Lightning 0.1 Released

Lightning 0.1 Released - MozillaZine Talkback

There's been some activity on the calendar front in Mozilla. Hope this project turns out to be better than the existing calendar or sunbird extensions.

Update
I got back home and downloaded Lightning. The installation was quick and painless.. my first view is that it looks pretty much like the old calendar, only tightly integrated with thunderbird.

Anyway, there is something that did catch my attention. The lightning app takes away a good chunk of my folder list's real-estate; and there's no way to disable it without uninstalling it.

For a person with an extremely long folder list, this is a bit of a problem. Hopefully, the next releases would have an option to turn off the calendar, or put it away in the background.

Middle click in Firefox opens a new tab

How would you word this message strongly? Check out the attempt by the folks at Wizz RSS News Reader

ISB's email address

This is a suggestion for my batchmates at ISB.

If you're trying to email the ISB folks, please use the new email address that has been listed on the new admits' micro-site. It is meant to be used for queries by the new batch, and I suspect one gets a prompt reply if one contacts ISB on that. I'm sure ISB usually gets flooded on the other email addresses, which is why they've set up this new mailbox for queries from incoming students.

Secondly, the hyperlink on that email address is incorrect. Do not click on the link to email them. Instead, copy the text of the email address and use it.

I'm not listing that email address here on my blog, for obvious reasons. I would appreciate it if no one posts that in the comments either.

one month to choo-choo

This time next month, I would be sitting in a train heading to Hyderabad.. let's look at my checklist and the status of each task which I should have done before that journey:

• Apply for loans - not done
• Apply for accomodation - not done
• Finish up the some miscellaneous applications on the ISB website - not even started
• Get my wisdom tooth removed - this has been pending for four months now

Hmm, it seems only yesterday that I was telling my parents that there was loads of time for everything.. well, time does speed up when you don't want it to, doesn't it?

Wherever you go, pug-rank follows

Here's a blog-entry from Nickey on the official Google blog.

A good number of folks, especially women, would qualify Nickey with adjectives such as "cho-chweet". Guys would too, but they'd acknowledge it only to their girlfriends or significant others... anyway, that's not the main reason why I'm posting.

My question is, why would Nickey elicit a "cho-chweet" response, while the the maniacal Mr Tinkles of the Cats and Dogs fame come quite low on the cuteness index? After all, Mr Tinkles looks more well-groomed than Nickey does. So, what makes people rate an animal (or any other character) as cute, or otherwise?

My theory comes in one of my next posts, hopefully in a few days' time.

Cell-phone not working

My cell-phone has not been keeping well the last few days... and I have not had the time to get it repaired.

Email's the best way to contact me till I sort this thing out. My email address is chiranth dot channappa at gmail dot com.

More missing docs

Uggh.. I've got more and more obstacles in my loan application.

I don't have all my bank statements for the last three years. My bank statements till September 2003 are missing in action.

I don't recall Andhra Bank asking for my bank statements - they only want my guarantor's. Thankfully, my Dad's a lot more organised than I am. I hope it turns out OK.

Online puzzles

I'd posted something about a game called Paheli earlier. Well the link for that has changed - thanks to a lack of bandwidth - and the game can now be found here.

BTW, I still have not finished Paheli.. stuck on level 23 with a clue showing a picture of a city and a picture of gold buiscuits. Let's see where that goes.

During the time I didn't find the alternate link for Paheli, I found another game by the IIM-Indore blokes called klueLESS. Yes, there is a blog to discuss hints. I've completed this game, all 30 levels of it. I did receive a congratulatory note from the folks behind it. They've acknowledged over 800 people for completing the game - and there are more un-acknowledged ones out there.

Apparently, both games have taken the idea from notpron, which is claims itself to be the hardest riddle on the Internet, something that only 96 people have cracked completely. Well, here's my take. It may be difficult all right. But the reason why only a few people can crack it is that it's got over a 100 levels. Even if one is smart enough to get over the difficulty, one might not have the time to solve as many levels.

Missing: my ISB blogroll

I need to build a blog roll of my to-be ISBian classmates. But I thought I ought to meet the people first before I link to their blogs. So I'm going to give myself time till I reach Hyd.

In the meantime, here's a link listing blogs of various people at different b-school: http://www.resolvequery.com/blogger.php And if I may add, the CEO of resolvequery is going to be my classmate at ISB.

S - I'll add this to my blogroll after 15th April. Hope it's OK.

whataweek!!

Whew! it's been one of the most hectic weeks this year. I guess it's the shape of things to come. Let me run it down, day by day.

Monday: Our release is already late by two days. We've promised to make it happen by one in the afternoon, so that our client can see the release notification in his inbox the moment he sees his email. Ah, but what's the name of the famous law-maker who's name starts with M? Well, one of his theories kicked in I guess, and the release didn't go at one. Well, A did try his level best to debug at the fastest pace to see the release through. But no luck. We finally managed to send out the release at seven in the evening. Total delay: three days. And my contribution on Monday: four lines of code change in eight hours. Damn! Or, maybe Wow!

Tuesday: Resignation day. Had a chat with our Vice-President of HR and put in my papers. Though I'd kept the letter ready for quite some time, I felt a certain emptiness sending the email out.

Wednesday: The first of March. New month. My last in Adea. Our CEO's trip to our office in Bangalore has finally started.

Thursday: Had a three-on-one discussion with our CEO. Three of us from our team, that is to say. We spoke for about an hour.. lots of points covered, from the current affairs in our company, to position in the market, to what not.

Friday: The loan panic has started. The ISB micro-site lists March 10th as the last date for loan applications from Round-1 admits. Huh? And this information's given out 10 days in advance?!? Oh c'mon, this is ridiculous! Thankfully, an email flies by in the isb-pgp group saying that the last date for all loan applications is the 20th of March. Gotta verify that with the banks though.

And I poured more money down the drain to save on taxes. Farewell, my dear money, go and help build the Indian economy, sob sob, when will I see you again? sob sob.

Saturday: It hit me at around 4:00 AM on saturday that I need my Form 16s for the last three years if I want to apply for a loan at SBI. Turns out that my Form 16 for the year 2003-2004 is missing. I don't have a copy, I don't have a clue where it is. Might take me a massive search operation in my cupboards to find the piece of paper (if I have it). Else, a visit to the finance department is the first thing to be done on Monday.

Now, the plan for Sunday. There's a meet of B'lore ISBians in the evening at a place that's twenty feet high. Strange, lots of places I know are at least 20 feet high...

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.