Lambi Pooch

New home for my blog

2006-06-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

My blog will shortly be moving to http://rake.sh/. For those of you who subscribe via RSS or otherwise, you shouldn't have to do a thing. And for there rest of you, click here!

(yes, until some recent DNS changes made get propagated, http://rake.sh/ will simply loop back to this blogger blog)

Why Apple left India

2006-06-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

Since I heard that Apple had curtailed plans to build an Indian operation, I've been wondering why and BusinessWeek claims to have found some answers. In short, it was a cost thing, India's getting too expensive and turnover's too high. I wonder if we'll see this as a larger trend. I tend to believe this is an exception limited to Apple and the fact that their focus was strictly technical support.

Movie makers should respond to reviews

2006-06-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

I liked Mark Cuban's idea for a rebirth of the 30-second ad spot. Great out of the box thinking.

So I was reading a review of the new Jack Black movie, Nacho Libre, on my drive into work this morning (yes, I've gotten into the unsafe bad habit of reading email and news on my cell phone while driving) and doing some out-of-the-box thinking myself, it occurred to me that the moviemakers should respond to reviews of the movie. Most of reviewers, based on a quick skim of the 300+ reviews of the movie on Google News, try to deliver some sort of intellectual commentary/analysis of the movie. Come on folks, who wants an intellectual dissection of "Jack Black's coming of age as an actor vis-a-vis his performance in Nacho Libre"? This is Nacho Libre (and Jack Black) we're talking about!!

So not only would this make for a great publicity stunt but it would be sure to galvanize fans of the movie. I mean, let's face it, no one goes to see a movie like Nacho Libre because of what Roger Ebert had to say about it!

In general, apart from Nacho Libre, moviemakers should respond to reviews of a movie and engage their customers in a conversation about their product. Why not? It seems to be working for everyone else. Da Vinci code, for example, got panned by reviewers. Why not let moviegoers hear from the moviemakers and have them defend themselves, speak up about where reviewers are wrong? Extras and interactive features on DVDs are popular, why wouldn't they be popular while a movie is still in the theaters? And with the high-cost of advertising in newspapers, engaging customers in a conversation about a movie would deliver a high bang-for-the-buck.

Let me pay for more space on Gmail (aka I agree with Paul)

2006-06-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

I had the same thought as Paul Kedrosky when I read about the paid space increments you can buy for Picasa Web Albums. Why not offer the same thing for GMail? I'm a heavy Gmail user and I'm soon going to need more space (I'm at 80% now, 2.2GB space used). I'd be MORE than happy to pay $25 / year to get up to 6gb. Like Paul, I'm baffled at why they aren't offering this. I spent some time trying to figure it out and it just doesn't make sense to me. E-mail is an extremely important communication tool for me and Gmail not only fulfills my needs here, but it adds quite a bit of value over other options IMO. I guess for now I'm fine and hopefully when I get closer to not being fine, Google won't force me into a position to start deleting stuff. After all, that would violate one of the basic tenets of Gmail: "Don't throw anything away"

Picasa Web Albums: first look

2006-06-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

I happened to be up when I noticed that Google had launched Picasa Web Albums. I'm a long-time Picasa fan so I took it for a quick spin. So far I think it's pretty slick, it's possible I might actually use it in place of my Flickr account just because it's so well integrated with Picasa and that's the first place all of my digital photos go. But we'll see, I'm also hooked pretty deep into Flickr. Some initial notes:

I need to figure out how to limit sharing to family and friends.
Uploading is PC-only -- I don't believe this version is available for Linux yet, even in beta. And it definitely doesn't work on the Mac. I know because that's what I was using when I first logged into Picasa Web Albums. :-)
I like the fact that albums can be downloaded (at least it seems that way) -- my family in India always wants a local copy b/c net connections aren't as plentiful there (at least not yet) and are left to do a bunch of right click and saves.
Slideshows are nice, I prefer them to the flickr flash-slideshow, one-size-regardless-of-how-big-your-screen-is thing.
Tagging hasn't ever mattered that much to me, so I won't miss Flickr's tagging, but I know it means a lot to other people. I suspect this will be the topic of a lot of conversation in the blogosphere. ~~That and the absence RSS subscriptions (another item that I don't use much)~~ (Correction, PWA has RSS subscriptions.)
As I mentioned, the integration is really great -- sure beats exporting from Picasa and then uploading using the Flickr upload tool (which is pretty unsophisticated and pretty not-integrated with flickr, unlike Picasa - Picasa Web Albums).

Fittingly, you can see my screenshot walkthrough of Picasa Web Albums as a, well, Picasa Web Album.

Or click on any of the thumbnails below...

The new Picasa client (Windows-only) with Web Album button

The built-in upload manager uploads your photos to Picasa Web Albums

Back at the Picasa Web Albums website...

All of my albums

Inside of one of my albums

Play a slideshow within your browser

When a choose a photo, it loads progressively

The same photo after the first pass at loading -- subsequent photos are pre-fetched so browsing from one photo to the next is fast

Organize my photos (move/copy photos from one album to another)

Re-arrange my album

Share an album of mine through e-mail

rest in a room

2006-06-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

"All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room." -- Blaise Pascal (from The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham)

Barcamp Houston photographs

2006-06-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded my first batch of photographs to flickr -- see them among other photographs tagged with barcamphouston.

heading to barcamp houston

2006-06-10T06:35:00.000-07:00

I'm headed to barcamp houston this morning. Look for a full report later on. Here's a write-up of my experience at barcamp delhi in March.

the sky is falling

2006-06-03T05:58:00.000-07:00

Read the story

Cingular is promoting Google SMS

2006-05-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I'm a big fan of many (but not all) Google products. One product that I'm a fan of is Google SMS. I've turned quite a few people on to this since I started using it more than 9 months ago and I still have people coming back to me telling me about how useful it is to them. And in spite of now having access, through Cingular's EDGE network, to mobile versions of Google's local search, I still use Google SMS fairly often. So I was pleased to see my cell phone carrier, Cingular, promoting Google SMS to subscribers in a recent e-mail newsletter I received:

Is Google paying for this or is Cingular simply deriving extra text messaging revenue from this?

The other Rakesh Agrawal in technology

2006-05-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

I had someone IM me today to congratulate me on my new job at Microsoft. Nope, I said, that's the other Rakesh Agrawal. There's also a third Rakesh Agrawal who studied journalism at Northwestern's Medill that used to factor into search results on the net for 'Rakesh Agrawal', but I don't see him around as much anymore. What happened to him?

Fear (from the Life of Pi)

2006-05-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Yann Martel's "The Life of Pi" and I just read a brilliant chapter on fear, chapter 56:

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

traditional approach to advertising: a cartoon

2006-05-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

from hugh macleod

Vonage is hard-selling their IPO

2006-05-12T05:14:00.000-07:00

Wow, Vonage is really hard-selling their IPO. In the past week, I've received two emails, a voicemail (on my Vonage line) and a piece of postal mail from Vonage advertising the customer IPO purchase plan. I also saw the IPO mentioned on slashdot.org. They've set aside a pretty significant portion of their IPO shares, something like 15%, for purchase by current customers. It seems that customers are an important part of Vonage generating demand for their IPO. I wonder how they did with their roadshow and with other more sophisticated investors.

I'm personally not that excited about Vonage's long-term prospects because of the competition that is and will be there in the voice over IP space. Yes, they've grown at an incredible rate, have spent tons of money on marketing (for several quarters, they were identified as the #1 advertiser on the Internet, according to the IPO prospectus) and are a well-known brand. But I don't think they have the differentiation or the DNA, at least not at this point, that they'll need to survive the onslaught of competition they're going to face.

I've studied this public offering closer than any other in the past so it will be interesting to watch it play out next week.

Houston municipal wifi

2006-05-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

I had lunch today with Terence Fontaine, deputy chief of staff for Houston's Mayor Bill White and I learned that Houston is in full swing, pursuing setting up a municipal wi-fi. After I got back from lunch and did a little bit of research, I realized that I've just been out of the loop and that people have been talking about this for at least the past couple of months. Exciting news! So the city appears to be taking bids now and I've heard that Google is one of the bidders so who knows... maybe WiFi in Houston will even be free.

Using Gmail for work

2006-05-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

After going through my fourth or fifth Microsoft Exchange crash and countless Outlook problems (after 3 years!), I decided that I had had enough. For a little over a month, I've been using Gmail as my primary client for e-mail -- for work e-mail, for personal e-mail and everything in between. So far I love it, though I've discovered that there are also a few things that make it undesirable. Read on for the details...

The Setup

First of all, how was this even possible? Simple, I have all my different email accounts forward to my gmail account. Then I'm using Gmail's "accounts" feature so that when I reply to messages sent to rakesh at agrawal.org, the message is sent by "rakesh.agrawal@gmail.com on behalf of [rakesh at agrawal.org]" so that when the recipient replies, they are replying to rakesh at agrawal.org and not rakesh.agrawal@gmail.com. Basically, it does a decent (but not great -- see below) job of making it look like the emails I'm sending are coming from something other than my gmail address. And it switches the "from" address based on which account the incoming address on a message matches so which account is being used is pretty seamless to me.

The Benefits

For me, there have been countless benefits of running email in the network cloud and not on a local client on my PC. Let me count the ways...

- No more crash-prone exchange server or outlook clients: Hey, maybe it was just me (or our network admin) but exchange and outlook were always crashing on me. And email is such a "mission critical" thing for me, this was completely unacceptable. This is really what pushed me into this experiment. With Gmail, I can actually spend all of my time using email rather than spending a disproportionate amount of my time troubleshooting email.

- Access from literally any computing device with Internet access: I don't need a client installed nor do I need to VPN into my office anymore to access all of my new messages and archived messages. Gmail is accessible from pretty much any web browser. Case in point: I accompanied my Mom to a doctor's office a couple of weeks ago and the room that we were in happened to have this wall-mounted PC with a web browser and an Internet connection. What did I do while waiting for the Doctor to come in? Why, whittle away my inbox of course using Gmail!

