Idle poking about

I'm so bored at work today that I started idly poking about different websites.

I found out that BigAdda (an Indian social networking site) is running a weblog written by Amitabh Bacchan (or so they say.)

More poking around. Their blog runs on WordPress. Their webserver is Apache and its all running on an Ubuntu Server.

WordPress themes folder

WordPress plugins folder

How do I know this? Well, the silly people have not disabled directory listing, so after guessing it was a WordPress install, I started checking out the standard tree of Wordpress folders, so now I know what's in their plugins folder and their themes folder and of course the helpful line at the bottom tells me they're running Ubuntu. Oh and for what its worth, they're actually running WP 2.5 or above.

Blog updates can be frustrating!

Thanks to Blogger deciding to add cute little icons next every commenter id, my blog layout was broken. Not terribly so, but enough to look ugly.

Since I had to edit the template anyway, I decided to make a few other changes too.

• Moved the post time to below the title (and removed post author, since it's only me.
• Removed the bit of JavaScript that would hide comments on Item pages
• Fixed the display of icons next to commenters.
• Some sidebar cleanup
• Added in some CSS to display labels like other post metadata
• Pulled the CSS out of the blogger template and put it into a single .CSS file (This alone saved me about 2MB of server space!)
• Lots of HTML cleanup. I can't believe the number of places I'd left open elements!
• Changed my DTD to XHTML 1.0 Transitional (It still won't validate though, there's a lot of work to be done before that happens.)
• Removed the display of backlinks

I also changed a couple of settings in Blogger before I was finally done.

Little did I know...

Since I publish my blog via FTP, Blogger had to republish the entire site, file by file. Hanging every now and then...

And then when I looked at my earlier posts, I found them all in single massive paragraphs. Back then, Blogger didn't have a rich text editor (or maybe it did, I can't remember) so I used to type my posts in with 2 hard returns to mark the end of a paragraph. Blogger, in all its wisdom, would preserve these hard returns as <br> tags, rather than enclosing each paragraph within <p> tags. (Oh glory days! When we didn't care about semantically marking up content!) I have known for quite a while that Blogger doesn't seem to want to create paragraphs for you. Not even the new version released just a year ago. Why? Google knows!

Anyway, I've been hand coding paragraphs as I type my posts in Blogger for the last year or so. So most of my new posts display and parse without any problem.

But today since I was making all these changes, I decided I should fix my older posts and even label them while I was at it.

And that's where I hit a brick wall. Or should I say Blogger's short-sightedness/cussedness.

• Making a change to a post's labels makes Blogger republish ALL the other labels. Everyone single one in your blog.
• If you're editing an older post, you have only two options. Either publish it or save it as a draft. No option to save and publish later.
• Publishing each old post means you have to wait until it uploads all of the labels each time.
• If you thought that you could mark a whole bunch of drafts as "publish" from the "Edit Posts" page, think again. All you can do is apply labels to multiple posts there.

So what's the solution? I don't want to host my blog on Google's Blogspot, nor do I want to go purchase a new domain just to point it to Google's servers. This means I have to sacrifice some new features of Blogger, so be it. But I really want to clean up my older posts. I guess the only solution is to temporarily switch to blogspot, so that republish older posts doesn't involve a round of FTP each time and when I'm done with all my label and formatting changes, to switch back to my FTP site.

Too lazy to do that right now though, it will have to wait for another day! :)

Must read comics obsessively!

(post title style borrowed from a friend. You know who you are.)

A few days ago samudrika introduced me to Ctrl-Alt-Del, an online comic strip that's mostly about games.

I took a look at it, liked it and added the RSS feed to my Netvibes comics tab and forgot about it for a few days.

This afternoon, I was a bit bored and visited the website to read a few strips. Within minutes I was giggling at the geeky jokes and decided I need to read it from the start. Except, the first comic was published in October 2002 and repeatedly clicking "Next" on the webpage got tiresome.

So I quickly viewed the source of the comic page to figure out which directory the images were saved in and the pattern of the file names. After that it was simple matter of writing a small script that generated all the file names for a given set of dates and add them to my download manager.

