oook! eeek!

An unlikely YouTube star

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:52:00 +0000

YouTube launched its Indian version a few days ago without much fanfare I guess. Or I don't know, it might have been covered in the local newspapers, but I don't look at any these days!

So what's different about YouTube India? For one, the featured and promoted videos are all from India. Also, if you look at the top right corner, they're promoting a special video to announce the launch of YouTube India.

This seemingly crotchety old Indian "uncle" is apparently some kind of You Tube star. In just over three months he has posted 500 videos! Mostly of him singing (not too well though) but also little tutorials on astrology, medicine and PHP(!)

With a droll sense of humour, and lines delivered with absolutely no expression on his face (or maybe that's just the poor web cam) he is quite the unlikely star. Yet there he is. On the front page of You Tube India. Say hello to Dr. K Chaudhry

Idle poking about

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:18:00 +0000

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.

The soundtrack to my dream...

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:31:00 +0000

... last night was Coldplay's "Don't Panic"

Hmm.

Asterisk, Star, British pound!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:49:00 +0000

Satchel is so cute when he's angry!

Long live the Laptop!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:03:00 +0000

For months (nay, years!) I have been considering buying a new laptop. I just couldn't scrape up the money to do so. (Buying books, DVDs and eating out all the time coupled with a sucky pay will do that to you.)

After getting my back pay from my previous job and getting a better paid job, I finally could afford to buy a new laptop. But so many choices and decisions had to be made. It didn't help that I moved to a new city and so had to spend a lot of money on setting up home once more.

Once the bank account was looking healthier, I started looking around. When I saw an advertisement for the Sony Vaio CR series, I was quite taken with them. Since the price was just slightly above my budget, I decided I would buy one.

Random expenses cropped up and I kept putting off the purchase. Then I also read a lot of bad reviews for the computer online, besides which I had second thoughts about the lack of certain features like a graphics card with dedicated memory, the weight and size, etc. (Apparently, the present models have a graphics card, albeit an ATI one.)

Also, while the exterior of the laptop looked quite cool, I wasn't too happy with the keyboard, which looked a bit small (and too Apple-y!)

All of this coupled with the fact that I was a little uneasy about splurging so much money just to get a "cool" laptop, made me decide against a Sony.

Just then, someone pointed out the new XPS laptops from Dell and I fell in love immediately!

A fast processor, good graphics card, appropriate amounts of memory for Vista, good sized hard disk, a DVD writer and all of this in a light-weight machine that was just about 2kg.

When my brother told me he could get an employee discount at Dell, that just sealed the deal. But, I had to wait a couple of months more. A few mix ups with which bank account my money should be in to pay for the machine delayed the whole ordering process. And when I did finally place the order, the website told me the estimated delivery date was a month away!

But she's finally here. I received the laptop a full two weeks ahead of the "estimated" delivery date, much to my surprise and joy. She's been christened Zippy, a "cuter" name than the last laptop had.

While I did save on the laptop because of the discount, I've been a bit splurge happy since, buying a new USB flash drive to port a few things and a laser bluetooth mouse to accompany the laptop. Not to mention that I also bought a copy of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars to play

Oh well, I shall just have to starve for the next couple of weeks!

Welcome Zippy, and here's to many great hours of games and blogging!

P.S. I bought the black one.

The Laptop is Dead!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:18:00 +0000

My old, trusty laptop has been in use by me for over 5 years and is virtually falling apart. Poor Eurisco. That's what I called her, a HP Pavilion ze1210 I bought in 2002.

When I bought her, the AMD Athlon processor was cutting edge and people recommended it over Intel's then line of Pentiums and Celerons. She had 256MB of memory when about half that was standard on most desktops too! She wasn't lightweight, but since I just needed a computer to use at home, I didn't care too much. She still looks pretty stylish in this picture I found online, but if you saw her as she is now...

