BYOD... the next hype cycle...

Bring Your Own Device. A neat way to reduce IT costs of an organization by tricking the employees to fend for themselves as far as computing devices are concerned. It is not even new, as some form of BYOD has been there for a few years even before people started calling it BYOD...

The current hype cycle belongs to BYOD... 

The curious case of 1366x768...

HD ready? Whatever!

Don't understand why it is the most common screen option in everything starting from an 11" ultrabook to a 17" desktop replacement...

The current MacBookAir 13" has better specs than most ultrabooks, and the price difference is not very much... And it has a 1440x900 LCD... An MBA for around 75k (INR)...

Firefox 1111...

Still do not understand why the Firefox folks had to change how the product is versioned. Something is seriously wrong. What's the whole point of pushing out multiple major releases within a span of only a few days!

Code search laid to rest....

Buzz had died down, that was a while back... Wave was a still birth...

Now, something useful, Google Code Search, has been shutdown...

Going to miss you!

Un poema........

The poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, by Yeats kind of captures my feelings towards my work.

I love programming, but somewhere along the line, the fun goes away. From then on, it is about the money, position et cetera.

I mean, I need the money. Seriously. WTF!

Still...


I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

New kid in town...

And it is called Buzz. Google buzz. buzzzzzzzzz.......

I fail to get excited. Or was it, I refuse to get excited? Is that so bad?

Why would my rants be of any interest to anyone else? Why would someone's rants be of any interest to me?

Damn. Oh well, I have the option of staying away!

Right. Shall exercise that.

By publishing online. Like this.

QED.

Ganymede to Galileo... to the moon and back...

Callisto to Europa to Ganymede to Galileo... The trend has been set... The next version of Eclipse is gonna be different... It is going to weigh more... Soon people will be forced to download a 500MB file as the IDE... and then the next version will be even bigger...

Great!!

Am loving it!!!

Thoroughly!!!!

RFC on TLAs...

Read one of the funny RFCs on TLAs...

Well... :-)

RFC-5513

Got a list of such RFCs here...

A new operating system...

Google building new OS, around a Linux kernel... Dunno how correct my understanding is! Ain't that more like a new custom distro?

Well, am no geek or a Google fan-boy!

Incorrect defaults...

Found out the hard way, after installing Fedora 11...

Have been running Fedora 8, decided to try the latest spin... and it won't let me choose the display resolution... but on its own it won't give me anything better than 800x600... WTF!

I mean, what the bloody f$#@ !

Am done with Fedora...

Switching to "linux for human beings"

And it at the very least allows me to set the display to 1280x1024, even if that ain't the native resolution of my CRT.

Cool... Peace... Bless!!!

Google waves...

Watched a demo of Google wave.

Frankly, am not very excited... :-|

Somehow I don't like the idea of 'browser-as-the-operating-system', or even 'browser-as-the-platform'. I am not a believer yet. Will not be as long as the browser windows have those forward, back, and reload buttons.

Would rather like to see (desktop-)applications that are seamlessly network enabled. Without having to fiddle around with "XmlHttpRequest" or some such shit. And not using "java.net.url" or some very low level stuff either. That's just me.

LTE...

Another TLA...

Stands for Long Term Evolution...

Wikipedia entry...

WTF!

KDE on Windows...

Installed KDE on Windoz Vista...

Jus' for the heck of it...

Installed digiKam too... Gotta play around with it.

Can't afford anything other than the free PDF reader from Adobe, leave alone Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom. :-(

Adobe converts the US prices to Indian prices by multiplying with the exchange rate of the moment. All their products invariably will remain way too expensive for someone like me as long as the exchange rate is above one :-(

Stock markets halted...

Apparently for the first time in the history for hitting the upper circuit... Just what an election result can do...

Talk about fundamentals... :-)

The bulls, and speculators are back... big time... at least for the time being.

Java to Scala...

Interesting, and cool... :-)

    boolean nameHasUpperCase = false; // This is Java
    for (int i = 0; i < name.length(); ++i) { 
         if (Character.isUpperCase(name.charAt(i))) { 
             nameHasUpperCase = true; 
             break; 
         } 
    }

in Java to

    boolean nameHasUpperCase = !name.toLowerCase().equals(name);

in Java to

    val nameHasUpperCase = name.exists(_.isUpperCase) 

in Scala.

From the article "How Scala Changed My Programming Style" by Bill Venners.

Stock market...

Stock market experts are one too many, on TV, here in blogosphere, in print media... I also have doled out unsolicited advice on the market conditions to people who are generally too gullible to take me seriously.

If the BSE index is up, and Dow Jones is down, the economies are not linked, if both head south or go up, markets are linked. Interesting. It is linked, then it is not linked, linked not linked, not linked linked, linked not linked. Repeat fast enough.

The current theme is whether the market has bottomed out or not... One day it has, the next oh, it ain't... it has, it ain't, it has, it ain't...

Bloody irritating... even blogging about it.

Intel powered... Harpic...

Intel powered Harpic, Intel powered MDH Masala... WTF!!

Of late, the "Intel powered" tag line in television ads about laptops with an Intel processor inside comes before the ads themselves. So if an ad for the Harpic or MDH Masala which does not have a tag line is followed by a Compaq or HP laptop ad you will get to see this nice blending effect.

Intel powered Harpic... Cool... I guess it will ensure that Harpic, and MDH have WiMAX capability out of the box pretty soon.

Interesting!

Question of type and character...

I have a soft corner for cursive fonts. But of the non-cursive types, I am not too sure what I like more, serifs or sans-serifs. :-(

In short, I like most types of types. :-)

But, type rendering on Linux still pisses me off. When will it become at least tolerably good? Being an armchair critic is much easier than trying to implement a good font interpreter all by myself, anyway. :-)

Small is beautiful...

May be.

But I do prefer my laptop to be at least 14.1". Watching videos on PDAs and mobile phones is not my cup of tea.

I wonder where all these convergence and miniaturization is taking us. Some people are buying into it (literally), and some people are making a bunch of money.

More Norton WTF...

Uninstalled and re-installed Norton Internet Security. Now SystemWorks keeps flashing that no anti-virus is installed. If it can't even detect an installation of a product from the same vendor correctly, how on earth would it protect me from virus, and other more exotic stuff... I mean, WTF.

Selective un-installation does noes even work.

Money gone down the drain... :-(