India Sri Lanka 1st ODI 2009 quick observations

So really close game, India just good enough to outlast the Lankans.

A couple of points regarding the finish. When Nehra bowled a yorker to Kandamby and Nehra threw the ball towards the stumps, Kandamby took a run with the ball deflecting off of his body.

Most teams have a policy which is generally accepted that you dont run if the ball hits you or your body. We had Brad Hogg in commentary praising Kandamby for taking the single. The argument being if the ball hits your body and deflects onto the stumps you are still run out if you are short.

A few overs later Angelo Mathews hit a drive down the ground and was coming back for the second run. He ran right in front of the stumps to prevent the fielder from being able to get the ball back to the keeper to affect the run out which is an acceptable thing. Except Hogg was fine with that too.

So in his rule book you should run in front of the stumps when taking a run and when the throw hits your body and deflects off you should take over throws as well. What a beautiful strategy. Why not have the batsman look at the throw coming in and hit the ball on its way to the stumps with his bat and collect extra runs. After all its all allowed right.

It was only deserving to see Kandamby run out a bit later on.

Highlights of the game if anyone is interested.

Best Facebook Privacy Settings

Privacy is not something I am usually too concerned with. Since you can usually rely on engineers at large corporations to make the right choices regarding what kind of information of a person should be made public and what kind of information can be analyzed to make money on through advertising.

Google does it, facebook does it and every other email/web service provider does it.

But with the recent changes to the privacy policy and default settings on facebook it made me wonder if facebook has their heart in the right place. Before you could leave all the settings untouched and be reasonably comfortable that only your friends and perhaps friends of friends would be able to access your information. And most people wont mind that, after all the way to grow your network and find new people is through letting a subset of facebook users see you.

With the new settings most if not all of your information on facebook becomes viewable by everyone on facebook. And to top it off there are things on your profile/status updates/notes/fan pages which will show up on any search engine as well.

So rather than going through all the details, here is a quick summary of what I have got on my facebook privacy settings to keep almost all the information on and about my profile limited to only my network.

To get to the privacy settings click on Privacy Settings under Settings. Top Right of the screen.

Profile Information. -> Photo Albums

Contact Information.

Applications And websites. -> What your friends can share about you

Search.

If you are making any changes click on the preview my profile on the top right to ensure your new profile page is acceptable to you.

Even with all these changes your friends list is still visible to everyone. This has been a bone of contention across the web. A simple way to make it invisible to strangers is to click on the small pencil at the top right of the friends box and UNCHECK the "Show my friends on my profile". Doing this makes sure no one sees your friends list if they stumble upon your profile.

It might seem a little paranoid to go through all these steps to hide all this information, but the information hiding is only from strangers, not friends of friends, Pure strangers.

Sehwag and his uniqueness

Absolutely brilliant breathtaking batting by Sehwag on the 2nd day of the 3rd Test match at CCI in Mumbai. In the first session of the test match the pitch looked like it would assist fast bowlers and spinners alike and what does Sehwag do? Gets India in the lead by 50 by the end of day 2.

The brutality of this innings was mind blowing. To bat the way he did for a session is difficult enough, he maintained his batting tempo for 79 overs except for a spell towards the end of the day and a couple of overs after tea.

During the 90s teams used to struggle to make 270 in a day. That gives a yardstick to compare the scale of Sehwag's achievement. And India did not even bat the whole day. Given another 11 overs he would have easily got the record for the most runs in a day which currently belongs to Sir Bradman against guess who, England, 309 runs.

If this was an ODI and Sehwag was the opponent SL would have still lost this match as I am sure if he plays 300 deliveries he will score around 350 runs.

Enough of stats. Coming back to the quality of the knock and the sheer brilliance of it. I dont think there has ever been any cricketer in the history of the game who bats as aggressively as Sehwag and for such an extended duration.

What goes into such an inning:

Talent

Hard work and practice

Physical strength and stamina to bat for so long.

Batting technique to survive international bowling

The sheer audacity to not give into the norm of bating for time in a test match. Following and trusting your gut instinct each and every delivery.

The first 4 any number of international greats have had over the history of the game. Sachin, Ponting, Dravid, Hayden, Viv Richards, Kallis, Border, Gavaskar..... Long list

But none of them have had the daring to have utter disregard for the classical mould of scoring runs. All of these players would have batted for the length of a day and longer. But none of them would have even thought about keeping their scoring pace for the entire duration of a day. Dont get me wrong I am a fan of each one of these players and they are all very very special batters. But the way Sehwag has batted for the last 6 7 years you just have to stand up and admire his style.

