Rajiv's View

Hooker Blonde

2010-11-23T19:06:00.000-08:00

Love this blonde. Tastes great

Two Blondes from Belgium

2010-02-07T16:57:00.000-08:00

It is not often that one pays $15 for a six pack of ale but if you are spending it on either of these Blonde ales from Belgium, it is money well spent.
Alligem, is a smooth excellent beer with a mild after-taste. It is not too bitter and has a thin texture for an ale. According to the website, it won a medal at the Luxembourg fair in 1951. I can assure you that it lives up to its reputation even today.
Leffe also blonde and from Belgium packs a great distinct flavor of its own. Both of these are excellent beers amd are heartily recommended.
And yes, they go great with a few helpings of the Superbowl!

Movie Review: Avatar

2010-02-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

Watching Avatar at Jordans IMAX was in every sense as spectacular as one could expect. The 3D effects were spectacular, with an astounding quantity of details packed into every frame.

The storyline is in every aspect built on the typical boiler plate, used in many movies like Dances with Wolves. The hero goes into a hostile territory, does soul searching are realizes that the evil is not where he ended up but from where he came from. He falls in love and stands up for what he believes in.

Then there are the usual cliches of developing a respect for nature, a nadir where defeat seems inevitable when the protagonists and his cohorts find the strength to stand up for themselves.

The minority who has not seen the movie are well advised to check out the scenes and contemplate the creation of effects of the movie rather than trying to get into the story. Director James Cameroon has indeed scored a big win in creating a beautiful world with human-like beings and wild beasts more fierce than any legends of the past have created.

Even the "normal" world where the protagonist comes from looks impressive in 3D with mamouth robots, futuristic fire power and sophisticated aircrafts. Indeed the critics were right when they said that it has changed movie making forever.

Cameroon has revived 3D and has struck a big home run for the film industry, in bringing back the movie experience to the theatres. We are already seeing the aftermath of this in that the two forthcoming Harry Potter films and the epic "Clash of the Titans" are all coming out in 3D.

In the meanwhile, Sony plans to bring the 3D experience to our living room, which is, as many pundits predict a risky move for the ailing electronics giant.

One other thing I liked about Avatar is that it did not take too may cheap shots always seen in other 3D movies, like bullets and daggers aimed at your face and the like. There is no need for such gimmicks anyway. The scenes are most impressive enough by themselves.

Except for Sigourney Weaver, there are hardly any big stars in the movie. This is probably a good thing, for the real star of the movie is the techhology that made it. Sure enough, there will be more like Avatar and there almost certainly will be a sequel. Hopefully, the screenplay for the sequel will be more imaginative than this one.

Nevertheless, I heartily recommend Avatar. It is not a movie to be missed.

Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes

2010-01-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

I have been a huge fan of the cocaine addicted, cigar smoking eccentic sleuth for several decades now. From savouring the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the stellar portrayal of Holmes by Jeremy Brett in a great BBC TV serial, I have seem many renditions of Holmes. I also liked many Sherlock Holmes movies I downloaded from the public domain.

Over the weekend, I got to see this rendition of Holmes, played brilliantly by Robert Downey Junior. While Sir Conan Doyle may not be happy with this screenplay, that is not close to faithful to any of his works, Downey's Holmes is every bit as eccentric as his maker intended him to be.

Supported by a stellar cast that includes Jude Law as the not-so-bumbling Holmes' sidekick, Dr. Watson and Rachel McAdams who plays Holmes' love interest, Downey delivers a spectacular performance. This combination of Holmes and Watson are every bit as comfortable when it comes to brawling the bad guys as they are in intellectual analysis of a crime.

Extremely well directed by Guy Richie, the movie has memorable action scenes and impressive special effects. With an interesting plot, the movie is fast pased and gripping till the end.

My only complainabout the movie is that the villain was not menacing enough. The movie leaves behind the promise of a sequel that will revisit the rivalry between holmes and his arch rival, Dr. Moriorty. Hopefully this Doctor will be more fiendish than the one played by Mark Strong. Despite this minor setback, Sherlock Holmes is a must see.

Savouring Open Solaris

2010-01-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

Open Solaris

Thanks to the virtual box, I got to sample Open Solaris. Yes, it is not the latest, greatest version but it is the only image I could find for the Virtual box.

I love the azure blue background. The GUI and the layout have a striking resemblance to Ubuntu Linux. The distro comes with firefox, thunbderbird and a number of games and many of the other applications found in Linux distros. One other gizmo on Open Solaris a windows-like task manager. Well, for now, I'll stick to Linux, Mac and Windows

Savouring Flavors of Linux: EasyPeasy

2010-01-19T20:02:00.000-08:00

EasyPeasy

With the proliferation of Linux across severl platforms,it is no surprise that there is one targeted for the netbook market.

EasyPeasy is a distro specifically designed to run on Netbooks. Like most major Linux distros EasyPeasy comes with numerous offerings including office tools, several games, audio and video tools and encryption support.

All of this is neatly arranged in a slick desktop. This distro is indeed worthy of your netbook.

Sun VirtualBox

2010-01-18T17:01:00.000-08:00

Sun Virtualbox
another
Have you ever wanted to savour a flavour of Linux, Windows or the Chrome OS without the hassle of a complete installation? You could get another computer and install the new operating system on it. Another option is to boot off a USB drive or a live CD. This mechanism of sampling a new operating system through a flash drive or a live CD is particularly popular in the Linux world.

The sun virtual box offers yet another option, virtualization. This means you can run one operating system (termed the 'guest') from inside another system( the host) . Using a pentium 4 system running Ubuntu, I can sample several operating system and even use features not installed on my system, thanks to an install of the virtual box. With Sun VirtualBox the guest operating system runs just like any other application in the host system. VirtualBox is available as an install for both Linux and Windows.

First download and install Sun Virtualbox on your system.Then head over to this site to download an 'image' file of the guest operating system. This Lifehacker article is a great guide to run your guest operating system on your machine using VirtualBox.

There are some disadvantages to using VirtualBox. Firstly you may not get some guests running at all. Sometimes, specfic applications inside your guest operating system may not work at all.

Finally, the guest operating system usually runs slowly. If you want to check out the performance of an operating system, VirtualBox is not where you should test it.

Fisherman's Navigator Winter Reserve

2010-01-10T17:04:00.000-08:00

This is another great lager from New England. Brewed at the Cape Ann Brewing Company in Gloucester, MA Fisherman's Navigator Winter Reserve is a double bock lager which packs good flavor, a bit sour and not too bitter. It is quite heavy for a lager, but one of the best I've tried this winter season.

Savouring Google Chrome OS

2010-01-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

The Chrome OS from Google is one of the most anticipated of software applications that is set to come out this year. Thanks to this great article on Lifehacker, I have finally managed to savour a preliminary version of the Chrome OS.

With an install of VirtualBox, another cool tool which will be covered here soon and a customized packaging of Chrome OS, I had Chrome OS running on a Pentium 4.

In a nutshell, VirtualBox is a free utility from Sun, application that can run one operating system(the guest OS) within another operating system (the host) as if it was an application of the latter operating system.

In my configuration, I had Chrme OS running inside Ubuntu Jaunty. The disadvantage of this type of installation is that the guest OS runs much more slowly. Because of this setback, I could not experience one of the best features of Chrome OS, its speed.

However, I did get to test out Chrome and many of its features.Here are my thoughts:

If you, like me are used to a desktop, with a cool background image that houses many icons inside it, you may initially get disappointed.

As soon as you login into Chrome, you are presented with a familiar utility, a maximised Chrome Browser. You must make a paradigm shift in getting used to the idea that the browser is your desktop and all the applications you'll need are accessible through the browser. These applications include Google docs, Gmail and other Google utilities.

There are also image links to other tools like Facebook and Twitter. In previous posts, we have looked at several cloud operating systems(See Links below.) These are operating systems that reside in remote(possibly distributed) locations and accessible through a browser.

At first glance, Chrome may resemble them. However, unlike the other cloud operating systems we have seen before, Chrome OS uses HTML5, the newest version of the language of the web. While the other cloud operating systems make little use of resources on the local machine, Chrome uses HTML 5 to make use of resources like the memory and processor on the local computer.

Chrome OS is expected to hit netbooks later this year. HTC is working with Google to release a Chrome Tablet.

Below is a promotional video from Google on the philosophy behind Chrome OS>

The Wowwee Roboquad

2010-01-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

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This is one of the most versatile of Wowwee. It looks like an arachnid and walks like an arachnid but is four legs short of being an arachnid. Its body has been compared to an airport hanger and its head, perched high on its long neck can rotate 360 degrees, reminiscent of the Exorcist movie.

TheRoboquad can be controlled by his remote or from a PC, equipped with an IR transmitter running Robodance. He can move in several directions and is one of the most stable of robots in the Wowwee family. He is also a versatile dancer and puts on a fine show when you hit the demo function on the remote.

Shown below is a video of the Roboquad equipped with a webcam and controlled by Robodance to make a neat surveillance device. This video was created by Robert Oschler, the creator of Robodance.In the video we see Mr. Oschler control his Roboquad using Skype commands.

Wowwee has since created the Rovio which is customized for surveillance.

Related links:

The Roboquad on RobotsRule

Exploring Music-Media centers: MediaMonkey

2010-01-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

By rajivram
Mediamonkey is another music media center/organizer for your desktop that offers compatibility with iPhones, Palm Pres and Androids. Like all other music centers the UI features Album art, libraries and playlists. Mediamonkey can play many formats of music files. Like WInamp, it offers addons(plugins) to play music from Last Fm,etc, provisions for skins and virtualizations.

Developers can use scripting tools to create plugins for mediamonkey. MediaMonkey also offers Winamp API support. The default UI is not as slick as Winamp but MediaMoney makes a decent music center. It comes in two versions, a free version and a 'Gold' version with more features.

Exploring Music-Media Centers: Doubletwist

2010-01-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

DoubleTwist
Intended to be an iTunes replacement, DoubleTwist is a music center for your laptop or desktop that offers sync-support for a number of devices like the Android, the PSP, the Blackberry and the Palm-Pre.
As a substitute for the Apple Store, DoubleTwist allows you to purchase music from Amazon. The UI is fairly spartan, providing album art and support for creating libraries from your hard drives or devices. You can also create some playlists on DoubleTwist. Doubletwist can also play videos.

Unlike Winamp and Songbird, DoubleTwist does not offer any plugin and add-on development support or the ability to play Internet content. Doubletwist does provide an Api to add additional hardware support. DoubleTwist is too simplistic to pose any threat to iTunes, Winamp or Songbird.

The Wowwee Tribot

2010-01-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

Tribot

Released in 2008, the Tribot is another cool robot from Wowwee. It comes in twocolors, red and white. Unlike the Robosapien or his mate the Femisapien, the Tribot does talk. This is quite a detriment as it can be quite annoying.

He has three wheels and can move in six directions. He can also panic and sound an alarm by thrusting out his ears and screaming.

One of the modes he can be put in is the guard mode. Here he says quiet until he dectects motion in his path. When he does, he screams and raises his alarm.

Remote controlling of the Tribot is one of his most advanced features. The remote comes with buttons to move him in different directions and perform impressive routines. However, the coolest feature is that one can control the Tribot's motion simply by holding down a button at the bottom of the remote and then waving the remote in the direction he wants the Tribot to take.

Mr. Personality, another Robot made by Wowwee is an advanced version of the Tribot.

Related Links:

Tribot on RobotsRule

Black Dog Ale

2010-01-04T18:04:00.000-08:00

This is another good typical Amber Ale. Sour, medium texture and great tasting. It is too bitter either. It is brewed by the Spanish Peaks Brewing Company in Montana.

Mayflower Porter

2010-01-04T17:16:00.000-08:00

I have tried the Mayflower Pilsner and really liked it. This one is as good. It is not too bitter, maybe a little sour, but smooth and not too filling either. As mentioned earlier, it is brewed close to where I live,at the Mayflower Brewing company, in Plymouth MA

The Femisapien and the Robosapien

2010-01-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

As mentioned earlier, I dig robots. Having done a few personal projects and one at MIT on Lego Mindstorms, I have now gotten into the world of WowWee, makers of some of the best robotic toys this decade.
Robosapien

This robot, initially conceived by Mark Tilden was first released by Wowwee in 2003. It incorporated some of the most advanced capabilities for its time walking with legs, and grasping and even throwing small objects.

It created a huge hacker community that has over the years created many hardware are software hacks. Among the most popular of these is Robodance created by Robert Oschler.

Using Robodance, one may control the Robosapein from a PC using key strokes, voice control or by a Wiimote. The Robosapien does not speak words. He grunts, farts and groans. This is fine with me. Some of the newer robots from Wowwee do come with speech but many of them simply have annoying voices.

Wowwee has since released several cool robots, one of which is featured below.

Femisapien

In 2008, Wowwee released a mate for the Robosapien, the Femisapien. The Femisapien is a beautiful robot that moves with an elegant feminine grace. It does not come with a remote, for good reason.

There are many ways to interact with the Femisapien. One his through her joystick arms. Another by waving a hand in front of her face. Thirdly, one may control her using the remote control that comes with the Robosapien.
Infact, one can use the Robosapien remote to control the Femisapien to run joint interactive routines between the Robosapien and Femisapien.

Like the Robosapien, the Femisapien does not speak words.Unlike him, she squeals and giggles.And boy, can she dance? This robot moves with feline grace and and dance beautifully. Hold down her head for a couple of seconds and she will perform some beautiful moves to music.

Related Links
Robosapien on Wikipedia
Robosapien in RobotsRule
Femisapien on RobotsRule
Femisapien on Wikipedia

Best of 2009 software Technologies: Part 3

2010-01-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Firefox 3.5
Any list of great software that came out of last year would be incomplete without the inclusion of Firefox 3.5. Firefox 3.5 has become the world's leading browser, stealing the thunder from
IE.

Release 3.5 has made Firefox to beat by including a slew of awesome features. Notable among them are

The awesome bar: This is the top address bar which provides intelligent suggestions as you type in an address or heading. Having used this feature, it would be hard for me to go back to other browsers.
HTML5 support: Firefox supports HTML5 and as a result, video becomes part of the page. This means that Firefox can display videos on HTML5 compatible web pages without asking you to download flash.
Private browsing and forget the site features: Firefox features a private browsing mode to hide your identity while browsing sites, similar to Chrome's incognito mode.It also has a 'Forget the site' feature that allow you to delete a site from your browsing history.
Session Restoration: The ability to restor a session when Firefox crashes.

Firefox has proved that it is the clear leader in the browser world. All other browsers have a lot of catching up to do to take away users from Firefox.

Opera

Opera 10.10 is another HTML5 compatible browser. One unique feature it has called 'Unite' differentiates it from other browsers. Using this feature, you can stream music from any laptop or desktop to another machine on the network running a browser, also running Opera.

Google Chrome Browser for Linux and Mac

In 2008, Google released the Chrome browser. After observing the follies of Netscape. IE and Firefox, Google produced a browser that runs each of its tasks on a separate thread. This means that if a tab in the browser is stuck in the midst of connecting to a site, the user simply closes the respective tab and does not have to restart the browser. The interface for the browser is intuitive and minimal. This and other features including speed made Chrome a nifty browser. See my previous post on the features of Chrome.

