Rajiv's TechnoBlog

Zune : Review

2006-09-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

A really good review of the Zune!

My opinion :
High marks for social networking concept but not a cool looking gadget!

stereogum: Stereogum's Sneak Peek At Zune#more

Coming Zune (Seattle Weekly)

2006-09-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

this post has some interesting details about the history of Zune
Coming Zune (Seattle Weekly)

» Apple takes back the copycat title | Ed Bott's Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

2006-09-13T14:24:00.000-07:00

» Apple takes back the copycat title Ed Bott's Microsoft Report ZDNet.com

more than a year

2006-09-13T00:55:00.000-07:00

hmmm, it has been more than a year since my last blog entry. This was mainly because I lost interest in blogging after a while. Well I'm giving it another shot. Here goes.
1. New ipods (hmm actually old ones remodelled in new package , for the most part except maybe shuffle)

2. Zune is going to go public soon.I dont know if it will topple iPod, but hey J Allard is the brains behind Zune (codename argo). He (for those who dont know much about him) is the guy behind Windows socket , IP stack in Windows, of late Xbox and now Zune. My guess is Zune will start off as a less successful product just like Xbox did and the next version of Zune will probably be the real competitor to the iPod.

3. Windows Live Search was launched (officially) yesterday. Did some searching to compare with Google , Yahoo and Ask.

I found that the search results were actually pretty good. They were wayyyy better than search.msn.com (which btw I never did use after trying out a couple of times). I'm a fan of google , but it is weird that the press and many dont take notice of www.ask.com . For me, their search results are very very good. Their mapping interface ask maps is probably the best (yes it is even better than google maps, yahoo maps, and live local) when you just deal with maps and aerial images. live local is amazing when it comes to birds eye view. Google is okay , they havent made any changes to the interface since they launched google maps(of course the satellite imagery has continued to improve, but that is not a big deal). Personally I've never liked yahoo maps which is not as elegant as maps.ask.com. So if you have never used this , go ahead and give this a try.

4. Windows Vista is looking good so far( I found only one bug ). The only thing that worries me is that it is extremely resource hungry. I read an article which says Microsoft took the option of making Vista perform the same as XP with more things running in the background. Of course memory (both volatile and non volative) is getting cheaper by the day, but still not many people would want to upgrade their systems. Also thanks to Dell, I'm sure there are millions out there using the stupid intel celeron processor machine (because they got a computer for $299 at dell.com). These users will not be ready to spend maybe $700 more to get a new machine (since there is not point upgrading a $299 machine that uses a celeron processor). The last time I used a celeron machine was way back in 1998 and it sucked. I was running a 800Mhz P3 (I think) with 64MB of SDRAM and it used to take about 10 mins for my machine to boot up (I was using Win 98 SE). Every time I tried to run any app , it kept spinning forever. Coming back to Vista, the aero graphics is cool, I like LUA (though it is annoying at first). IE7 is okay, desktop search is good, windows explorer UI is very good, Windows media player is hmm not good, Media center is good, device driver support is amazing ( I did not have to install any drivers on top). I think the killer app here is Office 2007. Overall Vista will be a highly stable product (unlike other initial version of MS OS).

Cinderella Man

2005-06-06T17:53:00.000-07:00

I saw Cinderella Man starring Russel Crowe & Renee Zellweger & directed by Ron Howard yesterday. I hade huge expectations from them after their last movie (A Beautiful Mind) which according to me is one of the best movies ever to be made. Russel Crowe is unarguably one of the most talended actors ever. He has the unique ability to play any role to perfection. With all this hyped up expectations, I went out to watch Cinderella. I had mixed feelings after the movie. It was'nt a classic like A Beautiful Mind, but it was much more thrilling and exciting. I found myslef cheering (literally) for James J Braddock (Crowe) during many parts of the movie. It was real inspirational stuff. There isnt too much in the story. Its about a boxer who goes from riches to rags and to riches again in the depression era. But it was a well directed movie which kept me on the edge of my seat. If you are feeling low , this movie is a must watch which will surely uplift you. On the whole I rated this movie 'A'.

