My Thoughts !

Yesterday, when I was in Chennai, I run across this Google service accidently. What else to say?

Another V.Good for Google :-)

"Senator Barack Obama made the point on Monday that the United States needs an education system that enables children to compete with those from India and China"

 - Source: The Hindu.

I thought that this day would never come! So following the same line what might be coming up? Let me guess not-so-far-in-the-future headlines:

• Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and General Motors to form a consortium to create next generation cars as they are facing tough competition from Ambassador & Contessa in the passenger segment and luxury segment. Due to unmatched safety features and comfortness, these mobile sofas took the US markets by storm last year and made the shares of these companies nose dive


• Apple Inc. in a wide anticipated move, shut down its PC hardware division as its can't win its competitors - HCL and Zenith Computers. Apple Inc's CEO Steve Jobs said that this move will help Apple's hardware division to concentrate on iPods and iPhones. He also claimed that within an year, Apple will overtake HRC and come back to number one position in personal MP3 players. Chennai based HRC is currently an undisputed leader in MP3 players with 80% of the market share and Apple a distinct second with 12%. Analysts claim that its better for Apple to shut down its entire hardware division and focus on Mac OS and its applications


• Bose Corporation proudly announced that it has signed a MoU with the Indian audio giant Ahuja. Under this agreement, Bose will use Ahuja's superior technology in all of its sound systems. Ahuja will provide all the technology and Bose will handle the manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Following this announcement, the widespread rumours that Bose is going to fire their entire R&D department, has becoming more probable than ever


• Taking clues from the successful implementation of Indian Railway administration in Germany and Japan, the French railway minister and his officials were on a 2 month visit to India to learn the functionalities of Indian Railway. They will implement the same structure in France for a better cargo management; better passenger satisfaction and reduced costs. The Indian Railways minister Dr. Kanimozhi will help them in the study and implementation as well


• In reply to Wipro acquiring Yahoo! for Rs 200 Billion, the IT major Infosys is all set to acquire Google for Rs 300 billion in all cash and stock deal. As Infosys already has many of Google's functionalties (Google Search - MSN Search, Gmail - Hotmail, etc) from its earlier acquisition of Microsoft last year, job cuts across the companies are envisaged


• The American parliament passed the bill on outsourcing its Government to India. Its a well known fact that for decades together, the American Government has failed to clear the debt on the nation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, appreciating Rupee, wrong foreign policies, unnecessary spending on military and war and much more problems can be solved by this. Neeraj Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India and the son of Rahul Gandhi, said that India is ready to help the reviving US economy by taking over as a President of US. Following this decision, the Nasdaq raised by more than 15% and the US dollar raised to 2 year high of Rs 52.

அப்பாவி ஆறுமுகம்: யப்பா ஒபாமா. எங்கள வெச்சு காமெடி கீமெடி எதும் பண்ணிடலையே?

I was looking thru the search queries of Jan 08 for this blog and found these interesting combination of queries:

No blah blah blahs, straight to the images to tell you the story.

An error in Google Doc:



An error in VSNL website:

Back in college days, the simplest way to talk to a stranger is take a cigarette in hand and ask "do you have a match stick". No matter which department the other guy is, or which batch he belongs to, you can get the talk going. I think I found another simpler way now. Cricket.

Sitting inside the Bangalore Airport I see that how everyone is obsessed with Cricket. Everyone, I mean EVERYONE, are watching the TV. The passengers, the shop keepers, the security guards, attendants - everyone. They all chat with there as if they were friends for a long time. The passenger who was standing next to me asking the security guard at the security counter: "what is the score?". The answer: "x for y overs with z wickets in hand. oh sir, you should have seen the xxxxx shot at yth over. Square cut on leg side, blah blah blah...". And the conversation went on. As the only Indian who don't understand or watch that game, I didn't understand all the technical words nor the person's name, but I can surely say, the easiest way to talking to a stranger is "whats the score?" not "do you have a match stick". Hmmm, Now that I've stopped smoking, I wish I like the game to get started.

PS: I typed this blog entry offline, when I was waiting in Bangalore Airport and totally forgot about it. Few mins back, my wife wanted to know the Cricket score, and since I don't know any cricket sites, I Googled. The result was simply impressive and thought of blogging it. Subsequently reminded me of the post that I've not-yet-published. So here goes the result:

Hope you would have got a ton of forwards on the Google Maps suggesting you to "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean". Here is another nice one. Seen on "Suggest a feature" page @ Gmail's Help Center:



Yeah, you read it right. The next feature of Gmail is to do your laundry :-)

Who ever said that web search is a solved problem, please look at the search terms, for which Search engines referred this blog!

Did you notice that the Google Reader now offers offline mode? It can download and save your files so that you can read them even when you are not connected to the internet. It is powered by Google Gears. I tried to create an application by going thru the steps in the Developer Guide Tutorial. It was not that easy to follow it. It could have be a bit more simpler. If you are looking for a simpler version, its available here.

The first time I heard about Google Web Toolkit, I was excited. I immediately downloaded it; wrote few samples and found that it was really a nice piece of software. But it lacked one thing - IDE integration. Although "GWT was intentionally designed to work well in any IDE", there was no direct support for GWT in any IDE. I thought how about writing an Eclipse plugin for that? I'm not an Eclipse plugin developer. I was a pure C++ guy who has jumped into several layers of J2EE and .NET and settled as a mainline developer in a top SOA product. Eclipse plugin development is something I've to learn. I decided to give a try.

Result? Googlipse. That is my first plugin. With over 25,000 downloads and counting, it generated a good amount of interest. So I get bugs (yeah, sometimes I write embarrassing code) and people extend it. It was a wonderful experience in learning Eclipse and gave me a better understanding about the Open Source from the contributing perspective. Googlipse has shifted my career and now my day job is also plugin development. Besides all this, I've to kill Googlipse. Why? Because of the name!

I was over enthusiastic that I coined the name by joining two names: Google+Eclipse. The logo is also the same way, Google colored text in an Eclipse background. I thought who cares about the name. I was wrong.

Google's legal department had "some trademark concerns about the name". I was pointed to Google Branding Guidelines. So I decided to change the name and logo. Hmmmm. That means its virtually creating a new product (at least to the users who don't worry about the code!) That is what I've done now. I've created a brand new product called "Cypal Studio for GWT". It is hosted @ Google Code. Its essentially the same code base (with the same Apache 2.0 license) but with little changes and few bug fixes.

So what happens to Googlipse now? Its dead. Means there will be no more bug fixes, no more features. The existing downloads & code base will remain there @ SourceForge. The home page will be soon pointing to new product's site (which is under development). Thus ends the story of my first Eclipse Plugin.

This below picture says it all :-)

I don't know what harm I did to Google. Its been targeting my blog for weird search terms. For the past one week, its sarees color. Check these search terms with Google:

sari color of 2006

orange color sarees

blue and purple shaded sarees

And another thing I don't understand is, why would anyone search in Google for a colorful saree? Shouldn't they go to The Chennai Silks/Pothy's/Nalli? hmmm. Gals!

[Update:15,Nov,2006]

After a week, I thought that saree stuff is over. And then someone landed in this blog for this query: "What color saree suits a dark woman". LOL!