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I’ll throw it out for you folks to even try to figure out what MS is trying!
(via)
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Tue, Jun. 30th, 2009, 03:09 pm
Piratebay sold
According to Techdirt Piratebay was sold to a public Swedish company for about 8 Million US Dollars.
Huge news and good for the Piratebay folks.
Wonder what this means for the service and its uers though..
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
I came across an interesting article which articulates much of my own thoughts on the entire Microsoft Internet Explorer antitrust saga. The article on a blog JCXP which I came across for the first time. The blog seems to be by MS fanboys supporters is calling for a boycott of Opera Soft, makers of the amazing Opera browser. The article, Opera Boycott: Clearing up a few things is actually a follow up article to the initial call for boycott.
I have some thoughts on the points presented in the second article but before that the disclaimer: I’m not a MS supporter or an Opera hater. In fact the two primary browsers on my laptop was Mozilla Firefox and Opera. I dislike IE (at least 6 and 7) primarily because of the headaches they have given me and the PITA they have been to the whole design and web-development industry. This article is not an evangelizing of IE or MS but broader thoughts on the anti trust calls when an organization starts to succeed and gains significant market share.
With that out of the way, I quote a part of the article:
"But it’s against antitrust laws!". Good to know. I’ll gladly admit I know very little about European antitrust laws (ie. barely anything). All I know, and this has been my stance since the very beginning, is that Microsoft has (or should have) every right to include their own Internet Explorer web browser as the only and default option in Windows. This applies to any and all companies on any matter, not just Microsoft. If Microsoft were to file an antitrust complaint agaisnt[sic] Apple for including Safari as the default browser in OS X, I would be just as peeved. Many have been saying that Microsoft has been taking advantage of its dominance of the market by bundling IE with Windows and that they are forcing it on customers. I do not see how that is true in any way. Nothing has changed in the last 15 years. Internet Explorer has been an integral and key feature of Windows ever since Windows 95, before Microsoft "dominated" the market. It’s not like Microsoft only recently started bundling IE with Windows, it has been there all along.
This is a view point I agree with whole heartedly. Why should an organization which has succeeded so wholly and entirely on their own suddenly be branded as cheaters? If this is the case, than is it not applicable for _all_ utilities being bundled with an OS, any OS (calculator, graphics program, image viewer etc). Isn’t Apple being anti-competitive by bundling Safari (and only Safari) with OSX? Or consider this – If Intel manufactured CPU cooling fans and they were bundled with the CPU, would they be behaving anti-competitively? Even though there are a zillion other brands and types of CPU cooling fans available for the buyer to choose
Let’s take another example: IPods are the most popular portable media players. They work primarily with ITunes which is what is bundled with those devices. Additionally, installing iTunes also forces a user to install QuickTime (a very bad media player and bloat ware IMO). Is that not forcing the consumer out of a choice?
Yes, there is Winamp, GTKPod and hundreds of other apps which can be used to manage the iPod and view the media files. But they are NOT bundled with the iPod. Why should they? Apple should and is free to bundle what they want with THEIR product. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. And if you still buy it, don’t install it (ITunes that is. QuickTime unfortunately is SHOVED down everyone’s throats by ITunes. Ugh)In the same vein, there are lots of other browsers available on the Internet, most of them definitely better than IE. But that does not mean that MS should start bundling everyone of those with it’s OS. You don’t like the components, then either don’t buy Windows (there is always Linux) or don’t use the browser.
I am not saying that MS is all holy. If they use their influence to force computer makers to install their software or to pressurizing them against installing competitors software then they should be taken to task. That would be an abuse of monopoly, NOT including their own software in their own product.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Coming a bit late but I wanted to jot down my thoughts on Opera Unite. My first thought, it is an awesome concept with the potential to change the way the Internet is used and also a huge boon for the us users, but in a different manner than envisaged by the Unite team. But I also feel it is a bit lacking as I will explain below.
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Read a trippy short story recently - Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. It is a short science fiction-fantasy about, hmm, Books 
The story is written in a nice easy style at a good pace. It features takes on the recession, layoffs, google and other topics with a hint of geek romance thrown in..
The story is pretty nice story but I disliked the evangelizing of Google. Except for the part extolling Google, the story was good and different.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Moved my domain from Dreamhost to Hawkhost. Will be some downtime while the DNS propagation goes through.
Dreamhost had been giving me problems with email, most commonly with Webmail. Also the site faced a fair amount of downtime. Hence the switch. Let’s see how’s Hawkhost
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Barcamp Bangalore 8 was announced sometime recently. So I headed to the Barcamp Bangalore site to check out the details and was shocked.
The site’s homepage has been changed to something so tacky, and my first reaction was, wtf, it’s so fugly. Ugh.. C’mon guys, do something better than that..