A big gaping hole where the battery should be. After 2 and half years, the battery gave out and I never got around to buying a new one. So to lighten my load, I removed the battery from the slot.
Two keys missing. In my zeal to clean the keys and under the keyboard, I managed to break the F1 and Enter keys.
A broken hinge. The hinge on the right mysteriously cracked (I have no clue how!) and a small metal piece that held the screen up fell out. So for a long time I had to keep the screen at one particular angle to make sure it was upright, or else it would fall down flat. Oddly, the cold winter in Gurgaon seemed to have done something to the innards since the screen now stands at any angle.
The CD-RW/DVD drive doesn't work anymore. In fact, it randomly clicks now and then in a vain effort to prove it's still alive. I have some success playing audio CDs, but nothing else works.
The USB ports are worn from use, so using any USB accessories is a touch-and-go thing.
And the biggest problem of them all, the port where the power cord plugs into the computer is loose, so that if I moved the laptop or jiggled the power cord, it would lose the connection (and since there is no battery, the laptop would go off.
On the software side of things, newer apps were beginning to crawl. Firefox was so badly behaved on this laptop that I had taken to using IE7!

I spent many, many hours on this machine coding in Delphi, random browsing, and learned to play an RTS for the first time. Ended up playing hours and hours of Age of Empires II, Starcraft and Warcraft III

I discovered Firefox when it was still called Phoenix and then Firebird. Thunderbird when people still preferred Outlook Express. I used Kazaa (remember that?) when I was first introduced to P2P. And I made my first forays onto USENET posting, IRC (using mIRC) and introduced myself to Linux via Knoppix using Eurisco.

So long and thanks for all the memories! RIP, Eurisco.

Reboot

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:21:00 +0000

I'm considering doing a re-design of the blog. And this time I want to try and do everything myself (from making the tiny bullet gifs to the header image) except, I'm shit at design. So, any one want to give me a leg up? Ideas, maybe even a complete mock up would be appreciated. Don't worry about creating the CSS & HTML, I can do that myself. All I need is a image of what the design should be like. The banana bullets will probably stay. :)

Secondly, domains are so cheap now, I'm considering buying my own domain and pointing Google at it, so that I can then use all the new blogger features. The problem is oook.com is already taken. oookeeek.com is available though. Should I buy that one? Anyone got better suggestions? I need to keep it relatively close to the blog name which I don't want to change.

Warning Sign by Coldplay

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:14:00 +0000

A warning sign
I missed the good part then I realized
I started looking and the bubble burst
I started looking for excuses

Come on in
I’ve gotta tell you what a state I’m in
I’ve gotta tell you in my loudest tones
I started looking for a warning sign

When the truth is, I miss you
Yeah the truth is, that I miss you, so

A warning sign
You came back to haunt me and I realized
That you were an island and I passed you by
And you were an island to discover

All you need is love

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:28:00 +0000

I watched Across the Universe, a musical peppered with over 30 Beatles' numbers, last night and I loved the movie!

It might just be because I can be a sappy romantic sometimes and this movie certainly appeals to that part of me, but I also thought the movie was very well directed (by Julie Taymore, who also directed Frida) and had some really awesomely picturised song sequences. (My favourite was "Revolution.")

The movie is set in the 60s and uses the riots, Vietnam, Princeton, New York and Liverpool as its set.

The actors are surprisingly good singers, and my favourites would be T.V. Caprio singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and any of Dana Fuchs' performances.

Joe Cocker, Bono and Eddie Izzard make cameos in the movie too. Joe Cocker's rendition of "Come Together" is pretty good but not much of a departure from the Beatles' version. Bono singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over the end credits as well as "I Am the Walrus" in the movie isn't much to write about. I'm beginning to get tired of Bono's cookie cutter vocals.

Most of the cast don't have much acting background but do an pretty decent job with a couple of wooden performances here and there. Evan Rachel Wood (who was the lead in Thirteen) does a great job here and I quite liked her voice too.

So if you're a Beatles' fan, like musicals, and can stand a bit of mush, you will love this movie. Oh yes, if you're a fan of the 60s, that's a bonus!