About an hour later thanks to broadband, I had every single Ctrl-Alt-Del strip...

And now I've already plowed through the first three years of the strip and I don't plan on stopping soon... :)

Another day, another phone...

Ever since I lost my phone in July, I've been putting off buying a new one because of a financial crunch (thanks to crappy employers under-paying me and the bloody malaria!) I kept using my 3-year old LG with it's scratched body, non-functioning buttons and annoying interface!

Well, that LG finally breathed its last. It just switched itself off quietly and refused to come on again one morning. Typical. I was not ready to buy a new phone as yet but I had to spend on one now.

I had been lusting after the Sony Ericsson K810i. Mostly for its looks, but also for the decent 3.2MP camera it packed. It was more expensive than I wanted to spend, but I went ahead and bought it anyway. And I've never been happier about my phone!

It didn't take me long to install a few games, Opera Mini and the GMail app. Not to mention SSH! Bliss!

New Phone!

After complaining about my old LG phone that never seemed to do what I wanted it to do, not even make or receive calls well, I finally went and bought a new phone.

While I had been planning to get one for a while, it was a mostly impulse buy as I had already decided on getting a Sony phone and did zero research beyond that. Well, not really, I actually decided what features I wanted and picked a phone that I could afford to buy and was quite happy with it. Except, when I went to the store, that model was not available anymore!

So I looked at other phones and while the shopkeeper kept trying to sell me a Nokia phone, I saw this nice looking K750i and decided I wanted it.

It had a MemoryStick Duo slot so I could increase the storage on it, it came with FM Radio, a media player and a 2 megapixel camera. Perfect. Or whatever. I wanted a new phone!

And that's how I ended up with my new phone.

Of course, I spent the next couple of hours ignoring my girlfriend and transferring numbers from the old phone via the SIM and then playing with settings, clicking photos. Even at dinner!

Blogcamp.in - Second day

Most people dashed off for the beach party at the end of the first day, but somehow the thought of a large bunch of nerdy boys and a lot of alcohol was not terribly tempting and so I just went to my friend's home for a quiet dinner of pizza, chicken wings and vodka! That was followed by general catching up with my friend and yakking on into the night. (When he was not whispering over the phone with his girlfriend!)

All of which meant that I woke up late on Sunday morning and so missed the first session at BlogCamp.in on Corporate Blogging. Apparently I didn't miss much since I popped into the IRC channel caught a bit of the presentations on the live webcast.

By the time I got to Tidel Park, that session was winding down and the next scheduled session was the talk by Sunil Gavaskar and followed by Robert Scoble's live webcast.

Mr. Gavaskar's talk was very measured and accompanied by a general hush around the entire hall. Only the flashes and clicks of cameras broke that silence. In fact, sitting at my table at the back of the room, it seemed like a surreal, choreographed performance as people glided fowarded, clicked a photo and glided back while Mr. Gavaskar talked in clear, slow tones about his experience with pod-casting, being in the commentary box and possibilities for blogging in the commercial sports world. While he didn't say anything revolutionary either about the technology or the technique of blogging and podcasting it was nevertheless interesting to hear his take on things.

One of the bloggers at the conference made a rough transcription of his talk. You can read that here.

What seemed like a perfectly organised half an hour with Mr. Gavaskar was followed by a completely chaotic and pointless couple of hours as they tried to get Robert Scoble up on screen. Since apparently there was a while to go before he could come online, a couple of other guys filled with some talks. When it was finally time for Scoble to go on, numerous technical hitches held things up.

Now, I didn't care to listen to the man, so I would have been perfectly happy to go sit in another session except there wasn't any other going on! All the guys who should have been hard at work making sure that other stuff went on as scheduled were too busy waiting to worship at the altar of Scoble! I even heard one nerdy kid say to another, "Scoble is the King, da!!" It took a lot of strength to not burst out laughing at that!

What this meant was that the session that was to start in the other room on Community, Languages and Bridges was delayed inordinately until each speaker in that session got barely 5-6 minutes to speak!

