Blog of Parag

Let's set so double the killer delete select all...

Check out the video, if you haven't already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkeC7HpsHxo

I don't know what everybody is complaining about. To me, Vista seems to be ready for delivery, judging from how buggy and reliable all the other Microsoft products are.

Cheap memory for iMac

Bought a cheap 1GB memory stick for iMac: Patriot 1GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300).

It is one third the price compared to the original Apple memory that sells for $300 on the Apple website. Hopefully, cheap stuff will work alright and not cause any problems.

Macs do windows, too

Apple just announced the release of Boot Camp. This software will install Windows (dual boot mode) and running windows programs on a mac will be easy. I can now play my favorite games on my imac.

Best of both worlds!

Cool UI

The computer user interface seen in the movie "Minority Report" is close to becoming reality. Check out Multi-Touch Interaction Research from NYU. Make sure you watch the video.

Thanks for the link, Mahesh.

Pop-up ads

Several friends had told me that they were seeing pop-up ads while accessing this blog. A few days ago, I figured out the link that spawned them and fixed it. If you still see those pesky pop-ups, please let me know.

March of Google

The march of Google to conquer your computers continues. Now, they have a messenger application called Google Talk. Just like other Google apps, this has a clean and simple interface.

Desktop widgets

While seeing ads for Apple's new OS X, I was very impressed with the desktop widgets that came as a part of the OS. The company that made these widgets, Konfabulator, was recently bought by Yahoo. Now, they have a windows version for the widget program and it is free.
Download your own Konfabulator and experience the widgets.

Personalised Google

Check out personalised Google home page. Pretty soon, it will look like "My Yahoo" portal. Still doesn't have all the content of Yahoo, but editing is done by supercool javascript. Looks good. Eagerly awaiting GoogleOS for PCs, which is not too far away in the future, I suppose.

Cool animation

A couple of links to cool animation...

Industrious clock

pinguin

MIT weblog survey

You can, too!

Quiz...

Can you tell a serial killer from a computer programmer? Take this quiz. I guessed only 5 out of 10 correctly.

malevole - Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

Yahoo!mail

Just noticed that my Yahoo!mail storage has gone up tp 1GB, now.

Gmail 1 year old today

Check out the home page for Gmail. The email storage space for every user just keeps on growing and growing and growing.....

iTunes

I am impressed with iTunes yet again. Not only it does a great job of organising all the music, but, it handles multiple processes very efficiently. I was listening to music from the library, ripping songs from a CD and downloading a song from iTunes music store, all at the same time. Cool, eh?!?!

Happy Birthday, Yahoo!!!

It was 10 years ago today, when Yahoo! become an incorporated company. I still remember using the Yahoo website in its Stanford days when it was a directory of websites. I have used Yahoo! as my primary search engine till Google came around. I think I created my yahoomail id back in 1996 or 1997 and still use it.

Here is a nice retrospective view of 10 years of Yahoo! as a company.

Don't forget to celebrate Yahoo's 10th birthday by going to the following site...

Yahoo! 10th Anniversary Ice Cream Giveaway

Hear ye hear ye

All rise and bow to the mighty Sir Bill

Google maps

Check out the latest Google tool: Google Maps.

The scrollable map feature definitely makes this better than Yahoo!Maps and Mapquest. It is also connected to Google Local, which is their version of Yellow Pages.

Feel the power of Javascript.

Update: A nice review of all the map tools available on the internet. Thanks for the link, Mahesh. Google maps is still in beta. I am sure a lot of other features are still under development and will be made available in the final production version.

Google Suggest

Another cool cool new tool from Google....

Google suggest

Comment spam

Every blogger is inundated with comment spam. Jay Allen's MTBlacklist works pretty well. But, it is a lot of work to update the blacklist all the time with new spam that gets through the filter.

I decided to implement a new method to stop automated spam with a plugin called SCode. It adds a verification procedure on the comment page. It is similar to the verification process used by Yahoo when you open a new account. It makes sure that a person is inputing the information and not a bot.

aNYa wrote a post about another plugin that he installed to fight spam on his blog. If the SCode plugin isn't enough to stop the spam, I'll install this additional plugin that aNYa posted about.

You spammers, burn in hell or a place of your choice!!! But, you must burn.

Computers in 2004

Do you have one of these at home? This was supposed to be published in 1954. If this is not a hoax, someone made really really wild prediction. I wonder what that big wheel is for...

The caption at the bottom reads: Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientitsts readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

Blog and get fired, part II

Here is another person who got fired for posting photos from her workplace on her blog. I had posted about this guy who got fired from Microsoft for posting workplace photos almost one year ago.