Why I won't be buying anything from U2 anymore

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:58:00 +0000

Because they have a git of a manager who thinks consumers all steal his stuff and wants to restrict our rights to enrich him and his buddies in the recording industry.

Read his speech.

Whew! All done!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 13:16:00 +0000

I spent the better part of the day patiently going through every single post on the blog, trying to label them and also formatting them into paragraphs, lists, etc instead of ugly line breaks every where.

And finally, I'm all done. Time to republish it to my FTP site. (I was using http://oookeeek.blogspot.com to make my life a bit easier.)

Blog updates can be frustrating!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:07:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:29:00 +0000

(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... :)

My first white hair...

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:11:00 +0000

... and it's on my chest.

I feel old.

My Googlewhack...

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:48:00 +0000

Sort of.

A Google search for "29 past my prime" (with the quote marks) turns up exactly one search result.

This blog!

Here comes another bubble

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:00:00 +0000

This hilarious video by an a capella group called The Richter Scales is about the current tech bubble (Facebook = $15 billion, really?) and sung to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."

My favourite bits? "Blog, blog even if you're wrong" plays over a clip of Robert Scoble whiteboarding away. And also "29, past my prime" shows a guy labeled as "Product Manager." Ouch! (Guess what my age and designation is?)

Oh and there's also a "blog this song," so I'm just doing my part.

The Tax-man cometh. NOT!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:38:00 +0000

The Guardian has this amazing story of how a New Zealander wreaked vengence on the income tax authorities after they wrongfully prosecuted him.

He bought the IT office, and then evicted them! :)

Social Advertising, bah!

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:22:00 +0000

A lot has happened since I posted about Facebook Ads, in fact, Facebook themselves further developed their ad platform adding what is now called "Beacon," Facebook Pages which allow businesses to create a page on Facebook to advertise from instead of using a profile and of course, Social Ads.

All of this is supposed to layer on another dimension to targeted advertising and make us want to click the ads.

Of course, a lot of privacy groups don't think so. In fact, MoveOn.org, an online advocacy group, has already started protests against Beacon even creating a Facebook group to petition against it.

I don't have very good feelings about social advertising, especially as Facebook is implementing it. Since even if Beacon were to go away, the Social Ads part of Facebook appears mixed up with your news feed. This is as bad as Google's text link ads which can appear unobtrusively in a blog post or article you're reading.

Another annoying social ad is people using Twitter streams to advertise. And doing it badly.

Case in point? Saawariya, a Bollywood movie decides to create a twitter stream. All well and good, but how does it publicise it? By following all the Indian users on Twitter. This doesn't mean they follow the Twitter stream back, but when someone goes to the Saawariya stream and hits the "With Others" link, it shows you the Saawariya updates along with public updates from all the people Saawariya is following! So while your updates may have been public, you probably didn't know that so many people could see your updates, huh?

When will we learn?

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:24:00 +0000

Of all places, I found an article on reddit about a girl born with eight limbs on the outskirts of Bangalore.

Lakshmi is one of those conjoined twins where one twin did not develop completely. What makes her case especially interesting (medically) is that the two bodies are fused in a mirror image at her pelvis. Soon, she will be operated upon in an attempt to remove the extra limbs and re-align her internal organs.

But what really shocked me in that article were the fact that the girl is 2 years old and has been repeatedly refused treatment at the government hospital near her village as well as at Delhi when her parents painfully scraped up the money to take her there! What's worse is that people have been lining up for her blessings assuming she is the reincarnation of her namesake, a goddess of wealth! Sigh.

Another day, another phone...

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:41:00 +0000

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!

Quitting a job is so much trouble

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:05:00 +0000

I finally did it. Quit from my fun but under-paid and over-worked job. Obviously the employers didn't take it well. They'd just lost a guy that did all their donkey work for them without a complaint in the absence of any support team whatsoever. Desperate attempts were made to retain me (none of which involved a promotion, pay raise and support which would have actually worked.)