- Gmail Mobile (m.gmail.com): The mobile version of Gmail is indispensible for me, though it's missing some features (see below). I can not only check for new messages from wherever I am (using my unlocked Cingular 2125 phone) but I can search my massive collection of archived messages. Mailing a package to a friend and need the address that he sent me? No problem, I've got the mobile version of Gmail. An interesting thing that I hadn't expected is that I even end up using the mobile version of Gmail around the house and other places where PCs are easily at hand just because I always have my phone with me (maybe this is just because I'm such an e-mail addict :-)) The other nice thing about Gmail Mobile is that it's fully synced with my actual inbox -- so if I archive something, I don't have to archive it again in my actual inbox.

- reliable and effective search: With Outlook, I was always a big fan of Lookout (a search tool that was acquired by Microsoft shortly after I discovered it) -- but as a bolt-on piece to Outlook it delivered inconsistent performance. Specifically, it seemed to periodically disappear and stop running and I'd have to uninstall and reinstall (and re-index!). With Gmail, the search is just there and it just works. Always (well, almost... see below :-)).

- interface is simple, uncluttered: I feel like I'm a lot more efficient in Gmail, though I haven't actually benchmarked this. Labels and archiving are the perfect organization paradigms for me. I had already moved to an "archive" model in Outlook (with Lookout as my on-the-fly folder generation tool) so archiving made perfect sense to me in Gmail. Conversations are also a god-send. I think I'd be lost without them now that I've been using them so regularly.

- spam filtering is really, really good: We never quite found the right spam filtering tool for Exchange/Outlook at SnapStream. With Gmail the spam filtering is pretty damn good out of the box and I can easily get correct any false positives/negatives myself and that feedback goes back into their spam filtering engine.

- filtering is fast, simple (just like search): Outlook filters suck -- I hated sitting there and watching/waiting for Outlook to filter messages. And Outlook filters sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. Again, maybe I just didn't have things setup correctly.

- HTML copy/pastes are FAST: This isn't a huge one, but in Outlook, if I copied a bunch of HTML from my browser and pasted it into a message, it could sometime take a whole minute or two before Outlook became responsive again and my message was ready to send. In Gmail, the HTML pastes instantaneously.

The Downsides

- E-mail accounts functionality could be a lot better: Google's email "masquerading" is less than perfect. In most e-mail clients, my e-mails look first like they came from rakesh.agrawal@gmail.com and it's only when someone replies is it clear that they were from [my personal address] or [my work address]. This is probably the biggest downside. I'm always concerned that this raises the question in people's minds about how legit we are (ie "What, their company isn't big enough to have their own e-mail domain? They use Gmail for email??"). So far I've been willing to endure this, but it's the thing that I probably worry about the most with using Gmail for work. Why not make it so that the emails are "masqueraded" more effectively and there are no links to @gmail.com in the from field? I suspect that the answer here has something to do with emails properly getting through most spam filters out there. I sure hope this problem is solveable and that it's something the Gmail team is working on!

- m.gmail.com doesn't support "accounts": This appears to just be something that the Gmail team hasn't yet built into mobile, but at the moment when you reply to a message in the mobile version of Gmail, there's no concept of an "account" -- ie all messages sent from m.gmail.com appear to come from your Gmail account. This makes sending emails from my Gmail Mobile account something that I don't do very often. I emailed Gmail support about this and their reply indicated that this is just a matter of time.

- No offline access: I guess this isn't true because you can always use Gmail's POP support to download messages into an offline client, but then I'd lose that notion of having one single email box for everything. And I guess I also haven't felt the pain as much on this as of late because I haven't been traveling quite as much as I have in the past.

- It's not a local application: I know, duh. But there are real disadvantages here -- attachments aren't at your fingertips. Cross-referencing two emails isn't trivial. In outlook you'd just open up the two messages in two separate windows. In Gmail, I have to get one message open, click on a "open in a new window" button and then find the second message -- a bit awkward. In general, running something like this in my browser is a bit strange maybe just because I was used to double clicking an icon and having a separate graphic in my tray for my email client. Now I have to find my Gmail tab from amongst the 10-15 other tabs that I have open at any given point in time.

- Space limitations: So yeah, Gmail offers you 2.8 gigs of storage space (and counting). But I use email A LOT. So I'm using about 2/3 of this right now and at the rate that I've been receiving emails, that means that I probably have another 4 months before I top out. Others (like Jason Calacanis) have complained about this. I'm hoping that between now and then Gmail does something to address users like me (yes, I'd be perfectly willing to pay something for more space!)

- Formatting limitations: I sometimes wish I had better control of the presentation of my emails -- the Gmail rich text editor control is good, but not great. Certainly not as good as the Microsoft Word editor that I used with Outlook to compose messages. Creating and formatting tables in particular is difficult in Gmail.

- Occasional hiccups of service: After using Gmail for 6 weeks, this happened to me the first time last week. For about 30 minutes, Gmail was unavailable. I'm assuming that this is because Gmail is in beta, but I'm certainly not willing to cut them slack just because they have a "beta" label in their header! :-) If this happened more often, it would completely obliterate all of the benefits listed above. Luckily, it doesn't.

I'm really hoping that the Gmail team comes through and addresses the downsides I've listed above and creates something that's attractive to business users. But even with the solution where it is I'm sticking with Gmail because the benefits far outweigh the downsides for me... and the whole setup, IMO, is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook.

(As an aside, this offline access problem has to be solved at some point by all these companies building rich web-based services. I haven't seen anyone create a competent solution here, at least not for a mainstream application. Google's got their Gmail notifier which helps bridge the web-app local-app gap. With Adsense, they've been beta-testing a local-app for managing Adwords accounts which I don't know much about, but would definitely fall into this same category. I wonder if there is a way to make a web-app available offline through the same browser model so there was no issue with needing to create and maintain multiple interfaces. Seems that would be a clean way to go.)

W3C MWI presentation

2006-04-29T23:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0419-MWI-Analysts/Overview.html

Great high-level presentation how the W3C is hoping to step in and help the mobile web reach its full potential. They've dubbed their efforts in this area the MWI (mobile web initiative). The presentation has some great data on mobile web:
- 63% of handsets are "web-capable"* (1.1B handsets)
- there's almost an order of magnitude difference between the number of "web caapble" handsets out there and the number of wifi connected laptops (there are a lot more handsets!)
- people spend as much time on the net as they do watching TV (14 hours a week in the U.S.)
- browsing represents the majority of data packets for cell phones
- (if you check out the presentation, slide 20 is a great articulation of the myriad of usability problems with the "mobile web")

* I suspect that this definition of "web capable" sets a low bar for qualification, just a guess... :-)

United Flight 93

2006-04-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering whether United 93 would be worth seeing -- Xeni seems to say that it is.

searching for sex on mobile phones?

2006-04-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

Interesting data from Google on mobile phone search queries from this Google paper to be presented at the CHI 2006 conference:

* one in five mobile searches have to do with adult entertainment (about twice the rate non-mobile of adult searches)

* mobile query text strings are as long as the non-mobile query text string

* it takes cell phone users, on average, 60 seconds to enter a search term and get results (wow, that's long! I think I'm a bit faster, though I've never actually timed myself.)

My best mobile search story is when I couldn't remember the details of a joke I wanted to tell someone and I was able to search for it and find it in the first page of results on Google Mobile (it was a long query string: "golf clubs dessert island joke").

blogging = cannibalism?

2006-04-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

"The truth is, it is still an open question whether the growth of cannibalism around the world is due to the blogosphere"

Funny article from Anil Dash.

nespresso.com: terrible usability

2006-04-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

I was recently gifted a fancy coffee machine by my parents -- a Nestle Nespresso machine. It's a razor - razor blade business model (though they definitely don't send you a free "razor" when you turn 18, this razor is expensive!). You buy a Nespresso machine and then you buy coffee capsules for it from them for $0.49 / piece. I don't know how this compares pricewise to the more traditional, less-yuppee coffee grounds approach to making coffee, but the nespresso system is clean and fast and the coffee is good and on price, it sure beats daily $4.00 cups of cappuccino / espresso at Starbucks. So I'm generally happy with the machine.

But I had to make a quick posting about their website. It's really, really bad. I've used it twice. Both times I've been completely bewildered when trying to buy the coffee capsules. First, they make it so you can't buy the things anywhere else (to quote from a 3rd party website, "To make sure Nespresso capsules are the freshest they can be, Nespresso handles all coffee orders through their web site") and then their site is terribly unusable. Lot of money spent on fancy graphics and animations, cryptic navigation, and who knows what else. Somebody at Nespresso, please, please, please spend some money and hire someone with an eye for usability to redesign your site!!

The coffee machine

$0.49 apiece!

Crazy headline: "YouTube lubed..."

2006-04-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

I've seen sensationalist and crazy headlines before in mainstream publications, but this one breaks new records:

YouTube lubed with second-round funding

Looks like mainstream media is getting some edge and attitude from the blogosphere.

I love the "subscribe" feature in Google Toolbar v2

2006-04-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

Before I switched over to bloglines from Newsgator for Outlook, I was using this newsgator for Firefox plug-in so I could right click on an RSS feed and subscribe to it in newsgator. This is something I have been missing since the switchover to bloglines (though on almost every other count, I've been happier with bloglines vs. having my blogs in outlook) and now the Google Toolbar v2 (in beta right now) gives this feature back to me with it's subscribe feature. Visit anypage configured with an RSS feed and the subscribe button lights up -- click it and subscribe yourself to the feed in bloglines (or in any number of other feed readers -- see below).

reverse brain drain and India-U.S. mash-ups

2006-04-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

India have always talked about brain drain -- the phenomena of India's top talents, educated in India usually by schools where tuition is heavily, heavily subsidized by the government, leaving India for the West. Hell my Dad was part of the so-called brain drain -- he topped in his States (Madhyapradesh), went on to study at one of India's top technical universities, paid very little for it (something like 50 rs / month! About $10 USD / month at the exchange rate back then), and then ended up here in the States. We moved back to India when I was in high school and my Dad maintains a lot of activity in India, but I digress...

Now the reverse appears to be happening -- Indians that came to the States from India are moving back to India to pursue professional opportunities there (Gaurav and Ashish at Tekriti are prime examples of this -- IIT educated engineers working for Microsoft in the States moving back to Delhi to start a software company in Gurgaon). And, as CNN writes in this article, Americans are going to India (and not Americans like me with Indian ancestry) to pursue opportunities there.

