Apple coming into storage?

Apple seems to be coming into the storage business, one of the testimonial is given below. the bench mark for selection? "gut" feel that it is the right technology. guess this is one of the time i am seeing someone truly admitting to the reason for going in for a particular hardware/software. instead of giving a lot of bull supported with benchmarks reports, test analysis etc

South Park turns to Apple for new storage setup - Computerworld


looks good , so should be good. J.J. Franzen , we hail you for being honest!

the neat peice of storage can be viewed here
Technorati Tags: apple, mac, xserveraid

invisibility cloaks

Quite of few of us who had seen the james bond movie, (i am not great remembering names of movies. i think it was "Die Another Day".) were quite thrilled to see his car turn invisible. and those of us who take thoughts forward and like to figure out howstuffworks, there is a post on "How Invisibility Cloaks Work"

the technology is in nascent stages of evolution, guess in another couple of years time this technology should be fully evolved.
howstuffworks.com have given quite a decent writeup on this one.
what would i use this for? may be for birding.

maybe in the future nikon d200M30P models would have this as part of the special software download, which would convert your fancy bio-digital 30 gigapixel camera into a invisibility cloak generator.

and pray what is a bio-digital camera and how does one make a bio-digital sensor? in the year 2009 the pundits in the photo industry realize that the limits of ccd and cmos technology's have reached its peak and there was no other technology which could excite consumers to purchase a new camera, then one of the technicians in nikon sneezes onto a experimental mixture of chemicals which he was working on, his boss gets upset with him and send him off because, that sneeze had costed nikon r department about half a million dollars.

the boss-man keeps this mixture out near a source of microwave radiation and goes home, next day in the morning he see an image of ceiling reflected in this petri dish of chemicales, very excited and starts working on this and discovers bio-digital sensors,of course the guy who sneezed was given the credit for this, but his life was made miserable for the next 2 years, as he was not allowed to get his cold cured, and he was the only source of the virii which could produce this material.

so this a brief note on how the bio-digital sensors came about into existance, and the other foot-note to history, this was the year when canon closed down their imaging business and moved into manufacturing batteries for cars. this was the year when kodak moved from imaging business to be become the worlds biggest photo stock an trader of images.

Technorati Tags: invisibilitycloaks, howstuffworks, photography

a new one. instablogs

i came across instablogs.com today, was looking at the blogging formats employeed and i thought to my self, maybe this instead of struggling with moving everthing i own in the blogsphere to here. and then i read the splash page on instablog.org and i says it is by invite.

Dammmmmm!

well ladies and gentlemen, can i invite myself in?

Technorati Tags: instablogs, uninvited

for the birdies amongst us

there is an exciting race which is scheduled on january 22nd 2006 in mumbai, the HSBC Mumbai Bird Race. this is the second time the event is being organised in mumbai. and seems to have become an annual event.

last time there were about 277 species of birds spotted ! bravo birders!.

where to get more info on this? click here "HSBC Mumbai Bird Race"

Technorati Tags: Birding, BirdRace, Mumbai

Turking

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.

this statement was what caught my eye.

i have taken the definition of "turking" from blogshares.com , you can find a list of blog/blogger who are writting about "turking" here

Definition:
Turking is an act of accomplishing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) on
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Workers are paid for the numbers of HITs they
accomplish. Since the Nov. 2005 launch of Amazon Mechanical Turk,
turking has become a popular online activity for many college students
and computer enthusiasts.

a very interesting concept. i can see the future were in lot of people would get involved into turking. the profile of people currently seem to be like the definition college students and "geeks"(?!).

i can see a future were in there would be new companies formed, whose main source of income would be from turking. would they be looking at outsourcing this activity to people who are looking for work? possibly the companies formed would hire infrastructure, possibly high bandwidth, have remote access servers to which hundreds of college students and techno-managers with spare time would be connecting to handle HIT's.


why do i think companies would be get into this business?


one simple fact, currently there is a process of qualification based on which a HIT is assigned to a person, the companies would have a higher turn around time in archiving and building on this qualification requirement. (by the way i had qualified to handle a few hits, and the first one i took was for a man who wanted to decide if he looked good with a beard or without a beard, in case this is accepted i guess i will be richer by $0.01)


i guess more qualified you/entity are, more HIT's will be assigned to you.


for an organization, this would be one continuous stream of HIT's


will pen more on this latter. but one this is sure, this is one definite activity which will be on peoples radar for some time. this could turn out to be as popular as RAP music.

