Random Bits

FOSS.in 2005 concluded yesterday. This event was previously called Linux Bangalore. It was great to see the open source gurus in person. Events like these are surely a source of inspiration. The event ended with a Rock show by the band Phenom. The FOSS.in 2005 had a record number of talks & BOFs, second only to OReilly’s open source conference. The event was studded by people like Adrew Cowie, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdof, Harald Welte, Jonathan Corbet etc. In this event, which was spread over 4 days, one speaker who caught by imagination was Adrew Cowie. His casual and open style of putting things was really cool. Only other person whom i have seen with such a distinctive style is Miguel De Icaza. Having attended all four days of the event, i fully enjoyed the conference and am looking forward for its next edition.

After attending the FOSS.in convention i have decided not to - steal s/w & music. So, i deleted the pirated proprietary s/w and songs from my PC, and now have only free and open source software running on my box. It really feels good.

National Informatics Center(NIC) has recently released india.gov.in - the official site of government of India. Unlike other sites of NIC this one is very refreshing. It has a very good, easy to navigate template. It is no IE specific crappy asp coded pages. It is built using php and is probably running on a GNU/Linux server. Most of the pages load quickly.
The site has tons of information and surely is serving its purpose of being a one-stop place for things related to India. It has links for official documents like budget, five year plan, Constitution of India etc. The “Know India” section is the one i liked the most. This has subsections like the Profile of India, National symbols, Culture/Heritege, States, Photo Gallery and also a kids section( not joking ). Going through these pages it was like reading history and geography books during school days. Reading about the history of India ( from Indus Valley Civilisation to partition of India ) and about the various geographic features of the country, brought back the memories of the good old school days. As they say “Those were the days”. Apart from these educative things the portal has other useful links like directory, maps, photo gallery, who’s who and also a e-greeting facility. The site has seperate section for citizens of India.
This site is worth exploring.

Google Adsense has added a new referrals feature. This allows website publishers to increase their adsense revenue by referring more people to Google Adsense. Thats the button you see at the top right corner of this page. What are you waiting for? Click the button and start making some money

The interesting part of the Google Referral scheme is that it is also encouraging people to refer others to use “Firefox browser with google toolbar“. Google will pay 1 USD for every such referral. This feature is currently available only for web publishers who reside in US, but it will soon be open for others as well. With Microsoft and Yahoo showing their intentions of having a tieup to counter Google’s recent successes in the webservices domain, Google is trying to take both its rivals in one shot with this new referral campaign. Google’s support for Firefox will go a long way in popularising the browser. Its not long before Firefox challenges Microsoft IE as the leading browser. How i am waiting for this to happen???

I’m loving it. Having weekends off, after a long time, i have taken to cooking. Last weekend i was on a role and prepared Mutton Masala. Suprisingly it was awesome and we managed to finish it. This has given me enough courage to go on with my new found passion. Tonight i was looking for some recipes online. Karthik suggested me sanjeevkapoor.com. On this site you can find recipes prepared by Sanjeev Kapoor. Unfortunately access to most of these require annual subscription, which costs 750Rs but comes with 3 best selling books of sanjeev kumar, which actually cost 750Rs when bought. However there are around 38 free recipes to try out. I will be having a shot at Mahorba Mushroom tommorow. It looks good, let me see how i end up doing it.

Apart from these recipes the site also has some interesting sections:-

With Windows Live MS is venturing into the online services sector in a big way. Though Windows live.com is not a novel idea it comes in a good package. With efforts like these they are directly competing with the Google, claiming their share in the pie. One thing Microsoft is trying to do with this is to build a “community” of users, like its rival Google. According to Microsoft the launch of live.com doesnot come in the way of its existing msn.com and its services.

Windows Live.com is a site into which user can login with their microsoft .net passport. The page can be customised by adding various gadgets like Mail previewer, Horoscopes, Stock Quotes, Clock, Shopping tool etc. There are many more cool gadgets available at microsoftgadgets.com.
Some of the things i have on my page are:-

Apart from the live.com the Windows Live includes

• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Care , etc..

