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Just got myself a copy of Office 2003. Prety neat, espically Outlook. I am an ardent Outlook fan and have a copy of each and every email (well almost every) that I have sent/ received since past three years. I have tried several email clients ranging from Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, etc etc but finaly decided to stick to Outlook. Reasons, well it has exactly what I want. Well for instance, I have three email accounts and I like to pop all of them to a single mailbox. Now Mozilla does not permit me to do that. If I were smart enough, I would have modified the mozilla source to make this happen, but I accept it I don’t have the time nor the inclination to be smart. I like open source and I use it quite a bit, but sometimes you have to draw a line. The other day I had to open a word document and I thought ‘Well since I don’t have Office, maybe I should try OpenOffice‘ . Sadly the Java code for Open Office does not produce a good UI. OOo is good but not good enough. I want the native OS colors on the UI. I hate the basic java UI and I am using the word hate coz I do. I DO NOT like the dirty gray color that java gives me. I don’t get it, if it is possible to produce native colors why isn’t it just done? Look at the difference between Eclipse and Netbeans. Netbeans is made by Sun and trust me the UI suxs. On the other hand Eclipse is opensource and supported by IBM. I love those colors. I think that if FSF has to grow to people’s desktop, the one thing that definitely has to improve is the UI. Why can’t Linux come with anti-aliased fonts by default? Why does text have to look so bad on Linux? Why do I have to downlaod Windows fonts and install them to make it look better? Well I know I might be asking for too much for a guy who lives off free stuff, but then what the heck. Anyway Office 2003 definitely rocks though I still am not fond of Frontpage and prefer Dreamweaver anyday. There is a tonne load of shit in there besides that. There is something called a Publisher and something called an InfoNote. I dont think I will be using any of those, but lets see.

Just came back from this movie ‘Stuck on you’. A mushy movie. Not too much to my liking. A movie I am definitely looking forward to is ‘The Return of the King’ . Doe to release next Wednesday it seems to have been timed perfectly to match with the end of my semester. Well shall ring the holidays in with the King. Anyway came across this article that said that Britain is planning to introduce biometric chips in its passports. These will have face, fingerprint and maybe iris data of the individual stored on the chip. Well since I have been working on face recognition the one thing I can definitely say is that face recognition is not something that is gonna work just like that. If a person is forced to stand in front of a camera and the light, pose and several parameters are held constant, then yup it will work. But we are still quite far from the day when a camera will be able to pick put a suspect from a crowd. The systems in the Florida airport and at the Superbowl prove this point. The recently held FRVT (face recognition vendor test) gave each of the participants a 3-D model of the face. Now a 3-D model is not something that you can make in a second. It is time / processor intensive even with today’s 3Ghz + processors and definitely not real-time. Well lets see how this goes. I think that this is going to be more money thrown down the drain

Just yesterday I came across this 3D desktop from Sun. Called Project Looking Glass, Sun claims it ‘will bring 3D windowing capabilities to the desktop to offer a far richer user experience for work and “play.” But, it’s not only about “eye-candy,” it’s about creating an engaging user experience, one that can make communications and collaboration even easier.’ Well I had a look at the video and it looks nice enough. But the burning question remains, will it be fast enough to run on my desktop? From my experience with Java, any progarm takes at least twice as long to run. In the demo video, we see multiple videos running simultaneously. IMHO this is possible only if they have a couple of Sun Solaris machines doing all the processing in the background. Well feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong!

Try this out. Go to google and type in miserable failure and click the I’m feeling lucky button… Guess who’s website is the first ?? Yup you guessed it right. It’s Dubya :)) . The cool part is that no where on the website can you actually find the word miserable failure. So is Google making up the results?

edit: Just found out that this is an idea by Old Fashioned Patriot . The idea is to link Miserable failure to Dubya’s website in as many blogs as possible so that his website always turns up as #1 when u search for miserable failure on google. Well I am doing my part 😉

What would you like your cellphone to do for you? Do you want to use it only to answer calls or would you like it to do everything? I still remember those days when a cellphone meant something as huge and chunky as a cordless phone that I use at home. But now with the marvel of technology, things are improving at a rate that is hard to comprehend. The other day when I was looking through Nokia’s website, I came across this phone. It has a built in web broswer (Opera) with a 640 * 480 res, it has handwriting recognition. You can play videos, music and God only knows what else. And look at the size and the weight. Would love to own such a device, just waiting to earn enough 😉 . I love technology. Another product I am really looking forward to is OLED based monitors. I hear that with devices a screen can be made as thin as a sheet of paper and the best part is that you can actually roll it and carry it. Boom the weight of your laptop just dropped by 3 pounds. Isn’t that worth waiting for?

Well seems like Redhat just gave up on the consumer market. According to this report, the CEO of Redhat thinks that Linux is not ready for the consumer yet. In a way I do agree , but at least the average user had an option of buying an OS at an affordable price and with some amount of support. Also Suse is being bought over by Novell. I don’t know what that means in terms of the life of Suse as a Linux alternative, but rumors are rife. Anyway my guess is that people who do want to try Linux will always go ahead and download it, install and try it. Hey on the flip side, I heard that there are a few beta versions of Longhorn floating around on the internet and ppl are actually installing it on their computers and trying it out. I don’t think I am that brave. I am blue screening with an official version of Windows XP and the only way out seems to be a replacement of my wireless chip. Sad… Anyway thats all for now folks. Am gonna check out Matrix tonight. And for the people who haven’t heard Neo dies! Shall update you about that in my next blog… Live life … King size (borrowed from an ad back home)

Yeah! Finally the spider at Google caught up with me! My website is now listed within the top 5 results when you look for my name (yeah an ego search, I am egoistical) . Well I think a part of this is due to Anil who placed a link to my blog on his blog. Also Devhood where I try to make a few decent posts in the forum. Just missed out on Halloween celebrations. Slept thro’ it actually. Anyway more later.

You might have heard about the term Easter Eggs in computers. Borrowing from Eeggs.com they are defined as The term “Easter Egg”, as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch. There are thousands of them, and they can be quite entertaining, if you know where to look. Pretty cool aint it?

Well the beta3 Core1 of Redhat Fedora Linux is out. Codenamed Severn it was released a couple of days back. Sure enough I grabbed it and installed it. Looks nice and good. There are several nice and new applications. There is a display manager that looks a lot like the display manager on windows. Also all that text that scrolls down the screen when you boot has been replaced by a graphical boot (you are provided with an option of looking at the text though). The fonts are good, unfortunately ACPI (Power management for Linux) is not installed by default. So need to recompile my kernel for that. Well hopefully with the next version the OS will ship with 2.6 kernel so the performance should be better. Haven’t yet got an opportunity to play around with it too much since I got it installed and working today morning at around 5 am. Shall post more comments soon.

Yup it is finally all done! Well almost. A brand new website with everything working. Need to add a few more pages and also need to migrate to oneonone.com. But besides that I got my blog up and running (Thanks to Anil) . The stylesheet for this page was borrowed from the kind guys at Bluerobot. Had to do away with all the layers and replace them with tables. Would like to thank the guys at enetation for the comment form. Shall post as soon as and when I see or hear anything worthwhile. Well do let me know what you think of the site. All criticisms, comments and praise (if any) are welcome. Keep the faith