Best of 2009 Software technologies: Part2

2010-01-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

In this section, we will take a look at two of the most innovative of technologies to come from Google.
Google Wave

Email is several decades old, says Google. It existed long before the web. It was designed for a different time. It is now time to reinvent the proverbial wheel.On this note, Google delivered the Wave, the email for the millenium.

Part email, part chat, part collaboration tool, part digital white-board, Google Wave is a marvel. It provides an interface through which multiple parties can coordinate efforts on a common screen. For those of us trying to coordinate efforts on a project with email,Wave minimizes the overhead by giving every person on the team the ability to keep up with the newest status with an ingenius playback mechanism to review the sequences of changes made to the wave after it was created..

A person who has newly joined a wave can easily bring herself up-to-date by hitting the plgo mainstream ay button that shows her the sequence by which changes were made by other parties participating in the collaborative project.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing features of the wave. However, experience tells us that great technology by itself cannot make a ground breaking change. It remains to be seen how quickly this development would permeate our culture. Email, over the decades has become so ingrained in our habits, that we may not be able to give it up for a long time.

Is the Wave ahead of its time?Google wave is not proprietary to Google. Anyone can create applications that cater to handling waves. However, if the wave gets to be the accepted way of collaboration in the future, Google has the prime mover advantage.

Google Voice

When Google released the android, it sounded off a warning that it was marching into the mobile space. Google voice left no further doubts about Google's intention of entering into the domain of mobile computing.(No pun intended on domain). A few months ago, the hype began when news was released that Google had bought a million phone numbers.

It was then realized that Google was onto an idea that would change the way we handle all our phones, lanline, work and mobile. I have covered Google Voice in fair detail in a previous post.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing features of the wave. However, experience tells us that great technology by itself cannot sell itself, a sentiment explained today as the mousetrap fallacy. It remains to be seen if these two technologies would become part of our daily life.

Best of 2009 Software technologies: Part1

2010-01-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

As the curtains have fallen on 2009, it is time to reminisce on the most notable software and application releases from last year. I have been a bit biased toward Google in these series of articles but lets face it, none of the big (or smaller players) comes close to Google's ability to innovate.

Google has been a relative newcomer into the high-tech internet sector. As a result, the company has a huge advantage. While the Microsofts and the Yahoos have to factor in the overhead of redesign, re-factoring and rewriting of their products, Google can start off with a clean slate on many of their offerings. It has the advantage of learning from the mistakes made by its competitors and avoid them. It could look at existing products like email and voicemail. that were made decades ago and give them a new context, a context more in line with today's needs and not from the perspective of what we have been used to.

Among the others who have mad my list are some well-known players, and some new ones.

Let us now dig deep and analyse the software releases last year that could indeed change the way we live our life.

Windows 7

Amid high expectations, and under relentless public scrutiny after a debacle called Windows Vista, the Seattle based evil empire released Windows 7 in October. It finally lived up to its claims, satisfying many of the toughest critics when it came to performance, speed and robustness

Many agree that this is the best quality OS ever to come out of Microsoft. Earlier this year, I attended a presentation of a Microsoft salesman on Windows 7. 'We took a step back from Vista and removed many features that impeded the system', he said, without offering details.

"In one client site we were able to bring back many old computers that the client had shelved." He added. "These were computers that were unable to run Vista. Most of my applications seem to run faster on Windows 7. The screensavers and icons are also impressive in this release.Windows 7

There were rumors in many sites claiming that the Windows 7 upgrade would be available for $45. These were exactly what they were- mere rumors. The upgrade sells around $100. New installation packages go for $145.

However, Windows 7 offers a stable system for all the heavy duty applications I have used. It has a few great features for convenience, which include a snazzy task bar, the ability to arrange windows side by side, a search feature to search the local machine for files( a la Google desktop) and some movie making tools. It also comes with the Windows media center installed. If you have have used this application, it is amongst other things, a poor man's Tivo.

There is no doubt that Microsoft has established some credibility with this version of windows even among its harshest critics.

There have been a few important distros in the Linux world in 2009. Below we review the big three.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala

The most popular Linux distro released a new version, possibly a little too soon. Many of the software applications for Linux were not able to keep up with this delivery. Karmic offers better performance, a better UI, faster startup time and in my experience, better playback of audio and video streamed over the net. Ubuntu includes sub-flavors, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Mythbuntu. Ubuntu also has a server version for hosting documents, media files or for running a web server like apache. Many netbooks come pre-installed with Ubuntu

Fedora Unite

Fedora is another popular linux distro sponsored by Redhat. Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora takes a one-size-fits-all philosophy and comes in only one flavor with a standard set of features.

Fedora 12 has a very impressive UI and its performance in terms of start-up time and response are very impressive.

Open Suse 11.2
This distro, sponsored by Novell is another big player in the Linux community. It incorporates other open standards like CIM (the Common Information Model), and YaST (a standard, open source configuration and management suite for Linux).

The new release has a beautiful UI and incorporates a large array of great applications.

Google Chrome OS

When Google released the Chrome browser, few would have guessed that this was a precursor to an operating system that Google will release soon. The company gave previews of this operating system, named the Chrome OS. We have had browsers within desktops and have accessed desktops using browsers. On this operating system, the desktop IS the browser. This is a minimal operating system where most applications will be online or 'in the cloud'.While Google has only provided a preliminary demo release of Chrome OS, it will provide more stable versions soon. Google is planning to target the netbook market and then find a path into our desktops for this system. One brave announcement made by Google is that this OS will not support hard drives and will only run on flash memory.
2010 will be the year to watch Chrome OS and its permeation in the Netbook and laptop markets.

Java EE6: Another major release from 2009

2009-12-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of eager and nervous anticipation from the Java developer committee about the release of Java Enterprise Edition 6. The focus of the nervousness has been Oracle's acquisition of Sun in April and how it would impact the future of Java. Java EE6 was finally released on December 10th but questions on the impact of Oracle buyout remain unanswered.

The key points made on this release are:

* Glassfish V3 is the reference implementation for EE6
* Java EE6 builds on the persistence and annotation features of EE5.
* This release is about right sizing:
Profiles:
In this release Sun introduces the concept of profiles. Instead of providing a single programming framework that may be used to build different architectures for different industry segments, this release will contain industry specific profiles.

Profiles may be licensed or created based on need. They will incorporate multiple technologies and will cater to different needs. The current release of EE6 contains a full profile and a web profile.

The web profile according to sun will be used to build 'modern apps' and will include security, transaction management and persistence tools. It includes a generic or 'plain vanilla api'.

The new technologies will include the following:
* Java Servlet 3.0
* EJB(Enterprise Java Beans) light 3.1
* Java Persistence Architecture 2.0
* JSP(Java Server Pages) 2.2
* Java Standard Template Library 1.2
* Java Transaction API 1.1
* Debugging for other languages(JSR 4.5)

* There is a lot of pruning of functionality in an effort to keep it light weight.
- The JSR-RPC modules had a lot of UDDI(Universal Data Discovery Functionality) functionality to discover web services. This has been pruned as it is clear now that industry is not heading that way.
In EJB 3.1, Container managed persistence beans are now replaced with the Java persistence API
This was done, according to Sun to keep the API simple and also have Java developers use a single standard API.

* Another goal of this release is to embrace open source frameworks.

* Another new feature introduced in Java EE6 is Webbeans to unify JSF, JPA and EJB 3.0 into a single unified platform.

* Zero configuration drag and drop web frameworks,

* Plugin library jars using web fragment: Here one may setup a framework and bootstrap it into a container. It is a mechanism to integrate 3rd party frameworks into a container. It is used in Glassfish v3.
e
* More use of extensions:
* EE6 will increase the use of extensions from EE5. It will eliminate the use of the deployment descriptor. Further the deployment descriptor has been eliminated and the @WebServices annotation is used instead.

* Another feature is the ability to package the ejb inside the war file. The old jar file is still supported.

Related Links
Java EE6 technologies
Rod Johnson: "Java EE 6 Gets it Right"
JSR 313
Apache votes no on Java EE 6
JEE 6: Extensibility, Profiles and Pruning

HTML5: Its about time

2009-12-29T21:14:00.000-08:00

In the last decade, we saw a lot of changes in the web. Here are some of them.

* Laptops and Desktops are more powerful and hard drives have become bigger. Increases in processor speeds is a simple case of Moore's law at work. While the focus has been to keep applications in the cloud there has also been a growing demand to harness the power of the laptop or computer used to access these web applications. Rich internet applications began this trend. Microsoft created a smart client initiative to address this issue.

* While text is the most basic way to spread the word, the web has grown to transmit more audio, video and image data. When Tim Bernes Lee invented HTML, it catered to a more text-centric web. Since then, the changes made to accommodate other types of data have just been hacks. While html does provide an IMAGE tag, there were no primitives to display dynamic images or animation, or play audio or video media. Javascipt provided the means to embed players to stream audio content.

* One breakthrough in improving performance was the ability to use ajax with javascript and CSS so that only parts of a web page needed to be refreshed instead of having a server deliver the a complete web page and then having the browser refresh that page.

* The growth of Wikis, IM clients, shopping carts for online sites, blogs and social networking has revealed shortcomings of HTML.

HTML, the primary language of the internet has remained untouched since 1999. But now, the big browsers have banded together to push a new specification: HTML 5. The browser list includes Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Apple Safari.

How about IE? Well, the short answer is not completely. IE8 supports some of the tags specified in HTML5.

HTML5 is a development, teb years in the making.Here are the its key features.

Video and audio tags and controls
Specifying the the video file to play, width and height of the player, whether or not to display controls, whether or not to loop video will all be done in HTML itself. The specification also specifies how the video player must respond to a mouse or keyboard click or some other event.
It is then up to the browser as to how the media player will be rendered. There is also a similar audio control. No need to download flash.

There is also an embed element to embed external content like an audio or video file in a page.

Dynamic graphics with the canvas Tag
Using this tag, one creates a placeholder or container on the HTML page where one may display dynamic graphics or images.

Standalone sections using the figure element
HTML5 provides the ability to mark off sections with of a page with the figure element.

Create blog post-like functionality with the article element
The ideal place one could use this is on the main page of a blog where you provide a teaser snippet for a post. This is usually the first few lines or the first paragraph of a post with a "Read more" link at the end. Clicking this link would take you to another page in the blog that contains the text for the entire post.

Provide additional data with an Aside element
This is a useful feature to provide additional information on the content of the page.

Enhanced menu options
One of these is the command tag to specify a command button in the menu. Another is a datalist element to show a drop down list. The days of using Javascript to create this functionality may be numbered.

Enhanced text options
One of these is the dialog option when you wish to exhibit a dialog among two or more individuals on a site. Another is a section tags to specify a section in a page.There are also header and footer tags to add headers and footers to sections.

A new element has been thrown in to specify a date-time format.

No more Frames
The frame and frameset tags have been removed in HTML5.

Text formatting moved to CSS
Bold, acronym, center,font and a few such tags have been depreciated. HTML5 mandates that these attributes must be described in the CSS.

Also Read:
Does Internet Explorer 8 support HTML 5? - Stack Overflow

HTML 5, Firefox and Internet Explorer

How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web - HTML5 - Lifehacker

HTML5 and The Future of the Web

HTML5 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HTML5 Gallery | A showcase of sites using HTML5 markup

HTML 5 Tag Reference

FengOffice: A decent office colllaboration Tool

2009-12-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

FengOffice

DO you want a central repository for your firm where people can share notes, documents, tasks, deadlines, statuses, etc. on Customers, Project, Corporate policy,etc? Feng Office (formerly OpenGoo) may be an option you could consider. You could listen to their promotional video,try out the free version first, and then decide if you want their premium version.

Feng office runs off Apache and uses MySql. (You could easily have it running on Xampp covered earlier.

While Google docs may be an alternative, you may feel it is more secure to keep you data on a local server. Besides, Feng Office is customized for office collaboration. It allows configuration of email,document upload time tracking and more.

With FengOffice one creates 'Workspaces' like Customers, Projects, etc. Within the workspace, one may keep relevant information like notes, email, tasks, statuses, links, documents and reports. Accoring to the website, Feng office is the most popular collaboration tool. It is certaiinly an option for small to medium sized firms.

Winter Bourbon Cask Ale

2009-12-27T16:32:00.000-08:00

Its the end of one holiday weekend and time to savour a good brew. Winter Bourbon Cask Ale(WBCA) is a good choice, especially for this time of year. Heavy but not as heavy as other winter ales, WBCA packs a great flavour. Yes, there is a hint of Bourbon and some chocolate(not of the sweet variety).

The big surprise is that it is brewed by Michelob, St. Louis Missouri. I'm impressed. It is unlike anything I have tasted before. I would definitely recommend it.

Lernid: A most useful classroom collaboration tool

2009-12-27T15:40:00.000-08:00

Lernid

Jono Bacon, one of the most popular bloggers in the Linux community had a problem conducting online classes. He used IRC, a popular IM client. His students first had to learn how to use IRC and then lean how to participate in the class in real time.
Necessity, being the mother of invention forced him to create Lernid, a nifty classroom tool that facilitators can use to conduct classes and students could use to actively participate in them.

Lernid is a cool tool that presents students with four panes. One pane is a customized calendar used to display session time information. Another displays a pane for displaying slides. The third is used by the student to get the actual lecture of the class in real time ascreensnd finally the last one is used by the student to participate in discussions.

Lernid provides the facilitator to create an event. This is done using a flat file where the facilitator may specify the respective web page, configure an IRC channel and schedule the event start and finish date/time information. The slides for the lecture are provided for Lernid as a pdf document.

During the lecture the facilitator has the ability to change slides or display a website while communicating with the rest of the class with a IRC client.

Lernid is a great and immensely useful tool. While there is scope for more improvement, it is hard for such a product to be commercialized or used on a grand scale. For now Lernid is available only on Ubuntu. Despite Ubuntu's immense popularity, I do not see too many lecture conducted on Ubuntu exclusively for a Ubuntu audience. Lernid also requires that the facilitators are comfortable with using script files. To the non-nerdy, this may be a turn-off.

Maybe Mr. Bacon has no such plans, but I'd like to see it ported to other platforms. I'd also like to see more of the newer technologies/applications integrated into Lernid, like other chat tools, Google Wave, etc. Nevertheless, Lernid is a great concept that I'd like to blossom in the next few years.

Freemind: A great mind-management tool

2009-12-26T20:54:00.000-08:00

Freemind
I discovered a bit late in life that I was a visual person, thanks to my discovering mind mapping. Mind mapping is a brainstorming technique discovered by Tony Buzan and then evangelized by Michael Gelb.

The synopsis of this technique is that one starts with a main theme that he puts on the centre of a blank sheet of paper or, if you are using software, the centre of the screen.
Next, you expand on the theme by adding branches(nodes) and naming ideas on the branches. You continue the process as long as necessary or adequate. Mind mapping works on the premise that the mind does not think linearly or with words. It thinks in pictures and with thoughts that come randomly.

Mind mapping seeks to synthesize right brain creative thinking with left brain creative thinking. As far as I could tell, mindmapping works well, atleast for me.