Oh, Scoble did go online finally and wittered on about God knows what. He also pitched for PodTech India, but oh well, who cares? I was busy eating lunch and catching up with other bloggers who weren't particularly interested in Scobleizing themselves.

The Community session was interesting with a fairly wide variety of talks. If only there was more time for discussion on those! Aparna Ray of newsmericks fame spoke on the difficulties of blogging in her native language and in characteristic style ended with a limerick!

Back in the auditorium, some twit read an interminable speech. Apparently he was a local journalist. At the time I sat there gritting my teeth and wondering why the guy couldn't have just put that damn thing online somewhere and tell us all to go read it. Apparently he did have the whole bloody speech on his blog, but still insisted on reading it out!

The last session was the most interesting one of BlogCamp and probably one that witnessed the most participation. Kiruba, Peter and Dina lead a discussion loosely on the responsibilities of writing in a public medium.

Blogcamp.in - First Impressions

In case the badge at the right is not "in-your-face" enough, I should mention here that I'm attending Blogcamp.in on my company's steam.

In the interest of keeping this blog as anonymous as its always been, I'm obviously not going to mention what I'm speaking on but people who know me can obviously figure that out!

The conference is happening at Tidel Park in Chennai which is a fairly fancy tech park but with some serious security! We had to pass through 3 levels of security before we even entered the building (after passing through a metal detector.)

My first big gripe about the conference is that during the registration (when we pick up our freebies, which by the way are fairly decent) is that we had to fill out a short form from Yahoo! (who are the "platinum" sponsors of the event) where we basically agreed to let them spam us. I quickly overwrote the bits where they said "I agree" and "Yahoo can" blah blah changing them to "I DO NOT agree" and "Yahoo can NOT." The guy at the registation desk mutely took back my form, I'm not sure if he actually saw what I did! :)

The entire morning I was offline since in a very "doh!" moment, I remembered that I should have packed my wireless network card only after I got to the airport. I thought this place would have ethernet ports around that I could use, but no. And that was my second gripe. The connectivity is provided by Sify and they have a pretty decent WiFi zone set up but if you want to plug in through ethernet, you're out of luck. I'm also carrying along my portable HDD which has all my portable apps on it so I thought I could just plug into the desktops they have around for free access. Except the desktops were the junk iWay systems which wouldn't let me plug in my HDD into their USB ports. Gah!

I only managed to get online because I had a crossover cable and connected it to a helpful guy's laptop. Phew!

The talks in the morning were quite blah. Someone from Sulekha was up first and I missed the bulk of his talk since we got here late. An open session where bloggers shared their experiences followed which had some fun anecdotes but also had some guys drone on about some story that only they got the point of. After a coffee break, Atul Chitnis was up with "Blogging in the 90s: A Dinosaur's Tale." The only thing to like about this was that Toolz is finally calling himself a dinosaur. Lets hope he goes extinct soon!

The parallel session going on in another room seemed interesting on paper. Intro to Wordpress, Wordpress Hacks were a couple of the topics. But when I popped into that room, it was mostly geek boys using the word "like" altogether too many times!

Lunch followed which was quite yummy but only veg.

I'm sitting right now in the afternoon session which is on "Collaborative Blogging" while a session on Podcasting is going on upstairs.

More later or tomorrow if I'm too bored today! :D

Weird

Reading Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail today I discovered that Wired News and Wired Magazine have been two different entities for the last eight years!

And all this while I've been subscribing to their feeds thinking they were Wired magazine feeds...

Anyone feeling generous?

Apple's announced the first of their computers based on the Intel dual core chips (quite originally named Core Duo) and since I'm out of a laptop anyway, I was wondering if anyone would buy me this one! Its only $2000 (and change, I guess) :p

Oh while you're at it, can I get an iRiver too? Thanks!

Performancing!

I recently installed Firefox 1.5 on my parents' computer and was idly browsing for extensions when I came across Performancing. This is an extension that allows you to blog to Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger from within Firefox!