Here's hoping he gets to 500 by the end of the day, provided he doesn't get bored from the Sri Lankan bowling.

On a side note: I am really hoping Muralidharan gets a few wickets. It would be an absolute shame to see a legend like him playing his last game against India and abroad bow out being treated like a 2nd grade net bowler. He deserves better. Have to admire the man's spirit. The final ball of the day he bowled a straighter one to Dravid which Dravid didn't pick and there was a huge appeal. The ball was missing leg but the look in the eyes of Murali was worth staying up all night. Toiling for the whole day the man still had the energy and the determination to plot for a wicket and the sheer disappointment on his face at not getting the wicket was really sad to see.

Facebook: Changes to the newsfeed filter

Just came across a neat little change on the newsfeed. Previously whenever you would get these annoying updates from spammy applications like "farmville" or "bestfriend" and the likes you could hover your mouse over to the top right corner of the message and a hide button would appear. Clicking on it would allow you to hide that application or hide that particular friend completely.

Now what you have is a hide button, clicking which you get the message " _____ has been hidden from your News Feed..." with an Edit options link. On clicking the Edit link you have options to customize your newsfeed, remove or add friends change the maximum number of messages you get in your feed etc.

This is a step in the right direction. As before there was no way to reduce the number of messages received from some friends with whom you weren't necessarily in touch with. This could lead to further narrowed down filtering options for users to customize the feed. Maybe even to the extent where messages from particular friends which contain certain words should be filtered out. A scenario where this could be useful would be if you have a certain friend who you follow but he msgs excessively about girls or computers then his messages could be filtered by these words.

Hopefully some day there would be an option to export your newsfeed to view it in an external rss reader :P

Spare External HDD

So my Compaq C700 died on me last week. The lcd was dead and the vga port didn't send out any signals to the external monitor. So I ended up ordering a Lenovo G550 from Newegg. Got a great deal, 395$ !!

Now I have the problem of moving stuff from my old 500 GB drive to the new laptop. I have an external drive (Western Digital passport portable 320). So my thoughts are to open that one up and replace the drive with the 500 GB drive. I am not sure how or if this would work.

The other idea I had was to somehow connect the HDD to my router so I could access it without connecting it to the computer with a USB drive. Looked at various USB to Ethernet adapters. But these seem to be solutions built for old computers with no network card installed and wanting to connect to a router. And none of these could be connected to the HDD as it takes in a micro USB.

Even if I could find a micro USB to Ethernet adapter this idea won't work. The problem is to work as a network drive the hdd needs to be a mini computer on its own. Hence there are these expensive NAS boxes and enclosures available online.

So now I have landed on Addonics NAS Adapter which is an enclosure in which you can put in your external 2.5" laptop drive and make the necessary connections and connect it to the router. With some additional software installed (the install guide is provided on the site) you have a cheap NAS solution.

The other option is to go for a customer product from DLink (DLink2). There are pre-built NAS boxes you can buy from Buffalo or Western Digital, but these are expensive solutions.

Will update this post once I have executed either of these strategies and got my old data on the new computer

Free Google wave Invites!!

Got 18 invites, anyone want one leave a comment with your mail id.

android 2.0 and google's navigation app

Just a quick note on a possible flaw or feature of this app in combination with google latitude (Latitude allows users to sign into google and show their current locations to their friends on google maps, uses phone's gps or a fancy google gears app to get your location on a laptop) You could have users stalking others friends of theirs via latitude and using google's navigation app to guide them get to their friends current location. Now depending on how current the data is or how often google refreshes this data users could possibly have a nightmarish situation.

On the other hand people could play games using latitude and navigation. Catch me if you can!

Zune HD and the mandatory software that comes with it

Got gifted a zune HD from a friend a few days back. Was a pleasant surprise.

(This would be an incremental post, would keep updating it as I have varied experiences using the device)

Must say the device on first impressions blows my mind away. The touch screen is smooth as butter. Absolute pleasure to use The text based UI. The menu system, even though slightly limited in that it is linear and doesnt allow you to jump around much, is very well thought out. Dont know the font they have used (Segoe UI?) but it is awesome to look at, especially on the black ground the letters just pop out.

The pictures section is very well designed too. Pretty standard affair these days considering touch screen devices have been around for the last couple of years.

Coming to some of the poorly built features of the device.

