Google Page Creator

Google has introduced a Page Creator for publishing web pages online.

Keeping up the tradition of gmail, the interface of this tool seems slick and user friendly. Apparently, this is still in beta (why am I even saying this?)

Anyway, check it out at http://pages.google.com

Paheli @ IIMA Chaos

I hit upon this interesting online game called Paheli set up by the blokes at IIM, Ahmedabad as part of IIMA-Chaos. There is also a blog to discuss hints, but I don't think anyone's posted on it recently.

I'm still stuck on level 15, with the sudoku.. I've never played sudoku before so I'm unsure how much time I might take to wrap this level.

Google Talk now on Gmail

Google has modified the gmail interface so that GoogleTalk can now be integrated with it. More information available at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/chat.html

Is this a good thing? Yes, certainly. The reasons that Google lists are all fairly accurate. Yet, Google ought to provide the option of disabling this feature. The reasons are the constituents of the remainder of this post.

The biggest advantage of email (and regular snail-mail) over other forms of communication is that the recipient chooses when they should read it. I can see an email header and say, "Oh, it's that bloke again! I'll look at this when I have time on my hands." Now, instant messengers don't give you that kind of freedom. Once you've received a message, it might be considered rude if you don't reply back. Sure, you could set a busy icon. But it does not prevent those pestering windows from popping up when you least want them. At last count, I had a dozen friends on my GoogleTalk list. In the future, I may have loads more. I can't be certain that all of them would respect the meaning of a busy icon.

I do not have any instant messenger program installed on my system at work purely for this reason. I remember hearing a story a few days back of a few office workers who'd gathered around a bloke's desk to discuss work, and POP! comes up a message window with some cupid-inspired emoticons. Pretty embarrassing, huh? Imagine the same thing happening simply because you'd logged into your email.

I, for one, would disable this feature on my gmail interface if I had the chance. Else, I'd just stop accessing gmail at work.


Update:
It appears that the chat feature can be turned off. Please see http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33807&topic=8405
I guess the Google guys have their heart in the right place :)

End of another weekend

So, another weekend goes by. The coming week shall give me some things I'm looking forward to, and some things that we could've done without.

I met some of my future ISBian classmates yesterday. There were loads of us, a dozen, I think. Some of the seniors from the class of 2005 had joined us, too. Was able to get a peek into a few post-ISB life. Looks like I'm headed to face intersting times.

Today was a perfect Sunday. I woke up no earlier than 2:00 PM, started playing with my laptop from the word go..; and I reckon I'm still playing. Added more friends on orkut, bookmarked a whole lot of blogs. Later in the evening, I tried my hand at studying Quantitative Methods, but I start feeling drowsy the moment I start reading the print of The 10-Day MBA




Hmm, now the week ahead. A dreaded file format shall continue to haunt me. It's challenging and interesting, so I don't really mind being haunted. But please don't give me any more cryptic surprises!

And it's going to be M's last day at work this Wednesday. It's been good to have you on the team, mate. Hope you enjoy yourself in your next job.

my latest toy

I got hold of my Dell laptop yesterday, but it took me the better part of this evening to set it up for my emails and stuff..

Well, one thing's certain -- widescreen's good. Really good. Hate to think of the real estate I've been missing all this while.

Thanks to the lack of an easily-available digital camera, I shall take my own sweet time to post a pic of this silver-coloured beauty.

Avian visitor

When I woke up today (at my usual Sunday wake-up time of 1:00 PM), I had a nice surprise waiting for me. An owl sat perched on a beam in our verandah, and it was quite a sight to see. Apparently, it'd been there from last night. About one-foot in height, it was quite a magnificent-looking creature. I learned later from a friend that it was a spotted-owl. I’m not sure the status of the bird, as a species I mean.

Anyway, I took some snaps on my SLR camera, which is not a digital one (unfortunately). So, I’ll be posting the snaps of our avian friend as soon as I have the pictures developed.

The owl flew away soon after sunset.