Experimental support is also there for LiveJournal and MSN Spaces or a custom blog based on known blogging APIs. I just found a flaw in this extension though. Actually it's more like a lacking feature than a flaw. There is no way to delete or go back and edit a post you make through the Performancing extension. You will be forced to do that from within your regular blogging service's interface. Also, there is no way to change the date and time of your post. And, Performancing is only for Firefox 1.5.

These are minor quibbles nevertheless, and considering that the extension is still in beta, its bound to get better! I'm already in love with it, although this is probably the last post I can make with it for a while since I'm heading back to Bombay tomorrow.

*sigh*

But dammit, this is so coooool!

Update: I'm just so stupid! There is a History tab which allows you to edit your last few posts and delete them even!

Science can be sexy!

Being a wonk (as Brits would say) or a nerd/geek is usually a bad thing. If you're too interested in science or (god forbid) you choose that as your profession, you can forget about ever being called hot or sexy. You're more likely to be that boring person in stuffy clothes and glasses that stands in a corner at party and bore people to death whenever you open your mouth to talk.

Well guess what? That stereotype is going out the window! Not only do some women find geeks hot (yay!) but even a magazine like People rated a scientist (a geologist, yawn!) as one of the sexiest men alive in 2005! Dr. Michael Manga who is at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley rubs shoulders with Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortenson and Matthew McConaughey among others in the latest issue of People.

While idly browsing the net for any other articles on Dr. Manga, I also came across inkycircus, life in the nerd girl world, a blog by three women science journalists which categorises their blog-post about Dr. Manga under "men whose babies we want to bear!"

New Features!

For lack of anything else happening on this blog, I've spent most of last night plugging in some new (and mostly useless) features! :)

Well, basically, I've just tweaked the way commenting works and I've included Google/Blogger's version of trackback which they call "Backlinks" (opens in a new window.)

Next, if you look to the right, you'll see there's a list of comments made on all the posts on the main page. If you click on the Date-Time stamp, it will take you to the item page for that blogpost and the relevant comment. Clicking on the usernames will take you to their Blogger profiles.

Also, the comments now appear on the main or archive pages too when you click on the comments link below a post. And (what I like the most) is that now I also list all the people who have commented on an entry!

Wheee!

Social network madness

Wasn't the acronym YASN coined at least two years ago? So what's with all the new social networks springing up? And why don't any of them work well? Gah!

What I am on...

• LiveJournal
• Yahoo! 360°
• orkut
• Flickr
• Ryze
• Friendster
• Breedster (is my bug still alive?)
• Three Degrees (been a while since I logged in I think)

I was also a GNE prototype player and someone might eventually invite me to Wallop too..

*sigh*

UPDATE: I forgot to add Hi5 (a piece of crap) to the list and I'm also now on Wallop. Yay me!

I used to be able to handle this...

There was a time I was pretty cool with whatever went on in the world of computing. I was a mad code monkey that wrote programs in assembly for fun, wrote DOS utilities, batch scripts and some simple database programs (for a library and a hospital.) The Internet came to India and I was on top of things since a geek friend and I hacked into the VSNL server in Bangalore and created accounts for ourselves. (Well, not really, it was simpler than that, but if I tell you how simple, I can't brag then, can I?) That time has long since passed.

All my friends went on to be computer engineers and I studied biology. I finished a bachelor's degree in biology and got a master's too. My metamorphosis from computer geek to biology geek was complete.

Nevertheless, I still played with computers a lot, never did any coding ever though. I surfed and surfed and then surfed some more. I had a million (some would say zillion) accounts wherever they were free and some paid accounts too. I was active on newsgroups, on fledgling social networks, played online games, and chatted with friends across three networks and IRC. Phew. And all this while being a grad student at university.

Today though (and for a few months previously) I can't be that active anymore. I barely make the time to read and reply to email. I check friends' blogs for updates maybe once every two days as opposed to several times a day! I rarely ever login to orkut when I used to be on for most of the day earlier. Yahoo! Messenger which would have me logged in even while I was asleep, hardly gets a workout these days. And I login to MSN only to play Minesweeper Flags with friends.

