" , "Dp replied to your twitter entry ..." ....)
The user would begin to get frustrated at times.

The solution? A notification system that each application could communicate with.

I just discovered a Growl inspired tool for Notifications on Windows - snarl.
How is it different from the numerous other notification software available? Well, for one, it uses a BSD style license, which means it is free to be used by both open source and proprietary software systems alike.

Snarl can be used by any application and it provides a centralized way for managing notifications. The user can turn it off, if say s/he has plugged the laptop to a projector and is in a meeting. Its a very convenient way to manage notifications and is highly skinnable and allows for fine grained control. The user can also override the application defaults and change the notification style based on their own preferences and style.

For a start, here is what you can do. If you have a Pidgin client (and assuming you have network on twitter / identi.ca etc which you have linked to your IM for updates), you can integrate snarl to give your pidgin more bite.

I think snarl is the future for notification management on windows. Looking further down the line, there would probably be standardized protocols for notification management making the application work seamlessly on any platform / environment.

Average is NOT Normal

2009-02-09T12:28:00.007+05:30

I found an interesting slide on slideshare. We all normally rely on averages and means to work out whether something is worth the effort or not. But averages are not actually normal phenomenon.

Consider the stock market as an example. For the last 80 years, it has averaged 10% increase. But if you invest your money on that basis, you may not grow by 10%. Why? Check this slideshow out:

It all depends on where you start, where you want to go, and your behaviour / skill.

Google FriendConnect - Great tool to keep visitors connected

2009-02-06T16:12:00.005+05:30

I've just added Google Friend Connect to this blog (You can see the members gadget on the right column). Seems to be a great tool and probably the next big wave of web 2.0 innovation. This is for all the bloggers out there. But not for them alone...

It such an innovative feature that facebook supposedly banned it for a while claiming that (competition?) developers get access to user data. Turns out that was an overhyped concern.

Whether you've been looking for something to market your website, blog; or to connect with readers; to network with people; or keep in touch with friends, Google Friend Connect is a great way to add this functionality to your blog or website.

It allows facebook like applications to take advantage of your social network to connect you with others and them to you.

This capability allows you to add your google friends, orkut and twitter (as of now, the list is increasing) to the network and add gadgets like a wall (facebook users, sound familiar? I'll soon add it here as well) to you website where your connected network can write / post etc. There is also an API which allows developers to write their own gadgets (much like facebook apps). So this is exciting new Stuff.

Here is a video on how you can add it to your blog too.

Pursue the passion - innovative website

2009-02-03T18:15:00.004+05:30

Here's what I came accross while surfing today.

http://www.pursuethepassion.com/

It's a website that is inspired by the passion people have for the work they do. (If you know how working for a mundane job which was never meant for you can feel, this is the exact opposite, if you know what I mean).

It was in 2006 that 3 college friends, who were presumably unsure of where their passion would be, traveled across the country in a 28-foot RV to discover how chasing your dreams can be the best career move you ever make.

"Pursue the Passion" RV traveled 16,000 miles over 38 states. We interviewed more than 300 people who love what they do for a living and created a sweet website at pursuethepassion.com from those experiences.

They went around pitching their idea to various companies, corporations, angel investors, magazines, TV shows, and a business school; only to discover that startup money comes in through finding the best fit and not 'spamming' per se.

I checked out their website, and at the time I saw it, it had a video of an intervew with an aerospace engineer. Seems like a boring topic to check out; but the way it was presented catches your attention as an interesting and amazing job profile to look at. The catch here is the passion with which the interviewee presented and the way in which the video was shown.

This is what their mission is

The goal of Pursue the Passion is to get people to think differently about career paths. We want current and future workforces to not only realize that they can be passionate about a career, but we want to provide them with the tools to do so. Through our website, speaking program, and initiatives in the classroom, we are playing a meaningful role in reversing the long-term negative trends in employment statistics.

The website is a collection of such interviews that inspire you to find where your passion truly lies. Because without that life seems a drab, quite unlike the roller coaster that each of the interviewees describe their lives to be.

Interesting website to look out.

Microblogging as a phenomenon

2009-01-26T08:52:00.003+05:30

Let me admit it. Im not (yet) a micro blogging addict.

Neither was I a blogger about 5 years ago. Back then, blogging was considered niche, and the rules were just being defined. You'd get a quizzical look if you said you owned a blog (unless ofcourse, you were confronted with questions like 'what is a blog?'). But now, its commonplace and its exploding, so much so that standards are being rewritten for scalability.

Its just a part of life that has engulfed everyone, irrespective of age, culture, employment, status, and what not. And it is a great leveler too, because everyone's opinion counts equally. Well, not equally, but then the mode of expression does exist. It has become a natural form of communication for most; while it still remains a form of publicity for others. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

But thats not what this post is about.

In the same way that blogging has revolutionized the connected world, a new concept called microblogging is beginning to do the same. And right in the midst of this new paradigm is twitter. Here's a video about it: "Twitter in plain english"

Here's what BusinessWeek Says:

It's easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. "My nose is leaking," writes someone called Zapples, "so imma go to sleep now.…" But I've heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one.

The key question today isn't what's dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here's why I'm looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers.

Yes, thats true. You will find many high profile celebrities, tech enthusiasts, company spokespersons, employees, product users and ofcourse, friends!

The fundamental difference between microblogging and blogging in the purest sense is that the former is centered around engagement and conversation, while blogging is more involved with expression and publishing. Yes, the boundaries are very fine. But what tells me that microblogging is still in its infancy is that the users are making up the rules right now. There is a large share of anti-twitter microbloggers out there who vouch for OpenMicroblogging (essentially get open source to do what wordpress did to blogging) and if you're one of them, there are other services available too. So why not Jump in and have some fun!

By the way, if you're wondering, I'm here

On Entrepreneurship...

2009-01-14T18:43:00.003+05:30

Interesting links on entrepreneurship:

Just read over a couple of interesting articles on entrepreneurship. Heres a short list (and a handy bookmark for myself).

15 tips to be a successful entrepreneur
Some general aspects of attitude, behaviour and outlook for entrepreneurs.
Nows the best time to start a business
How is this recession time the best time to start a business..
"History bears me out. When times are bad for the economy, it can be a great time to start a business. In fact, 16 of the 30 companies that make up the Dow industrial average were started during a recession or depression. These include Procter & Gamble, Disney, Alcoa, McDonald's, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson."
Thinking about starting your own biz?
"People are attracted to the idea of owning their own small business for different reasons. You may crave the freedom and independence of being your own boss, have a business idea that keeps you up at night, want to make a lot of money or simply escape the nine-to-five job routine."
An inspiring chinese Story
“You know, we were so hungry, people would take it home any wildlife to eat. You see, we were very poor. I mean –he paused- my grandparents were rich, they had a summer home, and a small brick factory, but after the revolution they lost everything. Not only what they had physically. My parents had to work very hard, we were displaced. It was very difficult. Some of my relatives die of hunger. I realized I had to study very very hard to honor my parents. I finally got to go to University, in another state. We were so poor –he sighted- I only had two shirts in four years, can you imagine? I washed one and used the other one. You could almost see through the fabric when I finished.” "I'm so lucky"
Kiva: loosen your social entrepreneurship credit
"I read a week of Wall Street Journals today. Lots of articles about worsening credit. The only lending I do is through ww.kiva.org so I've doubled the money I've channeled into the system. "
Campus Entrepreneurship - NYTimes
“We’re really a dorm of dreamers and doers,” says Prinya Kovitchindachai, who is hoping to market a vile-tasting pill, imported from Thailand, that he touts as a hangover treatment. “College students are the largest group of binge drinkers,” he says, quietly gleeful at the prospect of such a large market so close at hand. Friends have helped him bone up on the basics of international shipping, of securing shelf space and — in a consultation with a neighbor who was wearing a towel and still dripping from the shower — of creating Web sites

Plan to currently network around before delving into something new... lets see how things turn out...

Moving and resizing Partitions in vista

2009-01-02T10:16:00.002+05:30

Although vista has a cool partition management tool inbuilt, you cannot perform powerful operations like increase your primary boot partition space by bringing in free space from the end or another drive etc.

Gparted allows you to do that flawlessly. Here's a good howto on that:

http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/04/move_partitions_around_on_vist.html

I'm plannin to use it myself and see how it goes...

Other unrecommended but possible alternatives include:

Vista Troubles and Office woes...

2008-11-06T22:55:00.011+05:30

If there is anything I hate about technology, its institutionalization.
Think about it.

Everything we do with our Personal Computers, mobile phones, internet connections, and a bunch of other software has made us institutionalized.

Institutionalized in many senses of the word... We have become institutionalized to the user interface, the taskbar, the start menu, the OK / Cancel buttons whenever a dialogue box pops up, and many many things. In the absense of any of these, we feel left in the dark, insecure, and unsure.

Recently I got institutionalized to Windows Vista, and had to shift over from my earlier OS: fedora 9, for two reasons. Firstly, one of my courses this semester, creative multimedia, relies on Adobe Creative Suite 3, which runs only on Windows. Secondly, I had a lot of trouble getting the campus Wi-fi to work in fedora. But this institutionalization has its own demerits. I faced two problems (and when I googled, I found I wasnt alone).

===================================================================

Sonic Solutions DLA

On every Machine reboot, I would get a warning message saying:

this driver is blocked due to compatibility issues
sonic solutions
dlapublisher: sonic solutions

It turns out, this is due to the roxio drag and drop feature, which came bundled with the OS. The solution:

Open Up 'My Computer' and delete these files and folders if they exist.
C:\Program Files\Roxio\Drag-to-disc\
C:\Windows\DLA.EXE'
C:\Windows\System32\DLA\C:\Windows\System32\DLAAPI_W.DLL
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\DLACDBHM.SYS
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\DLARTL_M.SYS

Now, reboot. The problem should vanish.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Microsoft Office Word, Crashes on exit

This happened overnight. I didnt install anything new, no new drivers, no new softwares, no uninstalls, but yet one fine day My Word crashes whenever I close it. Heres what it says: "Microsoft Office Word has stopped working". Additional information:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: WINWORD.EXE
Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014
Application Timestamp: 45428028
Fault Module Name: mso.dll
Fault Module Version: 12.0.4518.1014
Fault Module Timestamp: 4542867b
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0003977b
OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.768.2
Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:
LCID: 1033
Brand: Office12Crash
skulcid: 1033

Solution:

If you want to work on Word, goto command prompt, and start winword.exe with the /a switch. It will work, but without addons. Its a relief, coz I can finally get my work done without bothering to search for the Office installation DVD, repairing office or uninstalling and reinstalling it...

