Geek

I don’t know if you knew or not, but as a kid Physics was my favorite subject (yep more than Computers), and I almost went into that line of things, but the idea of controlling a machine at my will (machine being a computer here) was more fun, so here I am many moons later. But, every now and then my old physics roots still pull me to something interesting I read about (its only reading now, no more experiments). One consequence of Einstein’s theory (E=mc²) is that a clock in motion will always appear to run slowly compared with one at rest (and since all motion is relative, the clock at rest will appear to go slowly from the vantage of the one moving). ...

This is very cool! Google now has officially released their API’s for Google Maps; till now there were a few hacks in place such as my where I work , but now its all supported. You would need to get a key, which is associated with a specific url, you can get that here and also read up on all the fun details here . ...

Jon has released a crack for google’s video viewer which allows you to view movies from anywhere (as opposed to those hosted only by google.com). Here is the crux of the code which prevents that: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 // Google mods const char\* allowed\_host = \\"video.google.com\\"; char \* host\_found = strstr(p\_sys->url.psz\_host, allowed\_host); if ((host\_found == NULL) || ((host\_found + strlen(allowed\_host)) != (p\_sys->url.psz\_host + strlen(p\_sys->url.psz\_host)))) { msg\_Warn( p\_access, \\"invalid host, only video.google.com is allowed\\" ); goto error; }

Yahoo’s new blog service called 360 , which till now was not open to the public is now up and open - you should be able to sign in using your yahoo id. You can do a lot of things in addition to the blog such as Photos, Reviews, Links, Blast (which is an online conversation thread - looks quite similar to a chat session), Radio, etc. Check out a sample page provided by Yahoo which shows their vision. I have been waiting for this to go live for a little while, and though Yahoo has come late to the game of blogging, it sure has added a lot of stuff which allows it to catch up. ...

Recently there has been a lot of hype and talk about Monad Shell (a.k.a MSH), not sure why, but such are the state of things. What is Monad? Simply it is the new command line interface to the Windows Server OS and is code named Monad Shell. It is fairly powerful and has its roots set in VMS and AS400 environments. I would check out the quick demo (15 mins) thats shows the power of the shell - very exciting and interesting. ...

Last few days I have been messing around with the Beta 2 edition of Whidbey (now its called VS.NET 2005, but I still prefer Whidbey). If you recall my previous post about ClickOnce , my experience so far has not been good. I imported my clock applicaton (more on the issues importing it at another time) to Whidbey and tried to deploy it but for some reason it did not work and get a non descriptive error saying: ...

If you saw my previous post about good free software one feature of Screamer Radio I forgot to mention is that is can save your stream you are listening to as MP3’s - and you have full control over the bit rate, file names, etc. Want to check out some samples? Well I recorded two songs from the Australian Station called Nova at 256 kbps; you can download the mp3s from here (6.4 mb). ...

These two choices for creating PDF’s and listening to Internet Radio are interesting because they are pretty good at what they do without all the bloatware from some of their competition and equally important - they are free! If you wanted to create PDF’s for your own personal use, now you can at an amazing price of free! CutePDF is a program which you can use for free for your personal use without any ads, popups, etc. Everyone cannot afford Acrobat Professional (but if you can its worth every penny), but this is pretty cool too. ...

I remember reading about this a little while ago and now ExtremeTech has a review. Ergodex has a fully programmable keyboard called the DX1 Input System. It is a USB peripheral device designed for users to arrange (and rearrange) an assortment of programmable keys anywhere on its 11-inch x 9-inch “DX1 Pad.” The concept is simple: You begin with 25 DX1 keys, place as many of them on the DX1 Pad in any layout you wish, and use the included software to assign functions to each one. ...

ExtremeTech interviews Microsoft VP, Todd Holmdahl who is responsible for all the hardware development, hardware and semiconductor teams, manufacturing, and test teams for the XBOX 360 - pretty interesting insight on how MS developed this from the ground up with IBM and ATI and on what to expect from the new device on the hardware front. ...

At last now you can personalize the google home page - options include seeing your emails (from gmail of course), stock market, news (from Google New, BBC, NY Times, etc), Weather, etc. Interestingly slashdot features on the list - separately - which means *sigh*, more noise is now going to be generated there. Check it out here .

Now that Windows Mobile 5.0 is released, if you want to see how it looks then check out the screenshots . I don’t know if HP would be releasing the updates for my handheld for this as mine is a bit old now - but if they are I would surely be playing with this in the near future. ...