So why am I boring you with all this? Well, it's just so if I don't comment on your latest blogpost, don't read your new 360° page/blog, don't reply to your email as often, you know why! ;) (Yes, Yahoo! 360° yet another social network is out and I have a page there...)

The funny thing is, just about this time last year, I was writing this post about how cool (sort of) my online existence was! One year later...

The family that bots together

The family that bots together
Originally uploaded by Shambly Hermit.

Kingdom of Loathing was this funny, weird, and fairly simple (in terms of interface) online game I played for a few months last year. Many of us from flickr/GNE really got into the game and spent a lot of time on it. We even had a clan of our own.

Then, quite as suddenly, many of us got bored with it. Some though, were still very into it. Notably Shambly Hermit. He kept playing and playing and eventually worked his way into the 1337 crowd. He is now a member of some warehouse whatever clan which apparently controls a lot of what happens in KoL.

Shambly also spends his time commissioning art and avatars for other KoL players. He also runs my two players on KoL. Shambly is the dog you never know is on the internet. (I bet his dog is online too!)

Netcraft confirms it...

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is: High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.

Isn't it Hobvias?

So then, striatic has been going under the name of Hobvias Sudoneighm for quite a while and a week or so ago, yeöz finally twigged onto it because of a Google search he did. If I recall correctly, in a moment of uncharacteristic eloquence, he said he was a moron.

Today, striatic was quite excited to discover that a Google search for Hobvias Sudoneighm presented yeöz' pic as the 5th and 6th search result. The hobvias thing to do was a Google bomb to help yeöz climb the rankings. My fellow conspirators in this endeavour are Shambly Hermit, striatic and Emily. (With hopes of recruiting more Flickrites.)

edit: We've just been joined by Meer :-) And I've learnt that co-ordinating a Google bomb is hard work. Out of the five of us doing this, three of us are linking to one page and two others linking to another page. Aaaarghhh!

Google's Game, Set and Match

The fun folks at Google now present for your viewing pleasure... Google Sets.

Enter in a group of things you know belong to a set and then click a button and Google predicts other items that might belong to that set each linked to a Google search for that word.

I played around with it, and found it to work pretty effectively. Some funny stuff, try putting in "walrus manatee dolphin" and click on large set to see someone unusual amongst all the sea creatures. ;-)

Or you could try putting in "one two three four five" and see how Google counts!

Can you see me now? Good!

It's always funny looking through the referrer logs for this blog. Especially the searches that seem to turn up my blog. Here's a random selection...

From AOL Search:

MP3s are for previewing purposes only

From Google (obviously the most)

pylons fluorescent tube
neena gupta+hot pics
download arul in wma format
hindu flickr
lesbian lj icon
shivanee blogger

GMail!!! and more!

So then, this blogging has paid off in one way at least! Today, Blogger (as a service owned by Google) has invited me to sign up for GMail. Woooo hoooo!!

/me dances around in joy!

So yes, I went right off and created my GMail account. It's quite nice and I like it. Maybe in a future post I will post some screenshots and more impressions about it. For now suffice it to say I'm very excited!

What's more then? Well, I was poking about Jason Shellen's blog and at the bottom I saw a link to bStats. This is a website stats thing provided by Blogger! And I never knew about it!! It used to be only for the Blogger Pro (read paid) users, but since Blogger Pro has been eliminated, it works for everyone now! Wooo hooo again. I went and installed that into my blogger template too. I'm not removing my eXTReMe Tracking counter yet. But If I grow to like bStats (which I think I will), out goes the eXTReMe tracker!

Today's bits of randomness

Right now I'm listening to the music of 1942 - A Love Story. Once again, I can't remember how I got there. I remember reading something about Kavita Krishnamurthy and suddenly decided I needed to listen to the music from this movie. Lovely songs.

I finally did my taxes today. I had all the forms and crap ready, just was too lazy to fill the damn things out and mail them. Well, now that's done. So I should get my return soon. I really need it, it's around 500 bucks!! :-) It's not fair that I'm not allowed to file online. It is so easy to do it online!

