Wandering in Elysium

Kindle 3G - First impressions

2011-01-31T23:04:00.000-08:00

Finally, after months of waiting, I have the Kindle 3G in my hands. And it has been well worth the wait.

The screen is a pleasure to read from, coming almost close to a printed book in terms of resolution and sharpness. Having read an e-book for more than an hour in a sitting, I came out of it without a headache or eyestrain. The Kindle truly delivers on Amazon's promise that within a few page turns (virtual, of course), you will disappear into the book. I know I did.

The experimental web browser is just that, experimental. The pages take some time to load, but it helps if images are turned of and you are reading the mobile version of the page. But then again, I didn't buy it for browsing the web, and it is more than a nice-to-have.

I only wish that Amazon brings down the Kindle book prices than their physical copies, still can't see the rationale of a digital copy costing as much as the real thing. However, if you are a bibliophile and can't have enough of the printed word, the Kindle is the best gift you could buy yourself.

Sixth Sense - Virtual information, real world

2009-06-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

Augmented reality finally seems to be coming to the real world. In an amazing demonstration of the possibilities, Pranav Mistry and Patti Maes of MIT Media Lab show how simple off-the-shelf components can be put together to make your own wearable gestural interface.

Called Sixth Sense, the device consists of a camera, a pocket projector with mirror and a mobile phone. The phone remains in the user's pocket, and uses visual input from the camera and the projector acts as the monitor. It can be programmed to recognise hand gestures and virtually any surface can be used as a screen.

With these basics in place, Sixth Sense can seamlessly plug in information from the virtual world to the real world. For example, a person browsing through a new bestseller at a bookstore can project Amazon ratings and reader reviews right onto the book and make instant decisions on whether to buy the book or not. You can check your flight timings by just holding the ticket in front of the camera. The system will scan the ticket and retrieve the current status from the Web, through the mobile phone's data connection.

An extremely interesting application of ubiquitous technologies, Sixth Sense has amazing potential to change how we see and interact with the world around us. By supplementing the real world with meta information and an easy-to-use interface, this is one technology that really lives up to its name. [Sixth Sense demo]

Change is good

2009-01-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin

Some people hate change. They just can't let go of the familiar and even bother to try and learn something new. Evolution takes care of them.

ZDNet's Ed Bott gives a good example of change in the technology world. In his Microsoft Report blog, he recounts how his colleague gripes about the user interface changes in Windows 7, the latest version of the operating system, which is still in development. As Bott himself notes, you can't please everyone. But to all those people who keep on complaining about how they have to keep up with the changes in software or hardware or everytime their favourite website has a new design, just remember Darwin.

Google Suggest, now with ads?

2008-12-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Google seems to be experimenting with ads in their search box, which will pop up as soon as you start entering a query. According to this SearchEngineLand article, the ads seem to be in test phase, and may not be implemented at all. They may be just testing the waters to see how users react, but this is surely an indication of how much pressure even Google seems to be facing in the current economic downturn. For a company which has kept its homepage free of any paid ads, integrating commercials right into the heart of its product is a big step.

Judging by the number of people who come to this blog, searching for ways to turn off the Google Suggest feature in the search engine's homepage, it may not be their most popular feature.

It will be interesting to see how the users react if they do indeed start ads in the search box. Maybe people will just grin and bear it, realizing that good things do come at a price, or maybe we will see some migration to Yahoo and Live search engines, which have been dwindling in market shares with every passing month. Google may have just given users an excuse to try them out after all.

Launching Chrome was good after all

2008-10-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

When Chrome was launched early September, there was much hue and cry about the need for yet another web browser in an already crowded market. I thought it was a good thing. Now, it is getting better.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, at the Hardware 2.0 blog on ZDNet, has published some numbers on how the new Firefox 3.1 beta 1 stacks up against IE, Chrome and the rest. If Chrome set the bar high in ACID 3 and SunSpider Javascript benchmarks, Firefox 3.1 has pushed it even higher. Chrome still takes the lead in Google's own V8 JavaScript benchmark quite convincingly though.

The Firefox 3.1 beta 1 also comes with a slew of features which will hopefully inspire developers in the opposing camps to create some magic of their own. As Kingsley-Hughes puts it, competition is good.

Anti Spam - Spamming the spammers

2008-10-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Did you know that 95 percent of all email sent in 2007 was spam? Yes, that is a fact.

In spite of all the legislation, the spammers keep marching on. Filling up mailboxes, overloading servers and clogging networks worldwide, the spam keeps coming. So how do you get back at them? That's right, spam them back.

AuditMyPc, an online security testing site, has put up a tool that they hope will give spammers a large dose of their own medicine. Anti Spam is basically a web-page that fills itself with fake email addresses every time it is viewed. The way the developers hope to get it working is like this:

1. Spam-bots, which scour the Web, looking for email addresses to spam, land on the Anti Spam page.
2. They find loads of email addresses (all of them fake, by the way), and promptly adds all of them to their databases.
3. Finally, they follow the last link on the page, which links to itself, thereby loading the Anti Spam page with a fresh list of fake email addresses. The process repeats, filling the databases with enough worthless addresses to make it inefficient to spam.

That sounds like a really interesting concept, and I for one would love to see it work. But would it really? The Buzz Out Loud crew makes some good observations on the idea. Adding fake email addresses to the spam database surely would take down the conversion ratio, but still might not bring down the absolute hits the spammers get. As far as they are concerned, it is all automated and wouldn't matter much.

ISPs could see a flurry of attempts to send emails to non-existent accounts, and that could help them identify potential spammers more easily and blacklist them. This is all assuming that spammers don't blacklist the Anti Spam page first and let their bots go round in circles, feeding on fake addresses.

AuditMyPc encourages the public to link to their Anti Spam page, so that bots are more likely to find it and collect the bogus addresses. As far as I can tell, their appeal seems to be working. Type in 'anti spam' on Google and guess what is the first organic result? If the company decides to make an actual anti-spam product of its own in the future or even take ads for them, they surely won't be needing any search ads. The Anti Spam page may not take down too many spambots, but it won't hurt their site traffic.

DECE - The future of DRM?

2008-09-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

“The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” - Andres S. Tannenbaum (Also seen attributed to Ken Olsen)

I love that quote. It is funny. It is funny because it is true.

In a digital media landscape littered with incompatible standards and casualties from the format wars, a host of technology and media powerhouses are joining hands to bring a consumer friendly version of DRM for content. In other words, a standard for DRM.

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which is backed by the likes of Cisco, Fox, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NBC Univeral, Paramount Pictures, Philips, Sony and Toshiba, among others, will offer customers the "buy once, play anywhere" freedom that has been taken away by conventional DRM. Simply put, the standard will enable content bought from consortium members to play on DECE hardware/codec. Not so much DRM-free as having no DRM at all, but a step forward, nevertheless.

Will DECE succeed in convincing consumers who are sceptical about DRM and how it restricts their usage of content they had paid for? Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, a technology columnist at ZDNet, says it beautifully with the title of his blog post - DECE : Lipstick on the DRM pig.

Read the Reuters story - Studios form digital-download ecosystem

Chrome - why another browser is good

2008-09-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

It has been more than a week since Google unleashed Chrome on the Web. Statistics abound on the market share erosion of the incumbents from the newcomer's arrival. Frankly, I think it is far too early for the numbers to make sense. There will be enough downloads and installs in the first week as people try out the new software and figure out if it is actually any good. (Remember, it was promoted in the Google homepage, no less - the most expensive virtual real estate in the world. That has to count for something.)

So how can the new browser help the Web? In a market crowded by the likes of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera, is there any need for yet another commodity software which is free anyway? I think there is.

Firstly, Google has open-sourced Chrome. This means virtually anybody can peer under Chrome's hood and take the best features and even improve upon it. Like the rising tide that lifts all boats, every browser developer and user stands to gain from this.

Secondly, I think the sandbox-approach to the whole browser and even individual tabs is an innovative move. If one site crashes your tab, just close it without bringing all the other tabs and browser windows down. (I am not sure about this, but I think only Chrome has implemented this as of now.) Spawning new processes for individual tabs keeps the user in control, and the entire system more secure.

Thirdly, Google has a way with how it puts the user in focus in product design. The clean, minimalist look of the Google homepage is appreciated by millions, and Chrome has borrowed this philosophy in its user interface. I am sure other browser designers can take a page or two from the Google design book and weave it onto their own. No big, bloated buttons and no useless menu bars. Keep it simple, silly.

There are many things that I don't like at all about Chrome, but that will form the topic of another post. But if somebody has ideas for yet another Web browser and intend to release one soon, I am all for it. Better too many than too few.

Of spam blogs and captchas

2008-09-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

Seems like even Blogger has spotted my irregular posting patterns. I tried to make a new posting and it won't allow me to do that, unless I solve another one of those captchas. And they even have a nifty link nearby which says 'Why do I have this', which explains that my blog has the "characteristics of a spam blog". I have applied to unlock my blog from the captcha curse, which apparently requires human intervention. Serves me right for not posting by procrastinating.

Google Suggest - Turn off autocomplete

2008-08-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

Google seems to be rolling out new features in a hurry, or in this case, integrating an old one. The official Google blog has announced that the Suggest feature will be available by default on the engine. Judging from the responses of bloggers, it is a love-it or hate-it feature. Personally, I don't care for it much, what with the suggestions coming nowhere near what I want to type in. Indeed, it is more of a distraction than anything.

It is quite easy to turn off too. Just type in - http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 and you have it. The feature can be disabled easily using the Preferences link from the homepage as well.

Google sort by date or relevance

2008-08-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

Google seems to be testing a new feature. Its News and Blog Search had this feature from the beginning, but seems like you can now sort your web search also by date or relevance. Probably they figured out that people were searching for news and blogs from the main search engine itself, and were shifting often to News and Blog search functionalities to get the latest updates. Maybe they had been working on this for sometime, and the Olympics just came by and users searching for medal tallies just pushed it to the tipping point. (It is worth mentioning that they have been manually tweaking search algorithms for Olympics related content, as has Yahoo and Live search.)

Here is a screenshot that I got a couple of minutes ago. Probably they are rolling it out only to a few users at the moment, as they usually do. Your mileage may vary.

Update - Feb 14, 09: From my web analytics, I can see that more and more people are searching for this feature from all parts of the world. Either Google is rolling it out slowly in test regions, or this has the potential to be an incredibly popular feature.

The importance of being Yahoo's Valentine

2008-02-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

The irony about writing on technology is that much like the subject itself, it becomes obsolete before you can say "Gordon Moore". Which is why analysing Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and the subsequent refusal is not exciting, now that we are a couple of weeks into it. But what would be really interesting to watch is Yahoo's flirtation with News Corp., considering the fact that it just passed on over $44 billion from the Redmond giant.

Is Jerry Yang simply holding out for a better price from Microsoft, considering how desperate Microsoft has shown itself to be in the race for the Web dollar? Or does he believe that a tie-up with the media behemoth can actually bail Yahoo! out of its impending financial crisis, given its relatively poor performance in online advertising sales vis-à-vis Google? (Even with all the commotion around it, Yahoo has been acquiring online ad companies to stay afloat.) The Wall Street Journal says that its owner News Corp could hand over MySpace and some other online properties to Yahoo for as much as 20% stake in the Web giant. This could keep Yahoo safe from a hostile bid from Microsoft, and also give it access to a wider user base, not the least of which would be the world's largest social networking site. Of course, monetising it would be a different story.

Looking from Microsoft's perspective, it just may be willing to raise the offer if Yahoo plays its cards right. But given the fact that it would have to finance even part of the current offer with debt, which would be a first in the company's history, it is highly unlikely to be much of an increase. Microsoft's stock did crash as soon as the offer was made, reflecting possible shareholder opinion that even the current offer is too much.

But even this willingness to borrow for the first time clearly indicates how serious Microsoft is to get Yahoo. Both the companies have been playing catch-up with Google in online advertising revenues, and neither have had much success yet. Even together, they may not be able to do this, given the complexities of integrating two large hi-tech companies and hit the ground running in probably the world's most dynamic industry. As one comment in a news site said, "Tie two rocks together and they still sink." Maybe. Depends on what you tie them with.

RSS agents and Instant Messaging bots

2007-09-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

It is hard enough to keep track of all the RSS feeds we have in our subscription list; knowing when they have been just updated would be helpful, but even more tough. Why not combine the power of RSS and Instant Messaging to give you an instant update? The idea is nothing new, and there are tons of services out there already.

Yahoo Alerts helps you pick different topics from a list, or even enter a custom RSS feed from third-party site, which can be delivered by email, Yahoo Messenger or text message. Some other websites that provide similar services are Imified, Rasasa, FeedCrier and ZapTXT.

You can use them to subscribe to RSS feeds (news, weather updates, sports score, etc.). As soon as the feed is updated, the bot would IM you the summary. It actually converts the pull based RSS into a push technology; you are updated as and when it happens. Of course, you can control the frequency and content of the updates through a web interface. What is really great is that some of them don't even require registration; just add a bot as your IM buddy list and you are done.

Imified, for instance, has a Blogger widget. You can add the Imified bot as a buddy on your IM, start a chat session and pull up sports score (from an RSS feed) or update your Blogger post; all of this from your instant messenger. Kind of like Twitter, which also has the same functionality. You can also create your own widgets and customise it to your requirements.

What is really great about using IM as a platform is that you can use your mobile phone's IM client to access the services anywhere, anytime. You are waiting for your bus, and in comes a new instant message : "Manchester United 2 : Liverpool 1 FT". No more expensive text messages, no more manual browsing!

More Bots

As you may know, Google Talk uses the Jabber protocol. Add eliza at swissjabber.org (in the usual email id format) as a contact in your Gmail account and you can start up a chat session with a bot.

There are also lot of Jabber bots that can provide weather, dictionary and mail notifications. (Jabber bots and IM Bots for Jabber). Please do leave a comment if you find other interesting services/bots.