Got my car back

2005-01-24T17:48:00.000-08:00

My car broke down last friday. I had it towed to the nearest Ford dealer. I picked it back today evening. Thankfully since my car is still under warranty(lucky me, my mileage is 35,700 and warranty ends at 36000) , I ended up paying nothing. I'm glad I got a used car which was under factory warranty, otherwise I might've ended up paying more than 500 bucks since the whole ignition system and key holder was replaced. Feels good to have my car back. Increasingly, I'm able to live without food or water, but not without my car and my computer. Is it good or bad? now there's somthing to think about.

Please help the tsunami victims

2004-12-30T20:04:00.000-08:00

Amazon Honor System This is the Amazon honor system where people have already made donations worth $6.82 million to date. This is a disaster beyond anyone's wildest dreams. We need to donate as much as we can to help out the needy.

Most powerful women in India

2004-10-30T12:42:00.000-07:00

Sonia Gandhi?? On the contrary, I believe the most powerful women in India is Ms. J. Jayalalitha. Accepted that she was/is corrupt. But tell me, who is not corrupt in India? Every politician is corrupt. At least Jayalalitha is not unafraid of cheap tactics employed by Karunanidhi. The transcript between Jaya and Shivarj Patil was really interesting. Jaya had pointed out several gaffe committed by the Home minister. Here is the transcript

Following is the transcript released by the Tamil Nadu government in the Supreme Court of a phone conversation between Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha and central Home Minister Shivraj Patil over governor P.S. Ramamohan Rao, who quit Friday.

The conversation between the two according to the affidavit is as follows:

Around 12.30 pm (Oct 28), the Home Minister made a call to the Chief Minister. His opening remark was "I'm sorry to inform you of the change of the Governor of Tamil Nadu. I have spoken to S.S. Barnala (at present Andhra Pradesh governor) and he has agreed".

CM: Are you consulting me or are you informing me?

HM: I am informing you.

CM: Whether it is a decision already taken.

HM: Yes. It is a decision already taken.

CM: I would like to have two days to think over the matter and get back to you.

HM said that time could not be granted because the file had already gone from him.

CM: Has the order been issued?

HM said that it could be issued any time since the decision had already been taken.

CM: Where is the file as of now? Is it with the President?

HM: It has gone from me. I do not know where the file is. It could be with the Prime Minister, it could be with the President. The order could be issued any minute.

CM: How could you take the decision without consulting the Chief Minister? Should I not have been consulted before the decision was taken?

HM: The Sarkaria Commission has made this recommendation, but this is the way we usually do these things... I have spoken to Mr. Barnala and he has agreed. He is a very good choice for Governor.

CM: I am sorry, I don't agree with your opinion. The present Governor is totally apolitical. He is a former Director General of Police with no political affiliation, whereas Mr. Barnala is the specific nominee of Mr. Karunanidhi... What crime has the present Governor committed? He is totally fair and impartial. What is the reason for wanting to remove him?

HM: I don't want to discuss the reasons.

CM: How can you remove the Governor without any reason?

HM: On August 15, Independence Day, the Governor did not take the salute.

CM: In Tamil Nadu on the Independence Day always it is the Chief Minister who takes the salute and hoists the flag. The Governor never does it. The Governor hoists the flag only on the Republic Day.

HM: The Governor did not host the tea party on the Independence Day, which he is supposed to do.

CM: In the past the Governor has always hosted the tea party. Only this time as he was away from the country, he was not able to host the party. Are you saying that you are removing the Governor only because he did not host the Independence Day tea party?

HM: Yes, it is a serious mistake but I don't want to discuss the reasons any further.

CM: Can you give me some time, at least two days, to consider the matter and get back to you?

HM: I am sorry. It is a decision already taken.

CM: That means you are only informing me and not consulting me?

HM: Yes, I am informing you.

The conversion ends.

(ends text)

The way the home minister is cornered by an astute politician like Jayalalitha is amazing.
Shivraj Patil seems like someone who just joined politics couple of days ago in this conversation. In fact Jaya has been in active politics only for past 13 years. She did the right move of making public the transcripts which gives an opportunity to the people of India and more importantly to the people of Tamil Nadu to realise that Karunanidhi has not real guts to deal with Jaya directly and instead is opting to make the central govt. play cheap politics.

I just hope that the people of Tamil Nadu realise that Karunanidhi is not a true leader but is a silly old and seemingly stupid politician, hell bent on getting back to power. I was hoping he learnt a lesson when he was arrested, but seems like he has not. Well I hope that J will be back to power in the next elections
.

