For Superman Fans out there... Superman movie in 30 Sec

Superman movie in 30 Sec

http://www.starz.com/features/bunnyclub/superman/

with bunnies of course

Just something...

Finally we will be into Certification (a.k.a testing), so I have one week with a little bit of less work. Anyways here is something that I remembered today don’t know why. I had my cousin salaa (my wife’s cousin) and his girlfriend visiting us. His girlfriend is American but unlike us she has read Geeta and Mahabharata. She is even learning hindi and knows some of it. Reading her hindi email is always funny… like to say it “time for lunch” she writes “samay lunch per hai” So just to see how she is doing in hindi one of her friend asked her to translate “Mein pass ho gayi hu”. And luu after a minute she wrote on a page “I am near cow”…Mein = I; pass = near; gayi == cow. Real bummer was when she asked my wife where is “goosalkhana” in my house... now my wife may be from India but who in the hell knows what is “goosalkhana” leave alone using it in sentence.., but my wife was smart enough since it involved “khana” she took the her into kitchen. Just in case you are wondering .. “goosalkhana” mean bathroom.. more importantly for no.2.This made my that weekend worthwhile.. otherwise who enjoys wife’s relatives at home.

Anyways now to some news that I found rather interesting on net.

The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits… now how safe is the city..

Italians prove themselves once again..More than 600 people in Italy wanted to ride in a spaceship badly enough to pay $10,000 a piece for the first tourist flight to Mars. According to the Italian police, the would-be space travelers were told to spend their "next vacation on Mars, amid the splendors of ruined temples and painted deserts. Ride a Martian camel from oasis to oasis and enjoy the incredible Martian sunsets. Explore mysterious canals and marvel at the views. Trips to the moon also available." Authorities believe that the con men running this scam made off with over six million dollars… always knew some Italian don’t really understand anything..

One of the top 10 stories I liked .., the crew of a trawler that sank in the Sea of Japan claimed their ship went down after "being struck by a cow which fell out of the clear blue sky". According to Flying magazine, no one believed this absurd explanation-- except the Russian military. It seems that the crew of a military cargo jet had stolen a cow they found wandering on a Siberian airfield, and loaded it aboard. While cruising at 30,000 feet, the terrified cow ran amok and jumped out of the plane.

And my personal favorite is the one I heard in office. One of our servers crashed. One of the guys was watching our new system administrator trying to restore it. He inserted a CD and needed to type a path name to a directory named "i386." He started to type it and paused, asking the guy "Where's the key for that line thing?" guy asked what he was talking about, and he said, "You know, that one that looks like an upside-down exclamation mark." The guy replied, "You mean the letter "i"?" and he said, "Yeah, that's it!"

In Washington, Congressman Bobby Jindal made history again this week when he paid a visit to the White House and became the first Indian-American politician to have his name pronounced correctly by President Bush. "The president is obviously getting better at names," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "It took him only a few minutes to learn how to say 'Bobby.'"

Meanwhile, some Indian-Americans are urging Jindal to go back to his Indian name Piyush. "Now that he's been elected, he doesn't need to be known as Bobby," said one supporter. "Not only would 'Piyush' increase his appeal among Indians, it almost rhymes with Bush. If Jeb Bush picks him as a running mate in 2008, we can all rally behind the Bush-Piyush ticket."

Google... Web Toolkit

As always Google keeps on inovating things and we try a catch up game.

Here is some possibly interesting stuff once again from google... Their toolkit allows for development in Java, then it compiles/translates to JavaScript. I am sure more and more people.. at least in Java world will start using it..

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Mr. Microsoft... Goodbye

Finally got some time free today.. Well yesterday evening we all got a surprise from Mr. Microsoft. He will retire from day to day activities of MS and work on his charitable foundation. Also I came to know that it takes $50 billion to retire and do as you wish. Something that Billy said yesterday struck me..” I believe with great wealth comes great responsibility”..heard this one before (Hint:Peter Parker’s grandma/grandpa). Well intentions of both these guys were to give back something to society for its betterment. Not sure why he made this decision maybe he knows more IE problems are on the way in Vista

I am no fan of MS Windows but I am great fan of Bill Gates. I also read that Bill Gates is increasing its donation for tuberculosis eradication. It's easy to poke fun at Bill Gates, the richest man on the planet but difficult to do what he does. Other rich people are busy buying boats, fighter planes, building big houses for their personal pleasure but Billy is working for noble cause

When Gates was in high school, none of the girls wanted to date him. Not because he looked like nerd, but because he was president and founder of the Nerd Club. He tried to ask one girl out, but she didn't understand what he meant when he said, "Let's interface tonight." It didn't help matters
when he tried to entice her: "If you come home, I'll show you my floppy."

Gates may not have been smooth with the ladies, but he knew how to connect with computers, and before long he had created some software, founded a company and was well on his way to world domination. He was often accused of unfair business practices, which is like accusing George Foreman of having an appetite.

You must also have heard that an employee made a spelling mistake in some help documentation at Microsoft and when this news reached Mr. Microsoft he went to that employee for a talk and asked him about the wrong spelling. After his meeting Gates told employee “Now you know the drill”. As a result Microsoft used its marketing and money power and got that wrong spelled word into the Oxford dictionary and made it an official legal word.