At MIT I used Mindjet which was more than adequate for me. Then I discovered Freemind which is a decent open-source cross platform alternative(It is built with Java). Freemind is easy to use and has a great set of features like the ability to add images to your nodes which is a key to great mind maps.

With Freemind one can also export the file into several formats including image, xml, pdf and open office types. Mindmapping has saved me many hours of effort and pstimulates creative solutions quickly.

If you are new to mindmapping, try using Freemind and see if it works for you. Do you have a favourite mind mapping tool? Please share your ideas on this subject in the comments. I'd love to hear from you.

Exploring Wikis: Tiddlywiki

2009-12-26T12:29:00.000-08:00

TiddlywikiThe genius of the Tiddlywiki is its simplicity. The wiki is a self contained single html file that has inside it all the code formatting and data that magically becomes a wiki when viewed with a browser.

Thus the tiddlywiki could run off a webserver like apache or carried around in a laptop or USB drive. You could also have your Tiddlywiki hosted online.

Tiddlywiki has the ability to be customized. Snippets of functionality, referred to as Tiddlers developed by a vibrant community of developers, can be imported into a tiddlywiki as required by the user. The "tiddly tool" include contact/address books, clocks, browser,Mindmap tools, GTD tools and more.

Many customized versions of Tiddlywiki are available, thanks to the efforts of these developers Below are a few useful links from Lifehacker for those who choose to explore this little marvel:

Host your TiddlyWiki at Tiddlyspot
GTD Tiddlywiki
Monkey GTD Tiddlywiki
Adding an addressbook to Tiddlywiki
Tiddlywiki Student Edition
TiddlyVault

TiddlyTools
Grab Text for your TiddlyWiki with TiddlySnip

Exploring Wikis: Instiki

2009-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

Instiki

Instiki is another tool used to build Wikis. It is built using Ruby on Rails and runs as a standalone server. It can run on Linux, Windows and Mac.

It provides the usual features of wikis including version control, access to multiple authors,etc.
In addition, it provides the ability to add RSS feeds to postings, regular expression search,etc.

The instiki website lists many web websites that use instiki. This wiki is a easy to install and decently user friendly. I have it instaleed on an XP box on my home server. In my experience, itis slow across my home network.

Have you used instiki? How? Please let me know your experience with this wiki tool.

Exploing Wikis: Mediawiki

2009-12-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

Mediawiki

The word wiki is derived froma Hawaiian word for 'fast'. A wiki is a collaborative website used by individuals and organizations used for the organization and management of knowledge. A wiki can be easily edited by all those authorized to edit it. Typically wikis make it easy to edit,add new pages, make changes to existing pages or revert to previous versions of pages in the wevbsite. To enable this functionality, Wikis keep track of changes made to them.

Individuals can use wikis for note taking. Students could use a wiki as a collaborative tool. At MIT the project teams I belonged to used Wikis for knowledge,schedule and status management. Organizations use wikis to track projects, maintain manuals, to brainstorm ideas and as a repository to share and access information.

A wiki can have one or more adminstrators who may set the access privileges(read or write) to all those who use the wiki. In these series of articles we will take a look at several tools used to create wikis.
Wikipedia is probably the most well-known wiki. Theoretically it is the
encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The reality is that there are only some authorized to make changes to Wikipedia. Dedicated administrators monitor Wikipedia and act as gatekeepers to its contents. In these series of articles we will look at different tools used to create wikis.

Mediawiki
Do you want to make a wiki out of the same raw-material used to create Wikipedia? You can and you can do it for free. Mediawiki can help you set up the wiki. Earlier we took a look at XAMPP a software application suite that creates a website with the Apache webserver and has it running in minutes. Once you set up your Apache webserver with the MySql database, you can quicky install MediaWiki to it.

When you do install Mediawiki, you have a wiki that has the look and feel of Wikipedia. Lifehacker has a couple of great articles on installing and running Mediawiki. Mediawiki installed on a websever on your home network may be a great way to collaborate with family members and share useful information.

I plan to write about several tools used to build wikis. I'd like to if you have favourite wiki application and if you do what you like about it. Please answer this query in the comments below.
Related articles:
Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate Collaborative Web Site
Geek to Live: Set up your personal Wikipedia
Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick

XAMPP: A Running website in minutes

2009-12-24T13:49:00.000-08:00

XAMPP
Have you ever considered setting up a website from home? Or have you dreamt of running your blog, you own photo gallery, or the family wiki or any other web based application on your own server or laptop? The good news is that you can, even if you have no real experience in such 'chores'. You can have a bare-bones webserver complete with a built in database and waiting to house your website, blog, photo gallery, music center, collaboration tool or custom tool in minutes. Yes, in minutes with a couple of clicks of your mouse.

If you are a web developer how often have you cursed under your breath trying to configure Apache or worse trying to get Apache working with perk, PHP and MySQL? Well, the folks at ApacheFriends.org have a solution for you that can rid you of those woes. They have created XAMPP to make this sort of installation a breeze.

Just download and install Xampp, carefully following their instructions and most of your work is done. You also have a nice little dashboard to start and stop your website or your database. The folks at PortableApps.com have a 'portable' version of XAMPP that can be run from a thumb drive. The great thing about this version is that you can take it with you and have it run from any computer. This version comes complete with a file server and an optional Tomcat install to host your Java web applications.

So why would you need a web server? Here are a few reasons:

Install Mediawiki, the software tool used to build Wikipedia. Use it as a collaborative wiki or to build your own encyclopedia.
Install gallery2 and run your own Flickr-like photogallery on your own computer.
Organize your music with Jinzora.
Install an office collaborative platform, Feng Office.
Install a professional looking website with almost no prior experience using Drupal or Joomla.
Host your own blog using Wordpress.

If you go through the exercise of installing one of the above mentioned applications, you'll realize that installing the others is almost an identical process.

Developers could simply use XAMPP as a sandbox to test out their own custom applications. Whatever your motivation may be, XAMPP gives you a webserver in minutes.

Here is Lifehacker's great how-to on how to install XAMPP portable with Mediawiki on a thumb drive.

Exploring music-media centers: Winamp

2009-12-23T21:40:00.000-08:00

Winamp

Winamp is another music center similar to Songbird or Doubletwist.It has been around for a while and has grown from music player to music organizer. If you wish to organize music media local to your computer or laptop (Windows only), then Winamp is a great choice.Winamp can also play some video formats.

Winamp's features include a slick interface, equalizers, artist bios and album infos and search functionality. Though not open source, like Songbird Winamp provides a SDK for developers to develop tools and plugins. The website provides numerous skins to customize the look and feel of your winamp player. The site also includes provides numerous plugins including one to access Internet Radio called Shoutcast.

Using the Shoutcast plugin with Winamp , you could also create your own Internet Radio station that can stream music from your media collection organized in Winamp. The station can be made accessible on your network or on the internet.

Other features include visualizations,CD ripping, the ability to buy concert tickets, iTunes support, native language support and more. Winamp comes with in a basic version, a 'lite' version and a paid version. It is a great choice for organizing you music on a desktop or laptop.

Exploring music-media Centers: Jinzora

2009-12-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

Jinzora
In one of my earlier entries, we took a look at Subsonic, a media center used to stream music from one computer to other computers on a network. Jinzora is another such music player/organizer.

Unlike Subsonic which is build in Java, Jinzora is built with PHP. While Subsonic can run as a standalone application or as an application within an application server like Tomcat, Jinzora is run as a web application on a Apache web server.

Jinzora is an open source application and can be accessed from a browser on a computer or any other mobile device. It offers better eye candy but besides that it is very similar to Subsonic in functionality. Like subsonic, Jinzora has a search utility and displays album info.

As Jinzora runs within Apache, and as Apache is a cross platform web server, Jinzora can run both on Linux and Windows systems.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: Freenas

2009-12-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

Freenas
In the past few weeks, we have had a taste of a number of Linux desktops. Today we are savouring another linux distro but not quite a desktop version. For Geeks like me, it has been a habit for a few years to hide an ugly noisy out-of-date computer in the closet, hook it to the network, attach a few internal or external drives to it, fill those drives with music, movies photos and documents. This computer then becomes a file server and can stream all the data on its drives to other computers all over your home network.

Microsoft Home server is one alternative but expensive way to set up a file server to hold your digital data. Linux geeks however, have an easier way to set up a file server. They use Freenas.Freenas has very minimal requirements. You can have Freenas running with 128MB of RAM and 32 MB of disk space. It can be run from a hard drive or from a USB drive.

Once Freenas is running on your file server, you can configure your settings through a very simple, user friendly console. These setting include assigning your lan interface, your IP address, your webgui password,etc. You can detach both your mouse, keyboard and monitor from your file server, transforming it into a 'headless system'..

You may then access Freenas from a browser on any other computer on the network to configure your file server settings.

These include mounting and partitioning the drives on the Freenas file server, adding new drives, monitoring their usage, etc. While freenas is small and probably not as good looking as Windows server, it is as powerful, easy to set up and ..free!

I have also tried the Ubuntu server as a file server. With Ubuntu, one can install apache on their file server and have the system double as a webserver. However, if you, like me would prefer to have a single dedicated file server, then stick to Freenas.

Related Articles:
How to build an open source Freenas Server

Long Trail Ale

2009-12-20T20:09:00.000-08:00

Well, I just had to get this one in before the weekend is over. Long Trail Ale, brewed by Long trail brewery Vermont is a decent beer, not too thick nor too bitter. Like most ales from this area, it packs a good flavour and is smooth but not too filling. Worth a try is my verdict.

Exploring music-media Centers: Subsonic

2009-12-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Subsonic
While iTunes, Songbird and Winamp are great for organizing your music on a single desktop, they cannot be used to stream music to other computers either on your home network or anywhere on the internet. If you wish to access your music collection from a web browser through a slick interface, you may want to consider Subsonic.

Subsonic is a java based application that can organize and give access to your mp3 collection on a computer on other computers through any browser. It can run on both Windows and Linux boxes as a stand-alone server application. A 'war' implementation of Subsonic can also be deployed on any Java application server like Tomcat.

Subsonic is a great looking application and provides album art and also can automatically search for a display lyrics for your songs as they play. It is very easy to install and configure too.

Exploring Media Centers: Moovida

2009-12-19T16:13:00.000-08:00

Moovida (formerly Elisa) is yet another open source media player that runs on both Windows and Linux. It ofers a decent menu, though a bit dark for my taste. It has all the features one expects from a media player: The ability to play video and audio, the ability to set up network players, etc. Moodia also comes with quite a few plugins to play content from Internet sites. These include Vimeo, YouTube, CNN news, TED talks,etc.

Unfortunately for Moovida, it exists in the same era as Boxee and XBMC. When compared with either, Moodiva pales in comparison both in features or in the number of plugins offered.

As one would expect, my verdict is: Stick with XBMC and/or Boxee.

Cloud & virtual desktops: iCloud

2009-12-18T21:56:00.000-08:00

iCloud
iCloud is another great looking virtual/cloud desktop that has a great look and feel. However, it seems to run only on IE8.It did not work on Firefox 3.5.6 for me. iCloud offers a MSN chat client, a twitter client, a to-do list and a built-in browser. The free version provides 3G of free space and a paid premium version provides 100GB of space.

Other features included in iCloud are a document editor, a photo manager and as with all the other virtual desktops reviewed in this blog, the ability to upload files.

Conclusion
In the last couple of weeks, we have looked at several virtual/cloud desktops. All of them offer great eye candy and a useful set of tools. In my brief analysis, there is no clean winner among them. The whole concept of having a computer in the 'clouds' accessible from any computer via a browser is indeed 'cool'.

Having said that, will they prevail in the future? The truth is that cloud computing is not new. Anyone who uses Yahoo mail or gmail uses the cloud. Google docs offers many of the online tools provided by these so called virtual computer. These include spreadsheet and document editing software.

With Google now offering disk space, virtual computers have lost out on yet another offering. Unfortunately, none of these cloud or virtual computers builds a strong case with a unique offering that can attract users. It remains to be seen how many of these cloud desktops will survive in the next few years. It is only a question of time before Google begins to offer online media management.

Exploring music-media centers: Songbird

2009-12-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

SongBird
In my previous post, we saw some two awesome media centers, Boxee and XBMC. However, when one needs to organize only music files on one or more drives connected to a computer or or one's laptop and also have the ability to access music from Internet streaming sites for music, then music media centers like Songbird may be worth looking at.

Songbird was once called the iTunes killer. However, it did not live up to the hype. It is still a worthy contender to iTunes and others in its own league like DoubleTwist and Winamp.

Songbird is an opensource, cross-platform music mediacenter/organizer that can run both on Linux and Windows. Included with the music-center are tools to buy music from 7digital Music store,listen to Shoutcast radio and mashtape, a tool to download music and artist information. Songbird has tools to import and export music lists, support for iTunes and can play a variety of audio formats including mp3, vorbis, flac, wma and aac.

Songbird offers discography, album information, etc. for songs played in a neat interface that also includes a search feature.Other features include the ability to create smart playlists and watch folders . Songbird also comes with development tools to build custom plugins or add-ons for enhanced functionality.The songbird website has several add-ons one may use to customize her installation of Songbird.

One setback I have found with Songbird is that I cannot mount network drives on Linux. On Windows mapped drives perform badly with Songbird. This means that songbird can only access media files on internal and external drives connected to a local computer. All in all, Songbird is a decent media manager that could be better.

Here are some more articles on Songbird.

Songbird 1.2 Integrates into iTunes and iPods

Songbird 1.1 Grabs Album Art in One Step, Runs Lighter and Faster

Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better

Boxee Beta: My official review

2009-12-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

As my previous posts indicate, I am a Boxee and XBMC buff. On December 7th, CEO of Boxee, Avner Rosen unveiled the Beta version, to an impatient fan base. The alpha versions for Winodws 7, Mac OS and Linux, which are still available as downloads on the Boxee website, is one of the most stable of alpha software that I have seen.

Avner said at the Boxee launch on Dec. 7th that the beta would be available for the general public, four weeks from the launch after it is officially released by CES. Soon, Lifehacker posted an entry in their blog that a leaked Beta Windows version of Boxee was available as a Bit Torrent download.
Before we get into the details of the Beta release,let us first look at Boxee and its offerings.So what can one do with Boxee? Why is it considered the breakthrough in Media Centers. Here are some of Boxee features.

You can set up Boxee on a HTPC(Home Theater PC) hooked up to your TV and do the following:

Stream media from all the computers and Laptops on your home network into your TV. When all your videos, music and photos are spread across one or more computers on shared drives, you can bring them all into your TV. Boxee can play several formats of music and video files. If you have backed up your CD collections as mp3s on your hard drive and your DVDs as ISO files, you could play these files via Boxee on your TV.
Play internet media on your TV using Boxee add-ons. There are a number of custom add-ons included in the Beta release of Boxee. These include

A YouTube plugin to search for and play You tube videos on your TV.
Plugins for TV network sites like PBS, CNN, National Geographic and so on to play TV programs archived in such sites on your TV
Plugins for several educational and informative sites like Flora TV, TED talks and Open Courseware. Open Courseware is a repository of educational content from soem of the world's leading universities like MIT, Stanford, etc.