Remove Text Ads from GMail

2004-10-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

Remove Text Ads from GMail (If you dont like them )

Google made my wish come true

2004-10-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

Google Desktop Search Download.Google has released beta version of Google Desktop Search which searches all the html pages, and other documents in your hard disk. I had stopped searching for a file in my hard disk for a simple reason that it took eons to fetch the results for my local disk search.I've always wondered how great it would be to search my disk just like searching billions of html content on the web. Guess what? Google has just delivered what I'd dreamed about.

I actually read an article long time ago that Windows Longhorn was supposed to have been based on WinFS file system for the sole reason of making searches faster than what it is right now. MS wanted to prove that if Google can search billions of documents in less than a second, they can do better. Hmmm actually now we know that the WinFS is no more a part of Windows Longhorn. They've traded WinFS for quicker market entry (apparently to satisfy their customer base, :) yeah right!). I just hope that MS does not try to compete with Google and supress innovations that we as users deserve to enjoy. I just love thinking about these technological marvels courtesy Gooooooooooooogle.

Google never ceases to amaze me

2004-10-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Google has launched Google SMS service. It is amazing. Just type in a query (mostly local google searches like finding a nearby restaurant or a nearby service) and send it to 46645 (GOOGL).
You will receive an SMS message almost immediately with the different search resutls.
It is a really handy when you want to find local services while on the move. Moreover the search results are from google, so we know for sure it is going to be the best local search available since Google's local search not only extracts contents from Yellow pages, but also crawls through different related web sites.
Google and it's creative team continue to amaze me. It seems Google makes every employee use 20% of his/her time coming up with special interest projects. That is such a great idea. I strongly believe that only when you are creative and aspire to do something different, you will be successful.

Be a Vegetarian

2004-09-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

A Key to Good Health

Once a farmer asked Thoreau, U.S. naturalist and writer, “I hear you don’t eat meat, where do you get your strength?” Pointing to the husky team of horses he said, “ Where do they get their strength?”

Vegetarianism has been a way of life for many people for centuries. There is no need for humans to eat any animal product. An adult male requires 44-56 grams and an adult female requires 44-48 grams of protein daily. A pure vegetarian diet provides 83 grams of protein to men and 61 grams of protein to female according to a Harvard research. Amino acids necessary for growth and maintenance can be obtained from dairy products or by taking a combination of two plant foods. Plants are far richer in vitamins and minerals compared to meat and fish.

Human teeth and intestine are designed for eating and digesting plant foods so it is no wonder that major health problems can be traced to meat consumption. World Health Statistics consistently show short life expectancies among heavy flesh eating people like the Eskimos, Laplander, Greenlanders and Russian Kurgis tribes.

Cancer is often correlated in scientific studies with a high meat diet. Many researchers consider meat with its high content of cholesterol as the leading cause of heart attack. The uric acid deposits in the muscle fibers of meat, in addition to the body’s own daily production of uric acid is too much for one’s kidneys and liver to eliminate causing rheumatism, headache, epilepsy, hardening of arteries and nervousness. Vegetarians demonstrate far greater endurance, stamina and quickness of recovery from fatigue than meat eaters.

Non-vegetarians take a greater amount of residual agriculture, chemicals, industrial pollutants, antibiotics and hormones than vegetarians. According to The Meat Handbook, seventy known animal diseases can be transmitted to man through non-vegetarian food.

Vegetarian helps to prevent world hunger and waste of natural resources. An acre of land used for cereals can provide five times and used for legumes can provide ten times more protein than used for meat production. Therefore, the meat of rich consumes the bread of poor. According to Dr. Aaron Altschul, a vegetarian diet requires 300 gallons of water each day for one person as compared to 2500 gallons of water required for a non-vegetarian diet.

Many great people like Annie Besant, Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Pope, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy etc. have been vegetarians.

Animals are living creatures with feelings and capable of suffering. The more helpless a creature, the more it is entitled to protection by man. The production of non- vegetarian food causes pain, suffering and ultimate death of animals from whom they are taken. So, we are morally bound to give up non-vegetarian diet.

Courtesy -Jyoti Bothra

The real innovator - Steve Jobs

2004-08-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

Apple today introduced its new Apple iMac G5 which is totally unbelievable. If you thought that the previous version of iMac was all the one could ever ask for in a PC, then you are in for a huge surprise. The new iMac G5 features a 2 inch wide flat screen display which integrates everything uncluding a Super drive. There is not power brick , nothing. The design is amazingly cool. It features the OS10.3 Panther Operating System.