Unlocking your iPhone - Legal or not?

2007-09-05T04:08:00.000-07:00

It has been some time since I put my last post. Six months, to be more accurate. And so much has happened in this time that I can't even begin to describe what. Google has bought over Doubleclick in a multi-billion dollar deal, the iPhone has finally come out (and promptly unlocked, I must add), Opera Mini 4 is in beta, millions of blogs have started since, and a lot many abandoned. Wow, and I haven't even scraped the surface yet.

Let us get back to the iPhone. I have said this once, and I will say it again - Apple is a master marketer. Their phone is not the first to have touch screen, nor is it the only smartphone with music capabilities by a long shot. Heck, it doesn't even have 3G. Still, you find thousands of people waiting in serpentine queues to get hold of the sleek black gadget. Pretty impressive for a commodity product, which is also tied to AT&T as the sole service provider. But then again, Apple has succeeded in setting up the iPhone as "the" product, and not a commodity after all.

Now to the whole unlocking the iPhone issue. Hacker groups across the world would have been working tirelessly to crack open the iPhone's lock to the AT&T network, ever since the product was unveiled late June. It is to Apple's credit that it took them so long to break open the lock; most hardware and software protection technologies have fallen in a few days' time. However, once the first method came in, others have followed pretty rapidly. Both hardware and software workarounds have been devised, independently confirmed by leading websites.

So the question is, would unlocking the iPhone be legal? If AT&T has not subsidised the cost of the handset from Apple to the subscriber, then surely this is between the user and Apple, isn't it? Or is it? What business is it of AT&T's to check what a user does with a phone she has bought from Apple? Seems like a pretty grey area even for the legal pundits, and as for me, I am still left wondering. However, if you go by common sense, what I do with hardware I have bought is nobody else's business, not even the company I bought it from. I could buy an iPhone and use it on AT&T network or choose not to, use it as a very expensive doorstop or simply put it in a blender and run the motor. Most product warranties would be void if you do any of the above three things, but wouldn't I still be legally entitled to do this? The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has explicitly cleared unlocking phones as long as they are used for legally connecting to a network.

Apple would probably be forced to go after these unlocked iPhones as per their agreement with AT&T and they would probably have the law on their side if the unlocking is being done on a commercial basis (in which case the above DMCA protection might not hold). But what is to stop a hacker group from releasing software on the Net which anybody can download and run on their iPhones to get them unlocked? Would it be still piracy or abuse of Apple/AT&T's IP rights?

The legal muscle of two of America's biggest companies might thwart most outfits hoping to profit out of the whole unlocking debacle, but if you are smart enough to unlock your own iPhone, you just might get away with it. But don't take my word for it, decide for yourself.

Links:

Update: Apple has announced a $200 price cut on the iPhone, in less than 10 weeks of the launch. All tech devices get better, faster and cheaper with time, but this one is phenomenal! CNET article

You will be assimilated

2007-02-16T04:35:00.000-08:00

The Borg is perhaps as representative of the Star Trek series as much as Enterprise or Voyager is. Always on the prowl to make contact with new species and assimilate them into the Collective, the Borg is one of the most feared enemies of the Federation.

The Borg is unique. Unlike other species, the Borg do not fight for territory or power. They only need your technology. The purpose of their very existence is to find and assimilate alien technology to their own. Once a species is assimilated, all their technological expertise and cultural distinctiveness passes on to the Collective. The Borg drones are not individuals, they share a Collective mind or its cybernetic equivalent.

I can not help but wonder how much we live in a Borg-like state today, with a life more and more immersed in technology. A new breed of human beings who love technology and want to be surrounded by it, be it our Blackberrys or iPods, our smartphones or laptops. Cases abound of people addicted to the Web or their smartphones, losing all sense of time and reality when they are plugged in, much like the Borg drones. So the next time you feel the urgent craving to check your mail when you are holidaying in Hawaii, stop and recall the Borg hail.

Resistance is futile. Maybe it is true. Maybe we are being assimilated.

iPhone - Anything different?

2007-01-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

Amidst the usual fanfare and hype surrounding any Apple product launch, the iPhone seems destined to be the next star product from the company. Described by Steve Jobs as "magical" and "revolutionary", the iPhone is expected to change the landscape of technology once again.

But before we start drooling over it, a bit of reality wouldn't do any harm. The iPhone is a combination of the legendary iPod and a GSM phone. It also comes loaded with standard smartphone features, Bluetooth and PIM functionalities. The one thing that is sure to excite Apple loyals is the operating system it runs : OS X. Put in a sleek Apple-style cool interface and you have got the iPhone. The 4 GB model that would be released later this year comes at $499, and a 8 GB one would cost $599.

The iPhone has no usable feature that isn't available on other competing devices, so I can't see why they would call it magical and revolutionary. If you are talking about the capability to play MP3 and other digital audio formats on mobile phones, others have had it for years together. WiFi and Bluetooth are nothing new either.

Apple has, quite predictably, decided not to open up the iPhone to third party applications. Any new application that you would like to run on the iPhone would have to come from Apple, and that too, at a price. Most mobile platforms, including Symbian and Microsoft, allow third party software to be run on their systems. This encourages more developers to contribute software, which in turn attracts more users looking for greater variety of software. (Also known as the Network effect).As a result, the price of software on these platforms would be much lower than controlled platforms like Apple's, simply because of the demand supply equations.

iPhone applications would be costlier to develop as developers would have to pay out huge sums as royalties and license fees to Apple, and this would inflate cost to the end user. So anybody getting an iPhone is not only looking at the base price tag, but a much higher investment in terms of cost of additional software. The usual service charges associated with Apple would still stick, as even the battery comes built-in and you would have to go to Apple for servicing it.

With all the above, Apple doesn't seem to be looking to market the iPhone to the masses. But then again, Apple has never tried to be the mass-market company. Either way, it would be really interesting to see how the iPhone does in the already crowded market.

BBC, Wikipedia (Technical specifications)

Neuronet - The Matrix is here?

2006-12-30T03:12:00.000-08:00

The Matrix films have been ridiculed by many people to be an impossible scenario- with machines enslaving human beings and feeding off our body heat to keep us immersed in a virtual world. Well, they have not mastered us yet, but a recent announcement from the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies could indicate the birth of a more Matrix-like Internet.

Called the Neuronet, scheduled to go live in 2007, the network would provide a platform for virtual reality and gaming innovators around the world to develop applications for a second-generation network.

Virtual reality refers to computing systems which provide sensory feedback to the user to make her feel like she is actually in a different environment. For example, flight simulators are examples of virtual reality environments where a trainee pilot can learn the nuances of flight training before actually flying a multi-mllion dollary aircraft.

Although much cruder than the versions depcited in sci-fi movies like the Matrix, virtual reality is all set to grow in the coming years with quantum improvements in computing power and network bandwidth.

The Neuronet would be separate from the current Internet, the IAVRT announcement explains. Virtual reality programs like IBM's Second Life has become very popular among its members, where they can actually live out a virtual life.

3D designer Sven Johnson has questioned the "reality" of the virtual reality network, saying that it could be a "get-rich-quick" scam funded by domain name sales. (link)

Scam or not, it is only a matter of time before virtual reality environments become more possible and inviting to the masses. Even now, the chore of getting online, checking your mail and IMs, hanging around in a social networking site, etc. is considered by some to be "virtual reality". Where "real" ends and "virtual" begins is becoming a tougher question to answer.

CNET article

Opera Mini 3 - Mobile web unleashed

2006-12-02T01:59:00.000-08:00

Study after study proclaims the arrival of the Mobile Web, information on the go and being "always connected". The few who have actually explored the Web on our mobile devices would know better that things are not all that great right now. Clumsy browsers trying hard to fit Web pages on the small screen, slow download speeds and the worst of all, the exorbitant charges for data usage by mobile operators.

Opera Mini 3

Opera Software, the makers of the popular desktop Web browser, have announced the latest version of their browser for Mobile phones, Opera Mini 3. Opera Mini is a Java application that can be installed on most of today's smartphones or mobile devices supporting Java.

Unlike traditional mobile browsers like Opera's own Opera Mobile and Symbian browser, the Mini does not connect to the concerned web server directly. Instead, it connects to a proxy server that fetches the requested page and reformats the original HTML, Javascript and multimedia content into a format optimised for mobile phones. Thus, when you type www.yahoo.com in the address bar, the application relays it to the proxy. The proxy then fetches the Yahoo! homepage, strips it off all the bells and whistles, optimises for your specific device and sends it to the application. All the app has to do is take this and render on the screen, a much easier task when the heavy objects are taken off.

The killer utility

What makes Opera Mini so useful is that it cuts out the data consumption drastically, since the proxy has filtered out most of the unwanted content already, making the pages much lighter. Some reviews claim to have observed 70-80% reduction in the data consumption, which can be extremely useful considering the exorbitant charges levied by mobile operators. Thus, even if the webpage is not optimised for your mobile device, you can expect Mini to step in and do the dirty work for you.

The standard homepage of the browser carries a Google searchbox, and a customisable search engine containing sites like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com. RSS feeds are also supported, and so is photo blogging that helps you blog from your phone to the Opera Community server. The scroll feature is really user-friendly and keyboard shortcuts are really a breeze.

Mobile web proxies

If your phone doesn't support Java and you can't install Mini, you can still use other mobile web proxies to reduce your data usage. A good one is Google Mobile service, available at www.google.com/xhtml. Enter the site name or URL in the Google Mobile search box and click on the relevant link. Google Mobile uses a proxy server to interpret the target webpage into a format more suited for mobile devices, although you can't really compare it with the Mini's performance. But then again, that was not what it was designed to do. It is a search again, after all. For browsing on mobile devices however, I highly recommend getting the Mini. Goto operamini.com on your mobile and install the app. The Web is truly mobile now.

Gmail client on Java mobile

2006-11-09T23:59:00.000-08:00

Google released its mobile client for Gmail sometime back, but I never actually got around to testing it until now. After having used Gmail & Yahoo Mail on my mobile browser (Opera), I had quit the service as the data transfer charges were getting out of hand. This client does help out a lot in that regard and much more.

Installation

The installation of the software was pretty simple. Type in the download URL (gmail.com/app) in your mobile browser and you can dowload the client and have it installed on your phone under a minute. There is hardly any setting or configuration changes required, and you can use it out of the box. You will need to have Java support on your phone for the client to work. Most modern phones support Java, so that isn't really a problem. (Installation on my Nokia N70 was very easy and totally trouble-free.)

Functioning

Once the program is launched, you are prompted to enter your Gmail username and password to sign in. A fairly redundant warning appears saying the program will use the network to send and receive data. Once confirmed, your Gmail inbox loads almost instantly. You can select messages and read them as conversations, in true Gmail style. I have not found that feature useful enough to cheer about, but some of my friends are crazy about it.

What is really interesting about this tiny app is that it can provide you almost all Gmail features, as if you were using it on a PC. Major functions are available through the numeric keypad, and also through a menu if your prefer that instead. Besides standard email functions like reply and forward, you can also archive, mark as read or unread, report as spam or delete.

Google claims that this client is faster because it has built-in prefetch feature, which automatically loads links in background while you are still reading the first message. Preloading is not recommended if your phone company charges for every kilobyte downloaded, as you may waste money on messages you never actually read. For a flat rate data plan, it is simply great.

The Settings menu does not offer you much though. You can choose to be signed in always, or turn off the preload messages or use smaller fonts, and that is about it. Another thing the program lacks is a new mail notification feature, which I believe would come in the later versions. Also, you can not compose an email to a new email address, unless you have added it in your contacts list which is not all that great either. For a Version 1.0.0b launch however, I think the program comes off really nice.

Better than Gmail through mobile browser

One major advantage of this application over using Gmail on a mobile browser is that it can limit your data consumption to a great extent. Many phone companies charge for data usage (usually for every Kilobyte downloaded) and over a month, this can add up to a decent amount. By using built-in forms like the login prompt, the app reduces your data consumption, which would have otherwise cost you for every sign-in. The prefetch feature is simply great if your data plan is a flat charge one, as it really speeds up the mail functions many times.

This application should encourage more Gmail users to use the service on their mobile devices, widely considered to be the next phase in computing. I would love to see if Yahoo can come up with something similar, as my experience with Yahoo! Go has been less than satisfying. Considering the two companies are going neck to neck in so many areas, it wouldn't surprise me to see a similar app from Yahoo very shortly. (Read the Google - Yahoo rivalry)

Social search with Google Custom

2006-10-27T01:26:00.000-07:00

Speak search and Google comes to mind. There is a very good reason why that is so. They try to make all Web users search more and more using their engine, and they roll out newer and newer ways of doing that. The newest in line - Custom Search Engine for everyone.

Using Custom Search, built upon Google Co-op, anyone can make a personal search engine of their own, defining the sites they want to be searched. They can either limit the search to a few sites, or the entire Web, emphasising the defined sites. If your passion is astronomy or computer hardware, you can define the few sites you visit religiously and the searcher would get results from these few sites.

Strategically speaking, this move from Google is nothing short of brilliant. When everybody you know is digging or bookmarking on del.icio.us, Google could have probably beaten all of them to the game by bringing in social search in its own ingenious way. Let us examine how Google has done this.

Suppose you are very passionate about astronomy, and has been so for some time. Definitely, you would be an authority on the best sites on the subject and visit them regularly. When Google gets you to sign up for Custom Search on astronomy for your site, you would be defining them with your favourite astronomy sites, and more often than not, these would be sites with premium quality content.

