online photo editor.. Picnik

This is one of the coolest online applications I have seen in quite a while..

http://www.picnik.com

Picnik allows you to edit/manipulate your photographs online.. in your browser!! Exposure, red eye, effects... You don't need any software on your computer if you're looking for lightweight image editing...

This is truly cool!! :D

good product + bad website = no sale

My brother had mentioned Crumpler bags very favourably. And my oz friends also had very very good things to say about the products. So it was with the enthusiastic anticipation of a seasoned online shopper with a hot tip that I looked up and visited Crumpler's US website.



The first thing that you notice is that it is a completely flash based website.

Flash Website = Bad Website.

For a variety of reasons, including the fact that google doesn't index them.. and the non-standard (read Stupid) user interfaces that are used. The websites can be noisy, flasy, confusing, irritating.... ad nauseam.



However due to the strong endorsements for the products, I decided to wade through the flash flotsam and find and purchase a bag or a sleeve for a 15" Mac Book Pro.



But at every turn my efforts were thwarted.

First of all the very weird and obnoxious music that played automatically as you entered the site. OK, I turned that off. But that doesn't turn off the sound effects... which are weird and obnoxious too. Think teenagers' myspace page.

The language used to describe the products was the next irritant. I mean OK, it's cool to be cool and trendy and explain the type of bag with humorous and witty descriptions. BUT.. the descriptions.. if you can call 'em that... are such that the potential customer won't know whether it's a bag he's reading about or a furry sex toy or a victorian naughty book...

You are more embarrassing than a lizard without a tongue, chum, more embarrassing than Superman’s skidmarks, son, I’m gonna throw you reverse piking from the diving board with your costume up your three bum cheeks!



Let me rub my hands on you, hairy one . . . Oooh, you are like silk that’s gone rough, yes. You are like velvet that someone has blended a goat coat through, hmmm. You are so tight, tight, tight, I can see your bruschettas through you

You see? It's funny. Sure. But it doesn't help me when I'm trying to see what kinda bag or laptop case I'm going to spend $130+ on.



ANYWAY.. even after all this, I still persevere. I decide to go with a sleeve not a bag and even manage to kinda interpret some of their gibberish babytalk to choose what I wanted. And then I realised that if I ordered it online it might not arrive on time, unless I paid another $15 for rush delivery.



So I decided to look for stores in the area which would stock these products.



And that's when I almost died with frustration because of the amazingly dumb user interface that is used in order to locate stores in the US. Why? Why? Why? At the very least take pity on guys who don't have the time to go through your site like they're trying to find their way out of the crimson room. Put in a link to a regular normal text based page with the information we are searching for.



Pheww..



It was one of my worst experiences with a website designed to sell a product.



I'm sure the product is great and if I do see it in a store I will probably buy it. But man, change your website design please.



So no, I did not end up buying one. And I did not end up finding the information which would help me find the product in a brick/mortar store. So essentially, due to poor design and user interface, the website lost a customer who was willing to pony up.



I hope someone from Crumpler reads this and realizes that if they already have a great product they do not need to indulge in flashy website bells and whistles to convince the buyer. If the person is a serious buyer then you'll only scare away the fella. And if it's a person who's just stumbled upon your site, he's gonna walk away without looking back. Lose-lose situation.

google talk on your webpage

Cool huh? :)

mapping, gps and hill towns

Many months ago Don and I were talking about Location Based Services on cellphones using the inbuilt GPS receivers. GPS is certainly the next big thing. But i'm just not so much into mobile programming and services. Maybe something more to do with distributed computing or massively parallel data collection would help.. And so the conversation went many places.. GPS receivers in phones to track networks.. demographics.. heat maps, and so on.

Then about 2 months ago he talked me into getting a BoostMobile Prepaid Phone in order to install and use Mologogo, which is a GPS phone tracking/friend findingsocial networking Java application. It was pretty cool and nifty.. but I found it little too buggy to use.. and not enough people on the network! However, it is interesting to see how GPS in phones is becoming ubiquitous now, except that the service providers haven't taken full advantage of it yet.

My main goal with this phone was to see if I could log the gps coordinates as I traveled. But I couldnt.. not with this phone. Maybe I could if I got into some serious Java programming but i don't have the time or the inclination.

Plus another huge factor: The phones run APGS, which stands for Assisted GPS, which means that some of the GPS work is done by the cellphone network.. so the cellphone service has to give you access to the GPS receivers in the phones. Not all providers do that. In the US, as far as I know, it's only Sprint/Nextel. I don;t know about India. I should find out when I'm home this time.