Technorati Tags: Turking, Amazon

trying the performancings blog this page

I was just waiting for something like this. I guess it should be soon available in india.

Boing Boing: Kill-A-Watt electrical usage meter

Technorati Tags: firefox, extentions, performancing

on the roll

i have not blogged so much in one day as i have done today. and i started blogging in november 2004.

i guess this is because of the convenience of PerFormancing extension for firefox.

viva la PerFormancing

Test post using Performancing for firefox 1.5

This is just a test post to check out how performancing for firefox 1.5 works....looks good so far!

update 29th dec 2005.

still getting used to this interface, looks extremely powerful and convenient to use. maybe i can get to figure out how to connect to blogzy.com blog and transfer my content from blogger to blogzy.

why am i looking at moving to blogzy? one simple reason, categories which blogger does not seem to have and the work around's seem to be involve lot of work. currently i am maintaining a number of individual blogs just because i want to categories the contents in a particular way.

i have been working with firefox for quite sometime now, i am a FAN.

the firefox extensions are amazing. performancing for firefox is great and you can find it here at

Performancing

Technorati Tags: Performancing, firefox, blogginginterface

On photography and people

not sure what exactly that i want to post. i have been working on 2 ideas for my normal humor/sci-fi writing, have been cooking this for about 10-15 days not much progress.

i seem to have got over the craze of playing blogshares.com. and this is giving me some time. i still log in every now and then. after about 10 months on this wonderful game, i am getting back to photography, and you guessed it....blogging.

(just a footnote in the history of blogshares, i had reached the 20th richest player about a month back. and now since the market crash i have been pushed down to what? 30? 36? place, the new turks are on the rampage give the old rich players a run for their money)
today i was browsing through the forum at jjmehta.com

and it was wonderful to see all the great photographers and their photos.

and posted one which i was working on...using a br-2a and a 50 mm nikkor reversed on a d70.

came across a guy going by the nic of "The Rider" and he reminded me of abijeet, the one whose blog is linked to the right of this post. Going through his blog i got a link to his wifes blog, and man i was crying after seeing the posts there...she was talking of walking around on brigade road and other great places in bangalore. and this is Priti's blog

i guess i am really missing bangalore.(or bengaloore or whatever they want to change the name to) wonder if Pecos pub is still around,they had a gobi manchurian which was absolutly out of the world, never had it so good anywhere else. dry and crisp went wonderfull with the beer.

Indian, the burger joint on st.patricks complex, "stars and stripes" in the same complex, the man running the place used to make apple pie once in a while and it was mind blowing, i was lucky couple of times when i was there(before marriage) that i got to eat this pie.

fanoos kebab rolls, his beef masala and roti was wonderful, the wet spots you see on these pages are my saliva....drool droooool.

there was this tiny mallu joint somewhere at the back of wilson garden, the food was real cheap, and quantity was big and quality was wonderful. hygine forget it! i think this place was called "Saigo"

enough about the food and bangalore( watch out bangalore i should be visiting soon!!)

i am still trying to figure out photoediting, it is slightly more than a year since i had picked up the d-70, still figuring out monitor caliberation. i have a feeling that this time i will be getting a hang of it.

had a wonderful day, this christmas, had a few friends home over, gala time, no booze, only veg food and also some jain food going around!! in the evening was invited by kumar to view the puja for the pilgrims who are heading for shabrimalai. kumar was one of the participant in the event.

and the event? fire walking! for those who have been looking at my photoblog, they would remember photos of a similar event 25th december 2005.

will post the photos soon.

guess that's it for now.