Goto start, type cmd and press enter.

Navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Type in "winword.exe /a" without the quotes and press enter. And now, it works!

And while ur at it, goto the office menu (top left), word options, add-ins and disable the culprit after you've identified it (no choice but to try all of them out one by one, unless you're sure).

Note that this solution works only if the fault module (in the crash message) is "mso.dll". In other common cases, the fault module starts with "hp... .dll". In such cases, your HP printer driver is causing problems and you need to uninstall it to get word to work.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Hibernate Option in Windows Vista is Gone!

This happened to me when I tried to clean up my C drive (system drive).

Right clicking the drive > Properties > disk cleanup

Here, I chose to remove everything I could, to make some space. And accidentally also removed the Hibernation file from the list (which was consuming > 4 GB of space at the time).

So now I find that the hibernate option has gone missing. I cant even enable it. It isnt there in the power options, neither is it there anywhere else. I was forced to make-do with the sleep option. But the solution i quite simple:

Get into the command prompt, open it in administrative mode (by right clicking the icon in the start menu and selecting run as administrator), and type in:
powercfg /hibernate on
Reboot. And voila, hibernate is back in the "Microsoft Power Options" and the shutdown menu.

===================================================================

I know institutionalization is bad, but in some cases its just about optimization. In the enterprise, professionals would rather continue with the inefficiencies of a system they know how to use, than invest time (and money) in learning a new and better systems (including open source counterparts) with hopes of improved performance.

The day when Open Source software institutionalizes the users as much, or more, than Microsoft has; will be the day when we will get to see true competition at its best...

Till then, its make-do time...

Subversive Art

2008-10-26T23:10:00.000+05:30

I just finished an interesting book titled "Film As A Subversive Art" by Amos Vogel" which is considered to be among the most unorthodox film histories in history. The author was also the founder of the New York City avantgarde ciné-club Cinema 16 (America's most important film club 1947-1963).

The book talks about the history of films that have been subversive in nature, first being used as tools by new, emerging, revolutionary groups (like the socialists and communists) and later being used against these very establishments. He also talks about subversion in a different sense, in the art of film making itself, in the portrayal of ideas, forms, shapes and direction - how they have responded over the years to a constant desire to challenge the existing norms and techniques of film-making (for example he talks about the movement of camera and camera angles as a revolution in itself). The artbook's review says:

So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual, and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.

The essence of book lies in eternal subversive art, where the author stresses that subversiveness is an inseparable attribute of true art. The freedom to question lies at the heart of what art is all about.

Indeed, if you notice, one of the most prominent periods in history of art was during the renaissance age, which undoubtedly came about as a result of opposition to the existing Church regime.

Its really amazing to see the time and age when Vogel wrote down the book. The fascimile edition, you will notice, is written such that the concepts have been conveyed in so abstract a sense that they are meaningful even today. This and this will give you a better read into the history / biography of Vogel and Film at his time, including cinema 16.

His work seems to be inspired in part by the outrage against Nazi oppression of occupied Europe. (He fled Nazism with his parents in 1938 to the American South, where, he noted, the racial divide was analogous to the anti-Semitism he witnessed in Europe).

We are what we are today as a result of what our ancestors were yesterday. In pre-historic times, the fear of attack and conflict with other tribes/animals was a catalyst for social bonding and building of groups. This, as it often happens, was (mis)used by many as a tool for power during the medieval ages, and later during the 19th century too (If you remember, it was the fear of communism that lead to appeasement of, and the rise of fascism WWII). In today's world, the fear is not as much of attack or danger, as it is about the curb of freedom.

Its not only about Film, but any art in general is used by the prevailing authority to reinforce the prevailing cultural values and beliefs. Look at China today, talk about the "cultural revolution", look at the promotional art propagated by the nazis, The communists at the time of Lenin were no different. Look at the media today, they seem to be reinforcing beliefs too.

But then history is witness to the fact that the nature of art is such that there cannot be no contradiction. There will always be a form of art questioning the prevalent obvious. Theres a British band (the name slips my mind, ill update the post when I recall later) who have taken it upon themselves to produce the most horrifying and unpleasant music as is humanly possible. This they say, is their attempt to oppose social norms and do things differently.

Grosz once said of his work:

I drew and painted out of a spirit of contradiction, trying in my works to convince the world that it was ugly, sick and mendacious

The origin of abstract paintings also shares a similar notion.

If you have ever heard of the Manhua comics, you will realize that what I am trying to say.

The first Manhua comic appeared on the Chinese market in 1928. The genre was used as a political tool during the Second World War and by Mao's regime, before being adopted by today's underground artists, intent on challenging the state.
During Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, comics were used as propaganda, featuring a smiling workforce and heroic images from folk legends.
In recent years, the artform has been adopted by a group of underground illustrators to challenge notions of freedom and modernisation in China.
Because of their subversive nature, Manhua comics are not granted licences to be sold in bookshops, so artists give away artwork or send it free to mobile phones.
[Offtopic note: Manhua comics now come to britain ]

Here's another take on subversive art blogging.

And Here's a really interesting depiction of subversive art in guerilla marketting.

If you ever get to read the book, and if you appreciate it, you would love to view the films that he discusses at great length. Here's a site which makes an attempt to provide most of them.

IMO, the quest for subversion will forever remain as long as art remains; for there will always be opposition and curbs of varying form and degree in times to come. There will always be something to oppose and something to embrace, for change is the only constant, and without that, we cease to exist.

Internet, Network and our Rights - BITS Pilani Goa Campus

2008-10-08T22:42:00.012+05:30

I am writing this blog entry out of sheer desperation over the hopeless actions continually undertaken by our network administrators and providers in college.

I am a 4th year student of BITS Pilani Goa campus. I have been studying here for more than 3 years. In today's world, network availability and quality internet access is indispensable for any sort of academic activity. Let me recall the issues that I am talking about:

The entire college shares the internet over a 4 Mbps connection. This connection is further bifurcated through the use of multiple proxies for the faculty, staff and students. The exact bandwidth available to us is not made public, but I can vouch for the fact that a common google search, for which Google, Inc. takes 0.12 seconds takes well over 10 seconds to display on my room connection now, at 11pm today. (And it has been roughly the same almost every day).
The internet access is unavailable in our hostel rooms from morning 9 to evening 5. Presumably this has been done to increase attendance in classes. If this were so, wouldnt cutting hostel electricity be the logical next step? Is it moral to restrict someone's right over a basic necessity for something like attendance? Why not just let the grade reflect the attendance issues and let internet and other rights be left alone?
This semester, we have timed internet slots of 2 hours each, during which we get access to the internet - hostel wise. Did we know we were paying for this at the start of each year? Do we _want_ to pay for this? If low bandwidth is the problem, shouldn't a raise in the payments be an issue of debate? Shouldn't quotations be obtained from other service providers in search for the best deal? Have we seen any such attempt? I am afraid not.
Up until a month ago, I couldn't search for 'tuberculosis' on the internet because of the censorship policy.
I couldnt search for 'chest cancer'.
Nothing with 'teen' included.
I couldnt apply to university of georgia because it had the phrase 'orgi' in it.
I cannot log on to orkut to join communities for placement discussions and project discussions.
Facebook has now been banned
I cannot update my Linux system (fedora) with online repositories because apparently their download links have banned phrases.
People have had to change their blog titles and had to rename sketches on their blog (remove the word 'Girl'!) to make sure they are accessible in campus.
I could go on, and this list runs into thousands...
I relied heavily on anonymous proxies to do this for me. And I'm not alone, a lot of my colleagues have to resort to it too. And given our bandwidth, imagine the patience that goes into such an effort. Add to that our growing censorship of these anonymous proxies by our self-proclaimed morality-keepers, the network administrators.
Our internal file sharing p2p network - DC (which has been the centre-stage of file search and information exchange in campus) - is in danger of being shut down because it is claimed (as per the notice put up), that it affects 'internet' bandwidth. I fail to see how much the internet bandwidth is affected by a p2p-based network which runs on a 100 Mbps network.
I'm afraid that if this continues, whatever we share over the network may come under surveillance of network staff and if deemed inappropriate the network facility will close down.
I'm afraid that soon, there will be a day when each of our computers will be scanned for 'inappropriate' or 'banned' material.
As deplorable as it sounds, these actions are still tolerable if these bans were legitimate, but 'tuberculosis' , 'chest' , 'georgia' etc. being considered 'inappropriate' ??

Is this what we have come to?

It seems that internet usage and LAN are considered more of a privilege than a right in this campus. But are we, as students, paying for a privilege? Something that may be denied to us at the free whim of some external agency (These bans are suggested and implemented by the network admins, some of whom work for Wipro)?
Who decides the morality of these restrictive actions that affect our usage?
In any considerate society (and I believe ours is a considerate society), a person who pays for a service decides how best to use it. Shouldn't the people who pay for these services, decide how to use it best? This is how it should be, but morality creeps in, and in order to justify the incorrect actions the general fall-back claim is

'The students don't know what is right and wrong. By imposing restrictions, we prevent them from doing wrong things'

Two questions:

Who decides right from wrong? Should it be the administrative staff who provide the connectivity?
When the network admins say that a particular policy or a restriction needs to be taken to 'improve connectivity' or 'bandwidth' , are they always right? most of the times, 'NO'. There are many other ways of achieving better connectivity but those options have never been explored. My guess is that this is because our network admins are incapable of, or do not know all the different ways and do not wish to let this incapability be known to the general public. As a result, secrecy creeps in. They do whatever they want and claim it is the right thing to do. Haven't we already abandoned this kind of thinking long ago when the renaissance age crept in? Has there ever been an open debate in campus over this issue discussing these policies? I don't recall any.

Today, I was intrigued about the economic crises that have brought a lot of countries to the brink of bankruptcy.
I couldn't read the New York Times, because www.nytimes.com has been banned by our network administrators. This is what it says:

Access to the page: http://www.nytimes.com
... has been denied for the following reason:
Banned site: nytimes.com

You are seeing this error because what you attempted to access appears to contain, or is labeled as containing, material that has been deemed inappropriate.

Reading international news is considered inappropriate?

We are paying for this connection, not to be told that few of the most informative and educative sites are "inappropriate" for viewing. And by the way, who decides on the appropriateness of sites? If the network admins provide us with connectivity, does it automatically give them a right to

control what we do with the connection?
pry on our usage and violate our privacy?
dictate moral terms on the usage of the connection?