You have essentially built an engine that searches the best sites on astronomy, and the definition of best is coming from you, a human being, who can recognise quality content much, much better than a computer program. Google has thus succeeded in coaxing you to sharing your judgement and reviewing skills, which combined with Google's automated technology brings up the best results on astronomy. Somebody who has used your Custom Search would find it giving more relevant results than the generic Google search, which even by Google's standards has not contained spam sites to a large extent. The site with the Custom Search thus gets more visitors searching on it and it is ideally a win-win situation for all concerned - Google, the Custom Search site and the users who search through it.

Google has always faced strong criticism because of the lack of human element in its search technology. The famous Googlebot and PageRank are, after all, only computer programs. Many people say that is an inherent weakness as they can be tricked by malicious webmasters who try to stay one step ahead of it. Yahoo!, on the other hand, had a better technique of human editors reviewing the pages in their directory, thereby providing quality content. But this model was simply not efficient enough to keep up with the tremendous pace that the Web is growing at. Any attempt to do it would be overwhelming, if not impossible.

Google might have jumped one more step ahead of Yahoo! by subtly bringing in the human element it has been so far lacking in their technology. With more and more Custom Search Engines springing around the Web, the quality of search results should also improve dramatically.

Get your own Google Custom Search

P.S: You can try a sample one at the bottom of this page.

Innovation for innovation's sake

2006-10-18T05:32:00.000-07:00

Innovation. The concept has been driving management principles for years together now that it has almost become a cliche. Entire industries have spawned in the last few years, with self-proclaimed creativity consultants and experts helping out corporations lacking the edge to beat the competition in the race for the most innovative product out there.

Many people equate innovation with business success and use them synonymously. It is almost as if innovation or the lack thereof alone can make or break a company. This innovation fever comes with its many cousins - lateral thinking, thinking out of the box and creativity. Of course, these should be, by no means, discouraged for only this vitality can churn out the next iPod or Post-it notes. But when a company gears itself for innovation and creativity alone and forgets how it affects the bottom line, you can know for sure it is headed for trouble. Innovation, for the sake of innovation, is simply not worth it.

The very concept of innovation, successful innovation that can affect your company's future, may not be what it seems. In a very insightful article on the topic, Carleen Hawn dissects the history of Apple and its corporate culture which teems with innovation and creativity. Hawn recalls how Apple almost single-handedly created the personal computer market, only to be taken over by IBM and its clones, powered by software from the then lesser-known Microsoft. What happened after that is history. Apple's decision of not to open up and license its operating system could have also considerably contributed to its low market share in the global personal computing market. As she puts its, technological innovation is what drives Apple, not business-driven. And that is the problem.

To take the exact opposite of Apple, we need to look no further than Microsoft. Technological innovation has not been the company's strongpoint. But when it comes to business-models, Microsoft is second to none. Gates and co saw an opportunity to bundle their very first operating system (which wasn't designed by them, as a matter of fact) with IBM's PCs, thus getting access to a very large customer base, with virtually no investment in distribution. What is more, Microsoft got paid by IBM for every PC that shipped with MS-DOS. The growth from a startup started by a college dropout to the software colossus that it is now is not a freak incident, it was business strategy and execution at its best.

So the next time you hear another preacher touting innovation as the only thing that can keep you going, just remember this old but very relevant quote:

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." - Peter F. Drucker

The jargon of technology

2006-10-07T01:54:00.000-07:00

Research from Nielsen/NetRatings, Britons using cutting edge technology are not as savvy when it comes to jargons, reports BBC.com. For example, 40% of online Brits receive news feeds, but are not familiar with the official term Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Some more examples:

Only 57% of online Brits knew that acronym for instant messaging was IM.
75% did not know VOD stands for Video-on-Demand.
35% have heard about podcasting but didn't know what it meant.

That is all very well, but does any of these statistics matter? If people are already using technology but just don't call it by its popular name, does it mean they are any less technologically inclined? In a world where technology is obsolete the second after it is invented and only the ubergeeks can keep up, doing that would be next to impossible.

A rose by any other name...

I am pretty certain the findings would be applicable throughout most of the world, not many people who actually use technology would be aware of the different names it is known by. That is because there is no need to. That is because being able to use the technology for betterment of our lives is infinitely more important than keeping track in the acronym jungle. If you now how to use newsfeeds and read them daily, why bother with the "official name" of RSS anyway?

Link: BBC

Nokia N95 - Pushing technology further

2006-09-27T05:13:00.000-07:00

If you happen to be one of the millions of mobile phone owners who have just upgraded to the latest Nokia N-series 'multimedia devices', this article can be quite depressing. Yes, you have been just rendered obsolete.

Nokia has announced the latest member of the N-Series family, the mighty Nokia N95. The first Nokia phone to have integrated GPS functionality (with maps of over 100 countries), the N95 comes with a 5 Mega-Pixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens. More notably, it has a 2.6 inch QVGA screen and runs the Symbian S60 OS. The device has a TV out feature and support for Universal Plug and Play technology facilitating connection with a compatible TV. Also supporting HSPDA and EDGE technologies for high-speed network connections, it also has integrated WLAN.

With 8 GB hard-drive that can carry almost all your favourite tracks, the device has built-in stereo speakers with 3D stereo effect and a standard 3.5 mm audio jack. This very well could be the nemesis of the new generation iPods.

A few posts back, I had written about the innovation wave and how I try to cope with it. I had just jumped from Nokia 6670 to the N-70 (not much of an upgrade anyway!) but technology just beats me to it. When Nokia terms their products 'high-performance multimedia devices' instead of just phones or even smartphones, I think they maybe right.

Get more details at the Nokia N95 site. For the more technologically inclined, the technical specifications are also available.

Free and legal music downloads from SpiralFrog

2006-08-30T04:18:00.000-07:00

In what could change the music industry since the launch of Apple's iTunes service, a startup company called SpiralFrog will offer music downloads for free. Supported by the vast catalogue of Universal Music which backs the service, this model hopes to make its revenue through advertisements. The users of the service will have to watch advertisements and the downloaded music will be copy protected to prevent being passed onto others. The advertisements will be a 90-second block which has to be watched before the content will be made available.

This move could be even more critical when the music and film industry is fighting a losing battle against piracy and illegal sharing through peer-to-peer networks. Almost every copy protection technology that has been employed recently has either landed the publisher in hot soup (Sony's DRM woes) or has been broken (FairUse4WM breaks Microsoft DRM).

Although not the first service of its kind to offer free content supported by advertising (Napster is already doing it and Kazaa is expected to follow suit shortly), SpiralFrog will offer actual music which can be stored on the user's computer, whereas Napster provides a streaming service, which can be heard only once. The likely option for Universal's cut would be a share of the advertising revenue generated through the service.Initially, the service will be available in the US and Canada, and may branch out to other regions depending on the success of the venture.

Web analytics revisited

2006-08-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

Just like research into customer behaviour is vital for all businesses, websites today cannot do without Web analytics. Simply put, Web Analytics is the collection and analysis of data on how users behave on a particular website. Web analytics can help you in deciding what users look for and see in a website, whether they are interested in staying on or decide to move on and so on.

After investing a lot of money, effort and time into building traffic to a website, it is really important to check your return on investment, and web analytics tools helps in doing that. Web analytics solutions can tell you which pages are the most popular on your site, what content users find more appealing and where they skip off to other destinations. They can also tell you which pages referred users to your site or what keywords in search engines led them to you.

Such kind of information is vital for webmasters and marketers because it helps them in tailoring their site content and design to cater to the needs of the users. When users find more relevant content during their next visit, they are sure to stick on. Besides, the solution can also tell you where users leave off, hinting at where your content or design needs modification to make them stay on.

There are lots of web analytics solutions in the market and depending on the features and benefits offered, the prices range from free to several thousands of dollars. I have been using Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) for sometime now, and I find it extremely useful, not to mention, it is free as well. Google Analytics has just been released for free sign-ups from the invitation-only mode and I would recommend getting an account to get started. It is extremely simple to use and gives you more information than most of us bloggers would need.

Web analytics solutions are not something that you can use just for the fun of it, it is something that is critical to measuring user behaviour metrics on your website. Anybody serious about developing a website as an online business or even as a hobby should definitely take a look into them. By creating more compelling content and improved design, you offer a better reason for users to visit your site again, which is a critical factor in deciding the success of the website.

How fast is your computer?

2006-08-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

No matter who you are or what you do, people are always complaining about how slow their computers are. We groan about how much time it takes for that spreadsheet to load or how jittery the graphics in that new videogame is. And that is after spending loads of money to get that blazing fast new processor and motherboard. When it comes to giga-hertz and giga-bytes, It seems we are simply obsessed with speed. Faster is always better.

That is why somebody who would say that all that processing power is maybe too much for us strikes you as somewhat odd. I have a friend who says just that. He thinks that we are simply being forced to upgrade to newer and faster hardware because of the evil nexus that exists between hardware vendors and software companies.

He might have a good case though. The latest operating system won't run with hardware that is now in the market, you would have to wait two more months for that to happen. Indeed, it might very well be the case that clueless consumers are being forced to upgrade to software that is by no means better, but definitely expensive and requires nothing less than a supercomputer to run on. But then, we have great visionaries like Bill Gates who made a software empire make statements like 640 K should be sufficient for anyone. Maybe he is seeing the glass half-empty. (To be fair to Mr. Gates, the authenticity of that quote has not been established beyond doubt.)

Consider what we have seen in the last decade in personal computing. To be more specific and really to the point, let us take computer games. Would you really believe that someone who was playing Dave in 1995 can play Halo 2 or FIFA 2006 now? (If you have actually played through all those games, you would get my point more easily.)

This revolution in the industry didn't happen because we sat tight with what we had. No, we decided to push the limits. When software was too demanding on the hardware, we made faster hardware. When we got better hardware, we wrote better code to take full advantage of its capabilities. This virtuous cycle is what drives innovation and indeed, the entire industry. It is not that we never seem to have enough, we just shouldn't. Maybe our obsession with speed isn't accidental, it very well could have been hardwired into us. So the next time you are wondering why that document is taking too long to open, you might be actually fueling innovation.

YouOS Web Operating System

2006-07-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

Seriously speaking, the title of this article is a bit misleading. YouOS is more like a bunch of useful apps put together that distantly resembles an operating system like Windows or Linux. Indeed, the application works on your browser, which itself requires another operating system to run. However, the idea is to have a virtual desktop that you can access from a Web enabled device, from anywhere around the world.

The system is in alpha testing, and what is more, it even comes with your own little shell for all that command-typing wizards out there. And as can be expected, 'ls' and 'mkdir' is about as advanced it gets. But what really impresses me is the idea behind it.

To actually have an operating system that runs on the Web is quite intriguing, something like even more personalised computing for people who are always on the go. We inevitably comes across a paradox in this situation though - how can you access an operating system that runs on the Web because don't you already require a Web browser to access the site? Hmm.

The idea is not that new, actually. In these very columns, I had toured another similar application - Goowy. It also had its own desktop, text editors and stuff and also a very attractive email system. What makes YouOS different is that it is done using AJAX instead of Flash, as Goowy is. Not that being done in AJAX itself merits more credit, it is just that I find the whole AJAX thing very interesting.

YouOS gives you the ability to write your own app for the system, and if you think that is not your cup of tea, you can install other apps from a nice little collection that you can browse within the system. You even get virtual sticky notes that you can set as reminders.

For sometime now, the idea of the Web based Operating System has been doing the rounds on the Web. Once we get around the paradox we mentioned before, maybe we will get to a real Web OS. Something like where the software for starting up the computer itself is received from a remote server, and all the usual operating system routines like IO, File and memory management is done by a remote service. I don't know if something like that exists already, forgive my ignorance if it does. Are the giants of the Web listening?

The Instant Messaging battle

2006-06-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

Consider this - how would it be if you could send an email only to another user on the same domain? Or you could call a subscriber on the same telephone network alone? Not many would welcome the idea, but that is how it is now with Instant Messaging.

Instant Messaging is a must-have tool in a world that runs on real-time. If you can't communicate now, better forget it. But all the big operators that provide IM services right now - MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail prefer to use proprietary standards and that means communicating within their own network and only that. So, even if you are a regular Yahoo! IM user but has a friend on MSN, one of you two would have to register with the other's service to communicate. Had the operators been charging for new registrations, you wouldn't quite fancy that option, would you?

Metcalfe's law (also referred to as the Network Effect) states that value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of users. What it essentially conveys is that the more the number of people using the same system, the better for everyone. You wouldn't need different softwares, different protocols and all the difficulties that come with them. Then why are they all still separate?

Of course there are numerous apps out there that can work with the different services, but still they are all running on different systems, and no standard has yet been defined. On the other hand, take IRC(Internet Relay Chat). Although now made obsolete by the more interactive and graphical substitutes offered by MSN, Yahoo and the like, IRC is an open system. Any user with an IRC client can connect to the server, and chat - it is as simple as that. It supports one of the basic tenets of the Internet that its founders dreamt of - accessibility. The more modern versions of IM do not. And that is a big problem.

If only the big IM services would just sit together and agree on a common standard, one which would work transparently and all the users in a single database, just imagine the value of the network as proposed by Metcalfe's law.

P.S: There are practical difficulties, of course, of uniting all these user bases into a single one, like overlapping usernames and database considerations, but technology has come so far, can't we work something out?

Picasa - A cool photo management software

2006-05-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

Picasa, the software that is available as a part of Google Pack, is a great piece of software for your image management requirements. As like all other Google services, it comes for free.

For starters, Picasa gives a simple point and click interface which requires minimal effort to master. You can lighten dark shots, apply color balance, crop and cut, zoom in or out. Other effects like sepia, black and white are also available, along with a red-eye removal feature. It can search for images on your hard drive, maintain a library that is easy to manage and find images effortlessly. It can save the finished images to the hard disk or burn it to a CD or DVD or upload it to the Net.

Give Picasa a try and you will not look at your photographs the same way again. Download now, it's free!

