New Parenting blog up and running (finally) – by popular demand. The intention is to keep that completely different from this one. I and the wife will be starting to post there so watch that space. Happy to get other new (geeky) parents (or soon to be parents) contributing if they want to.

Guardian story Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US where a number of academics have done studies which conclude that Twitter and Facebook don’t connect people, but on the contrary they isolate them from reality got me thinking about this and wonder if Technology is making us less human! MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s new book Alone Together (which seems interesting and is something I have not had the bandwidth to check out), is leading an attack on the information age. It does seem to agree with the recent articles like Is Google making us Stupid? I don’t quite understand Facebook (even though I have been more on it recently); my views on Facebook are quite well known, especially in the context of privacy and security . If I talk to a friend who could be in Delhi or San Francisco, I don’t feel as connected having a dialogue with him or her over Facebook as I do when talking on the phone, IM or even email. Often people thing just because they have posted something on Facebook, that is the end of it - it almost seems at times, I am too lazy and can’t be bothered, so will post a message and get it over with - or as they say in Punjabi - “syapa mukao”. :) ...

I was excited to find that Twitter had a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) endpoint for the current trending topics and decided to write a simple consumer which can read this and then spit it out in a simple console. And JSON being so simple and more or less “universal” meant that there are multiple implementations for .NET. Of course if you got lots of bandwidth you can roll out your own parser. ...

Upgrading through *all* versions of Windows from v1 thru to Win7.

Krodh k samay mukh se nikle ashleel shabd athwa shabdo ka samuh, jinke uchaaran k pashchaat vyakti k hriday ko shanti ka anubhav hota hai :) (Sorry too complicated to translate from Hindi to English)

So I am not the biggest fan of MS maps and prefer google maps. Any ideas if this is available instead of the default maps on Win 7 phone, and I don’t mean the web version :).

First post from my brand new Windows Mobile 7 - HTC 7 Pro. What free apps do you recommend? :)

I was wondering what new features of BizTalk 2010 do you like the most? Also are they any must have tools now? I am interested in the following: Automated deployment (of interfaces) Automated testing (regression and functional where possible) Automated configuration management (across various environments – development, various testing, pre-prod and of course prod). Coordination with AppFabric?

A family of tomatoes were walking down the street. The youngest tomato was being silly lagging behind and then unfortunately he was stepped on. The mother tomato turned around and said “ketch-up”

Yo mama is so stupid that when she locked her keys in the car, it took her all day to get Yo family out.

Get a Billion

I was planning on getting the Telegesis ETRX2USB and wanted to know if there are any open source (or shareware) open source ZigBee stacks that I can use with that? I also wanted to know if there is any opensource (or not too expensive), network management or network analyser for a ZigBee network? Essentially I want to be able to programatically view network and node information on the ZigBee network (e.g. S/N ratio, signal strength, etc.) - something similar to Ember's Insight Desktop which shows the details I am interested in. I could not find anything specific and would be interested in getting ideas. ...

Yo mama is so ugly that when she walks in the kitchen, the rats jump on the table and start screaming. Perhaps, I should revive my Yo Mama jokes, no? :)

Any suggestions for any a good iPhone App for tracking Baby feeds, sleeping, pumping, etc. that the wife can use? Below is a list of what I was able to find online; some of these on reading the reviews seem better than others but no one specifically stood out. Anyone with real world experience? Baby Brain Baby Tracker PeeDoodle BabyBix Baby Connect Total baby As of now, we are leaning towards Total Baby. ...

Those who don’t know, I and Meenakshi are the proud parents if our baby girl who we have named Maya Bahree. Maya means illusion (and not money as some have thought). She is a keen and eager little thing who despite being a few weeks early is doing extremely well and so is Mum. We had to stay back at the hospital until the doctors were satisfied that Maya was doing well. Git back home about 2 data ago. ...

After upgrading to the latest WordPress (v3.0.4), I also decided to have a look at the various plugins I am running. As part of that I stumbled across Ultimate Collection of WordPress plugins which are very interesting. If you run WordPress (and if you don’t, why not :)), I would highly recommend to check them out. I already was running some of these and not heard of others which are great. ...

I am thinking of implementing a queue in one of the projects I am working on right now (sorry cannot go into more details until it gets published - hopefully in a few months). Anywyas, this is in C++ which needs to run on Ubuntu and my queueing experience (with C++ or otherwise) is only with MSMQ which is brilliant, but does not help me here as that run only on Windows. I also cannot use something like STL Queue as this will need to run across a number of machines and trying to sync between them would a royal pain. In other words, this needs to be distributed and async “loose” messaging. :-) ...

This is Ottolenghi’s recipe as it was published in the Guardian . Ingredients: Aubergines (about 1.2 kgs) Salt (1 teaspoon) Freshly ground black pepper (1 pinch) Sunflower Oil (120 ml) Olive Oil (100 ml) Medium-hot Green Chillies (2, thinly sliced) Garlic (10 cloves, thinly sliced) White-wine Vinegar (1½ tablespoon) Basil (20 gm, shredded) Coriander (20 gm) Mint (20 gm) Dill (20 gm) Steps to cook the aubergines: ...

Was getting a little bored with the previous WP theme and changed to this one. It does have a lot of defaults in the footer and not had a chance to figure out how to turn it off or customize it. If anyone has any ideas on how to do it then let me know. Also, if you have any suggestions for free and cool WP themes then let me know. ...

We were cleaning up the house - sort of like spring cleaning, except in Autumn and in old boxes came across a whole bunch of old stuff, which for me was a blast from the past and each with fond memories. Before I recycled/donated/threw it, took a few photos (click on them to see them in the original size). Compuware, the best debuggers in town. Anyone remember a Palm Vx? ...

The latest version of WordPress 3.0.3 and the Redirection plugin (v 2.2.3) don’t play nice together. If you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress the redirection plugin will always show only your last post on your blog’s homepage. Until the plugin is fixed, the only way around this is either not to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (not recommended), or to disable the Redirection plugin.

Say you are writing a new stored procedure (for MySQL) and when you execute it, you get an error something like shown below - as you probably figured out all it means is that there is a syntax error with in the SQL. Often the error is misleading especially if it is a complicated query. One easy way to help narrow down the issue is to run it in a SQL Console which usually provides a better clue that can be your pointer to fixing the issue. ...

I’m so broke even my computer is low on cache.

I don’t think many people have heard of MOOS (which stands of Mission Oriented Operating Suite); I have been working with it for the past few months as part of my dissertation. And I must admit, the more I play with it, the more impressed I am. It is quite simple and yet powerful. Whilst MOOS’s roots are in robotics ( MRG ) and embedded systems, I wonder if I can extend it to use it some of the grid computing scenarios. Maybe implement a pMapReduce or pHadoop? Or perhaps a .NET implementation. Hmm, just need some time. If you need a robust, cross platform communication layer then check out MOOS . ...