Joined the wave

Hi
I too joined the wave, that is Google wave today.(Thanks to Cyriac and Ribu for sending me one invite each in an interval of two minutes :) ).
Initially I found it highly confusing and nonsensical. I had already got a few opinions of the wave being just a hype and it being a bore. But I was more interested in spending my afternoon trying out the new tool. I didn't find it to be something of interest after spending 10 minutes in it and went back to my other tasks.
Then my friend Anil popped up in Wave and gave me tips on how to use the features and we even played a couple of games collaboratively. That caught my interest and I started getting comfortable with the wave concept and interface. To my opinion both are flawed(yes I do mean it). Anyways, as with all Google products, its in development mode..(this is in Preview which is buggier than beta).
I found it to be very useful for collaborative activities,and having group chats like we have for our class group. Its great when there are a lot of people involved at the same time. Other than that, currently I don't see much of a use for this.
The extensions are cool and it alone made me stay for a while in the site.
I found the interface highly cluttered and difficult to handle.I was using my room-mate's laptop,making it even harder to move around all those windows. Also,I found out that in Chrome, the interface gets stuck when you select two waves one after the other. The number of unread wavelets in a wave also tend to change and it returns to normal only when the "Sync completed" message appears on top left.In a system with 256mb ram running Chrome, I got an error asking to stop an unresponsive script about 5 times in 10 minutes. Even while I type this, my wave interface is not responding. :D
I haven't tried Wave in FF,so I don't know if its some problem with Chrome (what an irony ).

Anyway for its initial stage,it does provide something different from the various other 'socializing' tools available out there. I wonder if it would just be another site you open as soon as you fire up your browser...Lets wait and see whether this tool becomes a communication wave or would require us to wave it goodbye...depending upon how much more value Google is able to add to its much hyped new product...happy waving..

Obama brings in change

So thats it, Barack Hussein Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President of the US of A. I watched the speech yesterday evening,and it was very interesting. It's not Obama's policies or what he is going to do or not do that I am gonna write about..its about his association with new technologies.

That is the change that Obama seems to have brought, and with good effects as well. From the time he began his campaign, the utilization of the web facilities made him pretty popular among the people who support and embrace such facilities of the internet. The facilities he used included Social Networking sites,blogs,dedicated sites for reaching out to supporters,forums,and even channels in Youtube. His attachment to the blackberry too was in the news for sometime.

Though America is far ahead of us in terms of technology penetration and quality of service, unlike us, there are many there who do not trust/understand such technologies, in spite of being well educated. Many people who use these technologies do not understand the reasoning behind them(not technical), and hence can't think beyond what is provided to them.

With his intelligent campaign, I feel Obama has reached out to the vast population online and even proved a point or two to the people who believed that web and its facilities cannot be used for uniting people for a common cause. The use of such technologies also meant, many of his supporters got a chance to understand and appreciate the underlying technology and its capability to be used in innovative ways.

I was surprised and even amused by the amount of effort that has been put by his campaign teams in utilizing the resources of the web and high end technologies for the campaigning purpose.Even after being elected, his public activities were religiously followed by groups and forums consisting of his ardent supporters and blogs were constantly buzzing with his whereabouts. Even tech bloggers found enough material to write about this man.

The inaugural function was streamed using Microsoft Silverlight technology, which made quite a news. Read M$ press article But later, to assist Linux and MAC users, it was made available via Moonlight technology. There are also many sites that cover the function completely as streaming video as well as pictures. The Official Presidential Inaugural Committee too has online resource to guide supporters who wished to come to DC for the event. It contains maps,contact informations and guidebooks.

It seems Microsoft and Google are stealing the limelight in Obama's victory as 'technology partners'. Here is an article on CNN-Microsoft collaborative Photosynth that covered the Inaugural ceremony. Here is something about Google's youtube.

That's all for now folks..lets hope the change is positive ...

Yahoo! is bugging me ..