But finally, to get to the meat of the matter; the reason I wanted to log the gps coords is... I want to create maps.

Now, the wiser man might ask why on earth would I want to create maps. It's not like I'm back in the late 1800's and the Great Game where it becomes crucial to map uncharted territory. Beat the Russians and all that.

But I still want to... I've been thinking of this idea for a long time now and my tentative forays into messing with GPS and researching it is starting to show me some direction that I might be able to go towards. The ideas are all hazy right now. But the bottom line is that, for the greater good, we need maps. And when I say we, I mean we small hill towns of the Himalayas. For planning and development and finally progress. And I am going to figure out how to provide it, on the cheap, using technology and the power of the collective.

Hill Towns... I like.

I received my NaviGPS BGT-11 GPS Receiver and data Logger in the mail today. I charged it up and now it's trying to locate some satellites. It's having a hard time coz it's indoors next to the window right now. But I'm tres excited about it. And that's what brought about this post.
I thought I'd write a review of the BGT-11 after playing with it, but there are some good ones out there already. here and here and here also (kinda). And you'll see that the last link is from OSM.. Get my point?? wink wink.

I'll post more on my travels and travails with this scheme of mine. My next post will probably be from another continent. :D..

vista blahs

I've been looking at Windows laptops recently.. No, not for myself!! But just my luck that I started my search after the release of Vista, and now that means that it's damn near impossible to find a machine with normal good ole XP.

I haven't understood this Vista thing yet.. Maybe I'll install it with Parallels and try it out for myself. I did play with it a bit in Best Buy but I guess the laptop it was installed on wasn't all that up to speed, coz I found it pretty clunky.

Anyway.. It is true that they have about 4 dozen different versions of Vista.. and just knowing which one to opt for will require a Dummies Book.

I think I should whip up a "Choosing Which Version of Windows Vista to Buy for Dummies".. something like this:


Here's a cartoon from the Joy of tech to illustrate this...

More multi touch displays...

Jeff Han (of the multi-touch display fame - from TED last year) has started Perceptive Pixel.

Here's a video of the technology.. This is different from the TED talk he gave last year. The screen is much bigger and it's vertical. I'm thinking he has to do something about the ergonomics though! It's get tiring moving your arms around like that while standing. The apps he's using are also very very neat (Yay Google Earth)!! I think the applications require the invention of such technology rather than the technology bringing about the applications.

(By the way multi-touch technology is already being used in MacBook touchpads and the new iPhones..)

new home

i think i have successfully migrated this blog and my gallery onto a 'real' webserver from my homebrewn webserver which was jus a poor ole windows box running Apache and PHP and blahdeblah.

And Blogger seems to be behaving itself right now so maybe I'll still around here and see.. before I actually decide whether to make the move to WordPress.

This is also a test post to see if labels will work.. and to test if it publishes these posts as .php files.. and to see if comments work. So please comment even if it is just junk comments for now! :)

Don's finally managed to convince me to try out the GPS enabled phones for some projects..

I'm going to Washington DC for TRB 2007 on Saturday.

Watched "The Queen" last night and it is brilliant.

Amherst is FREEEZING!!

Will blog more if this works out. :D

iWant

drool drool drool



The new Apple iPhone.

"Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in again."

new appleicious goodies...

New iTunes (v 7)
-incorporates good old CoverFlow. FINALLY
-free album art! (Amazon must be sighing with relief)
-new (better) layout
-gapless playback
-640 X 480 video playback
-integrated iPod management
-Movie Downloads.
-$12.99 a pop for new ones.. $9.99 for old ones!
-30 mins to download a movie (broadband)
-start watching after the 1st minute.
-near DVD quality

New iPod Shuffle
-its tinier (Altho I wouldn't still say it is the smallest mp3 player in the world. That distinction still is the mobiblu's)
-only 1 capacity, 1GB
-$79

2nd Generation iPod Nano
-now with brushed aluminum cases
-now in color!!!
-brighter screens
-more battery life (24 hrs)
-upto 8GB available now ($249)
-it's even smaller.

revamped iPod video
-new headphones
-brighter display
-gapless playback
-increased battery
-searchable songs!! -- letter input through scroll wheel. Finally!
-downloadable games (pay for them!)
-Reduces price
-ups to 80GB capacity!!! for $349. (That's the HDD on my macbook!!)

iTV
-temporary name
-set top box which stream movies/videos/music/photos/TV shows wirelessly to your TV from your computer.
-coming soon - Q1 2007
-$299

Macbook - status report

I sent it to them.
They replaced the hard drive and sent it back.
No reasons, no explanations.. not even a "sorry man, shit happens" note.

