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Showing posts with label link. Show all posts
24 January, 2008
15 December, 2007
Its now easier to locate your Gmail contacts in Orkut. But...
Orkut has just announced the ability to check whether people in your Gmail Address book are already in your orkut friends list. If they aren't, you are given the option to either add them (if they are already orkut members) or invite them to orkut.
Original Post : orkut Blog: I'm feeling serendipitous!
This would've worked out better, If only Gmail didn't add each and every contact you ever emailed - even just for once - to your address book! When I tried out the feature, I had to spend hours cleaning up my Gmail address book. Why? The sequence of mistakes are as follows:
One of the features I really wish Gmail had is the ability to combine contacts - I don't want to manually merge multiple entries into single contacts. But since I had to, I've already done that - just took me about three days... :(
I've also noticed another mistake some orkutians are making. They have multiple email addresses, like most of us do, say, tom@gmail.com & tom@yahoo.com. Lets say Tom created his orkut account using the gmail id (It was possible with any email id until Google integrated orkut into the Google Account). So when a friend searches for Tom with his yahoo ID, they may not find him.. Tom thinks, "Oh no! I don't want to keep my friends from finding me!"
So Tom figures out a workaround - he makes a dummy profile in orkut with his yahoo ID, and adds himself as a friend to that profile. Now when anyone searches for him in orkut with his yahoo id, they'll come to this profile, notices his real profile in the friends list, and sends the friend request to that profile instead. Simple, right?
No, its not, and there are two reasons: One, when we search for an email id in orkut, and if a profile with that address already exists, the orkut interface just gives us the option to add the friend; it doesn't show us the friends list of that profile. So, your friend won't even know that it was just a dummy profile. And Two, you could just add the second, third or even fourth email id to orkut's Contacts section in 'Edit Profile'. If you are signed-in to orkut, just click here to get there. All searches for any of the added addresses would lead the searcher to your profile.
Original Post : orkut Blog: I'm feeling serendipitous!
This would've worked out better, If only Gmail didn't add each and every contact you ever emailed - even just for once - to your address book! When I tried out the feature, I had to spend hours cleaning up my Gmail address book. Why? The sequence of mistakes are as follows:
- A friend of mine gets a forward. He is compelled by the warning in the email to send it to all his contacts, because otherwise, he could die within a few hours!! (Have been receiving mails which ask you to forward them? They are called 'Chain Mails' - click here if you have a minute to spare.)
- He puts his entire address book into the 'To' field when sending the forward. By doing so, he has just exposed all the email addresses in his contact list to the entire world - even company emails, private addresses which other people trusted him with.. each and every one. If only he had put them in the 'bcc' field - the email ids of his contacts would've remained hidden from all recipients.
- When I got the email, I couldn't resist telling him the errors of his ways, so I told him the stuff I just explained in the last two steps through the 'Reply' button - but alas! I had used the 'Reply to all' button instead; my advice is now being sent to more than a hundred people - my friend's entire address book..
- The last mistake wouldn't have been so bad as it was, if it wasn't for the Gmail feature I mentioned at first - all of the addresses which I (accidentally) just sent the email to were now in my address book as well! People I don't even know, haven't even heard of - were now in my Address book. Great. Just Great.
One of the features I really wish Gmail had is the ability to combine contacts - I don't want to manually merge multiple entries into single contacts. But since I had to, I've already done that - just took me about three days... :(
I've also noticed another mistake some orkutians are making. They have multiple email addresses, like most of us do, say, tom@gmail.com & tom@yahoo.com. Lets say Tom created his orkut account using the gmail id (It was possible with any email id until Google integrated orkut into the Google Account). So when a friend searches for Tom with his yahoo ID, they may not find him.. Tom thinks, "Oh no! I don't want to keep my friends from finding me!"
So Tom figures out a workaround - he makes a dummy profile in orkut with his yahoo ID, and adds himself as a friend to that profile. Now when anyone searches for him in orkut with his yahoo id, they'll come to this profile, notices his real profile in the friends list, and sends the friend request to that profile instead. Simple, right?
No, its not, and there are two reasons: One, when we search for an email id in orkut, and if a profile with that address already exists, the orkut interface just gives us the option to add the friend; it doesn't show us the friends list of that profile. So, your friend won't even know that it was just a dummy profile. And Two, you could just add the second, third or even fourth email id to orkut's Contacts section in 'Edit Profile'. If you are signed-in to orkut, just click here to get there. All searches for any of the added addresses would lead the searcher to your profile.