Rent movies from Netflix via Boxee.Boxee has a plugin for Netflix that allows you to login and access Netflicks content and have the content be streamed onto your TV
Another plugin for Clicker.com to access NBC and ABC programs. (This plugin is yet to work for me.)

If you do not have an HTPC and choose not to buy one, you can still run Boxee on any recent laptop or desktop.

So, with Boxee, one may cut the cable once and for all. Lifehacker.com has several articles to install and customize Boxee on apple TV and dedicated Boxee boxes. During the Beta release CEO Avner unveiled a Boxee Box which will be manufactured by DLink and available in stores in Q2 of 2010.One rant I have about the Beta is that, personally I liked the alpha's green look at feel a lot more. This beta one is a bit too flashy for my taste.

Secondly I could play CBS and Hulu feeds in the alpha version. Someone said that I could use clicker to access this content, but I have had little success so far.The beta version offers better navigation among menus and streaming is a lot faster.

One feature that is lacking is the the ability to watch and record live TV. Though I suspect that Boxee is not getting into this aspect of media, doing so would make the Boxee the undisputed leader of home entertainment. For now we must stick to Tivo, the Windows media center, Sage or MythTv to record or watch live TV.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: GoblinX

2009-12-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

GoblinX
GoblinX is an interesting distro based on an old Linux distro called Slackware. The philosophy behind Slackware and now, GoblinX is to strive for simplicity. This means that while the like of Ubuntu strive to be compatible with as many devices as possible, GoblinX offers no drivers nor addons.
The GoblinX website offers 4 types of distros:
g:Standard: This is the original version that has 5 windows managers
g:Noblin: This is a Gnome based distro of GoblinX
and two other distros, GMini and GMicro.
I tried the live CD of the g:Standard distro on an old pentium III. The UI is slick. The g:Standard packs a lot of system and network tools.
See also:
MakeUseOf article on GoblinX

Movie Review: Public Enemies

2009-12-13T20:06:00.000-08:00

Hollywood heavyweights Johnny Depp and Christian Bale star in this classic gangster flick based on the life an adventures of notorious bank robber, John Dillinger.

Set in post depression Chicago of 1933, the movie directed by Michael Mann is reminiscent of other great crime movies like 'The Untouchables' and 'Bonny and Clyde'. The background music, the sets and vintage automobiles transport the viewer to the 30s era.

The screenplay is a classic cat and mouse game between Dillinger, played marvellously by Depp and FBI agent Melvin Pervis, played by Bale.

Depp fits the role of Dillinger perfectly, a character unlike any other he has played before. Depp's Dillinger is a slick haired, fast talking, romantic gangster, giving the American legal system a slip at every opportunity.

Bale plays the ruthless Pervis, brought in by Hoover to stop the scourge of robberies and bloodshed caused by Dillinger. The chemistry between Bale and Depp in one scene they share is memorable.

The violence is graphic and realistic, as with all classic gangster flicks.With hardly a dull moment, this movie is a must see for for all fans of the rat-tat-tat genre.

Book Review: Wikinomics

2009-12-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Unfair as it is, to review a book like this and its predictions a few years after it is written, I do believe that the exercise does yield useful insights. Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, et al. is a well written and ambitious endeavor that attempts to cover a lot of ground in recent trends.

They push the envelope in promoting a collaborative economics or Wikinomics. Wikinomics goes beyond Web 2.0 and Open Source to paint a picture of an Utopia created by cooperation and trust among large corporations, governments and individuals.

The authors propose four principles for Wikinomics, openess, peering, sharing and global action. This new economy, they claim is born, from a perfect storm caused by the rise of Web 2.0, the coming of age of the Net generation and the breaking down of corporate borders on a large scale.

Peer production that evolved from software development, more precisely from Linux and Apache development and then in the making and maintaining of Wikipdia has now been embraced by global heavyweights like IBM. While the creators of Linux and Apache, Torvald and Behlendorf did not directly benefit from their creations, IBM and all the numerous companies that embraced the Apache server stood to reap rewards, claim the authors.

Behlendorf, having made a name with Apache, went on to make CollabNet, a succesful company. Reading this part, I personally felt that the person or entity who comes up with an idea or product, in the Wikinomic environment must only look for a branding opportunity and cannot expect huge monetary rewards for their creation.

Wikinomics, the authors claim, creates a marketplace for finding solutions to needs and for finding needs for existing solutions. This thought is in fact prophetic. The XBMC media center was a solution for streaming media to the XBox (I wrote a detail article on this a few days ago.). XBMC and its new popular offspring, Boxee, with their numerous add-ons, have begun the process of proliferation of TV with the Internet.

Wikinomics will create prosumers, claim the authors. BMW and Lego Mindstorms are touted as examples of this trend. User innovation is one of the big promises of Web 2.0 and peering. While there has been some evidence of companies prospering from user innovation, I cannot believe that it is an approach that all corporations must consider.

The authors also propose a modern day Alexandria where one has access to all knowledge relevant to her or her chosen field. We are not there yet. (Web 3.0 will make this happen, with all the hype about contextual information that one may access, say the futurists today.)

The book proposes the rise of platforms as another Wikinomic side effect. Platforms according to Wikinomics, include Mashups and Open Apis.Interestingly the authors claim that Amazon is spearheading this trend with its search. This was not to be. Amazon's A9, Amazon's customized search, today is History. There is no existing platform today, that can yet be touted as a roaring success.

Another effect of Wikinomics is global collaboration in manufacturing. Boeing and BMW are examples of this type global plant floor, where suppliers, customers and all other stakeholders, play a significant role in the design of products. As the authors caution, the balancing act of guarding one's IP with the spirit of openness is a risky proposition that must be approached with caution.

The authors also speak of openness and sharing of information and ideas within the walls of a corporation. Best Buy is one success story of this kind of 'Wiki Workplace' . The authors describe how, then CEO Brad Anderson, fostered innovation right from the bottom, by creating an intra-corporate social network where employees, irrespective of rank within the company can share ideas.

Interestingly, the latest Business week has an article singing the praises of Best Buy. The reasons for the company's success according to Business week are CEO Brian Dunn's efforts in fostering Best Buy teams that work with manufacturers like HP and Toshiba in product development and design, creating a 'digital playground' where customers can test out products and in experimenting in the selling of new products like electric vehicles and newer electronic products.

Best Buy attributes a lot of its success to its use of social media. Indeed, this is another Wikinomics prophecy that has turned out to be true. All in all, Wikinomics has proved to stand the test of time(about two years) in many of its predictions. This book is still a good addition to your bookshelf

Savoring Flavors of Linux: DSL-N

2009-12-12T14:05:00.000-08:00

DSL-N
This is another ultra-light weight Linux Distro that is a close relative of the fames DSL distro. While DSL strives to keep the distro size to under 50MB, DSL does not promise this restriction. However, as it is made by the same created by the makers of DSL, the size of DSL-n is not going to be much bigger that 50 MB.

Do not let the small size fool you. This distro can run on a 486 with 16 MB of RAM. It packs in it a a newer kernel than DSL. It has many applications, including the Mozilla suite,an internet browser, a word processor, media player. a handful of networking tools, a paint utility and much more. There are also a bunch of screen savers to choose from. DSL-n can be run off a hard drive, Live CD or from a flash drive.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: Feather Linux

2009-12-11T13:48:00.000-08:00

Feather Linux

Feather Linux(128MB) is another lightweight distribution that can be used for a basic desktop. Like Puppy Linux It comes loaded with many applications including Abiword, Calculator, Browser, Spreadsheet,etc.

Like Puppy, it can run on out-of-date computers. Unlike Puppy, Feather does not provide as much eye candy or as many applications.

Cloud & virtual desktops: Ghost

2009-12-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

G.ho.st
G.ho.st or Global hosted Operating system is another cloud desktop that offers a virtual machine inside a browser. Signing up for an account would let A you use the computer and its tools and a whopping 15GB of free space.G.ho.st provides a decent set of utilities.

G.host has an interesting business model. According to the website, G.ho.st gets a commission when one clicks on an ad in google from within a G.ho.st browser.(Got it?)

Savoring Flavors of Linux: gOS

2009-12-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

gOS
Here is another OS that can revive that old P3, collecting dust in your basement or closet. gOS, or Good OS is one of the most creative of ideas when it comes to delivering a desktop. If you want a powerful system with all the latest, greatest Linux tools, gOS may not be the system for you.

On the other hand, if you want a basic system and prefer to do all your work online or are a big fan of Google and the tools Google offers, this may be the system for you.Do not confuse gOS with the Google Chrome OS which Google plans to deliver next year.

Though years behind in simplicity, the philosophy of gOS is,(believe it no not,) similar to that of that of the forthcoming Chrome OS. Keep the machine uncluttered by doing all your work in the 'Cloud'. This means do your work online with online tools.
gOS comes with Firefox, Skype,icons linked to Google docs, Blogger, youtube, gmail,Google calendar, Google Finance, Google maps.,etc. Clicking on an icon brings up the respective application in the Firefox browser.
gOS is simple and functional.

The desktop may be best described as a mashup of Goofle widgets and a basic linux system. Walmart, a few years ago offered a $300 PC which ran gOS.

Cloud & virtual desktops: EyeOs

2009-12-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

EyeOs
This is another good virtual computer. It's look at feel is undoubtedly modelled after Linux.
In addition to the usual utilities, EyeOS provides a public board, an FTP client, and even a process manager.
The website promotes the use of EyeOs in schools, Government,etc. They offer different licensing options, support and training. A downloadable version of EyeOs can be used to run the system on your own server. EyeOS also provides the ability for branding and personalization of its look and feel.

See also:
Set Up a Web-Based Desktop with EyeOS

Cloud & virtual desktops: Glide OS 3.0

2009-12-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

The traditional desktop like a Windows PC, Mac an Linux come with browsers in them. With the coming of cloud cto upload from and download to the virtual computer. omputing, we now have desktops accessible within browsers and just days ago, Google released another model, the desktop IS the browser. For now, I'd like to look at some of the free desktops accessible within browsers.

Glide OS 3.0

This one requires a Flash 9.0 plugin and offers 5 GB on web storage. In addition to media tools, Glide offers a blogging utility, photo editing, a meeting scheduler, an email, and even web space.

Glide provides GlideHD, a media manager .One may upload or download audio, video or imae files to and from the virtual machine. There are utilities to sync files from the virtual computer to the local machine.

Further it offers a browser called Portal. Portal allows the ability to add bookmarks to quickly access websites or RSS feeds from websites. Portal also comes with a stock ticker. Interestingly, the Portal lacks the ability to import or export bookmarks.

Glide also provides premium monthly and yearly plans that provide 50GB of storage.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: Crunchbang

2009-12-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

Crunchbang Linux

Crucnhbang is what I'd like to call a 'Man's Linux'. Sporting a Spartan interface and just a black background, Crunchbang is eerily deceptive in its offerings. It offers almost no conventional eyecandy. A right click of the mouse will reveal the large number of applications in a small package. You can, if you choose customize the desktop easily to suit your needs.

Crunchbang is another Ubuntu derivative and is much faster and smaller than its parent. For regular desktop work, crunchbang offers a slick desktop. A build of Crunchbang Ububtu's latest version is yet to come, but the existing version, built of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is good enough for now.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: LinuxMint

2009-12-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

Linux Mint

LinuxMint is another Ubuntu/Debian based distribution of Linux and has a large user community. The latest version Helena is build off Ubuntu's latest version, Karmic Koala. I tried playing around with the Live CD. While it offers great eye candy and some good applications, it did not provide any strong reason to switch over from Ubuntu or Kubuntu. Having said that, it does make a decent desktop.

Everything XBMC

2009-12-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

Judging by the traffic on this blog, there seems to be a lot of interest in XBMC, the open source media center which was initially made for the XBox classic, but has now become a full fledged media center in its own right for many platforms. I have compiled a list of links below on XBMC that I found very helpful.

The XBMC site: This is the main XBMC site that has all the latest information and downloads for XMBC on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms.

XBMC for the XBox: For a number of reasons, the XBMC site does not include a donwload for the XBox. For the latest versions of XBMC for the XBox, this is where you go.

XBMC Plugins source tree: If you are familiar with checking out code with SVN, you can download most of the XBMC plugins at this URL. The plugins enable you to access online content from a multitude of sources like CBS, NBC universal, You Tube and so on. You can also access online music from sources like Last Fm.

Note: There is no XBMC plugin that I know that works with Hulu or Fancast as of this writing.

Getting XBMC on the XBox: (The old way) This article by Gina Trapani introduced the world of XBMC to me. I had little trouble getting it to run on the XBox. While it is an amazing feet getting an XBMC to run on a 64MB machine(XBox), people beginning their adventure with XBox are advised try to install it and test it out on a laptop or invest in a $200 nettop PC. (See below). Besides, Gamestop has stopped selling used XBoxes for $50. You'll have to get one off ebay if you do not have them already.
Running XBMC on a Net top PC: (the new way) This article by Adam Pash details how to install XBMC ona $200 nettop PC. The Acer Aspire Revo Nettop is a powerful nettop that comes with 1GB of memory and a powerful graphics card. This article leads you through a 'Live XBMC' install on the nettop.

Lifehacker offers numerous tips on customizing XBMC after you install it.

Hope you find these links useful for you.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: PuppyLinux

2009-12-05T14:44:00.000-08:00

PuppyLinux
There are plenty of reasons to 'wow' this distro. One is the footprint size. The live CD ISO file is has a size of just 110MB and downloaded in a jiffy. As advertised all over the web, it can be used on older PCs with small .drives and memory.

Having said that, I have had some problems trying to revive some older PCs with Puppy. It runs well, however on a P3 Dell (T.800) . Another word of caution is that if you plan to do some heavy weight development on Linux, Puppy may not be the one you want.

Puppy's desktop is also great giving the user a wide choice of wallpapers, etc. I preferred the older version of Puppy, titled 'Deep Thoughts', to the latest version (4.3.1), when it came to default wallpaper.

Another reason to be impressed in the number of applications Puppy packs inside it. (There are too many to count. )All of these applications come out of the box. These include utilities, file system tools, games, office applications, multimedia, internet and network tools. The network tools include a firewall, FTP software, a VPN client and many more. One of my favourites is the simple to use, network configuration tool, 'Connect' If you need a good, free and fast system from older hardware for your basic you may want to a good look at Puppy Linux.

Dundee Original Honey Brown

2009-12-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I had lager beer. Not quite winter brew, but well, its good. It is neither too sweet nor bitter. True to its name, it leaves an after-taste of honey. This one is brewed in the Dundee beer brewery in Rochester, New York. This is a good change from traditional beers and is heartily recommended.

The Netbook: A disruptive force?

2009-12-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

At MIT, I had the pleasure of listening to the great Clay Christensen author of The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)among other well-known books.

He is well known for coining the term, Disruptive Technology a technology or product that comes into a market and takes over from an existing market leader or incumbent. For this to happen, Christensen proposes three requisites:

1. It must be cheaper than in incumbent.
2. It must under-perform the incumbent. Why? To the incumbent, the technology seems trivial and unimposing so much so that the incumbent fails to 'see it coming'.
3. It must offer ancillary benefits.

