S Anand

Netflix doesn’t charge you if you lose DVDs in the mail. Nice of them. The only way I see it work is if they have the right to copy a DVD if they lose it in transit. Do they?

What Teens Want. From a session at Web2.0. The big laugh line of the session was when Safa asked them how they’d go about researching information on a CD player they might want to buy. They looked at him in silent puzzlement, as if to say, “why would we buy a CD player?”

How to convert a black & white photo into colour using Photoshop. The result looks remarkably good.

The Google Admin Console. Wonder what you can do if you have the password to this. More Google subdomains. Comments brinpage 10 Oct 2005 1:43 am: google/donoevil A 10 Oct 2005 2:59 am: anand, can I view this from a blog reader? where do I get the feed url? Smokey 10 Oct 2005 6:02 am: if u use google as userid and password it siplays apage which asks you to move to http://www.google.com/adsense/premium-login AlphaGeek 10 Oct 2005 5:58 pm: How do u manage u r time? You do all kinds of things Watching many movies,browsing extensively and also being sincere in u r work ! How is it Possible. Can u pls elucidate S Anand 12 Oct 2005 5:23 pm: Blogfeed available at http://rootnode.freestarthost.com/sanand.xml

Google Reader. Gmail principles applied to RSS. You can subscribe to posts, label feeds and star RSS items. The reader suggests items from your subscriptions based on your interest.

twofifty.org lets you track which movies from the IMDb top 250 you’ve seen. My twofifty.org list has 71/250 crossed off.

The next geek dinner is with Tim O’Reilly. Have to attend!

CNet has a tool that lets you see the big picture for articles.

War forecasting. Can software really predict the outcome of an armed conflict, just as it can predict the course of the weather?

Feynman quotes. BTW, Infinity – on the life of Feynman – would be a good movie to watch. Comments anony 3 Oct 2005 7:53 pm: This page is hell. Thise silly yellow things keep popping up. S Anand 4 Oct 2005 1:15 pm: Agreed. The popup shows the tags associated with the link. Any ideas on improving it?

I’ve put in Google Adsense on my page. But the results are ridiculously irrelevant! Comments Raghuraman 9 Sep 2008 9:15 am: google adsense work in expliand in tamil language, For an approval of adsense and how to publish my website to the visitors for click programe and get earn by this work. Thanking you

Web 2.0 Matrix. What APIs have been mashed up with what other APIs, and where.

If you let people photograph your debit cards, don’t be surprised if the balance drops to zero.

Better information is not always beneficial. For $795, LegalMetric LLC will tell you which judges rule most swiftly and which tend to favor patent holders. For lawyer and client, this knowledge can be very valuable. But does it increase the chances that the judge will come to a just decision? It is the sort of information that Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow labeled “socially useless but privately valuable.” It doesn’t help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure. It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie. Sure, if the product helps win cases, then both sides will buy it – just as both sides in high-stakes product-liability cases invest in jury-selection experts and software – and neither will have an unfair advantage. But does that make the society better off? ...

Interesting experiment to test the impact of changing the rate for Google Adwords. Two identical sites have Adwords account. One has an established account paying $0.10 per word. Another is a new account, and begins by paying $1.00, then lowers it to $0.40. The former got 15,000 click-throughs regularly. The latter started just above 15,000 and fell to 1,200 after the rate drop. Does the Adwords algorithm favours rate increases disproportionately (and hence is evil?) Or is the fact that the former site an established one create the difference?

Framing - using words to build a frame of mind. A Senator goes on a Fox News show in which a conservative argues with a liberal. The conservative host says: “Some say that more tax relief creates more jobs. You have voted against increased tax relief. Why?” The Senator is caught. Any attempt to answer the question as asked simply reinforces both the Tax Relief frame and the “Tax Relief Creates Jobs” frame. The question builds in a conservative worldview and false “facts”. Even to deny that “tax relief” creates jobs accepts the Tax Relief frame and reinforces the “Tax Relief Creates Jobs” frame. ...

Google markets. It’s not a new Google service. Just Google “putting the wisdom of crowds to work” by using online markets.

Innocent in London. LONDON (Reuters): - A London underground train station was evacuated and part of a main east-west line closed in a security alert on Thursday, three weeks after suicide bombers killed 52 people on the transport network, police said. A Transport Police spokeswoman said Southwark station was closed and Jubilee Line services suspended between Waterloo and Canary Wharf in the east London business district. This Reuters story was written while the police were detaining me in Southwark tube station and the bomb squad was checking my rucksack. When they were through, the two explosive specialists walked out of the tube station smiling and commenting nice laptop. The officers offered apologies on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Then they arrested me. ...

PostSecret, where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Showcases the extremities of human idiosyncracy.

AJAX-based personal home pages: Google’s personalised home page, Microsoft’s start.com, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, and now, Netvibes.