Well not sure what Google plans to do with this, but they just released something called a Web Accelerator that is designed to work with broadband connections and supports both IE and Firefox. What is it? Per Google it is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before. ...

Well, in addition to the antivirus issues with Windows x64 bit, if you upgrade in most cases you could void your computers warranty - this varies from manufacture to manufacture of course. If you know the advantages of 64 bit and are one of the early adopters (or in other words a geek), then you are OK as you probably don’t need the manufacturer’s support (except if they need to switch hardware when it gets fried). ...

Got this via Karan. Firstly, I am not suggesting you try this, and secondly it is probably a hoax; but I did come across this site which claims for a couple of grand or so (e.g. MCSD.NET $2,800), you can get certified in any of the MS and CISCO exams without sitting for any one exam. This sounds like one of those too good to be true stories and does not seem legit at all. Does seem quite hilarious… ...

I was playing around with Whidbey (finally), the Beta 2 drop and decided to check out if Entlib compiles. After converting the project (ping me if you need screen shots), there were a whole bunch of errors. Well, in reality not errors but warnings. Since, by default VS.NET 05 treats warnings as errors, the build fails miserably. Once I got around to setting ignore warnings, it did compile, but I have not gotten much further with it yet due to lack of time - more playing around with that this week. But almost all the failures were due to stuff being deprecated in .NET 2.0. I have both the logs - where things were failing and then the one where I ignore the warnings . ...

I came across this blog entry talking about the new transactional NTFS in action ; very interesting and very cool (yes this is in Longhorn - you can check out some screen shots). What is more interesting is that internally people at MS have started using it, but the question that comes to mind is, is that outside of Longhorn (are there any bits running on Windows 2003 Server or XP, etc)? ...

MSRA SRC is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, that was developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. On-the-fly it clusters a search engine’s search results into different groups, and provides meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate the user’s browsing. ...

Let me start of by saying that Firefox is some decent amount of code, and if you read this blog regularly you know I have use that as my primary browser as opposed to IE. In spite of all the comparisons and market share updates , I still have a few issues with it - and these are serious issues (in my context) and not minor gripes. ...

Well, when you combine two great ideas then the outcome is simply mind blowing. This has to fall in the category of “Why the heck did I not think of it!” and is totally awesome! Paul has combined the power of Google Maps and Craigslist into one application where if you are looking to rent or buy a house you can not only see it on the maps but also the satellite view! How sweet is this? Now I am just waiting for London to show up… dang, all the fun kicks off when I move from the US. ...

Not sure, when this was “launched”, but Google maps are now available for UK . Interested in knowing where I live, then click away ! Unfortunately, the Satellite view is not available right now, you can only look at it at the country level which does not help. ...

I have not tried this myself, no intention too either (one, am quite happy with my TomTom and two, maps are only for the US), but Moving Gmap adds moving map functionality for Google Maps using a connected GPS unit. (It makes the map recenter on you as you walk/drive around). If someone tries it out let me know how it goes. ...

If you ever mange to screw up your IP Stack on Windows how to fix it? Well one way is to remove the protocol from all the network cards and then possibly also your network cards and adding them again (after rebooting of course). Alternatively, depending on your OS version you could apply a service pack. Also, in Windows XP, the TCP/IP stack is considered a core component of the operating system, and you cannot remove TCP/IP. Therefore, when you view the list of components for a network interface, you may notice that the Uninstall button is disabled when Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is selected. In extreme cases, the best solution for this issue may be to reinstall the Internet Protocol stack. But with the NetShell utility, you can reset the TCP/IP stack to restore it to its state that existed when the operating system was installed. Here is the command you run in a command prompt: ...

I got this via my lovely wife Meenakshi (who still has not bothered to start blogging ;)). Google is further increasing the storage space on Gmail (on the occasion of its 1st birthday) and running something interesting on their website which shows how the space is increasing. They are beginning to roll out their “top secret"Infinity + 1 plan, with the key being the gift that keeps on giving… storage space that is.. :). From last night this has gone up from 1611.47 mb to 1924.88 mb and still counting! They also list out some features such as Fonts, bulleting, colors, highlighting , etc. This makes this even more compelling to use than other options like Yahoo or Spammail… err.. I mean Hotmail. ...

Got this one from Karan, if you have problems waking up in the morning, especially with an Alarm clock, you might want to check out Clocky . If you wondered what is so exceptional about this well read on… When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky’s shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day. ...