Speaking of which, my life is rapidly transforming into a complete online existance. I spend my time on my computer recording bee dances, writing software for the lab, reading papers, and I even do my notes on it. For the classes I teach, I make my presentations, find videos, visuals, resources all online. My bank and credit cards don't send me statements in the mail. All online. When I do get bills from the university, I get them online. My electricity, cable, phone, all online. Wheeeee! And not to mention all the time I spend chatting on flickr!

I got mad today. Maybe also a bit sad. I'm wondering if I'm too pushy online. Maybe I'm trying to be friends with people who would rather keep their distance from me. I posted a couple of comment on someone's blog and soon after those comments were posted, that blog was made "friends only" and hence locked me out. It wasn't the first time I've commented there, but I guess I rubbed that person the wrong way this time. I wouldn't be so mad, if at least I was told that I was not wanted. I hate the indirectness of the whole thing. There's also an element of hypocrisy involved, but lets not go into that here. For all I know that person is reading this now. Well, see, I don't care. This is what I feel, and I don't need to hide it from the world.

Well, it's also possible I'm being paranoid and overreacting (I tend to do the latter a lot) but somehow I don't think that's the case this time.

Anyway, this incident kind of made me think a bit about my online presence. I do tend to insinuate myself into conversations, posts, etc. I never really thought that if I was unwelcome I wouldn't be told so. What if I'm the online equivalent of that guy no one really wants to talk to but don't know how to say so? Oh man, now I'm horrified. Have I just been bugging a lot of people all these months? So I've decided then to tone down all the chatting, posting, silly jokes, stupid crap that I'm always spouting. Maybe even be more insular too. Ok, that's done.

Just had to mention here, Shambly Hermit met hey leto on flickr and pointed me at her blog. This is really good reading! I so wish I could write like her! Oddly, I have not met her on flickr yet, but I think when I do, I might just gush all about how much I like her blog. hehe...

IE is dead! Long live Firefox!

No, no... mozilla.org is not paying me to publicize them... I just like Firefox so much and have got used to a lot of the features now that there's no way I'm going back to IE.

I only use IE for some sites that have ActiveX controls (usually the Windows Media Player control.) I know there's a plugin that will allow WMP to work in Firefox, but the last time I installed that it messed up my Firefox install after a couple of days and I had to wipe it and reinstall.

Readers of my blog that use IE will probably notice there's two things broken. The "currently reading" list is literally broken into two bits in IE. I've yet to figure out why. It renders perfectly on Firefox. The second thing is the GNE neighbourhood browser. In IE it opens as a pop up window rather than as a drop down menu type thing.

I can't really be bothered, if you don't like the way my blog looks in IE, learn to live with it... or... get Firefox! :-)

Great Online Music service!

I love having my music as mp3s to play on my computer and not so long ago used to spend a lot of my time on Kazaa or various other p2p apps downloading music illegally. When I began to hear of legal music download services, I decided that it seemed the right way to go.

I spent a lot of time reading up and finally decided that iTunes was the music service I should use. Well, it's a few months later, and I'm wondering why people have raved about iTunes. Undoubtedly it is the best of the paid legal music services in the US. Nevertheless it's still tied down by the music industry's stupidity. All files you download are protected and can only be played on the iTunes player or on your iPod. I don't own an iPod or any other mp3 player and don't plan to in the future either, (Just too expensive for me) and I don't particularly like the iTunes player or interface. So that's two reasons why iTunes doesn't work for me.

You could say those are mere quibbles. Possibly. So then here's the clincher. iTunes refuses to burn CDs on my computer. I have no idea why and the error message quite helpully says "Unknown error." I can't seem to find anyone who is having a similar problem with iTunes even after myriad Google searches. So it's just one of those mysterious voodoo errors I'm stuck with, (and no I can't buy a new computer and/or CD burner either!)