Oh well.

And yes, they sent me a new HDD and kept the old broken one so I lost everthing I had on my old one. Applications, preferences, settings and some documents/data.

Luckily I'd been using the mac for only abt 2 months and still hadn't migrated to it as my primary system, so I had redundant data/documents/music/pictures etc. So I only lost abt a week's worth of data/documents.

Could have been worse.

Anyway, now I am searchin' for a good backup solution.
For the moment I'm doing a full disk cloning to my external 250 LaCie using SuperDuper. Will probably use the same to do incremental document backups and all.. My SyncBack system for Windows was(is) so good.. Hopefully I'll get something similar up and running.

Maybe I should get another external HDD and set up a RAID system. Is that even possible? I'm paranoid.

I'm following these links.. In case anyone else is interested in BackUps. Remember, IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU. YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL CRASH. They don't run for ever. Backup and save yourself grief.

Backup solutions for Mac OS - Googled:
http://matt.makalumedia.com/archives/000833.html
http://www.macobserver.com/tmoguides/backup/chapter4.shtml
http://www.digital501.com/2006021110/mac-backup-osx/
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13652&mode=info
http://blog.no-panic.at/2006/01/09/my-os-x-backup-strategy/
http://www.decimus.net/synk/
http://www.sitening.com/blog/2006/05/23/how-to-backup-your-mac-intelligently/

The last link is very useful. Even if you do not use what he suggests, his system and description is very good.

Good Luck and Backup.

Crash Boom Bang

Disaster.
Tragedy.

My new Apple MacBook crashed on me. Yes, the one I was so proud of.

The hard disk is totally unmountable and I don't think I can retrieve the data from it now. I took it to the IT dept. in the university to try retrieve the data but I was told that they couldn't get the HDD to mount at all.. in any other system or anything. Sucks.

So I've sent it back to Apple and they should fix it and send it back to me. Sans the data Im sure though, coz they don't do data retrieval. :(

It all probably started with weird error -10810 (not sure if that number is correct) when I tried opening applications. And sometimes the error was "too many processes".
I had no idea what was happening.. this went on for 2-3 days and I was tryin to figure out what the problem was. You know, online discussion sites and the apple support site and all that... but there was nothing concrete that i could do.

And then, on monday evening.. I'd just gotten back my external HDD and figured I'd do my long-awaited backup that night. But before that... I had heard of this application called "djay".. so I downloaded it and was checking it out.. when it froze.. It totally froze up my Mac. So I had to do a hard reset using the power button.. And after that the poor macbook never did boot back up! Tried every trick in the book but my HDD just wasn't being detected. Damn damn and double damn.

It is so disappointing. I am losing my data and stuff for sure. But what's worse is this faith that I had in the power of Apple. Their claims that they don;t crash and all that. All their press talking about the reliability and stability of the Apple systems. And I fell for that!!!

I've been working for YEARS with Windows based system and have not ever experienced a fatal crash. I have experienced crashes no doubt, but none that have left me feeling so helpless. I could not do diddly squat with the Mac when it crashed!

I'll keep ya'll updated on the status of my mac repair and what they tell me.

Sux.

The Switch

About 2 months ago I did the unthinkable!!

I switched to a Mac.

I bought myself a MacBook.
Black.
2GHz Intel Core Duo.
1 GB RAM.
13.3" Glossy Widescreen.
Inbuilt iSight Camera.
... the works!!!

Sweet!!!

Yea, it's odd that I haven't blogged about it huh? Maybe that is because every tech/non-tech blog I see nowadays is waxing poetic about the Intel Macs and about people switching and all that... from boingboing to the ever-gushing, ultra-verbose, sometimes-clueless, regularly-obnoxious Pogue. So maybe I didn't want to contribute to the cacophony...
Or maybe because I've been working so hard trying to beat this learning curve for a mac...
Or maybe because I'm having so much fun playing/working with my mac that I don't have the time to write about it...
Or maybe I'm studying too hard!!

Whatever be the reasons, I do realise now that I should have written about my Mac and my experiences. After all, I remember my motive for this website was to help with information. If just one person stumbles upon my posts and finds a bit of useful information, I'll be very happy! :)

So.. I decided that I'm gonna put in some posts about my switching experiences...
Switching to a Mac from a PC.
Switching to the OS X from Windows.
And about the MacBook itself... and its various issues.
And about the Mac OS X - as compared to windows.
And the available software for the OS.

But in the meanwhile - here it is: My MacBook.



