Thoughts of an inquisitive mind

Nice quote from hank moody

2011-08-03T10:53:00.001-04:00

Hank Moody (Californication) Quote by Quotes Widget for Android

Apps and application software

2011-03-30T13:59:00.000-04:00

Came across a video on the WSJ about apps being made available on computers by apple and google.
Don't know what kind of cave the reporter has been living in but on both the mac os and windows you had the ability to install "apps" since time immemorial. Apps are just a fancy marketing term by apple for application software.

To make it easier to understand - chrome, firefox, microsoft office, visual studio, anti virus software etc etc are all "apps".

Tip:gmail shortcuts

2011-03-10T14:42:00.000-05:00

Just discovered the shortcut to take focus out of a chat mole in gmail. If you are in an email in gmail and receive a chat message you could hit ESC to focus on the chat mole. But once inside the chat mole any keyboard shortcuts you type will be used as text in the chat mole.
To take focus out of the chat mole hit SHIFT+ESC. This takes the focus out of the chat mole and then the normal gmail keyboard shortcuts would be usable again.

Tool: Web conferencing and screen sharing

2011-03-09T11:18:00.000-05:00

Via lifehacker
https://Join.me is an amazingly simple implementation of screen sharing. Setting up a screen share start to finish takes less than a minute. Click on the share link on the left and a small client downloads, click run and you get a small control panel with a link to send to other viewers of the screen share, can be copied or emailed directly and options to get a conference line, chat, transfer control of your screen to someone else.

Bare bones and only the essentials. Awesome to the point tool.

Development: setting up a HttpProxy to read an image over an mixed content connection

2011-03-08T20:01:00.000-05:00

The problem is to avoid the "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this website from displaying content with security certificate errors. Click here for options...". slide down error in IE 8. This is a really confusing pop up in IE 7.

This happens when viewing a secure page over a https connection which has some content being delivered over a http connection.

To find the culprit content open the page in either chrome with developer tools (keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+I) or in firebug in firefox. Go to the "console" tab in the dev tools in chrome or the Net tab in Firefox. The content being delivered over http should be visible by sorting the requests by host/domain.

The way around is to move all this content to a secure connection to get around the error.

Now there are some situations in which you cannot get content especially images to come over a secure connection - namely content being delivered by a third party, e.g.: facebook, sharing sites, cdns. To get around this you need to create a localy proxy to stream the content to the user after fetching it over an unsecure connection server side from the third party url.

To build a solution to this problem in DotNet C# follow the solutions mentioned on the following url's

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1271701/reading-image-from-web-server-in-c-proxy

http://geekswithblogs.net/aguest/articles/58795.aspx

You could customize your solution based on the type of content you need to proxy.

Another issue you would face is the DotNet security requirements not being met and throwing an exception "could not establish trust relationship for the ssl tls secure channel". The solution to this is to replace https with http in your proxy. There is a minor security concern here since you are requesting unsecure connection to be eventually delivered to a secure page. You need to do some validation of the content being delivered to the user to ensure it is not malicious.

Another way around this is to follow the link below

http://www.ben-morris.com/asp-net-web-services-and-ssl-certificates-establishing-a-trust-relationship

The CheckValidationResult which returns true by default needs to be modified to actually validate the certificate or make sure that the host delivering the content is atleast a trusted one.

Membership minimum password requirements in dotnet

2011-02-24T18:17:00.002-05:00

Silly bug encountered in .NET while setting up minimum password requirements for a registration form. Adding the System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider to web.config would set the minimum requirements to be 6 letters and 1 number using the regular expression passwordStrengthRegularExpression = "(?=.{6,})(?=(.*\d){1,})". But when registering the user you would still get an exception stating "{"Non alpha numeric characters in 'newPassword' needs to be greater than or equal to '1'."}

This happens because if you don't specify minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" .NET assumes minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters to be 1. The correct config is to specify minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters = "0"

Testing first blog post using windows live writer

2010-10-10T04:53:00.001-04:00

Hello world from Windows Live writer. Hope this works. Should make blogging a painless 1 step process…

Spam/fraud on apartment postings on Craigslist

2010-06-11T14:51:00.000-04:00

Quick post to highlight fraud apt postings on Craigslist
The ad. Most likely this would get flagged down as spam.
Here is the email sent on replying to the ad

Thank you inquiring about my condo for rent. I am scheduling viewings of the unit and would be interested in showing you around the building.

Due to poor renting experiences in the past I am requesting that you confirm you have an reasonable credit score and would like to hear more about your current employment to avoid dealing with under qualified tenants.

I would suggest getting a free report from http://www.seemycreditscore.com which requires less than 3 minutes and has no cost. No viewings will be allowed until I have received your score. This will be helpful for other properties you are looking at and is a standard in pre-rent screening procedures.