Netbooks seem to fit that bill, or do they? Let's look at the prerequisites carefully.

1. Cheaper: Indeed Netbooks are cheaper. The Cheapest of Netbooks start around $150. Cheap laptops start somewhere near $300.

2. Underperforming: This requisite is also satisfied by Netbooks. They offer less computing power. Most of them have smaller hard drives and many simply do not have a hard drive. Of course, being smaller Netbooks have smaller screens.

3. Ancillary Benefits? I am not too sure about this one. The sales pitches mention lesser weight, smaller size, etc., but these simply mean one benefit: portability. Yes, low power consumption is another. Another pitch is the case for a small form factor. Is this really a benefit? Then I have seen the case made for 'Internet ready applications' and improved user friendliness for Ubuntu Netbooks. Pulling at straws, aren't we?

I remember an article comparing the Netbook to a second car. Guess that would be a good sell. Sometimes a second car is preferable, if the first one is the big family car and if I needed to pickup a few beverages in a hurry. I would not plan on giving up the family car, though.

Savoring the Flavors of Linux: OpenSuse

2009-12-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

OpenSuse

OpenSuse is another popular Linux Distro, sponsored by Novell. Version 11.1 ran wonderfully on a Pentium II 866 mHz and was quite fast. I had my heartaches trying to install 11.2 from a Live Cd though(I tried both the KDE and Gnome versions). A network install CD finally had me up at running with 11.2. I went for the KDE version. The network install takes about 3 hours.

Open Suse 11.2 has an impressive look and comes with an impressive set of applications. In addition to Open Office and games, it features Choqok, a desktop client for microblogging on Twitter and Identica. It also comes with Xsane, a scanning software that works with most scanners and Marble, a Globe, a Geography tool.

One of OpenSuse's claims to fame is its application installer Yast, which is more powerful that Yum and aptitude, the installers on Fedora and Ubuntu. Yast offers the ability to add the latest, greatest versions of applications housed on the OpenSuse machine.

Open Suse is another safe choice for anyone looking for a slick desktop. It does not have as many applications as Ubuntu, though. With Ubuntu and Fedora, Opensuse is one of the big three in the Linux world.

Savoring Flavors of Linux: Fedora

2009-12-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

Fedora

Fedora is another popular Linux distro sponsored by Red Hat.Taking on one size fits all approach, the distribution includes a lot of applications like a word processor, spreadsheet, media player and so forth. Fedora does not have as big a user community as Ubuntu and hence does not have as many applications.

Installing the latest version of Fedora(Version 12 titled Reign) on a Pentium III 512 MB was a breeze. Fedora's speed is comaparble to that of Ubuntu.Fedora makes an excellent desktop with a great set of utilities. Its newest release also features improved Bluetooth support.

Fedora is a stable powerful and fast system that makes a nifty desktop.

Savouring Flavors of Linux: Ubuntu

2009-12-01T15:17:00.000-08:00

For the last few years, reviving old pentium IIIs with 512MB or less of memory with a Linux distribution has been my magnificent obsession. This has been a rewarding and dare I say, a heart-warming experience that has opened up my eyes to free, legal and high quality systems that come loaded with equally high quality software. Here is my take on some of these systems.

Ubuntu
This is probably the most popular of Linux distros. Funded and developed by a loyal community, Ubuntu systems can be installed as desktop systems, servers or clouds. There is also a version for the netbook. Ubuntu comes with a deluge of applications supported by a vibrant user community.

My Ubuntu machine is a P4 with about 1.5 G of RAM. It also serves as my HTPC and runs Boxee, moodiva and XBMC.The installation comes with an open office word and spreadsheet programs, a media player and a few other utilities.

I tried the latest Ubuntu distro, Karmic Koala on it a couple of weeks ago. I was impressed with its speed and boot time, Unfortunately it does not reliably run Boxee or XBMC(for now) . I was forced to downgrade to the prior Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope.

Built from Debian, Ubuntu is a stable and powerful OS. I have had many problems installing the original Ubuntu on older machines.

Linux features a Gnome desktop. I figure that a bit of explanation is needed here. Linux has two kinds of desktop layouts. Gnome and KDE. Both are panel heavy though some of us prefer one over the other. A detail discussion of the two systems is a bit of overkill here.

Kubuntu This is a version of Ubuntu that uses a KDE desktop. In my experience I find it a bit faster than Ubuntu. It has a default blue background that I prefer to Ubuntu's brown and unappealing look and feel

Xubuntu is another version of Ubuntu I have tried. It is used to install Ubuntu on systems that do not have the luxury of too much memory or fast processors.

Mythbuntu is another Ubuntu flavor that comes preinstalled with MythTv. Mythtv can be installed on Ubuntu as an aplication. The latest version of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala has made much of this an automated and relatively easy process

Ubuntu supports an application distribution called 'PPA'. This allows for an easy upgrade of all applications to their most up-to-date version with a single system command. Ubuntu's default installer called aptitude facilitates maintaining of the latest application versions on the respective system.

Mayflower Golden Ale

2009-11-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

Though not quite a winter brew, this one is worth savouring. It is light and has a great pilsneur-like taste. Best of all, it is brewed in my own backyard: by the Mayflower Brewing company, in Plymouth Massachusetts.

Book Review: Web 2.0 : A Strategy Guide

2009-11-30T12:46:00.000-08:00

I guess it would be unfair ton critique a book on Web2.0 written in early 2007. However, it is an interesting exercise on looking at some predictions, some assumptions and some ideas just to figure out where they were right and where they failed.

In all fairness to this book by Amy Shuen, it tries hard to be useful. It has a lot of examples, attempts to analyze Web 2.0 business strategies and even tries to help the reader put together a business plan.

Unfortunately the final product looks more like a huge term paper or thesis from my last Master Program at MIT. It features numerous case studies and tries to fit Web 2.0 into analytical and business models from popular business and academic thinkers.

One of the authors quoted is also one of my favorite teachers from MIT, Eric von Hipple. von Hipple spoke of democratizating innovation and Lead users long before the term Web 2.0 was invented. Innovation with products,he said is not limited to the entity that creates the product but all other stakeholders who interact with the product: its users, resellers, etc.

Other models included in the book are Porter's forces, Gladwell's theory of Mavens, connectors and salepersons, Rogers' adoption curve and Chris Anderson's Long Tail.

The book uses more than its share of buzzwords: Prosumers, Mashups, Freemium, to name a few. It speaks of Salesforce.com that makes CRM easily available for those who cannot by traditional CRM software suites like Oracle. Today, Saleforce.com is more a warning than an example.

Web 2.0 speaks in detail about the business models of companies like Flickr, Linkend and Facebook. In. My problem here is much like as those who critique Web 2.0? Where is the bottom line?

Web 2.0's success stories are few a far between. Google is the biggest of these. Netflix is another, as it can be considered the Blockbuster killer. Amazon's zshops is another great success story.

All in all, one may read this book and evaluate its theories in the light of happenings in the present. While some models have their merits, unfortunately many serve as warnings.

XBMC and Boxee

2009-11-29T11:30:00.000-08:00

XBMC

It is almost 2 years since I hacked an old XBox to install XBMC the killer media center, at least at that time. With just a 133 mHz Pentium III and 64MB of RAM, the XBox could run an impressive array of games.

Open source XBMC took the XBox to a whole new level. It turned the XBox into a complete media center and gave it the ability to stream audio and video running on a file server anywhere in one's house into a television connected to the Xbox.

The plugins produced by a dedicated hacker community enabled one to stream video and audio available across the computer directly into the television. The arrival of XBMC accentuated proliferation of the television and the home computer.

XBMC has since grown out of the XBox and has become a killer media center for the PC, the MAC and Linux systems. There is even a 'live' version of XMBC that enables one to use a cheap computer like the Acer Aspire Revo as a dedicated XBMC box. Please visit xmbc.org to download a free version for your specific system.

Over the last year, website www.Lifehacker.com has featured numerous articles on XBMC.

Boxee

XBMC had and continues to have many offsprings. The most popular and impressive among these is undoubtedly Boxee. One website referred to Boxee as XBMX on steroids. Available at Boxee.tv, Boxee is another killer mediacenter available for PC,MAC and Linux. The alpha version of Boxee has a look and feel far more impressive than XBMC. Boxee is also a trifle more user friendly in giving the user the ability to add plugins, special add ons enabling the user access to numerous sources of media on the internet.
In addition to providing content from websites of popular TV stations like CBS and CNN, Boxee has plugins enabling one access to education and edutainment channels like OpenCourseware from universities, TED talks and Flora TV.
The arrival of Hulu, the second most popular website for streaming video brought with it the hope of getting quick access to popular TV shows and videos. Hulu's failed love affair with Boxee has been noteworthy and covered extensively on Lifehacker and Gizmodo.

The internet geeks have been critical of Hulu for bowing down to the demands of Media companies and not allowing its content to be made easily available to media centers like Boxee.

Business week and Gizmodo feature articles on how Hulu may charge for enabling users to acess its content. In fact Gizmodo suggests that users must abandon Hulu immediatedly to not get cornered by the media website and being presured to pay for watching its content.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, Boxee has a platform to allow its users watch, comment and recommend shows to others. At this stage Boxee is using the popular viral model to promote itself.

Boxee is planning a big release event for the 7th of December where it will unveil its Beta version. This version will be available to the public in January 2010. It promises to make this version more impressive than its alpha.I cannot wait to get my hands on that version.

Boxee has also hinted that it would release a dedicated Boxee box, a device that will only run Boxee and that one can include in her home theater setup. There is no word on pricing for this one yet.

About two years ago, Boxee and Apple TV seemed to make an impressive sleek and inexpensive media center. The Apple TV is a small computer with 250MB of RAM and priced around $200.

Today, one can build his own dedicated Boxeebox with a more powerful computer like the Acer Apspire Revo that costs around the same and has a great graphics card that allows watching of HD programming. Lifehacker carries a couple of great articles on how to build a dedicated Boxee or XBMC box using a cheap PC.

The big incentive with both these media centers, XBMC and Boxee is that one gets on-demand programming and can eliminate cable entirely. (A good HD antenna is another addition to one's home that will provide the ability to access real time news.)

If you have not tried out using any of these media centers, you owe it to yourself to check themout by just installing either or both of them on your laptop, for starters.
I was amazed I could get this kind of software for free. XBMC and Boxee are guaranteed to change the way you watch TV or listen to music.

Magic Hat Winter Seasonal

2009-11-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

With Old man winter quickly approaching, most breweries are switching from their October Fest offerings to their thick, heavy Winter offerings. The first one of these I tried was the Magic Hat "Howl" winter seasonal. It is brewed by the Magic Hat Brewing company in Vermont.

The original Magic Hat, 'Not quite pale ale' is one of my favourites. This one is a little more bitter, heavy and smooth. Not bad, is my verdict.

Making sense of Google Voice

2009-10-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in a recent Tweet, I just got my Google Voice account and I love it. Unfortunately, getting one is by special invitation from the other evil empire, Google. So what is Google voice?

It is an answering machine on steroids. A prerequisite for using Google voice is that you must have a Gmail account. Another prerequisite is that you must have atleast one phone(Mobile, LAN line or a workphone).

To begin with, you get your own phone number from Google. This will be your primary phone number which you will hand off to your contacts.

Many Phones, One number

By logging into your Google account and customize your Google voice. Let us assume you have a mobile phone, a LAN line and a work phone. Hopefully, you have all your contacts in your Google/gmail account. For each of your contacts, you can now decide which of your three phones to ring when that particular contact tries to call you using your Google Voice number.

Changing to a new phone number is painless and trivial

If ever, any of your three numbers(LAN, mobile or work) should change, simply log into Google voice and change the respective entry to the new number. Google voice will forward an incoming call to the new number/phone as long as you hand out your Google voice number to all your contacts as your main phone.

Your voice mail as email

One killer feature of Google Voice is its ability to transcribe your messages into text. This means that when someone leaves a message for you on Google voice, it is transcribed as text and shows up in your Gmail mailbox like any email message.

I experimented with this feature leaving a few messages for myself. The transcription process works reasonably well. It even tries to make some educated guesses when it cannot understand some words I use.

Your voice mail online

In addition to the transcribed message, your message is also available as an audio file that is playable from an embedded media player on your Google voice web page.

Unlimited Space

You will never have a full message box again. Messages are saved in your gmail account. As there is no limit on the size you your email message box, there is none on the size of your voice message box as well.

Integrated Interface
You have a choice. You can either use the Google voice interface or the gmail interface. Your choice. Each is intuitive and bear a striking similarity to the other.

Contact me when I am overseas
When I travel, I can still continue to get Google voice messages. I could check them whenever I have Internet access.

Its free!
Isn't this enough reason to get a Google voice account?

Do I have to hand out a new number to all my contacts now?
Google admits that it is a pain to replace your existing number but for now, there seems to be little they can do about this problem for now. There is some good news on the horizon, though. Google plans to give Google Voice users the ability to use an existing phone number that belongs to them as their Google voice number.

Google has permeated yet another facet of my life.

Two forgettable Flicks

2009-09-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

I liked the X-men trilogy. In fact I liked it more than the Spiderman series. Then add all the media hype on X-men Origins: Wolverine, there was no way I was going to miss X-men origins: Wolverine.

Wish I had missed it. This movie was a disaster. With cheesy stunts, an inane plot and terrible dialogs, this would easily be among the worst movies I had seen. Even Hugh Jackson could not revive this one. This movie is a disaster. Skip it.

Now lets look the second, Street Fighter, Legend of Chun Li. Well, there is nothing much to look at. This movie was hilarious, without any such intention. It was so bad- it was good! The dialogs were an anachronism. They belonged in a bad martial arts movie from the 80s with all the new age cliches about finding one's real self.

If you ever wanted to relive your Grindhouse memories a la Tarantino/Rodriguez, rent these movies on the same night and invite friends over. You are guaranteed to have a blast if you follow the plot and dialog carefully.

Only one question persists after I watched the second movie: What was an actor like Michael Clark Duncan of the Green Mile fame doing in the movie. The big guy plays a side kick to the caricature of some sort of mob boss.

On second thoughts, steer clear of both these flicks.

Wachusett Octoberfest

2009-09-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

With fall upon us here in New England, it is time to transition from the watery summer brew to the October beers from various breweries.

Wachusett Octoberfest is a great way to make this transition. This ale is smooth without aftertaste and has a great flavor. It reminds one of another great New England beer, Magic hat.

Wachusett Octoberfest is brewed in Wachusett Brewery in Westminster MA. (While looking for it in your local liquor store, remember to drop the last 'S' from Wachusetts for savings :)

GTD and the Monkey

2009-09-10T08:30:00.000-07:00

I recently read 'One Minute Manager meets the Monkey by Ken Blanchard and Bill Oncken. If you have not read this book, it is a classic from the 90s. Reading it is both an enlightening and entertaining experience.

Let us first begin to define the monkey. A monkey is any task that ends up in your care, thanks to the tactfulness of a subordinate, family member(typically your offspring) that you should NOT be doing. This is a task that shoul have been handled by the person who gave you this task.

Monkeys typically travel upward from employee to boss or offspring to parent. As mentioned in my prevoius blog entry, I was very impressed with David Allen's Getting Things Done, a classic on completing tasks.