Anyway, Barcamp Bangalore has been announced for March 7th & 8th.. I’m booking my calendar today 
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
The phrase “JavaScriptmaster” and Douglas Crockford are considered synonymous in the web development world. When I heard that Crockford was writing a book on JavaScript, especially a guide to the better features of one of the most maligned (and perhaps abused) but popular languages in the current web development industry, I was sure I wanted to read that book. I opened the book with very high expectations and unsurprisingly, I was not disappointed one bit.
With the recent explosion in the usage of JavaScript, the interest in JavaScript is at an all time high. When Netscape, which created JavaScript, released the specification of the language in the mid-nineties, it was unable to define a robust and complete specification for the language due to pressures of rushing out a production release. As a result, fair chunk of the language is not well thought out which contributes to bad programming style and promotes some bad programming practices. It is not the programmers but the language which causes this. Programming models based on Global variables, JavaScript eval, inconsistencies in variable scope, and confusion regarding how objects are created and handled in JavaScript can all be the sources of programming errors and give rise to bad programming practices.
This book, as its name suggests, focuses on the “Good Parts” of the JavaScript while cautioning the readers against the “Bad Parts” of the language. All the above mentioned “bad parts” and many other programming constructs are cautioned against in a two-part appendix.
Two other appendices also touch on JSLint, the powerful JavaScript syntax and program correctness verifier and JSON, the preferred and increasingly popular text data exchange format. These two chapters give a taste and a starter for two very important support tools for JavaScript.
However, the meat of the of the book focuses on the better parts of the JS language. In ten chapters, Crockford explains why features like - JS inheritance model, prototypes, objects, arrays and how the language handles regular expressions - are very useful and make JavaScript a fairly powerful language in its own right. Object Oriented programming in JS, how methods and the prototype chain is handled and can be used to write clean and powerful code are all a must read for advanced JS programmers.
The language of the book is very simple and sprinkled with illustrative source code which makes understanding the concept in discussion easy to understand. That said, this is not a beginners book. This book is aimed at those who have programmed in JS and have a working knowledge of the language. Nevertheless, it is a highly recommended book for anyone looking to get into better and more powerful JavaScript programming.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Today is April Fools day (like you didn’t already know!). In the recent years this day of the year is usually when a lot of lame April Fools pranks are played out across the Internet and blogs. This is getting so old and lame that its irritating, let alone humorous.
This sentiment is shared by others who are tired of the crap being passed off as April Fools day pranks. We need something really good and funny. Not the same prank rehashed year after year. Come on. It’s the Internet which has so many talented funny people creating loads of good stuff. Let them get more coverage than those listed above!
Update: Another one from Gmail
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
and maybe grow a thicker skin at that..
It all started over the weekend - a bitching match going on at Techmeme started apparently by Louis Gray who replied to Duncan Riley’s post on Techcrunch. The comment by Louis Gray
TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley checked in with a quasi-analytic comment this morning
prompted a response from Duncan Riley where he calls Loius Gray a cunt and a wanker. Duncan Riley also says in his post
Notice the put down with “quasi-analytic,” lets not fight on ideas, lets denigrate the messenger.
And on his response, Duncan Riley does exactly that. He describes Louis Gray as
I say A-List somewhat lightly, because the guy who’s come after me is someone who’s called Louis Gray. I’ve been blogging a bloody long time and for a lot of that time I’ve been reporting on the movers and shakers in blogging, and until a couple of months ago I’d never heard of this guy. His about page is as useful as tits on a bull: he does PR for a Silicon Valley technology company and found blogging in 2006. He’s talked about now at the same level as Calacanis, Scoble and Arrington, and yet he’s reached the lofty heights of 735 subscribers in Feedburner; probably more than this humble blog but this isn’t my main outlet.
Which is the opening of his post linked to above.
I found this quite ridiculous and hypocritical of him and said so through a comment on his post (Ah, Duncan was kind enough to delete the comment but I happen to have a copy of it reproduced below)
You say that Louis Gray attacked the messenger? What have you done?
With this idiotic post you have done exactly that.
Practice what you preach hypocrite
To this, Duncan responds in a classic teenage fashion (after deleting the comment). He emailed me with this:
Seriously, fuck off.
Well, that is the background so far.
What are you Duncan? An A-lister? You think you are so great that you can try and thrash anyone and if someone calls you out, you go down to teenage expletives. Grow up dude.
If you cannot take comments and disagreement, then get off the blogosphere. You are being a jerk and behaving like a child.
