Sunday, January 29, 2006

Some narcissism

Its been a long time since I uploaded my pic in my profile. Hence I uploaded pics of myself for each of last 4 years. I changed a lot between 2002 to 2004, no more changes these days.


2001/2002 - Final Year in College

2003 - In Bangalore

2004 - In Noida

2005 - Still in Noida

I am using the latest one as my pic in the profile. It was shot using my Nokia 6255 mobile camera.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Computer Guys

"Shakti, my network card isn't working, please fix it."
"Sorry man, I don't know much about hardware."
"kya kahe raha hai Shakti, tu to compu stud hai, theek kar de"

If you are familiar with such conversation, chances are that you are one of those people proclaimed computer guys out there. I was reading this article today and found this real good corollary.

"Did you watch the Raiders game?"

"No, I don't follow football ------"

"What do you think of the new quarterback?"

"Really, football's not my thing. I don't know."

"I thought that you said that you're a sports fan?"

"No, I said that I watched tennis."

"Right, so what did you think of the penalty called in the Raiders game?"

"I watch tennis."

"Why would they call a penalty like that?"

Um.


Interesting Read.

Update 01/02/2006: Check out today's dilbert.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Yahoo opens dot addresses

Yahoo email addresses, like gmail, can finally have dots. Even better is the fact is that you can create an alias to the existing account. So all you 2001, 2002, _delhi, _iitd people out there, grab one here. I already grabbed one you can guess.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Happy New Year

So many thoughts, so less words and even less time. Last year was a pretty balanced one, delivering the best of professional life experiences and the worst of personal life experiences at the same time. But hasn't life always been like that.

I want my life to be a decaying sinusoidal curve, slowing moving towards a stable equilibrium. Ever since I started writing there, I feel that I have been constantly moving closer to it. This is enough reason for me to be satisfied and hopefully that future will be good.

Hope all you people reading this never lose hope. Happy New Year.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Life should be easy

I believe that the basic stuff should always be easy to do so that one can concentrate on advanced stuff. But look at even the basic stuff of life, you move around in night and you catch cold, you eat a little extra and you get fat. Just maintaining a healthy body is the toughest task of the world. Add to it the little hobbies you want to pursue and see how much effort one has to put in each.
I remember at one of those corporate sessions, I was asked what I would I change if I was god. I said, I would give people the ability to pursue what they want, freed from all the unwanted responsibilities of their life.
Most people don't even know what they want to pursue in life and which way their life is going. But I don't blame them. The complexity of life is not easy to handle.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Spot the messenger

I absolutely hate MSN messenger, and I use it only because of friends and office colleagues. I am just waiting for the day when msn and yahoo collaboration is complete so that I wouldn't have to use the stupid msn messenger.
Why do I hate it so much? As an example, today when I booted my PC, I saw this:

But I hadn't launched the messenger yet. How come I got logged on to msn without my knowing? Clicking on the popup, I got:


Trying spotting the messenger now in the taskbar/system tray. There is no icon of messenger. I didn't launch it. But still I am logged onto msn, the chat window is open. Knowing the looks (and checking the version), I know its Windows Messenger 4.7 that comes pre-installed with XP. The question is, first, why doesn't this Windows Messenger gets uninstalled when I installed MSN messenger 7.0? Why does MS windows keeps 2 copies of the same program. Second, if it will not uninstall automatically, why its there a manual way of uninstalling it. I have tried using "Add/Remove Windows Component" and what not, but the fact is, it will not uninstall itself, it will log you on without your knowing as soon as you get connected to internet thereby wasting your bandwidth and invading your privacy, and it will make you and your PC susceptible to chat and advertisement attacks.

This is the exact reason why I hate it (and why I haven't upgraded to msn messenger 7.5). So I found this great tool to remove Windows Messenger (though it still have msn messenger 7.0 installed due to friends/colleagues) .

BTW, http://messenger.msn.com doesn't work on firefox due to poor conformity to web standards.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Firefox 1.5 review

Okay, I installed Firefox 1.5, looks good and most of my extensions worked as well. And the ones that don't work, it is showing them as disabled so that I don't lose track of them. There is also an find update option on each extension so that if a future release of the extension is compatible with it, it would be downloaded and installed. I also found this useful link to tweak Gcache extension to work with it.

First impressions, I didn't find much difference between the older version and this. The options screen has changed and it has this really cool setting of "Force links that open windows to open in new tabs". I always find it annoying when clicking on a link opens up a new Firefox window. I liked the way opera had everything contained in itself. Now firefox supports the same feature.

Other than this there is nothing tangible that I can point out, and I still have to figure out some of the extensions stuff, but the web surfing just seems cooler ;-)

Update: Jus tnoticed that upgrading made it lose the search engines that I added. Also, there is no direct way of deleting those search engines (there is an extension though, but I am feeling lazy to google right now)