Instead I was threatened about how I was walking away from such a great deal and that I could have all the support I wanted in a month as long as I did the recruitment myself. (I'm sorry, what are HR departments for?) Wild promises were made about the future of the work I was doing and about the benefits of working for a "global" company with a "global" clientèle. Yeah right.

My decision was made for me the moment my paltry pay raise came in and when I was offered a far, far better paid job at another company. And so I leave one marketing agency to join an online portal to manage one of their verticals. A lot more responsibility although just for one site, but accompanied with a good support team to help me realise my ideas.

Careers Meme

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 08:07:00 +0000

From All The Pretty Words

I went over to Career Cruising and found that the login and password from Rebecca didn't work. A quick Google solved that problem and I found another login. And I proceeded to take the Career Matchmaker quiz.

Here are my results:

Website Designer
Foreign Language Instructor
ESL Teacher
Marine Biologist
Desktop Publisher
Zoologist
Fashion Designer
Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
Computer Trainer
Animator
Multimedia Developer
Set Designer
Costume Designer
Professor
Taxidermist
Veterinarian
Botanist
Graphic Designer
Computer Animator
Artist
Biologist
Medical Illustrator
Corporate Trainer
Veterinary Technician
Music Teacher / Instructor
Industrial Designer
Animal Breeder
Craftsperson
Potter
Microbiologist
Video Game Developer
Coach
Interior Designer
Environmental Consultant
Pharmacologist
Special Effects Technician
Director of Photography
Makeup Artist
Sign Maker
Food Scientist

Facebook ads

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:45:00 +0000

Today Facebook began displaying advertisements in the "news feed" you see on your home page. Here's an example of one I saw today

When I clicked on the link in that ad, it took me to a page displaying this video

While a single ad in my news feed is not going to bother me much, I don't know whether I'd feel the same if there are going to be many of them scattered through the feed. Also, it doesn't look like this ad has been contextually targeted (unless Facebook knows something about me I don't?) But I'm sure they have that idea lurking around somewhere.

What was really interesting though was that the ad was being served through DoubleClick which is in the process of being acquired by Google. So all those guys predicting the downfall of Google at the hands of Facebook might want to re-think their arguments a bit! :)

Yes, yes I know that's not precisely what Scoble was saying, but I still think he's full of hot air. :P

Irony is...

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:28:00 +0000

... an Indian company out-sourcing jobs to the US!

Update: Apparently the newspaper site I linked to doesn't believe in permalinks. Here's a page at the Inquirer that summarises the article.

Rant

noreply@blogger.com (oook) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:03:00 +0000

This is going to be a post filled with me griping about random things in my life. You have been warned. Stop reading now!

I'm very irritated with how lazy I can be. Laundry piles up at home because I keep putting it off. I also own a bunch of clothes and other crap that I don't use but I've not got around to getting rid off! All of this contributes to how grubby my apartment is beginning to look and I get annoyed with that too.

I'm annoyed with the company that employs me because even though I was supposed to be appraised and given a raise in April that's been put off for more than 4 months now. While the appraisal itself happened in July, I'm still waiting for the promised raise.

The knock on effect of not getting my raise means I'm still living frugally and have to keep putting off the purchase of "luxuries" like new sheets for my bed or bookcase for my books. My books continue to languish in boxes or just lie around gathering dust which makes me very very irritated!

I also want a new laptop, my HP Pavilion is 5 years old, has no working battery, 1 or 2 broken keys, USB ports that are loose and wiggly and a power port that is loose and needs to held in place just right or it will turn off. Amazingly enough, the hard disk which is just over 4 years old is going strong, my speakers still work well and the screen is still in good shape after I replaced the backlight about 2 years ago.

I seem to be back in the "loner" mode that I was in for year or so in 2002-2003 but I don't feel too bad about it this time. While people still tell me its weird to go watch a movie on my own or sit at a coffee shop reading a book, I'm perfectly happy doing that. What's so weird about doing things on your own anyway??

I've have so many other things to grumble about, but I'm running out of time now. Bah! That's worth a grumble too!