As an analogy, does providing us with a hostel to live, automatically entitle the wardens to impose on us a lifestyle of their liking and self-proclaimed morality? (I'm not talking about socially acceptable norms). It obviously doesn't. And similarly issues of morality should be considered separately from issues of connectivity, service and bandwidth.

When the Local Area Network and the Internet were designed and made public, they were done so as to enable everyone to stay connected without bounds and restrictions. And the internet and even intranet networks today exist between many societies across the world.
Ours is a civilized society where we have rights and liberties and duties.
Recently, various international human rights organizations, the Internet Society, Human Rights Watch, The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Association des Utilisateurs d'Internet and other civil liberties and human rights organizations have joined together to create a Global Internet Liberty Campaign (http://gilc.org). Two of their principles that I would like to highlight are:

The Global Internet Liberty Campaign advocates prohibiting prior censorship of on-line communication.
The Global Internet Liberty Campaign advocates insisting that on-line free expression (reading and writing) not be restricted by indirect means such as excessively restrictive governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet.

You can read more about the principles here: http://gilc.org/about/principles.html
The GILC invites all aware and conscious global citizens like us to join them.

We invite you our fellow users from around the world who are interested in taking concerted action to protect the Internet to join us in this campaign.

I would definitely support the cause of this campaign. And in case you are an open and aware internet user, I would like you to do so too.

India is a free nation. We have laws of freedom and liberty applicable to all our citizens. And as 21 yr old citizen, I am entitled to my rights. I have the freedom of equality, of speech, of religion and many others... But before we speak about that, the spirit in which these liberties were designed, were such as to enable a person to reach his or her full potential. To lead a better, richer life. To live freely. Without restrictive boundaries and fear. And in order to protect these rights, we have an independent judiciary. Independent, to make sure even the government cannot step over the line. We are the world's largest democracy. And our current rise shows that our system is successful. We should be immensely proud of that. However the global internet liberty campaign has not yet made it into our legal system, but I think it is only a matter of time before a similar set of rights are incorporated(there are many agencies already campaigning for it within India). Until then, I would hate to see the lack of such rules or norms cause inappropriate restrictions in our campus.

Although I have criticized the restrictions and policies that we are facing, I'm sure the administrative staff and faculty don't bear any ill-feelings towards the students. There is a major lack of communication and uncertainty over the right course of action. There is a fine line between trying to impose a morally effective policy and crossing over the right to freedom, liberty and information of an individual. Although the actions are noble in spirit, they are restrictive in action. I believe that the network and internet should 'enable' a student to achieve and perform better, rather than 'disable' him/her.
And for this to happen I would like to see the following take place:

Removal of all absurd and inappropriate timing restrictions for the internet.
Availability of internet connectivity in hostels at reasonable speeds (which it certainly is NOT right now). There are two ways in which this can be done:
- Increase the bandwidth given the the ISP. This might involve increase in payments, and if this affects students' fee amount, a reasonable discussion should be put forth.
- Search for quotations from alternative service providers who provide better service.

In case this does not work out, then a reasonable and open debate about the restriction policy should decide the action to be taken.
surveillance of activities of individual users on grounds of morality should stop.
The connectivity staff should strive towards creating an open and free system in order to 'enable' every student in campus.

Although I have deep gratitude towards our alumni who provided us this connectivity through BITSConnect, I would like to point out the situation it is currently in. What was considered a luxury a decade ago is now a necessity, and we are being deprived of it. There is certainly something more to be demanded and done...

The engineering craze in India and college rankings

2008-10-05T01:09:00.004+05:30

This is partly in response to an earlier post I wrote about engineering college rankings.

Something offtopic before I get to the point: Outlook's ratings are out this time and it agrees with even Mint's engineering college rankings in stating that BITS Pilani ranks as the #1 private engineering college in India. Being a Bitsian, this comes as a relief to me (not as joy though, mainly because its common knowledge that these rankings lack credibility).

Anyways getting back to the point, this is about the engineering college rankings (or the so called perception among people, of ranking). To get into perspective, these are few of the most widely popular rankings that majority of the public go by:

India Today, college rankings: http://www.india-today.com/itoday/20010521/cover-engineering.shtml
Outlook, college rankings (methodology here): http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20060717&fname=Cover+Story&sid=5
Dataquest college rankings: http://admissionsync.com/2007/07/13/data-quest-top-schools-in-india-2007/

What is the fuss about?

In my opinion, all the fuss is about confusion and misinformation. Half the students who get into engineering dont know what it is about, or what they want to do in life. A great majority of them are pushed in by their parents, who know little about other alternatives and are ignorant or indifferent to suggestions of alternative options.

Whatever may be the reason, engineering is considered by a vast majority of people as a gateway to good jobs and a means to earn a good living. In this pursuit there is a mad rush for engineering all around India. This is evident by the number of students who sit for engineering entrance examinations such as JEE or AIEEE. And this number is only increasing year after year. No proportional growth in the colleges results in a very visible rat race for the few colleges that have earned a respectable reputation among the masses.

In this wild rush, there is a great deal of chaos and confusion which is the reason why people seek these so called rankings, so that they may get a sense of direction and information out of the confusing mess that they are in.

But they do not know that the rankings they depend on, are not dependable at all. They are at best attempts to judge the colleges. And different agencies, magazines, judge colleges differently and not always correctly. The criteria for comparison also varies and often it is misreported (as had happened in the case of bits pilani and india today). For example, in the case of anna university, I quote (From T.R. Muralidharan's article in Outlook):

Anna University (to which TN engineering colleges are affiliated) is still finding it difficult to ensure that infrastructure and facilities at the colleges conform to standards. The quality of education rendered too is often substandard. There is a shortage of good professors in areas like IT and communications where developments happen rapidly.

The rankings are widely accepted to be futile, but however they do seem to have a following among the masses because of lack of other information.

Rankings:

When we try to analyze all potential rankings, there could be 3 kinds (source of information detailed below is rediff.com):

Government rankings: The central government carries out a survey of engineering colleges every few years. The survey, conducted by the World Bank, is used to arrive at a funding formula for financing colleges under United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and to monitor the progress of the colleges receiving funding.
The government survey is highly respectable and includes comments/suggestions for the improvement needed by the colleges. These are generally not available in public domain.
Academic rankings: These is carried out by leading institutions around the world and sometimes by academic and scientific magazines. The survey is authentic and unbiased, but is of limited use. It is used mainly to boost the ego of a college among similar colleges, to attract talented faculty and to keep flow of money from its patrons.
The Asian Technology Information Program, Tokyo, is a prestigious, non-profit think-tank, which monitors research programmes from universities/institutes across Asia and classifies some of the leading universities in a specific research area.
For example, according to ATIP, Indian Institute of Science is among the world leaders in the field of nano-crystal technology research. Similarly, it puts Banaras Hindu University among the leading research universities in the world in the field of application of hydrogen energy to two-wheeler vehicles.
Magazine rankings: Also known as popular rankings, these are the ones that are mostly read by common folk. These are carried out by national magazines as a guide for students and faculty, and for the college themselves.

So what we do require is a blend of government and agency rankings (pure government rankings could make the system corrupt, agency rankings coupled with openness of the ranking methods and information used, could be more transparent and a better system).

The craze?
A third point to ponder upon is the mad craze after engineering in India.

The mushrooming of coaching classes for engineering and private tutors and the conditions of teaching etc clearly indicate that students are trying too hard to satisfy this 'craze' or 'rat race' of getting into a good engineering college no matter what it takes. Heres an article that discusses one such region: Kota, where 40000 students join annually in hopes of entering an elite engineering college.

The craze is maddening, and will end only when either or both of two things happen:

People get wiser to the availability of other options for a good career; and students going after their passions and interest to chart out a future career that is both satisfying and monetarily rewarding
The number of colleges (not just any colleges, quality colleges) increase in the country, without useless fuss of quotas and locality rules spoiling the merit-based-admission criteria.

Thats as far as my mind goes, lets see how the future unfurls itself. Either the rat race ends, or we just wait for a Pied Piper to come along and lead us to our own disaster.

Or probably we dont even need him, we are enroute already...

Google Chrome - Crash the browser :P

2008-09-06T20:38:00.003+05:30

Okay so this is a quick post on how to crash google chrome (not that you would want to do it, but just for fun).

This one was discovered by Rishi Agarwal, one of my hostel-mates: type in 'About:%' in the address bar, without the quotes, and the browser with all its tabs crashes instantly (even before you press the enter key). I think chrome was all about sandboxing of tabs... but apparently theres still some work to be done.
(Correction: I just realized here that just typing in ':%' is enough to crash the browser!)
For those interested in crashing Chrome through some under the cover techniques, check out this and this.
“An issue exists in how chrome behaves with undefined-handlers in chrome.dll version 0.2.149.27. A crash can result without user interaction. When a user is made to visit a malicious link, which has an undefined handler followed by a ’special’ character, the chrome crashes with a Google Chrome message window “Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed. Restart now?”. It crashes on “int 3″ at 0×01002FF3 as an exception/trap, followed by “POP EBP” instruction when pointed out by the EIP register at 0×01002FF4.”
A vulnerability that tricks you into execution of an executable / JAR file. More
Just hours after the release of Google Chrome, researcher Aviv Raffdiscovered that he could combine two vulnerabilities — a flaw in Apple Safari (WebKit) and a Java bug discussed at this year’s Black Hat conference — to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser.
Raff has cooked up a harmless demo of the attack in action, showing how a Google Chrome users can be lured into downloading and launching a JAR (Java Archive) file that gets executed without warning.
In the proof-of-concept, Raff’s code shows how a malicious hacker can use a clever social engineering lure — it requires two mouse clicks — to plant malware on Windows desktops.
The Google Chrome user-agent shows that Chrome is actually WebKit 525.13 (Safari 3.1), which is an outdated/vulnerable version of that browser.
Apple patched the carpet-bombing issue with Safari v3.1.2.

(Nothing more as of now. ill keep adding to this list as I find out more)

Google Chrome - First look

2008-09-03T11:20:00.005+05:30

So after a long and anxious wait, its finally available to the public, and I've been using Google Chrome all morning.

It seems to be fast and quick and as expected, user friendly.

Quick takes:

Minimalistic look, with maximum space given to the web page / content. Even the status bar is overlayed on the page when necessary and dissapears when not.
Intuitive interface. Switching between tabs is fast (compared to both IE and mozilla). Each tab is sandboxed separately so a slowdown or crash in one of them doesnt crash the browser (havent tested this though).
icon on tab to the left of page title (before the favicon appears) is a rotating arc, showing a 'busy' state. Anti clockwise rotation until the site is determined, clockwise after download begins.
Handy address bar: intelligent autocomplete for urls. google search results also supplement the options for easy selection.
Frequently browsed pages appear as a matrix on newly opened tabs. Quickly resume where the last session left off.
Most other features work as in firefox, including shortcuts.

