Hitting the blogosphere again.

Should be interesting to see how it goes this time around with WordPress instead of Blogger (http://the-enginerd.blogspot.com).

And yes, I am contemplating to host it on my own domain. I know many of you’ve already been bugged on this before, but still Any suggestions for a domain?

Cheers

These past few days, I have given it quite a thought on how do I continue this blog, and be more regular. I’ve been wanting to blog more often- blogging stuff that is interesting, and blog-worthy. But the fact is that Blogging doesn’t appear as exciting to me as it used to, and it could only be due to what I’ve referred in the past as blogging-burn out.

And so, it’s time that this journey of 400 odd posts comes to a halt. It was great fun writing about all the cool stuff and I’d like to thank everyone for reading the blog. I’ve enjoyed every bit of it right from the moment I decided to start this blog to this moment when I decide to call it quits.

I am not saying I am quitting blogging altogether. I might as well start a new blog or continue this one real soon, but for now, there are lots of other things in life that provide better distractions.

Cheers!

From Adam Green’s The second coming of the Web:

“When Tim Berners-Lee first gave mankind the Web, he made a tragic mistake. He granted us free will to use less than perfect HTML. His tools, and the tools of those to follow him, allowed users to develop sinful habits based on ignorance and sloth. The result was a Web of corrupt data, in which misformed tags abounded. This great fall from grace by the users of the Web prevented it from ever attaining the state of perfection desired by all computer scientists, a completely machine readable database.”

Without doubt, The Joy of Tech is the best techie cartoon site out there. Just browsing through their archives for the past week, I stumbled upon this awesome strip:

Source: The Joy of Tech Comic

Vox Populi: “I couldn’t give a boot load about this, gimme OS X on a non-Apple PC, … it’s what’s inside that counts.“

At last week’s Mix 06, Microsoft announced the launch of their Windows Live Developer Central. There’s lots of cool stuff available there if you’re interested in developing apps using Windows Live Services.

From Windows Live Developer Central website:

The Windows Live Platform puts a deeper level of control into developers’ hands by offering access to the core services and data through open, easily accessible APIs. Start building applications and mashups today with Windows Live.

The site has spme pretty useful information and resources that enables people to start building applications using the easily accessible APIs:

• MetaWeblog API programming interface for MSN Spaces for external programs to get and set the text and attributes of Weblog posts.
• Getting Started with Virtual Earth’s rich and easy to implement set of interfaces to get it running on your site

There’s also a link to the Channel 9 video where Scott Swanson is interviewed by Robert Scoble about the Messenger Activity APIs and other Messenger-related demos.

Also, I stumbled upon this transcript of Bill Gates’s opening keynote at Mix06 featuring Aber Whitcom from MySpace and Ashley Highfield from the BBC. At the end of the speech, there was a dicussion between BillG and Tim O’Reilly that makes quite an interesting read. (btw, MySpace uses SQL Server and Tim O’Reilly’s Safari books online service runs on SQL Server and ASP.NET )

Whoever said that the world would need only five computers was probably correct. Sun has now released its on demand Grid computing for $1/cpu-hour. As Jonathan Schwartz writes about Sun Grid, “…experience for yourself what it’s like to use one of the world’s largest supercomputers. Without having to house it, manage it, power it, administer it, provision it… or buy it.

Sun’s Grid Service is available at network.com, a domain they got with the acquisiton of StorageTek. From the About Sun Grid page:

Sun is changing the very nature of computing by delivering access to enterprise compute power over the Internet with its Sun Grid Compute Utility. Sun Grid provides an easy and affordable access to an enormous computing resource for the predictable and all-inclusive price of $1/CPU-hr.

Reminds me of what my Professor had said last semester in our “Introduction to Grid Computing” class: “As the world uses the Internet to communicate, soon it would use the Grid to compute”.

Alright. This is a wicked idea.

An exasperated father has discovered to his cost that cyberspace is not the ideal arena for family feuds. Two weeks ago Steve Williams became so fed up with his daughter’s messy bedroom that he built a website featuring pictures of his slothful offspring’s lair in an attempt to shame her into action.

But the public humiliation proved a short-lived victory. While it did spur his daughter, Claire, into tidying up her room, it also whet her appetite for revenge. With the help of her father’s friends, the 20-year-old business student has now set up a rival website that displays photos of him in a variety of compromising situations.

So if you wanna shame somebody or something with something like this, just keep it in mind that it could backfire!

I just cant help but think that the success of Digg and Newsvine has inspired a whole bunch of news tracking sites and mixups like diggdot.us and SlashDigg.

Another one to have sprung up recently is MyToday. MyToday is your another “public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds.”

I first heard of MyToday earlier this month at BarCamp Delhi and at that time I had thought of it like more of a memedigger with human-voting-system for news stories and it seemed a good idea to have an Indian memedigger at last. But as it turns out, MyToday is not a memedigger but only an AJAXy Public RSS Aggregator with an objective to bring the most relevant quality content to the readers through selective sources. This really is a wonderful thing considering the significant increase in the Indian Blogs that have sprung up and an assorted list of feeds in different categories would be a great help.

However, on first impressions, the whole news aggregator thing here looks pretty under developed:
- there aren’t any customization features available
- no options to change colour schemes, font sizes.
- no Search within feeds
- no options to “Mark as Read/Unread” or Bookmark

It seems to be a good idea for the large number of people out there who do not use a News Reader but others might as well have the OPML and use their preferred Reader.

I just wonder how are the editors going to handle the vast number of requests they are soon going to be bombarded with by bloggers wishing to be a part of MyTodays Dailies.

Ever got confused between a Web 2.0 Company and a Star Wars character?

How silly is the Web 2.0 hype getting? You tell us! Here’s a quick quiz…we looked in 30Boxes and analyzed 37Signals that led us to come up with the 43Things below. So without further ado, can you decide…Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?

I scored 32. You?

The fact that it happened does not surprise me but that it took so long for our network administrators to figure it out does.

And if you are wondering how do you disable Gmail’s chat features on your network, you only need locking DNS lookups to chatenabled.mail.google.com, by returning 127.0.0.1.