Anand’s Blog

This is what I had on my Windows Live Desktop the other day:

Correct me if I am wrong but shouldn’t the High and Low readings be the other way around in this case? I mean, how can we have a high of 10 degrees C and a low of 18 degrees C in a day?

I received an email this evening from Andy about Bumble Search, a Firefox extension built by him and Chris. Bumble Search is meant to add to your search experience and it introduces the concept of Cross Pollination, analyzing pages for keywords and finding related or similar pages.

This was the second Firefox extension for Google Search that I was hearing in the day, the first one being Advanced Dork that lets users quickly search for specific information using Google’s Advanced Operators. Curious with what Bumble Search was about, I installed it to give it a shot and was mostly impressed with what it had to offer.

The Bumble Search extension enhances Google Search to include specialized search engines like Wikipedia, flickr, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB etc, resulting in multiple search options. You can also optionally remove certain commercial keywords like shop, store, bargain, shipping etc. thereby refining your search a great deal.

An example of Bumble Cross Page Pollination

Also, the extension lends the capability to cross reference an auction item in Amazon and Froogle or a product in Ebay and Amazon to find the best deal.

Cross reference items in Amazon andFroogle with Bumble Search

The extension puts up a Sidebar in your browser which provides for a Search and a Notes Tab. The Search tab lets you search for keywords with MSN or Google and the Notes tab lets you drag certain links in the “Pages to Remember” box or add notes on the searched pages on the Notepad. However, once I filled up the available screen space for the The Pages to Remember section, I had to close the toolbar and start it again so that more links could be added. This definitely is a problem.

From what I’ve seen so far, it seems a decent enough experience and I am going to use it for a couple of days. Don’t go by all those negative reviews on the Firefox Extension Page. It really is a nifty extension that wouldn’t go down well with all users because of different searching behaviour but for a select user group, it is going to be pretty useful.

You can download Bumble Search Extension from BumbleSearch.com or the Mozilla Addons site

It just seems that this hiatus is coming to an end. Recent updates here have been few and far between but there is really not much that I could do. Things were moving at quite a pace and yet they somehow didn’t fall into the category of weblog content. Those that did, suffered a result of my now famous procrastination streak.

Anyways, lets just hope that this trend takes a deviation. (Though, I am really not too sure how as I am again off the town for next 4 days beginning tomorrow)

Here’s a run through of what I’ve been upto recently (in no particular order):

Been to BarCamp Delhi and met some really amazing people. I’ll most definitely be posting about in detail later.
Formatted and reformatted my desktop.
Cleared an IBM Certification Examination
Saw the new Google Pages thingy. You can’t imagine how glad I was to see it flop! But found the Google Calendar screenshots way too cool.
Struggled with tons and tons of meaningless assignments. It really amazes me how we engineers always manage to meet the deadlines. It seems that “beating deadlines” is concept alien to us.

There really isn’t an end to this stuff…

And finally, thanks to Prasoon for posting here in my absence.

Microsoft on 2^nd of March is expected to be launching its Origami Project. Essentially, its just another tablet PC kinda hand held device which would allow you to listen to music, give Internet access, messaging, photo editing, and video gaming. The project details are expected to be out on Thursday and not the whole thing – the site itself suggests 3 weeks of timescale.

Photographs started surfacing about 3-4 days ago and then, finally came a video which is supposed to have leaked from the headquarters. The final product prototype seems huge to me and I doubt if it really gets all that well amongst the masses. A Microsoft Evangelist Robert Scoble himself says that the Origami Project is overhyped and may not quite deliver what’s expected of it – quite possible. I’d be with Joe Wilcox who says that the best companies underpromise and overdeliver. It’s a wait and watch on these big giants – Apple and Microsoft; who are using this week as a launch pad for their fun products.

- Prasoon

Anything about Apple or Google draws my attention and today both of them need a mention.

Apple sold its Billionth song by itunes and that is one helluva achievement not just for Apple, but even the billionth buyer who would get – A 20” iMac, 10 60-GB iPods and a $10000 iTunes Music Certificate – so much for just spending those “lucky” 99 cents which earns him/her a lottery of about $16000.

