Mouli's thoughts and musics over two decades
Dear Readers
I will be off for a about 2 weeks. I am enjoying the last week of this
year at my home town – away from work. First week of the new year, I
will be attending a conference. I shall (hopefully) be back to
blogging around the 10th of January. Until then, have a great
holidays, and wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.
mouli
Seagate buys Maxtor for USD 1.9 billion. Read more here.
Remember a while back, MIT developed a $100 laptop. This was an experiment. It was decided that, if it could be done, it could be used to make computing available to the masses in developing countries. Well they did it. Looks like, there is now a Taiwanese company which wants to mass market this computer.
The coolest thing that I found in this was, the computer actually works using wind-up power ! Wow.
Read the $100 laptop page here.
A nice how-to from J_K9 on how to get a linux distro running from inside windoze, using the new free VMWare player. I am going to try this out some time. I have always hated rebooting to run linux – and VMWare was not free at that time. The how-to is pretty detailed.
Read the how-to here.
(picture courtesy the J_K9 webpage)
Just read an article by Steve Pavlina titled “Rules are no obstacles for the Committed”. Very good read. I should say a little boastful, but inspiring none-the-less. I think he probably has every right to speak highly of his deeds. They are indeed things to be proud of.
A small snippet:
Steve: I’ve decided to do X.
Cowardly Lion: Bock bock bock. Cluck cluck cluck. I’m scared.
Steve: Step aside please. Coming through.
Cowardly Lion: Huh? What? Um, OK.
Cowardly Lion goes home and ponders what it might be like to live as something other than a cowardly lion for just one day. Cowardly Lion obeys previous conditioning by flipping on TV to help eliminate such socially disruptive thoughts and feelings. Cowardly Lion begins feeling “normal” again (ca. 1984) after noticing that friendly TV characters universally agree that people like Steve are broken, anti-social, and wicked and that Cowardly Lion is in fact perfectly normal, average, and socially acceptable.
Read the full article here.
Disclaimer: Large file download. But if you have a broadband connection, it is well worth it. Dialup guys might want to rethink.
Paris by night
Ben Bishop has a wonderful how-to for flickr. A lot of us have seen/used flickr – but for those who are considering moving to it, this how-to is a storehouse of information – written in very simple english. Well written Ben.
Check it out here.
(thanks lifehacker)
Nope, that is not the local cyber police. This is a software that I just noticed on lifehacker, that is supposed to be an easy-to-use file recovery program. This is freeware. Lifehacker says it in a humorous way, and I have to reproduce it here 🙂
If you’ve accidentally erased a few important files that you would kill to have back, put down the gun and try out PC Inspector.
Go the PC Inspector page.
NY Times has an article about Ray Ozzie – the new CTO at Microsoft. The article talks about how Microsoft bought Groove Networks, the company that Ray Ozzie had founded, primarily to get Ozzie. Ray Ozzie has been enlisted primarily to get Microsoft to ‘rethink’ and ‘refocus’. Ozzie would be heading Microsoft towards the web services model . Though, they do not really admit it, this is to counter Google and several other small startups who are begenning to show up their web-services – which can potentially hit Microsoft where it hurts – revenue. Lets see what happens.
Read the full article here.
Be sure to peek into the leaked-out memo from Ozzie – a longish read, but a worthwhile glance. So the giant is indeed noticing what is going on.
Just read on Wired that Yahoo bought the tagging service del.icio.us . Being a big fan of the del, I hope this does not get sucked up into any slow yahoo app. If it gets integrated into the new Web 2.0 ‘ajaxy’ interface, that yahoo is working on, then I have no problems 🙂
Read the article here.