On my recent trip to India, I felt at times that I was inside some sort of strange mash-up, whether it was while I was at BarCamp Delhi and heard engineers talking about Chris Pirillo's Gada.be, whether it was at my uncle's house in North Delhi (the older, more conservative part of Delhi) giving a demo of Beyond TV to my cousins while they asked me very astute and challenging questions. I expect to see this mash-up trend continue and it's something that I'm excited about.

And as a sort of aside, my favorite mash-up story is one that I recently heard from my friend and co-worker, Soham. Soham has an American friend of Indian descent who recently took a sabbatical from her job at Andersen Consulting in the Bay Area to move to Bombay to try and make it in Bollywood. She's a talented dancer and since she's been over there, she's made it into a few TV commercials and as a dancer in several Bollywood movies. Great, but to make things even more interesting, she scored a gig as a dancer in this Bollywood extravaganza as a dancer so now she's touring the States as a dancer in an Indian production!

I'm an early riser

2006-04-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

Evan Williams links to Steve Pavlina's post about how to become an early riser. (And Steve, as it turns out, is the author of a bunch of articles on software marketing that I've read and am a fan of)

barCamp Houston, May 20

2006-04-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

BarCamp is coming to Houston. (I recently attended a BarCamp in Delhi)

Windows Mobile getting serious traction

2006-04-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've suspected that Microsoft's Windows Mobile was headed towards alot of traction in the mobile space since I switched to a Cingular 2125 from an old Nokia phone and this story today confirms it:

Microsoft Wins Biggest Phone-Software Order, Rivals BlackBerry

I suspect that Microsoft is throwing a lot of money at carriers and handset manufacturers to seed the market with their products (case in point: you can get a T-Mobile SDA for $30) but in this case they really have a great product that I think will do well beyond the purchased marketshare.

I also ran into Dipsu this weekend at Rice's Beer Bike. Dipsu's a friend of mine from Rice, my neighbor my freshman year and an up and coming doctor here in Houston. He's beginning his cardiology residency next year and I've found him to have become pretty damn tech savvy since we knew each other in college. Anyways, Dipsu had a new phone with him. What kind? A T-Mobile MDA. I was surprised. I quizzed him about his choice of the T-Mobile MDA since the last time I had talked technology with a Doctor (at least a year ago) the PDA of choice was the Palm. His comment: "All the medical apps are moving over to Windows Mobile and away from Palm -- the last thing I would have done was buy a Palm device."

Go Windows Mobile!

90% of music is still purchased on CDs

2006-03-29T12:02:00.000-08:00

A piece of evidence that Mark Cuban is right that TV won't be replaced by TV (at least not anytime soon): Even though digital music is pretty popular, 90% of all music is still purchased on CDs. Reed Hastings mentioned this in a recent interview that he did. This is same reason why I think that good old PVRs and TV time-shifting technologies are going to be around for a long time to come, even though TV shows are increasingly available online through channels like AOL's In2TV and Apple's iTunes.

My notes on the Riya beta

2006-03-23T07:25:00.000-08:00

I started testing Riya, the much-talked-about face recognition company, and here are my notes so far:

- There are people I don't care about having Riya recognize -- I'd like for them to NOT show up in the manual training. There's isn't a way to tell it to stop showing me certain faces so at this point, when I go into manual training, the first three or four rows are full of poeple that I just automatically skip over. And this makes each training "session" less useful.

- The first thing I wanted to do after I did some "training" was see what faces Riya had properly recognized based on my training. The way I see it, face recognition is the reason why people are going to use Riya so it's the place a user should be taken after they've done the work of uploading and "training" (instant gratification). As it is, I had to hunt and peck for this screen, I wasn't automatically taken there.

- On the "People" tab, I want to have a count of how many photographs it's found for each person I've trained it for... This would be a good measure for me to quickly get an idea of how well it's done.

- On the "People" tab, the left and right browser arrows don't appear to work in the "Browse unrecognized faces in your photos" section.

- I'm curious about the percentage of faces (in my photographs) that Riya has recognized on its own. I have the total number of faces recognized, but I don't know how many of these were because I specifically said this face = this person. On one end, this number could be zero (this is the scenario where I've taught Riya 100% of faces in my photographs) and Riya would be adding no value. On the other end, It could be something high and that would indicate (assuming a low rate of false positives) that Riya's recognizing a lot of faces.

- The uploader wasn't as effective as it needs to be -- it should have had Picasa-style directory selection/de-selection. As it is, I do a lot of exports from Picasa and so I have lower-res duplicates of a lot of my images at My Pictures/Picasa Exports/[Album Name]. And all of my native resolution pictures are at My Pictures/[Album Name]. So as a result, a believe Riya's uploading a lot of stuff twice.

- I manage all of my photographs using Picasa. It would be nice if Riya integrated with this so that it picked up edits / crops / rotations that I have made to photographs (Picasa doesn't change any of the source image files, it just stores the changes in an INI file and applies them whenever you try to do anything with the file outside of Picasa like send it out for a print, do an export, email photographs, etc.). If there was integration, I could also tell Riya to only worry about the photographs that are marked with yellow stars.

- Is Riya uploading the high-resolution images (3-4MB per image)? Or is it just doing image processing locally on my hard drive (utilizing the higher-resolution data) and then uploading a lower resolution version of the image along with the results of that image processing to Riya? Does image recognition quality get incrementally better at higher resolutions and then plateau past a certain resolution?

- Summary: So far, it's been fun and interesting. But what I really need to do is assume that Riya will integrate nicely into my photo ecosystem (ie my multiple cameras, my portable hard drives full of photographs, Picasa, and flickr) and figure out whether this facial recognition stuff is actually useful. It's certainly cool, but why do I need to have photos referenced by person? Does it improve the photo sharing experience? It's more often that I want to share photographs from an event or by theme, but it's not too often that the theme is a person. I can think of some instances where it would be useful, like if I'm putting together a slideshow for someone's birthday -- then having all the photographs of that person is useful. If I'm looking at really old photographs, I think it might be useful to be able to pluck out photographs by who is in them. Maybe. Like I said, this is one that I have to figure out.

1600+ photographs uploaded so far, I'll continue to report on how well the technology works and, ultimately, how useful I find it.

Tag: riya

Book Search in Delhi

2006-03-09T02:52:00.000-08:00

While the debate around book search rages on in the U.S. tech community and around the world, witness the power and efficiency of book search in New Delhi, India at Teksons Book Store (GK-1 M-Block market):

1. I execute a query for 'Lord Ganesha's Feast of Laughter' with a store manager

2. The store manager dispatches two resources to search for the book (see photograph below)

3. The book is delivered to me with a response time of 5.342 seconds

Delhi Geek Dinner

2006-03-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

Copy of the mail I just sent to the barcampdelhi Yahoo group:

> Hey folks,
>
> I'm organizing a geek dinner (with help from Gaurav @ Tekriti) on
> Monday, March 13th. At Gaurav's suggestion, we're going to meet at
> the DLF Mega Mall food court in Gurgaon at 8:30pm. Please RSVP on
> e-mail (rakesh at snapstream dot com) or by phone (9810497266). Please pass
> the word along to other geek friends, even if they weren't able to
> make it to barcamp. It'll be a good chance to connect again after
> barcamp this past weekend.
>
> Hope to see a lot of you there!

My experience at Barcamp Delhi

2006-03-06T01:28:00.000-08:00

I spent all of Saturday this past weekend at BarCamp Delhi (a nice coincidence that it was scheduled while I am here in India for a wedding!)

My summary of Barcamp Delhi:

* I love Delhi (lived here for five years during middle school and high school) and while I've spent a lot of time here, I've never been around the kind of smart, motivated and talented technologists that I spent time with on Saturday. I expect great things from these people!

* Meeting the folks that I did really hit home what a small technology world we live in and how much smaller it is thanks to blogs. It was a bit surreal (Scoble has described the same sentiment before) to be sitting in Adobe's office in NOIDA and hearing folks in the audience dissect and discuss technologies like Google News, gada.be, Windows Live and Gmail.

* Adobe's office in Delhi is really nice -- a big thanks to them for giving us their conference rooms, for feeding us lunch, and last, but certainly not least, for the fast and free wi-fi. And while I'm at it, big thanks also goes to the folks that catalyzed and planned the event: Gaurav, Jonathan Boutelle, Manik Juneja, and Amit Ranjan.

* Manish talked about microformats as a solution for knowledge management in organizations and in this context, he had a screenshot of a microformats plug-in for wordpress. I've read about microformats and understand what they are all about, but seeing it integrated into a blog publishing platform wasn't something I had seen before and it was very cool. Manish's is a great speaker, but I felt the content was a bit jargony and maybe too academic in places -- I could tell from the Q&A that Manish gets this stuff so my only criticism here is that IMO he should have communicated it in clearer simpler language. Anyways, I'm still not sure about how structured user-generated content is going to come into existence, but microformats deployed through blog publishing platforms seem like one viable approach. There are other approaches like Edgeio and Google Base.

* Want to befriend an Indian engineer / technologist? Buy him a beer. In particular, buy him a Foster's. :-)

* Gaurav (one of the barcamp organizers) had a great presentation on bootstrapping a company -- it was succinct, to the point and engaging. There were a lot of things in his presentation that I've learned myself through personal experience or from others, but I particularly enjoyed how everything was contextualized to India.

* Abhishek Agrawal had a presentation entitled "Why startup?" that preceded Gaurav's. I missed most of the presentation but caught the tail-end of it and I could tell it that it was a good session. Abhishek carpooled with me to and from barcamp and he struck me as a well-informed, analytical and motivated technologist. I look forward to following what he does with his new company.

* Some of the presenters were talented speakers -- VeerChand Bothra and Anuj Khurana were two guys that I'll single out.

* There were no female presenters, though there were several women in attendance.

* Sorry I couldn't join everyone for drinks later, but I plan to organize a geek dinner in the next week or so before I head back to the States. If you were interested in joining, drop me a line at rakesh at agrawal dot org.

Barcamp Delhi was great and I hope to see this technology community in Delhi really grow and flourish over time!

BarCampDelhi tagged Flickr photos
barcampdelhi

Barcamp Delhi is over

2006-03-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

Just finished up the day at Barcamp Delhi and it was great. More on the conference later, for now check out the photographs that I took (or check out all flickr images tagged with 'barcampdelhi')

barcampdelhi

Shozu review

2006-03-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned earlier I've recently begun to use a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone, the Cingular 2125 aka the HTC Faraday.

