February 2005

Of robots that learn to walk and robots that learn to talk (well, translate, at least).

You turn your house into a bank. Act it out. Take the money and run. And then you call up and brag.

Findory. Their site says: Just click on the articles which interest you. No signup required. The more you click, the more personalized your Findory homepage will be. Enjoy a great Personalized newspaper!

Stephen Covey’s mission builder. Comments Aditya Chaturvedi 25 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Using site tool Anonymous 25 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Does it realy help? Anand, you can tell better.

Google Movies.

10 steps for boosting your creativity If you’re stuck for an idea, open a dictionary, randomly select a word and then try to formulate ideas incorporating this word. You’d be surprised how well this works. The concept is based on a simple but little known truth: freedom inhibits creativity. There are nothing like restrictions to get you thinking.

Complete Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Grab while the site lasts. (Alternate Calvin and Hobbes collection. I’ve typed the quotes.) Comments S Anand 15 Apr 2005 3:11 pm: Quotes from Calvin’s Dad

Google India Zeitgeist.

The Google-like blogger template had me for a while, when I was browsing Shamit’s page. Comments Kaviraj 21 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Hi Anand TOPFRAME 21 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: that was pretty good.. Dhar 8 Mar 2005 8:06 am: In the free anti virus category, I would put Clam-Av, in firewalls for Linux - iptables, IDS I am surprised they didnt put in SNORT, website ripper - wget.

The 46 best ever freeware utilities. What do you find useful? Comments Ashu 21 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: thats cool m1109113562454 21 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: I use freemind too

It’s incredible what RFID and GPS are being used to track: cars, trucks, drug bottles, passports, driver’s licenses, ID cards, loyalty cards, luggage, rifles, casino chips, shopping carts, soda cans, newspapers, razor blades, clothing, books, tyres, etc. What’s even more interesting (scary?) is when it’s used to track kids, students, teens, girlfriends, employees, patients and criminals. Comments S Anand 17 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: I use a domain hosting service that uses hidden frames to point to my Geocities site. Know of any better (cheaper) ones? TOPFRAME 17 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: why do you have to keep the URL at “http://www.s-anand.net” when I follow a link from your page? It’s very irritating actually.

Marc Eisenstadt has analysed 15 years of email. … it is trivially easy to get to 2.5 hours per workday assuming a fairly ruthless, ‘one-touch’, knee-jerk email interaction regime. And worse if you deviate from the regime. Then there are other sources of workflow: blogs, aggregator summaries, phone calls (rare, but I still allow one or two), cell-phone, text message, instant messaging (my buddy list is very large, and most of them are work-related). ...

Why Your Pointy Haired Boss Is A Mathematical Certainty. The Occupational Employment and Wages report … [shows] how many people have what job and what they get paid. But what is that dot … that employs nearly 2 million people and pays nearly $90,000? Why it’s General and operations managers, of course. It’s an attractive, well-paying job, that doesn’t seem to be too discriminating about who gets hired. Comments Aditya Chaturvedi 14 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Cool

MPAA to use digital fingerprints to fight P2P movie sharing. At last, they’re beginning to use technology, instead of regulation, to fight technology. Comments S Anand 14 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Yeah, had a heart attack when I saw it the first time :-) TOPFRAME 14 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: :-) lol! funny comment-ator Venkat 14 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: I think you can have an upper limit on the number characters that one can type. (rather cut-n-paste) :-)

Google donates infrastructure to Wikipedia. Possible benefits to Google? Test another end use for the famed Google OS Get an “authoritative” knowledge base to provide search results on Position against Microsoft Encarta as an encyclopaedia

We are the final frontier. The Guardian asks leading scientists what they think will be the next revolution in science. (It’s almost a trend, spawning books like The Next Fifty Years.) First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren’t special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection. Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. So what’s next? What will be the fourth revolution? ...

Are computers increasing or hampering productivity? This article at NY Times talks about the increasing levels of distraction PCs drive us to, with e-mail, Internet, games, music, photos, movies, books, chat, … It’s a form of ADD: attention deficiency syndrome. Harvard Business Review has an article titled Why Smart People Underperform (Jan 2005: subscription required) talks about its impact in the business world.

Why is Microsoft not opening more source code? Apparently inappropriate code comments is one of the reasons according to this story. I wonder what kind of things developers put in comments that would be so bad for the rest of us to see? Comments sathish 10 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: checking if the contact name is coming properly.. Venkat 10 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: GMaP is cool! Better than mappy. Do we have something like this for India?

How Google Maps works: a look behind the Javascript of Google Maps. Whereas GMail uses XMLHttp to make calls back to the server, Google Maps uses a hidden IFrame. The method has its benefits. The push-pins and info-popups are a different matter. Simply placing them is no big trick; an absolutely-positioned transparent GIF does the trick nicely. The shadows, however, are a different matter. They are PNGs with 8-bit alpha channels. ...

Amazon enters blogging. Comments Navneet 10 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Whoa! Hee-uu-ge Geocities popup on page. Thought it was temp. Apparently not.. S Anand 10 Feb 2005 12:00 pm: Can’t seem to avoid it… Dhar 8 Mar 2005 8:08 am: Amazon India Center’s blog: i-5.blogspot.com S Anand 8 Mar 2005 8:24 am: That was a good one! Didn’t know corporate blogs were getting along in India.