Be careful about what you post on your blog, people! It is in public domain. Your employer can view it too.

Fire Ty Willingham

A couple of weeks ago, I made a post about NCAA football and wrote that Notre Dame will probably fire Ty Willingham. I have been seeing a lot of hits coming to my blog through search engines (Yahoo and Google) with words "Fire Ty Willingham". Looks like Notre Dame fans are totally pissed at him and want to blame him for their team's poor performance and want him out. How many coaches will they fire before they realise that their whole football program is in trouble? How long will they live on those stories from past about their greatness?

Interestingly, this post will be hit by those looking for "Fire Ty Willingham", too. :)

Cheapware

An article published in the Forbes magazine talks about Cheapware. There are many open source and other alternatives for proprietary software available at a very cheap price. These range from operating systems (Linux competing with Microsoft, Sun Microsystems) to webservers (Apache competing with Microsoft and Sun) to databases (MySQL competing with Oracle and IBM) to user apps such as word processors (Staroffice competing with Microsoft). People in the software industry scoffed at them till recently as 'toys of hobbyists'. But, more and more corporations are slowly moving to the cheaper software alternatives.

The article highlights Sabre's move from Oracle to MySQL databases. Sabre is not a small company, they manage a big chunk of airline reservation system. They are slowly moving their whole operation to MySQL at a saving of more than 80% in software costs. CEO of MySQL tries to explain this switch to cheaper software.

"There's just no reason for customers to be paying so much for software," says Marten Mickos, chief executive of MySQL AB, in Uppsala, Sweden. "Software is not rocket science. It's a commodity. The business has been overglorified for 20 years."
...
Executives at Microsoft and Oracle dismiss MySQL as too puny to handle serious corporate projects. The Swedish company will likely gross $20 million in 2004; Oracle generates that much every 17 hours. "You don't want to use products from companies that perceive themselves as commodity suppliers to handle your data," says Robert Shimp, vice president of technology marketing at Oracle in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Mickos says he's glad bigger rivals dismiss his company. While they're not looking he has been winning business in the data centers of FedEx, Ingram Entertainment, Lufthansa, NASA, Omaha Steaks, Sony, Suzuki and UPS.

If this trend continues (I think it will), there are difficult days ahead for software companies unless they slash prices drastically and get competitive with the cheapies. Companies like IBM and Microsoft have diversified their business in other areas as well and they'll do OK. But, this could spell doom for software-only businesses like Oracle, Adobe etc.

XP S(ecurity)P(atch)2 ?!?!

While everyone has been rushing to get their PCs upgraded with the Windows XP SP2 patch, security researches have already found security flaws in it. I think I'll wait for a few weeks till they figure out if it is really worth doing the upgrade. Afterall, if you get an insecure buggy operating system for what it seems like the cost of an arm and a leg, how can you expect something good that is given away for free from the same company?

As a MSFT shareowner though, I hope this free upgrade will cause some unrepairable damage that can only be cured by buying the next version of Windows. *evil grin*

Thanks for the link, Vinayak!

Dinner with CSA Bill

Jeff Maurone, an intern at Microsoft blogs about his dinner at Bill Gates' estate. Must be an interesting experience to visit the world's richest man's home. Jeff's description is worth reading. The only thing missing from the account is the dinner menu.

via Prashant

Firefox 'tip of the day'

Create a new folder under bookmarks and put all the webpages that you open 'first thing every morning', in it. Under 'general' options, choose that folder as default home page. Whenever you start Firefox, it will automatically load all those pages in different tabs.

Cool, eh?

Thanks, Patrix!!

Firefox 0.9

Just upgraded to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox (0.9). Just 4.7MB to download. It is amazingly easy to install and fast to use. It allows tabbed browsing with built-in pop-up blocker. There is a huge list of extensions that can be installed with it to do different kinds of things such as a gmail notifier to a built-in text editor.

I would highly recommend everyone to try out Firefox, if you haven't already. I bet that you'll not go back to Internet Explorer. Here is a link to download it.

The blazing speed of Gmail

A recent article in MIT Technology review talks about the pros and cons of Gmail. It is not just about 1GB storage space, but, a simple interface that delivers email at lightening speed, even better than an application that is locally run on the PC.

Like most of Google’s infrastructure, Google’s Gmail service is probably hosted on racks and racks of Intel-based computers running some variant of Linux. Google’s expertise is in making thousands of these machines run in concert as a single computational resource—a resource that can store thousands of terabytes and satisfy simultaneous requests from millions of users.

Gmail validates a claim that Sun has been making for nearly a decade—that it’s possible to replace a network of PCs running Windows with world-class computers offering computing services to low-cost and easily-managed desktop machines—perhaps machines so inexpensive that they don’t even have a hard disk. Sun called such computers “thin clients.”

