Tsunami Relief

The events of the last week have shocked all of us and effected millions of people.

To contribute and help out at this time of need - please see what avenues are open at TsunamiHelp or the wiki Mirror

Couple of good donation points - Amazon for the red cross and save the children.

Web 2.0 - Conference Summaries and Audios

Web 2.0 had some of my favourite people from the web - Larry Lessig, craig newmark (craigslist fame) , Brendon Eich (Firefox Architect)
It also has interesting presentations from Kim Polese (New open souce IT services company). There were other columns on Search, VOIP , Clustering, Keyhole.

To access this - you might want to check weblogsinc site for web2.0.

Interesting Firefox Speed Hack

BoingBoing has an interesting Firefox hack to speed up the refresh rate - I tried it - think it works !
Need to try it on the high graphics sites - and not ones like this or this :-)

Blogger's servers - thanks !

........for supporting scaled up bandwidth requests for some of the good Tsunami sites. It has really helped the content team to not have to worry abt that issue while handling the traffic spikes.

Learning CSS

......... and I finally put some colors more suited to me on my blog. Thanks to Douglas Bowman at stopdesign whose template this originally is !

Been interesting using CSS - Same old problem of not closing the

tag wasted a lot of my time today... !

I used 1st page 2000 from evrsoft - Nice clean and simple editor. Only problem is that the preview parser - seems to be more error correcting than Firefox or I.E - and accepts tags for break with or without the '/' and also seems to accept 'divs' without the appropriate closing '/' . Anyways fixed them to work better.

Tsunami and More

Terrible news on the Tsunami in Asia. The Coast is about 100 metres from where I used to stay while working in chennai .

Hope there are speedy efforts to help out the people in time of this terrible tragedy. My thoughts are with all the families who lost their loved ones in this disaster.

The government could look to putting in early warning systems (like they do for storms) for this one.


Update ------- Please link to this blog http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/ for further updates and learning how to help.

Search Salvo - IBM

Search seems to be hottest word out there nowadays. IBM has fired its salvo by talking about using natural language processing and trying to build search software which understands the underlying meaning of the the text that is being searched.

This is quite interesting - talks abt the Search 1.0 being the not so cool - desktop based search, Search 2.0 - regarding google's web dominence - and (ahem ! - with no product yet - they are really stretching this one ) and search 3.0 will be dominated by the ability to understand the meaning of what is being searched.

Other interesting search engines were discussed in a previous post

Some new ones which I have been reading about include indeed - which is a Job search engine , Blingo - which is a site where you can search on certain key words and win prizes (ok - I got a message saying I am sorry - this current search doesn't qualify - but you COULD win .. blah blah)..

A real interesting one is an information aggregator called PubSub - lets you index on a certain topic and gives you RSS feeds of information on that topic . Quite similar to Google News - but not sure of that has an RSS feed ?
PubSub has a cool plugin into Firefox which I installed.

Then there is vivisimo - which uses some technology called cluster searching.

Also heard that Yahoo has bought out X1 to help in its quest for desktop search dominance.

The truth abt credit..

Fastcompany has a very interesting post regarding a study from NYT and Frontline on Credit cards.

Makes for good reading - some concepts like revolvers and deadbeats are quite interesting. I am the latter and pay my bills the day it lands up !

Google vis-a-vis Microsoft

Been reading a lot of stuff on google vs microsoft and their search battles.

Here is an authoritative in depth analysis of the history of both companies and the path ahead for google.

Funnily enough the author Charles H. Ferguson sold his company Vermeer (they made frontpage !!) for quite a tidy sum in microsoft stock ...

This has not really 'influenced' the critique though. The author's insider knowledge of microsoft sort of adds to the articles depth and flavour.

Interesting JPEG compression tool

Cool tool designed by yafla which helps remove unnecessary bytes from your jpeg images.

Thanks to Joel for this one !

New Definition to 'Top it up'

.... and I thought I only said that to the guy who pumps gas.

Check this one from boingboing on efficient usage of bowls in salad bars ? Someone must have done a Phd in physics to predict the balancing algorithm for that one !

Don't Speak!

Ok - This one belies the name of this blog - BoingBoing really caught a good one on cell fone rage .

This doesn't have stats , facts and the regular boring stuff - Just a few interesting ways to fight back..

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh !

Information Privacy ....

Bruce Schneier has an interesting article on this one - on the potentials of use (or misuse ?) of Private information by various US corporate and government entities .

Thanks to Rebecca for this one .

Whats common to NASA and the Indian Constitution?

The Voyager satellites .... looks like aliens will get a taste of how many languages that India has - there are close to 10 indian languages in this script ..

Thanks to Anil again for this one.

Interesting Google - Predictive algorithm

Mmh.... This is a good beta from Google - basically links to predictive search based on what you type - almost feals like gmail's dhtml to autocomplete for your contacts

Credit - Anil Dash's post


12/12 - Update from Joel's site - Seems its a XmlHTTPRequest - interesting read on sitepoint