Happy New Year!
An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
~Bill Vaughan
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Valve announces Steam Cloud “At a conference on Steam and the future of PC gaming at its Seattle headquarters today, Valve announced that it would be introducing a new feature to its digital distribution platform that allows remote storage of all game data for Steam games.”
13 Tips for creating a successful new online product
Six Principles for Making New Things “The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it; now it looks like they're merely floating downstream.”
FUEL “FUEL is a JavaScript Library designed to help developers build extensions using terminology and interfaces that are familiar to them. FUEL is new in Firefox 3 and will be backported to Firefox 2 as well.”
HAL “Traditionally, desktop applications discovered hardware by talking directly to the operating system kernel (the kernel maintains the list of devices attached to the system). This is a tedious process and is not exact because sometimes the kernel doesn't know everything about a device. For example, some digital cameras and portable music players show up as just another hard disk in the user interface. Thus, not many user interfaces have been built for hardware discovery.
With HAL, all the interesting information about certain classes of hardware is easily accessible in a well-defined format. When a new device is added to the system, an asynchronous signal is broadcast on the system message bus detailing what kind of device was added.”
Indians smash cell-phone sales record “A new world record has been set in India. On October 19, an auspicious day to purchase new products in the country, mobile-phone maker Nokia reportedly sold more than 400,000 handsets, a number not achieved in a single day anywhere else in the world, including China, one of the most rapidly growing mobile-phone markets.
The firm's previous sales high was about 100,000 phones in a single day.”
Are cities the new countries? “Is the nation state under threat from the rise of the super-city?”
The Semicolon Wars “Every programmer knows there is one true programming language. A new one every week”
Kerala Tourism is a well run government organisation - a not so common occurrence.This new ad, in the Sunday supplement of Times of India (Bangalore Edition), is eye catching. The romance of monsoon is wonderfully conveyed.
Topics : kerala, monsoon, ad
Introducing the Catenator
“This article presents a new container for arbitrary lists of strings that are made from tree-like combinations of lists of shorter strings. The new container provides a highly compact representation allowing efficient searching through the list. It also raises intriguing questions about the philosophy of C , the values of semantic and structural conformance and the uses of policy and trait clases.”
Read on.
Ourvie.ws
It was early 2000. The recession was months away, the markets were at all time highs and techies were generally a happy bunch.
We had just done a major release and were waiting for fresh work from our client. Waiting is never an easy task, especially when one has had a busy phase just before that. IE and Outlook kept me engaged on otherwise boring days.
On one such day, I remember getting a mail from Vijay asking me to check out a new language called Ruby. Being a programming language junkie and having nothing else to do, I downloaded and tried writing a few basic programs. It felt different and programming was fun again. In the coming months, I wrote automated test solutions with Ruby and cut down the time it took us (and our client) to test our releases.
Years passed. I occasionally visited the ruby language website. Always left with a tinge of sadness, sad at the lack of popularity of this wonderful language among the programming masses.
Sometime last year, things started changing. Came by way of a strange name => rails. Been following the buzz for a while now. Extremely happy for ruby for it deserves the attention.
Finally got tired of being just an observer. Took the plunge a few days back and whipped up a small bookmarking tool. Put in a bit of AJAX as well to be buzzword compliant ;)
Will be doing more if time and work permits.
The top 10 “new” hot colours I liked Ruby Wine Topics : 10, colour, hot, new, top
Flickr integration is over
I am now aggregating my flickr pictures on tamizhan.com. Overnight, my plugin runs and grabs any new picture I post at flickr.The sync is an one time static import i.e if I change the title of an existing photo in my flickr account, the change will not get reflected here. I thought of making it dynamic but that would mean checking every photo every night for changes, which has huge bandwidth implications as my flickr account grows (which it should in the coming year).
These fun projects are a welcome diversion, especially since I am having a hectic time at office.
Anyways, next on my plate is AJAXification. Probably followed by a grease monkey user script. That space is looking more and more interesting with every passing day.
Jason kottke
Jason wants to do blogging full time! Here is what he has to say about this whole “blogging thing”,Looking back on it all, this little hobby of mine has been the most rewarding, pleasurable, maddening, challenging thing in my life. I've met so many nice, good people, formed valued relationships with some of them, traveled to distant lands (and New Jersey), procured jobs & other business opportunities, discovered new interests, music, movies & books, and lots of other stuff, all for putting a little bit of me out there for people to see.
After two centuries of Western domination, China and India are poised to claim their places
“The second wave of globalization began at about the time of the founding of the United States, with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine and new manufacturing technology multiplied productivity and wealth a thousand-fold. Over the next 200 years, this further accelerated the rise of Western wealth and dominance. In 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence, China still had by far the world's biggest and most powerful economy, with the area we now call India and Pakistan following close behind. Indeed, at this time, Asia accounted for well over half of global gross domestic product. Industrialized mass production dramatically reversed the balance; by the end of the 20th century, the US and Europe accounted for two-thirds of global GDP, while Asia was responsible for only 20 percent.”
Read more.
TCS to expand in Thiruvananthapuram
“Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country's biggest software-service exporter, will expand its training centre at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala to accommodate new global recruits and employees.
TCS, which concluded the country's biggest initial public offer last week raising Rs 5,382 crore, will invest between Rs 50-60 crore by the end of the current fiscal to expand the training centre.
Currently housed in a picturesque two-acre campus, the centre, which provides training to domestic recruits, will now be spread across an additional 10-acre campus with approval from the Kerala government to construct over 50 per cent of this land.
The software firm, which aggressively plans to acquire firms after it lists on the stock market, will hire over 5,000 people in the current year to March 2005. TCS, which last year hired about 3,000 people, currently has an employee strength of 30,121 of which 29,177 are based in India.”
Read more.
Feels good. More so because I am typing this sitting in Thiruvananthapuram.
Kerala selected for 'India Today' award
“Kerala has been selected for the 'India Today' award for its outstanding performance in various fields.
The state was chosen for the Award on the basis of an integrated study conducted on various sectors, including education, agriculture, health, basic amenities and economic reforms, by noted economists Bibic Deb Roy and Livish Bhandari, who were deputed by India Today.
State Fisheries Minister K V Thomas would receive the award from President A P J Abdul Kalam on August six at New Delhi, Official release said.”
Read more.
Two different magazines saying two different things about the same state.