But Gmail does work just as well as a copy of Outlook Express running on the desktop. In some way, in fact, it works better. This is big news—bigger, in fact, then most people seem to realize.

Until Gmail, practically every Web-based application was a pale imitation of that same application running on a PC. Web-based applications had the advantage that they were accessible from any computer on the Internet on professionally managed servers, that the data was backed up, and that the applications themselves were constantly updated. But compared to applications running on your local machine the web versions had fewer features and performed more slowly.

Gmail is different. For starters, it’s blindingly fast—so fast that it feels like it is running on your local computer and not in some data center. Click on a message’s subject and it instantly appears. When you are done reading a message you click “Archive”—the message is instantly stored, and you’re looking back at your inbox. (As with other Web-based mail systems, you can report spam simply by clicking “report spam.”)

Gmail gets its speed from some of the cleverest JavaScript ever written. Lots of information is stored inside your browser and redisplayed from memory; this avoids the need to constantly download pages from Google’s servers. The JavaScript can "listen" directly to your keystrokes, allowing you to drive Gmail with single-letter commands: press “y” to archive a message, “c” to compose a new message, and so on. You don’t even have to depress the Ctrl key, making Gmail even faster to use.

Gmail shows that Web applications with thin clients can have advantages over software running on your desktop. The most obvious is reliability: Gmail runs on Google’s servers, not your hard drive, and Google almost certainly does a better job than you do with routine maintenance, backups, and the like. And because everything is kept on Google’s servers, you don’t have to wait for long downloads. Google’s computers are blazingly fast: searching through the few thousand messages stored in my Gmail account is essentially instantaneous. Searching through the same amount of mail on my local computer takes ten seconds or more.

As my last note of singing Gmail’s praises, I need to point out that it seems to work equally well with practically every other browser that I’ve been able to throw at it, including Internet Explorer for Windows, Apple's Safari for MacOS 10, and Mozilla Firefox for both. This is no easy feat for an application this sophisticated in its use of JavaScript. Google has clearly gone out of its way to show that complex Web-based applications can be developed and deployed without relying on all of that Microsoft-specific junk that’s been crammed into IE.

Bloglines

I was using a RSS reader module in My!Yahoo to keep tabs on my favorite blogs. Lately, it has been flaky, at best. Last week, I discovered another way to do the same using Bloglines | Free, Web-Based News Aggregator. The nice thing about this is that it comes with a 'update notifier' that can be integrated in Mozilla Firebird.

Yahoo!mail expands quota to 100MB

Thanks to Google for raising the bar with 1GB Gmail, Yahoo launched its new version of web-based email program today with 100MB mailbox capacity. All current users are automatically upgraded.

The wonderful, free internet! Keeps growing and growing and growing....

MT Blacklist

Anyone who has a Movable Type blog and is annoyed with spam comments about porn sites, low rate mortgages and cheap drugs, should get a plug-in called, MT Blacklist. It is just wonderful. It easily removes the comments and adds those sites to its filter list to prevent future comments from the same source. I realised the value of this tool when I looked at the activity log of my blog and was amazed at the number of spam comments, MT-blacklist denied.

So, my advice to you dear friends: Don't blog without it.

gmailswap

Thanks to my dear friend, pseudofreud, I have a gmail account of my own.

There are many around the world who are offering everything from money to 'a date with their wife' for a gmail account. Interested in making the most of your gmail account? Check out the offerings at gmailswap website.

New Windows release later this year!

Now that Windows code up for grabs on the internet, and in the hands of OS developers worldwide, we can expect a good version of Windows distributed freely later this year. Or maybe, they'll find out that the code is crappy and nothing good could be learnt from it.

200 days to fix a broken Windows

It seems like Microsoft doesn't really care about Windows security. It took them 200 days to release a patch for a major security problem in Windows. Two years ago, Microsoft started the 'Trustworthy Computing Initiative, making security the top priority of the company.

"If it really took them that long technically to make (and test) the fix, then they have other problems," Maiffret, chief hacking officer for security research firm eEye Digital Security said. "That's not a way to run a software company."
...
eEye notified Microsoft of the issue July 25 and of a second, similar issue on Sept. 25. The software giant didn't release a fix for either problem until this week, 200 days after the first flaw was found.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to retire

Yahoo! News - 'CtrlAltDelete' Inventor Restarts Career

Thanks to David Bradley, all of us could perform the three-finger-salute every time we saw the famous 'Blue Screen of Death' and started the process of putting together all the lost of work. It took David 5 minutes to write the code for this command and little did he know that he would be famous for it.