27 November, 2007
TechCrunch : While Live Documents Yaps, Zoho Delivers
India and Silicon Valley based Zoho has launched full offline access for Zoho writer, based on the Google Gears open source platform.
Read more at TechCrunch
Read more at TechCrunch
22 September, 2007
Stanislav Petrov : The Man who saved the World
Without knowing on the cold Moscow night back in 1983, a badly paid 44 year old military officer saved the world, and made himself one of the most influential persons of the century in the process, saving more lives than anyone ever did.
Read the whole story : maltaStar.com
06 September, 2007
Apple cuts 8GB iPhone price to $399, Early Adopters of $599 phone left crying in streets.
Just after two months of its release, Apple has cut th price of the most hyped cellphone in the history of technology, the iPhone, by 33% from $599 US (~24,500 INR) to $399 US (~16,300 INR). We all know that technology gets cheaper with time, but this is ridiculous!
Those who were having second thoughts due to the high price tag of the iPhone will surely be much more willing to get one, but people who waited outside Apple stores for days on end to be the first in line to get one could be feeling ripped off.
Indians won't get to have one at least until a couple of years (unless they can get from the gray market). However, Rs. 16k for a touch-screen cellphone with an in-built iPod, not to mention dozens of high-profile websites having custom versions for just this phone, is as much bang-for-the-buck as it gets!
Source: Engadget
Update: After receiving 'hundreds of' emails from upset customers, Apple has decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. In an open letter to all iPhone customers, Steve Jobs justifies the price drop, saying that Apple is using the price drop to 'really go for' a wider customer base this holiday season.
Those who were having second thoughts due to the high price tag of the iPhone will surely be much more willing to get one, but people who waited outside Apple stores for days on end to be the first in line to get one could be feeling ripped off.
Indians won't get to have one at least until a couple of years (unless they can get from the gray market). However, Rs. 16k for a touch-screen cellphone with an in-built iPod, not to mention dozens of high-profile websites having custom versions for just this phone, is as much bang-for-the-buck as it gets!
Source: Engadget
Update: After receiving 'hundreds of' emails from upset customers, Apple has decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. In an open letter to all iPhone customers, Steve Jobs justifies the price drop, saying that Apple is using the price drop to 'really go for' a wider customer base this holiday season.
08 August, 2007
Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web turned 16 yesterday.
No, not the 'Internet', which is an interconnected worldwide network of networks through which users connect to (and via) ftp servers, smtp servers, http servers etc. WWW comprises of the interconnected web pages we visit every day; just one of the services of the Internet, provided by http servers (a.k.a. Web Servers). The basis of the WWW (or 'Web') is the Hyper-Text Markup Language, HTML.
The Wired News Article is being copied here:
1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.
The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.
His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.
The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet.
Today's web is far more powerful and sophisticated than the research tool developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau but continues operating on basically the same principles they established a quarter of a century ago.
27 May, 2007
Geni - Make Your Family Tree, as easy as 1-2-3!
I have been putting this off for a long time; been using Geni more than a month now - So here it is: A review for Geni : The flash-based, easy to use family tree service.
Geni is not the first team to venture into genealogy, the study of pedigree (ancestry); which deals with the bloodlines which connect you and me. Others, like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, Genealogy.com, Genealogy.org etc. have been in the field for many years (See for yourself if you want; the basic services are free for all.), but Geni steals the prize by being simple.
Just seven weeks after going public in January this year, Geni caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of people through a simple, intuitive interface which far surpassed the interfaces of the competitors. Another major reason behind its popularity is its viral nature : you invite, say, 10 relatives, they invite 5 each, and so on - soon, your tree will contain hundreds of members you've never even heard of!
The service caught my sight when it was mentioned in Digit Magazine as a free service for building family trees. I was actually looking for a way to re-connect with my family members; its quite hard for me to remember the exact relationships when meetings are quite rare with distant relatives - sometimes, even close ones. So I didn't waste a minute and jumped online to www.geni.com...
