Another series of blasts in London

Another series of blasts has hit the city of London. The casualty figure this time is a solitary one. It seems this was not a properly planned one and was intended more to show the intelligence agencies down than to cause material harm to the people of London

Read here

Google Toolbar for Firefox

Google has just released its toolbar for Firefox. It looks kewl on my Firefox :)

What a day

Yesterday I spent the day with an old buddy of mine. We were together in Bangalore for two years and now he has shifted base to Gurgaon. I picked him up from his guest house and headed straight for the Metropolitan Mall. The idea was to find parking space before it fills up. At 11:45 AM, all we could find was space just enough for one car in some obscure corner of the second basement. Ours would have been one of the last cars to enter the basement.

The first priority was to get hold of tickets for some movie. We zeroed in on D. Got the 2:00PM show. Then we headed for Amoeba for a round of bowling and other games. My friend amazed me by his bowling skills; he had just the right speed and the way of releasing the ball to generate that spin I have never even tried. The only problem was that his direction was not always right; at one time he bowled three gutter balls in a row. He ended up with 105, I got 135. Not bad. Then we played one game of Air hockey, and the both of us enjoyed it to our heart's content.

Time was running out; we had to have our lunch before the movie began. Since his stomach was not in its best of shapes, we went to Banana Leaf, as South Indian cuisine has lots of light dishes. I had onion uttapam and a pair of rawa idlis. He was content with some Aapams. After lunch we headed straight to the movie hall. The seats we got were comfy, but the angle at which we had to sit could have been better. D turned out to be a nice movie. Pretty clean too. Of the lot playing these days, it’s perhaps the best Hindi film.

After the movie, we went window shopping. The first victim was the Bose store. Now this friend of mine is a major fan of Bose systems and has a long-cherished dream of owning one of them. Joseph, the CI agent at the shop sat us through a small but lovely demo of one of the Lifestyle systems. The sound was just awesome. He told us about some of the awesome features of that system, including the ability to pick up similar-sounding songs from the 340-hours-of-music capacity hard-disk it carries and the RF remote that works across walls and water from over 65 feet. It also played two separate songs across two rooms simultaneously. As I mentioned, we were window shopping here. But that day I resolved that one day I would also own one of these systems. And if things go as planned, that would happen within the next 5 years.

Then we just went around the mall and went into the shop that sold amps and speakers. We found out one Denon amp that would fit the BookShelf speakers from Bose. Just that the amp was priced a little to high. Maybe some other shop has a better deal for him. As for me, I know I need to save every penny. Well, almost.

We decided to have a Mc’D softy each and walk to the next mall, the Sahara Mall. For the fear of not finding parking space, we left the car in the basement. The moment we stepped out, we noticed it was drizzling. We walked about 500 meters to the mall and headed straight for Big Bazaar. The shop, as usual, was filled to capacity but it was hot enough for us to just rush through the things I wanted to buy and get billed ASAP. It did take a long time but we had chosen a cooler set of counters. Once out, my friend stopped at the Airtel Shop to pay his bill after which we left for the third mall.

The only thing we liked in this third mall was the LifeStyle store. It had lots of good stuff we want to buy, at some time in future though, like an easy chair and bean bags. I bought an aromatic candle from there and went to check out the rest of the mall. Finding it rather deserted and utterly boring, we went back to the Metropolitan. We first went inside Marks & Spencer, as it was offering a 50% discount. The discounted shirts started at Rs 990, and so we just came out of the store. Anyways, it wasn’t my idea in the first place. We then went inside a bookstore where I found just one book but the counter was packed and my patience just gave way. I dropped this latest title from CK Prahlad which I was getting for 80% of its price. Maybe I’ll read it later; maybe I’ll go to Michigan and study under this great guy himself. Oh, I am a big dreamer .

Then we had another bad experience at the Barista outlet. I waited in the queue for some time and ordered two Ginger Fizzes. They were out of them. Then we asked for Lemon Ice Teas. They were out of them also. So we decided to have coke/Iced Tea from the Mc’D and push off.

From there we went to the guest house of my friend, saw some TV and then I took off. Both of us were really tired from all that we did in the day. I still had an hour of travel in front of me. But there was contentment that I had spent a very nice day.

Slashdot | Blogging For Paychecks

Slashdot | Blogging For Paychecks: "Blogging For Paychecks"

Now this sounds interesting. Basically it shows how powerful and influential blogging has become. How important it is to business to promote their stuff. Have the right blog portal and the right guys filling it with text, you can seriously increase your profits

Google Now Included New Oxford American Dictionary

Google and Google Bombing Now Included New Oxford American Dictionary

Google and Google Bombing are officially in the Oxford American Dictionary

Wired News: Hey Google, Map This!