I am asking that you complete the report and provide me with the numerical score, please DO NOT send the report as it contains sensitive information, you can print it for your records and bring it with you to the viewing.

If you can also tell me a little bit about yourself, your interests, hobbies.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you,

The mail id I received this response from was amy.ede83@gmail.com

Thoughts on the new youtube Layout/User Interface

2010-04-11T23:00:00.001-04:00

This is going to be a more of an explorative post about the UI of youtube, not a totally fun read unless you are into User interfaces.

So its been a few days since Google revamped the layout of youtube and pushed it across to all viewers rather than making it opt in only.
Interesting to see that they chose to go for an absolutely clean interface hiding everything but the most essential links/buttons from the page. Considering the site had the old layout for over 3 years it must have been a tough call to move a lot of page elements around - especially the uploader and video info to below the video from the right. I find I am totally lost when trying to get more information about the video. Before it was an easy glance to the right to get some meta info like the title of the song/movie clip, the time the video was uploaded and associated tags along with the subscribe button. The most important bits all put together in a neat little box, with the move to the bottom and the separation of the subscribe button to the top the same tasks will take a lot more movements on the touchpad + moving around in the wrong direction.
Previously you could just with 1 click favorite a video but now the same thing requires 2 clicks - click save to then favorites. This isnt that much of an issue unless you used this feature a lot, perhaps through analyzing their logs on the usage of favorites they gathered the damage on moving favorites in a sub menu is affordable.
Now to the comments section. Previously you could view how old a comment was, the rating, and a reply button right next to the comment. Now the same info is hidden away and requires a mouse over. At first glance I thought this more information has just been removed by Google who thought was worthless and decided to get rid of it to clean the page. But it was just hidden away. I find it has been a lot more tedious to move the mouse around on all comments to get such basic information. The quality of a video is judged not only by the number of views it as received but also by the number of comments the overall likes and the interaction between commentators. In this new layout there is no way to know how many comments have been received, the overall rating for the video nor how many threads of conversation are happening. A simple replication of the commenting layout of stackoverflow.com would have been much appreciated.
Another gripe is adding videos to quickplay which is now called a queue. Previously each video had a small + button to its bottom right which could be clicked to add it to your playlist. This same task now requires you to click on the right arrow at the bottom right AND THEN click add to queue. I dont get why would you require a sub menu for 1 function. Another issue with the queue is everytime you go to a new video, be it in the queue or some other video, the queue collapses and requires another click to expand it. Now this isn't a major problem but if you add another video to the queue the queue expands again and you have to scroll down to look at the list of related videos. Example.

Apple iPad initial thoughts - Product, market, audience

2010-04-04T20:56:00.004-04:00

Just went to the apple store on Boylston St, Boston. Amazing to see how many people were flocking to the store just to touch and get a feel for the device. Being the opening Sox game there was no shortage of people on the streets.
It was very interesting to see the kind of people playing with the device. There were no obvious geeks looking for their next programming device, nor were there people from the young student populace. It was mostly middle aged people and kids. Its clear that Apple's marketing using the show "Modern Family" paid rich dividends. (Also tells you a bit about what audience apple is really after with this device)
The device itself feels like a finished product, some technical specs - USB ports, cam, 3G, storage - aside. It is an absolutely smooth experience interacting with the screen. Flicking across pages of apps, rotating the device makes the screen image reorient itself, although there is perhaps a tenth of a second's lag, but its hardly noticeable. Used the youtube and gmail apps on the device. Absolutely gorgeous. Wonder why google keeps building their best apps for apple devices when there is so much open animosity between the two :P.
Coming to the important points of typing on the large screen without any tactile feedback. The only negative was not knowing which key the fingers rested on. All of us have our own quirky ways to type. All you have to do is rest your hands on your natural typing position and just type. The keys are spaced well enough that most (9 out of 10) keystrokes will be accurate. The only things I noticed about the keyboard that would be a pain is the flatness of the device, the lack of a palmrest and the fact that you cant just "rest" your fingers on the keyboard without inadvertently pressing the keys. Hope there is some kind of a software/hardware lock to prevent unintended input.
Another minor issue with the flatness of the back of the device is that you cant place it somewhere and watch a movie/video on it, this would have real practical problems if you have a group of people trying to watch something on the device. But this could have a work around using some third party cover for the device with a built in stand.
Coming to apple's strategic targeting of market segments. The ploy seems to be to place the iPad as a general purpose consumption device. With a screen larger than the iPhone/iPod it will meet a few more requirements like pass time consumption of youtube/other internet videos, television viewing online, reading blogs/books even email.
A common argument would be I can do all that AND more using a computer. Agreed. But an average 30+ year old or a 12-20 year old doesn't want to have to fiddle around with 10 settings and codecs and directory structures just to watch videos or browse the web. They want a device that gets out of the way and lets them do what they want with it. With windows or even a mac the device is just way too powerful for such basic tasks and it takes devices like the iPad and iPhone for these points to become glaringly visible.
A final point - imagine you coming home from work or school where you use your "computer" for work. Once getting home you dont want another "computer" to look at, it feels like you are working again. The iPad and other tablets like it will create and then fulfill these market needs.
For the non technically inclined they have the iPad, for the rest of us geeks we have our computer which can do what the iPad can do and a LOT more (and its got USB ports a webcam and 320 gb storage :P :P :P)