The phone's EDGE/GPRS connection has proven to be very useful here in Delhi where one can end up spending a lot of time in the car driving from one part of the city to another (though the traffic gets better every year as the infrastructure improves). So I've been using an Airtel SIM chip with an unlimited GPRS subscription and one incredibly cool and useful service that I've been using on this trip to India is Shozu.

Here's the usage scenario for Shozu:
1) snap a photograph with your phone's camera
2) tell Shozu whether you want to upload the photograph to flickr
3) if you answer yes, it automatically uploads it to flickr

(And if you want, you can configure it so Shozu skips step #2 so every photograph you take automatically gets uploaded... not a feature you'd want to turn on if you were, say, Paris Hilton.)

I used this feature all night at the wedding last night so my parents, who are sorely missing Ananya back in the States, could see near real-time photographs of her:

Shozu installed pretty easily on my 2125 and linking my Shozu and flickr account into the Shozu software on my phone was pretty easy too. I particularly like the way Shozu seamlessly integrates in with the camera software on my Windows Mobile phone. Immediately after I snap a photograph, the Shozu screen seamlessly pops up to ask me if the photo I just took is something I want to upload. The uploading is also seamless and in-the-background and I could easily check to see whether images I had chosen to "Shozu" had actually been uploaded or not.

The only downside is that the camera on my 2125 (like most phone cameras) isn't that great. Actually, it's pretty terrible for anything other than, well, photos where I don't care about image quality. So, what I really want is to have this built into my digital SLR (like Jason Calacanis put on his Christmas wishlist). Nonetheless, I see myself continuing to use Shozu a lot and it's a great pointer to the future of Internet connected consumer electronics devices.

The other thought I have is this: considering that early reviews of Wi-fi digital cameras haven't been that hot, the people designing these products would do well to carefully study the Shozu experience.

Reliance WebWorld review

2006-03-03T10:42:00.000-08:00

I had to download some large files (1gb in size!) and my home broadband connection just wasn't cutting it. So in search of a faster internet connection, I ended up at the Reliance WebWorld internet center / cafe in New Friends Colony. The experience was terrible -- someone at Reliance, hire some real programmers! The sign-up process was four steps but each step took about 5-7 minutes of processing. I asked one of the attendants why this was the case and he gave be the bizarre explanation of "Well, it has to check your desired user ID against the entire national database of Reliance WebWorld user IDs." Huh? And then, once I was logged in, it was this very crippled kiosk shell on top of Windows with the filesystem locked down. I was eventually able to get around the filesystem being locked down and when I did, to my disappointment I was only able to get download speeds of about 8-9KB/s. :(

I love the Reliance WebWorld concept and the fact that they are all over the place here in Delhi. These shops will prove to be very valuable to Reliance as it sells more and more consumer services. But they have a lot of work to do on the user experience.

Will be attending barcamp in Delhi... with Scoble in attendance?!

2006-02-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

Man, it's a crazy world... I'll be in Delhi (India) next week for a wedding in the family so I decided I'd try to connect with some technologists over there, maybe organize a geek dinner or something. What do you know, next Saturday they're hosting a barcamp in Delhi! And of all people, Scoble will be there! Wacky. Last time I saw met him was at Gnomedex in the beautiful downtown library in Seattle. Anyways, I'm looking forward to connecting with technology folks in Delhi!

UPDATE: Oops, my mistake, as Gaurav was nice enough to point out, Scoble's not going to be there.

barcampdelhi

digital photography idea

2006-02-08T18:43:00.000-08:00

why don't we enable the storage of the next and previous photograph(s) in the digital file for an image. yeah, sure, it would take up a lot of storage space, but it's often really cool to see other photographs that were taken before and after an image. case in point: I don't know about others, but for me there are certain "famous" photographs, indelible images that have gone from being images that capture a moment to being, well, famous. take an image that's iconic like that for you and try to find the photograph taken before and after that photograph -- the result for me was kind of like a behind-the-scenes of the original photograph. that would be the idea behind this, build in a behind the scenes into every photograph.

this may be more relevant to prosumer cameras (like my canon digital rebel) where multiple photos can easily be taken in succession. and then, what if the before and after photographs were crappy images or simply duplicate frames?

Cingular 2125 (aka HTC Faraday) Review

2006-02-06T20:43:00.000-08:00

The old phone

Until recently, I was Nokia 6610 user. What a great cell phone. I used this phone with T-mobile service and it made me a big, big fan of Nokia phones. The hardware was very robust (my phone took quite a beating over its long life -- when it wasn't being chewed by my daughter, Ananya, it was being dropped on a hard surface). And the software, ah, well, the software was wonderfully simple and usable. My love of the Nokia 6610 should probably be the subject of another article... Back to this story. In the past 6 months or so I was looking for some things that Nokia didn't offer on the 6610 or on any other phone that fit what I was looking for -- bluetooth, a good web browsing experience, and a directory that would store more than 200 contacts.

I sat on the decision to switch over to a new phone for a while and recently made the decision to switch over to Cingular because of the reviews I read about Cingular's 2125 aka the HTC Faraday and because of the good things I had heard about Cingular's EDGE data network. I was hesistant to move away from Nokia's software, but decided to make the leap anyways because of everything I read, including Robert Scoble's praise. Here are my thoughts so far...

The Hardware

The only reason the Cingular 2125 was even an option for me was that it packed a smartphone into a normal phone form factor. I know a lot of people are Treo fans, but I've never been able to handle its larger size. I'm not a clip-my-phone-on-my-belt kind of guy and the Treo has never been small enough to comfortably fit in my pocket (I don't wear parachute pants). Plus I hate the fact that there are so many small buttons on the Treo (I know, I know, it's the alphabet, but I guess I don't plan to type text so much on my phone). I like phones with phone style keypads. So the size and weight of the 2125 are perfect for me, just a bit larger and heavier than my old Nokia 6610.

The keypad's buttons are a little bit small and positioned low on the phone so dialing without looking is more difficult. But I'm getting used to it -- I'm going on a slim finger diet. The tradeoff of the smaller keypad, obviously, is a much larger screen compared to the Nokia 6610. So the screen is nice, high-resolution and bright. I'm a bit concerned about scratching it, so I need to look into something to protect it with, something that doesn't add much to the size of the phone.

Battery life appears to be OK, not as good as my Nokia 6610, but we'll see how it holds up under regular usage.

I read a lot about how the 2125 power button was hard to use -- I would have agreed with this until I figured out how to use it properly (press down, not in). It's very easy to use once you figure it out.

The Software (Windows Mobile 5.0)

I love being able to surf the Internet from my phone. It's practical and useful, the biggest "new" thing for me as a part of this upgrade. My favorite web apps / sites so far:

Gmail (http://m.gmail.com/)

Google Local

Google Homepage

Bloglines

A bunch of news sites... (nytimes, bbc, the onion :) )

I've been using Internet Explorer as my browser but I did download Opera Mini to try it out. I've played around with it and like some things about it, namely, the way you can scroll up and down by page and how the font size can be adjusted to pack more information on the screen. But I haven't delved into how to reconfigure Windows Mobile to use something other than IE as the default browser, or, for that matter, how to establish a direct link to a Java application like Opera Mini from the Windows Mobile "home page". So anyways, at this point there isn't anything compelling enough for me to switch to Opera Mini. Let's see if that changes as I play with it more.

The app that I've been using to show off my 2125: Google Local for Mobile. I had to choose the Audiovox SMT5600 to get a version that works on the 2125 because the 2125 wasn't listed (hopefully GLM adds it soon). This application is really, really cool. Do searches and get results on an interactive map. Zoom in on the map. Scroll around with the joystick. Choose the right matching result and get directions to and from that location. Click to dial the phone number for that location. It remembers your last x searches so you don't have to search from scratch everytime. It's another java app so I'll have to figure out how to link directly to the application rather than going through the MIDIlet manager everytime I want to launch it. But it's incredibly cool and useful.

Then there's MSN Mobile, a piece of client software that came pre-installed on the 2125 that wraps a bunch of MSN services into a Windows Mobile client. MSN messenger was interesting, I had a couple of chats on Saturday with it and it worked well, but I had a really strange experience with it earlier today. The application hung up on me while it was trying to connect and it blocked all incoming calls (presumably because EDGE can't be used at the same time as a voice phone call). I wasn't able to kill the MSN messenger task using task manager so I had to reboot the phone to begin receiving incoming calls again. Scary that something on my phone could block incoming calls! I'm not running MSN messenger on my phone again...

A bit about the basic Windows Mobile interface: I can already feel the home screen getting cluttered up. Hotmail (which I never use!) installed an entry for itself on my home screen and after I sync'ed my outlook schedule and contacts, I've got a couple of daily schedule items on my home screen. Lot of stuff on my home screen now, there's stuff I'd like to take off of there, there's other stuff I'd like to add (like a link to gmail). Have to learn how to do this.

I send and receive a lot of SMS text messages so that part of the WM software is important to me. So far, I'm happy enough with how Windows Mobile does text messaging, even though my old Nokia did it better. There are matters of habit, like I'm used to the space button being the 0 on the keypad, not the #. I'm also used to having text messaging one button press away (with Windows Mobile, have to scroll down to the text messages option on the "home page" -- or I have to go find the messages icon in start menu and then choose text messages). Once I'm entering words, I like the way Windows Mobile automatically learns new words. When I toggle between different modes of text entry (t9 vs T9 vs. abc vs. Abc vs. numbers vs. symbols), one of the modes (symbols) clears the screen and brings up a matrix of symbols -- ack, confusing. I also find it annoying that using the joystick I can't wraparound from the end of a line of text back to the beginning of that same line. Also, when I'm T9ing a proper noun, it lets me do one word stem and then another to build a word that it hasn't already learned -- that's good. But let's say I'm done T9ing something and then I go back to that word because, say I made a mistake, it doesn't go back into T9 mode on that word. I have to delete and then re-T9 that word. Also, when a new message comes in, I want a single click to take me to read that message. As it stands, I have to click down to "text messages" and then choose it and then choose the message in question.

One other nitpick I have: I loved the way that my Nokia 6610 let me take a number down while talking on the phone and save it to the directory. So far, I haven't seen this to be easily possible on my 2125. When I enter a number while talking on the phone, after the call is disconnected, that number is lost forever. Maybe I need to go into a "add contact" screen while talking on the phone. Maybe another example of less is more.