The new mobile web

2006-05-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

Accessing Internet and email on your mobile device is nothing new. However, from last week, businesses have been buying up .mobi domain names, which will indicate that the site is designed specifically for mobile devices, and therefore optimising performance in terms of speed and accessibility. The Internet regulatory authority ICANN had approved the concept almost a year back, but the domain names are available only recently.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, have shown clear dislike for the idea. In his argument, he has stated that the new top-level domain names (TLD) will fragment the web. Instead, he says, the content should be made smart to recognise what kind of device it is being viewed on, mobile or not.

The opposing group, the ones who are supporting .mobi domains are saying that the .mobi domains are intended to serve as a trust mark, which will assure users that the site will work on their mobile phone.

Source: BBC

The new managers of technology

2006-05-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

The importance of Technology Management as a course in business schools around the world have been growing over the years. Now there is even more good reason for that.

Deloitte, the management consultants, in their report titled "Eye to the Future — How Technology, Media and Telecommunications Advances Could Change the Way We Live in 2010", have concluded that technical skills will become crucial in plotting your way up the corporate ladder. As managers work in an increasingly complex world filled with complicated technology, their skill to make informed decisions will depend on their ability to understand the technology and how it will affect their business. The more technology oriented you are, the more your chances of making it big.

The report also looked into the issue of mobile and remote working and concluded that the number of employees with always-on mobile email is forecast to rise from the current millions to at least tens of millions by 2010.

The report states that by 2008, 41 million corporate employees globally may spend at least one day a week teleworking, and 100 million will work from home at least one day a month.

Source: ZDNet.co.uk

Riding the technology wave - Nokia 6670

2006-05-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

I am a techno freak, and I love gadgets - the newer, the better. Fortunately, I don't go by my desires everytime I see the new Blackberry or the Nokia N Series and that has kept me from going broke. Most of the features of the gadgets won't be either supported by my operator, or will cost me an arm and a leg for it. Instead, I try and ride the innovation wave. That way, I can stay just ahead of being totally obsolete and not end up paying a fortune for it. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.

That is why I got myself a Nokia 6670. I did quite some research on it before the purchase, both online and offline, and my experience with it is simply excellent. It has all the basic features that I need and I am quite satisfied with it. I opted for the model because I didn't want to spend a lot of money on an object that I could lose easily, get stolen easily or let go and break even more easily. But I didn't want to end up with a stone-age cell phone either. And I think I have succeeded in timing my purchase just right so that I can get my next gadget (not 'phone', your next 'phone' may not be a 'phone'. Says who? Says Nokia!) My point: The price may stagnate at the current level, giving no incentive to wait any longer and your phone's life is just enough to take you to the next wave.

Quantum encryption - The new security frontier

2006-04-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

What has Werner Heisenberg got to do with computer security? A lot, actually. Quantum encryption technology is maturing fast enough to replace the current encryption technologies employed in today's digital systems, and the best thing about this is that, it is theoretically unbreakable. The final frontier in security may not be too far.

We will go back to what Heisenberg has got to do with all of this. Werner Heisenberg, in 1927, discovered a very interesting property of elementary particles. Based on his experiments, he concluded that it was impossible to accurately measure the position and momentum of an elementary particle simultaneously. The key word is 'accurately'; you can predict either one accurately, but the other one would lend itself only with a degree of uncertainty. [Uncertainty principle]

Coming back to the normal world, current encryption technologies almost invariable use keys - public key encryption is the most preferred. However improbable breaking this security system may seem, with enough computing power on a parallel-processing system, it is possible to compromise the security by the classic "brute-force" attack.

Quantum encryption is immune to this because the photonic stream which carries the data is ruled by the Uncertianty principle and anyone trying to intercept the stream will alter the state of the photons in a way that it will be detected. Thus, in theory, it is impenetrable and can be proven mathematically.

Quantum encryption and NIST breakthrough

IBM joins the hardware encryption club

2006-04-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

Let us face it. The world we live in is not a very secure one. You are not safe, nor is your precious data. Everyone, from multinational corporations to ordinary citizens doing their banking on the Net is paranoid when it comes to data security. And maybe it is this paranoia that is getting the big computer makers out there to build more and more hardware with built-in security. Soon after Intel's announcement of LaGrande technology that integrates encryption into the central processing functions, IBM is following suit with its SecureBlue system.

According to CNN, IBM researchers are of the opinion that as long as the CPU, essentially the brain of the computer and the encryption engine are two different systems, hackers can get in between the two and cause enough harm or steal whatever data he needs. Intel's implementation uses something known as a Trust Platform Module (TPM) and Apple's new Intel-based PCs are rumoured to carry these (Read more).

Hardware security, then again, is only as good as the chip designers have made it. Unlike software which can be upgraded for bug fixes or updated to include more features and tighter security, hardware implementation is something only the designers know about and is essentially a black box. If we believe that it is truly secure, our security is only as strong as that belief.

One interesting point noted in the article is the comment of Bruce Schneier, founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., on the new security system: "Security is a chain and it's as strong as its weakest link. They're talking about taking a very strong link and making it a little bit stronger, at best. Maybe."

DRM and hardware security

2006-04-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

Did you just get a new Mac with an Intel chip inside or are you planning to get one soon? If so, you might find this article interesting.

I don't know a lot about how TPM (Trusted Platform Module) technology works, but if this article is even half right, you may think twice before getting that Mac.

The one thing in the article that caught my attention was the reference to the EFF's (Electronic Frontier Foundation) analysis of the Trusted Computing initiative, in which a significant portion of security implementations are based on hardware. (Read more about it here.)
It opens a very fundamental question - is hardware security really secure? Just consider the following hypothetical situations :

1. The hardware version has implementation errors - This is something very serious because it basically means you will have to throw out your whole hardware to ensure that it is secure. If the software had bugs or glitches, you can always replace it with an upgrade or a completely different system, much like changing the firmware of your cellphone. You would never even know this until you come up with something like what Intel faced with the Pentium FDIV bug. (And it wasn't pretty.)

2. The hardware vendor intentionally creates backdoors - This is an unlikely scenario, but far more dangerous than the previous one. While the former possibility would arise only when discovered by somebody accidentally and then find ways to misuse it, this option gives the vendor known pathways into the system. The possibilities of abuse are endless and I wouldn't even want to imagine what the vendor could do with such a kind of privilege.

I am no Mac expert and I wouldn't know RISC from CISC, but if the article is pointing to something really fishy, I would rather stay with my PC for now.

Apple in DRM soup

2006-03-28T18:56:00.000-08:00

Digital Rights Management (DRM) laws are still very much in their infancy today. This may be partly because laws just can't seem to keep pace with technology and partly because technology itself is in a state of constant flux. Apple's experience in France is a case in point.

The French Government has proposed a law that would force Apple to open up content from its online music store iTunes so that they can be played on any digital music player. Currently, songs downloaded from iTunes plays only on Apple's own hugely successful music player iPod.

The law would require DRM developers to reveal details of their technology to rivals that wish to build compatible systems. Apple uses FairPlay DRM in its iTune store and iPod players. The law could wreck Apple's current system since it can not control music on players other than iPod. Apple has reacted to the government's move by terming it "state-sponsored piracy".

Experst feel that Apple would be better off withdrawing the iTunes service from the French market completely than give in to the pressure and suffer. If Apple executives had been thinking of this strategy, their worries would have been compounded by news that Denmark will soon be following France in implementing similar legislation. If more countries decide that Apple is locking in customers by abusing its dominant position in the market and follow suit, the entire digital rights managment issue will come under intense scrutiny and companies and customers will soon be needing a universal yardstick to measure what is acceptable and what is not. Shutting down operations in every country that implements the legislation just doesn't seem to be a viable option for Apple right now.

Does IT matter?

2006-03-20T03:27:00.000-08:00

To say that we live in a world of technology would be to state the obvious. Technology pervades every aspect of our lives and transforms it. It influences everyone and everything - from individuals to giant multinational corporations. Technology is after all the means through which businesses deliver value to their customers. It even helps them build and sustain competitive advantage over competitors in a rapidly changing world. Or does it?

In his groundbreaking Harvard Business Review article, Nicholas Carr examined how technology and more specifically, information technology helped businesses build competitive advantage and sustain it in the long run. He argued that the costs of adopting the latest, state-of-the-art information technology was plummeting and this was in fact levelling the playing field for the smaller players, who were till now at a disadvantage. These smaller players, who couldn't afford the technologies that their bigger competitors enjoyed, no longer had to sit back and watch the game. They could also go in for the same, if not better, technology and compete with the Goliaths, and that the playing field was indeed levelled. He says that business can no longer seek to gain an edge based solely on the technology that they employ.

Let us examine this argument. It is indeed true that the cost of adopting the latest technologies in IT have fallen drastically from those of yesteryears. Processing cycles are much more abundant and a lot cheaper, storage even more so. Entire industries thrive on seeking to provide the best solutions at the lowest costs, and this competition has caused a huge acceleration in the diffusion of technology throughout businesses across the world. Concepts in Information Technology like Enterprise Resource Planning have enabled corporations ranging from the Fortune 500s to medium size businesses to integrate their business processes and cut through layers of bureaucracy, increasing efficiency and cutting response time to competition and the market. But that is that.

Even today, no business can dream of surviving, let alone beating the competition, without that necessary ingredient that we all like to preach about but seldom practice, intentionally or unintentionally - innovation. Innovation spawns new businesses, it keeps existing businesses afloat. Without it, your business is as good as dead. Like every other business aspect, innovation helps companies find new ways of better leveraging their existing IT systems, or even better, design entirely new ones. And in doing so, the company pushes itself ahead of the competition. Relentless, non-stop innovation can virtually keep the company there, but that would be too ideal a scenario.

Granted, Information Technology is only a tool that helps businesses deploy their resources at the right time and right place, against competition or in a new market. And as Carr argues, the competitive advantage that the company gains from adopting a new technology is perhaps short-lived. But in a dynamic global business environment, where markets appear and disappear in Internet time, that may be more than sufficient. IT does matter.

See both sides of the argument:

Does IT Matter?

IT Doesn't Matter

To link or not to link

2006-03-15T00:04:00.000-08:00

What makes the World Wide Web such an efficient medium for dispersing information is its non-linear organisation. Unlike a book that you read from one end to end, a web page contains hyperlinks that can transport you from page to page (or indeed, from site to site), thus giving the reader the control of what to read and what to skip. That is good for the reader; not that good for the publisher.

Granted, the quantity and the quality of the hyperlinks in a page is a key factor that determines the quality of the page as a whole. As a reader, you search for something on an engine, find a page and go there. You run through the first few paragraphs and finally find that what you exactly were looking for is not there. What do you do? Yes, you click. You find the nearest hyperlink that you think will lead you to nirvana and you dump the site, just like that.

Now see this from the publisher's perspective. He has been spending hard cash to get you to his site using all the tricks in the book - search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, referral programs and what not. He doesn't want you to leave the site that soon; not before you have taken a look or even better, clicked at some of his advertisers, or browse other articles which drives up his pageview stats, a valuable information he needs to sell more advertising.

Frankly, he doesn't want to put any external links at all on his site. But that is not how the Web is designed to work. If your reader doesn't find quality links, you can be hundred percent sure that she doesn't think it is worth visiting again. On the other hand, putting too many will increase the probability of driving away the reader even before the page has fully loaded.

The solution here, as it is for most things in life, is a trade-off. Keep those links that you think will provide value to the reader, and you can be sure that the reader will reciprocate the feeling by visiting again. Happy linking!

Spam and the CAPTCHA defence

2006-03-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

It is difficult to imagine e-mail without spam these days. The vast majority of the world's electronice mailboxes are haunted by it and an entire industry thrives on it. Companies and ISPs spend billions of dollars to fight it. Not only does it clog the networks due to the excessive traffic, but precious processor cycles and manhours are spent everyday to keep them off our inboxes. It is no wonder that another industry, the ones out to fight spam, is thriving as well. Spam is so much a part of our life that 'checking mail' means clearing up our mailboxes so that we don't lose out on genuine messages. So if everybody hates spam so much, what is being done to stop it?

Stopping Spam

The spam industry works on numbers, large numbers. This means that , say for every 100 e-mails that the spammer sends, his client gets one response. ( A 'response' here refers to a click on a link which either promises you a debt-free life or the woman of your dreams or eternal youth, or whatever.) To get 10,000 responses out of which only 10 may give any returns, he has to send a million emails. It is quite clear that sending that many emails is simply beyond anyone. The solution - automation. A software program, similar to a bulk mailer, is programmed to send out the message to a database of addresses the spammer has harvested from the Web or bought from another spammer. This is where the CAPTCHA defence comes in.

CAPTCHA, which stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart' tries to identify if the entity trying to send an email or make a blog post is human or just a robot. It supplies that entity with a graphic, such as the one shown below and challenges it to enter the characters shown in the graphic in a textbox.

If there is a match, the entity is assumed to be a human and the email message goes through or the blog gets published and so on.

CAPTCHA broken

The main problem with CAPTCHA is that it is just a computer program trying to beat another computer program, namely the spambot. CAPTCHA will win as long as the spambot is dumb enough that it can't recognise the characters. But it loses the moment the spambot begins to think like the CAPTCHA program.

How does the spambot 'think' like a CAPTCHA? It is quite simple. Since it knows that there is a valid character sequence in the graphic and it was generated by a computer program albeit distorted and deformed, enough combinations and permutations of the graphic will definitely yield the original sequence. And that is exactly how CAPTCHA is broken. By identifying and learning the distortion patterns of the CAPTCHA program, the spambot is turning the tables around.

A few interesting links:

The CAPTCHA project

Breaking a Visual CAPTCHA

PWNtcha - captcha decoder

VoSky - The Skype enhancer

2006-02-22T18:59:00.000-08:00

Everyone has heard of VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol, the technology that lets users make cheap phone calls over the Internet. Chances are everyone have heard about Skype too, the program that allows users to make online calls to other users, now owned by eBay. Put two and two together and you can probably use Skype to make calls over the Internet to conventional phonelines, fixed and mobile. And that is exactly what the VoSky Call Centre does.

