Photo movie of my car

I came across a site called BubbleShare that allows us to make a slideshow from a collection of pictures, and embed our voice into it. Finally when the slideshow is all done, we can integrate it into the blog/personal website.

Here is my first photo movie... Its a tour of my new car (Volkswagen Jetta'06)

Mind Reader

Reading the mind is a central theme for many sci-fi fiction movies... Matrix and Minority-Report are some of them. Well... now, its not fiction anymore. Check out this article that has info on the 'Mental Typewriter', which is basically a mind reader. They help to carry out actions at the speed of thought..

A Desi's dating story

Found an interesting Desi-story as forwarded mail in my inbox. Its a good read!

A Mom comes to visit her son kumar for dinner.....who lives with a room mate, a girl named Sunita. During the course of the meal, his mother couldn't help but notice how pretty Kumar's roommate was. She had long been suspicious of a relationship between the two, and this had only made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between Kumar and his roommate than met the eye. Reading his mom's thoughts, Kumar volunteered, "I know hat you must be thinking, but I assure you, Sunita and I are just roommates."

About a week later, Sunita came to Kumar saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the silver chutney jar. You don't suppose she took it, do you?" Kumar said,"Well, I doubt it, but I'll email her, just to be sure."

So he sat down and wrote:

Dear Mother:
I'm not saying that you 'did' take the chutney jar from my house, I'm not saying that you 'did not' take the chutney jar. But the fact remains that it has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.
Love, Kumar

Several days later, Kumar received an email from his Mother which read

Dear Son:
I'm not saying that you 'do' sleep with Sunita, and I'm not saying that you do not' sleep with Sunita. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her OWN bed, she would have found the chutney jar by now under the pillow...
Love,
Mom.

Taking Digital Notes

This article is a good find... It lists many possible ways to take notes using a computer.

Blogging is essential

The blog-post has been moved. Click here to read the article

How blogging can improve your career

Check out this article that enumerates why blogging is essential to one's growth. Apart from all the reasons listed in the article, I also feel that it gives a sense of contentment after blogging. I feel a lot more complete on sharing my thoughts with the world. The comments to my posts encourage me and also guide me to think in the right direction.

Blogging organizes our thoughts, and induces many good ones into our minds. To write a good blog-post, we definetely require some deep thinking, have to formulate opinions, and judge what is good and bad. This in-turn sharpens our cognitive process to make decisions, and make us aware of our thought-pattern.

Sharing with the world makes a whole lot of difference than keeping stuff to ourselves. Be it informing, boasting or mourning... we feel a lot better. There is no better way to share our thoughts in a gentle manner than blogging.

Hope people realize it and start blogging sooner or later...

I.T Legends

I came across some priceless pics of I.T legends while browsing the net...

Andreas Bechtolsheim , Bill Joy, Scott Mc Nealy and Vinod Khosla of SUN(StanfordUniversity Network) MicroSystems

Founded by four StanfordUniversity buddies. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer... Vinod Khosla recruited him; Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer...

Bill Hewlett(L) and Dave Packard(R) of HP


Behind them in the picture is the famous HP Garage.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. And the winner was NOT Bill... the winner was Dave.


Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore of Intel


Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce'. But that was already trademarked by a hotel chain... So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics... INTEL


Infosys group

Picture taken when INFY was started. This picture was found in the album of the clerk who took this picture... The picture was with that clerk only because it was his birthday and he just told everyone to stand together at one place to take a pic.

He borrow a camera from his friend and as he can not tell any of his boss to take pic, so he took pic by himself... even it was his birthday.


Ken Thompson (L)and Dennis Ritchie(R) ,creators of UNIX...

Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'. B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie). He later called it C.


Larry Page(L) and Sergey Brin(R), founders of Google...

Google was originally named 'Googol'.

After founders (Stanford graduates) Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor... they received a cheque made out to 'Google' !... So they kept name as GOOGLE


Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System...

Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his OS.

Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix). He thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to name it Freax (free + freak + x).His friend Ari Lemmk encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded.

Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax. Linus like that directory name and he kept the name of his new OS to LINUX...


Steve Woznaik(sitting) and Steve Jobs of APPLE Computers...


He was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn't get any better name for his new company.

So one day he told to the staff: "If I'll not get better name by 5 o'clcok today, our company's name will be anything he likes..." so at 5 o'clcok nobody comeup with better name, and he was eating APPLE that time... so he keep the name of the company 'Apple Computers'


Tim Berners Lee -- Founder of the World Wide Web


Microsoft when started...

Lessons from the spastic kids

I found an interesting incident that happend in Hyderabad [India], and believed everyone of us have something to learn from this...

It was a sports stadium. Eight Children were standing on the track to participate in the running event.

* Ready! * Steady! * Bang!!!

With the sound of Toy pistol, all eight girls started running. Hardly have they covered ten to fifteen steps, one of the smaller girls slipped and fell down, due to bruises and pain she started crying. When other seven girls heard this sound, stopped running, stood for a while and turned back, they all ran back to the place where the girl fell down.