Creating PDFs on Windows

I've written a howto document on creation of PDF documents from other files on the Windows platform.

It's available here http://symonds.net/~chiranth/technical/pdfWriter.html

Religion vs Ethics

What does religion give us? Faith
Faith in what? An unknown force/a known force/a recognisable force
What else does religion give you? A moral sense of direction

Hold on! Let's go back on the last one. Do non-believers not have any moral sense of direction? I don't think so. I've known athiests who would gel very well with society and be up to all the socially acceptable norms. Their definition of "right vs wrong" could very well be derived from religion, but it isn't. In fact, one wouldn't come to know that they're atheists unless they said so themselves.

Check out the article Ethics Without Gods, especially the section titled Back to Ethics. The section quotes Plato's argument about there being a standard of "goodness" that is independent of the God who's preaching it.

Heading to Hyderabad

I've been selected by the Indian School of Business for their
year-long MBA course.

I shall be heading out to Hyderabad in April this year.

Asking the right question in an interview

Here's an interesting discussion on slashdot on what questions to ask a prospective employer in an interview.

Netkraft had interviewed me in my sixth sem of Engineering; there was a full year to go before I could join the company. In that interview, I remember asking "Assuming that you do select me in this interview, what technologies should I study over the next year to prepare myself?" Seemed a little overambitous to me at first, but I got the impresseion that the interviewer might appreciate a little brashness ;-)

htp

I used to have a website (actually I still do) at http://symonds.net/~chiranth/ But to maintain this thing was really not worth the effort. I tried out this tool called htp over the weekend, and I really seem to like it. Perhaps it might make the web publishing job a whole lot simpler.

I don't have much against html, but writing html for more than one page is quite boring. And if one needs to update it over time, it's really quite irritating.

Anyway, let's see how inclined I am to put something up again.

Mah Jong

I've been hooked on to a game called Mah Jong for the last week or so. Have been playing it on the Excite website. Site needs javascript and flash.

Here's how one plays it. You've got a bunch of tiles that are arranged in semi-pyramidal structure. The idea is to remove two tiles at a time, as long as they have the same face (they should represent the same figure, or should have the same theme, e.g. seasons or flowers). The catch is that you're allowed to remove only the tiles located edges -- it doesn't matter if the two tiles that you remove are in different layers. The objective is to be able to remove all tiles from the board.

And it took me a week to win my first game, and here's the screenshot before the last move. I think my score was around 900, too bad Excite refreshed the window a bit too fast when I'd finished.

The Full Monty

Naveen, my classmate from Engineering, has this interesting discussion on probability. Something about a 1970's show called Let's Make a Deal

Telegram

Has anyone received a telegram lately? I hadn't seen a telegram for ages, but yesterday, some recruitment consultant decided to send me an email that looked like a telegram, or a telegram that was wrapped up in an email... here's how it goes:

Dear Chiranth,

UNIX ADMIN / LAN-WAN / WIN-NT in Bangalore on 23.11.2005 (Wednesday ) & SHIFT LEAD / DCC / PC SUPPORT in Bangalore on 26.11.2005 (Saturday)--Inperson Interviews with CMM Level 5 Accenture

Regards
[name snipped]

What's wrong with chappie? Being a quick fire mode of communication, does email give license to put basic letter writing skills to the backburner? My English teacher would have been apalled if she saw this.

I received a suggestion that I should send this bloke back an equally short reply, but I want to make it harder for him to read it. Perhaps, I should avoid using the spacebar while writing back, or I should toggle between upper and lower case for every alphabet.

Any other suggestions?

Old pictures of Bangalore

Some photos of Bangalore that date back to 1946 made their way to my mailbox earlier this evening. Here they are:


The building on the left-hand side now is the Lee and Louis Phillipe showroom.



South Parade Road, now better known as M.G. Road. We can see the Higginbotham's building in its former glory.



Town Hall -- really peaceful, isn't it?



Ah, this one (my favourite) is where my office is located... Hosur Road.