updated: Forgot to mention how the device give a platform for the dying media and publishing businesses to reinvent themselves and if nothing else survive for a few more years. Hopefully they wont just build apps costing 30/mo which let you read the same stuff you get on their website for free. If this happens and is successful it might be the beginning of the end of free information as we know it on the internet, also applies to music and videos. Why would any organization let you have things for free on one family of devices when they can charge you on another family of devices.
Add your comments below by clicking on the comments link

Google Buzz: updated hacks

2010-02-11T08:36:00.005-05:00

This would be more of a running post where I will update hacks as I discover them.

Hack#1: Find all posts by a user
In the search box on buzz type in Commentator: USERNAME -author:USERNAME to see all buzzs by the user-USERNAME. Replace USERNAME with the name of the person whose postings you want to search
Now to save this search as a readily accessible link
Enable "Quick Links" under gmail labs
Paste in the above search string in the gmail buzz search box
Click "Add Quick Link"
Type in whatever name you want to give to all the buzzs from this particular user.
Now all messages posted by this user are available at a single click

Hack#2: Clear your inbox of all buzz related mail
Click "Add filter" next to the search box in your gmail inbox, below "Show search options"
Type "Label:Buzz" in the "Has Keywords" box
Click "Next Step"
Check "Skip Inbox"
Check "Mark as Read"
Check "Apply The Label"
Create a new label with whatever name you want (this way all the buzz mail will be labelled as something else and you will never see it)
Check "Apply Filter to conversations below"
Click "Create Filter"
Your inbox should be cleared of all buzz related mail.

Google BUZZ - Features, Tricks, Initial Observations

2010-02-10T22:11:00.005-05:00

[EDIT]: Realized this is a rather long post, so just a headsup, formatted the post a bit for readability. Hope its better :)

Got BUZZ! enabled today within gmail. Here is a quick run down of the features and initial thoughts on it.

The Good

amazing integration with most google services.
Cool usage of the google profile page to show your own buzzes
@replies brilliantly integrated with your google contact list
simplicity of posting a msg very much comparable to fb and twtr
nice way to step users onto a wave like way of communicating, informal when needed and email for the formality when needed.
brilliant tool to email an entire list of buzzes via 2 clicks
Excellent thinking to integrate google shortcuts inside of buzz. j/n to move down the buzz list, k/p to move up the buzz list.
LISTS!! excellent way to partition you contacts within family formal and informal categories to limit who in your friends list sees your messages. +1 to buzz, -1 to FB. Should be one of the first things you do, would make everything a lot simpler
If you end up watching some one else post something live, be prepared to be blown away, msgs magically appear. The buzz canvas magically grows and slides down

The Ugly:

email updates on anything that happens on buzz. Can be fixed using the filter technique (Refer the end of this post)
The buzz image next to the buzz label. Just looks crass and a last minute job. They can come up with something smoother, more fitting of the times we live in
Default privacy setting is public for everything buzz. The ramifications on public search aren't clearly specified. Where are all the buzzes going, are they available [EDIT: 12:39 AM 2/11/10]on the open internet crawlable by all search engines. Do you own your own buzzes.
[EDIT]Another bit of ugliness that seems to come to mind is the gmail profile id. It is either a long random auto-generated number or your gmail id. This is just inexplicable, unless gmail allows people to have their own vanity url people are going to hesitate using it. NO ONE wants to give out their gmail id out in the open, it is the last bastion of privacy

Wishlist:

Easier way to have a contact list and the ability to view all msgs from any contact at a max of two clicks
Better way to integrate multiple google accounts as most people have more than one
retweet/share like functionality
Buzz settings tab under the overall gmail settings link to turn on and off certain features aka Labs under gmail (especially email alerts on all buzz updates)
Star mark certain buzzes to be alerted on updates, like for instance for an important public discussion which u wud like to get an update on instantly similar to how you can mute a buzz
@replies shud write the name of the person rather than the email id
Use the gmail id as a handle like in case of twitter rather than using it as @xyz@gmail.com 2 @s just doesnt seem right
A way to view all your own msgs posted, not just direct buzzes but comments and likes on other friends posts. Similar to how the facebook profile page looks or the twitter profile page looks
Way to look at public buzzes. Currently no way to look at what is being discussed publicly
Latest buzzes floating to the top of the page without having to click on buzz just to refresh the page, better still a keyboard short cut. Perhaps R+B (see a pattern here, B+ something to indicate the shortcut is specific to buzz and not for the inbox)