With Apple holding a special event to launch ‘fun products’ on February 28^th, I wonder what would be launched now. I have already seen rumours which suggest that apple could be launching new iPods, may be even a Phone of a Gaming device but then, any rumour about Apple can never hold true unless Steve jobs holds that one more thing out in his hand. Reports also suggest that a mega event could be planned for April 1^st this year, when Apple celebrates its 30^th Anniversary when there could a touch screen iPod or even more sleek and faster MacBooks. Stay hooked – Apple is just getting better Day by Day; Month by Month and Year after Year.

100 MB of space with a wysiwyg interface for making pages is what you get with Google Page Creator now. It was launched just a couple of hours ago and my first impression – It’s a product launched to compete with and the whole new bunch of wikis that have sprung up everywhere and the old-school Yahoo! Geocities!

With AJAX based interface and couple of templates and layout already available – Google Page Creator is a ‘perfect solution’ for beginners with minimum requirements who would want to maintain information pages n allow for a few files to be there on their pages. 100 MB might seem less but then, it could be used in integration with say flickr [for photos], or other file hosting services. Every change triggers an auto-save and all changes are published by a single click – The Google crawler would update all published pages within a few hours – this I suppose is a plus point over other similar services.

Currently all the pages are hosted on a url of type .googlepages.com and Google says that someday they could be allowing users to create new sites as well. I’d maintain a wait-and-watch strategy on this release of Google as of now.

- Prasoon

Alright. I know I am supposed to be taking a break from blogging here but I had to blog this!

Asia’s first BarCamp is happening in Delhi this March 4th and whats’ more I am going to be in Delhi that weekend!! How cool could it get??

If you are anywhere near there, just be there. C’ya at BarCamp Dehi.

Technorati Tag: BarCampDelhi

First, I’d thank ‘enginerd‘ for proving me a space here to write

Flock – The so called next gen social web browser aimed at Web 2.0 gurus and bloggers has released an update and I should say – its impressive. The only flaw I still see in it is the memory leak, something native to anything built over Firefox 1.5 and sometimes, the RAM usage skyrockets itself to over 250 MB when Flock is left idle with an AJAX webpage like meebo.com running.

Whats new in this version -

I noticed a new and better blogging interface, advanced flickr integration and a host of tiny tweaks with the topbar. The upgraded RSS viewer is definitely fast and looks great. Good news for WordPress users because now, categorization happens right from the blog editor within Flock. Next time, you use Flock for filling out forms, do not forget to use the inbuilt Spell-Checker. This version also supports shadows.com integration other than del.icio.us.

I wonder how many of you visiting have used the previous version but I would suggest all of you to at least give it a try for once.

Going by my description which Anand gave about me, I shall not end my post without criticizing Microsoft for its IE 7 Preview to Beta 2, it sucks – at least for bloggers using Blogger.com

-Prasoon

It took me a week but I have finally succeeded in persuading Prasoon to guest blog here at the enginerd Weblog while I take a small break from the blogosphere.

Prasoon is a Mac geek and maintains a kind of antipathy against all software that come from Microsoft. He has a whole array of blogs online, from photoblogs to technoblogs to stuff you hardly hear about. I can’t really say what stuff will he be putting up here but it could include photography, the latest gadgets, or even rants and raves on how Google is God and Microsoft is History.

Signing off for a while,
Anand

About an year ago, I wrote:

I write this post in the middle of the biggest college technology festival in the country. With what would have begun as an attempt to create, connect and relate aspects of technology, it has now taken the shape of an entirely commercial event with enormous budgets and unprecedented extravagance.

Forced to wonder, is it still THE platform for the energetic and creative to push the frontiers of expanding technology, or is it the place to see ‘branding’ take new dimensions, the place to “walk away with a fortune”.

The trend just can’t seem to stop. In a year, this “festive spirit” is sweeping the country with every second institute organizing a festival boasting of budgets running into millions of Rupees.

Traffic on the enginerd Weblog is scaling new heights ever since Laurent linked to my Firefox Extension from the coComment Teamblog. Also, I checked out the GreaseMonkey script and it is simply awesome.

Meanwhile Microsoft Research has released GroupBar, a tool that allows window tiles to be rearranged in any order or dragged and dropped into “groups” with one-click task-switching and convenient group operations. Really useful and makes a lot of sense.

I got my invite for 30Boxes, the online calendar application (with a bit of social networking thrown in) from 83degrees yesterday. It’s certainly the best online calendar application I’ve seen till date.

And finally, while browsing through my blog archives, I came across this post on software engineering that I thought would be quite relevant NOW for some of my friends on campus