I wonder what has happened to Yahoo! services nowadays. None of them load properly for me all the time.
I use Mail,Answers and delicious.All three have been upset in some or the other way.
Logging into mail leads to many errors coming up as message boxes(strange enough that I suspect malicious activities..but even on Linux?) and finally leading to me opting for classic mail,which has no images or backgrounds and no proper ordering of contents..I didn't investigate what exactly is off,but then I am not pretty good with web stuff..

The above list of services is in the increasing order of usefulness and frequency of use for me...and hence the errors with Answers bugs me more than mail.It shows similar errors with only text showing up,that too one beneath the other and no horizontal spacing and all..I know I am not stating the correct technical terms,but I am helpless about that :) Sometimes,they even turn up errors that say 'Oops' ...

The most important tool that I use almost daily is delicious.With the new interface I found its use increasing for me...and now my earlier method of browsing the bookmarks via the web interface has to be dropped as it doesn't load in the new interface or as any interface..the links are listed vertically and that needs tedious scrolling..so I stick to logging in and using the integrated bookmarks using plugins in Firefox.

All these look like some rendering issues,so would I be right to think the issue is with FF3?But I couldn't find any article or issue of this form reported anywhere or never heard anyone talk about it..I wonder if something is off at the other side..Yahoo's web servers having issues of some kind?
Any idea?anyone?Its irritating for a pretty much used service from a company I had dreamed to join and prepared like hell for it turning up so bad...


Update:Finally,on whitelisting the site with Adblock,the problem seemed to be solved.But it exists even now,and doesn't seem to be going even after disabling Adblock.So,the issue persists....

Double Bonanza

Yippe..just confirmed the news that BSNL is providing broadband at double the usage limits to users who have been subscribers for atleast 6 months...
I have now 5 gb as the limit...and I am at about 1.53g as I speak..so gonna do downloading in broad daylight (happens rarely)

I thank BSNL for bringing such a nice offer,hoping that this doesn't lead to any problems due to confusion and bring about huge bills next month.This news was confirmed by authorities when I called them up.It is an offer that lasts only for November...and it is gonna help in the project hunt.

Happy...

Google Introduces Video Chat

Wow..google comes up new feature.just saw..lets see if its good enough..hm..clicked the link and reached the site..
As usual.the beautiful page that google always sports...with the same type of buttons( of chrome and lively fame) and owww..hm..they have kept that same thing over these three products...crap...

It's free and installs in seconds
System requirements: Windows XP or later

Why only windows xp...?why not Linux..why don't they ever release products for Linux anymore..I would love to see chrome get more add-ons and a Linux version...they are using the beta excuse over the line..
Hm..and ya ok..whatever..lets see what they have to offer...clicked 'Learn More'
and hehe...and what awaits is...ads from Buy.com for web cams and also a link to Google's product search for webcams..so this is just an ad gimmick..not focused on the technology it seems..

Feel lil bit sad after learning Pagerank for IR today( easy paper..:) )....hm..have a stall at a Free software national conference at CUSAT tomorrow..got some work also..

BSNL Dataone screws up own service

This is the biggest news of today.that is why I am taking my time to post this,even though I have two exams to prepare for tomorrow :)





From today morning,my friend who uses Dataone 500C was getting a strange problem with the otherwise troublesome service.Whatever url he gives in his browser leads to a page that contains a login page and tells the user that their bandwidth has exceeded 1 GB.

http://172.30.3.134:8080/ssssportal.war/exceedlimit.jsp

I being a user having 59 range of ips and him being a 117 user(a class of users doomed to face the wrath of foolish dataone engineers),I had no issues. The description of the problem suits a classic DNS poisoning case.Whatever url you give,is redirected to the above said page,asking for username and password(which doesn't work also :P).So I feared it might be related to the BIND bug that had surface a few weeks back and is at large even now.Our lab administrator had explained how dangerous that could be and we had seen it attack ours as well as our University's sites.