Allen suggests that we have 'buckets' to handle tasks. The proverbial bucket may be a paper or electronic to-do list or some variation of the two. We then record all the tasks that need to be done in them.

The Monkey book reveals a potential weakness of the GTD system. Left unabated, the GTD system could be a breeding ground for monkeys. Well, I found a problem that others may have discovered by themselves.

I can only prescribe vigilance as the only solution for now. Be watchful of monkeys in your to-do list.

Movie Review: Gone Baby Gone

2009-09-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

What do 'Seven', 'The Pledge', 'No Country for Old men' and 'There will be blood' have in common? These are all movies with non-conventional endings. 'Gone Baby Gone' (GBG) joins this list.
This movie marks the directorial debut of Ben Affleck, and stars his brother Casey Affleck in the lead role. The ensemble cast also includes Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris.

GBG begins as a thriller involving the kidnapping of a young little girl in a Boston suburb. Casey plays a sleuth brought in by the girl's family to find the girl. As the plot evolves, it opens up an intricate web of evil and unholy alliances forged among the girl's relatives, gangsters and even members of the police force.

Finally the story becomes fodder for a philosophical discussion about making ethical choices. The raw dialogs enhance the realism of the movie and add to the mounting tension.

The camera work is impressive. One particular scene is quite graphic adding more to the film's intensity. Kudos to Ben Affleck, who hails from my present hometown, Boston. With GBG, Affleck has made a decent directorial debut. I look forward to seeing more of his talents.

Book summary: Flextactics -I

2009-08-27T03:23:00.001-07:00

Though this book was written in the late eighties, It has a few nuggets well worth preserving. Few writers can articulate ideas like Dennis Waitley. Here are some of my takeaways

The new millennium needs a whole new way to set and achieve goals. Waitley christens his strategy, 'Flextactics'.
The following are the essence of his strategy

Tactic1: Risks
Embrace risks: Risks can enable one excel and be a force for good. They reap outstanding rewards. Taking a risk can be going with a new business idea and refusing to retreat at seeming reversals.
Incorporate yourself: See yourself as a virtual corporation offering services to others: your customers or even your current employer
Prepare for the naysayers. Prepare to be unstoppable
Expect the world to be indifferent to your ideas
Challenge your own assumptions. Talk to risk takers on the upside and the downside of taking risks.
You do not have to take all the risk at one time
You do not have to take the risk alone
You are never ever fully ready to take risks. Indeed fortune favors the brave.
Ask yourself:

If money or time were no consideration, what would you be doing?
What did you love to do as a child?
Are you now doing something you love?
Are you making a valuable contribution to others?

Tactic 2: Use the present to chart your future
Get a baseline by writing down

Your character strengths
Your natural talents
Your formal qualifications and skils acquired through self-study

Make a list of primary and professional mentors

Tactic 3: Set lifeforming goals to keep you on track

Ask yourself:
Do you want to stay in the same house/city/state/country?
Do you want to learn a new language?
Familiarize yourself with new technology?

Are your goals truly your own?
Do your goals benefit others as well?
Do not compare yourself with others. There will always be someone better than you in anything you are or do.

Time and Tide

2009-08-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

You probably knew that denial was a river in Egypt, but did you know that Time and Tide were laundry detergents? Oh yeah, one of them is only available at the dollar store.

Rajiv's Sun Jars

2009-08-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

Inspired by this article on Lifehacker, one of my favourite sites, I decided to make my own sunjars.
A trip to Walmart for the landscape lights, a trip to Michaels for the jars and frost paint, and a half hour of work did the trick.

These jars are great. They light up small area around my house. The blue jars serve as great bedlights. Then there are the usual advantages: No need to shut them off, good for the enviroment and soul, green and ...

Well, they simply look good and are a great way to get on the Solar bandwagon, if nothing else. All I need to do is leave them in the sun in the morning.

With this day being the hottest day of the year, I think I put the sun to some good use today. These lamps are really bright today.

A Korean Touch to New York,New Jersey - Part 3

2009-08-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

HMart
(Apologies: No pictures this time)
Shopping at HMart, the Korean grocery chain is another great experience. While many grocery stores offer a few samples, every nook and corner of the store has an employee( Usually polite) offering samples of Korean delicacies.

These include noodles of several varieties, seaweed with rice, marinated meats, and more. One could fill oneself just by walking the aisles.

Coming from Massachusetts, I found this place a shoppers heaven. Many of the products offered here were a fraction of the cost of similar items in Massachusetts.

Rumor has it that HMart plans to expand into Massachusetts. I am eagerly waiting.

A Korean Touch to New York,New Jersey - Part 2

2009-08-18T09:26:00.001-07:00

King Sauna
321 Commercial Ave, Between Central Blvd & Palisades Blvd

It would be hard for me not to exaggerate any of the offerings of King Sauna. To the average man, this spa is an escape from the reality of the daily grind.

Do not be fooled by the unassuming exterior of this spa. King Sauna has several floors offering variety of services. These include saunas of increasing temperature and even a cold sauna. Further the services include massages, a sports bar and a restaurant serving delicious Korean food. Try the curry rice with beef.

The decor is exquisite with chesstables, relaxing lounges, zen rock gardens, mini indoor waterfalls and giant TVs for those who want to watch a (Yankees) game. Geod stones, bamboo and indoor foliage enhance the tranquil experience. The spa also has a video gaming area and offers wifi to its customers

The men's facility in addition to lockers, has a steam sauna and four hot tubs within it. It also has a sleeping room. For the convenience of its patrons, the spa offers disposable toothpastes, razors and other toiletries to ensure a comfortable nuisance free experience

I was very impressed with how well-maintained the facility were. The shinny wooden floors were spotless and the whole place despite the intricate decor, was almost dust free. Best of all, King Sauna is very affordable for all its offerings and gives group discounts.
It is well worth your while to spend an afternoon at the venue if you are near or close to the area.

A Korean Touch to New York,New Jersey - Part 1

2009-08-18T09:14:00.001-07:00

Wonjo
23West 32nd Street
New York, NY 10001

The Wonjo restaurant in New York City gives one a taste of Korea and many of its delicacies.

Many dinner tables had two built-in ovens to allow the waiters to quickly place marinated meat and for the patrons to savor it by placing it on lettuce and adding dashes of spicy Korean sauces. As part of the Korean tradition, the meal is washed down with cold noodle soup which was a bit sour for me. Having a meal here is an unforgettable experience and is well worth the visit.

Watchmen the Movie

2009-03-22T16:56:00.000-07:00

Alan Moore's larger-than-life classic book has finally made it to the big screen, much to the anticipation of geeks like me. Big Screen, indeed!

Watching any movie in IMAX is an experience in itself. The Jordan's IMAX in Natick is a remarkable venue equipped with audio-sensitive seats in addition to its giant screen to enhance both the visual and auditory experience.
Watchmen is one of those movies that should be watched in such a theatre.

Years ago, I reviewed the comic book as one of the best graphic novels of all time. Needless to say, expectations were high when I went to see the movie. Well, on the plus side, the movie was not completely a let down. Having said that, only a handful of movies have managed to bring the magic of the penned word (or image) to the big screen, and Watchmen, much as I liked it, does not make this cut. It probably went as far as a movie could go in such a reproduction.

The story takes place in an altered reality where Nixon is enjoying his fourth term, and the cold war has taken on a new form. The United States is on the verge of anarchy and the future of life itself depends on costumed heroes who exist among the public. Most of these superheoes have a secret identity.

So beings a murder-mystery where one of these superheroes, christened 'The Comedian' is thrown off a building. The Comedian, intentionally or unintentionally bears a striking resemblance to Robert Downey Jr, which is an interesting observation by yours truly.

Back to the plot. Was the killing of the Comedian an isolated case, or is someone bumping off superheroes, one by one? As the plot unfolds, revelations begin to unravel in quick succession leading to a frightful climax that none of the protagonists can anticipate.

Watchmen asks the philosophical question as to whether humanity could decide the future based on intelligence alone, without the presence of ethics and morality. It goes on to say, that even those with the most noble of intentions must answer their own internal questions of right and wrong. And sometimes, this linebetween good and bad is not always clear cut.

The movie features some excellent special effects and the fight sequences are intense. The violence in this film is non-stop and extremely graphic, keeping up the spirit of the 'Graphic Novel'.

Despite the movie's shortcomings, I would recommend it. Watch it at the IMAX, if you have not seen it yet.

Here is the movie's official website.

Robots of Christmas Past - II

2009-02-26T14:30:00.000-08:00

The Robopet, a contemporary to I-Cybie is another quality robot dog worth examining. Created by Wowwee, one of the most innovative toy manufacturers today, the robopet like his then ancestor I-Cybie and his recent descendant Wrex the Dawg, the Robopet also has a mind of his own.

Its legs do not pack the muscle or the elaborate gear and lever system as the I-Cybie but the Robopet has a flexible waist that aid in its abilities to twist and turn. Its waist can help it stand up even when the robot finds itself on its back. Its sounds are more robotic than canine. The robopet does not respond to voice control though a hacking community has successfully made it do so with a PC and Blue tooth adapters.

So how does the I-Cybie compare with the Robopet? This excellent short article analyses both these robots.

Robots of Christmas Past - I

2009-02-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

While kids of all ages embrace the Pleo as a companion, an almost forgotten robot dog from almost a decade ago, I-Cybie demands attention for being a technological marvel and for manifesting the talents of its creators, Silverlit Electronics.

Released in 2000 and marketed by Tiger Electronics and then by Hasboro, the I-Cybie packs personality along with its innate cuteness factor. Along with the soon to be reviewed Wowwee Robopet, I-Cybie was intended to be a cheaper alternative to the then famous Sony Aibo.

The I-Cybie, like its cousin the Aibo is now discontinued. I was lucky to get my hands on on. There are three ways to make the I-Cybie obey its human lord-master. You are hereby warned that none of these ways is guaranteed to work all the time. The I-Cybie responds to sound. You can use your voice to give it simple commands or use claps to make it respond to you.

Like most other robots, the I-cybie can also respond to a remote control. The I-Cybie also came with a charger but unfortunately a four to six hour charge could disappear after a two hour play with the I-Cybie.

These two hours could however, be two hours of indulgent fun as you watch and play with the I-Cybie. I-Cybie is e effortlessly and realistically walks about, negotiating obstacles in his environment using his eyes that pack light sensors. His eyes can change from yellow to green to red.

His limbs are among the most amazing mechanical marvels I have seen. As he comes to life after a fresh charge, he goes through a few amazing motions which include push ups and some dexterous twists and turns.

His master can also set his moods to friendly, disobedient and so on. When commanded either by voice, clap or a remote the I-Cybie responds, often, in unpredictable ways.

Growing up, I remember an old TV ad that said, ' A thing of quality has no fear of time.' Undoubtedly the I-Cybie qualifies as such a 'thing'.

While the I-Cybie was not intended to be hacker friendly, some brave souls have actually managed to hack it. The bravest among them have actually taken I-cybie apart and dug deep into his wiring. This is a realm I will avoid... for now.

Movie review: Eagle Eye

2009-02-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

Well, its good to be back after a long hiatus. I'll begin (or try to) with a movie review. Eagle Eye stars Shia LaBeouf of Transformers fame and is directed by D. J. Caruso and is another cat and mouse game a la Enemy of the State, and more recently the Bourne Ultimatum. LaBeouf, however is the unwilling victim in a tense situation and not like the 'professional' macho men of the other flicks. He is confused and is not in control right until the climax The plot is also a cliche of the 'big brother' variety. Having said that, Eagle Eye is worth watching, just for the action sequences.

Book Review: Black Wind

2008-12-26T18:25:00.000-08:00

While the last two James Bond movies seemed to focus more on Bond, Clive Cussler's novels are more reminiscent of the Bond movies of old and seem to have all the necessary ingredients. The tall handsome hero, Dirk Pitt is Cussler's own alter ego who shares with his creator,many commonalities like working for NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Association, NASA's counterpart in the ocean. Another commonality is that both Pitt and Cussler have a common hobby of collecting vintage cars.

Clive Cussler's Pitt has been around for more than a decade and unlike Bond, he has aged since then. As the plots came along, Cussler realized he had to remedy this situation. He decided to clone Pitt. One of his older novels featured the adventurer unite a son, Dirk Pitt Jr. and a daughter Summer, the older Pitt never knew he had.

Black Wind is a Dirk Pitt Jr and Summer adventure. It has all the ingredients of an older James Bond movie: the damsel in distress, the dashing hero and of course the maniacal villain with a plan that threatens the future of humanity. There are the other Bond cliches including the one Austin Powers always picked on: the failure of the villain to kill the hero when the hero is in his captivity and providing the opportunity for the hero to escape.

This tale begins in 1944 when a Japanese submarine armed with biological weapons is headed for the US to carry on a mission of mass carnage on the Americans. the sub does not complete its mission and lies harmlessly in the depths of the ocean causing no threat to anyone.

This is until a North Korean tycoon decides to seek the deadly contents of the sub and wreak havoc on the US in his demonic plan. The stage is set for Dirk Pitt, his sidekick, his twin sister and all the other Cussler characters to join hands and save the day.

Black Wind is an enjoyable read and is highly recommended.

Portable Web Server Sandbox

2008-12-24T08:09:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I did mention that I am hooked on portable applications. Taking the initiative further, I followed Gina Trapani's advice on life hacker and soon had a MediaWiki up and running on XAMPP server right from my thumb drive. For those who are new to XAMPP, it is a packaged version of Apache, MySql, and PHP. Perl and Tomcat come as optional add-ons.
As my drive was big enough(8G) I was able to install the complete XAMPP server on my drive and did not have to settle for the lite version. It was a breeze to install and fire it up!

I was now totally into configuring my web server. Soon I had Gallery2, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress all running from the webserver instance on the thumb drive. This thumb drive has become my official sandbox for web application testing.

Taking the concept further, I now have Tomcat and the Sun Glassfish server running from my thumb drive and use them to test out many J2EE applications with struts and hibernate.

Xampp can be downloaded with Tomcat and Perl addons here.

Portable Applications

2008-12-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

After reading enough articles on Lifehacker.com, I've become a big believer in Portable thumbdrive applications. For software geeks, a portable application is one that can be run on several platforms or operation systems.

However, they mean something a little different in this context. Here A portable application is an application that resides on a removable hard drive, music player or as a growing trend on a thumbnail drive. To use them on another machine, you simply remove the removable device, plug the device on the other machine and voila, they simply start working.

Over the last year, it is safe to say that the thumb drive has moved from a mere hot swapping tool for data,video, audio and image files to a hard drive hosting executable applications. This is mainly due to the fact that over the last year their capacity for holding data has grown substantially. It was just over a coupel of years ago when I used a 256MB thumb drive. Today, buy.com sells a thumb drive with a capacity of 32 GB at $50. The 64GB version sells for $100

Consider that my 20GB Arhcos Jukebox purchased in the pre-iPod era is slightly larger than an audio cassette and uses a hard drive. I could carry three of those in a 64G thumb drive.

