Styled.... Hendrix

I had tried to style the Hendrix page just for fun a few months earlier. It was accepted and is online at hendrix.mozilla.org. Its based on the Planet Mozilla design, and includes enhancements of it own like: mozilla.org head section, highlighted form sections, framed image of Jimi Hendrix, etc. :)

Its fun using CSS for creating HTML designs.

First Spam Mail

Today, I got the first spam email in my gmail.com account. Its the first one since I started using gmail about 8months ago. Good work Google. Just for the records, below the the spam email info:

From: "Neateye" < NitaiGouranga@aol.com >
Subject: Gouranga
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 05:57:49 -0000

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

In case you are curious, the email was sent by Outlook Express :)). If the above email address looks familiar to you, please let the person know that he does not own his PC ;). Its time he made better chioces about which softwares to use.

Smoke - II

Smoke 1.5.1 for Nvu.
Changelog:
-- enabled feature to use small icons, icons only or text only.

Get it!

Google Maps

Google Maps is out. Try it at maps.google.com. You can search cities, get driving directions, etc. The search also show important landmarks with icons on the map and details on the right. My only complaints: They say that Consulate General of Honduras is 7.7km from my place :(, its in the same building. They could have made the marker pins of different color. Sample marker pin...

Go ahead find your paths with Google :)

Smoke

Smoke for Nvu. Download

Around the World!

Who: Ellen MacAurthur
Time: 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds
For Real? Yes. This is not a writer's imagination.

Ellen MacAurthur has made a world record by going around the world in just over 71 days, eclipsing Francis Joyon's earlier record of 72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes and 22 seconds set in Feb 2004.

That is a highly commendable feat which requires a lot of courage and wants you to be really tough. Congratulations.

Read More:
Daily Mail
In Forum

Web Standards

Just came to know about the site mininova (does the name look familiar? Yeah, you guessed it). When I looked at the website it gave me a feeling of being clean....and indeed the index page was XHTML1.0 and CSS2.0 compliant! Its good to see more and more websites adhering to W3C standards rather than just to be compliant with the most poplular browser.

Gmail Invites

Got lots of 'em. If you want a gmail account, leave a comment with your name and email address.

Kudos to Firefox

I had found a pair of EDO RAM modules(yeah, I know its old!) and thought of testing them on my old, yet working, Win98SE box. I had shut down the machine a few months ago and I was too lazy to boot it back up. So tonight I finally hooked up the machine and added the newly found old RAM modules to it. With 64MB RAM it booted much faster than earlier.In the process of testing its performance, I thought of firing up Firefox. It took around 30-45 seconds to start Firefox, but it was much faster than when it had only 32MB RAM.

After a few seconds after Firefox started I saw the pending updates icons (red arrow) on top right of Firefox window. Just to check if everything worked allright, I went into Preferences and clicked the "Check Update Now" button. Firefox's auto updater started and showed 3 updates were available for downloading. They were Firefox1.0, DOM Inspector, and Feedback Client. I selected all of them and to my surprise it downloaded all of them. I did not have to do anything else till it finished downloading and installing the updates. Finally, it gave me the following message:

Firefox successfully downloaded and installed updates. You will have to restart Firefox to complete the operation.

That is perfect as far as normal user is concerned. The update system worked seemlessly with minimum user interference. Had I not shutdown my machine for this long, I would have never known how nicely the updater works as I normally downloaded the nightlies weekly.

Congrats to the Mozilla community for such a professional product.

Full Circle!

I came across the following image while reading a forum. It reminded me of the Mozilla stomps IE incident that happened on IE4.0 release in Oct.'97. Although IE still maintains a clear lead in the size of its user base, Mozilla/Firefox and friends are getting a bite out of IE's share slowly.

Musique de Paris!

I just discovered this shoutcast channel. Its straight from Paris with all commentary in French and music is all Indian (the last few songs were Punjabi :) ). I'm sure one of my friends will be happy that this will help improve my French.

Boring??

Thats why I didn't switch on the TV today.

O' Canada

Go Canada Go.

Amrish Puri is no more :(

Just read the news that Amrish Puri(June 22, 1932 - January 12, 2005) died at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai on Wednesday morning following brain haemorrhage. His passing away has left a big hole in the Indian film industry, which will be hard to fulfill. He gave a great performance in his recent movie Hulchul. Anyone who has heard his voice would rate him with the best there are.