Cons:

It takes the connection settings from IE. So everytime you need to change a proxy, for instance, you will have to tweak your IE setting.
Closing the entire browser does not prompt you for confirmation. Neither does it save the tabs to be reloaded at next start.
No easy way to bookmark pages. Right-clicking on the tab or the page doesn't have a bookmark option. The only way, as I see it, is to go into bookmarks and add the link manually.
Drag drop of tabs onto bookmark toolbar doesnt work.
the "forward" and "back" buttons dont have a drop down menu to jump into history more than a step.

Issues

On my laptop, the touchpad scroll works fine when scrolling down, but scroll up doesnt happen. I check with firefox and it works fine there, but on chrome it just doesnt. Something that needs to be fixed.

Havent gone deeper than this so far. Next thing to do is probably test it out on wine for Linux. After that, probably check if the settings and preferences are exportable if I need to get back to firefox later.

So far it seems chrome will cut into firefox's user share pretty easily. I'm already a chrome-user :P. Find out more and more and more.

Below: A video by google on the philosophy behind the need for chrome.

The Google Browser: Google Chrome - Download

2008-09-02T14:30:00.005+05:30

A little more about how the browser is going to be..

Google Chrome will be a multi tabs browser, with each tab owning its own process running with limited rigths for improved security and crash prevention. Google Chrome browser will also include several innovative features like a JavaScript Virtual Machine, called V8, to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, an address bar ’omnibox’ offering search suggestions ( top visited pages or popular pages ), a special 'incognito' tab with improved privacy protection.

The entire Google Chrome Browser Blog announcement
The Beta Download: Available September 2, 2008 (Today!)

Google (GOOG) said it would be launching Chrome in 100 countries, but it will only be in beta in Windows (Google said Mac and Linux versions were coming soon).

Download links (Ill update this with information as available):

The Home page (http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en). Yes it used to work earlier, but a few days ago, google redirected it to its search page. Probably when Chrome is released, the link will work.
Updates on download links: http://digg.com/tech_news/Where_to_Download_Google_Chrome.

The Google Browser...

2008-09-02T12:28:00.005+05:30

Google just officially confirmed that it is releasing a new open-source web browser,named Google Chrome.

So after all that we've heard about Internet Explorer being the evil spearhead and firefox being the savior of us all, there's a new entry - Google's browser! [read more]

An interesting introduction to it using a comic strip (by Scott McCloud, creator of the classicUnderstanding Comics.) : http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/

Google's products invariable get associated with descriptions like new, simple, powerful and innovative. Not surprising, considering what they have under their belly so far:

Gmail
Gtalk
Google maps
Google Groups
YouTube
Google Spreadsheet, Docs

And now, they are going to have their own browser as well. Its a cool idea, and any competition is always good for the user [:P]. But just how good is Google Chrome going to be is just something we can only guess right now. I guess, we can take firefox to be a benchmark on which to make judgments.

Going by that, there's already rumour on slashdot that Google Chrome is based on Webkit, the same basic engine as Mac OS X's Safari. And we all know how great that runs on anything thats not a mac. Not to mention the portability issues of web applications and sites that depend on flash and client side scripting based UIs. And the mobile platform is something entirely out of picture right now. Anyway, any new entrant does deserve some time to make its mark. I dont know about you, but i'll just wait and see...

As Sadagopan points out,

Google is using the internet to systematically devalue Microsoft’s assets, forcing a “Microsoft’s Black Monday” on the wall street in future. Google is leveraging the mantra that built Microsoft: who controls the UI controls the user; who controls the API controls the programmer.
While there may be scepticism about what could a new broswer do - except introduce more confusion, as I see it, if Google Chrome delivers on its promise of speed, stability, security and reliability, it will like gmail soon command the mind share of the web users. This in turn should make it possible to push common web standards!

And it might actually happen! We have seen how firefox has been forcing web standards through its respawn in recent years. There's no reason why google wont play a big part in the process, now that it has a browser in its name. MSNBC says:

Until now, Google had been trying to undermine Internet Explorer by supporting Firefox, a Web browser developed by the open-source Mozilla Foundation. Bolstered by an advertising partnership with Google's search engine, Firefox ranks as the second most popular browser, with a market share of more than 10 percent. Google recently extended its advertising alliance with Firefox through 2011.
Bearing the stamp of Google's renowned brand, Chrome could be an even more formidable rival to Explorer.

There's also rumour that Chrome has better support for cloud applications than Mozilla, and getting a browser out is just the first strategic step in entering this valuable technology that many believe will decide the next decade of computing technology.

Anyways, I'll just wait and see before making a judgement.

Signature Quotes - Politics

2008-08-31T02:08:00.006+05:30

Found some interesting quotes on politics, government and western bureaucracy.
Some of them are courtsey P.J. O'Rourke, while the others are randomly picked up from sites on the net.
And with elections for the students' council just around the corner, It makes it all the more (ir)relevant.
Enjoy...

"The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it." -- P.J. O'Rourke - A Parliament of Whores
---
"Giving government money and power is like giving car keys and whiskey to a teenage boy"
---
"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them."
---
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
---
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it"
---
"The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you."
---
"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
---
"Well the planet I've got a chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a look."
---
"When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people."
---
"A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians." -- from All the Trouble in the World
---
"If government were a product, selling it would be illegal."
---
"Schneider has made a career of telling the public that the climate is going to change drastically any time now, and indeed every spring and fall he's been right."
---
"The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge pinata -- a papier-mache donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budge and other goodies. The American voter is blindfoled and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard."

Annoying phone service SPAM

2008-08-21T23:10:00.005+05:30

Theres a great deal of buzz going on around the importance of customer privacy and preventing spam calls to the extent that its a crime to do so, if the customer has expressly enforced it.

All this doesnt bother me, I just get occasional spam SMSes on my vodafone postpaid account. But then today, I happened to be in a meet for a couple of hours. And I was out of reach for the most part.
So when I finally get free and reconnect, I get 4 messages sayin I have a voicemail from +919764616724 . Again, wouldnt bother me, except that there were FOUR of them from the same number. So I dial up to receive the all important message, and after going through half a minute of typing in the mobile number and the security code, I am greeted with a recording that plays the crappiest bollywood song I have ever heard.

Yeah... I know. I had already stored the number as a spam so I can recognize it whenever I get such a crappy call. But now, the smart asses at vodafone decide to change the source number for every such ad-call. But recently I had noticed that they rotate between some standard numbers, so you can still store them as spam. But in the voicemail system, you just get a message indicating the number of the caller. So now, I get a spam calls rite in the middle of my all important meet, and while chilling out after the hectic work, I end up payin Re1 / min hearing the spam recordings that chose to be so strategically timed.

There are times when, after something annoying, you sit back and think: 'how did that happen'.

The Real Problem with Linux :P

2008-08-12T19:19:00.004+05:30

This one is courtsey George Joseph, http://blogs.sun.com/josephgeorge/entry/real_problem_with_linux

Neat!

UPA Survives the Trust vote

2008-07-22T21:27:00.001+05:30

So, finally the big drama is over and the government survives the trust vote in the parliament!

Dr. Manmohan Singh is the 7th Prime Minister to win the trust vote.

With 271 being the magic number to be reached, the UPA allies managed 275 against 253 in opposition, with the others abstaining from voting.

The climax of the event can be judged from the fact that Punters had bet more than Rs 500 crore on the much publicised event of the year. It is speculated that the amount crossed 2500 crore by the end of the day!!!

This is what was said about a week ago:

Bookies think the UPA would not get more than 274 seats, so they are offering higher payouts to punters who bet their money on seats above 274.
According to one punter, the market expects cross voting by four SP lawmakers but UP Chief Minister Mayawati would not allow at least two other lawmakers of her Bahujan Samaj Party, who are in jail, to travel to New Delhi for the vote, reducing the halfway mark.
"Yet, we are sure the UPA will get more than nine seats from small regional parties, but cannot cross 280-seat mark," he said.

The trust vote, scheduled at 5 pm today, was postponed at the last minute to 6pm and the proceedings were nothing short of a classic case of climax. What was disappointing (though entertaining) was that the entire diaspora was not centered around the deal and its merits/demerits, but rather on the politics behind it and picking of MPs and parties over one another with pouring criticisms and sarcastic remarks. The bargains between them were visible clearly as both sides were desperate for support.

A new twist to the drama was added when a few MPs (rumoured to belong to BJP,) marched into the parliament with cases full of cash claiming that they had been bribed for abstaining!

The Lok Sabha witnessed high drama when a Bharatiya Janata Party member shocked the House by walking into the well with a bag full of currency notes, which he claimed was given by a Samajwadi Party leader in return for his support in the trust vote.

And with Laloo and Mayawati's comments adding more comedy than productive discussion on the deal, the show was more pitifully entertaining than intellectually enlightening.

The results were not disgraceful though, thankfully, and since I was supporting the deal all through, there should be no reason for complaint!

It will be fun to watch world reaction to today's development. Most interesting would be to watch China's response (and the left's response to that).

Update (As I write): Karat, on behalf of CPI(M), has already made a statement that the winning of trust vote by the Manmohan Singh government as the "sad day" of Parliamentary democracy as it was accompanied by charges of bribery and horse trading.

The story has just begun, the deal is still a long way from being a law...

In case you need some food for thought, read yet another conspiracy theory on the Indo-US Nuke Deal here: http://ia.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/22rajeev.htm

JDK in its newest release...

2008-06-08T13:42:00.003+05:30

This post follows an interesting development at the BOSUG meet this saturday.

I met an employee at Thoughtworks (until then I hadnt heard of the company). Its a software consultancy based company completely based on open source and focussed on quality and performance.

So these guys try out all the newly released versions of open source software and conduct variety of unit tests and several other benchmarks to test out improvements and select the best Open source app for the customers. The discussion this time was regarding JDK 6.