That's it for now... More to come. I'm looking forward to getting all of my numbers transferred over to this phone from my Nokia. I'm also hoping to get a solid photo sync / slideshow app, preferably something that syncs with Flickr and/or Picasa. If you have a 2125 and have any tips on how to solve the problems I've talked about above or have a cool mobile website or application to recommend, please let me know!

product rave: Roku Labs Soundbridge

2006-01-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

I bought a Roku Labs Soundbridge on a special that they had two months ago and after breezing through setup and using it almost every day, I have one thing to say: it's an excellent product. Setup: setting it up is what setup of any tech product should be like -- it detected my wireless network automatically, found my imac full of music automatically, and within minutes I was listening to music. And I love the design too -- the barrel shape is cool and different and it just works, at least in my particular setup (I'm using it to get music from an imac in the house to a receiver that powers speakers next to our pool/deck downstairs).

Welcome to 2006!

2006-01-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

I've been incommunicado for too many months. One reason: Beyond TV 4. Not an excuse, but an explanation. I'm back though. Welcome to 2006!

memeorandum is cool

2005-10-13T20:25:00.000-07:00

I agree with TechCrunch's post about memeorandum (which I incidentally came across reading memeorandum). It's a great site. A "newspaper for anyone interested in what's happening right now" -- couldn't have put it better myself.

New version of Google Picasa 2!

2005-10-13T19:45:00.000-07:00

There's a new version of Google's Picasa photo management software, version 2, and I'm most excited about this feature:

External drives - Find photos on external drives using Picasa. Simply go Tools > Folder Manager to choose whether Picasa should scan a connected external drive to find pictures. When you unplug and reconnect, Picasa will find your pictures instantly (with no scanning), and will also preserve your labels

I've been needing this for a while since I'm constantly having to move files off my hard drive onto external storage.

qoop + flickr = I'm unimpressed!

2005-10-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

I read ehomeupgrade's post about qoop-flickr and it reminded that I wanted to post some brief feedback on qoop+flickr.

The ordering experience was OK, nothing stellar, but by far the biggest downer was the print quality of the photos in the book that I ordered. Pixely, dithered -- how else can I describe them?

While Derek Powazek does point out the inferior print quality, I think he understates it.

Anyways, I'm surprised that flickr did a deal with qoop with the quality being what it is. You'd think print quality would be criteria numero uno for them!

UPDATE: Phil, President of QOOP, found my posting and has just responded in the comments. His attention is commendable and I look forward to seeing them improve the quality of the QOOP-Flickr service.

UPDATE 2: Phil just called me and after chatting with him, I have a high level of confidence that they'll address these issues fairly soon. When I see the new results, I'll definitely be posting my feedback then.

Idea: vertical search engine for stock photos

2005-10-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

Searching for stock photography has always been a pain -- visit corbis, then getty images, then veer and then... who knows what else. I'd like a single site to deliver a consolidated image search across all of these image databases.

And most stock photographs seem to be pretty well tagged, but how about letting people tag/rate photographs, collections and stock photo companies? This additional meta data could go a long way to making it easier for designers to find good stock photographs.

The site could make money through referrer fees (assuming that these sites have such a thing), though this sort of revenue model could create a conflict with the goal of providing high quality search results. Maybe the site could make money providing other services to a designer community that it would foster.

One of the other cool trends that I think will grow to dominate the stock photography business, or at least grow it to a new set of customers that don't buy stock photography today is the trend towards amateurs and prosumers selling their work online. Why couldn't some average photographer upload a bunch of his stuff to flickr and, in turn, have someone else pay him for those photographs? I'd buy those photographs -- they'd be less expensive and there'd be a lot more to choose from.

Off to Austin!

2005-09-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

IMG_7641
Originally uploaded by rakeshagrawal.

We're off to Austin. Check out the house all boarded up!

boing boing taunts India for its offer at aid?

2005-09-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised at xeni and boing boing for taunting India's offer to help the United States with handling the aftermath of Katrina in this post. The post is entitled, "Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!" Hey Xeni, boing boing, way to propagate American arrogance to all of your readers in and outside the United States!

gmail's support for other e-mail addresses

2005-09-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

I've been using Gmail now for a little bit and it works pretty well -- I'm impressed with the Gmail interface. There are still some things I need to experiment with like attachments and keyboard shortcuts (are there any?) but right now, I'm not feeling much pain after using Gmail for a while. I wonder if there will be pain associated with not having my calendar or tasks in Gmail.

One thing that I wish worked better: I've setup my personal and work e-mail addresess to both forward to my gmail account and I've also verified both against my Gmail account so I can send e-mails from personal/work addresses from with gmail. But one problem I've encountered is that Gmail doesn't make any inferences about which e-mail address to use when replying to a message -- it simply uses whichever e-mail address you've marked as default. In my case, I have my personal address marked as the default so when replying to work e-mails, I have to CLICK on other choices (under the from address) and then I have to CLICK and CHOOSE my work e-mail address. Three extra clicks, in my opinion. Hey Gmail product people: why not do away with those extra clicks?

outlook keep crashing... randomly

2005-09-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

For the past week (give or take) Outlook has randomly been crashing on me about 3-4 times a day, on average. What a frustration. I spent a little bit of time playing with GMail yesterday and with their support for third party verifiable e-mail addresses, I'm thinking about making that switch. It sure would be nice if Google had a client-side rich app, though I have to say that Gmail is pretty damn rich for a web app. Off to re-run Outlook. Sigh.

a quick review of Slide (after using it for 15-30 minutes)

2005-08-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

So here's my quick review of slide, after using it for 15-30 minutes:

I'd love to have the sidebar thingy as a feature of flickr or have it as a plugin to the Google sidebar (feeding off of my flickr photostream).
I'd also be interested in the ability for the software to scan my local hard disk and just automatically find them and then, with the click of one button, upload them to a central site (I'd prefer flickr) for sharing or subscription by my friends (imagine this as a feature to picasa -- it does most of this, it's just the "upload to flickr" part that I'd want it to do).

All of my photo management stuff revolves around one software package: picasa. I'm starting to introduce a second service into the mix: flickr. I'm just not sure where slide fits into this.

One thing that Slide hasn't done, in my 30 minutes of installation and expirmentation: it hasn't found most of the photographs on my hard drive, which is weird. They are all in a pretty standard place (the My Pictures folder) yet it's only found other, more obscure photos.

One thing that I find to be a bit annoying is how when I mouseover a photo in the stream at the left, it automatically enlarges the image that I've hovered over and then it takes a moment for that image to go away. The enlarge thing happens too easily -- it's almost like I have to avoid that section of my screen now because if my mouse rolls over there, I suddenly have this big pop-up taking up my screen (and covering up the slider and preventing me from browsing other images). And, if I want to see an even larger version of that image, I double click on that image in the enlarged slide window and it takes me to a webpage (slide's webpage for some channels or a 3rd party website for some other channels). When I do this, I would expect for the enlarged slide image window to go away but it doesn't. So now I'm looking at the enlarged-enlarged image in a web page, I close that, I have to go back and close the enlarged and then I'm back to viewing the slide bar. Basically, this whole (important!) part of the app doesn't seem to be polished from a usability standpoint. The dynamics should be slightly different I think, at least for the way I want to use it.

Also the slide thing can be annoying and distracting. I used the Google Sidebar for a couple of days (before I decided it wasn't a useful enough allocation of desktop real estate) and I like the alternating single image in its photo plug-in a lot better.

So those are some scattered notes and first impressions.

Robert Scoble wonders if Google is trying to recruit one of their researchers

2005-08-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

In this post Robert Scoble wonders if Google is trying to recruit one of Microsoft's researchers because there are Google Adwords on her name. Maybe, but what I think is more likely is that she's well published in her field and they are ads targeted at other researchers who are likely to be doing searches for her work. I noticed this a long time ago because there's a well known computer science researcher with my name at IBM and for a long time I've noticed that Google has adwords running on his name.

Hmmm, actually, now that I think about it, maybe their ads on "Rakesh Agrawal" are because of that great elevator algorithm I wrote in my operating system class in college that won me fame and adulation around the country! :)

two interesting articles on the IM industry and Google Talk

2005-08-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

I read two interesting articles this morning about Google Talk and the IM industry. First, Nugget's livejournal post, picked up on slashdot. Thesis: Google's not implemented s2s in their implementation of Jabber which means that Google Talk users are still in a closed system. What Nugget didn't try to do is answer the question that this article lead me to: why isn't Google supporting s2s? There must be some reason for this over there. I read something on one of their Google Talk web pages, where they talked about federation, about how they had federated with sipphone and earthlink because they 'agreed with their philosophies about open chat systems' or something like that. It sounds like there are some hints at the reason in that statement, but it doesn't fully connect the dots for me.

And then there was this story that Nugget posted to about how Google Talk was shaking up the IM world and how this might accelerate some real competition and how that would be a welcome thing.

ofoto / kodakgallery: poor international infrastructure?

2005-08-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

This is interesting. One of my cousins in India has just started using Ofoto's UK site to upload photographs of their newborn daughter (lotta babies born in the past 2 months!). My first surprise was that I had to create a new account on the Ofoto.co.uk site. Hmm. I can type pretty fast and it's not above my threshold of pain to create a new account, I guess, so OK, fine, I create an Ofoto UK account, wondering all the while why I can't just use my Ofoto U.S. account. Now I can view the photographs, great.

So today, I decided I wanted to order a bunch of photographs from the Ofoto site and I wondered to myself, "Surely they have at least their back-end infrastructure setup so that the photographs will get shipped from their U.S. office rather than their UK office." I'm probably wrong, though I'm not sure. It looks like the photos are going to get printed in the UK and then mailed from there -- at least that's what I'm left to conclude after the magnitude of the shipping charge I'm paying.

What are the implications of this kind of weak international infrastructure (besides the fact that it's annoying to me as a user :))? It seems obvious to me that we live in an increasingly globally mobile society and that this is the type of user an Internet-based site should be supporting. It's specifically within the grasp of any company, with technology and the Internet, to solve problems like these. Not doing so is bad operations, architecture and design.

