Monkey On

Yahoo! has had a beta service called Search Monkey that has been picking up some steam off late. Apart from some of the cool plugins for linkedIn, Yelp and such I have seen some very valuable plugins off late especially for software developers.

Check out the Java Documentation once you add the Java Doc Plugin.

To add these plugins go to the Gallery

Pick and choose whatever you like.

Beware : You are entering Genius Territory

If you find the content of my blog ridiculous and don't get what I am trying to say, it's not on account of my horrendous writing but because according to this rating my blog requires you to be mensa certified. I really did not realize I had the ability to write such profound stuff. Time to get some tips from sundar's blog

Movie Reviews

What are your favorite sites?

Time had an interesting article about the 10 sites we cannot live without. I guess this list varies from person to person and from the list I would say I can live without most of those sites. Youtube was prominent in it's absence.

Show Me The Money

Satya Nadella, the key executive for Microsoft Live Search had this to say while shutting down the Book Search initiative.
"We believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer and content partner," Nadella wrote."

This translates to "show me the money" and not necessarily all hard problems are worth pursuing. Now that Microsoft has thrown in the towel, will Google follow suit on this one?

Steve Ballmer Egged.

Check out this video out where the Microsoft CEO is being egged by an irate Hungarian customer.

Mechanics of Business

If I were to take a course in business strategy I woul probably get an F-; Here's why. Today Verizon and Mozilla announced support for LiMo a rival wireless platform to Google's Android. I can totally understand why Verizon would do that, they own the networks and they want to own the data going over the networks as well. Now why would Mozilla do that. Unless my memory is failin me, was google not the company that pumped in millions of dollars into Firefox which one can easily say is the flagship product from Mozilla. What am I missing?

Eeadichan copy

Encyclopedia Britannica

When I was a kid I remember going to a friend's place and staring at an entire collection of Encyclopedia Britannica. Let's just say this friend was very rich. So when I got to know the entire collection was now available for free I could not resist the urge to sign up. People had written obituaries about Britannica what with Wikipedia and Web Search engines making any information a matter of a few keystrokes. I thought this was an awesome chance for them to prove the critics wrong.

I promptly decided to fill out the form when I caught the line in CAPS.


Start using Britannica's premium service immediately. Just complete this one-page form, then confirm and submit your order in Step 2!

Account Information
Subscription Type: FREE ACCESS FOR 1 YEAR 0.00 (USD)
Why would they offer this for a period of 1 year only. Is it to attract to lock in people and show how valuable their content is?
It's hard to comprehend who comes up with these buisness decisions. I just have a feeling they have let one more golden oppurtunity slip.

Apple Vs Mac - Friday Evening Fun

A fairly old clip but I watch it every once in a while just to admire this brilliant piece of advertising. Now do you want to buy a PC or a MAC? I was a PC guy until very recently. My home desktop still is a PC but my work machine is a powerbook. Needless to say I never use my home desktop.

Blogs Vs Newsgroups.

So I had this interesting exchange with one of my friends about blogging. I was saying how blogging was a new paradigm shift in how people express themselves. No more editorial control, you have a thought just go ahead and scribble it up for the entire world to see. I was sold on blogging being a phenomenon but found significant resistance from the other end, he is after all someone who is still not sold on the need for a cell phone. Then he threw in a surprise punch almost as an afterthought. He said blogging was pure hype and had existed with a different name "Newsgroups". I almost instantaneously dismissed it. Then he got me thinking and increasingly I felt he had a point, though I am not fully sold on it. I am still to do some deep thinking on this front. But for starters he and this other person seem to agree. If this were a tennis match my friend is up 15-0. But the game has just begun. To be continued..

Browser Challenge : FireFox vs Internet Explorer

I have always been under the impression that though Firefox is popular and I use it, the world still uses Internet explorer. So the stats on my blog as to which browser the traffic came from came as a complete surprise to me. Here are the stats.

FireFox : 57.94%
Internet Explorer : 36.51%
Safari : 3.97%
Mozzilla : 0.79%

These stats are not part of a scientific study to analyze a trend but does this bode well for Microsoft?