Technorati Tags: bangalore, food, memories

Himalaya pictures

i was trawling the net and i came across a post on ramesh dhami! on a blog. have given the link here On the Edge - René Seifert's Insights: Exhibition in Bangalore: Himalaya Pictures

having seen a few of dhami's pictures, this must have been an absolute fantastic show.(not this shows one)

i guess this is one more reason why i need to look at bangalore! missing out on a lot of stuff there.

on the other side, life if real interesting in mumbai. from a different point of view, i have met lot of amazing people from tania's school. the parents, the teachers(didi's) a great man called Manoj Lekhi, a person who is sooooo active in ISP and SSY and the school.

all such high energy people. so charged.

keeping in touch

Posting here after a long time. This is just to let blogger know that i am still around. I have been totally bogged down with work and personal commitments.

In the last few months i have spent quite some time travelling, have been to ooty,coonor, mudhumalai, mysore,ganapatipule,cochin. these are some of the places i can recollect off hand.

I have become an uncle to a beautiful little girl.

my daughter has been awarded the yellow belt in karate, she is 4 years old!

work has been continiously interesting. the chinese curse which goes "may you live in interesting times"

i have been spending quite some time in photography. also thinking of taking up a formal course in photography.

have started working on macro photography(or photo micrography as it is known) have posted a sample of a dead fly i found in the house at http://pvvpics.blogspot.com

i have not picked up a macro lense. i am doing macro photography using a lense reversal ring, br-2a for nikon, reversing a 50mm 1.8 lense onto a d70.

a few rounds of this has convinced me to start saving for a macro lense. he he.

with a br-2a all metering and auto features of d70 disappears and it becomes a manual camera!

till the macro lense comes in guess it is nikons br-2a to the rescue.

I have been regularly posting images here

I had very briefly met the actress Sonali Kulkarni at a birthday party of a friends neice. 

this a photo of my daughter take a few days back.. just before the rains. a very thoughtful mood! 

hard rain

last 48 hours has been a wierd,wonderful,scary and a real crazy time. hopes...simple wishes...a wish to be with your family, a wish to be with you child, a wish that your loved ones are safe whereever they are.

i guess i know what noah went through with his ark'ction, man..966 mm (96.6 cms or about 38 inches) of rain in a 24 hour period.

Naina was to pickup our daughter tania from the school, she was caught up in unmovable(sic) traffic about a km from the house. then i ventured out, with about 5 other friends, managed about 4-5 km in a small car, in about 12-16 inches of water, and then we came across a road which had turned into a river.

we could not drive the car here. we got out and tried walking across the river/road and that was one scary experience. the currents were so strong, but the friendly helpful people of mumbai were using ropes to help people get across to the other side.

one scary visual here. a road normally packed with cars,autos, buses, lorries and what nots, was deserted towards one side,(and on the other side cars and other automobiles floating in water), nothing was visible except water for a distance of about 2 km. and on this waterway i seen a solitary man dressed up in rainwear, walking on the edge of the road. knowing the condition of the road's in mumbai(dug up roads and uncovered drains)about 40 people raised their voice as one, warning this man about the perils of walking on the edge of his life?

then we make it back to the office as there was no other option. and this was a difficult journey, water levels had risen further. driving was tougher the earlier venture. a canal ment to carry the excess rain water started overflowing and caused hard flowing water.

we met our daughter after 48 hours today. we dropped about 5 of her class mates back to their houses. one of the area was still slighly flooded out. the people are trying to get their houses in order.

the roads were clear of water and traffic in the morning...0700 hrs.

in a 2 km stretch of road i must have come across about 3000-4000 abandoned vehicles along the sides of the road, some in the middle of the road.

i have noticed the civic infrastructure teams starting to work at a few places, moving cars from the middle of the road, getting it towed out of the way. clearing up bodies of dead animals.

last two days people of mumbai were so helpful to each other. supporting strangers and helping, and i belive at a few places people were singing song to pep up the people trying to walk home.

today the people of mumbai are slowly limping back to normalcy.

infrastructure is still scratchy, medical shops are opening up at a few places, bread and milk does not seem to be available.

i saw the sun come out a few times in the last hour or so. with a few patches of rain.

p.s : i have been trying to upload this for the last 3-4 days..no luck. whats up blogger.com??

