July 2006
15 posts
Tapping into human cycles to solve age-old AI...
I just watched this interesting talk by a prof from CMU at Google TechTalks. Basically his research is about designing interesting games for humans. These games are modelled around the human player solving really simple problems which are very difficult for computers to solve by themselves. The best example will be the problem of listing all objects in a picture. This is a very difficult task for...
Best Firefox extensions
For the general audience:
Flashgot - download manager
del.icio.us
Image zoom
Flash block
SearchPluginHacks - right-click on a search plugin entry and remove!
Tab Mix Plus
Google Notebook - access your scratch pad anywhere
User Agent Switcher - to cheat those annoying IE-only sites
Searchbar Autosizer
Video Downloader - download Youtube, Google Videos, etc
MyStickies -...
Arguments over the Long Tail numbers
Let’s say you have 1,000 items and the top 100 (10%) account for 50% of the sales. Then you add another 99,000 items to the catalog, and the sales of that top 100 fall to just 25% of the total, while it takes another 900 items to make up the next 25%. I would say that demand has shifted down the tail, because those top 100 items have dropped from half the market to just a quarter of it and...
India rejects OLPC
The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as “paedagogically suspect”. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.India...
Dell Direct not cool anymore?
But there’s another side to the PC business: the support side. And here, the direct model looks less attractive. If, after all, you’re selling directly to customers, you have to shoulder all the related support costs, from handling information requests before the sale to taking and tracking orders to handling service inquiries after the sale. You can’t offload any of those costs...
Collaborative spam filtering: why not?
I just watched this video recording of a talk titled “Turning Email Upside Down” at Google Techtalks by two guys who proposed a RSS-type pull email system instead of the current SMTP-based push system inorder to overcome the spam problem. I have heard this idea a lot of times before.
There are two big problems with this pull approach:
the “first contact” problem.
...
Scrutiny of the Technorati top 100 blogs list
Today I visited the Technorati Top 100 list and saw this (screenshot taken at July 18, 2006 10:50PM GMT+0800): If you cannot spot anything interesting in the picture above, the hint is to take a look at the 3rd top blog which seems to be www.bestonlinecoupons.com. Clearly that is not a blog and not anywhere close to being one. Normally this sort of stuff does not show up in the Technorati...
Digg.com needs session-aware pagination
Though Digg.com v3.0 has been released with a lot of fanfare and lot of accolades, it makes me sad that they still haven’t fixed this annoying problem - the pagination in digg.com is not specific to a certain session. And the negative consequence being that reading articles in the “Upcoming stories” section is such a pain in the ass. I enter the first page of the “Upcoming...
On why mass surveillance of phone calls and emails...
I found this really interesting article by a Norwegian professor which explains why NSA & Bush administration’s decision to monitor all the phone calls and email messages of all Americans is such a stupid idea. His arguments are based upon a simple theorem in statistics called the Bayes theorem.
In brief, the author says that the whole mass surveillance idea would seem logical and sane...
Windows XP: My productivity enhancement tools
Microsoft Windows XP Power Toys - Virtual Desktop Manager lets you create 4 virtual desktops like KDE/GNOME on Linux
Launcy - launch apps with keystrokes (like MacOSX’s QuickSilver)
Folder size extension to the [tag]Windows[/tag] [tag]shell[/tag]
Vitrite - nifty features like window transparency and “Always On Top”
Console2.0 - enhancements to the Windows...
Just Gotta Run
Just Gotta Run
Originally uploaded by Suyog Gaidhani.
Describes the current state of India - it is our chance to run like crazy and catch up with rest of the world!
Stupid software design decisions - Timeout-based...
The more [tag]software[/tag] I use, the more I realise how many stupid design decisions we (software engineers) make when writing software. And instead of just grumbling about it alone in front of my computer which unfortunately cannot yet understand whatever I’m saying to it (if it ever becomes intelligent enough to understand human speech, it probably will be intelligent enough to stop...
8 tags
Tutorial : Setting up Django on a shared host
In this tutorial, I will walk you through the process of installing Django on a shared host.
Before we proceed any further, I would like to mention a few things first:
The instructions I provide over here work well for my hosting space provider - A Small Orange. But you may need to adapt a few things here and there to suit your setup which may vary from hosting service provider to provider.
...
Opera’s Small Screen Rendering technology
I just discovered an interesting feature built into the latest versions of [tag]Opera[/tag] for the desktop. Just press Shift + F11 or click on View -> Small Screen and Opera will render the webpage for a small screen. It is actually an emulator for their SSR technology built into the [tag]mobile[/tag] versions of Opera.
Their technique with SSR seems to be to remove the need for a horizontal...
Kamla Bhatt Show: The first Indian podcast I...
From what I’ve listened to so far, Kamla is based out of NY & Bangalore and she goes around interviewing interesting people in her [tag]podcast[/tag]. She doesn’t seem to restrict herself to a particular genre though and really anything regarding India seems to suffice as potential content for her show as of now. And if you’re based out of [tag]Bangalore[/tag], you got to...
June 2006
10 posts
We’ve been funded!
Hitachi-DSI Award
Originally uploaded by Harish Mallipeddi.
After a lot of convincing, [tag]Data Storage Institute[/tag] ([tag]A*Star[/tag] [tag]Singapore[/tag]) has finally given us the green signal to go [tag]commercialise[/tag] our innovative product called “[tag]3dium[/tag]” which won the second prize in the new product design competition held jointly by [tag]Hitachi[/tag]...