Category: Uncategorized

Guess what!! MobilePCMag has rated the powerbook as the #1 Gadget of all time. They have rated 100 gadgets and the powerbooks stood first ;). Well of course I should not fail to mention that the powerbook in question here is Apple’s Powerbook 100 and not the latest generation that I own. Here is the reasoning given on the website

Never mind the Apple versus PC debate: Until Apple unveiled this 5.1-pound machine, most “portable” computers were curiosities for technophiles with superior upper-body strength. But the PowerBook 100’s greatest and most lasting innovation was to move the keyboard toward the screen, leaving natural wrist rests up front, as well as providing an obvious place for a trackball. It seems like the natural layout now, but that’s because the entire industry aped Apple within months. The first PowerBooks captured an astounding 40 percent of the market, but more important, they turned notebook computers into mainstream products and ushered in the era of mobile computing that we’re still living in today.

Wow, imagine a single portable capturing 40% of the market. Innovation, thats the name of the game. Kudos Apple. Even Apple has it share of problems, for eg they will not replace a laptop with bad pixels unless there are 10 or more of them. I find that totally absurd. But I am quite happy with them for their products both hardware and software. Lets see what the future hold for them

Well you might have heard about how MSN had doctored its site just so it didn’t work in Opera. Well I have no idea why they did that only to Opera and not to any other browser. Anyhow yesterday I paid my taxes online and got a nice refund back (yippie!). Anyway I used this website, exTaxreturn. Now the odd thing is that they seem to have differing PRICE SCHEMES depending upon the browser you use. This is so so very odd. Here are screenshots taken from three different browsers at around the same time today.

Thanks Anil

On Windows

On Firefox on Mac

On Safari on Mac

Check out the range of prices!!

I was browsing the net looking for some good websites. Anil had linked to this site, thedailywtf. Pretty cool site, ithas what the author calls wtf’s in code. Anyway so there was this link out there where a user had queried msn for the quickest and the shortest route between two places in Norway. Man the results were astounding. Please do go here and check it out for yourself. Anyway for ypur benefit, here are the results. The first image is for the shortest route and the second is for the quickest. :)). I will never believe in these maps ever again

The Shortest route

The Quickest route

Well the hot news for today is that I have updated my photogallery. It now uses the latest version of expose(4.0). The guy who made expose has also created an album manager for both Mac OS X and Windows. You can find both at the website. Check it out. Really good stuff.

Today I was trying to render video using bitmaps I create in memory. Now I don’t know why but if I render two videos simultaneously, my processor utilization went sky high to 90%. Now keep in my mind I code on a 3.4 GHz hyperthreaded P4, so there is no dearth of processing power out there. I tried several things, but the lowest I could bring the CPU utilization to was 40% and this was in the release mode. I don’t get it. Am I doing something wrong here? If any of you .NET gurus are reading this blog (I am sure you aren’t who reads my blog anyway), please suggest something

Yup. I donated some money to the Mozilla Foundation so they could place an ad for Firefox in the New York Times. So today the ad came out, amazing piece of work. God knows how those guys managed to render that ad. Thanks to Anil I managed to get a copy of the paper and found my name on it. It is arranged alphabatically by the last name. Here is my name in the paper .. pretty sweet heh ;).. next up I am gonna buy a mozilla firefox t-shirt. Since I haven’t been able to code for them, this is the last I can do

My name yippie

The entire ad, trust me it is huge

I came across this really cool optical illusion on Anil Dash’s website. It shows a dragon that follows you whichever angle you look at it from. Pretty nifty. I just mirrored the video on my website. Here is a link to Anil’s comments about the same. Cool stuff!!

A few days back my roommates showed me a video. It was a 45 minute show by this Indian called Russell Peters. He is an Indian and a stand-up comedian. This is what a website had to say about Russell

Gemini award winning Canadian comic Russell Peters is known for a cheeky brand of comedy, that is rude and laddishness without being offensive to the females in the audience. With Asian roots, Russell explores attitudes towards race in a way that is fresh, surprising and hard-hitting. At times controversial, Russell combines his observations with a likeable stage persona and a cheeky grin.

I warn you, this show is not for
1. People who cannot take jokes about race
2. People who don’t have 45 minutes to spare.

But if you don’t fall into either category, you will surely enjoy this.

EDIT: I had to take down these videos since someone complained that this was copyrighted material.

If you are a true programmer, then at some point of time you surely would have employed the services of the command ‘man’ on your shell prompt on unix. the output produced by man is great and the help is excellent, but somehow I always felt that the interface was lacking. Today I was browsing MacOSXHints and I came across this free tool called Bwana. Quoting from the developer’s website

Bwana is a manual page viewer for your browser. It parses man pages in real time to provide the most up to date pages in an easy to read format. The pages have links to other man pages, http and email references–the way man pages should have been from the start.

I tried it out, works perfectly and you can display the output on the browser of your choice. Sweet stuff. Also in case you are curious, Bwana means ‘Mr.’ or ‘Sir’ in Swahili.

Ever wanted to create a really light weight slideshow to be displayed on your website? Powerpoint or PDF really aren’t good solutions. I came across this tool for creating slideshows. It is called S⁵. The back-end for this slidewhow is CSS, Javascript and XHTML. Believe me the slides load FAST. Wanna try it out. Check out this slideshow. Now I know how to put my slides up on the web without resorting to powerpoint.