My Thoughts !

Found a good video thru a forward:


Loved this quote: "An India that no longer boycotts foreign made goods. But buys out the companies that makes them instead". :-)

... again.

Thanks everyone for your wishes.

PS: I almost forgot that a website in the name of Orkut exists. Looks like it reminds me and tells the world about this fateful day :-)

Today I was booking my tickets to Chennai in the IRCTC website. When I was about to click the "Pay Now" button there was small link saying "Click here to see the performance of the Payment Gateways". I was puzzled what the heck is that. I clicked and an XL file got dowloaded. It said how much money has been transacted thru each payment gateway last month. The total amount that IRCTC has received was 2491585261. Yes that little less than 250 crores!!! Infact the banks also benefit hugely by this. The charges for each payment gateway is a minimum of Rs 10 (for a debit card) or 1.85% (credit card). Here is the comparision chart. Calculate how much money they make!

The yearly total would be around 3,000 crores and they don't even care to give a nice looking feature rich website. Someone got to tell Lalooji that if they have a proper functioning website, they can even make more money and less crowd in the reservation counters.

Happened to Gimp a Wall-E poster for Ganymede poster contest. Its been voted for the fourth position. Happy :-)

http://www.eclipse.org/ganymede/postercontest.php

You can find the original poster here.

FireFox 3 is released and it will create the most downloaded software in 24 hours time. The original estimate was around 5 million copies. But the actual downloads exceeded the expectation and crossed that level well before 24 hours. Due to heavy download, Mozilla servers were down intially. I checked the counter now and its already crossed 7 million and the downloads were clocking at more than 7k per minute. Hope the total download in 24 hours will be around 10 millions.

Congrats Firefox team.

I've got few TinEye invites available. In case you are interested in trying out this Image Search Engine, let me know, I'll send you an invitation.

Yup, it doesn't cost you anything. Its absolutely free :-)

I often use the Albert Einstein's quote, "Simple, but not simpler". I think I should rethink that.

Today there was some crap movie in some channel. The hero will be flying a B2 bomber and there will be few F-14s behind his tail. He will switch to stealth mode and fly away. My daughter came from outside running towards me. I thought I'll make the scene simple for her. I said, "See that biiiiiiig aeroplane? That is going so fast and the small ones can't even see". She turned to the screen, saw the bomber flying for few seconds and exclaimed "kaka!" (crow)

Hmmm, I should think simpler :-)

I always love Pixar movies - not for Steve, but for the amount of detailed attention they pour into every little stuff. Now the upcoming Wall E is something special for the following reasons:

• First movie after Disney "acquired" Pixar


• Its released after the biggest flop of Pixar (Cars)


• This will be the first Pixar movie where a real human face is shown!


• The one liner of story is too good


• As per the rumours, there are NO dialogs in the movie. Its all the beeps and light flashs of the robots!!!

Pixar took too much efforts to make us visualize a fish as a character in the Finding Nemo (I'm not going into details here, in short - we can't easily visualize something as a character unless it resembles humans in most of ways. Think of the characters of Shark Tale, they are more of humans than of fishes) I bet they have gone even beyond that to create a movie without dialogs. Waiting for the release ...

If you look at your blogger profile, only the blogs that you started with blogger will be available. Lets see how to "trick" the system to have any other blog.

• Login to blogger and create a dummy blog. Give it your blog name and any address. Eg: "My Thoughts!" "dummy12345"


• Go to the Settings->Publishing of the blog


• Click "Custom Domain" & then "Switch to Advanced Settings"


• Give the URL of your blog there and click Save Settings.

I just linked this blog to my blogger profile. Have a look here.

Remember there is no validation done whether the address you mentioned there is a blog or if its a blog, whether you are a member/owner of that etc. So virtually you can have any URL there (except *.blogspot.com). Check where the "My Employer Blog!" links to :-P

Got an invitation for private beta for TinEye - an image search engine. When I say image search its not by entering some keywords and searching for images, rather giving an image as reference and finding out similar images. I've worked on a similar product for my final year project (identifying traffic signs), I know its not an easy task. The algorithm that I've used, needs proper training to identify the images. But for a search like this, you don't have a training input. You get only one chance to identify the images. Sounds pretty complex to me!

I tried this search:



And the result:



As you can see the results are accurate even thou they are cropped, added few elements etc. Sounds like a perfect target for Google to acquire :-)