The Call Center comes for around $70. You can attach an ordinary fixed line phone and use it to make calls to regular phones over the Internet at a reduced rate, made possible by the SkypeOut service. You can always make free calls to other Skype users anyway.

It also lets you forward incoming Skype calls to your landline or mobile phone and even lets you know when another Skype user is online by ringing your phone. The Call Center connects to the USB port of the PC, meaning no external power source is required. The only people who will not be too happy about this technology is your phone company. Say goodbye to long distance phone bills.

The Million Dollar Homepage

2006-02-21T06:10:00.000-08:00

What would you do if your debts are way too high and you are so poor that you don't even have a good pair of socks? If you are Alex Tew, you would start a million dollar homepage. And make a cool million dollars in four months!

How can I become a millionare?

That is what Alex asked himself when his finances were really bad, even to the point that his pair of socks was not decent enough. He got out a notepad and started thinking of a way to get out of the misery. Twenty minutes later, he had an idea. He would sell pixels.

For the uninitiated, pixels stand for 'picture elements', those tiny dots that make up your computer display. In most Internet advertising, pixels are sold in bulk, like banners or skyscrapers. The very idea of selling individual pixel was what made this different from the rest.

That very night, he registered the domain milliondollarhomepage.com and started working on the project. The minimum purchase was for $100, which will give the buyer 100 pixels in a 10 X 10 space. Clicking on that space will take you to the advertiser's page.

With the $1000 that he raised from friends and family, he bought some publicity to his site. With every new visitor, the word about the new idea spread and the whole thing snowballed until he was able to raise his target within a short period of 4 months.

Besides making Alex Tew a millionaire, the site also spawned an entire industry of pixel selling sites. Many copycat clones with similar domain names have been registered, and what is more, you can even get a basic pixel selling kit for a few dollars.

For 20 minutes of thinking and 4 months to project completion of getting a million dollars, that is not bad, Alex, not bad at all.

The first anniversary

2006-02-14T05:22:00.000-08:00

One year is not that long a period. However, in Internet time, it is eternity. And that is exactly how long this blog has been around. Wandering in Elysium is one year old today!

I didn't start off the blog as something that I would regularly update and maintain (and it hasn't been, I am afraid!). But then again, as all of you know, a blog is a precious little thing that you hold close to to your heart once you start one. Same is the case here. Completing one year is not a great achievement; but completing one year after it had been entirely deleted is something (Recovering deleted blogs).

I would like to thank all those nice people who happened to stumble across this blog and read a line or two and found it worthwhile. If any of my posts made you sit back and think about technology and how it affects our everyday lives, the purpose of this weblog has been served. I hope to write more frequently from now on, and hopefully, the writing shall get better as well. Wish me luck!

The Google Bomb lives on

2006-02-08T05:10:00.000-08:00

Almost everyone reading this post would know what Google is and why it is the top search engine on the Web today. Type in a few words and you are guaranteed to find the most relevant website pertaining to that topic. Well, almost.

The set of algorithms that makes this possible is hailed as revolutionary in how it makes sense of the structure of the Web. The major innovation Google brought into Web search was the computation of value of a web-page on the basis of how many pages link to it, among many other things. This means that if page A links to page B, page B's value goes up; how much, depends on the value of page A itself. The algorithm is a work of genius. (On hindsight, it looks obvious enough; true genius always does.) But, like all software, it has loopholes.

The anatomy of a Google Bomb

As mentioned before, Google computes the value it assigns to page X on the basis of a number of factors, an important one being the number of pages linking to it and their respective values. However, it also does one more thing - it also notes the anchor text of that link and associates it with that page. That means if enough pages link to one particular site with the same text in its anchor, that word/phrase will be associated with the target site. That is exactly what a Google Bomb is.

Yes, that is right. The Google algorithm is not safe from attack. However, I will say that it is the more immune than others to the so-called black-hat techniques. Still don't believe me?Try searching for 'liar' or 'miserable failure' on Google and you will be surprised by what you find as the first search result.

This was done by a few Net-activists who set up enough pages with the above word/phrase as the anchor text and pointed it to the target site. (However, doing it on the same page won't give the desired result. You might even be black-listed by the Googlebot for spamming!)

It was first said that the Google Bomb was not a serious threat to the integrity of its search results. The temporal variables that Google has in its algorithm would defuse the bomb over a period of time, or after a couple of re-indexing. However, the 'miserable failure' search has been yielding the same first result for quite some time now. Maybe the Blogosphere is way too strong for Google to handle after all.

Read more - a few interesting links.

The Google Bomb
Google acknowledges the Google Bomb

The copyright debate

2006-02-01T19:13:00.000-08:00

As like most of their other offerings, Google News is a great utility for Net users to stay updated on the world around them. Unlike Yahoo and others who offer similar services, Google News is completely automated - the Googlebots scour the Web and deliver the cream, all at one easy to access location. But that may end soon if some newspaper websites can prove that they have been wronged.

The World Association of Newspapers have brought a suit against Google, claiming copyright infringement. They argue that Google is using their content- headlines, stories, even photographs, in its own website and they are suffering as a result. Let us examine that argument.

If you have used Google News, you would know that it is categorised into sections like sports, business, science and technology, etc. Once a category is selected, news snippets from various websites are shown, one after the other. The point to be noted is that the whole content is not displayed; instead, a link to the original website is given. If a particular item catches your attention, you click that link and read the whole thing on that website.

Another important thing is that Google News does not carry advertisements. (Not yet, anyway.) Apparently, Google is not getting any benefit from this service and it doesn't pass off the content as its own either. It even links to the original websites. Personally, as a regular user of Google News, I have visited hundreds of websites that I would otherwise never had. I fail to see the rationale behind this lawsuit brought forward by these websites which raises the issue of copyright in a manner that seems to beat their cause rather than help it. Talk about cutting your own leg with your axe.

Backup your posts

2006-01-18T04:53:00.000-08:00

Back up all your data, regularly. That is the first law for any prudent computer user. Virus attacks, hard disk crashes and simple human errors all gobble up your precious bytes in no time. And it is no different for a blogger. In a world where easy-to-use interfaces allows you to dump all your valuable posts to oblivion in a split-second, it is all the more true.

So how do you backup your blog posts? That would mainly depend on the blog you are using. I will describe a very simple method to backup your posts in one single file from Blogger, and things shouldn't be very different for others as well.

As you might know, every blog on Blogger has a unique ID. First, find out yours. Then, type in the URL : https://www.blogger.com/atom/xx, replacing xx with your ID. You might be prompted for your Blogger username and password. Enter it and you will get all your posts in that blog, in one single XML file. Save it to your harddisk or CD and you can be assured that next time you need it, you can safely find it there. Do this on a regular basis and you will never lose another post. (And yes, I did say that it was a very simple method.)

Other blogs offering RSS, XML or Atom feeds will most probably have a similar option as well. Play around with your feed to find them. Any feedback in the comments section will be greatly appreciated.

The technology paradox and innovation wave

2006-01-11T06:23:00.000-08:00

The story is a familiar one. You wish to own the latest, most advanced mobile phone (or notebook computer or digital camera) and you pick your brand and spend those hard-earned cash to get the gadget of your dreams. You get home and see the newspaper lying on the floor. You stoop down to get it and guess what you see - an ad for a better model of the gadget that you still haven't unpacked, and at a lesser price!

The rate at which technology advances is mind boggling. It is amazing that the so-called Moore's law still holds to such a large extent, even after so many years have passed. Not only does the computing power expand exponentially, the cost comes down drastically too. And that is what haunts the mind of anybody wanting to buy the coolest gadget in town. Because as soon as you buy it and get home, it is no longer cool, and certainly more expensive than the latest model.

But what is the solution to this paradox? You obviously can't put off buying a computer that you need badly forever. I should know, I have been wanting to get a notebook computer for some time now. Everyday I scan the newspapers and see a better model at the same price or the same model at a lower price. Enter, the innovation wave.

Innovation wave

"Always remember that someone, somewhere is making a product that will make your product obsolete. " - Georges Doriot

Innovation wave is a term that vaguely describes the advancement of technology in terms of conceptualisation to actual product realisation. An innovation wave starts with a disruptive technology, something that is totally new that it suddenly makes the preceding technology totally obsolete immediately. An example would be how the advent of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) made command prompts obsolete. A person who adopts the technology at the very start of it would stand to gain the maximum from it, although the cost may be higher at the initial stages. But if you wait for the cost to come down, you may buy it at a lower rate, but another technology would have made what you bought even more obsolete. So you end up with an inferior product although at a lower cost. The person who adopts the technology at the middle stages of its life gets a trade-off between cost and the utility - it will not be state-of-the-art nor obsolete, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg either. It all depends on what matters to you more - the cost or the performance/utility.

Thinking about buying a notebook computer is a similar issue. The best ones will definitely burn a hole in your pocket, and you always run the risk of being obsolete when a better technology comes along. So looking at how the industry has been progressing on the technology and economy front, it would be a wise choice to wait for a while when the cost comes down. But wait too long, and you risk becoming obsolete. Other questions like the validity of Moore's law in the future comes into play, with the possibility of packing transistors even more densely pushing the physical limits. Maybe another wave of innovation like nanotechnology or quantum computing is just around the corner. And maybe, just maybe, that sleek new notebook that you are flaunting right now at your neighbour has just been made obsolete.

Google to offer video downloads

2006-01-07T06:23:00.000-08:00

Television may well be on its way out. Google has announced that it will offer video downloads, not unlike Apple's hugely popular iTunes online store, which offers paid music and video downloads to users. Video downloads are very popular on the Net, although most of the traffic is allegedly illegal using peer to peer file transfer software like the Gnutella and Kazaa networks.

Convergence advocates have known it all along. With broadband becoming increasingly popular around the world, the role of television will be taken over by the PC, even when the mobile handsets get smarter everyday. Google will offer content from hits like "Survivor","I love Lucy" and "The Brady Bunch". The service will be known as Google Video Store.

The move comes in the wake of Yahoo announcing its own video offering, Yahoo! Go TV. The new service allows users to take content from their personal computer or from the web and extend it onto the biggest screen in their home, according to businesswire.com.

Questions and answers

2006-01-03T04:52:00.000-08:00

The Web has changed the way people store, retrieve and use information. With an entire generation growing up believing that Google has answers to all your questions, it is not that hard to get the idea that any information we need is available on the Internet. The tough part is finding it.

Yes, web search is not the most difficiult thing to do when you are searching for 'general theory of relativity' or 'iPod'. However, when you are searching for concepts that are hard to put down in a couple of words, you hit the brick wall of irrelevant results.

This is because all current search engines work on the principle of keywords. The keyword based search system implicitly assumes that the user knows enough about what he is looking for, and only then can she find a relevant webpage. I emphasise on the point that we are not talking about simple factual queries like the 'capital of Finland', which will yield the correct answer in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. Instead, imagine you are researching on the problems that a traditional media company will face in the next few decades. Depending on your luck and the keywords that you choose to search the Web, your results may range anywhere from mediocre to average. Unless, of course, you have done some lateral thinking.

The lateral thinking I mentioned is not exactly the Edward de Bono variety, you really don't need to go that far. It is indeed much simple. If you got what you are looking for with the exact keyword of the stated problem - 'problems faced by traditional media company in the future', well done. However, in the more likely scenario that you did not, consider stating the problem in a different way. Try using synonyms of the different words in your search query, mixing and matching them and see if your quality of results improve. In fact, to be more succesful, imagine yourself as an online webmaster or publisher writing an article on the topic and use the words that you would use in your article as the keywords. Chances are you will get to the relevant results much sooner.

Search engine technology have come a long way and already some of them provide answer to basic questions. However, their semantic and syntactic abilities are much limited at the moment, but improvements in artificial intelligence will see much clever search agents ready with answers to more complicated questions in the near future. Until then though, we will have to contend ourselves with keyword tweaking and trial- and- error searching before that elusive page answering all your doubts can be found. As Peter Drucker once said, a great consultant is one who asks the right questions.

Europe launches own GPS system

2005-12-29T02:36:00.000-08:00

The European Union has launched the first satellite in its mission to build a GPS (Global Positioning System) of its own, rivalling the existing system offered by the US Military. Named Galileo, the new system will offer more precise navigation with an accuracy of upto one yard, beating the US system which offers only a five yard precision. The system is slated to be operational by 2008.

Other than the technical improvements that it offers, Galileo will offer the European Union an independent navigational system of its own, and unlike the US system, it will be more open to civilian uses. The system was developed in co-operation with China, Israel and Ukraine, and more countries including India, South Korea, Norway and Argentina are expected to participate in the future.

The current GPS system is controlled by the United States, which had recently warned that it would cut off or deny access to countries considered enemies in times of national emergency. The EU said that Galileo will be available at all times except in the case of "direst emergency." What qualifies to be one is left to the imagination.

The launch of Galileo comes at a time when Russia is moving forward with a positioning system of its own known as GLONASS. They have already put three satellites into orbit, and their system is due to be operational by 2010.

Read more on the Galileo program.

Amazon jumps into Web Search battle

2005-12-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

"If you think about it, when you shop online, you're really searching for whatever you want to buy. What would happen if people went to Google or Yahoo instead of to Amazon every time they were looking to buy something on the Web? That thought must scare the bejeezus out of Bezos."
- Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0

Not a bad piece of observation at all. With Microsoft and Yahoo battling it out to beat Google's domination of the Web Search market, you would think the party is hot enough already. But throw in another Internet heavy-weight, Amazon, and you can expect some fireworks. After all, when people are looking for things to buy on the Internet, going to Google or Yahoo is only a natural thing to do. That will be a good thing for online shops like Amazon, or eBay for that matter when the user sees these sites listed in the top search results. But when they don't, things do look a bit bleak for likes of Jeff Bezos and Meg Whitman and co.