CLICK ON THE PIC!! REALLY, CLICK ON THE ABOVE PIC!!!
:D

Now I know you're dying to ask me.
Why o why... pray tell me why did you switch to a mac?

There is a simple answer and a more complex one..

Reason #1- simple/straightforward/shallow:

I was SEDUCED!!! The black Macbook was on display in the Campus Store and as soon as I saw it I fell for it. Wow. I had to go check it out everyday! I had to play with it everyday! I have never felt like such a gullible predictable brainless consumer before. But I have to hand it to Apple's designers. WOW.

Reason #2 - reasoned/practical/acceptable:

I needed a laptop. I needed a good one. And it was just a matter of good timing. I was SOOO close to buying a Dell 710m. But the MacBook was realeased and a slew of reasons tipped the scale in favor of the Mac:
-MacBook on Intel Core Duos.
-BootCamp allowing you to dual boot into Windows.
-Parallels allowing you to virtualize Windows.
-Very very competitive pricing.
-My need to learn more, experiment, break out of the Windows mindset. (Haha! Hypocrite!)
-...and not to forget the deal where I'd get a free iPod with the purchase! :) (Yes, even though I've talked about not falling for the consumeristic iPod culture and being a sheep and all that, I now have a 30GB Black video iPod. I try to think of it as a portable HDD!! :D.. and yes, I do listen to music on it too. It really isn't that bad. It's easy to disguise it with skins from iFrogz. :)

Many more reasons, but I cannot think of them right now.. I'll have more in future posts.

I have never been an early technology adopter (well, I cannot afford to!! :D) And specially with the first versions of Apple products it is risky coz their penchant for secrecy overshadows their Quality Assurance.
But I bit the bullet and figured that I might as well go for it: After all what did I have to lose? (Maybe a couple of paychecks!!) And what did I have to gain?? (Maybe hours of fustration and remorse!!) Oh well...

Not many regrets so far.. I'll tell you about the various pros and cons in another post.

Till then... contemplate the switch yourself. It is fun.

p.s. - comments welcome. questions welcome.

Google Calendar

http://calendar.google.com/

Yup, It's online.. still Beta.

Am playing with it, looks cool.. AJAX and all that.

Too bad I'm entrenched into Yahoo! Calendar/Notes/Tasks/Address Book/Mail etc etc.. But depending on the ease of use and functonality of this new GCal, who knows, I might be persuaded to switch. Once GCal lets me check my calendar from my cellphone I'll probably be sold..

Wish Google Calendar had a To-Do list! :)

gladwell on big cars and small cars

I remember having written somewhere that I wasn't completely impressed by Malcolm Gladwell and his "Blink"...

But this weblog entry of his is excellently researched, thought out and presented...

Gladwell talks about the S.U.V. culture in the US and of its whys and whats...

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE READ!!

Click here for the full article (Will open in new window)..

Here's an excerpt...

In Europe and Japan, people think of a safe car as a nimble car. That's why they build cars like the Jetta and the Camry, which are designed to carry out the driver's wishes as directly and efficiently as possible. In the Jetta, the engine is clearly audible. The steering is light and precise. The brakes are crisp. The wheelbase is short enough that the car picks up the undulations of the road. The car is so small and close to the ground, and so dwarfed by other cars on the road, that an intelligent driver is constantly reminded of the necessity of driving safely and defensively. An S.U.V. embodies the opposite logic. The driver is seated as high and far from the road as possible. The vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it. Even four-wheel drive, seemingly the most beneficial feature of the S.U.V., serves to reinforce this isolation. Having the engine provide power to all four wheels, safety experts point out, does nothing to improve braking, although many S.U.V. owners erroneously believe this to be the case. Nor does the feature necessarily make it safer to turn across a slippery surface: that is largely a function of how much friction is generated by the vehicle's tires. All it really does is improve what engineers call tracking—that is, the ability to accelerate without slipping in perilous conditions or in deep snow or mud. Champion says that one of the occasions when he came closest to death was a snowy day, many years ago, just after he had bought a new Range Rover. "Everyone around me was slipping, and I was thinking, Yeahhh. And I came to a stop sign on a major road, and I was driving probably twice as fast as I should have been, because I could. I had traction. But I also weighed probably twice as much as most cars. And I still had only four brakes and four tires on the road. I slid right across a four-lane road. " Four-wheel drive robs the driver of feedback. "The car driver whose wheels spin once or twice while backing out of the driveway knows that the road is slippery," Bradsher writes. "The SUV driver who navigates the driveway and street without difficulty until she tries to brake may not find out that the road is slippery until it is too late. " Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem.