Older iPhone mockups by fans till date... before the Best of them, by Apple was announced ;)

PS : Image courtesy : http://appleiphone.blogspot.com/

Yay!

Do your computers used for developing your websites run Linux? Were you pissed off by all the dirty layout/script/rendering problems for the same on Internet Explorer? Now it's time for you to scream Yay!

Kudos to Web Expose, check this article to find out How to get IE 5.0, IE 5.5, IE 6.0 and IE 7.0 (release) running concurrently on Linux.


I found this out through /.


Read the slashdot version of the story here.

"Agent Smith"s on ORKUT!

Remember the character Agent Smith from the Matrix trilogy? The character who has thousands of clones!



Just cited the reference above since i remembered it immediately when a strange incident occurred recently to me! (This post was to be written a couple of months ago, but i am posting it now due to lack of time then!)

Someone had created a fake profile of mine in ORKUT! The fake profile was an exact clone of my profile! and the only difference was the number of friends!

He/She, whoever it is, was very clever and had already started adding all the people on my friends list!

I did not come to know this till some of my friends started asking me why another profile when i already had one! They thought it was me who created the profile and thought it was one of those pranks which i casually did!

I was taken for shock when i saw the fake profile, luckily he/she had not abused anyone using it, else there was a chance that i would have been mistaken by my friends.

I decided to get rid of that profile immediately, sent out a mail to all my friends to report it as a fake profile. I also did the needful from my side by lodging a complaint on "Impersonation" in ORKUT.

Surprisingly fast enough, By next day morning, the profile was gone!

Now i do regular checks on orkut to find any so called clones or fake profiles of myself, which i suggest to all my friends since anything can be done and end of day, you will be held responsible since it was done on your name!

On a last note, getting a profile deleted in orkut is not that easy! Since i had a huge circle of friends(close to 700) i could do it easily! ORKUT has some threshold to decide if the profile is actually a fake one, if you don't get it reported to that level, you cant get the fakes deleted, so better be careful!

The best thing about being me is that there are so many of me.
-Agent Smith

My room... Rules which apply if you wanna come in, but no one follows ;)

My room... I never close the cabinet, it needs some fresh air after all!

My room... The monster on which i churn out code from almost the past 5 years!

My room... Library and footwear!

My room... powered by GNU!

Long live FireFox...

India Shining... Really....

I feel India is finally getting the global recognition it deserves, in all or at least most aspects. India in itself is like a prototype of the whole world given the heritage of India, and the diverse culture of people living in the country.

One best thing happening is that even Indian festivals are being celebrated and recognized globally, I guess Google which morphs it's logo on the search page for festivals finally made up it's mind to celebrate Indian festivals also and the results were not only seen on their search page, but surprisingly on ORKUT which is also owned by Google!


The orkut logo above was put up on orkut home page during Diwali/Deepavali, the festival of lights, which is the most eye catching festival celebrated in India from ages.

I felt this example suits the shine! since the festival of lights is very significant since it represents the reign of light over darkness.

Highlighting such things on community and social networking sites is great! It helps people understand each other's culture and the significance of the celebrations, which helps them value each others beliefs and interact better.




This is just one of the thousands of reasons to celebrate... India is really shining this decade, and the world has slowly started realizing the potential of India.

I hope the new year has a lot in store for India, hope we get more global recognition and acclaim, and hope India will continue to be the best place it has always been.

On a last note, many people may not agree with me on my views about India, but my personal feeling tells me that India is the greatest and If I achieve something, i will do it in India. There's often a complaint from people who left India that talent is not valued, but the paradigm is changing and India is getting better on these things day by day, finally people are waking up and things are changing the way they should. I feel the day is not far.



PS : this was a long pending post and it has spent almost a couple of months in the drafts folder :)... i wanted to post this during the festival itself... but still, better late than never :) and New year is the next best occasion to celebrate :)

Maa Tujhe Salaam!
(Rough translation : Mother, I Salute You!)

And the Aftermath of such recruitments...

The way recruitments are turning out in the IT industry!

Welcome 2k7

Yet another year passes by... leaving loads of resolutions pending... and its time again to make new resolutions for the new year :)

Here's me Wishing the whole world a Happy and prosperous new year...

Welcome 2007!

Won an iPod Nano on Yaari!

Q3 Nostalgia

I recently found my Quake III installation CD ROM while cleaning up and organizing the huge pile of CD ROMs in my room! Suddenly I was hit by a nostalgic feeling of missing all the fun me and my friends used to have in college lab while playing Death matches and CTF(Capture the flag) missions in Quake III when we were in our final semester of Engineering!




The game play used to go on for hours! We used to take small 5 second breaks by either by pressing Alt+Tab or by turning off the monitors when the lab managers/instructors or even our lecturers came around!