Needless to say, I was instantly Hooked! Hectic days of compiling relations ensued, and within just 3 days I had added 500+ relatives to my tree (Yeah, I'm impulsive like that :) ), thanks to my parents who helped a lot by making dozens of phone calls to get names & long-forgotten bloodlines. (You don't have to do all the work yourself; inviting relatives to join is the recommended way to compile the tree.)
Here is a screen shot of the tree view:
You can add more members to your tree yourself, or can invite relatives to join the tree. Only those you invite to your tree will be able to see it, so there is no privacy threat. If a member joins Geni through your invite and chooses a password, their profile will become un-editable by others; otherwise you can edit any profile in your tree.
Every member gets a photo album by default. Uploaded family photos can be tagged with the names of those who are in the photo, which will automatically add the photo to their profiles. For example, if I upload a photo of my cousins, and tag it with their names, all the cousins' profiles will have the picture in their album. Nice!
Recently they added the option to invite your family friends to Geni, which will enable those who join via the invitation to see your profile and your immediate relatives (but not their profiles).
In the true spirit of Web 2.0, Geni carries a 'beta' tag; they are still working on many of the features frequently requested by users, such as ability to import trees from other genealogy programs, an option to merge trees, exporting the entire tree as a GEDCOM file (industry standard for genealogy information) etc. Expect much more, soon.
So why wait? Go to Geni.com and start your tree - maybe one day you'll beat the old-school members of ancestry.com, with over 30,000 relatives(!!) in their trees...
Geni is not the first team to venture into genealogy, the study of pedigree (ancestry); which deals with the bloodlines which connect you and me. Others, like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, Genealogy.com, Genealogy.org etc. have been in the field for many years (See for yourself if you want; the basic services are free for all.), but Geni steals the prize by being simple.
Just seven weeks after going public in January this year, Geni caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of people through a simple, intuitive interface which far surpassed the interfaces of the competitors. Another major reason behind its popularity is its viral nature : you invite, say, 10 relatives, they invite 5 each, and so on - soon, your tree will contain hundreds of members you've never even heard of!
The service caught my sight when it was mentioned in Digit Magazine as a free service for building family trees. I was actually looking for a way to re-connect with my family members; its quite hard for me to remember the exact relationships when meetings are quite rare with distant relatives - sometimes, even close ones. So I didn't waste a minute and jumped online to www.geni.com...
Needless to say, I was instantly Hooked! Hectic days of compiling relations ensued, and within just 3 days I had added 500+ relatives to my tree (Yeah, I'm impulsive like that :) ), thanks to my parents who helped a lot by making dozens of phone calls to get names & long-forgotten bloodlines. (You don't have to do all the work yourself; inviting relatives to join is the recommended way to compile the tree.)
Here is a screen shot of the tree view:
You can add more members to your tree yourself, or can invite relatives to join the tree. Only those you invite to your tree will be able to see it, so there is no privacy threat. If a member joins Geni through your invite and chooses a password, their profile will become un-editable by others; otherwise you can edit any profile in your tree.
Every member gets a photo album by default. Uploaded family photos can be tagged with the names of those who are in the photo, which will automatically add the photo to their profiles. For example, if I upload a photo of my cousins, and tag it with their names, all the cousins' profiles will have the picture in their album. Nice!
Recently they added the option to invite your family friends to Geni, which will enable those who join via the invitation to see your profile and your immediate relatives (but not their profiles).
In the true spirit of Web 2.0, Geni carries a 'beta' tag; they are still working on many of the features frequently requested by users, such as ability to import trees from other genealogy programs, an option to merge trees, exporting the entire tree as a GEDCOM file (industry standard for genealogy information) etc. Expect much more, soon.
So why wait? Go to Geni.com and start your tree - maybe one day you'll beat the old-school members of ancestry.com, with over 30,000 relatives(!!) in their trees...
