Posts

Dang! I got stung today, by a bee, for the first time in my life. The little critter was trying to sniff some aroma from the back of my head, and I reached out with my hand, grabbed him (sorry, it must of hurt), and he got pissed and wanked me. Just as any normal, crazed-out geek would do, the first thing I did was to search the net for home-grown, bee sting remedies and I found this post by William Brantley. Being a much braver individual than I can be (when it comes to bee stings), he went through a series of bee-biting to test various remedies, that exists in the market-place and several home-grown remedies. ...

First off, this is a rant. You have been warned. I have been banking with ICICI bank for the last 6 years. I have generally had a pleasant experience banking with them, since you could do pretty much everything you want to do with your account through their online interface. With my recent move to Canada, I was pleased to see an branch here in Vancouver. I opened an account with them last week, and had used a check to make the initial deposit. A week passed and with no sign of a confirmation of account activation, I called their call center. ...

Twitbin has been my favourite client for twitter. the key thing that attracted me to it, was that I can use twitter, along side my browsing, and that makes life much simpler. Also, it have a very simple interface, to track your friends and their messages. I realized how much it mean to my twittering experience, when it went down sometime last week. I presumed, it was due to the upgrades that the twitter team was planning, and want to see if the problem persists. Well, looks like twitter is working fine now, through the web-interface, and I guess twitbin should be operational now, but.. well NO.. I still have to use the web interface and it suck big time. ...

After several months of keeping away from updating or changing my website, I broke the fast today. I found a wonderful plugin, sideRSS, which allows display of RSS feeds within a blog’s sidebar. As usual, I needed a specific functionality that was not supported the way I wanted it. I hacked it a little bit, renamed the plugin, and posted a custom version for download on my website. If you need to share Google Shared Items, on your blog, but hate to include javascript (like I do), then use this. You can download it here (right-click and use “Save Target As…”) and find install information here. ...

I wrote this a few months back, when I had just starting using facebook, but never got around to posting it. With a recent cleaning spee (of my laptop) I found it lying in a neat corner. If you are not already infected by facebook, here it is. Facebook, is a web2.0 app that has the most serious drain on productivity, and got me to waste all of 5 hours on it, doing nothing but organizing, linking, inviting hundreds of friends; and just lounging around! ...

I had to compare machine hardware today, and found information on that here. **#prtdiag -v - **Gives hardware information about FSB, Sparc Model, CPU speed, RAM, Harddisks, USB drives (ie. PCI and networking slots) etc. Click on the image below, for a detailed overview of prtdiag’s output #psrinfo -p - lists number of physical processors . #psrinfo -p -v - list number of virtual processors (cores) per physical processor. #psrinfo -v - detailed information for each virtual processor. ...

I use AVG antivirus, which has never ever caught a virus on my laptop. For long, I have pondered if I really need one, since I have been quite fastidious in ensuring the media that I download/execute on my laptop. In my eagerness to try out Dreamweaver CS3 and Photoshop CS3, I slipped in the latest chip-India DVD (July 07) which carries the trialwares, and boom! AVG chucked out its first trojan alert in the last 5 years! That is quite amazing ain’t it? I haven’t had a virus in half a decade and boom one fine day!!...

It has just dawned on me that I have more work to do, that when I was employed. So many things to catch up on: emails, orkut messages, linked-in invites (ohh. Kristopher Tate is a contact now! Thanks Kris! :) ). Talking of linked-in, the pressure from the ‘opening-up’ of facebook is showing. Linked-in has added several new features and made interaction much easier than it was before. Things are where they should be; A free member can get in touch with someone they know directly. No need for any introductions if you know a person. (you don’t need to know their mail id, either). Finally someone at Linked-in realized that they need to accelerate the rate at with the interconnections were formed between people. That’s where the money is. ...

I recently quit my job at Novell. After more than half a decade of working 5 days a week and several hours a day, I get to spend my time doing only things I want to do. No more tasks that I have to complete, no more deadlines, no more betas to release (atleast for a few more weeks). I get some time to myself before take a deep dive into the job of chucking out code day-in and day-out. ...

Zooomr, for those of you, who don’t know it, is a photo-sharing site, that is developed and maintained by a single developer, Kristopher Tate. Thomas Hawk, the CEO, is a wonderful photographer, and writes a great blog, which you should check out. If Flickr started web2.0 photo-sharing, zooomr is slowly moving the game forward. The latest version of zooomr, offers a bunch of new features, that are nothing short of amazing. Now, they are offering free pro-accounts for bloggers who use zooomr. (Marketing tip #1: Befriend the blogger). Ohh, btw, you can choose to use zooomr, on any blog service that allows you to add html to your post. I guess, that includes every single blog service out there! ...