Asides


26
Jul 10

Open-source, software-based GSM cellphone network

Open-source, software-based GSM cellphone network – GSM air interface + Asterisk + VoIP backhaul. Commoditization of the telco network stack is well on its way.


7
Apr 10

Flickr Tagr and YQL

Flickr Tagr now uses YQL to generate the list of related tags. The performance is a lot better. Check it out here.


11
Jan 10

Mysore – go there in 2010

Mysore is in a NY Times list of places to visit in 2010. Yay!


22
Nov 09

Mobile phone making things obsolete

Slashdot discussion on an article about things mobile phones will make obsolete. I made the same prediction in 2006 in the context of an article by Tomi Ahonen.


12
Nov 09

Is It Wrong To Sleep With Your Sister?

Google Suggest contest winners on Slate. Wisdom of the crowds indeed.


21
May 09

Tweeting too hard

Tweeting too hard: Self-important, egotistical tweets = Hilarious. It really needs an RSS feed.


19
May 09

EC website crash

The numbers in the last paragraph of this news report on the EC website crashing indicates one of two things – the reporter who wrote it is clueless, or, there has been some serious loss in translation when the people at NIC explained the problem to the EC official quoted in the article.


19
Apr 09

Dravid’s day out

During his long career, I’ve never seen Rahul Dravid succumb to the temptation of having a go at anything. Last year’s debacle in the IPL,  his subsequent demotion to a normal player, and questions about his suitability to T20 must have been gnawing at him. He got a word in after a brilliant performance against Rajasthan today – something along the lines of “… in South Africa, you can’t just tee off with the bat like you do in India. You need to play proper cricket”. Well played! Looking forward to more of his on and off field shots…


14
Apr 09

Candidate information from ADR

The Association for Democratic Reforms has made available data collected as part of the various election watch activities. This should help people make a more informed choice. Please forward the link to as many people as possible!


23
Oct 08

Slicehost acquired by Rackspace

This blog and many of my projects, code, svn etc. are hosted on a virtual private server at Slicehost. I started using them a couple of months after they launched their services two years ago. I had come off some bad experiences with shared hosting and was looking for a VPS. I’m not sure why I thought everything would be ok with Slicehost as they had no track record, but, they just seemed to get it. Well, I’ve been hosting with them for two years now and couldn’t be happier. They’ve now been acquired by Rackspace, a much larger player. Congratulations are in order. As a user I’ve rarely been in touch with them. That’s good! It means everything just works. Hopefully, that won’t change when they join a bigger company.


18
Oct 08

Obama-McCain comedy

Barack Obama and John McCain do stand up comedy at a charity dinner. Both are very funny. Here’s a story with more details.


25
Jan 08

The US sub-prime crisis

Finally, an easy to understand explanation of the US sub-prime crisis.


19
Nov 07

Amazon’s e-book

The dream is slowly turning to reality.


15
Sep 07

Imitations by Novak Djokovic

US Open 2007 finalist Novak Djokovic does some excellent imitations of his fellow tennis players. Here are a few.


11
Sep 07

Web 2.0

We need to pass a law banning the use of the term Web 2.0 by people who have no clue about the meaning. The term is so abused that even people who know what it means shouldn’t use it, but the people at Techtree who wrote this article on BigAdda don’t know that. Even if you ignore the fact that it is a blatant copy paste of a press release which is being passed off as journalism, it’s just utter drivel.


20
Aug 07

Devil’s Advocate: The 123 nuclear deal

Karan Thapar usually gets on every interviewee’s nerves on Devil’s Advocate on CNN-IBN. This week’s interview with Sitaram Yechury was no different. But, don’t worry, if you were confused about the 123 deal earlier, you’ll come away more confused after watching the interview.


26
Jun 07

Vinay in Canada

Vinay has been in Canada for a few months now. Onsite! Photos of his sight seeing are here.


24
Jun 07

Syntax error

Syntax error.


18
Jun 07

I Can Has Cheez Burger?

I’m a dog lover and don’t like cats all that much.. but man, is this funny..


18
Jun 07

Gmail faster in IE?

Not sure why, but I’ve noticed that Gmail is much faster in IE/Maxthon compared to Firefox. In general javascript heavy sites seem to be slower in Firefox. But, the no. of useful extensions available for Firefox make it hands down the best browser for regular use.

Update: One of the reasons for the slow performance was that an extension I use was forcing secure connections, which doesn’t help in speeding things up. But, even after I disabled it, the performance sill seems to be sluggish in Firefox.