Another perspective on this issue is that societies and communities that cross national borders are able to develop much more quickly today than ever before because of the Internet. Folks from all over the world have access to reams of data from other countries of the world. I can surf the website of Japanese companies, buy electronics from Hong Kong (like lik-sang), exchange e-mails with bloggers in the UK, etc. Look at how engadget has launched sites in Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. So even leaving aside people/communities/societies that are moving around, there are tons of people that are interacting across borders and societies and communities coming out of it. At the same time, I'll temper these comments by saying that it is not like we live in a borderless world. There are still lots of things that stymie these cross-border societies and communities (language, probably a fair bit of culture, legal code, tarriffs). But the trend is definitely one that involves more global mobility and more cross-border communities and societies.

Two final observations:

1) technology companies should do what they can to cater to, where appropriate (like the ofoto / kodak gallery example above!), globalization trends because they are, I believe, up-and-to-the-right trends.

2) there will be exponential growth in technologies and services around globalization that will drive these trends and will be driven by these trends.

I'm a fan of optical illusions

2005-08-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

I came across the Koffka ring and the Checkershadow optical illusions earlier this morning. Very cool! Here's the checkershadow in-lined:

(the square labelled 'A' and the square labelled 'B' are the same color!)

Seeing these two optical illusions reminded me of the rotating snakes optical illusions that I think were slashdotted a long time ago. He's got a few new ones up that are as interesting and along similar lines as the original.

One short comment on Google Talk

2005-08-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

So I just tried Google Talk on a quick chat with Chris Pirillo and I have one quick comment: the simplicity reminds me of UNIX's ntalk application. The good old days. :)

Something I'd love to see in Google Desktop

2005-08-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

Something that I'd love to see in Google Desktop/Sidebar is a much better version of the Windows "My recent documents" feature. I'd like to be able to browse documents that I've opened in the past much like I can browse through my browser history. Maybe an application specific browser would be useful too (to effectively replace the MRU feature in Microsoft Word and Excel and promote it up a higher level in the OS). I remember reading that David Gelernter was developing some new paradigm for file management that could replace the traditional folder/sub-folder model. Maybe that's something that could be implemented in Google Desktop? I'm sure Google has a name internally for things that they can't do because they don't control the operating system (like they can't build searchability into the filesystem, for example -- they have to instead crawl the filesystem) -- "OS blocked"? Maybe Google would be "OS blocked" from creating something like this. It seems like a simple place though where they could do some innovation and make a visible impact on people's user experience with PCs (and control more of the user experience). It's a step away from their focus on search, but in many cases, I want to browse, not search. And the traditional folder/sub-folder model sucks when it comes to browsing because it requires stuff to be organized in the first place.

Related thought: It would be cool if my laptop had a GPS sensor built-in so I could not only browse by date/time, but also by geography, ie "I'd like to see all the webpages and documents that looked at or worked on while I was in San Jose last week." That kind of association is more natural and seamless than folder or date/time.

Google's not going to buy Skype

2005-08-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

I have to get in on the commentary because I think the idea of Google buying Skype is ridiculous. This article was posted on slashdot earlier this morning and the idea of Google buying Skype have been floating around in the blogosphere for a little bit now. I really doubt this happening. I'm inclined to agree with Dave that Google's new IM package will be an eventual Skype killer (or force them to adopt an open standard rather than a proprietary one).

There's a deep cultural difference between Skype and Google Talk, a difference that happens to be Google Talk's only strong selling point right now: Google Talk is based on an open standard (Jabber). Skype is proprietary. Oil and water. Google's not buying Skype. (There is one other thing that Google Talk has: it's so freaking clean compared to it's advertisement laden competitors -- but I'm not sure how much that's going to do to get people to switch).

Rob gives bad advice on digital SLRs

2005-08-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Rob Pegoraro's column in this weekends Washington Post was a general buyer's guide to digital cameras and I liked the the no-nonsense advice he gave out until I read this:

That, in turn, undercuts one of the primary advantages of digital cameras -- the ability to take one to as many places as possible. That's also why I don't recommend D-SLRs -- "digital single-lens reflex" models that, like their film equivalents, let you frame a shot through the same lens used by the image sensor. They take extremely sharp pictures and do so extremely quickly, but they also cost far more and are hardly smaller than film SLRs. Hold off on any D-SLR shopping until you find you're making photography a serious hobby.

I disagree here. The benefit of the extremely fast photo taking seriously outweighs the "downsides" of extra disk space. You don't need to have photography as a serious hobby to get big benefits from a digital SLR. Fast photo taking is one of those things that's hard to understand the benefit of until you actually have it. And I'm generally a photo geek and a technology geek so you might discount my opinion here, but my wife who is neither LOVES our Canon EOS digital, she absolutely swears by it. With a young baby (they never sit still!) or kids that play sports or perform in school plays or WHATEVER, the quick response time from a camera fundamentally changes the quality of the shots that you get -- not in terms of pixel quality, but in terms of capturing what you intended to capture and not an image 1-2 seconds later.

Yes, the bulkiness is a disadvantage but it's outweighed (no pun intended) by the shift in the results you get from digital SLRs.

Now if only the makers of smaller digital cameras (the stuff that Rob exclusively advocates) could put the storage buffers and whatever else gives digital SLRs a quicker response time on digital SLRs into the next generation of Digital Elphs, we'd have the best of both worlds.

Palestinian Study Tour -- photographs from 1997

2005-08-22T21:57:00.000-07:00

A girl and her brother at a school in the Gaza strip

Back in 1997, while I was still in college, I took a class on the history of the Palestinians and I was part of a subset of the class that went on a 2 week study tour to the Palestinian territories in Israel. Most of us stayed near Jerusalem and during our stay, we traveled to Ramallah, Bethlehem, the Gaza strip, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Organized by student Allison Fine, the trip included private meetings between our group and key Palestinian leaders and intellectuals like Sari Nuseibeh and Haider Abdul Shafi.

I shot about 30 rolls of 36-exposure black and white film on the trip, probably the most significant photography project that I have ever undertaken. I got back to school and processed all of the film myself and put together quite an exhibit of phtoographs. I've always meant to put the photographs online because I'm really proud of the photographs I took on that trip but never got around to it until now. I hope to put up more of my photographs here along with captions and more information, but for now, I've uploaded a selection of photographs from the Palestinian Study Tour. All of the B&W's were taken by me. Color photographs were taken by Adam Reiser. Adam, where are you these days?

TheHoneymoon.com not tested in Firefox!

2005-08-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

In Chicago right now for a friend's wedding and I went to buy them a gift from TheHoneymoon and I was surprised to find out that the site didn't work properly in Firefox. All of the checkout pages had the action buttons "confirm order" and "place order" covered up by the footer of the page. TheHoneymoon.com, fix your website dudes!

always explain the why

2005-08-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is a simple rule, but I think it's a valuable one in several if not all spheres of life -- business and family for sure. I think it will make me a better parent.

Necktie overload

2005-08-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

I realized tonight that I have way too many ties.

I've had this mostly broken tie rotator in my closet for the past year or so (it used to work before that). When I've wanted to find a tie to wear, I've had to manually rotate the belt to circulate the ties. I decided to take action and remove this broken piece of technology today. So I ripped it off the hanger rod in my closet and that's when I realized just how many ties I have.

How many? I'd say the count is easily above 50, maybe approaching 75. I'm not sure where these things came from, but somewhere along the way I picked up a bunch of ties. Yes, it is ridiculous. Want a tie?

problem solved with... a corded telephone

2005-08-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you have a problem that only gets solved with some very old, very non-flashy technology. We have a Panasonic multi-line, multi-handset telephone system in the main house with probably 5-6 handsets. We also have a room that's designated as the library and has the main computer (the same one that I recently bought a new dell widescreen LCD for). Problem was this: very often, when someone was working on that computer, they would want to make or answer a phone call (examples: look up restaurant review and phone number, call to make a reservation; look up store hours, call to confirm availability of some product; working at the desk and the phone rings). So as you might guess, cordless phones are useless in this scenario -- you've got to go hunt around for one and when you have as many people at home as we have, forget about it. No amount of training or exhortation will EVER get anyone to put anything where it belongs, much less the cordless telephones. That's why they are cordless!!! So that they can be taken into far corners of the house and hidden so no one else can find them or use them!!!

So I always thought it would be a good idea to get a two-line corded phone for that desk but never got around to it until last weekend. (As a side note, amazon and most other online stores don't make it at all easy to find corded telephones. Consumerreports.com hardly has any reviews of them. Likewise for other product review sites. So I was a gadget-purchaser-fish out of water. Not much to help me buy the right phone.) Last weekend I bought two single line, compact corded telephones with caller id from Target:

I'm getting high praise around the house as EVERYONE has been using these phones. Sometimes, the solution to a problem, even for the earliest of early adopters, is old technology.

Ticketmaster is terrible

2005-08-06T14:07:00.000-07:00

I'm on the phone with Ticketmaster right now. What a terrible company. Ugh.

So here's the story, quickly: Shonali bought 4 tickets to an upcoming showing of the musical "Wicked" for a friend (b/c the tickets were being pre-sold to Amex gold card holders and Shonali has one and her friend doesn't). But after buying the tickets Shonali realized her friend had mixed up the dates and actually needed tickets for the following week. Shonali asked me to take care of it. I called Ticketmaster. I waited for a long time, frustrating in this day and age for any sort of customer service. I spoke to someone who said, "Your tickets have been mailed and you need them in-hand before I can help you." OK, fine, it's like a paper ticket. I get it, I'll wait.

So I got the tickets earlier this week and I called back today. Again, I have to wait a long time before I'm connected to someone. The gal on the phone is flippant, unsympathetic, and unhelpful. From her, after going around and around a few times (I could have sworn she was chewing bubble gum, filing her nails and rolling her eyes while I talked to her), I find out that there is no such thing as an exchange and that I need to mail the tickets back for a refund and buy completely new tickets if I want to.

Why didn't someone tell me that 6 days ago when I first called when I could have gotten better tickets for the following week?

I have to say that I've always disliked Ticketmaster, their service fees are outrageously high and they've never seemed worth it (in this case, their service fees accounted for about 15% of what I paid -- $10 per ticket!). They don't serve much of a function, at least not to me as a consumer. And to then see them do what very little they do (acting as a middleman for ticket sales) so poorly, well, it's really frustrating. I don't know anything about their business or their stranglehold over their customers, but I do know that there are countless companies today that could do what they do better than them -- how long before Ticketmaster gets toppled?