Amazon has unleashed Alexa Web Crawler to the public, which runs on A9 search technology which powers the searches on Amazon. Besides trying to become a major search engine on its own, the opening up of the technology to programmers may see the spawning of many smaller search engines, which may cut into the biggies like Google and Yahoo. And guess what, all of these engines will be using Amazon's database for generating results? I don't think that will hurt Amazon's interests one bit. Smart move, Jeff.

Creative attacks iPod kingdom

2005-12-19T03:36:00.000-08:00

It is kind of hard for a marketer when your competition defines the market; when their brand is synonymous with the product name. And Apple's iPod is definitely synonymous with portable digital music players around the world, much like Google is for Web search. And that is exactly the predicament that Creative Technology faces when they launch their own 30 GB version of Apple's dream machine, with almost the exact same specifications.

The Creative 30 GB Zen Vision:M is almost an exact replica of iPod, and has almost the same user interface. It also features a 2.5 inch screen at 320 * 240 resolution. It is also slightly larger and heavier than iPod too, hinting that Creative has not been able to replicate Apple's finesse. It also will make your wallet lighter to the tune of $30, with a price of $329 against Apple's $299. Frankly, I don't know why someone will buy the Creative machine, when it is bigger and heavier and even costs more.

Lawsuits against illegal file sharing

2005-12-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

Relentlessly waging its battle against music piracy on the Net, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed hundreds of lawsuits against users who have been allegedly downloading pirated music from the Internet. The move comes as RIAA steps up its efforts to curb music piracy which has been consistently draining the industry of billions of dollars in lost revenue.

The defendants, the RIAA claims, had been using popular peer to peer file sharing networks such as Kaaza and Gnutella to download music from the Internet. These networks work in a very simple way - Anybody who has bought a music CD can "rip" it and convert the songs into MP3 format and put them in a folder which can be shared using programs like Bearshare or Limewire. Other users in the network can easily search for the song and download it from this user, who in turn can access the files shared by other users. Anybody can share a single song which becomes accessible to everyone else, and the potential size of the library will be enormous. However, copyright laws in many countries forbid such practices explicitly and some even consider it a criminal offence.

The defendants in the latest batch of suits include students at the University of Southern California and Drexel University, the Boston Herald reports. University students are believed to be active users of the file sharing networks targeted by RIAA.

Yahoo Mail Beta - Where is it?

2005-12-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

It has been really a long time since Yahoo announced that it will be rolling out its beefed up version of web-based email. When I first checked their sign up page where you can submit your email address to be invited to try the program as a beta tester, they said that it was being offered to US users only. A few weeks have passed since that and when I checked it again, it is still the same thing.

Google offered its Gmail as an alternative to Yahoo and Hotmail and I don't know how successful they have been in whisking away users from these services. One thing I know for sure is that I have found it quite useful, although sometimes the site is awfully slow to respond and even times out at times. I don't care much for their thread-type email 'conversations', but a lot of people apparently like it. I use their POP services frequently and it is the one of the few free and reliable services out there.

Yahoo, apparently, needed to respond fast to the Gmail threat and did. They expanded the storage to 1 GB too. (Gmail went one step ahead, and is offering 'infinite storage space', which grows everyday, all the time. Just check their home page.) Their Beta offering is rumoured to look like Microsoft's Outlook email client, with drag and drop functionality and quick preview and everything else. As someone said (I don't remember who), Yahoo's mail service is designed to look like an email client that nobody should be using in the first place. So Yahoo's service better be really good if it intends to fight off Gmail's persistent attempt to siphon off its userbase.

The Web and open standards

2005-12-03T22:36:00.000-08:00

“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

The great thing about great men is that they are able to see and foretell something that becomes obvious to the rest of us only after a few years or decades. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the WWW, predicted the potential danger that open standards faced from proprietary technologies and we can see it today on some web-sites that proclaim their loyalty to one or two browsers and send the rest away, just like that.

One of the most important factors that made the Web so popular is the universal accessibility that it provided to the users. Regardless of the hardware or software they were using, they could easily access the information without worrying about the operating system, network platform, software versions or whatever. And now, the Web is being threatened by one or two browsers that obviously can't accept the beauty of the system and want to dominate the WWW with their own proprietary technologies. What is even worse is that webmasters and page designers actively encourage this trend just to make their site a bit more flashy than the rest by discouraging other browsers which are far more efficient and HTML standards compliant.

I am glad to mention a site, Viewable with Any Browser Campaign, which is fighting this and I suggest you take a look there too. And speaking of better browsers, see this article, Browser war heats up with Mozila 1.5 which speaks of the Mozilla foundation's effort to break the browser dominance on the WWW.

P.S.: I personally use Mozilla and Opera web browsers because they are definitely more faster, secure and respect the HTML guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Don't count out Microsoft yet

2005-11-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has never been known as an innovator. They didn't make the first operating system for the PC. Neither did they bring in the graphic user interface (GUI) concept - along with Apple, they took the idea from Xerox. Yet, the market share of their operating system on the world's PCs is simply absolute. Their Web browser is technically one of the poorest out there, riddled with obscene security holes and buggy programming. Still they hold an unbelievable market share, fighting it out against Mozilla, Opera and others, which are far more superior when it comes to performance. They didn't bring out the concept of gaming consoles, but their new Xbox is slated to beat Sony's Playstation to the No. 1 position. So what keeps them going?

The Redmond giant may not be a breeding ground for new ideas and inventions that have transformed the way how we work and play, and indeed live. But when it comes to playing catch-up and beating the leader, they are second to none. Only Apple can make similar claims (with their user interface, MP3 players and so on, which they didn't pioneer but are the current market leaders), but Apple is indeed thought of as one of the more creative companies out there.

Microsoft, over the years, and with the help of its Windows platform, bulldozed into the computing industry and has retained that lead ever since. They have not been entirely successful in plotting the industry curve and almost blew their chances when they missed the Internet bandwagon. But resilient as ever, they fought their way back into the Web by riding on the browser software they had been bundling with Windows. They crushed Netscape and almost got split up in the process by inviting the wrath of the US Anti-trust laws.

The Web today is dominated by Google and Yahoo when it comes to search and content, respectively. However, both of these giants are battling out for becoming the largest Web service provider. Conventional computing standards and systems are being increasingly replaced by Web services. Microsoft has finally decided to jump into the arena and flex its muscles with Windows Live, available at www.live.com and Start at www.start.com.

Some people have already written off Microsoft from the race, and have declared it a final battle between Google and Yahoo. But from what we know of Microsoft, they might be in the game just yet.

Website tracking - The Google Way

2005-11-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

If you are a web publisher and you don't have access to data like who is viewing your site and how actively have they been following it, there is good news. Google, adding to its ever-growing portfolio of Web services, is offering Google Analytics. And like everything else from Google, it is free.

Google Analytics is based on Urchin, which was acquired by Google sometime back. Urchin offered its customers access to web-site statistics and user information which would help webmasters and publishers determine who is doing what on their web-site. Urchin offered its services for fee, while Google is offering it for free.

Well, it is free if your web-site has less than 20 million page-views, and if you are a blogger, you should most probably fall in that category. Analytics also comes fully integrated with Adwords, the Google advertiser program.

How to use Google Analytics

Anybody with a Google account can access the Analytics after agreeing to the terms of service. Once you are logged in, you can setup profiles for the different websites you want to track. Once you are done, you will be provided with some lines of Javascript code to be inserted in your pages that you want to be tracked, and that is it. If you are a blogger, insert the code into your blog template, and it will be automatically inserted in every page of the blog.

There are quite a number of options available in Analytics and frankly, I haven't figured them out yet. But I was amazed by the sheer amount of data that a webmaster can collect from a simple page-view. There are a lot of options available and it seems to be a goldmine of information.

There is only one problem though. By Google's usual standards, the site seems to be pretty slow. Browsing around takes quite a while, and the next page takes forever to load. However, to be fair, the interface is quite user-friendly and there is quite a lot of information to be presented in the first place. Maybe these are operational issues and will be sorted out soon.

So, Google has begun to flux its muscles in its fight to retain publishers with its Adsense program. I wonder if Yahoo is watching this.

The Undelete My Blog Project (UMBP)

2005-11-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

If you have read my previous post, Recovering deleted blogs, you would already know that I had deleted this blog on accident a few days ago. However, I didn't want to let my posts go into oblivion just like that and I managed to get all the posts back. Going through that experience taught me that there weren't too many resources out there to help a blogger out of this predicament. To take on the challenge, The Undelete My Blog Project (UMBP), was born.

The Project intends to be a resource site dedicated to helping bloggers in need. It will offer my very limited knowledge on the subject, but even better, the collective wisdom of all our blogger friends. The blog has just started, but I would definitely welcome any inputs and suggestions that you have on the topic. All helpful suggestions and recommendations will be duly acknowledged. And one more thing. The 'Me' in UMBP refers to all those bloggers who need help in undeleting or recovering their blog. Not just me. :)

Recovering deleted blogs

2005-11-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

The other day, the most terrible thing happened. I was messing around with the Blogger interface, and before I knew it, I had deleted my blog. This blog. Yes, 'Wandering in Elysium' had vanished into thin air.

I was horrified. Shocked. Down in the dumps. Call it what you may, it wasn't a great feeling.

I fumbled around in the site, searching for ways to recover the blog or some magic button which will bring everything back to life. Alas, there was none.

I refused to give up. Then, a thought struck me. I summoned up a couple of search engines and entered a few keywords from my blog and I scanned the results for references to my blog. And there, near the links to the blog address, I clicked on the 'Cached' link. Gotcha!

It took some time, but I had done it. With some meticulous searching and formatting, I had recreated my entire blog, right from scratch. Couple of blog tools like IceRocket also helped me out in ordering the content as in the original one. The only sad thing was that all the comments posted on my blog were gone for good. But still, this is better than being 404'd!

P.S: For people who didn't quite get a grip on what happened till now, here is what happened. The major search engines on the Web keep a local copy of all the pages they have visited in an archive, and this is what they call 'cached copy'. That means that you can still search for content on the engine and find pages that have been removed from original locations, even months after that has happened. Of course, they should have been spidered by the search engine first.

What I did was extract the cached copy from the search engine and recreate my blog, right from the very first post. Do leave me a comment and contact info if you need any help on how I did this. It is pretty simple actually, but I will be only glad to help out a fellow blogger in need. :)

Google and Yahoo - The clash of the titans

2005-10-29T06:26:00.000-07:00

Google is the world's most popular search engine. Yahoo is arguably the world's best portal. And both of these giants of the Web are entering into a battle for supremacy. It is going to be one long struggle.

Yahoo, the oldest of the two (and even then only about ten years old!), started out as a bunch of links to some good sites on the then, sparsely populated Web. Over time, it has become a one-stop shop for the net surfer, offering everything from mail and chat to finance and search. The user-base of the portal is very strong, and growing every day.

Google started out as a project by two Stanford University students. Designed to make sense of the Web using an algorithm of link structures of the pages on the Web, Google provided the searcher with more accurate results than conventional search engines, and its popularity soared in a couple of years to make it the most popular search engine.

Google's efforts to build on its loyal users and convert them into an active user-base with huge potential for revenue generation is only the natural thing for them to do. After all, they have one of the strongest brands in the world and what good is all that brand equity if you can't make some money out of it? Google has been offering advertising solutions to marketers who will be only too happy to pay Google for showing their links near to the search results. Also, using its context-sensitive advertising, Google is even making money out of content of other publishers.

That is all very good, but is Google trying to do too many things at the same time? Gmail, their free e-mail service, is still in Beta stage, and users aren't too sure when it will be final. Google's homepage, which was a clear white screen with a searchbox and a couple of buttons a few years ago is turning into a collection of links to the many services it offers. It is okay for now, but if the trend continues, it won't be soon before the Google home-page will be looking more and more like Yahoo's. Yahoo, on the other hand, is much more experienced in content management and portal design than Google, and the number of visits to their different services everyday proves it.

Granted, Google's services have been delivering, but aren't they really straying a bit too far from their core competency - search? Google is what it is now because of its excellent search engine, and nothing else. Shouldn't they be rather trying to improve the quality of their search results than to give users what they can already get from other sites? After all, the mantra of survival on the WWW is differentiation. If you are just like the rest, who needs you anyway?

Biometric protection for mobile phones

2005-10-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

If you have ever been worried about your mobile phones being stolen in the airport or in the train, fear no more. Finnish scientists have developed technology that will curb the theft of mobile phones which are "smart" enough to know the user by the way he walks, or the gait. They claim an identification rate of over 90 percent, which will improve over time.

The technology works like this: sensors in the phone continuously monitors the gait of the user and compares it with stored values, on a variety of parameters from your speed of walking to how your body swings, and many others. If the phone sees any difference in the monitored data and stored data, it immediately locks up and can be unlocked only by a password.

This is to discourage steal theft in the hope that thieves will be unable to bypass the system, which is essentially biometric in nature and theoretically non-mimicable. However, the system may be triggered when you change your shoes or something else which may change the way you walk. The technology has been patented and is expected to be commercialised in a variety of mobile phones, PDAs and notebooks. Thieves beware - the phone may actually ring up the police and let them know that it has been stolen, and more importantly, where you are right now.

Geolocation : The new tool in Internet Marketing

2005-10-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

If you thought that you were anonymous on the Internet, think again. Your IP address (the unique ID of any device connected to the Net) and your browser (Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc.) gives the server or anyone interested, enough information about your geographic location, timezone, operating system on your PC, browser configuration, etc. that can be used to identify you as a unique visitor with specific preferences and characteristics. This can be used to target you with specific marketing tools on the Web.