The newest release, in its JIT compiler improvements, produces targetted code compiled to exploit the benefits of the microprocessor architecture of the running machine. Also the adverse effects of reflections (where some common method calls loop over 50 or so times before getting to their destinations) and method call loops seem to have reduced drastically due to better optimizations in the JIT.
The result, as claimed by thoughtworks, is that JDK 6 provides 2.5 times better (faster) performace than version5. Theres more on this performance improvement here, and how best to exploit it here

Some additional info about the performance improvements:

Many deployers in the field, using pre-release versions, have reported noticeable runtime performance improvements, in the "two-digit range" according to Sun, which translates to anywhere from 5% to 24% improvement. Note that this is anecdotal, of course, and depends on what tasks you're performing. However, the JIT has been improved, with better runtime analysis of program characteristics, and the performance improvements have been agreed with by external users.

Desktop support may not be as relevant for the enterprise community, except for rich clients. System tray support, splash screen support, and other elements have been added.

JSE6 now has dynamic language support. It comes pre-delivered with Netscape's Rhino, a Javascript engine, and the scripting project's home page documents many other available scripting languages, including Ruby, Python, awk, Jelly, Pnuts, and Scheme.

Java SE 6 also has new diagnostic capabilities. For example, profilers and debuggers can now attach to a running JVM without specifically using a debugging-capable configuration. For example, if a problem is found at run-time for a production server, a debugger can attach to it without restarting the server, a valuable feature for issues that show up after the server has been running for a long period.

Now, when one talks about performance, the obvious notion is that nothing can get better than targeted assembly code. But thats zero on interoperability, so here's java for that. But somewhere on this transition, the performance suffers partly on effects of interpretation of bytecode and various other overheads. Needless to mention, the JVM on various platforms are not exactly quite consistent in their look and feel, so application starts looking and behaving differently on different machines. Of course for the performance critical (or real time) applications, C/C++ would be the default preference for producing fastest code with some lever of interoperability.

This always has been the belief to the extent that it has been generalized to imply that "any language in its native form gives better performance than one that runs on a virtual machine like jvm". That belief comes now to be questioned as it is claimed (by thoughtworks again) that JRuby runs faster and is better space optimized than native Ruby itself. The explanation is that this is accounted for by the superior JIT compiler optimizations which ensure coherency among objects being accessed together.

Seems like the easier route for developers may not actually tax them on performance anymore. But its just the beginning. I havent really tried out version 6 so far, but user targetted apps with interoperability in mind definitely must go in for it as the best option.

Firefox 3 .. on the way

2008-06-02T11:11:00.007+05:30

This post follows my new experience with firefox 3 beta 5.

Im not usually the kind who downloads the latest and greatest to test them out. I generally prefer the stable versions to work with rather than experiment with.

But with fedora 9, I gave it a try.

The features are good.

First Impression:

User interface, although mostly similar, has grown better.
Web pages layouts (when opened) have become more beautiful: Button styles, text boxes, frames etc and other page elements seem to look slick(er than on earlier versions).
The tab edges are squared rather than rounded on previous releases... and this blends well with the gnome desktop.GTK supporters should rejoice.
Full screen goes REALLY full screen. So on my 12.1" laptop, i get maximum leverage for viewing web pages. really helpful and cool.

Usability:

Much faster (is expected)
Few points to prove this: On firefox 2, some of the popular blog posts with a cazillion comments used to take ages to load (the comments would only appear much later). Firefox 3 loads them in a breeze. (not that its too much faster, that depends on ur net connection; but its smoother and not jerky and really pleasing to use :-) )
Theres a slight issue in installng adblock. But latest devbuilds here work effortlessly: http://adblockplus.org/devbuilds/
Although I dont use too many extensions, some people do and they faced problems getting their extensions to work on beta. But mostly lifehacker solved their problems: http://lifehacker.com/355973/make-your-extensions-work-with-the-firefox-3-beta. Cool for me.. i just stick to the basics without depending on too many extras... keeps me independent of the platform.
The auto complete on the address bar makes it more user friendly, in that it provides extra information in the drop down besides just the url. positive to some, negative to some. not a difference to me.

PROBLEMS?
Havent run into any serious problems yet, but yes:

VERY VERY SLOW SCROLLING. they like to call it smooth scrolling, but its too annoying to use. rather than improve aesthetics, it removes the users command of the page.
Adobe flash plugin installer doesnt install automatically. Manual install necessary. I havent tried other plugins yet, but some others might face similar problems. I installed mine through yum

All in all a pretty cool browser. waiting for the final release...

btw, the firefox community is eyeing at setting a new guiness world record for most downloads in 24 hours, when firefox 3 is released.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
Join us in our mission to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours!

Till then, its beta 5. Just hoping that the scroll fix is out soon.

Easy SSH technique (SSH Public key based authentication - Howto)

2008-05-25T12:59:00.004+05:30

SSH is a technique used to login remotely to another machine and execute commands from your own machine.
For simplicity, we will call the machine that you are sitting at as the local machine, while the machine you wish to connect to, as the remote machine.

so,

USER : [LOCAL_MACHINE] -----------ssh------------------> [REMOTE_MACHINE]

(Obvious assumptions are that the remote machine should be switched on before you attempt to login and that a valid network connection should exist between the machines)

Normally, this would present a security threat, so you cannot login without supplying the password to your account first.

When I first arrived for my internship, I was given a thin client (Sun RAY) and had to connect to a machine (intel) remotely everytime I needed to use utilities like firefox, gnuplot etc. (Of course, everytime I logged in I had to open up obvious utilities like firefox/mozilla)

$>ssh -X garl-intel1
$>abhishek@garl-intel1's password:
garl-intel1.serc.iisc.ernet.in> /usr/local/firefox/firefox

But this process can get annoying sometimes:

When you wish to login frequently (almost everytime you boot your local machine) you have to keep typing in the password again and again.
If you wish to run a shell script at your local machine which executes a set of commands on the remote machine, it asks you for password at every command to be executed. Wouldnt it be simple if I could write a script here that runs a couple or more of commands on a remote machine without me having to type in the password every time? Lets assume I have a script that has the following lines:

ssh -X garl-intel1 xpdf ./abc.pdf
ssh -X garl-intel1 gnuplot gp.sh
scp ./abc.ps abhishek@garl-intel1:./a/abc.ps

I would have to type in my password for each of these commands.

So this post is for those who are looking for an easy way to use ssh without any hassles at all. For simplicity, I have numbered the steps. I assume you are in my position and the remote machine is garl-intel1.serc.iisc.ernet.in

Step 1

Make sure the default shell is bash. (type bash and press enter if not)
Check the ssh connection to make sure its okay and works fine. For me, its:
>bash
$>ssh garl-intel1
$>abhishek@garl-intel1's password:
garl-intel1.serc.iisc.ernet.in> who

Step 2

Create a Simple Cryptographic Key by the following commands:
$> ssh-keygen -t rsa
Now assign a passphrase (if it asks, for simplicity just enter you connection password) and press enter twice (when it asks for location) to store the key in its default location.
Normally the default location is ~/.ssh/id_rsa (private key); ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (public).
In case you need to change your passphrase later, you need to type:
$> ssh-keygen -p

Step 3>

use scp to copy the id_rsa.pub file to remote machine. This is called installing the key.
$> scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub abhishek@garl-intel1:.ssh/authorized_keys2
The procedure should be over in a flash. (It will ask for your login password to complete).

Step 4>

From now on, you can type [ssh garl-intel1] to connect. But it still asks for passphrase everytime which is annoying. So to turn this off make sure you are in the bash shell and type:
$> ssh-agent $BASH
$> ssh-add
Now type in the current passphrase for the last time and press enter.

Step 5>

Done!
Now you need to login using [ssh garl-intel1] without any hassles.

Step 6>

A note about security: The remote machine is still password protected. It is not open to attacks through this process. BUT, the current local machine has been authorized to login without asking for user password. So as long as the local machine is secure and access is given only to authorized users, the server is secure as well.

However, if any time you wish to remove all keys. Type in the following in a bash shell:
$> ssh-add -D (delete all keys)
$> ssh-add -d key (to delete specific key)
$> ssh-add -l (to list all keys)

And now, its playtime.

The most wanted gadget of the next decade.. the new XO-2 (OLPC)

2008-05-24T21:27:00.006+05:30

For those not familiar, the OLPC group aims to provide children in developing nations with low-cost computers.

Although it seems like a noble cause on the outset, it has been criticised for several reasons including but not limited to:
- profit making attempts by various vendors through unscrupulous means
- Top bureaucrats adjusting purchase policies in accordance with manufacturer-friendly contracts as opposed to open and transparent means

The recent period has been a difficult one for OLPC, during which the entire ethos and aim of the project has been called into question. One former employee, Ivan Krstic, blasted the organisation for becoming a vehicle for creating the "economic incentives" for a particular vendor.

Apart from these, functionality is also of some concern. One user mentions how he tested a beta release and found problems in basic operation.
However that is not what this post is about. Its about the future plans of the next generation XO. Its supposed to be a touchscreen based book-shaped gadget half the size of the current one (now that is something everyone would vouch to get - IMHO). Here are further details:

The new XO-2 machine will be developed by the team behind the One Laptop per Child project. It will have two touch-sensitive screens and be about half the size of the original, iconic white-and-green XO device. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, also said the XO-2 will have a foldable book-like feel to it.
"The next-generation laptop should be a book," he said. The screen will be optimised to ensure it can be seen both in low light conditions and bright sunlight, while power consumption will be reduced to just one watt. Negroponte said the laptop would be ready for launch by 2010.
Users will be able to switch between using the computer in a book-like vertical format, a normal horizontal format, and even as a touchscreen tablet PC.
“Younger children will be able to use simple keyboards to get going, and older children will be able to switch between keyboards customised for applications as well as for multiple languages,” said the organisation.
More information at thejournal and geekzone
Geekpics offers some stats as well.
The next gernation OLPC (the XO-2) will have:

Dual 16x9 proportioned sunlight-readable touch screens

Keyboard and touchpad both replaced by touch screens

Physically smaller than XO-1; size and weight more like a book

1 watt power consumption

Target price of US$75 to large educational buyers

Now theres just one point worth noticing here: "the machines will have enhanced dual-display capabilities with touch-sensitive screens." There. We have seen a preview of the technology in the just launched iPhone and it has been loved by many (probably some of the performance aspects need to be worked out, but the touch sensitive addition has been most undoubtedly the defining factor of the trend of mobile phones today).

Now imagine an ultra portable device which u can carry along as a notebook (not a laptop-notebook; the notebook-notebook!) and be able to access documents, run applications, watch videos, pics, surf the net, check your mail wirelessly and what not. And besides, you could also load in ebooks to read in a friendly gadget like that.

Fancy?

