Category: technology

Google pages

I tried out googlepages today. My personal opinion : It is a good webpage creating tool for grandma at home. If grandma can do gmail, she can now create a webpage. That is how simple it is. Not sure if someone who has more tech skills would like it though. The AJAXy interface is good but too restrictive. I like to see my html tags. Well, one more positive in this whole thing is memory – they give you 100 Megs even for the free version – Geocities does not give you that much (but hey they let you even upload html created by you.

So overall :

+ Phenomenally simple to create a webpage
+ No bandwidth restriction
+ Free version gets you 100 Megs (no one else gives you this)
+ No ads (like geocities forces on you) – but how long will this last ?

– Restrictive
– Cant see html tags
– Cant create your own html and uploade
– System was pretty unstable as of this morning and I see several bloggers complaining the same.

Go check out my page though at http://gcmouli.googlepages.com/

TDavid from ‘MakesYouGoHmm’ blog also has a good analysis. [link]

Update:Ok, I take back my words. You can upload your own html into googlepages. I just tried it and it works. I guess, I will have to agree that googlepages does seem viable now. Though, I am not sure if it is stable enough yet. My sister tried to create a page today morning and it did not allow her to do so. She got a message saying that, due to heavy system overload, they are not accepting any more invites.

One hour brainstorming session –> Heart behind the Digital Camera

Washington post has a beautiful article on how the heart behind the digital camera – the CCD (charge couple device) was born. Pretty interesting story. Two guys who were afraid that their funding might get cut – do a one hour brainstorming session and come up with the brilliant idea.

[link]

He (boss) called every two or three days, and Boyle and collaborator George E. Smith soon got the idea that their funding might disappear unless they invented something in a hurry. So they did.In a one-hour brainstorming session in late 1969, Boyle and Smith drew up the basic design for a memory chip they called a “charge-coupled device,” more familiarly known as a “CCD.”

Something else that was very funny in the article.

In the late 1980s, Kodak developed the professional “Kodak Digital Camera System,” which debuted — with a 20-megabyte hard disk and a backpack to run the electronics — at the 1991 Super Bowl.

Quotes for Presentations and Laptop hacks …

Presentation Zen my favorite presentation critique/info site has a great post today on places to get some good quotations from. Ofcourse topping the list is the Tom Peters site.

Go on, steal some quotes .. and make your presentation snazzy.

[link]

Gina Trapani, Queen of Lifehacker.com has a great post on laptop tips. Good set of must-do tips if one has a laptop.

[link]

Lack of Professionals blogging

NY Times technology division has a nice write up on how and why there is a dearth of blogs about business travellers. After reading it, I would say that the reasons given are exactly the same reasons, why a large number of professionals in other fields also do not blog. We are always paranoid about our anonymity getting lost somewhere in the middle. For instance, one business traveller says that,  sometimes just disclosing which city I am visiting can give my competition ideas. These are just some ideas that float through all our minds. We would not be writing as candidly, if we knew our bosses were reading it. Add to the fact that there were a slew of people who got chucked out of their jobs after their employers found references to them in their blogs.

Oh well, do read the article though. It is a good read. [Link]

Body Area Network

Ok. The name defenitely sounds cheezy. But that seems to be one of the 15 new tech concepts for 2006 according to Popular Mechanics Magazine. Lets see what that means:

Body Area Network (BAN)
Like everything else, implantable medical devices are going wireless. A new in-body antenna chip from Zarlink Semiconductor is in preproduction, and should appear in pacemakers and hearing implants this year. By transmitting data to and receiving instructions from nearby base stations, BAN chips can reprogram your heartbeat at your doctor’s office or make a diagnosis from a bedside wireless monitor at home.

Wow. That defenitely sounds dangerous to me. What if the heart beat programmer gets into the wrong hands.

Possible bad scenario:

Hey .. I dont like you, let me lower your heart rate to … heh heh zero.

Possible good scenario:

Romeo to his girlfriend: hey dear, let me make your heart go …. ooomph.  🙂

There are some other interesting tech concepts too. Read the full article at the PM magazine website here.

I. Cringely from PBS predictions for 2006

Check out I, Cringely’s predictions on technology for 2006. He does this every year, and he has been doing this for years now. Each year, he also evaluates his predictions from last year. Apparently he usually averages about 80+%, his truth percentage has dropped to 73% for 2005. Check it out anyway. Makes an interesting read.

Read the full article here.

The war is on …

Ok. I am now officially on an apple roll 🙂

According to this money.cnn.com article, Steve Jobs is now on a war footing – not against Wintel (they just kissed and madeup), not against Microsoft (they still do the MS office for macs). But against a whole lot of companies like Adobe, Yahoo, Google etc. Their new iLife software suite makes things so much cooler and easier, that it is creating jitters around. The iLife suite has a webpage creator which can do blogs by drag-and-drop. The new iTunes can create podcasts. Hmm. Curiouser and Curiouser.

Read the full article here.