13 May, 2007
One kilobyte is just 1000 bytes?
| Quantities of bytes | ||||
| SI prefixes | Alter- Usenative | Binary prefixes | ||
| Name (Symbol) | Standard SI | Name (Symbol) | Value | |
| kilobyte (kB) | 103 = 10001 | 210 | kibibyte (KiB) | 210 |
| megabyte (MB) | 106 = 10002 | 220 | mebibyte (MiB) | 220 |
| gigabyte (GB) | 109 = 10003 | 230 | gibibyte (GiB) | 230 |
| terabyte (TB) | 1012 = 10004 | 240 | tebibyte (TiB) | 240 |
| petabyte (PB) | 1015 = 10005 | 250 | pebibyte (PiB) | 250 |
| exabyte (EB) | 1018 = 10006 | 260 | exbibyte (EiB) | 260 |
| zettabyte (ZB) | 1021 = 10007 | 270 | zebibyte (ZiB) | 270 |
| yottabyte (YB) | 1024 = 10008 | 280 | yobibyte (YiB) | 280 |
The above table is taken from the Wikipedia page for Byte - took me by quite a surprise.. I mean, have you ever heard of the word 'kibibyte'? I know I haven't...
Apparently, the hard disk manufacturers were right all along! I thought they were ripping us off by selling 80 billion bytes of storage, saying that its 80 x 230 - which I thought, was 80 Gigabytes (80 GB). Well, lets just say I'm so sorry for spreading that story among my friends, many of whom look up to me as the computer genius (a.k.a geek)...
On a side-note, Hitachi just announced a 1TeraByte Blue-Ray Writer; they had released a similar sized Hard Disk about a month back.
11 April, 2007
Pi is Wrong!
'Pi is Wrong!', says Bob Palais, Research Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at University of Utah - the article is an scanned copy of his own post in a magazine's readers' section.
He says the current value of 2π should have been assigned to the symbol we all are familiar with, π. He has all the arguments right, too - wonder why others decided they way it is now!
He says the current value of 2π should have been assigned to the symbol we all are familiar with, π. He has all the arguments right, too - wonder why others decided they way it is now!
07 April, 2007
Grammar Help : How to properly punctuate a sentence
Michael Leddy of Lifehack.org (not to be confused with LifeHacker.com, a similar and more popular website run by Gina Trapani) guides you through five rules to remember, to properly punctuate a sentence. Not surprisingly, he teaches college English.
He uses well-placed commas, semicolons, and colons, to dramatically improve the readability of sentences. Not only does it help the reader move through the sentence faster, it makes it that much easier to understand what exactly the writer intends to convey.
A related article by Michael himself, on 'How to Unstuff a sentence', is worth a read.
He uses well-placed commas, semicolons, and colons, to dramatically improve the readability of sentences. Not only does it help the reader move through the sentence faster, it makes it that much easier to understand what exactly the writer intends to convey.
A related article by Michael himself, on 'How to Unstuff a sentence', is worth a read.
20 March, 2007
Illustrated Google Wishlist: Google Drive
While personally I've been using GSpace Extension for Firefox for some time, it seems the world has gone quite ahead with the idea of using Google's 2.8GB (and counting) -sized inbox.
While Google was rumored to have plans for a similar project called 'Platypus', these people have taken it to a whole new level. And, it looks awesome! I mean, who wouldn't want 10GB of online storage?!
Maybe we'll all be backing up our hard disks to a server one day. Why not today, right now? Because my 'broadband' speed isn't exactly measured in GBps, that's why not.
While Google was rumored to have plans for a similar project called 'Platypus', these people have taken it to a whole new level. And, it looks awesome! I mean, who wouldn't want 10GB of online storage?!
Maybe we'll all be backing up our hard disks to a server one day. Why not today, right now? Because my 'broadband' speed isn't exactly measured in GBps, that's why not.
14 March, 2007
Tips for Using Images in Blogs
This post on the 'Google Blogoscoped' blog hints on some helpful things to remember, when using images in your blog posts.
Good read, except that they seem to dislike the GIF format, which I use frequently on my websites. Being a web designer, I would prefer to use GIF-formatted images on my site than PNG ones. Why?
When displaying graphics with transparent portions (such as a curved border for a section), GIF is the only way to go. This is because IE6 doesn't fully support PNG transparency, and will cause problems when using PNGs, more often than not.
There seems to be some efforts to solve this, but a workaround is always a workaround.
Good read, except that they seem to dislike the GIF format, which I use frequently on my websites. Being a web designer, I would prefer to use GIF-formatted images on my site than PNG ones. Why?
When displaying graphics with transparent portions (such as a curved border for a section), GIF is the only way to go. This is because IE6 doesn't fully support PNG transparency, and will cause problems when using PNGs, more often than not.
There seems to be some efforts to solve this, but a workaround is always a workaround.
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