So,I advised him to move to OpenDNS,hoping that it would have solved the issue.But it didn't.One thing to note is that torrents were working properly,you could visit secure sites(which used https),use Yahoo Messenger etc.Also ping and other network tools work without issues.I was wondering if its some kind of virus,as he and some others who had issues were from Windows.

This continued till just a few minutes back.I looked up several forums,and found one which mentioned and debated various reasons for this to happen.The last post was by a guy who got info from BSNL that this is a legitimate work of BSNL that got screwed up due to their usual crappy implementation policies.

The intention was to warn the user that their bandwidth has exceeded 1GB,so they can login,accept and continue with net usage.But thanks to the good engineers sitting over there,the login code was not in place..hence giving it a hacking site look.Also the traceroute gave its position to be just after the BSNL site,making people think that the site got hacked or corrupted.Also as the users were never informed beforehand of such a move,all were taken by surprise.But thanks to a few ppl in 117 range who didn't cross 1GB,I could fix that it was not bind bug,in which case it would have affected all 117 ppl at once,or even using OpenDNS would have solved problem.

I just got information that it has finally been fixed.But I wonder how could such a blunder have occured?Why did they implement a feature without warning or informing users?Shouldn't they have given workaround or info on the page they had redirected everyone to??? And wth did they not test the login code that was supposed to affect thousands of users all over India???This is not the first time such stupid things are being done by them.

On implementing and introducing the 117 range of ips,their login and usage checking site was a complete mess...it was a big headache for those users.A friend informed me that its not quite perfect even now.Also there were many cases when users got huge bills as big as 35k per month.Their support system certainly has improved a bit(8 bit=1 byte),but they still can deal with only the old issues that plagued initial Dataone users,like with the router and other things.Most of the BSNL offices responded to this issue by either taking the JTO's phone receiver off the cradle or giving a list of phone numbers(mostly disconnected ones) to call to.

Hm...I have been using BSNL Dataone for quite some time now..I had faced some issues,but the new 117 users are facing much more troublesome ones...not to mention the other bureaucratic delays involved...Why is all this happening to such a big company that deals with such a huge number of customers who are paying to get good service.The speed and plans provided by Dataone makes it a destination of all those who can afford it(time cost far exceeds financial cost).I still can't figure out what is happening at their technical office...what the engineers were thinking before letting out such a new feature...are they dumb???I am not alone is expressing this kind of feelings...just google for BSNL or bsnl sucks or check any broadband related forum..there are always more people pointing out new and strange issues of the service than those pointing out good features.

I do appreciate their technical service quality(read as bandwidth and speed),but their implementation and support policies are the worst of any I have ever seen or heard in this high tech field.The fact that they do limit speeds during 2-8 is something bad which I add here...so thats it..hope those guys improve ...

"Good decisions come out of experience,but experience comes out of bad decisions!":P

Thought Controlled Applications

Hi.
With the hunt for seminar topics...started the soaring imagination..my imagination.

I thought up 2-3 things that could change the way we live..if it were ever implemented.
I have mentioned about them in a fictional setup in my personal blog.
Here I will try to put down the specifications about these ideas and the issues I face.

The topics are kind of spawned from my deep interest in A.I,Neural Networks,Data Mining and the concept of web.All those who have heard about/played Neural Network Mapping would know my interest(or craze..as some see it) in understanding deep concepts of the mind and extracting it...and also the effort to connect it to the vast web containing the products of millions of brains and hearts...(actually billions and also hands,toes watever..)

Ok idea number one..in its raw form..is translating thoughts to a language understandable by softwares...mainly web search engines.A lot of doubts would arise in everyone's mind on hearing such ideas...one being the ability of machines to read and interpret thoughts...and even if did so...(actually brain signals have been utilised so far..never heard about any solid breakthrough in understanding thoughts)..the issue of utilizing it in its full strength.

