Random Bits

“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.

Google has recently released Blogsearch. This search is specifically reserved to search through blogs which provide feeds through RSS or atom. There were many search engines reserved for indexing and searching through the blog feeds, but Google Blogsearch beats them all with its cool and familiar Google search interface. Though the regular Google search also indexes blogs, Blogsearch is very handy being specific to Blogs. This also has some Advanced Search features specific to Blog search like Searching based on blog author, etc. One more cool feature of Google Blogsearch is that it lets you subscribe for the search results. A feed for feeds

Links:
1. Google Blogsearch - Google Interface
2. Google Blogsearch - Blogger Interface

http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/
One of the cool versions of Apple ipod. It gets its name “ipod nano” by its sleek looks and amazing features. Its tagged “Impossibly small”! It can store upto 1000 songs and is available at a starting price of 199$. It has all the features of a regular ipod and more…

Kannada Kasthuri the First Online 24/7 Radio. It plays some great songs - a good mix of old and new film songs. It also has a very active forum. I was surprised to find so many interested kannadigas on internet. The site also provides an option for requesting songs to be played on the radio. We can also find kannada music reviews like “Akash - not a typical Appu’s album”, “Valmiki - Nothin Special Guru!”,… Lots of Kanglish used by the visitors of the site.

Masth aagidhe guru.

Platypus and GreaseMonkey are some of the coolest extensions for firefox that i have used. Any web page can be edited using Platypus. If you want to take a print out of a web page and if it has lots of useless information like Ads etc. then the unwanted portions can be cut using the smart cut feature present in Platypus. If you visit a web page and it is too gaudy then you can selectively make it black and white and view it peacefully. There are host of other tools in platypus to tweak the web pages. After modifying the web page it can be saved as a greasemonkey script, so that your subsequent visits to the page will be customised.

There are numerous other extensions for firefox. Need be, i will try out all those plugins.

ShouldExist stands by its tag line - “Good ideas, free for all”. Its a place where people pitch in their ideas on variety of things. These ideas are released into the public domain and are intended to make the world a better place to live in. In this present world of patents and ugly plagarism beating its trumphet all over the globe, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the site “ShouldExist”, in which people freely publish their ideas for the betterment of the world. If you are a person looking to implement an idea but dont have one, or if you are one with lots of ideas but dont have time or other resources to make them work, then “ShouldExist” is the right place for you.

If you are thinking not many people will be ready to share their ideas openly with others then you are wrong. “ShouldExist” has reinforced my belief that “The future of human beings will be driven by their community.”