Who are you

When you are down and out and feel that you need to quit, sometime, you come across people who are there to pull you up, encourage you, prod you to go on and not give up.
Guess this has happened to lot of people in real life. And most of the time you call these people family.

So what’s the big deal? Right?

Now close your eyes imagine that you are in a game, intensively competitive, everyone trying to get an edge over the other, to be the alltime top player, best player for the month or whatever.

You are in trouble, you are not progressing, you are stuck for ideas. Now imagine the same things happening to you in real life, happens to you in a GAME?

WTF?

This is game right, and in a game people are supposed to be aggressive with no quarter give and non expected. In real life they are all "nice", and games are places where people are “supposed” to let out aggression.

Blogshares is an aggressive game. Played by some extremely helpful, some not so helpful, some indifferent to what’s happening around and some thoughtful fun loving people.

I have never come across such a bunch of humorous, supportive, aggressive and helpful people, who seem to thrive in teaching the newcomers, welcoming the new players. (Actually I dont think this happens in real life). But these are all real people!

I have seen some of them answering the same question put by multiple newcomers with smiles (or :) ).

The guys maintaining the site are doing it on their own time. There are volunteers who help out by contributing their time and skills.

I wonder why? For the love of the game, maybe. For the sheer thrill of working with similar minded people.

I feel like I am at home. The game is addictive as are the people.


Player nickname : Judge Fred
Player Id : 26422
Category : BlogShares Community

What have i gotten into, mate?

I had never heard of blogshares.com until a few months back. How and why did I landup on blogshares.com?

Like a lot of things that have been happening in my life, this was, once again a coincidence. One day when I had a lot of time on my hand, I was looking for a directory of blogs, to get a feel of what the rest of the universe was blogging about. This was a few months after I had started blogging!

I searched the net, went to a few blog directories listed out by the search engine, most of them did not interest me much, a few more clicks and I landed up here.

HOW WAS I TO KNOW THAT THIS WAS THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP?

A few clicks, got myself registered. I had checked into Hotel California.

I have sold my soul to a game!

My life is revolving around this game. I started blogging and now I am just blogshare(s)ing! The last few posts in my blog were about, (take a wild guess here), blogshares.

Considering the fact that I have never been much into computer games, I had never imagined that I would get hooked on to Blogshares.

I never thought that I would bust a pulmonary artery when I see numbers like 120, 80, 323. By the way these are the tiny number of ideas which keep popping up in expensive industries and your keyboard skills come into picture trying to buy them of the “market” before anyone else does.

I must be crazy, refreshing the screen every few minutes trying to see if any ideas have dropped or been sold by an existing holder.

I had never cussed my ISP, until I lost out on picking up a few great ideas because someone else was operating with better net infrastructure.

Where I used to spend time reading or thinking up “creative” fictional writing for my blog, now I am spending time plotting and planning on how to increase my virtual wealth.

Take a look at me now, sitting and writing up about blogshares.com.

This really is “Hotel California” , and I am sure the owners of blogshares.com were the original members of “Eagles”

To have a look at how i have been spending my time at blogshares, check out my BlogShare CV

Player nickname : Judge Fred
Player Id : 26422
Category : BlogShares Insanity

one more on blogshares.com

still playing blogshares. an interesting couple of weeks, have managed to break the trillion mark. with help from some of the players who have been here for quite sometime now and have breached the multi-trillion mark.

a very interesting game. and so many helpful people around. if this was happening in real life wonder what would happen to the world?

i am finding the concept of gifting economy very interesting. i have started practicing this in the real world

slightly less than 2 months to break the trillion mark. wonder where this will go from here!

signing off for now. and you can guess that i am playing blogshares.com rather than blogging!!

one month on blogshares

i have now been slightly more than a month on blogshares.com.

i have realised something funny. the way i have been playing blogshares reflects the way i have been handling my real life finances.