Best of such situations, One fine day, we were playing Quake in the laboratory in the last row of computers, me along with 3 of my friends 2 per team. The whole lab was vacant. We were half way through the game and suddenly the Head of our Department showed up in the laboratory and headed towards us! All of us managed to somehow switch off the monitors before he came to the last row! He had a doubtful expression like what we did in the last row when the whole lab was vacant! For our lucky fortune, each of us had a pile of documents related to the projects we were doing and we reasoned out that we were sitting together and discussing about the implementation of the project since the lab was vacant ;)

Then came along like bullets, a series of questions related to the project! All my friends looked at me with a scared expression on their faces and they all relaxed and smiled when I answered those questions at the same pace not giving him a moment to doubt, for we still had quake running on the systems with only monitors turned off! Finally, he probably felt our reasons and my answers were reasonable, he wished us all the best in achieving the goal we set for ourselves on the project and left the place.

We were very fortunate not to have speakers on any of the systems in the lab, else we would have been probably thrown out of lab and the lab manager would have checked upon us every time we were in the lab!

Everything rolled over my thoughts in a moment! College days were the last when i played Quake death matches and Need For Speed races! We even used to have contests in the college fest for these games!




The last contest in which I played, we had Quake with the Afterwards 2 mod. Afterwards mod is the best Quake mod I have played till date! We generally used to play for a limit of 100 frags with over 12 people running around the Arena! We had sometimes even played for 200 frags!

Quake has been the most addictive gave I have played ever! I was fully into gaming till i was in college and have played all sorts of computer games, the very first game I was hooked onto was Wolfenstein 3D which is probably the great grandfather of Quake, and one of the best FPS games of its time! I was so addicted to the game that at a point of time, I had around 80 mods of Wolfenstein! Some other games which were of my interest are Roadrash, Need For Speed and the whole of the Age of Empires series!




Now I wonder if I will ever play Quake 3 death matches with my same gang of friends over a network! I guess dream is finally turning into reality as one of my friends is setting up a computer training center and I have suggested him a Quake death match challenge between us friends for the inauguration ceremony of the center! ;)

Frag 'em!

A bit relieved from work...

Finally i feel i am a bit relieved from work! With a release scheduled around the corner in a couple of weeks, development has been brought to still and bug fixing happens only for very very severe bugs!

All these days, my whole work schedule was upset! Used to get in and out of office at timings which seemed very odd when compared with my regular work schedule...

Unfortunately once i even ran out of fuel in a place where there was no petrol available anywhere around 5km radius, and to make things worse and make me feel even bad, it was on a Friday night at 12:35 PM (I know all of you out there who are Software Engineers would definitely understand why i felt bad about this). I will write about this incident in another post since it is a separate story by itself and can span pages!

I am very happy that finally i am getting some time to sleep in the normal sleep hours!

Now i am trying hard to get back to my regular work schedule which should be easy since still we are in a bit of what i call relaxed mode of software development.

Remembered a quote from one of my friend's email signature... it brought a smile on my face now :)

Work Like a dog, Exercise like a demon, Party like a rock star!

A Phenomenon called YAARI

Social Networking Rocks!

Here's an excerpt from a comment i left on the blog of a social networking site called Yaari

Social networks will become an inseparable part of people who are hooked onto internet, as of now, the net is drawing more and more people towards it… People will definitely get in once they start recognizing the awesome power and usefulness of social networks (for example, i started orkutting more after i got in touch with school friends with whom i had lost contact for past 8 years)…

Yaari is a new entrant in the whole plethora of social networking sites out there! None of these sites were interesting to me after i came across ORKUT! But Yaari is a different story! I am hooked to Yaari since the time i joined, It has cool fresh look and feel with vibrant colors and guess what, The interface is done in AJAX! Rearranging page elements is as easy as it can get!

Will write more on Yaari sometime later... try it hands on!

So long gone...

Damn! it has been 2 months since i forgot i had a blog! All off a sudden today i remembered that i had a blog and i have not posted on it for the past 2 months...

Work's been keeping me away from all other stuff from past 2 months... Hope i will have time to breathe and write blogs sometime soon!

Yahoo! decides to go open yet again...

Yahoo! has done it again, some months ago they showed interest towards Open development by giving out the code for their AJAX Libraries, now they take a call to give out the source of one of their legendary and killer service, Yahoo! Mail.

This was announced by Yahoo! officials along with Chad Dickerson, head of the company's software developer relations program, on September 30th 2006.

Lets hope that other Services like GMail, Rediff and Spymac open up too for there are lots of developers in the community who can make all these services better.

Read the full article here.

Does Java Suck?

When fiddling around with wikipedia recently, i got to an article accidentally which defined why Java sucks inspite of being the best. The article written by Jamie Zawinski can be found here.

Since it has an awesome explanation of the fact that java has it's own drawbacks and limitations, i had to rethink on those and conclude the same even though i was/am/will continue to be an avid Java fanatic.

Feel free to jot down your thoughts as comments...