Using geolocation (also known as geotargeting), advertisements can be delivered for users who visit the page from a specific geographic location. For example, a New York computer store can display ads to users from New York alone, thereby filtering out prospects who are more likely to become customers, and thereby incur a lower rate on ads displayed. The users also will get locale-specific advertisements, which is basically information on purchases he is potentially interested in.

Geolocation can also help in redirecting visitors to sites with localcontent automatically, as Google does in its homepage, for instance. A visitor from India typing in 'google.com' will first be taken to 'google.co.in' automatically.

Geolocation services basically work by looking up the country against which the IP address of the visiting user is registered and uses this information for providing localised content or delivering locale-specific advertisements or whatever. The possibilities of using technologies like geolocation and IP mapping to Internet marketing are endless.

However, technical measures to ensure anonymity such as proxy servers can be used to circumvent restrictions imposed by geolocation/geotargeting software.

Refer Geolocation by IP address for more technical information about the subject.

P.S: The script used in this page to identify your location is provided by Geobytes. (I am sorry if your location was not detected correctly by the script; it was alright when I checked from a few places.)

P.P.S: I have removed the script that 'geolocates' your location since my current blog post has changed. There are a lot of GeoLocation services like Geobytes.com and ip2location.com that provides these services. Most of them are paid, and some are free.

Free email: With Flash?

2005-10-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

Oh, not another one, you say. Well, this one is quite different. It even has a radically different name. How does Goowy sound to you?

Tired of boring old emails? Need a new look to your inbox? You got it.

The guys who gave us Geocities ( for the uninitiated, Geocities were one of the pioneers of free Web space) are responsible for bringing out Goowy. Now in Beta stage, Goowy already offers free accounts at its home page and I strongly suggest that you get one for yourself and try it now.

Probably the first webmail application built on Flash, Goowy offers an exciting new look to the way you look at your mails. Interactive menus and sound, online calendar and a contact manager all add up to this new Web experience. However, the site recommends a broadband connection on a reasonably fast computer for the best experience. People with dial-up connections need not worry, there is also a lite version, but it naturally will not give you the best.

Macromedia, the guys who made Flash technology, have officially recognised Goowy through a whitepaper they released, on the future of Flash.

Designed to take the boredom out of Web email, Goowy does just that. Providing the ease of use of a conventional desktop email client like Outlook Express, Goowy is anything but conventional.

The service, like Gmail, is in Beta stage. That is the stage where the developers release the product for user testing and it means that the final product will be even better. So we can expect a lot more from Goowy. The only thing I am wondering is how did they come to that name anyway?

iPod nano - Small and beautiful!

2005-09-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

Apple has did it again. iPod Nano - their brand new version of this ultra-cool and hip MP3 player is breath-taking! And they don't call it 'Nano' for no reason. Take a look and you will know what I mean.

At an amazingly impossible dimension of 9 x 4 x 0.69 cm and weighing just 42g, the iPod nano comes in 2 GB and 4 GB models. That comes to around 500/1000 songs, with a battery recharge that will last about 14 hours of music playback, as Apple claims.

The most interesting fact about the iPod nano is that it is meant to replace the iPod Mini. Go to the Apple site and you won't find a single trace of the Mini anywhere, it has simply vanished into thin air. Or rather, has been eaten up by the Nano. It gets even more interesting when you consider the fact that the Mini is one of the most successful music players around. Apple has really taken a bold step to replace the Mini with the Nano. How it will fare with the market is something that remains to be seen.

At the heart of the matter, the Nano is more expensive than the Mini when you consider the price per Gigabyte of storage. A 6 GB Mini would have cost you about $250 whereas the 4 GB Nano costs about the same. It is possibly because of the change in technology. The Mini used a hard-drive for storage, whereas the Nano uses flash memory. That would probably also explain the razor like thickness (or rather, thinness) that it has managed to achieve.

However, the Nano does look a bit flimsy in the photographs ( I haven't seen a real one yet!) and it is hard to tell how easy would the ClickWheel to use. I hope that Apple's obsession for attaining nano dimensions for the prodcut hasn't forced it to make a ClickWheel too big for the user's thumb.

Apple has indeed taken a bold move in taking the Mini off its shelves and putting the Nano in its place and the fact that the Mini accounts for more than half of all iPods sold. Wit the Nano, Apple has stuck to its tradition of pushing technology and customer imagination to the limits. We just hope thinking differently hasn't been a just too different this time! All the best, Apple!

The new face of the Virus : Digital Evolution - Has it begun?

2005-09-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

Sit back and look at your mobile phone for just a second. Ah, you say, just another phone. Okay, maybe a scheduler too. A mega-pixel camera. An MP3 player. E-mail client. Web browser. Geez, it is almost like my PC, only smaller and also mobile. In fact, it is so much like your PC that it comes with a built-in Anti-virus program, to keep all your digital information intact from invasion and corruption.

That's no news, I know it already, you say. Surprise, suprise, there's more! Cardtrap.A, a Trojan horse that infects Symbian operated mobile phones is the first reported mailcious software that can "jump over" from the mobile phone to the PC. The Trojan first writes itself onto the memory card of the phone that it has infected by posing as a pirated mobile phone game. When the user connects the card to the PC and clicks on an innocent looking file, lo and behold! the virus infects the PC and tries to spread further through the network. On some systems, the Trojan propagates using the Auto-run feature in some systems.

This Trojan is not a particularly bright one, it doesn't do any damage unless some unwitting user clicks on the file. But the implications are significant. What if a new Trojan acted more like a worm on a PC, actively searching for victim computers on the network, rather than waiting for user interaction? It would, then, be able to infect both PCs and any connected phones as well, and would spread like wildfire.

We have heard of pig viruses capable of infecting humans and more recently, the bird flu virus crossing over to humans and so on. The virus mutates and infects the new species and causes a similar disease there. What we are witnessing could be a possible digital equivalent of the same evolution process. It is indeed a fact that this Trojan was designed specifically to infect PCs and phones simultaneously. If it had been given the ability to infect other digital devices like PDAs and other phones through Bluetooth or infrared or other means, just imagine the havoc it could have played, had it been more destructive.

Technology - for good and bad - is advancing so rapidly that what seems like science fiction today could very well be reality tomorrow. With our civilisation becoming more and more dependent on digital information devices and networks for day-to-day functioning, it would be indeed foolish to think that a day will not come when a smart polymorphic virus will just decide that it needs to infect the world. And we can't even treat a cold yet!

Google launches soft drinks!

2005-09-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, what has the famous Internet search company that has been breaking new ground in Web technology have to do with soft drinks, you might ask. Well, nothing actually. If you were fooled by the title of this blog, then don't worry, you are not alone. This is just one of the harmless pranks that Google plays on the casual surfer.

Google Gulp comes in four distinct flavours, and each one is suited to a different person. The Google Gulp product line explains the flavour in words, but you really have to taste it to know what they mean. At the moment, the product is in "Limited Release" mode. So you will have to get an invitation from somebody who already has the product. (Ring a bell? Think Gmail.)

If you had your share of Google Gulp and need more, here is a few more interesting stuff that only Google can give you.

Google MentalPlex - The only search engine which can read your mind!

Google PigeonRank - Google Algorithm finally revealed (Ah, now I can get my site rank up!)

Google Copernicus Center - Get a job that can really take you somewhere - the moon, no less!

It is nice to know that a company that can provide us with such great stuff as Google Search and Gmail has a funny side to it. As they say, they are only human after all. Thank God they are!Go Google! We love you guys.

Murphy's Law and the Universe

2005-08-05T05:43:00.000-07:00

It is the simplest thing that you can learn from the Universe through that now-extinct skill of observation. It is known as Murphy's Law.

"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." This is the most common version of this famous law and it is credited to Major Edward A. Murphy, Jr., a development engineer working for a brief time on rocket sled experiments done by the United States Air Force in 1949. (Courtesy: Wikipedia). He is said to have said this when frustrated with the repeated failures of experiments for testing the human tolerance for G-forces during rapid deceleration.

Some may call this a pessimistic way of looking at things (in fact, one of my close friends does!), and rightly so. But have you ever wondered why it rains the hardest on the only day you forgot to take your umbrella? Or that you get caught in the busiest traffic on the very day your boss's boss is visiting the office? Or why the other line always moves faster, when you are getting the ticket?

Now this is what happened today that made me write all these things about the Law. I normally put my mobile phone on silent mode, with the vibrator turned on, when I am at work. So, today morning, before leaving from home, I put it on the silent mode and at that moment, my mom asked me to get something from the basement. I put down my phone on the edge of the nearest table and went to get the thing. At that precise moment, my friend called me, and the phone's vibrator turned on and propelled itself from the table onto the floor. Thankfully, the Nokia guys have made it so well that it has survived many a fall before this, and it came through this one without any problems either. Now, consider this. My friend could have called me any time in the morning and he chose to call me in the 20 second time-frame when I put my phone in silent mode, at the edge of the table, just before I was to put it into my pocket.

There are a few interesting sites out there specialising in the Law and here is one good site.

Murphy's Laws (with variants)

So the next time you are caught in the rain or waiting in a long queue, remember Murphy's Law. (And by the way, knowing the Law beforehand doesn't put you in a position to change the outcome. - Murphy's Law Variant no. 377 )

P.S: What if Murphy's Law was applied on itself? :)

A ringtone?? (Minor Earth Major Sky)

2005-07-16T05:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is a weird post on a blog that usually concerns itself with the thoughts going on in my head. I don't know about you, but I am a great fan of the Norwegian band A-ha (yes, some even call it a boyband, but I really don't care). The trio have been around for some years now, and one of their latests albums Minor Earth Major Sky's title track is one of my favourite tracks ever. It really gives me the feeling that I am floating in space, and everywhere that I look, I see this vast emptiness. It does sound crazy, I know, but then again, I really don't mind being called that. I have searched and scoured the Net for the ringtone of the track for my Nokia 3315 (an obsolete model) but turned up with nothing to show for it. So I finally, boldly, decided to compose one on my own and it goes something like this:

Minor Earth Major Sky

Nokia composer : Tempo : 56

16a2 16a2 8a2 16g2 16g2 8g2 16f2 16f2 4e2 8d2 16- 16c2 16c2 16c2 8d2 8d2 8a1 4a1 8- 8c2 8d2 16- 8a2 8g2 8c2 4d2 16- 8d2 8c2 8g1 4a1

That's it! If you are one of those rare A-ha fans who found this useful, I would like to hear from you. Leave me a comment!!

Artificial Intelligence : A few observations

2005-06-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

"A computer can only do what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do." - Greer's Third Law

Artificial Intelligence - The term has been so widely used, overused and hyped about in pop culture that we think of it as something that has already arrived. But has Artificial Intelligence (AI) really come of age yet?

To define AI, we should first define intelligence itself. Intelligence is normally conceived to be the ability of an entity to be aware of itself, to think and to reason, to undergo experiences of varying nature, and to learn from them in order to make a choice among the varying alternatives it has before itself.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsgar W. Dijkstra (1930-2002)

Thinking comes to us (well, most of us!) naturally. Getting a machine to think is a different ball game altogether. It involves a lot more than pre-conditioned and pre-programmed responses to anticipated situations. It is much more complicated than adding 2 and 2 to get 4.

Yes, I know. You are thinking about how the computer Deep Blue beat World Champion Gary Kasparov some years back. The press declared that the age of the intelligent machines had come. But was Deep Blue really intelligent? It was only a computer, doing what it had been programmed to do- play chess. And it did play very well too. But it was not thinking as Kasparov was. For every possible move, the computer was doing a trial-and-error computation analysis. Simply using the most potent weapon in its arsenal - brute force calculation.

Kasparov, on the other hand, was thinking strategically and forming and discarding options as the game progressed. He didn't have the luxury of trial-and-error; the human brain is simply not designed that way. The machine was not worried about making a blunder; Kasparov was. The machine did not have to think about what it would do to win the next match; Kasparov had to. So, really, it was not a close match by any means. The result was only inevitable.

It does not mean that AI is not here yet. Some dictation software packages can actually 'listen' to what the user says. The accuracy level increases with practice, as the program 'learns' the speaker's voice pattern. Anti-virus software programs using 'heuristics' technology can stop viruses that have not been yet created, which is impossible using conventional packages that can only identify and stop already known viruses. But even then, they do not meet all the criteria that intelligence demands and cannot be termed really intelligent.

Anybody can program a computer to do a task. But a system can be said to possess Artificial Intelligence only if it can transcend its programming and perform tasks that it had not been instructed to perform, tasks which it had learnt on its own. It is a formidable task. And we can only wish the brave men and women working hard to push the limits of computer science and technology the very best in their endeavours. Maybe we may see AI in our own lifetime. The future holds promise.

You can visit these sites for more information on AI:
American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
What is Artificial Intelligence?
The AI Depot

Time travel

2005-06-20T05:34:00.000-07:00

One thing that I have always wondered about is whether it is possible for us to travel back in time. Wouldn't it be just wonderful to be back in the days when you were just a little kid, oblivious to all the problems haunting you? I have wished I had a 'Time Machine' of my own, something I could use to go back and undo all the mistakes I have done in my life as a child. Is it really possible?

Einstein says it is. If we can manage to travel faster than light, beating the mind-boggling speed of 3 * 10^8 metres per second, we really could go back to yesterday. It has not been experimentally proven though, for beating that speed will take something really special than jet propulsion and rocket engines.

But suppose you do manage to travel faster than light, what would happen? Would you go back to yesterday and see yourself or would you experience yesterday all over again? The former case will create two of you, and in the latter, you wouldn't even know that you had travelled back in time. Or would you? It really gets confusing over there.

Another phenomenon that is associated with time travel is what is known as the 'Grandfather Paradox.' Suppose you travel back in time to the childhood days of your grandfather. You take a gun and kill him. Now, obviously he died before your father was conceived. That would mean you wouldn't exist. So who killed your grandfather anyway?