LCD

Flat panel displays such as LCD's and Plasma's are on the top of the shopping list for most people. LCD which stands for Liquid Crystal Display has someone taking the term very literally. Philips has launched a television set with diamonds encrusted on them.

Philips also unveiled the one-of-its-kind diamond-encrusted Ambilight flat TV. Created in association with New York-based jewellery company A.Link, the 42-inch piece features 225 carats of about 2,250 individual diamonds set into a floral pattern around the edges of the frame.

I think this is one of the cases of someone going too far.

It's not immaterial after all.

The popular saying when I was in school was people doing material science engineering would never get to savor material pleasures (read money!) given there was a severe dearth of jobs in that field. You want to be an idealist, this is the field for you was the popular adage. While there was a frenzy to get into Computer science there was a severe drought of students in fields like Material science. A number of students used to jump ship to computer science and the university promptly banned this practice. Well , fast forward to 2007 and now we are beginning to hear and entirely different story. This article seems to indicate that the folks who stuck it out potentially stand to gain and actually make a difference to our lives. If you want an example, all of Apple's latest innovations have been possible on account of the work of material scientists and device physicists. So the next time you listen to a tune on your shiny Ipod pay a silent tribute to those hardworking Material scientists.

Bronze medal.

Can you folks take a guess as to who is the bronze medalist when it comes to web search. The answer is not MSN, not Ask but Baidu. The chinese web search engine is ranked third after Google and Yahoo! as per Comscore's lates reports. Surprised?, don't be. This is going to become a global phenomena as the Chinese are on target to dominate the world by the end of the century. So my favorite fruit starting today is going to be mandarin oranges :)

Real Star not a Bollywood Star.

This was how Rajdeep Sardesai referred to Sunita Williams. Enjoy the clip.

Search Assist from Yahoo!

This is a shameless plug for a new Yahoo! Search feature called Search Assist. Try out Y! search either at search.yahoo.com or in the Y! home page www.yahoo.com
Try typing queries where you have a hard time spellings as is typical with queries involving queries with Indian Last names which are notorious for being generous with the number of syllables. Give it a spin and hopefully you wont have to go back to that other nasty search engine :)

Me 2 Nah Me 4.

AMD launched a Quad Core Opteron. This in my opinion is really a "me too" launch given that Intel has had the quadcore processors in the market for a little while now. It is a clear signal that AMD has become the follower again. When you have a company like Intel as your competitor you really can't afford to slip and sadly AMD will need to regroup and focus on it's core strength "innovation" again.

illegal exception: Programming in legal

A good number of programmer geeks would have seen this message every once in a while when you write bad code. Before non-programmers dismiss this post this is not a post on how to avoid this pitfall so rest assured you can safely read further.

A friend of mine told me about making a will that would bequeath all our assets to our kids. He told me the cost would amount to something in the order of $2000. He went on to add that one could get a better quote if one were sane enough to jump though all the legal jargon and fill all the paper work by themselves. I found all of this too hard to comprehend. My kids getting my property after we die is as simple as it gets. My thinking would be unless otherwise stated they would get 50-50 (almost like the default label in a switch statement). Too much of programming makes you think only in terms of logic (if/then/else). It appears the Legal language is foreign to this programming paradigm. Apparently they speak a different language if you go by this post.

India's Infrastructure Woes

Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo! Research has a very different spin on India's infrastructure woes.

LinuxWorld 2007

Just got back from Linux World 2007 at the Moscone Center. This is my first trip to Linux world and I was impressed. I saw a huge breadth in the crowd. Got to meet some sisters from church ministries to CEO's of companies asking if I had a CEO opening in my company :)
Technology wise the companies that were taking center stage were the usual suspects Intel, Oracle, IBM and HP. Vmware also got a lot of attention and was one of the more popular booths. Amazon had a booth showing off their web services stack. There were quite a few backup solution companies. O'Reiley was a very popular booth. Overall the conference had a very good mix of companies covering a broad spectrum.