Read more:

• Bollywood actor Amrish Puri dies
• Bollywood star Amrish Puri dies
• The noblest villain

WoW :O)

These stars are HUGE. No wonder they are called "Red GIANTS". Our good'ol Sun would look like a mouse in front of an elephant. Wonder how much stuff in the universe is still unknown to Man!

Patent-Freeing software

Thank you Poland!

Donate for a cause.

Not many people read this blog, but those who do, I request you to contact the nearest Tsunami Disaster Relief agency and chip in whatever you can afford. Every penny counts. This is the time when the social resposibility towards other humans requires us to do as much as we can to help the survivors of the South Asian Diasaster. I'm sure we can forego our daily cup of tea/coffee and contribute to the cause.

I did my part by donating to Red Cross. Here are a few other agencies you can donate to:

• UNICEF
• American Red Cross (1-800-HELP-NOW)
• Care USA 1-800-521-273
• Indian Red Cross Society
• Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
• The Hindu Relief Fund a national daily
• Google listing Ways to help Tsunami victims.
• United Sikhs GHANIA - Tsunami Relief Project
  

Tsunami Blog

Superpower??

There is only ONE superpower - Nature. No nukes, patriots, or even cruise missles can provide the defence to anyone from it. The best defence is to repect nature.

Futureshop.ca Woes

Just like last year, I braced up myself to buy a bit of computer hardware during the Boxing Day (BD) sale at Futureshop(FS). Last year, I was just plain lucky to to actually get the rebate as Futureshop completely refused to honor the Mail-in-Rebate as I had made the purchase 5min before midnight PST! Do they open their stores in the East coast according to their store times for the West coast? However, Western Digital was considerate enough to understand the problem and send me the MiR.

This year(BD sale started at 0000hrs 25Dec05), I was expecting more rush for the online BD sale with more and more people subscribing to high speed internet. So as expected, the site was almost unreachable till 0200hrs 25Dec04. When I was finally able to login(FS asked me to quote one of earlier order numbers, nice security if you haven't ordered something for some months), I selected the 256MB Kingston USB key drive and added it to my basket. Trying to checkout was futile because all I was getting was VB Script errors. When I got through about half an hour later, it again asked for my login and password!! Why did they ask me a second time? OK, fine. I assume that my session expired. But then I had to tell them an older order number from my record again. On submitting the info again for the second time, I got to a page telling me that the site was very busy. Didn't they know that the website will be busy during their boxing day sale? They should have taken appropriate measures so as to provide the users a pleasent experience.

I finally got to the point of providing payment information. Typed it in, and clicked confirm payment info button. That went in allright, but the confirm page had a message at the top that the product I was trying to order was already soldout! It was just like someone took stuff out of your basket while you were still shopping in an actual store.

And that was not all, worse happened the next night. I wasn't even able to login between 0000hrs and 0200hrs 26Dec04!

A better system would hold the item for the user for a few minutes or so. They could alert logged-in users just before the holding time expires, or keep the item if the user has initiated the payment process. They need to update their systems or atleast lease more computing power for the few days when they know it will be very busy. Not all systems need additional power, even increasing the computing power for the login and payment system would be of great help. I think it would be a good idea for Futureshop to spend sometime on improving their own Future by working on their customer dealing methods.

After Browsers and WWW Search, Desktop Search is heating up

With the ongoing wars between different search engine companies and internet browser companies going on, a new front is opening up: The Desktop Search. Yes, its time we got good destop searching softwares. Its getting hard to find stuff on such huge hard disks we are able to get these days!

• Goolge has just recently released their Google Desktop Search Tool.
• Microsoft will soon release their MSN Toolbar Suite (possibly in December 2004), which will be configured to run in Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and as Deskbar Toolbar. Report and Screenshots. This is probably something to fill the void of a delayed Longhorn release which initially was advertised to the have Microsoft's revolutionary file system WinFS.
  
• Yahoo! is too planning to release their own desktop search system and make a niche in destop search field. The major difference in Yahoo! destop search will be that it won't employ a browser to show the results.
  
• Copernic, which already offers a wonderful desktop search system, just recently announced the integration of their desktop search software with Firefox.

It will be interesting to watch the big players fight to get their share of the desktop pie in the coming few months. I just hope that we, the users, get the best possible software for our desktop searches.