One among them bent, picked and kissed the girl gently and enquired 'Now pain must have reduced'. All seven girls lifted the fallen girl, pacified her, two of them held the girl firmly and they all seven joined hands together and walked together and reached the winning post.

Officials were shocked. Clapping of thousands of spectators filled the stadium. Many eyes were filled with tears and perhaps it had reached the GOD even! YES. This happened in Hyderabad [INDIA], recently! The sport as conducted by National Institute of Mental Health.

All these special girls had come to participate in this event and they are spastic children. Yes, they were mentally retarded Challenged.

What did they teach this world?

Teamwork...
Humanity...
Equality among all...

Successful people help others who are slow in learning so that they are not felt far behind. This is really a great message... spread it!

Google Calendar

The Google Calendar service is so cool... as you can always expect from Google. The calendar is fully ajax based, searchable and sharable. They have also released the related APIs for building several extensions and 3rd party products. One such product that I wish to see is a tool to import all the Blogger entries to the calendar. That would be a perfect way to backup my entire blog, and refer to it as a personal diary.

BTW, Its good to see many shared public calendars in the web already. I've shown interest in the following ones...

#EarthSeasonsSouth
This calendar contains all of the start of Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer times for the Southern Hemisphere through the year 2020.

#2007 Cricket World Cup (West Indies)
Full Calendar of the 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup including the warm up matches.

#Indian Team Cricket Schedule
Schedule of the Indian Cricket team in the near future

#Indian Holidays Calendar 2006

#US Holidays

Yet another cool feature is the "Quick Add" functionality that can parse a normal english sentence, and create a corresponding event/appointment. I also appreaciate the integration of the Calendar service with Gmail, in the form of alerts and navigation. If by any chance you did not explore this yet, please dive in immediately.

Check out this article to know what analysts have to say about Google's business plans and the Calendar service.

Thirst for Accomplishments

The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it
- William James (1842 - 1910)

There is so much that one can accomplish, and there is a whole lot to be accomplished. Yet, we end up having so little to our credit. Yesterday, I happened to browse through blogs of several folks who are of nearly my age. I was very surprised to find out their long list of accomplishments, and their contribution to society, in addition to their successful career path. It is a measure of how distinguished can a person be from the rest.

Let me now dig into the specifics... Here are some folks with same interests, similar educational background, and an equivalent job as mine. But what they have to their credit is more noteworthy.

• Elliott Back
• Balaji Vishwanathan
  

Check out their websites to learn more about them. Btw, just in case if you are curious to know about my accomplishments, its all here. I feel good about myself when I listed them out, especially those certifications that I have. But, I know for sure that I can do lot more than just those. I'm now very inspired to do more, and am striving hard for it.

My plan of action is to develop a handful of freeware that uses some of the latest technologies related to Java. This is all I need to get back in race with those whom I admire for their accomplishments. I know its not easy... Let me see how hard can it get in putting my plan to action.

Reservation System - Limitations should apply

Check out this blog-post that precisely explains how insane it is to have a reservation system in place for IIT/IIM institutes in India. I am no IITian, but I totally agree to the views expressed in it, and hope the Indian government realizes how much harm the reservation policy could cause. I support reservation system for certain aspects..., but not for every aspect of life. IITs and IIMs are world-class institutes that India has been proud of since many years. Any compromise on the quality of their students is not a good sign both for the institutes and the country.

For any policy, limitations should be applied... and this reservation policy is no exception. The government should clearly define the suitable areas where the policy can be applied... Any policy if applied to a wrong entity will mess up the whole system. The boundaries for this reservation policy is very clear... obviously applicable only to the normal attributes of life such as basic education (schooling), non-critical jobs, etc.

Another reason why this policy can be used is to encourage the backward/minority communities to leap foward and take up the initiative. Certainly IITs and IIMs are not the place for this.

As a side effect to the reservation policy in general, I've heard of many communities appealing for "Backward" status, and hence can get an edge in every sector (engineering, medical, government jobs, ...). What a sad scenario! I could not believe its all happening under the leadership of one of the most educated prime-ministers of India (Dr.Manmohan Singh).

Luxury of TIME

This slide-show/movie is an old one, and I am sure you guys must have watched it before. But guess its worth watching it again. This video makes us realize that watching some crap in television just to kill time is the worst activity one can ever do. Much to the dismay, many of us are fond of doing it. Thank god! I am not a TV addict.

HTML - Linking within a page

Earlier, I was wondering how do I link to an article that requires scrolling down to middle of the page. The below answer is being borrowed from this site.

To link to a specific section in a page, you need to place
<A NAME="section_name"></A> tags at the beginning of the section you will be linking to (section_name = a unique name for each
section of a page).

Then to link to that section from within the same document, use the
anchor tag:
<A HREF="#section_name"> text to be linked
</a>

To link to this section from another page, add #section_name to the end of the url of the
page, i.e. http://server_name/path/filename.html#section_name.