THE BROWSER: Absolutely disgusting to see that Microsoft has ported some archaic branch of IE for the portable device. It literally feels like you are back in the dark ages of windows 98 with your browser supporting only mobile versions of most sites. Lot of the modern and most importantly MOST OFTEN used sites by people (gmail, facebook) dont even render their standard versions in the browser. Even if you are willing to accept the sub standard experience you would get on the small screen, you just can't get the full version of gmail or facebook as the browser is too old to support a lot of the newer html and javascript features.

Seeing how any device that connects to the internet will be used to connect to the internet they could have certainly done a better job with the browser. Hope microsoft is not as hard handed as apple and allows people to install browsers when they open up the app store. Seeing their history with monopolistic law suits, they might just allow third party browsers

The keyboard is quite innovative and given that the screen is not broad it works wonderfully well. You can conveniently use it for a few lines of text (twitter updates, or a few lines of mail)

The HD radio is being used as a big selling point. They shouldn't brag about it too much. It doesn't even have an easy way to preset some stations or mark some as favorites (atleast I haven't come across such a feature yet). When you do catch a station it plays very well and the sound fidelity is excellent. Especially love how it displays the title and artist name with an option to add to cart and later buy it from the market place (if you use the market place feature and plan to buy some music from it ;) )

Video player is pretty run of the mill. Renders wmv and some other formats I think, havent bothered too much with it, too memory intensive. Saw the video of Billy Gates at TED, was pretty good.

That is about it for the player. The biggest drawback software wise is that there are 9 (NINE) apps other than the standard apps. Just for reference apple has 100,000 (ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND) apps. Agreed that perhaps 90 or even 95 % of these applications are absolutely useless to most if not all the people. that still leaves about 5000 useful apps. Zune has a weather app, a sudoku app and a chess app that I have tried. Good for a few minutes but not particularly involving. Once I started using the device I quickly ran out of things to do on it. Have a bunch of songs on it which will play in the background, there's only so many pictures you can look at, the browser doesn't render most of the internet and... well there is no and. A real waste of such a beautiful screen, you would quickly end up dumping it in your pocket or on the side.

In a later post I would crib a little about the Zune software that is mandatory to be used with the device (ala Itunes for the ipod) (heads up: not too many positives)

UPDATE: Some more pathetic experience using the Zune software. (10/30/09 12:19 am)

First things first. The UI is awesome. The way the player goes into full screen mode is beautifully designed (graphically, software not so much).

Thats about all the positives I can think of as of now.

Now to the negatives. Whoever designed the playlist feature should get a kick up their backside. There is no way to create a playlist on the device itself. I dont see a reason why this is not provided. They have a virtual keyboard, there is a way to add songs to a current playlist. Why not just add a couple of more options to create a new playlist right on the player and add songs to it. Its not like everyone has a pre-planned process of dumping songs onto pre defined playlists on the player.

Coming back to the software there is no way that I could find to create a new playlist on the device via the software either. I click on the device and I see a bunch of songs, I try to right click on everything and all there is is delete/copy to collection. WHERE is the add to playlist option. I click on playlist at the top right and it says there are no playlists on your device currently. Given that there are no playlists what do you think is the thing I am looking for when I click on playlists (Ans: create one)

Not too bitch too much about the layout of the entire software, but trying to create a new playlist out of your collection is quite an arduous task. Clicking on playlists opens up a playlists column on the left, you click on new playlist and a new playlist column opens up on the right. Now what. How do I add songs to it? Thats click on collection to go to your songs now, right click on a song, click on add to playlist, then select the playlist, then select OK. So from creating a new playlist to managing to add a song takes a royal 8 (EIGHT) clicks. So much for usability.

How bout going back to how this was done in Windows media player and giving a single view of the library and the playlists, so someone could just drag and drop songs right onto a playlist, reduce the clicks by atleast 4 or 5.

Besides the pathetic usability of the software, it is a humongous memory and cpu hog. At any given stage the memory usage doesnt drop below 140 MB. Now this is when you are doing nothing with the software and it is quietly sitting in a corner. Start any task on it and watch the usage spike to upwards of 170 MB closing in on 200 MB. As far as the CPU goes, seems like msft wants a monopoly there too. Anytime you close any other application seems zune is just waiting to eat up the cpu cycles. CPU usage keeps fluctuating from 5% all the way upto 100% depending on whether the software is idle or you use it.

Its bad enough that the device itself feels 2 years behind the current competition. But having to suffer pains because of a poorly designed software by one of the largest software companies in the world is just inexcusable.

Hello World :P

Coming from a computer science background it is only logical to have a hello world post. More to follow