So just when I thought I was done with online music services for the nonce, someone points out AllOfMP3 to me. Almost any artist you want (even the Beatles and Michael Jackson) available at any bitrate you want, upto CD quality music. On the fly encoding with whichever encoder you choose, MP3, Ogg, WMA or lossless encoding formats. Price? As cheap as $0.01 per MB downloaded and no membership fees! Holy Cow!! I just couldn't believe this is legal!

But, apparently, it is! As is explained at that link, allfomp3 is situated in Russia and according to Russian law, all digital IP rights rest with a single entity called ROMS (link to English version of site) and ROMS pays out the licensing fees to the artists/owners. So apparently anyone can offer music/content downloads online as long as they pay ROMS for it. I'm still confused as to how this works, but I assume the dollar to ruble conversion rate also plays a role in keeping prices low.

It gets better, AllofMP3 has a client called the AllofMP3 Explorer (thank Microsoft for that ubiquitous Explorer suffix) which when you have it running on your computer will automatically download your purchased music for you. You will still need to find the music using your browser and the web interface, but nothing more after that. The Explorer will start downloading the files as soon as they have been encoded and made available.

Still doesn't sound good? Just registering on the site (for free) gives you access to all of their music as 24kbps MP3s. These are for previewing purposes, so you can actually listen to entire songs/albums to see if you'd like them before you buy them. You can also download an mru of an album to load as a playlist in winamp/[insert media player of your choice here] which will stream the mp3s for you!

Ok, a little exploration and you will be able to figure out whether you like it or not. I know I do. I'm busy purchasing a lot of music from there already. I'm just worried the RIAA (or whoever are the current bad guys) will discover this loophole in Russian copyright laws and lobby for it to be closed or made illegal for download in the US, so that they can all pay themselves hefty bonuses once more.

Nerdy nerd!!

47.61904761904762% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?

Ha! Big surprise!

Blood test analysis shows:
40-49%: What's this, a well balanced nerd? Impressive.

hehehehe

Add-ons to the blog... or How I love the free services on the Internet

So while spending time chatting on flickr, I came across this website called AllConsuming, mostly because the guy behind AllConsuming, Erik Benson, created a service tied into your contact list on flickr called Connectr. I'll let you go to those sites and see what they're all about. What I do want to tell you here, is that AllConsuming allows me to put in a snazzy "currently reading" list into my blog with minimal fuss and with all working links to Amazon and whatnot.

To coin a phrase... "That totally rocks, duuuude!!"

The next thing, HaloScan, the service I have been using for commenting, has now implemented trackback too. More power to them! (More power to us bloggers too!)

And if I hadn't mentioned this before, both these services are totally free. No strings attached. No pop-up ads, no spyware installed on your computer, no... oh well you get the point.

Let's tally up a few things that go into this blog: I create it using blogger, that's free. I host it at webspace my school gives me, that's free. I use DynDns's WebHop service to cloak and redirect requests from oook.blogsite.org to the actual url, that's free too (with one single small pop-up), and, using HaloScan, I have commenting and trackback, all free. I Love the Internet!! ;-)

Firefox, the browser reloaded

Ok, sure, cheesy tagline... but the browser is far from cheesy!

For those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about... it's about Firefox 0.8, the next generation browser from mozilla.org Too many improvements and generally goodiness in it for me to list here, so instead, you can surf over to their website and read all about it there.

I'm no Bill-basher... in fact, I like and use a lot of MS products... but heck... I just like Firefox so much, I'm beginning to use it as my default browser and phasing out IE. Yay me!!

I've done my bit by adding a "Get Firefox" button in my nav bar on the right. Oh and btw, Firefox is the new name of Firebird.

RSS??

For all web-designers in India and people that live off news and feeds from the web, RSS might be a little hard to get used to. Yes, it's the greatest thing since hyperlinks (or sliced bread, whichever way you see it) but... (aha, bet you saw that coming!) it's also the acronym of a fundamentalist political organisation in India!

So, anyway... I just discovered RSS (the web version!) a few days ago... after puzzling over the XML links on the GNE discussion boards, I finally figured out what it was all about.

I downloaded this news aggregator and started playing about with it.

.... and I'm still playing...