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Showing posts from February, 2007

Proxy Switcher is such a convenient tool

If you chugg your laptop along across your company's locations in different cities or buildings, chances are that you may need to change the proxy server settings in your browser to access the internet, which at times can be such a pain. Even if you do not need to do so, chances are that you are using your laptop with a proxy in your office and direct connection while in Hotels or at Home. Proxy switcher is one cool utility that helps you take the pain out of the whole process of remembering and changing proxy server settings. All you have to do is let the tool know about the different proxies with location identification such as Locations Office A, Office B and so on.Proxy Switcher sits in your system tray and changes the proxy settings at the click of a button.The biggest appeal of Proxy Switcher is its ability to switch proxy on the fly across Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. To use on Firefox for example, as a one time action, set the browser proxy to locahost and port a

Goodbye Ford for Thousands?

Feb 28 is the day not just being watched in Dearborn or at Wall Street, but across the world.Every analyst worth his salt expects some major announcement on this day regarding restructuring of Ford under CEO Alan Mulally. It is also the last day for possibly thousands of Ford employees, who opted for the buyout package for which they had Feb 19th to sign up. The management will possibly also try to portray the 'new Ford' or whatever, it sure will be a painful new day for many of Ford's long time employees.While the analysts world over focus on the market movements and meltdowns, folks in Dearborn and elsewhere near Ford's plants are possibly least bothered, with Ford its rock bottom share value has possibly nothing more to loose at Wall Street, but lot of human capital to be lost at the plants.What a shame!

Google Apps for Your Domain micro case study

Few weeks back I signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain, now called just Google Apps for my college alumni. It was tempting, since we were already holding a domain, and running a WordPress blog hosted by Wordpress.com(via domain integration). We were a little unhappy with Wordpress since it put lot of limitations in our ability to do anything with the scripts, which it does not allow, till you take their software and host it elsewhere. We defined our objective as follows: Keep the blog format(which means we did explore Jumla , Xoops, Drupal for content management, but decided not go forward for the time being ) due to its flexibility and collaborative abilities. We wanted to start email service, without taking too much headaches, and yet wanted the best. Run the blog on the domain Retain flexibility on our ability to play with the html. We succeeded in some steps quite easily, and learnt some steps the hard way, and yet to figure out some missing ones. Learning One: Domain re

World Cup Cricket Squads at a Glance

There are four groups in the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 and sixteen teams in all.While there are bound to be injury related changes, like the Brett Lee and the threat looming over Irfan Pathan right now, here are all the teams for your quick reference. Group A: Australia World Cup Squad: Ricky Ponting (Capt), Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Michael Clarke, Mike Hussey, Brad Hodge, Shane Watson, Andrew Symonds, Brad Haddin, Brad Hogg, Brett Lee ( injured, now replaced by Stuart Clark), Mitchell Johnson, Shaun Tait, Nathan Bracken, Glenn McGrath. South Africa World Cup Squad: Graeme Smith (Capt), Jacques Kallis (Vice-Capt), Loots Bosman, Mark Boucher, AB de Villiers, Herschelle Gibbs, Andrew Hall, Justin Kemp, Charl Langeveldt, Andre Nel, Makhaya Ntini, Robin Peterson, Shaun Pollock, Ashwell Prince, Roger Telemachus. Scotland World Cup Squad: Craig Wright (Capt), Ryan-Watson (Vice Capt),John Blain, Dougie Brown, Gavin Hamilton, Majid Haq, Paul Hoffmann, Douglas Lockhart, Ross Lyons, N

Britney Spears and Google's spelling Correction System

Google frequently gives suggestions when you run a search suggesting an spelling correction in the search string, which appears something like 'Did you mean: Britney Spears? '. Google has an interesting trivia page around Britney Spears and Google's spelling correction system. It lists out hundreds of spelling errors people made when they intended to search "Britney Spears" on Google. It also lists out the frequency of such errors in a two month time period(does not say the specific start and end dates though). What is remarkable is the robustness of Google's spelling correction system in detecting a wide variety of errors. Now that Britney has gone bald and is again in the news, search for Britney Spears would soar sky high and surfers across the world would benefit tremendously from Google's spelling correction system. According to GoogleGuide, the system was developed by a bright Google engineer by the name Noam Shazeer. Britney Spears Google

No Day Night Matches this Cricket World Cup

I was pretty surprised to note that there is not a single match in the day night format this cricket world cup 2007. The official ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 website makes a very innocent one line mention that all matches start at 9:30 AM local time. And never mind the importance of sponsorship monies that getting pumped from India in sustaining ICC and in sustaining cricket itself, ICC website does not provide the match timings in IST . The even more horrible dimension is that the website 'partner' is Indya , owned by Star . To rub salt to insult, it provides the same schedule in GMT, where perhaps only a handful of people may be interested in knowing about it.Perhaps for ICC and the likes, the centre of world cricket is still Greenwich meredien. Pretty funny isn't it? But atleast the event has a website, unlike BCCI , which has so far not felt the need for a web presence! Updated: Click here for the schedule in IST.

WikiCamp Chennai: The Promise of BlogCamp?

I knew something was up in the air when Kiruba created Extrabed.in in a wiki format and began talking about wikis more frequently on his blog. Well, I am glad that we have another unconference in Chennai, this time on wikis.Last September's BlogCamp was a great experience and I feel it will be the same at WikiCamp. 25th Feb is not far away, but if someone tells Jimmy Wales is going to be there, I cannot wait. The big question on Wikipedia's revenue streams is definitely going to be fielded, but that is not the only reason why we should be there at WikiCamp .Never mind Time Magazine's announcement of 'You' as the person of the year, I know very little of Wiki as a format.See you there guys.

Nanotech for dummies

I have been looking for some starter level material to satisfy my curiosity around Nanotechnology, and this morning I cam across a great 42 minute video on this subject at Google Video by Stanford professor of Chinese origin. Prof Yi Cui is Assistant Professor of Material Science at Stanford. He gives this talk in his visit to Google. Not that I undetstood everything, but certainly felt happier having watched the entire video! Do see the video below. nanotech