And Duncan, don’t denigrate the messenger, discuss the idea. Oh, you already do not follow what you yourself write. Mea culpa
A very good analysis if also provided by Matthew Ingram.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
I’ve started to use Twitter increasingly and find it to be a great tool. I joined Twitter when it was quite young, a couple of months after it launched but never used it much (my tweetstats graph) but have started using it more often in the past couple of months.
The main point of Twitter is the conversations it fosters as well as meeting new people. The advantages of Twitter over other forms of communication? Short 140 character messages and the ability to follow someone’s “tweets” without them having to follow you, which in my opinion is a good system.
But it is also flawed. As I stated, Twitter is the new medium for quick conversation outside of email, IM etc. Now the web-interface of Twitter is designed such that if someone posts a tweet to you, it comes in your replies tab but not in your message timeline. For those who have many followers, friends on Twitter, they will get a lot of @replies so can easily miss this.
And this has been a frustration. Many times I have tweeted someone but received no reply. No I guess it because they missed my tweet (and assume that they are not ignoring me ) . I think is fundamentally due to the design of twitter. There should be a way for the recipient to know that someone tried to contact him/her. Not necessarily in their normal timeline but somehow, distinguish that someone who is not on their friends list said something to them. In this manner, twhirl/snitter etc are much better because they show all @replies to the twitterer.
Anyway, I have also come to decide that I will only start following me those who follow me. (with a few exceptions of course ) If I follow someone and it is not reciprocated in a few days (a week or two maybe) I will un-follow. I think it is just a matter of courtesy if s/he feels that we can, at some point share a good conversation.
My twitter profile is here. Add me if you want to follow me there 
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
A very interesting web/flowchart of the data flow and gathering when you publish a blog post. Though the depiction is mainly for hosted blogs (wordpress.com, blogspot etc) it remains true for self-hosted blogs too.
The entire flow chart is from the social interaction perspective of readers, marketers, spam scrapers etc reading your content and the chain reaction it starts.
Just like the chain reaction I am starting with this
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
A very interesting web/flowchart of the data flow and gathering when you publish a blog post. Though the depiction is mainly for hosted blogs (wordpress.com, blogspot etc) it remains true for self-hosted blogs too.
The entire flow chart is from the social interaction perspective of readers, marketers, spam scrapers etc reading your content and the chain reaction it starts.
Just like the chain reaction I am starting with this
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
This IS reality and not an MMORPG. Keep the rivalry to the game please.
Thank you
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Well the MacBook Air has been released by Apple. I think it is a beautiful machine but the specifications of the system sucks. And it’s freaking expensive. I know I wont be getting it anytime
However, I came across an awesome pic which does a feature comparison of the MacBook Air to one of the most popular computers in the history of computing. No surprises that the Air comes out on top. I will let you decide for yourself though
Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
I’ve been on the Barcamp mailing list and I’ve been following the “post barcamp” discussion. While Barcamp itself was successful, this being the biggest Barcamp ever, in the world; there was discontentment and a longing for improvement in the next iteration of the event (which by the way has been tentatively scheduled for November of this year)
Issues I identified which could have been better or should be next time (This is my opinion and open for discussion)
Main points -
- Too many tracks, too little time. The sheer number of collectives was overwhelming.
- Too many newbies, not enough interaction
- Giving tees on day 2 was a good idea
- Entry fees goes against barcamp philosophy (already agreed upon)
How/what we should change:
Change in facilities -
- Have fewer projectors. Allocate them only who really need it
- Let anyone initiate a discussion. But to make a formal announcement, the initiator needs at least 5 participants(including or excluding the initiator. That’s a no point). Otherwise they can still have the discussion but no formal announcement (via sms)
- In addition to collective charts, have a couple of impromptu talk/discussion charts. Slight conflict with the previous point. Need to resolve that. If we have these, have them in more replications so that participants don’t have to go from one end to the other to check the posters
- Preferably, try to get the rooms/auditorium closer to each other as compared to bcb4
Possible alleviations -
- Don’t prefer to have formal talks by one speaker. Encourage discussions
- But do keep a few slots for formal talks; ‘presentation’ if you want to call it. Call for presentation ppt in advance to filter/approve and pass the presentations and then assign the formal presentation slots. Some might argue that it is against the spirit of barcamp. My opinion is that it’s a barcamp. We can add a limited number of those to mix up types of interaction. There are no formal rules. Let’s define for our convenience
- Noticed that a couple of collectives were trying to be too organized so time management was an issue
- A lot of of talks were talks. And not discussions as it should have been. Demos, prod launches are exceptions
- Educate collective leaders on how to lead more effectively. Encourage more BOFs(birds of a feather)
- Stress on participants that those who are a part of one collective can attend other talks and they don’t necessarily have to sit through all talks to attend just one talk
Lastly, my pics from BCB4 have been uploaded to a Flickr Set.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
It’s a bit late but I’ll still give my take on day 2.
