MAY
7
2006
It has been more than two months since I posted an update on the books I have read. So here goes :-
- The Complete Adventures of Feluda - Volume 2 by Satyajit Ray (Translated by Gopa Majumdar)
- Infinite Loop : How Apple, The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane by Michael S. Malone (chronicles the history of Apple till 1998 - an engrossing read, based on solid research)
Currently reading :-
Tags :
A Bookworm's Diet
Posted by Rajat @ 10:22 PM
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APR
29
2006
After much rumination, procrastination, research, planning & testing I have finally managed to set up my own website. I have also moved my blog from its old home to http://rajatupadhyaya.net/blog/. Please update your bookmarks & the links which were pointing to my Blogger site. You don't need to update the feed URL as it has already been redirected to the feed URL at this site.
This site is still "a work in progress". Much of the content here is preliminary. I am doing my best to remedy this situation though.
Comments and feedback are welcome.
Tags :
Miscellaneous
Posted by Rajat @ 10:15 PM
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APR
1
2006
It has been a year since I started this blog with this post. The most memorable thing about that first post was the first comment that was registered - by Mr.Barger himself in response to the "Did you know?" section in that post. "How did he know about your blog?", you may ask. Presumably he had used one of those tracker thingies which send out alerts whenever there is some new content on the web about the topics you specify. Anyway, thanks Mr.Barger - for the comment (that made my day) and for the erstwhile neologism.
Thanks to all of you who still try to follow my posts despite my erratic posting patterns. Muchas gracias!
P.S. I have certain things planned for the blog. Let us see how things turn out. (And for the Doubting Thomases out there, I am not joking. ;-))
Tags :
Blogger Days
Posted by Rajat @ 12:18 PM
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MAR
30
2006
Yesterday afternoon I went to the Premier Bookshop to redeem the coupons we had won at two of KQA's open quizzes (in particular, the open quiz on February 5th by Avinash Thirumalai & Siby Kuriakose of the Thought Gang & the one conducted by Dibyendu Das & Vinay Das on March 26th). We had been instructed to redeem them before April 15th. I didn't understand the reason for this until I read Suresh Menon's article in the Sunday Herald supplement of the Deccan Herald dated March 26th :-
Soon the bookshop itself will no longer be there: Premier is on the verge of closing down.
Needless to say, I couldn't believe my eyes. Premier? Closing down? What's happening? At the bookshop I talked to the proprietor, Mr.Shanbhag about this - it seems the lease for the place has expired & now the owner is reluctant to renew it. Mr.Shanbhag has been asked to vacate the place by around April end. So he is currently searching for another place where he can set up shop again. It was heartening to see some customers offering to help him out in searching for suitable places. I wished him the best in his quest & returned with these :-
Tags :
A Bookworm's Diet, Blogger Days, Quizzing
Posted by Rajat @ 11:28 PM
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MAR
29
2006
In the last week of January, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. This works only with Windows XP SP2. I had read about the amount of freshly copied features from better browsers (read Firefox & Opera) which would be available in IE7. Curious to see how the new & improved(?) IE would look, I downloaded & installed the browser.
Check out this screenshot of my desktop with IE7 showing the Google search page :-
Quick! Can you find the Stop button? Time up. Now can you find the Refresh button? Time up. Well, could you find them? Immediately? No? Look hard at the top right area of the image. Found them?
Typically one would be accustomed to having all the navigation buttons together at the top left. To achieve differentiation, Microsoft seems to have gone in for unintuitive interfaces. I want to stop some page from loading & I suddenly find that my Stop button is missing from its usual place. By the time I spot what I think is the Stop button & click on it, the page would have already loaded. Moreover I feel that both the Refresh & Stop buttons are not very responsive - they hardly seem to get depressed. And what is the reason for this wholesale shuffling of buttons? MS says they want to foil the attempts made by some sites to trick users into clicking on imitation toolbars at the top of the page. Huh? Whatever.
Tabbed browsing, anti-phishing tool(s), RSS feed detection are a few of the new features in IE7. But most Web developers want IE to support standards first - an area where IE has differentiated itself very well from its competitors ;-).
The release doesn't make any difference to me anyway. I have been using Firefox for a few years now & before that I had been using Opera (Before Opera? IE 5.x, of course. But those were the times when I was just getting my feet wet online. That's excusable, I guess :-)).
Interesting fact about the browser wars :- Microsoft is beginning to face stiff competition from Firefox, which actually rose out of the Mozilla codebase which in turn was contributed by Netscape Corporation when they were being blown out of the browser business by Microsoft in mid 90s. So, will Firefox become IE's nemesis and avenge its ancestor? We can only wait & watch.
Tags :
Blogger Days, The Binary Files, Usability
Posted by Rajat @ 4:15 PM
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