Wired News: Hey Google, Map This!

This is what I call real technology. Yes, its a hack that is not authorized, but as a pilot it shows what one can do with XML data freely flowing across websites and its integration with the Google Maps system.

Some use of technology

Yesterday, I really felt good having had a laptop with Centrino technology. I was asked by my manager to write an email, but it slipped my mind. I got a call from him at 10:30 in the night asking me write that one. Since I have no form of Internet at home, I had to drag my feet and go to office, a drive of 5-7 min. But since I was not properly dressed, I did not want to go to my floor.

And then the wireless technology came in handy. I drove to the office and parked in the basement. I turned the laptop on and it instantly caught on to the wireless network of the office. I connected to my main PC and then to the test PC, did all the necessary testing activities, wrote the email, and then closed the lid of the laptop. And I drove out of the basement and then office and went back home. I never got out of my car and did all the necessary work. Pretty neat, ain't it?

Another chapter ends...

Another chapter of my life is coming to a close today. this girl i did not know till exactly 13 months back is spending her last day in office. she is going to the States to join her husband who is working there as an IT consultant.

i came to know her when she joined adobe just a day after i did and we hit from day one. our employee ids are successive and we hail from the same city. we became good friends over a period of time and ended spending hours together. she would keep telling me things that i did not know about my company and the people working there. she would also tell me about the problems she had with the family of her fiance and i would try to suggest ways for her to get over it. she took the plunge in jan this year and is soon going to join her husband. living in US, with your new spouse, away from family and relatives… must be fun, I guess.

i hope to keep in touch with her over email, but i do not have high hopes of that. i have had one such experience a few years ago when another very good lady friend of mine got married. she was more conservative in nature and i haven't heard from her from even before her marriage. i hope she is doing fine; must be a mother by now, hai na :)

What a defeat

The first ODI between India and Pakistan was a great match to see, as India managed a great victory, after loosing early wichets and letting Pakistan go on rampage in the early overs of their innings. Sehvag and Dravid were the only scorers in our innings; both of them scored over 100 and the next highest was a measly 16. No one else really played an innings and we could not cross the 300 mark, something that was very much in our reach.

Anyways, all's well that ends well (the motto of my brother's school). I am looking forward to the Bahrain Grand Prix and Episode 11, Season 2 of The Apprentice that I missed on Friday. I am watching the current series, thanks to the Internet.

GMail doubles up

Google inclreases the disk space quota on its email service GMail to 2 GB, exactly one year after they announced the 1GB free email boxes. The first announcement was too good to be true, and people thought maybe Google was throwing up its first April Fool story. Not this time. And not only are they giving another free Gig, they shall keep adding a little amount every day, as per this article.

I checked mine today and I saw 1145 MB as my quota. I was hoping for 2GB, but sine right now I am using only 260 MB, its fine with me.

Yo Testing!

People keep asking me why I am still in testing and not planning to move to development. I keep telling them "I don't want to take the burden of someone telling me you created a crappy code or be in the jam trying to fix a bug at the last hour". I am not able to convince them that testing is a great job and is very much respected in the industry today. Its because these people are NOT from the IT industry and hence its difficult to convince them that the industry is fast waking up to the need of expert testing. Microsoft has more testers than developers (their software is still crappy, but its the most user-friendly, in each category they have a product).

Maybe this article would help explain it to them

What * am I ?

I did not know wild-cards could be used in Google searches, till I read about this one
"What * am I"

Mobile phones to turn into golf clubs and toy guns in Japan

Mobile phones to turn into golf clubs and toy guns in Japan

I'd love to see how this thing is achieved. In this case, only seeing is believing :)

400 years of print newspaper

Read it in the Times of India. Think of what Guntenberg would have thought the newspaper would do and what form it would take in the next few centuries. And what might happen to the newspaper in the next few years? Here is one interesting vision. "New York Times goes offline in 2014"

Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 is out

Hoorah! Acrobat 7 is finally out. If you get hold of it, you can look for my name in the Credits, Quality Engineering section.

Ten Commandments of Traffic Rules in India

Got this nice post on Traffic Rules here

What has the world come to?

C&EN Latest News - ACS Takes Legal Action Against Google: "Google search service is said to infringe SciFinder Scholar trademark"