In the recent past, we carried our data with us on CDs or DVDs which we though was convenient. Today, thanks to high capacity disk drives, we can carry entire programs with us like the entire Open Office suite, Development tools, Image, Audio and Video processing software and other utilities for FTP, chat tools and so on. In fact, we could carry with us a portable Apache web server along with tomcat and MySQL on it. If that is not impressive enough, I have a Linux operating system on my flash drive in addition to the above mentioned utilities.

This is most useful for several reasons

We do not need to lug around a laptop everywhere we go.
All one needs is access to a computer (and maybe with Internet access)
We can recreate our environment on any other computer with all the programs and data we need, along with our personalized setting, bookmarks, etc.
Think of the savings in time and productivity.

Here are a few extremely useful websites:

Portable Apps: This site has numerous portable application choices that you can install on your pen drive.

Pendrive Apps: This is another good site that lists numerous portable applications.

PendriveLinux :This site details a variety of choices of Linux that one may install on a USB drive.

Mac on a Stick: This website details how you could be up and running with an older version of Mac on your USB drive.

Here is a listing of all Lifehacker articles on Portable applications.

It's time all of us jumped on the Portable Apps bandwagon.

Movie Review: Infernal Affairs

2008-12-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

Having seen the Departed a few years ago, a movie that picked up several academy awards, including Best Picture, I finally got around to seeing the original Hong Kong movie that it's screenplay was based on.

Infernal Affairs is the movie and is, at least more riveting than the Departed. Andy Lao and Tony Leung deliver a tour the force performance and an offbeat end that is quite different from the one in the Departed.

Infernal Affairs is a cat and mouse game at two levels. One is between a top police and his nemesis, a notorious gang leader. Each of them has a mole in the other's team. So there is another cat and mouse game between the moles.

The movie is fast paced, slick and violent and has an end that leaves the viewer breathless, even if the viewer has seen the Departed. It is a must see for lovers of action movies.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), John Battell

2008-11-30T22:20:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), John Battell
John Batell is a take-no-prisoners interviewer. Seen here is the interview with Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook, the world's youngest billionaire. He asks a few tough questions on the 15 Billion Microsoft handed to Facebook. Mark is a tough kid to scare. He speaks of Facebook's two revenue channels, brand direct and online advertising. He says that revenue is in the 100s of millions.

Batelle continues to question him on the Microsoft deal. Mark Zuckerberg mentions that the Microsoft deal is a smaller part of the revenue. He does mention that they are working of late on search and that Microsoft is a good partner for Facebook.

Is Balmer happy with the price, Batelle asks and Mark evades the question.He goes on to say that Facebook will not go public for a few years and feels no pressure to justify the 15 B.

Facebook has more than 700 employees says Mark. They continue to hire great technical people and expanding the sales force, he adds.

Facebook Connect has been announced for a while and now the closed Beta is going to be opened says Mark.

Bartelle then asks Zukerberg about facebook being a walled garden that is not jumping on the Open Source bandwagon. There is a transition from closed to open system and Facebook was one of the first to provide a development API, counters Mark.

Microsoft's claim to fame was its opening up its software to several hardwares says Mark. Facebook is now faced with the challenge of getting people to share their information online.

There is no way for Facebook to serve all the ways people share information concedes Mark. Over time people will have websites and use the Facebook platform to make it more decentralized, says Mark.

Facebook and connect are evolutions, says Mark. As poeple add applications, a new ecosystem has evolved. Now the model is more feed based, he claims. One example is the election conversations in the system..

Budweiser American Ale

2008-11-29T15:58:00.000-08:00

I must admit that I am not a big fan of Budweiser beer but this new ale offering from Budweiser was a pleasant offering. It is a little bitter compared to other ales but still good. I liked the design on the label which was a great decoy for those like me who are programmed to avoid anything that says 'Bud beer'.

Hibernator Long Trail

2008-11-29T15:57:00.001-08:00

The Hibernator Long Trail from the Long Trail Brewing Company is a great offering from the Long Trail Brewing Company. It is very similar to another of my favorite ales, MagicHat, also brewed in VT. It is heavier than Magic Hat and does not have a subtle flavor like MagicHat.

Mindmapping

2008-11-24T16:32:00.000-08:00

Mindmapping is a note taking technique invented by Tony Buzan and popularized by many, including Michael Gelb. It is based on the notion that the mind does not think with language and sentences and instead thinks in patterns, logic and pictures.

The left side of the brain is associated with logical thinking and the right with creativity and intuition. The traditional method of note taking is a left brain activity and is based on logic. The problem with this approach is that the mind does not think linearly and thus makes forced list making inefficient.

The mind mapping mechanism designed by Buzan integrates both sides of the brain and is thus a great tool for any task or set of tasks like making a simple to-do list, writing a novel or managing many projects simultaneously.

It is one technique that that has worked for me well over the years. When Buzan first introduced it, the lack of good software for mind mapping prompted Buzan to promote mindmapping on large sheets of paper.

While this may still be effective in some cases, there are enough tools today from Mindjet Mindmanager to free software like my favorite, Freemind.

Here is a list of mindmapping tools from Mashup.com

Below is a list of LifeHacker articles on mindmapping applications

Using a mindmap to organize your week

Lastly, as mentioned in my one of my previous posts, I have been using Tiddlywiki a lot,of late. I have successfully been able to add Minmapping features thanks to a plugin from TiddlyTagMindmap. I like it so far. Mindmapping is the most effective and efficient way to take down and review notes.

David S Rose on TED

2008-11-24T16:31:00.000-08:00

David S. Rose on Pitching to VCs

In this talk, David S. Rose, former serial entrepreneur and now serial investor talks about pitching to VCs. The most important aspect that the VC is interested in is you. You have about 15 minutes to about half an hour to make your pitch.

The most important part of your pitch is your integrity. The second most important thing is passion. Then comes experience. (I have done this before). If you have failed, maybe you have learned from this. You must have domain expertise(knowledge). Then come the skills to run the organization. You must exhibit leadership.

Commitment comes next. You must have vision but still be a realist. Finally, you must be coachable. Your pitch must include all of these without your mention of them.

You have 10 to 30 seconds to grab their attention. The rest of your pitch must have an upward path. It must get better and better and at the end, knock them out of the park. Make sure that no threads are missing.

Begin with the market, the how and why you are going to do it. Reference things the VC can relate to. Show validation through something that has been done before or awards you have received.

You must then have a believable upside. There may be things that may take a VC's mind down. It is your job to recover from these. One of these is when you speak of competition. The VC may have heard of a widget similar to the one you are creating. Some things mentioned may not be true. Even things that make the VC think could be detrimental.

Make sure the figures add up. Watch out for silly mistakes and typos. If you cannot make a good presentation, how can you run a company?

Bullet points are OK. Headlines are better but images are best.(A picture is worth a thousand words)

Your presentation need not have introductions like 'I am presenting...' (The VC knows all this.) It must have your company logo. Then proceed with a overview of the business and give a sense of context. Then talk about the product. Do not do a live demo. Then tell them how you make money on it. Talk about your distribution relationship or a partner. This helps validation.

Tell them exactly what the competition is and then tell them how you are special. Your pitch must have Financials. Speak about your growth plan for about four years. (About a 100 customers the first year...) .

How is the money you get from a VC going to help you get there? How much are you looking at? Two or Five million? Are you invested in it? Do you have other angel investors?

The conclusion: Go back to the logo. Wrap it up by 'sending the VC into space'.

Use ovation or other presentation software.
Always use the remote control.
Your handouts are NOT the presentation. The handout must stand out without you.
Never look at the screen. Connect to your audience instead

Movie Review:Quantum of Solace

2008-11-23T16:44:00.001-08:00

The street fighting, error prone, jilted Bond is back and back with a vengance in this action packed sequel. In addition to the task before him, he has issues of his own. He is conflicted from the loss of a woman heloved, his anger towards her from betraying him and his anger towards himself for allowing himself to be played.

Quantum of Solace begins almost exactly where Casino Royale left off. Once again, the focus is more on Bond than on the evil designs of madmen. It is more about Bond seeking redemption for himself and his prior deeds.

Bond is still prone to recklessness. This time he is after the person who was responsible for the death of his woman. His assignment is not assigned by the British Government. In fact he must seek out the evil minds and then find out the the evil designs on these minds.This chase takes Bond from Italy to Bolivia. Bond joins forces with a woman who has a vendetta of her own.

Physically, Craig is the biggest of the Bonds and prefers fist fights and in chasing the bad guys on foot through elaborate sets. The movie is action packed and intense, but I expected more after watching Casino Royale. There are some great car chases and one particular chase has no doubt, been 'inspired' the the Bourne Ultimatum.

I also noticed that the last couple of Bond movies have cut down on gadgets that we had come to expect from these movies.This is probably a wise decision from the movie makers in realizing that audiences worldwide have probably seen the cutting edge of technology and would not be awestruck by electronic devices created by Hollywood.

Quantum of Solace is worth watching but I would recommend that you wait till it comes on on DVD/Blue Ray.

Movie Review: Casino Royale

2008-11-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

Few fictional characters have gone through as many avatars as Ian Flemming's creation, James Bond. In five decades, Bond has been unemotional rugged(Connery), one hit wonder(Lazenby), wisecracking philanderer(Moore), Shakespearean (Dalton), runway model(Brosnan) and finally, street fighter(Craig).

Daniel Craig has indeed created a phenomenon with the street fighting, no nonsense Bond, a big contrast to the one played by Brosnan. Many have criticized Casino Royale, including Roger Moore, for excessive violence but as Moore himself would concede, it is a sign of our times that we prefer more 'high Octane' action.

Bond movies have had many fixtures, notably the scantily clad bond girls, high tech gadgets, fancy cars and of course, maniacal villains with grand designs of destroying or altering the planet. This is where Casino Royale breaks away from many Bond cliches.

As one would expect, it has more violence than any of the bond movies made before it. There are women, but unlike in past movies many are more than mere showpieces. In fact, Casino Royale continues the trend from the Brosnan movies of portraying Bond's Boss, 'M' as a woman.

Unlike the earlier Bond films that focus on a madman hellbent on causing world destruction this one focuses on Bond himself and how he got to be 007. Unlike his predecessors, this Bond is not infallible and does not make the right judgement. He gives into his emotions more than once, incurring the wrath of his demanding boss. He is also vulnerable to feminine charm and this could jeopardize his future with the Secret Service.

Casino Royale is the tale of a vigilante Bond trying to destroy the entire supply chain of an illegal arms trade. The endeavor would take Bond from Africa to the Bahamas and the United States and finally land him in a high stakes Card Game.

Could Bond keep his emotion and the villains at bay and win the game? The climax, however is not the game but its aftermath, that would force Bond to make judgment calls on who to trust.

Casino Royale is among the best of Bond movies and humanizes 007 for the first time. It is the tale of how Bond becomes 007.

Restaurant: Chilli's Braintree

2008-11-21T17:23:00.000-08:00

Braintree-Chili's
170 Pearl Street Ivory Plaza
Braintree, MA 02184
Call: (781) 849-6151

Sometimes one neglects a quality place because of the 'familiarity' trap. By this I mean, as one sees more and more of something, like a Chilli's Restaurant, it slips his attention and he fail to notice it or care to visit the place.

This Chilli's restaurant in Braintree is located conveniently at the Pearl Plaza with ample parking. The restaurant has a large bar and a spacious seating area. The servers are friendly and courteous.

The menu features many choices, including delicious burgers, fish or my favorite, the Fajita trio, shown in the picture which comes with steak, chicken and shrimp. The guacamole costs another $1.29.

They also serve great margaritas like the Blue Pacific or Presidente margaritas. Do not let familiarity stop you from a quality meal.

Full Moon Winter Ale

2008-11-21T17:11:00.000-08:00

This is the winter version of the Blue Moon White Belgian Ale, an offering from Molson Coors Brewing Company.

It is smooth and heavy like most winter ales and not as sour as the original. I prefer the original Blue Moon, though this one is OK.

Movie Review:Mississippi Burning

2008-11-21T13:12:00.000-08:00

Created almost two decades ago, the cinematography in this movie could put most modern camera people to shame. Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe lead an outstanding cast of both black and white actors in this epic movie on racially motivated crimes in the sixties.

In a small isolated town in Mississippi, three young one, two white and one black, drive out in the dead of night. These civil rights activists have no idea about the evils that await them that very night.

Their disappearance would bring into town, two FBI agents. The older of these men(Hackman) is a wise cracking cynical individual who holds no illusions about the ability of justice to come out through conventional methods of interrogation.

His boss, the younger agent(Dafoe) is a play-by-the-book official, who does not approve of his colleague's methods. Needless to say, the there is tension between the two men. However, both are committed in finding out the truth, and in prosecuting the guilty parties.

These are not easy tasks. The clan has a strong foothold in the town. Both blacks and those who sympathise with them are unwilling to cooperate with the FBI agents, as they afraid of repercussions and fear for their own lives. The clan members who have high political clout are hell-bent in getting the outsiders out of the town.

The movie picked up two Oscars, one for best actor(Hackman) and another for cinematography. Dafoe picked up one of the movie's six other nominations. Hackman looks the same, and seems to have aged little in these years. He is bound to go down as one of the greatest that Hollywood has produced.

Many movies on this theme have been made, but few have the raw intensity and the cinematography that are part of this movie. While this movie was criticized for not having blacks in leads roles, one has to admit that the blacks and the supporting white actors in the movie have performed in outstanding capacity even in their small roles. Mississippi Burning is an important and entertaining movie, that simply cannot be missed.

Tiddlywiki: The ultimate organizational tool

2008-11-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

Tiddlywiki
For the last few days, following the advice of Gina Trapani of LifeHacker, I decided to give TiddlyWiki a spin. I have always been on the lookout for productivity and organization tools. I have read numerous books on this subject too.Among the best of them is Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Over the years, after playing with Outlook and numerous online and desktop tools and was not satisfied with any of them. This was until I found Tiddlywiki.

Tiddlywiki is a wiki/ online notebook that is customizable into a to-do list, a collaboration tool, etc.(Visit their site for other uses of Tiddlywiki).

I was surprised to find flavors of tiddlywiki modeled on the methodology of David Allen's Getting Things Done. Here are a few

I played with the first of these, the d-cubed adaptation. This is one of the most impressive, customizable and flexible tools I had used.

This is a single html file that can be used to keep all of one's appointments, tasks, notes, reminders, etc.
Along with this file, the download package also includes a jar file(Java executable archive). By merely saving the tiddly html and jar file in a folder on your computer, you create a powerful versioing system. Each time you make changes to the tiddly file, a backup of the previous version which enable you to track changes or revert to a previos version

The beauty of the wiki is that it can be stored with the jar file in a thumb drive and can be immensely useful for those of us on the go. One person describes in a lifehacker article, how he carries around his wiki and Firefox portable in his thumb drive and has access to it on any PC.

The tiddly file can also be hosted on a site.
Hosting Tiddlywiki Online

The most popular of these is tiddlyspot. I must admit that I had problems hosting it on this site.
Here is an example of tiddlywiki hosted on Googlepages.

Then I realized there was a whole community of developers creating plugins to customize the wiki.

Tiddlywiki Plugin Sites

Here are two sites that have some of the most innovative plugins one can incorporate into the wiki:

TiddlyVault,
Eric Shulman's TiddlyTools.