I also had a chance to view the World Wide Developer Conference on the apple.com website which gives a glimpse of the next version of OS10( OS10.4 Tiger)Its got a lot of cool features, but the one that struck me the most was the RSS enabled Safari browser and iChat(video conferencing software).

I just hope that the new iMac causes another revolution in PC market similiar to the iPod in the Personal Music player market. Kudos to Steve Jobs- The real innovator!

Windows XP SP2

2004-08-28T13:09:00.000-07:00

I installed the service pack 2 for Windows XP yesterday. The only problem with the installation was that it took more than an gig of space in already my space starved hard disk!
I had partitioned my hard disk into 3.
Partition 1 : 6 Gig (NTFS) (Windows system files)
Partition 2 : 16 Gig (NTFS) (Windows data files)
Partition 3 : 6 Gig (EXT2 for Linux)
Partition 4 : 1 Gig (Linux swap)

I was hoping that 6 Gig should suffice to install Windows XP and quite a lot of service packs!. But now my partition 1 is almost full!. (In spite of clearing all the restore points and deleting the Service pack temp files manually and clearing all application cache!)

SP2 slowed down my system a little bit, but at least it blocks all the spywares which used to get access to windows system directories so easily in the past. The firewall (internal) is pretty good. The pop up blocker was okay, but I've almost stopped using IE.

I just hope that there are no more Service pack releases since I wont have space to install any more service packs!

Collateral

2004-08-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'd been to the movie Collateral *ring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx and Jada pinkett smith directed by Michael Mann (of Ali fame). The movie was not bad. It was realistic without any special effects and sudden plot twists. It was a fast moving film indeed keeping the viewer on the edge of the seat most of the time, though there were some slow moments during the movie.

But after having seen countless Hollywood movies with great special effects and mind blowing story twists, I felt this movie to be little lifeless. Acting wise, it was pretty good with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx in lead. Overall I would give this movie a B.

The next big movie I'm waiting for is Ocean's Twelve. This movie is the sequel to the 2002 movie Ocean's Eleven which is one of my all time favourite movie. I've seen Ocean's Eleven 10 times and I'm yet to figure out how they get away with 160 million dollars. I thought that Ocean's Eleven was a very stylish movie with an amazing background music and a terrific cast. Ocean's Twelve will also include Catherine Zeta Jones to already long list of top stars including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Robers, Andy Garcia, Bernie Mac.

I liked Ocean's Eleven and Italian Job, both were stylish heist movies with super background score.

Twins Game at Metrodome

2004-08-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

I' d been to the Minnesota Twins Vs Oakland Athletics game at the metrodome here in Minneapolis yesterday(08/06/2004). It was a pretty good game. The Twins were trailing 1-0 till the bottom of the ninth. Shannon Stewart hit a home run in the bottom of ninth to tie the match. Unfortunately some poor outfielding and uninspiring catching by the Twins made them lose the game 3-1. I thought Brad Radke pitched really well, and Tori Hunter did not have a good hit all!