Advanced Wishlist:

Inline commenting to comments from friends for a threaded discussion and done smartly using @symbols rather than via clicking reply links next to all comments like in google wave
privately message users without having to go out of the buzz view. Clicking on the users image should give an option to send a private reply rather than having to email
Prioritize users who you would like to see buzzes from. Or better yet lists like in twitter!
have a keyboard shortcut to make a new buzz, aka c for composing a mail, something like c+b to post a new buzz, or just b for new buzz
API's for integrating more web services into buzz either to publish to other services, or to pipe in data from more services write into buzz
Integration with google latitude
Integrate #tag functionality and use the hashes for suggesting within the searchbox of the inbox as well as the buzz search
Perhaps if possible a way to import facebook contacts and integrate facebook and buzz updates. We are all one big happy family :P :D (this one is just wishful, will never materialize, akin to sleeping with the enemy)

Future trends indicated by Buzz:

Teaching gmail users to become a bit more informal within the gmail environment and view gmail more akin to twitter or facebook.
Concept of a hosted conversation without looking at it as a hosted conversation as is the case with google wave.
Integration with google wave would be a natural progression. Buzz is not much different, except in wave u have to add friends to a conversation, here everyone is auto-added unless you specifically make a buzz private or restricted to a group.
Eventual integration of buzz+inbox+wave into one big GBox, All your conversations belong to us
When will google start shoving contextual ads within buzz. How much context does google hope to extract out of the buzz conversations
Google is invading the social territory of facebook and facebook is slowly but surely coming onto google's turf with most personal information management featuress. (watchout for a much advanced mail application in the comming weeks - Gmail has about 180 million users and FB over 350 M, as it stands gmail is a sitting duck)

P.S. :Filter trick for eliminating all buzz update emails from your inbox

Click create filter next to the search box
Paste "Buzz from" in the "has any words" box
Click "test search"
All your buzz related mails should show up
Check "Skip Inbox"
Check "Mark as read" (since u will get an update in the buzz label)
Check "apply label"
Create "new Label" - Name it whatever u want, I have the name starting with Z so it goes all the way to the bottom.
Check "apply to the following conversations "
Click create filter.

[EDIT]: Discovered a couple of new shortcuts: G+B to go to the buzz label, and B+M to mute a particular buzz conversation. Mute is to stop following the buzz and not get any updates on it.

Kailash Kher - Piya Ghar Aavenge

2010-01-18T20:03:00.000-05:00

Just heard one of the most beautiful tracks ever - Piya Ghar Aavenge. From the album Chaandan Mein from Kailasa the band of Kailash Kher.

Below are the lyrics for the track, its a combination of hindi and Braj Bhasha (Hindustani during pre-independence days)

Chok puraavo Maati rangaavo Aaj mere piya ghar aavenge

Khabar sunaoon jo Khushi reh bataoon jo Aaj mere piya ghar aavenge

Eh ree sakhi mangal gao ree Dharti ambar sajaao ree Utregi aaj mere pi ki sawaari Har koi kaajal laao ree Mohe kaala teeka lagaao ree Unki chav se dikhu mai toh pyaari Lachhmi ji vaaro Nazar utaaro Aaj mere piya ghar aavenge

Rangon se rang mile Naye naye dhang khile Khushi aaj dvaar mere daale hai dera Peehu peehu papiha ratte Kuhu kuhu koyal jape Aangan aagan hai pariyon ne ghera Anhat naad Bajaao ree sab mil Aaj mere piya ghar aavenge (2)

oh oh oh he ri oh oh ho he ri he ri....

Anhat naad Bajaa ree sab mil (3)

The Baasuri towards the end is really nice touch.

mp3 on pakistani.pk

The rest of the album is equally good. Kailasa keeps one upping itself with each successive album. One point of contention is they add a couple of tracks from an older album in each new album. Albela Saajan is also in the album Kailasa and Tere Naina is there in Jhoomo Re. But I guess with such high quality music can't complain listening to good music over and over again.

India Sri Lanka 1st ODI 2009 quick observations

2009-12-15T17:14:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-12T20:05:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-03T18:55:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-17T09:07:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-15T08:41:00.000-05:00

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!!

2009-11-11T00:54:00.000-05:00

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

android 2.0 and google's navigation app

2009-10-28T22:27:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-27T21:37:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-17T00:49:00.000-04:00

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