Imagine a mobile phone integrated into it. You dont need anything else at all. Some users fret over the possibility of having to use touchscreens. I see it as just the future. People will adapt and the technology will adapt making it easy for both. Another slight concern is the processing power and the low grade features offered. But I think we can trust the technology gurus and the economies of scale which should eventually bring a compromise between features and cost. Until then, its waiting time...

Check out a video of the features:

A Better coverage of the unveiling-of-the-plan reveals that the gadget is aimed to be cheaper than even the current $188. Now the current XO was targetted at 100$ and it came out at 188. The XO-2 is targetted at $75! Only time will tell how it comes out and what it actually offers.
As tekno_boy puts it, "Forget MACbook Air, the coolest thing on the horizon in the computing world might be something bound for the third world."

QUARK 2008 is coming!

2008-01-17T01:42:00.000+05:30

2007 is behind us, and we’re all staring madly into a very promising 2008. And it is time for an exciting festival coming up - QUARK 2008! If you are a College going student in India, you won’t want to miss the party. Encompassing three days of engineering perfection, the campus will play host to some of the finest minds in the fields of engineering and the sciences. QUARK '08 will witness students vying to master the arena of technology as they compete in a medley of events spanning all aspects of innovation.

In case you are wondering, the registrations are up @ www.bits-quark.org.

There are many exciting competitions lined up for you. The core events provide you ample opportunity to showcase your talents and win prizes along the way. Ranging from Computer science to electronics, robotics, mechanical and corporate, there are events that test you for every dimension of an engineer's skills. Registrations have started and the deadline (Jan 25) is approaching. Start registering at http://www.bits-quark.org/index2.php?id=register
(In case you face problems in registering due to heavy traffic / load on the site, mail the event managers with your team details).

We are holding a range of different workshops in QUARK '08, pertaining to fields as diverse as Aeromodelling to Origami. We are having workshops in the fields of Robotics, Telescope Making, Linux User Group (LUG)-Install Fest and so on. Under the Specials section, you get an opportunity to test your skills with Sudo-'Q' (Its more than just an array of numbers), M^+KA (The ultimate Gaming Zone), Paper PPT and Open Showcase. For the Nobel geeks, we provide an opportunity to showcase your innovative minds in our very own version of the Ignobel.

Our Aurora - QUARK@Twilight special events are bound to leave you starry eyed about the ways we can make Engineering an Artist's canvas.

To know more about the events and QUARK, visit the official QUARK website at http://www.bits-quark.org

The registration for all the events has commenced. For information regarding your stay at campus visit the 'Hospitality' section on QUARK website. The Hospitality Team is there to ensure your nice and comfortable stay in the land of Sand, Surf and QUARK!

Richard Stallman's Speech on Intellectual Property and Software Patents

2007-12-01T00:33:00.000+05:30

Here are some extracts of an interesting speech by Richard Stallman (RMS) on Intellectual Property and software patents etc. An interesting read...

Prof. Jyothi John, Head of Computer Engineering Department introduces Stallman:

It's my privilege and duty to welcome the most distinguished guest ever we had in this college.
Mr. Richard Mathew Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system in 1984, the goal being to create a completely free Unix-like operating system. The organisation that was founded in 1985 to further this purpose is the Free Software Foundation.
Stallman is a visionary of computing in our times, and is the genius behind programs such as emacs, gcc, the GNU debugger and more. Most importantly, he's the author of the GNU general public licence, the licence under which more than half of all free software is distributed and developed. The combination of GNU with Linux, the kernel, called the GNU/Linux operating system, now has an estimated twenty million users worldwide.
Stallman's concept of free software talks about freedom, rather than about price. His ideas g a long way into ensuring development of software for the welfare of society, collectively developed by programmers who do not "lock up" their work, but rather release it for others to study, modify and redistribute.
Stallman received the Grace Hopper award from the Association for Computing Machinery for 1991, in 1990 he was awarded MacArthur Foundation Fellowship - other recipients of this prestigious award include Noam Chomsky and Tim Berners-Lee. In 1996, an honorary doctorate of Technology from the Royal Institute, Sweden was awarded to him. In 1998, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski Memorial award.
Today, Stallman will be talking about the danger of software patents. In fact this is one of the most important aspect of the freedom of programming because the aspect of software patents may make all programmers potential lawbreakers because unknowingly they may be violating some of the patents registered by some other company.

Stallman's speech:

After that introduction, I am sure many of you want to know about Free Software. But unfortunately that's not what I am supposed to speak about. In fact, this topic, software patents, is not very closely related to the issue of Free Software. Software patents are a danger that affect all programmers and all computer users. I found out about them of course in working on Free Software because they are a danger to my project as well as to every other software project in the world.
There is a very unfortunate phrase that you may have heard. It is the phrase "intellectual property". Now, there are two things wrong with this phrase. One - it prejudges the most important policy question about how to treat some kind of ideas or practices or work. So, whatever it assumes that they are going to be treated as some kind of property. Now, this is a public policy decision and you should be able to consider various alternatives to choose the best one. Which means you shouldn't name the whole field, name the question with with a term that prejudges what kind of answer you use.
But second and and even more fundamental, that term is actually a catalogue for totally different areas of law including copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and various other things as well. Now these areas of a law in fact have almost nothing in common. What the laws say is totally different from one to the next. Their origins are completely independent and the public policy issues that they raise are completely different. So the only intelligent way to think about them is to pick one of them and think about it; think about them separately.
So the intelligent way to talk about them is never to generalise about them but to talk about a specific one, you know, talk about copyrights or talk about patents or talk about trademarks, but never lump them all together as intellectual property because that is a recipe for simplistic conclusions. It is almost impossible to think intelligently about "intellectual property" and so I refuse to do that. I just tell people why the term is a mistake and then if you ask me for my opinion on copyrights or my opinion on patents it will take me an hour to tell you it. But they are two different opinions and my opinion on trademarks is something completely different as well.
So the most important thing for you to start with is never mix copyrights and patents as topics. They have nothing to do for each other. Let me tell you some of the basic differences between copyrights and patents: a copyright deals with a particular work, usually a written work and it has to do with the details of that work. Ideas are completely excluded from it. Patents, by contrast - well, patent covers an idea. It's that simple and any idea that you can describe - that's what a patent might restrict you from doing.
Now, copyrights have to do with copying; if you wrote something that was word for word the same as some famous novel and you could prove that you did this while you were locked up in a room and you have never seen that novel, this would not be copyright violation because it's not copying. But a patent is an absolute monopoly on using a particular idea. Even if you could show that you thought of it on your own that would be considered totally irrelevant. It doesn't help you.
Now, copyrights exist automatically. Whenever anything is written, it is copyrighted. Patents are issued through an expensive application process. There is an expensive fee and even more expense in paying lawyers, which of course tends to be good for big companies and the patent office says that it only issues patents for things that are unobvious. However, practically speaking, in many patent offices the criterion is unobvious to somebody with an IQ of fifty. And they have all sorts of excuses to ignore the fact that whenever any programmer looks at it his first statement is, "this is absurd, it's obvious." They say, "well, this is hindsight". So they have an excuse to completely ignore the judgement of everybody who really is a programmer.
Now, copyrights last an extremely long time. In the US today it's possible for copyrights to last for a 150 years, which is absurd. Patents don't last that long; they merely last for a long time - 20 years which in the field of software, as you can imagine is a long time. Now there are many other differences as well. In fact every detail is different. So the worst thing you should ever do is to learn something about copyrights and suppose that the same is true of patents. No, more likely it is not true of patents. If it's true of copyrights, it's not true of patents. That would be a better guideline if you had to guess.
...
Well, since we in the GNU project needed a data compression program and since we could not use compress we began looking for some other compression program. We found that somebody came forward and said, "I have been working on this algorithm for a year and now I have decided I am going to contribute it to you. Here is the code". We were a week away from releasing this program when I just happened to see a copy of the New York Times , which doesn't happen very often, and it just happened to have the weekly patents column and I noted it and so I read it. It said that somebody had got a patent for inventing a new method, a better method of data compression.

Well, that was not in fact true. When I saw this I thought we'd better get copy of this patent and see if it's a problem and it turned out to cover exactly the same algorithm that we were about to release. So this program was killed one week before it was released. And in fact that person, that patent holder had not invented a better method because in fact it wasn't new, but that doesn't matter. He had a monopoly.

So eventually we found another compression algorithm which is used in the program that's known as GISA. But this illustrates the danger that you face: even if you had unlimited resources, you couldn't find out about all the patents that might endanger your project.
...
When the United States entered the World War I, nobody in the US could make a modern airplane. And the reason was that modern airplanes use several different techniques that were patented by different companies and the owners hated each other. So nobody could get a license to use all these patents. Well, the US Government decided that this was an unacceptable state of affairs and essentially, paid those patent holders a lump sum and said we have nationalised these patents and now everybody go make airplanes for us. But the amount to which this happens, the frequency and the seriousness of it varies according to how many different ideas go in one product. It varies according to how many points of patent vulnerability there are in one product. And in that question, software is at the extreme.
...

More <here>

Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

QUARK 2008 is coming…. start thinking of ways to engineer perfection

2007-11-06T03:04:00.001+05:30

You think you are perfect?

Get ready to define perfect.

Coz we are here to Engineer Perfection. QUARK 2008, our national science and technology festival is coming this february (9-11) and we promise that it will be 3 days of pure technical extravaganza.

QUARK refers to an elementary particle which is the fundamental constituent of matter. It is synonymous with the exploration of scientific knowledge and the unknown, upcoming face of science. This precisely echoes the spirit of QUARK ‘08, the annual technical extravaganza of BITS - Pilani, Goa Campus.

QUARK ‘08 is all about being basic and showing simplicity in an extra-ordinary way. It is a national endeavour and will feature premier colleges from all across the country. BITS - Pilani, Goa Campus provides the ideal platform for such a convergence of intellectual resources from all over the country. With the technical fest spread over three days QUARK ‘08 provides the most extensive brand marketing opportunity among college students in the region.

Check out http://www.bits-quark.org to keep yourself updated on current issues / opportunities and developments about QUARK. Stay tuned and get started. Because when we talk of perfection, there is no margin for error.

Inviting you, on behalf of the Organizing Committee, to the exciting and thrilling arena of QUARK ‘08,

Abhishek Kumar
Chief Organizer, QUARK 2008

Of the era that was and the age that is, electronics

2007-09-17T21:57:00.000+05:30

Its funny that I pen down a title like that (above) when what I really intend to do is write about my experience at Pilani during my summer internship.