Google SMS: my latest show-and-tell

2005-08-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

I pretty consistently have some technology product/service that I think is cool that I evangelize and show off to anyone and everyone that I meet. A couple of weeks ago, it was Google Earth. Five years ago (give or take) it was my home WiFi network, back in 1996 when I was living in Washington D.C. and working for American Management Systems it was my Palm III organizer (back in the US Robotics days, before 3com and everything else that has followed). For a while recently it was Lookout (and Google Desktop and X1, but mostly Lookout since it's what I use the most).

The thing I've been show-and-telling most recently is Google SMS. I use SMS a fair bit, the most when I'm out of the country or when Shonali is out of the country -- so I'm pretty good with text entry using T9 and I love everything about the user interface on my Nokia cell phone (including how it learns proper nouns in my 'vocabulary' that weren't built into its dictionary -- I should write about my love of my Nokia 6610 another time). So I've known about Google SMS for a while, but I only recently started using it. It's great. No more 411 and it does a whole lot more. I was in San Jose on Wednesday of this week and on my way to a meeting, I decided I needed some coffee -- I punched in the zipcode for where I was (I had it because I had just checked into my hotel and it was on the receipt) and 'starbucks' and I instantly got a list of all the nearby locations. I was parked at a Starbucks within about 2 minutes. Likewise, I've used it to get restaurant numbers, movie showtimes, and more. It just works. Now it certainly has it's limitations. There's no interactivity and the response time between input and output isn't that great (again, not Google's fault -- it's just about the way SMS works). This just means I have to know exactly what I'm looking for. Text entry can also be difficult for some people, so those people will continue to use 411's voice-based technology. Also, for someone whose not done any serious sms'ing, I'd imagine the menus might seem esoteric for a query response sequence.

I've also briefly tried Google's richer XHTML based portal for mobile devices (mobile.google.com, I think) and it improves on a lot. Again, like their SMS product, the results of this product are extremely well suited to the target device (which translates to "it just works!" in terms of user reaction). You can iterate more with your queries on this device, though the Cingular Edge Treo 650 that I tried it on was still laggier than I had hoped. I could search Google Local for a restaurant or a restaurant category and not only get a phone number and address, but I got a map (that I could zoom in and out of) and the ability to get driving directions. Similarly, I could look up movie times and more. I didn't have enough time to use it in real life, but I could tell that there was quite a bit of promise behind the concept.

Google SMS is great, if you can get the hang of using SMS, I predict it will be invaluable to you.

Just getting to 'e' for ebay

2005-08-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

I have had about 200MB and 45,000 e-mail messages marked as SPAM sitting up on our company mail servers from the past couple of months. While most of them are actually SPAM, some could be actual messages that never made it through so I'm sitting down today to go through the painstaking process of filtering out the good messages and deleting the rest. Luckily, our SPAM filters are relatively good and I'm mostly deleting messages. I just hit 'e' and boy do a lot of spammers masquerade their SPAM messages as ebay emails!

switched to cable modem

2005-08-04T19:38:00.000-07:00

About 2 weeks ago, I switched from DSL to cable modem and my connection is much, much faster now. It mostly just makes a difference when I'm pulling down large files. I'm not sure why I couldn't get more out of my DSL connection... I think it might have had something to do with my distance from my nearest CO (central office). I know that I wasn't eligible for SBC-Yahoo's premium service for this reason.

iTunes everywhere

2005-08-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking about this ever since I bought a new wide screen Dell Ultrasharp LCD monitor and integrated speaker for the PC downstairs: wouldn't it be cool if the 100 or so CDs that I have ripped to my iMac upstairs were available everywhere in the house? The only thing preventing it was the fact that iTunes's built-in sharing feature would only permit sharing between computers on the same subnet. So I actually spent the time to reconfigure the two routers that provide network connectivity between the apartment upstairs and the house downstairs so now they're on the same subnet and voila... iTunes everywhere. It's pretty cool... The stereo for the speakers on the patio and by the pool are immediately below the apartment (which is where the iMac is) so nowadays when we are out by the pool, I just drag one of the laptops down there and wirelessly share music from the iMac upstairs to iTunes on the laptop downstairs. What we used to do was sync some music to the iPod Shuffle and then hook that up to the stereo downstairs.

Now I'm thinking about getting some appliances -- like the Roku Soundbridge -- that will eliminate the need for a laptop or a PC in between. I wonder if the iTunes SDK could enable a plug-in for Beyond Media for iTunes? I would LOVE that.

Google web accelerator causes IMAIL web-based e-mail to fail

2005-07-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

I discovered something interesting... I occasionally check e-mail on my company e-mail address through IMAIL's web-based e-mail client. Recently, from the computer downstairs at my house it hasn't worked and today I figured out why. I have the Google Web Accelerator installed on this computer and somehow it prevents IMAIL's web-based e-mail client from working correctly. Is there anything out there that fixes this problem in Google's web accelerator? Is it a known bug (or is there a similar class of bugs that's known)?

fat man walking

2005-07-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.thefatmanwalking.com/page/65308/index.v3page

I read a short essay by this guy at the back of the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago and now he's getting a lot of attention in the tech world -- CNET wrote this article about him. Steve appears to be in Flagstaff, AZ right now so he's well on his way from CA to NYC. It sure would be nice if his site had an RSS feed!

Disposable video camera from CVS: follow-up

2005-07-23T12:57:00.000-07:00

I finished off the remaining video footage on the "disposable" video camera that Anu bought from CVS and dropped it off at a nearby CVS just before lunch. After lunch, I swung by the same CVS and was disappointed by two things: 1) they tagged me with a charge of another $12.95 (+tax) for the DVD (?!?) and "processing" and 2) the quality of the video on the DVD was seriously lackluster. I shouldn't have expected much better, but the net-net is that definitely wasn't worth $45. I still love the hardware and the simplicity of the model, it's so well contained as a product:
1) buy/rent some inexpensive and simple hardware
2) have fun using it to record video and then
3) hand-off to someone and get a DVD back.

I didn't have to mess with any firewire / USB cables, I didn't have to think about video qualities to save to the DVD, etc. It just worked, it was foolproof. So I like the idea, I like the hardware, but the final product was expensive and low-quality.

a different approach to evangelism?

2005-07-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

A note to Robert Scoble: I know it's the evangelist thing to do to talk up announcements (early morning ones at that!) but maybe that's not the best approach. Maybe a better approach is to let announcements and releases speak for themselves, ie underpromise, overdeliver. In the blogosphere, announcements and releases speak for themselves (and then some!) and all you do by over-hyping things is set yourself up for a fall, especially when you are Mr. Microsoft. But the bigger thing here is that hype like this makes it sound like you're trying too hard, like you need other people's confirmation of your ideas. What a company really needs to be successful is a strong internal compass pointing the way and with this, I believe, evangelism becomes the human voices to communicate what the compass is saying (yes, it's a talking compass :)). I had a similar feeling about the hype around the Microsoft RSS announcement made at Gnomedex. When people figure stuff out why something is meaningful on their own, they understand it a lot better and you can create self-propagating evangelism/buzz. But anyhow, we'll see what the response is like to the big announcement on Monday.

And, as an aside, is it just me or does a 6am PDT announcement seem nuts? I know, I know, it's probably so that the news coincides with the opening of the stock market, but I'm assuming the buzz that you're trying to generate here isn't buzz on wall street. Steve says press releases are dead but I'm not even going that far. I'm just saying that when you're making an announcement that you want people in the tech world to get excited about, 6am might not be an ideal time.

Disposable video camera from CVS, $29.99

2005-07-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

On the way back from the airport after picking up my niece, nephew and sister, we passed a CVS near my house. The digital marquis outside the store was advertising a disposable video camera on their digital marquis. A disposable video camera?!

So when Anu, my sister, was in Monroe on Wednesday she picked one up to try it out and take some video of their new house (they are in the process of moving from Denver, CO to Monroe, LA). Anu got back to Houston today and I'm checking the thing out and it's AWESOME. What a great product.

* 20 minutes of video
* little unit that fits comfortably in one hand
* nice full color LCD that serves as the viewfinder
* only four buttons on the thing -- on/off, playback (you can playback the last clip you recorded), a record button and a delete button (presumably, you can delete the last clip).
* you return the thing to CVS and they give you a DVD with the video on it, presumably with chapter points at the beginning of each segment.
* I think the cost of "processing" and the DVD is included in the $29.99

Anu just handed the thing to me and asked me to finish off the last 10 minutes of video for her and I love this product, I can think of all kinds of uses for it. It's only a matter of time before these things are all over weddings, being used in businesses for field visits and more.

Hey pt, how long before you hack one of these?? The LCD on this thing is great. I'm sure you can think of all kinds of cool uses for it.

Update: I'm behind the curve. Someone's already hacked this thing.

quick notes from this week

2005-07-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

- my new bluetooth mouse came in earlier this week (Logitech MX900, I talked about it here last weekend). it's working quite well with my iMac and it's great to have gotten rid of a wire.

- I also received a new external USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive for my periodic backups -- 320 GB. I'm going to initiate it this weekend and use it to do my next backup. I really wish my laptop had a larger hard drive.

- My Dell laptop is now running with 2GB of RAM, up from 512 MB. I'll report in the next couple of days how it impacts the performance of my PC. Basically, I'm hoping it'll prevent my PC from slowing down when I'm running 10-20 apps at once, each with multiple windows.

- Last weekend, I watched the Aviator and found out that Howard Hughes and I went to the same school... of course, I graduated and he dropped out. He also seems to have married someone with the last name of Rice (Ella Rice), someone presumably connected to Rice's founder, William Marsh Rice. Good movie by the way, though it wasn't interesting, well done and thought provoking in the same way that Birth was.

- Just came back from chai at Balaji. If you are in Houston and like chaat-type of Indian food, this is our favorite place. I recommend the pao bhaji and chole bhature.

- We released Beyond TV 3.7 this week. It's been nearly ready for release for about two weeks, so it was nice to see it go out this week.

Fun with Google Earth

2005-07-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

If you've met me, in person, in the past 2 weeks, you probably know that I've been having fun with Google Earth. The first day I downloaded it, Shonali and I had a great time flying/driving around Delhi, identifying all the places we could recognize. The keyhole database only has data for about half of Delhi, the south half, but that was OK because that's the part of Delhi that both of us used to live in. It seems like somewhat of a fluke that Google has data for Delhi, when you consider that they don't even have data for Bombay in India.