I don't know if I can bring forward all the arguments and counter-arguments about this idea that I had over a period of time and write it in this post(if i do so...i fear this wud be a dynamically changing post,which wud require a reader to refresh page occasionally to read more)

My proposal is to use a nano device that resides in the brain(implanted) and can monitor brain signals.I assume that by the time this technology is operational,there would have been some breakthrough research that would allow us to atleast get an idea of what is being thought(i.e identify formation of thought and convert this into abstract form that can be used to uniquely identify the thought).It should be able to distinguish between my perception of an idea and another person's(which is quite different).What I think when I hear 'tree' is quite different from what you might be...Once this abstract form is available..it is transmitted out as a magnetic signal that doesn't affect normal working of body or other devices.

An external device (I called it mind-pod..:P),reads this data and can use it for any application.Here I am trying it for searching the web.This is tricky.I have to use an advanced AI to create a set of keywords from the abstract form that would then be used to fetch accurate results from teh web in the ordinary way.I felt this is a revolutionary idea..but depends a lot on future technologies and as a IR man,only the small AI is involved..which might well be done with some AI and Data Mining.My original design had design and concept flaws,so I propose this.The abstract form maybe used for any other innovative applications as well..actually it would open up a plethora of opportunities for application development....


The second topic is similar...its called dream analyzer(Dreamfix).Its faar more advanced than the previous..it should be able to read dreams and make a list of possible inferences.Its application would to be salvage useful ideas after a nap..after all sleep enhances thought processes and creativity!!!

Pidgin rocks!!!

PIDGIN




This is about my favorite IM,Purple Pidgin.I had used GAIM messenger previously in Linux.As with most of the Linux Apps, it had lots of shortcomings,in spite of which we all loved and used it ..mainly because that was the best one available.

Then with the latest Ubuntu came Pidgin.The base install is clean and looks similar to GAIM,only that the interface looks more clean and attractive.Also with pidgin,I set up my google and yahoo accounts and hence was more useful to me than my GAIM,for which I didn't know how to setup up google account.



Why I am suddenly blogging about this software is because last week I was bored and had nothing to do.... and my bandwidth was pretty low.So I just opened up Pidgin and started checking out all options and configurations.I got curious with the plugin list which is quite interesting.There was a mention about more plugins available on the site.

After 2 am that day...I searched for pidgin plugins...got a few sites and went through the plugins...some where mind-blowing and some were the features that other IMs sport.I had also checked the Google Summer of Code page for Pidgin,there were some interesting plugins like Musictracker which puts currently playing music on status message.Soon I had found about 10 plugins and downloaded and installed each.


The main one I did was the best in the pack.It gives a script for my site.I can put up a chat window on any site,with the javascript.Then I have to configure my client with a new Account(all details from that site itself).I configured it and tried it soon...it was simply amazing...I really love it.Many of my pals have already tried it.Its here in this blog...please do try if I am online.

I also installed some more plugins from the Synaptic Package Manager.I didn't get a chance to try them though.Today I found all of them installed and I just went through the Plugins list..whoa..and I enabled a few.I will list the ones I liked and am using and describe a few.

Chat colours,autocomplete(really cool),Off the Record,Invisibility,Away Time Setter,Psychic Mode,Availabilty Probability,GUIfications,Hotkeys,New Smileys,Notifications,Music Messaging and Mouse Gestures.

Invisibility and Off the Record
The really cool features available in most IMs...now in Pidgin too

Psychic Mode
Whenever a user starts typing a new conversation...I get a funny message..saying "I feel a disturbance in the force..."so i can react before they do....helps startle my buddies...

Availability Probability
This I don't know how it works.It is supposed to give probability of being available for each contact.... :P

GUIfications
Cool pop ups and notifications when someone types or leaves or returns

Music Messaging
Allows people work on same score of music simultaneously..not much use to me..but cool

Mouse Gestures
Allows many operations by mouse gestures..cool

There are many more cool features about Pidgin and many more to come.Anyway pidgin has become more fun than gtalk.It just lacks in file transferring,voicemails and ability to remove status messages.

Pidgin Site
Also there is a command line version called Finch.Its really cool..do try it out.
Finch