The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to restart the computer should it fail. Bradley wrote the code to make it work.

"I didn't know it was going to be a cultural icon," Bradley said. "I did a lot of other things than CtrlAltDelete, but I'm famous for that one."

I wish him a great retirement and hope he gets to enjoy life after more than 28 years at IBM. This story just cracks me up every time I hear it...

At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys.

"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Bradley said.

Gates didn't laugh. The key combination also is used when software, such as Microsoft's Windows operating system, fails.

via Prashant Kothari

Keep tabs on your blogs.

My Yahoo! RSS Beta Launched

This is great. Now, I can keep track of all my blogs from the page I visit frequently through the day. Don't need to use the Feedreader anymore. Less load on my PC, that means it may crash less often.

Google Bombs

All you need is a creative mind to find an undesirable application for every good invention. Google Bomb is an excellent example. Google's incredible algorithm finds webpages with your exact search keyword, and also finds webpages that donot have the keyword but are linked to pages that have the keyword. If one creates a webpage multiple links to a certain website using the keyword as the link, that website can be at the top of the search results of Google. Easy way to manipulate Google results.

Blogger Jivha created this google bomb to term Times of India as Dishrag of India. Click here to see the reults of Google search for Dishrag of India.

Another blogger Ankh is thinking about creating a google bomb to term Praful Bidwai as the Resident Idiot. I just contributed to his efforts by making this link. I have had enough of this idiot too. He recently expressed his opinions in a BBC interview that the call centers are bad for India. He termed the job growth experienced in this sector as "irrational exuberance" and something that has no future. Of course, he blamed it on the current government for lpromoting this as a short-cut remedy for India's long-standing problems of poverty and illiteracy. It is ridiculous to reject any kind of jobs when unemployment runs as high as it does in India.

Maybe, the Resident Idiot is just a moron who knows only to criticize the current government no matter what they do.

Spam is bad for you

Yahoo! News - Virginia Arrests Man for Spam Email Under New Law

I hope they continue to enforce this law with much vigor. Spam is probably the biggest annoyance of the internet. It accounts for almost 50% of all email sent.

This is as disturbing as the fact that 50% of world's internet traffic goes through Virginia, because of AOL and MCI. This is the reason why MCI is allowed to survive as a company even after all the lying and cheating carried out by its officers. If MCI is shut down, it will take down a big chunk of internet with it. So, sad!!!

Recent wacky referrers

It is interesting to see what link leads to your webpage. Many times the search engines pick up words from different posts that are not related and puts the page on top of the list for hits because the search keywords appear in the page. Here are a couple of wacky searches that led to my blog:
- Yahoo! Search Results for bodybuilder matthew rush
- Yahoo! Search Results for i hate dante culpepper pictures
- Yahoo! Search Results for god hates ill people
- MSN Search Results for Jessica Lynch nude pictures (multiple times in different forms)

What the Blog just happened?!

Mahesh Shantaram published a nice article on history of blogging. Learnt a lot of things I didn't know about.

Blogging could lead to unemployment

Here is a story of this guy, Michael Hanscom in his own words. He lost his job at Microsoft because of a post on his blog that talks about Apple G5s being used at Microsoft's Redmond facility and showed a photo of a truck delivering crates of G5s. He also described which building he works in and what he does.

His immediate firing would make people think that Microsoft has something to hide with respect to use of G5s. But, I don't think that is the case. He was fired because he disclosed company information (location of buildings, what goes on inside, etc.), which could be considered confidential on the web without any consent from the company.

I have no doubt MS uses Apples at its facility. They have to, because they develop Office software for Apples. I am sure they use a lot of Linux there too. Not only because it is more stable and reliable ;) , but because, it is a competing product to their own. They would try and learn things from it to make next version of Windows better(Huh!!), as tough as that may sound.

What a joke!!!! Ha Ha

What a joke!!!! Ha Ha HaNow Linux is in the same category as Windows. I don't know if this is a step up or several steps down... ;) I hope Linux systems don't start behaving like Windows.

International group Approves Linux for Use on Most-Sensitive Computers The Common Criteria organization, an international technology standards body, certified Linux for the first time on "mission critical" computers, including those in America's top-secret spy agencies and those used to deliver ammunition, food and fuel to soldiers. The certification is akin to the technology industry's seal of approval.

Supporters said it could increasingly help persuade skeptical governments and corporations to consider Linux, created and developed collectively by an international community of programmers, as an alternative to Microsoft's flagship Windows software.

Linux was certified as providing only "low to moderate" security, compared with the same group's certification as "moderate to high" last year of the security of Microsoft's Windows 2000 software.