I hope the Google Earth team licenses/acquires some street level data for Delhi. If anyone from the Google Earth team is reading this, Eicher's of India definitely has street level data for Delhi. While I was living there, they were the first company to release a detailed book of roadmaps for Delhi. Get the data from them and let me know when you have it intergated into Google Earth!

Anyways, in the spirit of participatory Google Earth'ing (?!), I posted a bunch of spots in Delhi to the Google Earth BBS.

Also, in the "huge and unique" forum, I posted a link to the only baseball diamond you'll find in Delhi.

Zoomed out on Delhi with all the places that Shonali and I identified

Baseball field at ACSA, across the street from the American Embassy School

Logitech MX900 (for my Mac) on its way

2005-07-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

So I ended up buying the Logitech MX 900 to replace the one-button corded Mac Mouse that came with my iMac. It'll be here in a couple of days and I'll post a report then. While this mouse doesn't officially support the Macintosh, the reviews out there say that it works just fine with Mac's that already have Bluetooth (mine does).

If this thing works well, then I'll have to move on to replacing my wired keyboard with Apple's wireless version. I like the fact that this keyboard is nice and compact so it would be hard to replace with most of the other bluetooth keyboards that are out there.

In the course of searching for Bluetooth mice and keyboards I discovered that there aren't many such devices out there. I should have guessed that this would be the case from the whole process I went through of un-installing Microsoft's crappy XP SP2 bluetooth drivers and replacing them with 3rd party drivers (Widcomm / Broadcom drivers) to get Bluetooth to work on my XP laptop. Obviously, without Microsoft's support in Windows, a hardware standard like Bluetooth would have a hard time building a strong ecosystem.

Apple single-button mouse

2005-07-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

I really need to get off my duff a buy a two button mouse for my iMac. I can't stand the single button thing. Nothing deep about my dislike, I'm just so used to having two buttons. Just asked Shonali and she has the same problem. I wonder when Apple will start shipping Macs with two button mice out of the box? (heck, for all I know, they already do... remember, this iMac was a gift)

high-speed overseas file transfer service

2005-07-09T08:44:00.002-07:00

Dear As-of-yet-non-existent-reader,

I'd love to have a consumer-priced service that I could use to ship large files (e.g. video files for a DVD or lots of high-resolution photographs) from here in the United States to India. Most of Shonali's side of the family live in India and I'm always sending them photographs online (see http://www.agrawal.org/ananya/). On occasion, I've created DVDs (on my iMac) and sent them over with other family I've had traveling to India or through a courier service. But I'd much rather just be able to capture & author the video, set it to upload to somewhere and know that it will get delivered to them on CD or DVD. Basically, I want to avoid the whole step of filling out a bill of lading, finding out how much it's going to cost, etc. etc.

Do you know of any such service? Do you have one that you can recommend?

Movie review: Ripley's Game

2004-11-07T17:56:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching "Ripley's Game", the sequel to "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Overall, I give this movie a C+. John Malkovich plays his character well, but his character is just uninteresting. He's uninteresting compared to the younger Mr. Ripley (played by Matt Damon in the first film) and he's uninteresting on an absolute level as well. The older Mr. Ripley doesn't have the problem of a conscience, something we see him struggle with in the first movie. No, in this film he's without morals AND without a conscience. The guy who COULD have saved the film and made it more interesting is the guy who plays opposite Malkovich. Could've, should've, would've but unfortunately he doesn't. He's basically tricked into becoming a murderer for some money by Malkovich's character and by an unruly friend of Malkovich's who is looking for a rookie killer. And then, surprise, surprise, he realizes that being a murderer doesn't stop after a two day trip to Berlin. The guy who plays opposite Malkovich is, I guess, in a similar position to Ripley in the first movie but he's a bundle of loose ends in the movie. Why does he take the job for the money? Is he not conflicted about it? After the first murder, how does it change him? Why does he take the second job? Why does he develop such a camaraderie with Malkovich's character by the end of the movie (at certain points during the movie, it's like they are busom buddies)? How does he just happen to know how to whack a guy over the head with a gun so as to knock him out? Unfortunately, these loose ends, in the end, detract from what I think the director wanted this movie to focus on: Ripley's character. Again, Malkovich was great, but the movie was like that year old bottle of soda in the cabinet that you pull out for a party: completely flat.

2004-10-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a so-far proud owner of a new iMac G5! Bought for me as a gift from a buddy of mine as a sorry-I-couldn't-make-it-to-your-wedding-so-I-bought-you-an-iMac gift, I've been enjoying this box.

As usual with Apple products, the packaging on the product was where the fun began. Opening up the box, all the manuals, the keyboards and the mouse were nestled in the top styrofoam. The keyboard and mouse were both wrapped in this nice and glossy plastic with adhesive seals. The glossy plastic made everything look really high quality and the adhesive wrap made everything easier to open than traditional shrink wrap stuff which often requires a knife or teeth. Nice keyboard and mouse with shiny clear plastic exterior and white interior/core. They keyboard is nice and compact, has a USB hub built in and connects to the main PC unit via USB. I also liked the way all the plastic parts had additional peel-away protective plastic on them to avoid scratches from shipping and handling.

Underneath the top foam was the main event: the iMac G5's all-in-one flat-panel LCD and computer in one. Very cool. I liked the brushed aluminum base. I like the way the power cord plugs into the back of the case and creates a flush surface with the back of the case. I like the hole in the brushed aluminum base that the power cord threads through. And then there's the neat and clean vertical row of connectors for everything from USB to firewire to ethernet and a modem port. The LCD itself was fine, nothing spectacular there -- thin bezel flat-panels are really cool and looked at from that perspective, this screen is a clunker. So while sticking all this stuff in one is cool and not having a separate box for the CPU, mobo, and hard drive is cool, I don't find the design to be a grand slam.

I did find that I could easily rotate the entire unit in one direction or the other because of the low coefficient of friction on the brushed aluminum base. I found myself doing this a fair bit -- to show my wife a photograph or to show someone on the other side of the desk what I'm talking about.

On to the applications because that's part of the complete Apple story.

So my iMac came with what Apple calls iLife -- software for photos, music, videos and DVDs. The different apps are pretty well known, especially their music app, iTunes. The integration between these applications and the overall usability is really impressive.

My wife recently had our first baby so I've been shooting some video with my camcorder and I've been taking even more photographs. The camcorder is one of those DV cameras so I just had to digout an old DV to 1394 cable I had to plug it up with my Mac. iMovie made it pretty easy for me to import the video in. It did automatic scene detection, it let me add titles with effects and it let me then drag the scenes and titles into a timeline to create my Movie. All in all pretty easy. Then I decided to try and put my movie on a DVD (so I could send it to relatives, etc) and one of the brilliant things was the tight integration between iMovie and iDVD, their consumer grade DVD authoring app. I would say that end to end, I imported a bunch of video, added a bunch of titles, created a DVD menu for it with some neat music and effects and created a photo slideshow on that same DVD all within an hour or hour and a half (not including the time the computer spent rendering the DVD and burning it). And this isn't something I had ever done before on a Mac or PC so it was all pretty unfamiliar territory for me.

Another kudos to Apple -- Mac OS X just simply looks and feels awesome to use. The animations and effects -- all the 3D accelerated stuff that they use -- go a long way to improve the usability of the system. From a user's standpoint, everything seems to flow smoother, I guess because everything literally does flow smoother. Windows XP seems kind of "Mickey Mouse" next to the richness of the Mac OS X interface. Makes me excited about Longhorn because they'll 3D acclerating everything there.

Another interesting aspect of the Mac OS X -- files are mostly hidden from me. I seldom have to worry about or concern myself with files and file extensions and folders. All of that hierarchy and detail is kind of flattened out and made invisible to me through a combination of the Mac OS X and Apple's suite of tightly integrated bundled-out-of-the-box apps.

Back to the integration of the apps in iLife and overall usability:

It was clear to me in using the Apple software that they probably have two things happening to achieve the integration and usability they have:

1) they've got software designers and programmers with great intuitions and heuristics about how things should work for consumers.

2) they constantly, iteratively, intensively bang on their products to continually refine the usability.

So how else am I using this thing?

I've copied over about 16GB of MP3s (created from my collection of audio CDs, digitized by Get Digital) so I'll occasionally use it to play music (iTunes has AWESOME visualizations, way above and beyond any of the crappy stuff that ships with WMP -- this is due, in part, to the fact that everything is 3D accelerated in Mac OS X). My wife can definitely use the iMac for web surfing which is a big part of what she wants in a home PC, but she hasn't been using it too much so far. I'm not sure why, but that needs to be the subject of some research and observation.

Overall, the question now is: where does this iMac fit into my life? I spend most of my time on my Dell X200 (which is where I'm typing this post from). I dump most of my photographs here. Is my new iMac a really expensive movie making, DVD authoring machine? I don't know yet. We'll just have to wait and see!

2004-10-06T21:01:00.000-07:00

Join us in counting down the launch of the next generation of Beyond TV!

2004-04-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

I bought a Harmony Remote yesterday from Best Buy (they just started carrying it) and I set the thing up yesterday. I like it -- it does it's job and it's far better than any universal remote control at orchestrating all the devices in my home AV system.

Taking a step back from the Harmony Remote, the fact that something as complicated as the Harmony remote is even necessary highlights the unnecessary complexity of home audio/video equipment in general. Jakob Nielsen talked about this a few weeks ago in his alertbox column. He talks about the usability of BMW automobiles, and consumer electronics remote controls. Personally, I'm always shocked at how cryptic the on-screen menus are on every Sony camcorder I've ever used. I could go on and on with examples of horrible user experiences from traditional consumer electronics devices -- I find them at every turn. This is a problem that we are very tuned into at SnapStream

2004-04-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

I created this blog almost a year ago and I'm finally going to start using it!

I'm a long-time blog reader, but near first time publisher. I'm just starting to get more tuned into and immersed in this new media.

A few of the blogs that I read right now are pvr.blogs.com and Om Malik's blog (mostly because it was one of the earlier blogs that I came across and I find the not really indian to be clever and informative. Occassionally, I'll check out Dave Winer's blog because in my explorations of RSS, XML I've heard his name a lot. And then there is Dick Scoble @ Microsoft.

Onwards!