Anyways how rich is Bill Gates? He's so rich, he can buy every member of Congress. With enough money left over to give Martha Stewart a lifetime supply of Oil of Olay. He's so rich, he can afford his own island. And change its name to Great Bill-tain. He's so rich, he can put a large Microsoft logo on Venus. And an even bigger logo on Serena. His house in Washington state is worth more than $100 million. It makes the White House look like a hut in Botswana. (With a grinning Bush man in charge.) A 21^st century high-tech house, it's full of modern amenities, such as a 17-by-60-foot swimming pool that plays music underwater, a reception hall that seats 150 people and an underground shelter that allows the maids and babysitters to hide from immigration.

Yes, it's easy to poke fun at Bill Gates. What he's doing is much harder: Giving his dough away. Well, a big lump of it anyway, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he and his wife have pledged more than $30 billion for various causes and put a sharp focus on fighting diseases in poor countries. They recently tripled their funding for tuberculosis eradication to $900 million over the next decade, hoping to save as many as 14 million lives. That's a lot of people, folks, almost an entire neighborhood in China.

When the world's richest man gives money away, there are bound to be skeptics, people who question his motives. Is he just giving himself more tax deductions? Is he trying to create goodwill to offset Microsoft's poor image? Whatever his motives, he's doing the right thing: trying to help the underprivileged. How rich is he? He's so rich, he can do what many countries can't: provide hope for their citizens. And to them, there's no one bigger than Mr. Microsoft.

Next of Web

I hope I don’t bore you guys over here in this post. This post is from my other blog. I work for a media/publishing company one of whose competitor is Google. Of course we are threatened by Google but our profits comparable if not better and more than them. Basically we are also search business but the difference between us and Google is that, we have our own data/content and google does not, google just has indexes and produces links to different site. Since we have our own data so when you search on our site you get premium and reliable data.. and of course it is paid service. Anyways Google has faster and may be somewhat better search engine than we have but we have better user interface and more helpful and user friendly features. I am not going into details of all that. I was in research team before I joined development; there we used to keep track of our competitors.

With recent announcement of Sun and Google tie-up and collaboration, the face of technology is going to change. Google has already started what is called as Web2.0. In this you get desktop like application in your web browser itself, Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application. The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing — retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems — and then returns an HTML page to the client. It’s a model adapted from the Web’s original use as a hypertext medium, but as fans of The Elements of User Experience know, what makes the Web good for hypertext doesn’t necessarily make it good for software applications.

This approach makes a lot of technical sense, but it doesn’t make for a great user experience. While the server is doing its thing, what’s the user doing? That’s right, waiting… looking at the hourglass..and at every step in a task, the user waits some more.
Obviously, if we were designing the Web from scratch for applications, we wouldn’t make users wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?

That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.
Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications. With Sun, imagine the possibilities. You will have an application similar to MS office on web and that too my guess is will be free and open source. I think we will have openOffice online in near future. This will be a big blow for Microsoft because MS office is also an important revenue stream for them. My second guess is domination of IE as a web browser is going to end. We the developer community, have already moved to FireFox. More over last week we found out that around 10% of our users are using FireFox which some assume is more secure and has more and better features than IE. Of course MS is going to do something as always it will try to copy or crush the innovation. This time around they are trying to copy. Of course MS will have no problem in bringing Office collaboration on to web and crush out these online applications. They are going to reverse engineer Google and FireFox. For example again in IE 7.0 they are adding some of the features like tabbed browsing and may be support for GreaseMonkey
So in short Google will be the company that will define and redefine new technology. Check out AJAX and wait for everyone to follow it.

Who should pay for Internet?

I have always wondered.. why I am paying so much for Internet for my home computer. Is it justified.. I don’t make any money using internet.. in fact I am helping others make money.

I ask should it be us the people who use Internet to browse site or should it be the websites that we browse. It is perfectly logical for the web sites to pay for the cost of internet.. after all its mostly their data that is traveling in wires. Googles (I have nothing against google.. in fact I adore it but I work for a its competitor ) and Amazons of the world are making money through internet and we are the one who pay to use the internet. I am surprised that no telecom company has started asking for some part of cost from them.. They should start charging Google for using their bandwidth.. for long Google has been riding it freely.. its time for them to share some cost of maintaining internet. We wrongly assume Internet is free. It is not.. there is cost to maintain those networks. If they refuse to the telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon or for that matter VSNL of India can block Google to travel through their wires or to make it more frustrating let them travel slowly, this will force Google and other internet companies to pay for some cost of Internet. Of course this will be beneficial to the telecom companies but I am hoping they will pass on some of it to us the customers. It is like cell phones in US.. you are using our network pay money.. you use you pay.. I am not saying I do not want to pay for internet but at least reduce some amount and let it be shared by the web sites that travel through those wires.

Why just let Googles and Amazon make profit.. they should share it with companies like AT&T who provide all this network and still have nothing to show for it. Of course I am sure this will happen sometime if not sooner… government will pass the law. I am sure one day all these telecom companies will rule the world again..