My tiddlywiki has also an addressbook that I integrated from twab. In addition to saving contact information, this addressbook also has tools to import contacts from Yahoo, Google or CSV files.
It also includes an export mechanism

Further, I have a mini browser with my bookmarks I got from Shulman's site. The Tiddlywiki is a small and powerful tool and is testimony that great software functionality can some in the smallest of packages.

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker is a big fan of Tiddlywiki and warns about its addictive abilities. You are well adviced to take her example seriously. Here are links to several articles on LifeHacker about Tiddlywiki.

Lifehacker Articles on Tiddlywiki

Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki
How to use GTD TiddlyWiki
Get organized with GTDTiddlyWiki
Host your TiddlyWiki at Tiddlyspot
Embed any web page inside Thunderbird
Add an Interactive Address Book to your TiddlyWiki with twab
Integrate a Personal Wiki into Outlook's Today pane
TiddlyWiki-SE
Get things done with MonkeyGTD
Grab Text for your TiddlyWiki with TiddlySnip
Ask Lifehacker: Opening one file with a different program?
Hack Attack: Quicklaunch your USB workspace
Take In-Browser Notes to Read Anywhere with TiddlySticky
Tagged single-page wiki, TagglyWiki
ServerSideWiki, hosted GTDTiddlyWiki
Top 10 Underhyped Webapps

John Battelle , Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc.)

2008-11-20T14:42:00.000-08:00

John Battelle , Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc.)
This interview of Jerry Yang by John Battelle is important for many reasons. The two that come to mind are that this event served as a precursor to the end of Yang's tenure as CEO of Yahoo and the fact the 'Jerry Yanging' actually became and expression.

It is surprising that Yang refers to the year as being 'extraordinary' for Yahoo. I would have used different words but then, that's just me. Battelle is a 'take-no-prisoners' interviewer who asks Yang all the questions.

He asks Yang if it was an ego issue for Yang in rejecting Microsoft's offer of $33 per share for Yahoo. Yang goes on to say that they did go back to Microsoft with the latter's offer but this time Microsoft walked away. Yang realizes that he may be blamed for this supposed blunder, possibly forever.

Yang says that despite this debacle, he respects Balmer and that none of it is personal.

Batelle next questions Yang on the Google deal which also went south. Monetizing assets at yahoo via Google were estimated at a 100s of millions. Yang said that as they were meeting with the Dept of Justice to convince them that this deal was good for the market. It would benefit users and advertisers said Yang. Google walked away from the deal.

He goes on to say that Yahoo search engine was still good. He point out that the government did not, in this case, look into Yahoo's History.

Batelle asks Yang about Yang's comeback as CEO after making money and whether he was the right guy? Yang stepped back in 2007. He was a joint CEO with David Filo.

Yang says that he does not take his position lightly. There has been a lot of change and he is proud of what Yahoo has become, a great platform company. He has no regrets, he says.

The vision for Yahoo: Yang says that Yahoo is a consumer brand that allows people to get what they want in the Internet in the way only Yahoo can. He says that people are returning to Yahoo, despite all the criticism. Yahoo is the consumer starting point.

Yahoo OS now allows 3rd parties build apps. It also allows social network applications. He speaks of the ad revenue model wherein an advertiser can monitor their sales on many websites through the Yahoo platform.

Is Yahoo going to buy again? Yes says Yang. It is an important part of growing talent and working with the start up community. He makes no comment on buying AOL.

When asked about the search competition with Google and the fact that Google is spending a lot more on research than Yahoo, Yang says its a question of how well capitalized they are in the search market. He goes on to say that Yahoo is well capitalized. He believes that Search is innovation based rather than capital based. Yahoo is not in maps like google and Microsoft is, which is capital based.

Yahoo is also in the cloud computing arena. It takes a certain amount of capital to compete in both search and display. They may be the only company to build data centers in this economy.

For Entrepreneurs:
Yahoo came out of a similar economic environment. He says that he would not have done things differently. Think Long term in this environment where share holders want things short term.

Yahoo is still changing the game, says Yang.

Cheesecake Factory, South Shore Plaza, Braintree

2008-11-20T14:16:00.001-08:00

The Cheesecake factory, located in the south shore plaza in Braintree is a great place for a business lunch or a romantic evening or just to enjoy the big game.
It is spacious and has an extremely elegant decor and a fine seating area. It's trademark cheesecakes are a fitting desert after a meal, if you are still hungry.

I say this because, in each of my visits, I had no other option but to bring home the leftovers for a delicious lunch 0r dinner the following day.
I was surprised that the menu was eclectic, featuring dishes from pasta, steak, fish, along with Mexican and South Asian cuisines.

I have tried the Orange Chicken, the Spicy Cashew Chicken or the Bang Bang Thai Chicken and Shrimp dish and are all well recommended. Also great in size and taste is the mammoth factory burger. You just have to make sure you have the appetite for it.

The Tex Mex rolls with the chutney and salsa makes for excellent appetizers.Finally, as it is located in the mall, there is ample spacing except for the holidays. I dare say, there will be ample parking during this holiday season :)

James Boyle at Zeitgeist 2008

2008-11-18T20:05:00.000-08:00

James Boyle at Zeitgeist 2008
In this talk on intellectual property, Duke University professor, Boyle talks about two themes. He says that we are bad at looking at distributed creativity but very good about the dangers of openness. We have biasses not just about IP but about our business plans, our methods of social organization, our culture and our politics.

He also says than in the last couple of decades, people have become the subjects of copyright law as never before. We never had to be in the position of risking with copyright law. The combination of these two themes has powerful implications.

Behavioral economists discovered that people do not act rationally. They said, however, that there are patterns to our thinking. We are risk averse. Most people buy warranties on consumer items. We are aware that the odds of using it are low, but we want to eliminate uncertainty.

He challenges the audience that if we have the choice of two networks, given they do not know what we do now. One totally open and another totally secure. He argues that all of us would have been tempted not to pick the first network.

The other example is of Wikipedia. No one could have predicted this as a viable business as well. We systematically pick closed propitiatory systems. the IP on networks is not intuitive. We have a bias in our thinking.

People of the past were not subjects of copyright law. It could not be easily viloated by individuals. Today we cannot live without copying or distributing information. We 'press' copy law triggers.

The fact is many people do make illicit copies. We have not focussed on the flip side. We have handed the tools of creation of 1.3 billion authors, filmakers and creators. These are subjects of copyright law. They may not have the same motivations as big movie makers or organizations but they too wish to create.

Boyle is the chairman of the Creative Commons. Many who create copyrighted works wish to share them. What can we do with such content- copy, modify or share it?

Creative commons offers simple choices and makes it human readable. We can use google or yahoo to find content based on what is allowed. They come together as we:
1. Are very good at figuring out the dangers.
2. Run the risk of loosing out the benefits.

We may regress to the old world where we are limited from accesseing creativity. Indeed we have democratized creativity.

Michael Jordan's 23 Sports Cafe, Mohegan Sun

2008-11-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

Michael Jordan's 23 Sports Cafe is located on the 2nd floor with many other eateries at the Mohegan Sun, one of the two famous gambling Meccas in New England.The cafe is one of your choices when you decide to take a break from the tables or the slot machines.

Ok, first the good news. The ambiance in this Sports bar is excellent. It is well lit, spacious and has many monitors that make it an ideal place to watch the big game.

Well, the compliments end there. Michael Jordan's Sports Cafe was meant to be the poor man's alternative to the elegant and elite Michael Jordan's Steak House next door.

The food is definitely not something to write home about. The Chili was solid. They might have tried to push the 'atypical' card too far. The burger I ordered was tasteless and too raw(I had ordered the burger medium rare). Then, to make matters worse, the fries were cold The waiter for his part was good, quick and courteous, but the food simply left a sour taste in my mouth. Needless to say, the meal was a disappointment.

One gets the feeling Jordan is putting all his attention on the Steak House and ignored the sports cafe.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons)

2008-11-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons)

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection act of 2005 has no consumer protection.
The effect of this act is that Credit Card obligations cannot be escaped.
President Clinton was for it.
Hillary first called it the 'Awful Bill', opposed it. When she became a senator, she voted for it twice.(She got paid $140K by the credit card companies.)
Lessig believes her and we should too, he says.
Going back to 1785, when America was believed to be a failure. Independence had become a dependence. America sought non-dependent individuals.
They failed. In the 19th century, Congress was a cesspool of corruption.
Daniel Webster openly asked for 'the usual retainers'.
Bribery was not even a crime till 1853.
People went to congress to make money.
In the 20th century, Mr. Stevens was found guilty of accepting bribes.
The real problem is not people going to Washington to make money.
The real problem is using money to secure tenure at Washington.
This is a constant attention to money for reeelection.
They get a 100% return rate to come back to congress.
The 2nd job of raising money becomes the 1st job.
The return for a lobbyist is investing in Washington folks greater than investing in technology.
The cost is that money destroys trust. 88% of voters believe that money buys trust.
9% believe that Congress is doing a good job.
Even those who did not support Obama are hopeful.
We must allow ourselves to revel in this ideal but the Presidency is not at the core of this cancer.
We need a more fundamental change.
We need a change in congress.
Go to www.change-congress.com

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Saul Griffith (Makani Power/Squid Labs) , High Order Bit

2008-11-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Saul Griffith (Makani Power/Squid Labs) , High Order Bit

We talks these days about energy independence, the need to get off foreign oil and are familiar with the term Carbon footprint.
We needto know our role in this and make energy choices that are in tune with these grandiose visions.
Wattzon.com is a site which has internet tools like wikis using social networking to help people make the right energy choice.
Griffith was curious about how much energy he used in daily life.
We aggregate all our activities to get this number.
One of the biggest uses in Griffith's life was a return trip to Sydney. His cars, cooking and taking showers the A/C he uses at work.
Some of it is energy the government uses on our behalf like creating roads,etc.
Others are laptops, bicycles,etc.
America uses a tenth of the total energy, Canada a little more. The US average is 11.4 Kilo watts The global average is 2200 watts.
The world uses 18 terra watts of power. When it comes to CO2 production, US is #1, Russia is #2 and China is #3.
We can only burn 3 terra watts of fossil fuels in 25 years time.
We need 11.5 terra watts of new energy. This is a scary concept.
We have 85000 terra watts Solar power, huge amount of wind and some in geothermal.
We must measure in watts and not in carbon.
To conserve the power we use we could use tools for this.
The wattson website is in public alpha.
We can choose the number of flights we take and the flight company we use.
We can choose our foods and personalize our diets. Being vegan reduces the power we use.
Other choices are commuting.
.The US government uses more energy than all individuals in the world combined.
We could ask:What is my life power in terms of light bulbs, wind turbines, pints of oil, etc.
So we could use this website to lessen the energy we use.

Beringer White Zinfandel

2008-11-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

From the oldest vineyard in the NAPA valley comes this pocket offering of white Zinfandel. This is one of the sweetest wines I have tasted, almost as sweet as a wine cooler.

However, it is not on the fruity side. The interesting thing about it is that it is served in single serve plastic unbreakable bottles. undoubtedly an offering for the tyro wine drinkers like yours truly. (Talk about a Blue Ocean Strategy!)

Motrin ads do it again

2008-11-16T18:40:00.000-08:00

Motrin has done it again. This time, a lot more people, other than me are upset. The ad featured here created an uproar from moms around the social media world, forcing Motrin to take it off their site and then causing the Motrin site itself to come down due to outraged or curious traffic.

Motrin may have to clean up their department and get rid of the 'We feel your pain' theme. Here is my rant on one of their previous ads.

Short Web 2.0 Clips

2008-11-16T14:56:00.000-08:00

Web 2.0 Definition Revisited

While others have defined Web 2.0 as the 'Wisdom of Crowds','The long tail', social networks, peer collaboration, You Tube and Flickr,etc, here is yet another short clip where it is defined by the newer technologies it incorporates: Ajax, flash, mashups, SOA and web services. Andy Gutmans also describes it as bringing apps from the dektop to the browser.

Mashup Camp Silicon Valley 2008 - WSO2

WSO2 has created the first Mashup server with open source. Jonanthan Marsh, WSO2's director of technologies talks to InformationWeek's Fritz Nelson on this server.This server can incorporate web services, mash up several types of data and display them on a web page or as data to programs or as email. It is freely downloadable, installable and usable by both individuals and by teams of an enterprise. It can easily host web services. WSO2 can provide paid support. The advantage is speed of development.

It is usable without Java programming. One can use javascript to create applications.
You can copy, redistribute and even resell the server. The SOA architecture platform allows access to apache and rolls up web service, messaging, configuration and integration of webservices.
The webservice bus enables transform, route and audit messages as web services. The mashup server augments this offering by allowing easy scripting to bring these services online and allow user interaction with these services like emailing, download and display of services, etc. and display on a browser.

Here is the project home page.

Gary Vee is the Web 2.0 Antony Robbins

2008-11-16T14:30:00.000-08:00

The more I watch Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of the Wine Library TV, and one of the leading evangelists of Web 2.0, the more impressed I get. This guy is barely in his 30s and is living the American dream. He has been criticized by many for being obnoxiously loud, crass and unconventional.

If I were to give this guy advice(like he needs it) I would tell him not to change a thing, except his line of work. Thats right, Gary wine a'int for you. You should be a motivational speaker. Yes, I mean it.

I've seen all his talks and he has all the goods.

1. He is caring about people. Gary is known to personally talk to all those who come to him with questions. Despite all his swearing, his messsage is very simple. Care for others and reach out.

2. He preaches tolerance in his own way. I loved this presentation where he is honest about his own shortcomings and says that he is respectful of all, including his critics.

3. He is unbelievably insightful. In this presentation I loved the way he breaks down Howard Stern's prepostous views of My Space and Facebook, never at any point discrediting Stern's success, but clearly explaining where the shock jock was wrong.

4. His public speaking skills are outstanding. Despite all that is said about his style, his public speaking abilities are outstanding. He is a natural at introducing pauses between sentences, adding voice variation and stressing on the important points to add additional impact.

5. He is passionate and his sincerity comes through in every one of his presentations, both on Wine library and on his blog. This is a perfect example of someone epitomizing the Antony Robbins 'Live with Passion Mantra'.

6. He embodies the American dream and thus has built credibility. In the movie 'War of the Roses', Danny DeVito made the memorable quote: 'When someone who earns $500 an hour gives you advice, you better listen'. This is great advice to all his critics. Gary took his parent's wine business with his gift in savoring wine, turned it into a multi million dollar business.

7. His How-to Messages in achieving an objective are crystal clear. Never before have I seen any speaker deliver a detailed message in explaining how to present an idea as well as Gary can.

Check out this presentation where he explains how to build a show on baseball cards.

8. He has convictions and a strong opinion on the world. Whether one agrees with him or not, one has to admit that it is only those with strong convictions that ultimately succeed. Watch this outdoor presentation where Gary delivers a speech on the current state of the economy and how one may capitalize from it, by what he calls the 'Hussle'. (Warning: He swears a lot in this presentation.)

9. The man is a genius on branding. There is no question about this one as is obvious in all his presentations.

Move over Tony Robbins, here comes Gary Vee.