In one way, May 15 - July 15 brought about a myriad of experiences, each unique in its own right.
Although this fact alone should have accounted for my jubilation when I first received my confirmation mail, the fact that it is one of our reputed research institutes got me excited.
Pilani is about 5 hours from Delhi - by road - and there is no other means of transport to get there. So, after a 5 hour grueling bus journey, I finally arrive at my destination: A land full of camels and the desert wind. The land of the Rajahs, as they say, and the town for education - Pilani. It took me a bit of time to adjust to the extreme climate, not to mention that adjusting with peacocks as your friendly neighbourhood stray animal was a pretty formidable task in itself! An oasis in a desert, It could put many fairylands to shame.

Of course the most striking factor about the place was the pace of its functioning. Time would literally stay still as you would take your own sweet time to adjust and go on.
Hardly a few days of stay, and I was already convinced that I had entered a new world.

And then, I was proved wrong when I entered CEERI - the real new world! A lot more than what it appears on first sight: A modest research institute established under the CSIR. The History attached with the place is compelling: A lot of technical breakthroughs without which the country would probably have had to shelve lumps of money for technology transfer; and of course, live without television! But again it was a new experience, a new way of life and a new world to enter.

A glimpse into the developments that are going on here, and I begin to wonder about the era that was and the age that is, electronics. Since the turn of the century we have had numerous breakthroughs and path breaking findings, even revolutionary progress; yet we seek to answer the same fundamental questions and are groping for the still more fundamental answers.
One begins to question the nature of revolutions themselves, based on the scope that they claim to affect.

"New hopes, new styles, and, most important, a new way of seeing. Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account on nature replaces another. Old problems are seen in new light. Something takes place that resembles a whole industry retooling for new production. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well." - CHAOS, James Gleick

And this is the situation that people at CEERI try to address and bring about all the time. We may talk about the next big breakthrough, the next big Silicon revolution, even pathbreaking findings that may allow us to look back and laugh at what we currently regard as the highest achievements we have made.
Yet, in the foreseeable future, I cant help but see a fraction of us smirk at those who laugh, for we still, as always will, remain in an endless pursuit of answering the fundamental questions that stare at us.

Beyond Images: universal facial recognition accross the internet

2007-07-03T19:26:00.000+05:30

Polarrose is a swedish startup company which promises to allow the user to identify a face from all the photographs distributed over the internet.

This means that you would have to just give the photograph of the person you want to find and polarrose will give you all the photographs of the person, distributed all over the internet.

Imagine what would happen when you give your own photograph and find out a lot more about yourself distributed around the internet :D.

This has already stirred a huge privacy debate when the The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of such online photo-tagging. See the slashdot thread for more.

PolarRose, however, believes that they are as harmful to the photo web, as Google and Yahoo! (& others) have been to the text web. By sorting the text web, these search engines exposed the wonderful resource of public documents that web had already become.

Polar Rose adds tremendous value to the photo web.

Quote:

Hundreds of millions of photos that are screaming to be sorted, viewed, and searched are not being so because no one took the time – or had a facility like Flickr or other photo-sharing sites – to add descriptions, names, or tags.
We want to sort this photo web to make each photo more valuable to the viewer, but also to the person who shot it.
Tell the story, make it discoverable.

And for those of you who are privacy maniacs, here's more:

We’ll end up finding photos that the published never really thought of as being public. The trick, however, is not to turn off the technology, just like Altavista or any of the subsequent search engines weren’t shut down or otherwise censored. The challenge is to facilitate a way to make sure that photos that shouldn’t be in our database, aren’t. This can be by restricting access or by telling us not to pick them up.

We don’t index private photos; photos behind a firewall, login, or on a user’s desktop computer. (We’ll do some partnerships where private photos will be indexed, but thus only for the individual user’s viewing)
We honor robots.txt and subsequent requests by a site owner to remove photos from our database.
We’ll never engage Polar Rose in the application of the technology in security or surveillance. It’s explicitly stated in the contracts we enter with partners.

My take:

I feel every new technology faces some opposition and resistance before any stage of acceptance.
Take Google for example..There were points in its history when people were convinced enough to fight for Google's shutdown simply because they believed the entirety of web should not be publicly accessible!
(Of course, they didn't bother to keep private articles off the web or behind a firewall! No, they want security by obscurity rather than true security and I think this basically reflects the foolish mindset of those people. It also reflects how any new innovation requires a change in mindset to be viewed in true perspective.)

I think Polar Rose is doing a wonderful job and Id like to see the concept extend beyond faces to any recognizable object. And not only Images, videos as well. Imagine searching videos not on basis of tags or names or descriptions; but on content! That would be truly revolutionary.

I know Google is doing something in this regard (read something about their research on pictoral descriptors for indexing images...but cant seem to recollect where I found It - The web is huge entangled Jungle, with Google right in the very dense heart of it! Ill add in that article when I find it).

Any comments/more info is more than welcome...

Apple iPhone - less known facts & Technologies to Ponder

2007-06-30T12:33:00.000+05:30

Apple is known for its innovative gadget design, and with the release of the iPhone today, it continues to live up to its hype. But theres a lot more to the iPhone than the hype associated with it.

Of course it is THE gadget of the time with features like the smart, multitouch screen and the advanced Web browser, and you'd do better to go and get one; but here are some less known facts and technologies under-the-hood that are generally under appreciated by the media and the public.

The iPhone has tiny, powerful sensors--an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and an infrared sensor--that are able to pick up cues from the environment and adjust the phone's functions accordingly. Apple has decided to use these sensors for detecting when to convert the screen view from portrait to landscape, for adjusting the brightness of the screen based on the brightness of the environment, and for disabling the touch screen when a person holds the phone to her ear.

Independent research projects at MIT, Intel, and other companies indicate that phones built with hardware such as accelerometers, light sensors, a GPS, and a microphone could provide clues about people's activities and behaviors.

Such a phone could monitor exercise habits, track an elderly relative's activities, and let friends and family know if it is an appropriate time to call or instant message the phone's owner

At Intel Labs, researchers equipped first-year students at University of Washington with an accelerometer, barometer, a humidity sensor, a thermometer, a light sensor, a digital compass, and a microphone and were able to watch social networks form as subjects with the sensors interacted.

Eagle says it would not be difficult to write consumer software that would deduce a person's basic activities, which could be used to update the status listed on an instant messenger program or a blog, for example.

Wake-up people, the future is here! (for all those of you crying over privacy issues, id just say go-to-hell.)

More for you Here

Fedora 7 - Enter the new world (Download links at bottom)

2007-06-28T10:03:00.000+05:30

Its been quite a while since Fedora 7 was released (10 days is really a long long time). Im really eager to get dirty with it, especially since I heard about a lot of the major changes going on in features.

And while I wait for the distro to download fully, I thought ill share some insight here.

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community supported open source project.
Its goal is the rapid progress of free and open source software and content. It offers cutting edge softwares for desktop usage. The latest version of the popular Linux distribution has a lot to offer users and developers.

You might want to take a tour of the new and latest fedora 7 here.

A small note: Till now the Linux distribution was called "Fedora Core"....The core is now off and its simple fedora 7. And its power packed with features that make ur PC a lean machine!

The Exciting new features:

1.) Spins

This is a first for fedora. Spins are basically like distros. We've got millions of linux distributions out there and those that are built from the fedora base(or rather, are variations of fedora) are basically clubbed into a group, of which each member is a 'spin'.

Technically, they are variations of Fedora built from a specific set of software packages. Each spin has a combination of software to meet the requirements of a specific kind of end user.

There are mainly 3 spin choices.

One is a GNOME and KDE desktop environment based bootable Live image for hassle free disk installation.
The other one is the regular desktop image intended for desktops & servers. The adv with this is that its got a well documented and neat upgrade path for those using fc6 (fedora CORE 6!).
And the last one is the set of dvds that have all the fedora repository you will need to install. (I said 'need' not 'want' :-P).

2.) A small boot.iso image for network installation.
Setting up fedora 7 in a lab is not a difficulty anymore!

3.) Desktop Environment

This release features GNOME 2.18 and KDE 3.5.6.
Read more about them here: GNOME 2.18, KDE 3.5.6
Ill be sticking to the standard Gnome Env while I prepare to get my hands dirty. (Its already 36% downloaded....:)

4.) Xorg server 1.3 included and ConsoleKit enhanced...

Xorg server promises hot diplay device plug-n-play capability. ConsoleKit integration promises fast user switching but we'll have to substantiate that ;)

5.) Some other Misc points worth noting:

Firefox 2 includes a host of new features.
Fedora 7 includes a refreshing new "Flying High" theme, which is part of a continuous team effort from the community and the Fedora Artwork Project:
A new comprehensive graphical administration tool for SELinux, system-config-selinux is available by default in this release.
nVidia Card holders: Fedora has arrived! It now integrates the experimental nouveau driver within Xorg and the kernel. The nouveau driver, which is disabled by default in this release, aims to provide free and open source 3D drivers for nVidia cards. The Fedora 7 team seeks comments on this inclusion for feedback on further such attempts. Do put in a line if you find it useful! we might well have more driver integration in future.
This release integrates Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology with Fedora’s graphical virt-manager and command-line virsh tools. KVM provides a hardware accelerated virtualization solution, and users have a choice between KVM and Xen, along with Qemu, in this release.
In this release, the performance of yum, Pirut, and Pup have been significantly improved.
This release features integration of a new FireWire stack in the kernel for more robust device handling.
Python 2.5 is included in this release, and all of the Python software available in the repository uses it. (Ill be starting my Python-learning-drive soon :) )
This release of Fedora includes Liberation fonts, which are metric equivalents for several well-known proprietary fonts found throughout the Internet. These fonts give users better results when viewing and printing shared or downloaded documents.

6.) A Really exciting development (skip to the downloads section)
This is a truly exciting development.

Fedora now includes improved power management through implementation of dynamic ticks in the kernel

Humble as it may seem, it represents a generation of change in kernel development. Ill try to simplify what it means and the difference it will make.

There is a general trend among kernel developers to create a 'tickless' kernel for improved power efficiency. It abandons traditional time-keeping methods for a more power-friendly technique.

In simple terms...lemme put it this way. When you have multiple things(processes) running on your PC, there is a lot of scheduling that is being done .. and very frequently too. so then the kernel has to "check for work to be done" very frequently. And remember, our processors have capabilities ranging in gigahertz. So that means a Lot of checks are futile (no work to be done :( ).

The tickless kernel, instead of frequently checking for work to be done, schedules the hardware to interrupt when it knows a future job will require attention. Again simplifying it, you may say its like reaping the advantages of using interrupts rather than polling!

