Yahoo! Mindset

Yahoo! Mindset is a different kind of search service which gives you a choice to view the search results according to a shopping perspective or a research perspective. I gave it a go with the search query "google" (snicker) you have a bar on the top left with which you can adjust the relevance of your query. Needless to say, like all modern web interfaces, it uses AJAX and it caches the results as you adjust the bar. When I pushed the bar to the left (shopping) it showed me results from google-store, amazon etc whereas when the bar was on the extreme right it showed results from wikipedia , searchengineshowdown etc. A nice innovation from the yahoo labs.

India's supercomputer vs X-Box 360

I was just looking over the Xbox 360 Fact Sheet when I noticed that it would be performing at 1 TeraFlop. Compare that to India's supercomputer: Param which also offers 1 TeraFlop. It's really interesting to note that the game box from Microsoft performs calculations at the same rate as that of one of India's supercomputers. In fact the yet to be released Playstation 3 will perform at 1.8 TeraFlops.

[delicious-discuss] Banned ?

This explains why the link is there..

An easy way to ban yourself on del.icio.us

I was viewing the source of the del.icio.us bookmark page when I saw this hidden link at the bottom of the page.

<a href="/PleaseBanMe//roxtar"><span style="color: white;">.<span></a>

Out of curiosity I clicked on that link and I found out that I was banned for 30 minutes.
It is really odd why the del.icio.us people have put a link over there and why would someone want to ban himself (in my case it was pure curiosity)

AJAX - Javascript + Flash = AFLAX?

This article tells more. I guess Ajax is mainly becoming a brand name these days. If you look at it closely it is just a fancy name given to the XmlHttpRequest object.

Social bookmarking

Recently there was an article on slashdot about social bookmarking, I myself use del.icio.us to gather my bookmarks. The good thing about such services, except for that they let you organize your bookmarks with tags and let you view bookmarks of other people, is that it is cross platform. The reason I say this is because half the time I work on Windows and the other half on Linux. Sometimes I need a link which I have bookmarked on the other OS, which is really tedious to retrieve. It is much more convenient to set up a live bookmark to the RSS feed of your bookmark and then work from there. There is even a firefox plugin for del.icio.us

Conquered the top of ...ummm... Top Station 

Bollywood style heroes.. for more photos look here 

Us near the "Kashmir trees" 

A surprising day

You could call it outrageous or heroic or extremely foolish but I had a wonderful experience today.
The day started at 1:00 am when we were looking at Sujit's photos of his previous trip to Munnar, when I casually said that let's go there. As no one else seemed to have a problem we (Me, Anshul, Sujit, Bhatta and Rahul) took off instantly at around 1:40 am.

The drive was around 3 hours long and everyone, except me, took turns driving. We reached there at around 4:30 am and had Tea and had a small nap.

We woke up at around 6:30am and started for this place called "Top Station" which was supposed to have a Bird's eye view of everything around Munnar. It was 34KM from where we were stationed. The drive to "Top Station" was pretty nice and we got to take some snaps during the way.
When we reached there the whole scenery was mind blowing. We spent some time up there at the top took some snaps and started towards are next destination.

Our next goal was a dam (the name of which I fail to remember) which had facilities for boating in its reservoir. We reached there at around 10 AM at choose the "rowing boat" instead of the "peddling" one. It seemed to be a wrong choice in the beginning as none of us knew how to row and the boat was just rotating at one place. Me and Sujit were the one's doing the rowing. But after some time we gained rhythm and were able to make the boat move in a straight line (well almost straight). In fact we parked (if that is the correct term for a boat) it pretty nicely.

After our long trek to "Top Station" and the tiring (but successful) boating experience we needed to take some food, so we headed back to the Munnar town (as places near the tourist spots are too expensive) to have our brunch.

After that we left for the Rajamala which is the natural habitat of the Nilgiri tahr (looks like a grey goat). The drive to the place was pretty exciting. The road was very narrow, twisty, at a high altitude and two way. Somehow we managed to make it to the sanctuary (which is at a greater altitude than top station). The place was situated high above everything else and we could always see a steep drop nearby.
We were just able to take two or three snaps when Rahul's battery went dead. But we did get to see the goats (yeah Nilgiri tahr) and in fact some of them even posed for us to take their photos (no kidding). We spent some more time there and headed back to home.

Right now we are really tired and exhausted but happy that we made the trip.

Chugging along

I met mom and Rajeev mama and family yesterday. I had a nice time with my two little cousins (Rinee and Rohan). I have started studying a bit for my external exams from today.. hope to up the tempo.

Sharat and Sujit at Amoeba, Bangalore 

Me and Sujit on our Bangalore trip ( read as Subex interview ) 

Mono

I have been playing with Mono for the past few days, along with trying to learn a bit of C#. Mono is an implementation of .NET on Linux. One thing which I liked about .NET is the ease with which you can develop applications. I was able to make a working browser (it is not too cute) ,using the gecko engine, without any trouble. A lot of development is going in the mono community and I have joined its mailing list.
Yes among other things, I had my lab internal yesterday (8086 lab). It went pretty smoothly. I got output for my program in 20 minutes :D and the viva was also good, I could answer all the questions. I also got my sessional marks yesterday. I got 90.75 % and am currently 6th in CS (both should improve after I get my lab marks ;) )

Googlewhacking

You have to find two words which produce exactly one result on google.com to get a name in here:Googlewhacking: The Search for The One True Googlewhack. Another way to kill time :)

XML-RPC

A lot of web services, like flickr, livejournal etc, provide APIs for developers. Both of the above use the XML-RPC protocol to make remote procedure calls. I was trying to find a .net implementation for xml-rpc when I came across this. Unfortunately I was not able to make it run on mono :( So I moved over to PERL. I used the frontier API and it ran beautifully. I was not satisfied and wanted to try the java api. It didn't work :( Here is a nice XML-RPC HOWTO on it.
[Update] The java xml-rpc worked. I was stupid enough not to include the files in the CLASSPATH.

Ajax

I was looking over some of the blogger api documentation when I came across ajax . Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML and is used in things like Google suggest, Google maps etc. Pretty cool and a nice read.
Yes, another thing, I got a phone call from the nice people at Subex. They told me that they will be sending the call letter by courier on monday. Isn't that nice :)

Spell with flickr

This is a nice word to pictuer thingie. Check it out :)

Pictures from words

A lot of work

It was a nice morning I had planned to work on something new: Mono. By the time it was evening I was actually enjoying the ride, when suddenly out of nowhere I came to know that we have to write the Lab record again. V.K is going to come for our external lab exam so we have to rewrite the whole lab record according to his format... (damn ..)