sometimes stupid, othertimes more stupid.

right now, i am using blogshares as a place where i can fine tune my personal finance handling skills.

what are the realisations so far

a) money makes money
b) think big , if you want to make big money
c) going after the safer smaller returns options continues to keep you a smaller safer person, but not rich

and an act of chance/fate (yesterday), a friend of mine give me a summary of a book,i think it was called "rich dad,poor dad" and this summary seems to confirm my realisations.

note to self : get this book.

so based on my "realisation",today i have made some "serious investment"(at least for me) which have reduced my blogshare networth substantially.

the objective over the next 10-12 day is to get returns back on this "serious investment"

more latter, on how i fare and if my intutions on the above financial wisdom is right.

Lady Laila

Lady Laila started blogging on Saturday, April 26, 2003; little did she realize what she was getting into.

Lady Laila joined blogshare on 24th Jul 2004. Little did she know where she was going to be.


September 30, 2004, Lady Laila's blog was nominated as Philippine Blog entry into the Annual Philippine Blog Awards and the blog made it to the Semi-Finals.

The first feel of the blog, was like standing on the edge of an abyss; you know the feeling one gets when one is about to loose one’s balance? You see everything that is happening to her, you get to see how her mind works.

I am looking into the soul of another human, no filters no masks.

The Blog is a central part of Lady Laila’s life, and a very essential part of her daily life.

The look and feel of the blog:

- the background though essentially an yin and yang arrangement of the floral design could go easy on some of the darker colors used

- the archive links are organized easy

- all that, which has played an important part in Lady Laila’s life have been organized into the “Life’s Journey”


And hey she is doing good, making real money out of a game and using it to help real world people. Kudos to her.
An very interesting use of “THE GAME”.

blogshares frenzy

this one is a review. of a nice, cool and an exciting place on the net.an addictive stockmarket game on the net.

this is just like the real commodities market. only difference is that the commodity traded in are blogs.

i got on to this by accident, when i was trying to get traffic moving on to my blog.

last few days have been crazy. i have stopped blogging and just working on increasing my blog $'s.
concept is simple.

blogshares is a place where you trade in blogs. this is a fantasy stock market , where on registeration you are given 500 blog $'s. you play with this $ 500 ; invest in blog shares ,buy,sell and increase your blog wealth, stuff like in the regular stock market.

if you have have a blog of your own, then you can claim ownership and start trading. this is were the difference comes in, this is like having your own company, you can issue shares, bonds and increase your company's market valuation.

considering that this is not real money , it still gives you a real kick is you pituitary glands .

there are actual blogshare trillion'ers. nice people they are(i mean most of the interaction i have had and based on what i have observed), if some one likes you, they might even gift you a couple of billion blog $'s.

the few things which i have figured out so far are

a) there is something called the shares, these are shares in a blog

b) there are something called as industry, an industry is basically a classification of the blog
ie. a blog on india would be part of an industry called india. or a blog on humour would be part of an industry called as humour( were your surprised??)

c) there is something called the idea, i am still grappling with the idea(!) here. i think an idea is basically a blog entry which a person makes into the blog. investing in ideas seem to be the way to add wealth to yourself. the price moves up and down like in a real stock market, more rare an idea, more valuable it is, as the coolkats of the blog world want to buy and collect rare ideas.. more detailed stuff on this is put on the blogshares help page.

d) there is something called as an artefact which i have still not checked out nor have i figured out what this is yet, why? why because i dont have the moola,( yet!)

e) your interaction on blogshares (like voting a blog into a specific industry based on the content, earns you karma points(?) and chips

f) chips are the currency of the blogmarket. one correct vote give you 1 chip and i belive the going rate of a chip is about $25M (and M is million what else?)

i am just a couple of days into this, i am still wonderstruck just thinking of the mathematical/ computer model which is running in the background.

mind blogging(!) stuff.

there are a set of people working in the background, working on the maths of how the markets would move in the real world. checking out the forums i see that there is lot of interaction on evolving the game further.

just get to blogshares.com and get hooked yourself's.