Ill write another detail post on this exciting technology some time later. For now, here are some download links:

Download Links

Fedora 7 DVD ISO download
- Visit mirror to download Fedora ISO images (2.7 GB)
Fedora 7 DVD ISO BitTorrent download
- Download from BitTorrent (requires a BitTorrent client)
Fedora 7 Live CD ISO download
- Use Live CD (700M) if internet connection is slow or you just want to see how Fedora works and looks in its new flavour. You can install fedora from Live cd (Thats the best part about this time's release. Nice work, fedora team!).

Upgrading from Fedora Core 6 to fedora 7 with YUM package.

With its improved YUM performance this release, Here is a very interesting Article describing the Upgrade for those of you already on the fedora bandwagon!

Alright...time to get my hands dirty with fedora!

The Holy Crusade: Its Google vs Microsoft again!

2007-06-22T17:02:00.000+05:30

OK this is the latest that has hit the wires:

Microsoft Changing Vista Desktop Search

Microsoft's compromise with the U.S. Justice Department, detailed in a report released late Tuesday, allows Windows Vista users to set a non-Microsoft program as the default search engine on hard drives. Microsoft will also add a link to that alternate program in the Windows Start menu, but will not change the way Vista "Instant Search" technology works.

Recent concessions by Microsoft are part of a broader battle between the two companies. While Windows continues to dominate the desktop operating system market, Google's ability to make money from search advertising has left Microsoft scrambling to catch up. Google has also stepped into traditional Microsoft territory in the past year with a set of free, Web-based programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.
Tuesday's regularly scheduled status report came after Google filed a 49-page document with the Justice Department in April, claiming that Vista's desktop search tool slowed competing programs, including Google's own free offering. Google also said it's too difficult for users to figure out how to turn off the Microsoft program.

It is interesting to see how millions of us are closely following the so called 'crusade' between Microsoft and Google. In the not so forlorn past we can trace a similar analogy that prevailed between Apple and Microsoft.

Its easy to see that every attempt of Microsoft to provide default Ms tools to its users has created a hunch for many other software providers. consider these for eg:

Computer security software companies testing early versions of Vista last year also believed that the operating system might interfere with users' ability to chose products other than Microsoft's.

Also last year, Google told the Justice Department it was concerned that Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's latest Web browser, made it harder for PC users to install toolbars of competing search engines. Regulators declined to intervene, but Microsoft still changed the way Explorer worked. And at the request of antitrust authorities in Korea and Europe, Microsoft released versions of Vista without the Windows Media Player.

The instant search technology so ambitiously flouted in the new vista release has been said to have existed in the Mac since prehistoric times (A very huge fan following would resist any of your attempts to prove otherwise). However, software developers have a different take to it:

Microsoft is enmeshed in a similar battle with the European Union, which has levied more than a billion dollars in fines against the software maker for depriving competitors of technical information, and charging too much for some licenses.

In response to claims that Vista's "Instant Search" slows other products, Microsoft agreed to give competitors technical information to help optimize performance.

Google had initially raised concerns about desktop search in December. The April complaint that drew public attention to the skirmish was filed just days after Microsoft called for antitrust regulators to scrutinize the search company's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc. (That was a big story in itself).

More of an interesting read here.
Here is the Antitrust case filings (for those of you too interested!).

As I said it will be interesting to see how the two companies continue their skirmish. As users, of course, Its a pleasant ride all the way to the end. The more the competition, the more the options we have and the better it is. All we can do is spectate, comment, participate and enjoy the ride!

A Lookback at Our Experience @ Imagine Cup India SDI Finals - The Beginning

2007-06-20T23:32:00.000+05:30

Alright this was long overdue...So here goes a small adventure that I've been through this last semester@college. Its all about our (first)experience at the Imagine Cup competition held by Microsoft. For those of you who admit to be naive, you'd do better to click <here> and <here(details)> to find out more and the rest of you....read on with patience.

The competition has a strange knack of getting into the line of fire for various reasons by various people. Id love to talk about the Open source movement and alternatives to .NET as well as competition policies/privacy policies some day. But today is not that day.

'Twas the beginning of March (As far as my poor memory recollects) and I along with some friends & college mates was at the GRID lab...at the time discussing about current projects etc.

We were a team of 4: Roshan Sumbaly (Roshy - the senior), Shubham Malhotra, Gaurav Paruthi and O'course I, myself; and we were involved in a project related to GRID computing at the time. It is needless to say that BITS college life turns us into nocturnal creatures; and not being an exception, I could proudly say at the time: "Laziness is the most active thing inside me!".

Well, so as our discussions focussed on our techfest preps (QUARK - our own science & technology festival) we started thinking, inadvertently, about competitions. Having been to IIT Bombay's techfest earlier this year, we were in no mood to participate in another College festival (We had simply had enough of it for this sem at least!). We knew that the Ms organized compttn Imagine cup was coming up and upon inspection of the website, we realized that the theme this time was education.

What followed was a small brainstorming session (I would rather not call it a brainstorming session because we hadn't thought of participating whole heartedly - just to have some fun!). This continued over at DC @night and we finally hit upon an idea. The deadline was still out of sight, and, disconcerting as the habit is, it was remembered just the very day before round-1 submission deadline. I had to quickly make up a write up of our concept for submission and we managed to get it through just in the nick of time. Of course, who cares, we're just doing it for some fun; and even getting into the top 75 teams was enough as far as we were concerned. We already had a lot in our hands and mind you, QUARK 2k7 was approaching at the time.

The week that followed has been and probably will be the busiest week of my life@BITS. I was supposed to be the chief organizer of Quark (of course Hari Sudan was d head Org...and it was mostly upto him to manage the important as well as the nitty-gritty work. We were all there to assist and take responsibility). Roshan was the organizer too ... he'd, of course, the most imp role of gettin da main sponsors and organizing the main workshops, events etc etc. Shubham was the event management coordinator while Gaurav was the event manager of an event 'Lines of code'.

So, you see, we were all heavily involved in the safari ride that was to take place at BITS Goa in a week...and guess what? we were already stranded in the middle of the jungle! You see, organizing an event to be held on a national scale, that too the first time, is really a formidable job.

No, really!

As a spectator it seems easy and jovial but it soon becomes excruciating when the stakes are high. You get to learn a real lot from such an experience. It shows you that idealistic management is so different from practical management. So many new challenges at every step and a degree of risk involved with every decision. Of course, some of the crucial decisions were taken through a consensus....so we could take solace in blaming the rest of the committee if it didnt work out! All in all I think we managed pretty well for a first time. Of course we could have done better, but there are some things we couldn't help -things that jeopardized our budget plans. But we couldn't help it. Where there is power and where there are people, there is politics.

But hey, it was one hell of a battle. And we were one hell of a crew!

Oh..and did I mention, we had thought of participating in one of the 'Open Software showcase' events of QUARK with our IC (ImagineCup) Idea? Well, we had; but were forced to drop it due to stringent persuasion from the rest of the participating members of our college!

So! Round 1 results were out and we managed to clear the first round of the competition. Party Time! But wait...Deadline for Round 2 was approaching...and this time we were supposed to give an interview as well....That spells serious work! The next week or so saw lots of brainstorming over ideas and technologies and final project specifications. It was the one thing that kept us nocturnal creatures alive by the day and out of our den.

So the D-day arrived...I remember it was exactly the day before Quiz-II started. We had 'screwed up' our Quiz-1 thanks to QUARK..and we had absolutely 'No Idea' about the syllabus for Quiz-2 until now. Of course it would be utter blasphemy if I don't mention that Roshan was an extreme exception to this! (Im sure u get d point).
The Interview was scheduled to be at 3 pm...and we were toying around with our idea since 11 thinking of what we would be asked and what we should stress on. It went well...smooth and encouraging and we kept our fingers crossed.

As expected Quiz-2 went disastrous for us all.

Next thing we know we are greeted by a mail from Microsoft which says 'Youve Stepped Up!'.
We qualified to the Top 10 teams in India! Now this calls for a Party!

So now our real work had started. We were in the league...and on our way to the national finals.

Compre's were round the corner, no doubt, but we were attuned to this mode of 'Ignorance' which is bliss! And bliss it was...until the very end.

Ill be posting on the 'Finals Xperience' next. Keep tuned

Engineering College Rankings - Outlook vs India Today

2007-06-13T14:57:00.002+05:30

So its finally out.
Last time it was India Today and now its Outlook.

Im talking about the Great Coveted survey and rankings of Engineering, Medical and other colleges/universities in India. The June edition of Outlook features a grand cover story over this.

Among the top 50 Private Institutes/colleges, BITS Pilani (www.bits-pilani.ac.in) topped the list while BIT Mesra was second closely followed by other colleges including Vellore Inst of Technology (VIT), DCE, NSIT, Thapar etc etc.

A Point to note is that BITS Pilani opted out of India Today's survey because of a pending court case between them (India Today had cited wrong facts about the collg in the 2005 survey, as claimed by the university). However there are no qualms against Outlook as far as I know.

A lot of people rely on these rankings to decide their "destiny" during Engg entrance exams and counselling. A lot of other people have rubbished these surveys as mere rubbish and some even say that they are bogus and biased. There was a great furore over India Today's Survey and you will find various blogs and posts that convey a general sentiment among the public that the rankings were more or less "cooked up".

Well, In my opinion, It does not matter what the rank of your instt is, what matters is who you are. period. A guy who time-passes for his 4 years even at an IIT is no better than someone who makes productive use of his/her graduation time at any college.

The "final verdict" is to be decided by the populace alone...lets see whether this turns out to be "yet another survey" and finds the wrath of the people; or whether this turns out to be a more acceptable one!

PS: Here is the link 4 u to read (you need to create a free account on outlook to view these pages):
Link #1, Link #2

UPDATE: A follow up of this article is here: [http://xploretech.blogspot.com/2008/10/engineering-craze-in-india-and-college.html].

About: This is about the engineering college rankings (or the so called perception among people, of ranking). In my opinion, all the fuss is about confusion and misinformation. Half the students who get into engineering dont know what it is about, or what they want to do in life. What are the possible solutions? and why all this craze about engineering in India?

Celebrating Technology

2007-06-13T14:29:00.000+05:30

Technology is Driving the current age. From everything that has ever been to everything that will ever be, It is the single factor that contributes most to it. The only thing thats constant is "change".

Ill be blogging about my adventures in technology and various tid bits that I manage to get along the way. You'll get to read more of a compilation, along with personal projects and experiences with lots of info on various upcoming technologies thrown in.

Lets Celebrate Technology!