DeeKaying @ Nettle

With Apple now shifting to the Intel platform - the Mac has become another shark hungry for the market share being doled out by the beleaguered Microsoft Vista. To quote from the Apple web site: Why upgrade to Vista when you can upgrade to Mac? Especially when you can move all your stuff from an old PC to a shiny new Mac in less time than it takes to add the memory, hard disk space, and graphics card you’ll probably need to install Vista. Here are three easy ways to make your move. That's a pretty strong statement coming from the Apple stable and yet another indication of the poor feedback offered by Vista users. Personally, I feel Vista is still just as secure as Windows XP from the user's point of view but more secure from the programmers viewpoint. The whole crux of the matter being that Microsoft forgot its end users while trying to implement new revolutionary (read: proprietary) technology for its programmers. With the .NET platform still stuck onto Windows due to the poor...

Planning to make those college videos into cherished masterpieces? Have a look at the great online tools for editing video. Check out this site . Give me a feedback on how you liked these tools.

हाँ! अब आप हिंदी में भी भी ब्लोग कर सकते हैं। गूगल में तो कुछ अलग ही बात है। इतनी आसानी से मैंने कभी हिंदी नही लिक्खी थी। चलो, इसी बहाने मेरी हिंदी कुछ और शुद्ध हो जायेगी। इस लेख का मुख्य उद्देश्य है आपको AJAX नामक टेक्नोलॉजी (इसे हिंदी में क्या कहते हैं?) के एक अंग से परिचित करवाना। AJAX का पूर्ण नाम है Asynchronous Javascript and XML और इसी के मध्यम से मैं अभी इन्टरनेट के द्वारा ब्लॉगर के इस सुन्दर यन्त्र का फूलपूर्वक इस्तमाल कर रह हूँ। दरसल AJAX द्वारा हम Desktop जैसी look aur feel web applications को दे सकते हैं। पर आज के लिए बस इतना ही। अगले लेख में मैं इस टेक्नोलॉजी पर ज्यादा विस्तार से बात करूंगा। तब तक के लिए शुभ रात्री, शब्बा खैर, और अपना ख़याल जरूर रखियेगा। तब तक के लिए नमस्कार। ;-)

Firefox in Firefox! Here's something of a "Do you know?" variety. One of the great things about Firefox is that its interface is highly modular and creating an extension or a plugin is as simple as editing xml files and writing Javascript code (things most web designers do on a daily basis). Firefox renders its interface with the appropriate theme by evaluating an xml file. So effectively, Firefox renders itself by evaluating its own interface file and placing widgets as defined in it in a blank application window. Well, I just came to know that it's possible to load Firefox within itself by asking it to evaluate its own interface using a chrome:// uri. Don't be surprised - just try typing chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in the address bar and see the results. The new interface is a fully functional Firefox! Now, for the more curious among you - the reason why this works is because the chrome:// uri is interpreted by the firefox engine as a reference to i...

Looking at my blog, it just occurred to me that I have become very tardy in posting here. Its been over a month since my last post! Anyways, this is just to post the fact that my Bhawan Day concluded on 20th March and my room got trashed. Apparently, there is an age old custom of ensuring that the inmates atleast bother to clean their rooms once every year. In a nutshell (for those of you who don't know), every hostel on campus organizes an evening of cultural events and a DJ. All inmates are allowed to invite 1 other person to the Bhawan Day (held at night, of course ;). Oh, I almost forgot - girls are also allowed to enter the Boys hostel on this day. Coming back to the point, most people give their passes to their "Room Baaps" (seniors who have stayed at the room last year) and they end up coming with a few friends to their ex-room and trashing it. It only helps if you are a member of any student group like IMG or Watch Out. They come and finish off whatever is left of...

The Big Brother of the Internet: Google. So you really like Google , use it for searching, check your mails on it, link to your friends on Orkut , blog away on Blogger , create web pages on Google Page Creator , organize images using Picasa , shop using Froogle , read news using Google Reader , publish scraps of info using Google Notebooks, edit documents using Google Spreadsheets , find maps using Google Maps , view your home using Google Earth, soon you will be operating on Google OS.... Doesn't this sound like a monopoly of sorts? Not that you are forced into opting for Google products, its just that there are no good alternatives. So, what does all this mean for an average guy? It means that everything about your online "personal" life has a record on some Google server and you and I can't do anything about it. (I mean, I doubt that sending a mail to Google, asking them to delete all your private data would even elicit a response.) It all depends on how much you...

Ekta Kapoor had a reason when she named her serials with a K. K has a universal appeal. Have a look at Gopal's Blog on this topic: http://k-gopal.blogspot.com/2007/01/k.html

As far as I have been able to discern, there is no law that states that momentum must be quantized. It is defined to be a continuously varying function dependant on the velocity of the particle according to the relativistic equations derived from the Lorentz Transformations . However, this article: http://www.nemitz.net/vernon/MOMEQUAT.htm on the web puts forth on first glance a convincing argument for the quantization of momentum. I haven't analyzed the mathematics in detail but can anybody spot some flaws?

I recently received a forward mail from Utsav that has generated some debate. I am posting it below. Forwarded Conversation Subject: Fabolous Article abt India!!!Are we dreaming the correct future for ourselves!!!!!! DO read ------------------------ From: utsav kumar Date: Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 5:41 PM I belong to life's batch of 1979 and as I grew up through the 1980s and early 1990s I was deeply embarrassed about India. About everything, our movies, our cricket team, our athletes, our products, our infrastructure, our poverty, our politicians and the whole damn system. No matter what we did, we fell painfully short of potential. Time and again! It hurt because I wanted to belong to a big, strong nation that could kick some a** and not to some laggard. But the story has changed, and how! Here I am in a brand new 2007, miles away from sweet home India, yet still closely following her story. Now they all say that it is not so much 'whether or not' as much as 'w...

I recently posted a very intriguing and irritating problem with a C++ program on the GCC help group. A certain piece of (incorrect) code was returning a defined answer when compiled with DevC++ and g++ on linux. Have a look at the problem and the solution here . If you are really interested in competing with the best at the highest level, come for Cognizance , IITR's tech fest. Plenty of programming opportunities (multiple programming events and great cash prizes). Make sure you check out the E&C department's and Maths Department's list of events.

Yippee. A new template for my blog. I seriously got bored of the previous one. How do you like it?

How many times have you wasted hours in finding good website templates? Google searches for " web templates ", " free html templates " and the like give terrible results. I found a really good site that hosts a lot of Open Source Web Templates. Its really terrific and I'm not kidding. Kudos to Open Source and all the people who actively support it.

A lot of people have been asking me about what they should make for the ISC Physics project. Well, all I can tell them and those who are here looking for more info is that I made a full wave rectifier . Its really easy and fun to make and the concepts of a diode are really cleared up. For more info, consult Wikipedia or Google : full wave rectifier . While on this topic, I came across some good explanations about the internal working structure of a transistor . Its by an amateur electronics hobbyist but he does a good job on the whole. Check out his site . Also, if you want to keep up with posts on this blog, you can add an RSS feed to your browser. The instructions to do this vary from browser to browser but in the case of Firefox, look for an orange icon in the title bar. In case you find any broken links, don't hesitate to send me a comment stating the problem.