Frankly, I was disappointed by Day 2. The sessions started off late as it did on Saturday but that was okay I guess. During the introduction, a lot of speakers came forward to announce what they would be talking about and frankly, I thought that it exceeded the possible time constraints as well as the space constraints. But well if it could happen, good for everyone.
The bloggers collective as expected (by me) had a large number of talks. I was skeptical about accommodating so many talks partly because the collective tended to not fragment into those interested in particular topics and not others (As in, if 2 speakers wanted to talk about different topics at the same time, they could not so that the audience does not get split). I was supposed to give a talk on micro-blogging as well.
However, once the talks started, things started getting messy because the talks would overflow and not all the talks had been alloted a time slot (including mine) I did listen to a couple of nice talks like moblogging, securing your images from being downloaded. I tried to attend a talk on Semantic web and moving towards an Internet with all data related semantically. But unfortunately I reached late so missed a significant bit of the talk.
The highlight of the day for me was a very nice discussion on bloggers getting a chance to have their posts published in the print medium to reach a wider audience. And another nice discussion with Arun Ram during lunch(it ranged from phone comparisons to egos of popular bloggers, Techcrunch, Robert Scobel etc)
Anyway, overall I felt that day 2 was fairly underwhelming for me.
Ps. The campus at IIM is gorgeous
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
I attended my first BarCamp today held in Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
It was scheduled to start at 9 AM but I overslept and reached there only by 10. But as IST (Indian Stretchable time) goes, I wasn’t late and the registrations and the introduction session was still going on. So I did not miss much
I wanted to be a part mainly of the Bloggers collective and the Photo(graphers) Collective, hoping to learn, mostly in the latter and more to give a talk in the former. The bloggers collective started of fairly decently but was delayed as people trickled in fairly slowly and almost everyone had a problem getting the WiFi to work on their laptops.
But once that was done, the first talk on Podcasting took place. I was not interested much in that so I went around helping people configure their laptops to connect to the WLan.
The next talk by Kishore Krishna (aka Kpowerinfinity) was on Widgets but due to some conflicts, it was delayed. So my talk on Blogging Platforms and setting up your own blog was advanced and his postponed to after mine.
My talk started on a fairly positive note with lot of discussion and interaction but once I got on to the setting up a self hosted blog using wordpress, people lost track. The topic got far too technical for most of them so I decided to stop and instead move that to a demo after the talk for those who were interested by making it more basic and easy to follow(the demo did not happen eventually)
After my talk, I moved out from the bloggers collective to check out the other collective. I entered the Internet collective where a talk on MS Silverlight was just about to start. Not much interest there so I moved on to the Startups collective. That was in the fag end with the speak just starting to take questions so I left there too and went back to the bloggers collective. Kishore’s talk was just about over when I reached there and soon we all went for lunch.
Immediately after lunch, the bloggers collective seemed to have disappeared with only a few visible from the earlier 40-50. So I held a discussion on micro-blogging (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) with a few of the interested attendees. After that, I discussed the various blogging platforms and what would be a good choice for a non-techie beginner blogger and set up an Livejournal account for her.
That was the end of all blogging topics as the photography collective was having it’s first (and only meet for the day) where a lot of discussion went on and Amoghavarsha and Jace and few others. Learnt lots of basic tips and got a lot of information.
There was a band jam happening later in the evening but having tired myself out earlier, I decided to skip that. Day two of the un-conference is tomorrow. Watch for a report about it tomorrow.
Oh and I got a chance to meet Aaman and Deepti Lamba, the chief editors of Desicritics. That was really great. We discussed the upcoming changes to DC, the current happenings and how it is really growing as a community. That was really great.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
Bangalore Bloggers Meet is happening for the first time this month. It’s on the 21st of July at BrewHaHa near Jyothi Nivas College, Koramangala. I’ll be there. All those who read this, please do come. And comment here so that I know who to expect
Register for the meet at the Meet Wiki.
Bangalore Bloggers Meet Event Details
Date : 21st July,2007
Venue: BrewHaHa
Near Jyoti Nivas College, Koramangala
Also happening later this month is the Bangalore BarCamp at IIM Bangalore. It’s on the 28th and 29th of July.
There are a lot of collectives and a lot of bloggers should be participating. I’ll hopefully be there too. Register and find more information at the BarCamp Wiki. BarCamp has a lot of Geek oriented Collectives but a few are non-geeky ones too (which is what I’m going to be attending mostly.. Though the Internet Collective and BangAJAX collective is tempting as well..) These will be my first ever bloggers meet and I hope this will be a good experience.
Originally published at Living Life. Please leave any comments there.
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