Kerry or Bush

2004-07-31T18:55:00.000-07:00

Not that my opinion would in any way matter, but I find both Kerry and Bush unsuitable to lead a country which not only controls most of the world,but is also under the scrutiny of most of the world's scum. The world needs a powerful dynamic leader , who can build strong external relations and one who does everything to root out terrorists. This is precisely what Kerry said in his acceptance speech during the Democratic convention. But somehow I don't think Kerry is as passionate as his speech was! Even his pathetic dab at humor wasn't really funny. "now I'm going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: Go to johnkerry.com." - what was that all about. I was expecting a hard hitting emotional speech from Kerry. I was expecting him to project himself as someone who is very passionate about leading this country, someone who is strong and decisive , someone who connects with everyone. I did not see any emotions at all. There was total lack of body language. Wonder who trained Kerry for that speech. All those made me think of something totally out of this world. What would I do if I were to be the President of United States of America. I know this would never happen, but I thought it would be really interesting, so here it is!
If I were to be the President of the United States,
1. I will do everything possible to root out terrorists. I will take preemptive actions against countries which act as a safe haven for terrorists. I won't t be as unreasonable as Bush was, but with proper evidence against a country which breeds terrorists, I will never wait for Germany or France or any other country to approve a military strike just for the simple reason that the U.S is the only country which is targeted by terrorists all over the world.
2. I will rethink the covert operations of CIA in middle east. Any covert operation should be done if and only if it can be made sure that it wont backfire . Osama bin laden was a perfect example of a CIA operation backfiring.
3. I will ensure that intelligence about security be monitored in a centralised way rather in a decentralized way.
4. I will invest more to improve field intelligence in the middle east and in other non democratic countries.
5. I will make sure that terrorists dont get access to nuclear/chemical/biological weapons from rogue states. I will put a system in place which automatically secure the nuclear weapons of a rogue state in the event of its downfall.
6. Foster research on finding and preventing various possible terrorist attacks.
I totally think that this problem of Islamic terrorism against U.S is because of U.S foreign policies and short sightedness of CIA operations. I will do everything to undo some of the harmful policies of previous administrations. I see this problem spiralling into a major problem for the U.S unless and until it is nipped at an early stage.

I, Robot

2004-07-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

I was not expecting too much out of a Will Smith summer blockbuster, but to my surprise this movie made some sense. It had a proper dose of action, robot psychology and Will Smith cliches. I personally like movies which depict the future. I like to envision the future, think about various futuristic technologies. I loved the futuristic Audi car in the movie. It looked pretty darn cool.

I heard that Steven spielberg had hired a lot of futurists to think of futuristic technologies in his movie 'Minority Report'. The difference between Minority report and I, Robot is that the latter looked far more realistic and simple. Things were not overdone!

Multi-threading in .NET

2004-07-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

Multi-threading in .NET A Simple article on .NET threading and synchronization!

Installing Mono on Linux

2004-07-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Installing Mono: Running .NET on Linux and Windows by Charlie Calvert
Install Mono on Linux.

IE Vs Firefox

2004-07-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

Are the Browser Wars Back? - How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer. By Paul Boutin is a very simple article which explains why we should move away from IE.

WMD & Nuclear Club & incompetence of the UN

2004-07-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

I was reading some articles about weapons of mass destruction possessed by many countries including the Nuclear Club. Wikipedia contains a lot of amazing articles and other documentation about almost everything. I visited a lot of other sites from wikipedia which gave a more details about nuclear,chemical and biological weapons being possessed and developed by many countries. I'm deeply concerned about the prospect of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons falling into the hands of fundamentalists. Rogue states like North Korea have to be reined in by the U.N. else the rogue states might transfer WMD's to terrorist easily.

I was also reading about the Darfur conflict and I was amazed at the incompetence of U.N to do anything about it. Kofi Annan had visited Darfur and just before he could do a reality check , the Sudanese government moved all those black refugees to a different place making Kofi Annan look like a joker!. In both the cases ( WMD and Ethnic cleansing), the U.N is unable to do anything quickly. Actions are done only after thousands of lives are lost. I believe that the U.N should be given far more authority to intervene in cases like Darfur and North Korea immediately. The U.N should have a far bigger military presence in many countries.

Newbie to Blogging

2004-07-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

I simply love google. Though I'm a late entrant to blogging, I hope I will use this as constructively as possible. There was talk that Microsoft was trying to buy Google. I predict Google buying Microsoft in the future.
I took the MS self assessment test today(Intro to .NET for Developers) just for the heck of it. I did not do too bad considering the fact that the average score was around 35%. But found out at the end of the assessment that there were no review of the questions with correct answers which was kind of annoying.
I'm planning to install mono 1.0 on my RH 9.0.
Also I'm trying to get out of the habit of using IE since I was recently affected by a lot of spywares which kept me frustrated for 5 days before I got rid of them all.
Unfortunately the spyware called Vx.BetterInternet was not removed by ad-aware or spybot or other hundreds of different spyware removal programs. I found a small 100KB .exe file on the net and took the risk of running it. Fortunately for me it worked and now I'm free from those annoying spywares. I wish I could upload that .exe file since I know many on the net are bound to have this problem considering Microsoft's small browser market at around 95%.
I've been using Firefox 0.9 for sometime now. But I just cant do away with IE because of compatibility problem. I'm wondering why Microsoft has not yet released a browser with support for tabbed viewing