There are a couple of arguments against the 'Grandfather Paradox'. The first says that you just wouldn't be able to go back in time. As plain as that. Another one says that even if you do go back to your grandfather's childhood days, you wouldn't be able to affect it in anyway. You just wouldn't be able to kill him. There are no solid explanations as to why this is not possible though.

As always, science fiction has always tinkered with Time-travel. A number of Star Trek episodes talk about the timeline, and how the information from the future can "contaminate the timeline" and so on. There is also the 'Back to the Future' trilogy, directed by Robert Zemeckis which is also an interesting flick. The 'Terminator' series also has some time traveling associated with it, with machines with artificial intelligence sending an agent into the past to kill off their enemy - a human soldier's mother before he is born and later the soldier himself.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that time travel to the past is possible. Then I wonder why we are not seeing visitors from the future visiting us right now? After all, we are past to them, aren't we? :)

UEFA Champions League Final - A tribute to Liverpool

2005-05-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

I know that it has been some time since my last posting. (Well, actually only a couple of months, but in Internet time, that is an eternity). Anyway, I had been really busy with my final exams and took some more time to cool off. Hopefully, I will be able to write more frequently from now on.

A tribute to Liverpool

Last night was truly unforgettable. The European Champions League Final between Liverpool FC (England) and AC Milan (Italy) was one of the best soccer matches that I have watched in a long time. Since my favourite team this season, Chelsea, had already been beaten in the semi-finals by Liverpool, I was even more keen to watch Milan win the match.

The match had hardly begun before the Milan skipper Maldini netted the first goal, plunging the Liverpool team, and of course, the fans, into a state of disbelief and confusion. The remainder of the first half witnessed a committed Milan attack flowing into Liverpool bastions, wave after wave. Some incredible play by Kaka' and clean finish by Crespo. It was only inevitable that a couple more goals landed in Liverpool nets. Halftime score: 3-0 Milan. It seemed that the second-half of the Champions League final will be a mere formality, with all possiblities of even a worse scoreline for Liverpool in prospects. Liverpool was dead and buried, or so we all thought.

It is said that great champions come out with their best in times of adversity, when all hope is gone and you are doomed to fail. I don't know what their manager said to the team during the half-time team-talks, but as one commentator rightly put it, it would have been nothing short of 'Churchillian.' To say that when the Reds walked out to face their opponents in the second half, the task facing them was Herculean would be a massive understatement.

I had always liked Steven Gerrard for the great player he is - persistent, tenacious and never willing to give up, never. Skippers are supposed to set the pace for their teams; to lead by example. And that is exactly this hardened English international did for his team. A sidelong glancing header from Gerrard of a long ball from Riise landed in the back of the Milan post. Score : 3-1 Milan

The seemingly invincible Milan defence was not so invincible after all. Little did the players or the millions of spectators worldwide realise that this was the beginning of a fightback. Milan side was exposed, but not definitely disturbed. After all, they still had a 2-goal buffer.

Only a couple of minutes had passed that Smicer, who had been brought in to replace Harry Kewell, found himself with the ball a few yards from the box. There were no defenders to put pressure on him and he let go off the ball in a blazing shot. Dida, the Milan goal-keeper, was found wanting as the ball managed to fly past across him into the back of the net. Liverpool strikes again.Score : 3-2 Milan

Liverpool, it seemed, had found their rhythm and started keeping more of the ball possession for themselves, steadily gaining in confidence and control of the game that had been away from them only a few minutes earlier. The renewed confidence transformed their attack plans and they had started asking more questions of Milan defence.

The Liverpool skipper, Gerrard, once again managed to get the ball near the box and he was fouled by Gattuso in the box, and the referee promptly awarded Liverpool a penalty kick. Xabi Alonso stepped in to take the kick and managed to get his kick blocked by Dida, but his quick reflexes caught the ball on the rebound and this time he didn't make any mistakes. Liverpool equalises. Score 3-3

In a span of just 6 minutes, starting from Gerrard's goal to the penalty kick by Alonso, Liverpool was back in the game, and the Milan team and their fans were dumbfounded, indeed, shell-shocked. It was not really complacency from the Milan side; it was more of tough, gritty, committed football from Liverpool and they deserve all the credit for getting back into the game.

And when full-time play and extra-time failed to break the deadlock, the game moved into that heart-breaking ritual, the penalty shootout. Personally, I am very much against this ghastly routine. It is not football skills they are testing, it is just tough nerves and some good old luck that you need to get through this. But since there is no other alternative than play for a tie-breaking goal in open play (the so-called golden goal), which could take anywhere from 20 seconds to all eternity, you just have to accept it for what it is - a necessary evil. The one, and the only flaw that you can point out in this graceful and beautiful game ever created.

It seemed that Lady Luck had quarrelled with Milan after the half-time and was squarely on Liverpool's side, as they won the shootout. I won't describe the shootout myself, as I thoroughly despise the heart-break and the crushing emotions associated with it. But I do admit that it was Liverpool's night all right. They showed that there is nothing like 'unbeatable odds' and 'hopeless situations' in front of persistence, commitment and hard-headed optimism. As the saying goes, 'it ain't over till it ain't over.' You are never defeated till you give up.

Liverpool are the new European champions. And they truly deserve this victory. Hats off!

The Matrix experience

2005-03-27T05:22:00.000-08:00

Let me start my blog with one of my favourite topics that deal with one of my favourite movies of all time - The Matrix (1999, Warner Bros.). I must admit that I don't recollect the exact details about when I saw the movie but I am very sure that I didn't understand a lot the first time. I do remember the breath-taking visual effects, and the cool and stylistic theme in which the movie was set, with the protagonist and his team clad in black leather and sunglasses that would leave you drooling. It was only after I saw the movie on my computer, rewinding the bits that I didn't understand and watching them over and over again that I found what it was all about. And when I did, I fell in love with it.

The idea of creating machines that can think and are also sentient (self-aware) has fascinated man for ages. Hollywood and its sci-fi community are no exceptions to this fact. Movies like 'Terminator' and 'The Matrix' depict a world in which the machines, after becoming self-aware, attempt to take control over the world, till then dominated by the humans. While the 'Terminator' and its sequels portray the machines as a super-intelligent entity that is hell-bent on eradicating humans from the planet, 'The Matrix' movies give a new twist to the terms 'artificial intelligence' and 'virtual reality.' With the basic distinctions in place, let us delve deeper into the Matrix world.

(Spoiler warning: Please don't read the text below if you haven't watched 'The Matrix' and its sequels already as it will surely take the fizz out of it when you see it later. In case you haven't watched them, you don't know what you are missing. And I wonder why you are reading this anyway.)

The movie is set around a computer hacker, Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo, played by Keanu Reeves), a young man disillusioned by the modern world, and working as a program writer for a software company. He is met by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), branded "the most dangerous man alive" by the authorities. Morpheus offers Neo a chance to know "the truth", about what the Matrix is - a question that Neo is desperately trying to answer. Neo accepts the offer and takes the red pill and the world goes topsy-turvy for him.

What is the Matrix?

As Morpheus explains to an awe-struck Neo, "The Matrix is a world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." The explanation: The year is actually closer to 2199, instead of 1999, as Anderson believed. Human beings had succeeded in creating machines (computer systems) that had developed the power to think, super-systems with "artificial intelligence". The machines had decided that they would no longer be slaves to humans and a long battle between the machines and humans had started. Human beings, in trying to deprive the machines of solar energy, had "scorched the skies", hoping the machines would give in. But the machines were even more intelligent than their enemies thought.

By utilizing the body heat and bioelectricity generated by the human body and "combined with some form of fusion", the machines had found the source to all the energy they would ever need. But the problem was that the human beings were their enemies and wouldn't let the machines just feed off them. For this, the machines devised an ingenious method.

They created a "virtual world" (referred to as "The Matrix" by the rebels) and linked up the human beings as individuals of this artificial world, while in reality, their bodies were lying in pods, their brains linked to the Matrix, their bodies powering the entire machine world. To someone jacked into the Matrix, the world would seem just as if it was "real". They would be born as babies, grow up into children and adults, and die of old age or whatever. They would be no more aware of this "virtual reality" as you and I would be aware of the artificiality of a dream while we are sleeping. In a way, everyone connected to the Matrix were sleeping all the time, dreaming his or her lives out.

What Morpheus had done was to free Neo from the Matrix, by "waking him up" from his slumber. Morpheus tries to convince Neo that he is "the One", somebody who has the power to overthrow the Matrix and free his fellow humans. He tells Neo that the Matrix is just like a computer system: "some of its rules can be bent; others can be broken." Morpheus tells Neo that he can defeat the Agents and free his people because the rules of the Matrix do not apply to him. As he puts it when Neo asks cynically whether he can dodge bullets, "When you are ready Neo, you won't have to."

A word about the Agents: Agents in the Matrix are computer programs, that try to keep order in the system, a kind of control and the first line of defence against the human rebels, like Morpheus and his friends. They are computer programs and hence, faster than the humans. They are so fast that they can even dodge bullets shot at them by the human rebels. Agent Smith is the lead agent in 'The Matrix'.

Following a dramatic turn of events, Morpheus ends up in the custody of agents and it is upto Neo to rescue him. With the help of Trinity (Carrie Ann-Moss), Neo does succeed in rescuing Morpheus but gets trapped in the Matrix before he can get out. He chooses to fight Agent Smith rather than run, and almost defeats him the first time. But Smith, being the computer program that he/it is, escapes and kills Neo. Neo had begun to believe that he is the One, but his belief was not complete (he couldn't see through the Matrix fully yet) and that cost him his life.

Trinity had fallen in love with Neo and she kisses and tells the dead Neo that she loves him and since the Oracle had told her that she would fall in love with The One, Neo can't be dead. Miraculously, Neo does come back from the dead, and this time, he is invincible. Smith and the other agents shoot him and Neo stops the oncoming bullets with a gesture of his hand. He destroys Smith and comes out of the Matrix, this time, a free man.

Perception is reality

As the movie emphasizes from time to time, the "reality" of the Matrix is so great, its impact so profound on those who are jacked in, that their experiences do become reality. Morpheus tells Neo that if you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world because "your mind makes it real." If you are connected to the Matrix and you are being fed the signal that a man sitting next to you shoots you with a gun and you actually "feel" that the bullet has struck your heart, then it may kill you, "really" kill you.

"There is no spoon"

Morpheus and his friends, with the exception of Neo, are aware of this fact and this is why they can do things that normal people (still jacked into the Matrix) can't, like jumping over skyscrapers and escaping from agents. However, Neo is aware of this fact to such a degree that he sees the Matrix for what it actually is, a virtually real world, but in the end, it still is all virtual; a sensory deception. That is why he knows that the bullet coming at him is just an electric signal sent to his brain by the Matrix, and by choosing to exercise his free will over the sensory input, he is able to dodge, and later, even stop the bullets. (Technically speaking, he is able to send a reverse, more powerful signal to the Matrix from his brain that ends up as "stopped bullets" to others in the Matrix.) He gets this realization from the yogic boy in the movie who tries to reveal the truth to Neo that it is all in your mind. If you think there is a spoon, there is; if you don't, there is actually none.

Referring back to the point mentioned earlier, some individuals are said to have the rare gift of lucid dreaming (conscious dreaming). This means that they are actually aware that they are dreaming and hence can take control of the dream and turn it into anything they want. To take a well-quoted example, suppose you dream that you are falling from a tall building and then suddenly realize that you are dreaming and yet you don't wake up, you can do miraculous things in your dreams. You can suddenly grow wings and fly away or just freeze in mid-air and stop the fall and what not. Neo, in a way, has this gift, as he knows that he is actually in a dream-like state and thus can take control of the dream, which is of course, the Matrix. His friends (Morpheus, Trinity and other rebels) are also aware of the fact but they just can't let go, as the "reality" of the Matrix is just too much.

The science part of the Matrix may be a bit flawed. Case in point: To provide life support facilities to all the people connected to the Matrix will perhaps consume more power than that is being generated using the "fusion method" described in the movie and to keep the humans in this sleep-induced state is almost impossible without some kind of medication or hypnotism (I am not quite sure about this, so please correct me if I am wrong here.) Also, the amount of computing power needed to create this virtual world and make it "feel real" to all the persons inside will be simply enormous. Just think about this simple illustration: You and your friend are standing in the Matrix world and you take up a pile of sand in your hands and let it go from a height above the ground. The computers of the Matrix would have to simulate every single grain of sand with all its aspects correctly; its size, shape, velocity, dynamics, trajectory, and what not so that you will actually believe that you are doing what you are doing. Ditto for your friend who is watching from a different position. Now imagine all the processes going on simultaneously, and, most o f them are infinitely more complex than the process just described and it will give you some idea about what amount of data processing tasks I am talking about, to say nothing of the thought process of every individual connected to the Matrix. There are lots more, but this article wouldn't go there.

However, the underlying theme of the human race "waking up" from the maya (an illusion, according to the Hindu concept) is illustrated beautifully using technology as a medium. And perhaps that will be the reason why the movie will remain as one of my all-time favourites.

This blog has intentionally left out the numerous references of the movie to mysticism and many religions through symbolisms because there are many well-referenced and better articles out there on the Web, written by better authors. (Just a hint: Did you notice that Neo is supposed to be the "savior" of the world and he comes back after dying to save the world?)

For more interesting ideas, visit the Official Matrix site

The wandering begins

2005-02-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

Hello there,Although it has been a few months since I have been hearing about the latest Internet phenomenon known as 'blogging', it is only today that I have decided to start one of my own. I truly don't know how long this is going to last, but I am sure that I will enjoy it as long as it does!You will be hopefully hearing from me soon enough on topics that I would love to share with the world, everything from AI (Artificial Intelligence) to Just in time management. Till then, take care fellas!Regards