enginerd

From Adam Green's The second coming of the Web : “When Tim Berners-Lee first gave mankind the Web, he made a tragic mistake. He granted us free will to use less than perfect HTML. His tools, and the tools of those to follow him, allowed users to develop sinful habits based on ignorance and sloth. The result was a Web of corrupt data, in which misformed tags abounded. This great fall from grace by the users of the Web prevented it from ever attaining the state of perfection desired by all computer scientists, a completely machine readable database.”

Without doubt, The Joy of Tech is the best techie cartoon site out there. Just browsing through their archives for the past week, I stumbled upon this awesome strip: Source: The Joy of Tech Comic Vox Populi: " I couldn't give a boot load about this, gimme OS X on a non-Apple PC, ... it's what's inside that counts. "

At last week's Mix 06, Microsoft announced the launch of their Windows Live Developer Central . There's lots of cool stuff available there if you're interested in developing apps using Windows Live Services. From Windows Live Developer Central website : The Windows Live Platform puts a deeper level of control into developers' hands by offering access to the core services and data through open, easily accessible APIs. Start building applications and mashups today with Windows Live. The site has spme pretty useful information and resources that enables people to start building applications using the easily accessible APIs: MetaWeblog API programming interface for MSN Spaces for external programs to get and set the text and attributes of Weblog posts. Getting Started with Virtual Earth's rich and easy to implement set of interfaces to get it running on your site There's also a link to the Channel 9 video where Scott Swanson is interviewed by Robert Scoble about ...

Whoever said that the world would need only five computers was probably correct. Sun has now released its on demand Grid computing for $1/cpu-hour. As Jonathan Schwartz writes about Sun Grid, "...experience for yourself what it's like to use one of the world's largest supercomputers. Without having to house it, manage it, power it, administer it, provision it... or buy it. Sun's Grid Service is available at network.com , a domain they got with the acquisiton of StorageTek. From the About Sun Grid page: Sun is changing the very nature of computing by delivering access to enterprise compute power over the Internet with its Sun Grid Compute Utility. Sun Grid provides an easy and affordable access to an enormous computing resource for the predictable and all-inclusive price of $1/CPU-hr. Reminds me of what my Professor had said last semester in our "Introduction to Grid Computing" class: "As the world uses the Internet to communicate, soon it would use the...

Alright. This is a wicked idea . An exasperated father has discovered to his cost that cyberspace is not the ideal arena for family feuds. Two weeks ago Steve Williams became so fed up with his daughter's messy bedroom that he built a website featuring pictures of his slothful offspring's lair in an attempt to shame her into action. But the public humiliation proved a short-lived victory. While it did spur his daughter, Claire, into tidying up her room, it also whet her appetite for revenge. With the help of her father's friends, the 20-year-old business student has now set up a rival website that displays photos of him in a variety of compromising situations. So if you wanna shame somebody or something with something like this , just keep it in mind that it could backfire!

I just cant help but think that the success of Digg and Newsvine has inspired a whole bunch of news tracking sites and mixups like diggdot.us and SlashDigg. Another one to have sprung up recently is MyToday . MyToday is your another "public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds." I first heard of MyToday earlier this month at BarCamp Delhi and at that time I had thought of it like more of a memedigger with human-voting-system for news stories and it seemed a good idea to have an Indian memedigger at last. But as it turns out, MyToday is not a memedigger but only an AJAXy Public RSS Aggregator with an objective to bring the most relevant quality content to the readers through selective sources. This really is a wonderful thing considering the significant increase in the Indian Blogs that have sprung up and an assorted list of feeds in different categories would be a great help. However, on first impressions, the wh...

Ever got confused between a Web 2.0 Company and a Star Wars character? How silly is the Web 2.0 hype getting? You tell us! Here's a quick quiz...we looked in 30Boxes and analyzed 37Signals that led us to come up with the 43Things below. So without further ado, can you decide... Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character? I scored 32. You?

The fact that it happened does not surprise me but that it took so long for our network administrators to figure it out does. And if you are wondering how do you disable Gmail's chat features on your network, you only need locking DNS lookups to chatenabled.mail.google.com , by returning 127.0.0.1 .

This is what I had on my Windows Live Desktop the other day: Correct me if I am wrong but shouldn't the High and Low readings be the other way around in this case? I mean, how can we have a high of 10 degrees C and a low of 18 degrees C in a day?

I received an email this evening from Andy about Bumble Search , a Firefox extension built by him and Chris. Bumble Search is meant to add to your search experience and it introduces the concept of Cross Pollination, analyzing pages for keywords and finding related or similar pages. This was the second Firefox extension for Google Search that I was hearing in the day, the first one being Advanced Dork that lets users quickly search for specific information using Google's Advanced Operators. Curious with what Bumble Search was about, I installed it to give it a shot and was mostly impressed with what it had to offer. The Bumble Search extension enhances Google Search to include specialized search engines like Wikipedia, flickr, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB etc, resulting in multiple search options. You can also optionally remove certain commercial keywords like shop, store, bargain, shipping etc. thereby refining your search a great deal. An example of Bumble Cross Page Pollination Also,...

It just seems that this hiatus is coming to an end. Recent updates here have been few and far between but there is really not much that I could do. Things were moving at quite a pace and yet they somehow didn't fall into the category of weblog content. Those that did, suffered a result of my now famous procrastination streak. Anyways, lets just hope that this trend takes a deviation. (Though, I am really not too sure how as I am again off the town for next 4 days beginning tomorrow) Here's a run through of what I've been upto recently (in no particular order): Been to BarCamp Delhi and met some really amazing people. I'll most definitely be posting about in detail later. Formatted and reformatted my desktop. Cleared an IBM Certification Examination Saw the new Google Pages thingy. You can't imagine how glad I was to see it flop! But found the Google Calendar screenshots way too cool. Struggled with tons and tons of meaningless assignments. It really amazes me how...