To know more about these services check the site ideas.live.com.

sandbox.msn.com is the MSN equivalent of Google labs. It is a place where all the cool ideas of MSN are put on display. Start.com is one such cool idea.

ICICI Direct University gives insight into various investment options. It gives gyan on things like Equities, Futures, Options and Mutual Funds. There are many sites in the internet describing these topics in much detail. But good thing about this site is that all the explanation is done in an Indian context. ICICI direct is a mechanism for online trading. An account in ICICI direct comes with an embedded demat account which enables trading of stocks in electronic format. The site is still not mature with some broken links and missing information. However the demos present here are encouraging.

“The States of Indian Cricket” is a book written by Ramachandra Guha. I recently bought this one by exchanging a few coupons in landmark. This book is divided into two parts

I have managed to read the first part of the book. Here Guha deals with various domestic teams of Indian cricket listing his all-time teams to represent them. The books focuses on many old-timers starting from Ranjitsingji, CK Nayudu, Vinoo Mankad, etc. Guha is settled in the state of Karnataka and shows his open appreciation for the players from here. Being a follower of the game of cricket and a big time fan of it, i loved to read about the tales of some of the all time great cricketers of India. The book also talks about the major cricketing tournaments which were being played then like the Pentangular tournament - now banned, was contested by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Rest, …

While telling about the state teams Guha talks about the tough luck of the players from Bengal - the lack of opportunity given to them. He compares the changes in cricket with that of politics of that time, like Subhash Chandra Bose being sacked from the Congress presidentship etc..This thing however cannot be said about the current crisis in the Indian cricket team over Ganguly’s issue. Ganguly had been a great captain but, in his current form he should make way for Dravid, a humble cricketer and a consistent performer. He has justified this with a fantastic win over Srilanka today. I hope the good form of Sachin and Dravid continues…

Being a crazy cricket fan, this book has been worth a buy. Being mostly jobless till 9th, I hope to finish reading the second part of the book.

I just watched this 1967 movie. The Graduate is one of the best Romantic Dramas i have watched so far. Its about a fresh graduate who is confused about his future. Then he is seduced by his father’s bussiness partener’s wife and he ends up having an affair with her. The Graduate ( Ben ) then falls in real love with this woman’s daughter -Elaine. The rest of the film is about how he tries to convince Elaine about his love and what he does to get her love. The Graduate is fun to watch and it rightly falls into the genre of Comedy also.

I had thought i would write only about technical things in this blog. But i have no such fundae anymore. Moreover i watched this from my office…

Some of the other
Good movies i watched this week - “Wicker Park”, “Crash”.
Not so great one - “Mon tresor” ( a hebrew movie )
Bad one - “See the Sea” ( a french movie )

Google Zeitgeist
Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google

This captures the general interests of the people using google around the world. Google generates this report from the millions of searches done through google search engine. It has some interesting summaries like Popular Celebrities, Google News Queries, Google image search queries, etc…

The word Zeitegeist derives from the German words Zeit(time) and Geist (spirit). Going by the number of users of Google search it truly captures the sentiments of the people.

For example the popular queries from india include - sania mirza, kingfisher airline, tsunami etc…

The Google Zeitegeist report is free to use but should be attributed to Google.

Current TV - a new way of integrating Internet and Television. Current is a new TV channel started by Al Gore. The basic funda of current is to show people the things which the people feel are happening and not decided by a news room. Current works in collaboration with Google. It uses a service called Google Current. Every half an hour Google current gives what people are searching over Google. Using this knowledge from Google, Current decides its content. Current is mainly targetted at capturing the interests of younger sections of the society. Cool feature of Current is it lets people create the content. It calls it Viewer Content Creation VC2. It lets the registered members of the site to review and rate the programs to be viewed on Current.

This one seems to be a good idea - trying to capture the interest of the masses through internet and reach out to a large number of people through television.