Dexter's Lab

Gmail has been a wonderful experience until now, not anymore.
It is literally being a pain in the a**

Of late the spam filters in the gmail has gone haywire.
There are so many false positives that I started losing important mails.

And not that its by mistake, its consistent.
I am tired of marking them as "Not Spam" but yet the filter never seems to learn.
I manage a group and weird it marks messages from its own groups as spam.

Apart from that a lot of mails marked directly to me are also being marked as spam.
The feature that once has been the strength of gmail is now no more the same.

I am getting myself used to checking spam folder as well these days.

And worse it doesnt have controls for spam filters. I mean I can't turn off spam filtering or the level of spam checking.
Maybe they are just over confident of their filters.

People including me started to rely so much on gmail that a sudden change from it is impossible.
A one point failure indeed.

Maybe this is the right time indeed to sort my email out.

There goes the Yahoo saga.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/10/yahoo-goes-scorched-earth/

I don't know what to say of the recent developments. They are just so many :)

It takes immense pleasure to complete a project you have taken up either professional or personal.
And the personal projects often give you more pleasure since you own it form the heart.

Yesterday was one of those days I felt that kind of elation on completing a project.
Blogging is one thing now which has crossed language barriers. What I mean is that people not only blog in English but in a lot of other languages.

The way its evolving in India is also pretty exciting.
There are dedicated communities for many languages which support and help the new bloggers.

I blog in telugu on my other blog.
Its been one and a half years journey on that.

It was a great experience and learning all the way I must say.
First thing I experienced is seeing how a community evolves. Being there in the initial few and seeing the blogging community grow into the near thousand is one great experience.

So just to spice it up a bit more I started on a project a while ago. What if I can create a book out of the blogs ?
There are so many great entries with excellent content. People share good information on literature, stories, technology, politics, you name it.
If only you could get the best out of them and create a book. Its just an e-book though.

It was a tough journey wading through the posts, collecting the good and interesting ones, sorting them, formatting the book, coordinating the effort.
But at the end I am one satisfied person.

You can get the copy of the book from here.
If you can read telugu great, go through and let me know your feedback.

A picture of a tiger taken at Bannerghatta National Park.

If you guys ever read Chandamama in your childhood and liked it you would want to have a look at the website now.
It even has all the archives of the old issues.

There's even a telugu version of the site here.

An awesomely fitting result to a greatly controversial tour.

Things were on the Indian side today with Sachin firing yet again and Praveen coming up with the wickets.
After throwing away a nice start the Indians made a decent score instead of a big one.

I was skeptical to be honest since the Aussies had everything at stake.
But the bowlers made it counte yet again as they did all along in the series.
And we have a great series win.

Many inteteresting finds from the tour Ishanth Sharma, Rohit Sharma, Praveen Kumar.
Some failed ones Yuvaraj, Robin Uthappa.
Some controversies which included harbhajan, hayden and symonds.

But to the least I can say that the series was rivetting.

Where are the High Definition videos in the Video websites ??

Its irritating to watch the crappy quality of the videos.
While YouTube has a good community and great recommendations it has a badly designed website and irritating quality of videos.
One can't quite enjoy it.

While there's all the talk about Video websites providing HD content I can see a very few, just maybe one or two which have it (with no interesting content.)
Stage6 divx was better but now shutdown.

YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo Videos (Its back...), all suck.

Ah come on guys you can do better.

Meanwhile Yahoo! Live launches with an interesting concept but its boring for now. (I don't like to see a bunch of guys tapping their keyboards and making faces)
And black background. Aargh! It hurts the eyes.

Any other recommendations for good video websites ?

Sometimes things happen for our own good.

A month back I had to move to a different campus in our company which is around 15KMs far from my house.
(The old office location was just a KM away.)

Moreover the traffic on the way is horrible and I had to struggle driving in that for a month on and off before I switched to the new campus.
Finally I decided that driving is not my forte anymore that too in this disastrous traffic. So I booked myself a seat on a company cab.

After a month now I can say that I have peace of mind at the least.
Many good things have come out of this.

Before this I was irregular in office timings. I mean I go to the office by around 11:00 AM but coming back I never knew.
Most of the days though I used to stay pretty late for no reason.
Now the cab timings are fixed I go by 11:00 AM to the office and return by 8:30 PM.

I have a lot of time at hand and try to do somethings which I didn't do earlier.

One more good thing to come out of this move is there's a pretty good Gym available at my new campus and I started working out.
Though I seem to be fit I am not quite. I knew that but I didn't do anything about it. Now I do since I have time at hand.
I walk atleast a couple of KMs on the tread mill, cycle and do a bit of weights.

And more I get to sleep a couple of hours more. (well close to)
One while going to office and one while coming back. That too listening to favorite songs on the player.

Ah! sometimes things work out for our own good.

Do yourself a favor and listen to the song Saiyyan from Kailash Kher's "Jhoomo Re" album.
This song sounds great in his voice.

I love his voice and mentioned it on my earlier posts on LJ.

The talk and rumours about M$ taking over Y! have been going around for years now.
They again surface now.

I wish Microsoft does indeed succeed in this deal.
Its been boring to watch a great lot of uninteresting products being churned out by Y!.
Hoards of aimless social networks and meaningless stuff.

Atleast this would bring a change. I used to like the company once for its innovativeness but the respect for it slowly started dwindling.
The mail, news, portal, finance etc. have been good companions all the time and they are the oldies that earned the company respect initially.

Lets see if Microsoft gets the prize catch this time.

One more reason I would like the deal would happen is because of the way Google is going these days.
Its just been stuck and no great improvement/innovation. Atleast this would trigger some interesting competition. :)

A while back Y! announced the web based media player which attracted me a lot.
Reason being now I can collect all my favorite music in one single page/playlist without ever downloading.

But what bothered me was that the player is hosted via a javascript that resides on the Y! server.
One, you are dependent on an external server. Two its branded :), Three you can't have it say on your localhost without being connected.

So I have been doing a li'l bit of search and was amazed to see some quite excellent flash/javascript based open source players.
Apparently I got them from source forge. They work pretty flawless.

One in particular I liked was XSPF Web Music Player.
Its simple, no nonsense player which does the job.
The playlist needs to be in the XSPF format which is quite simple to understand even for a non techie.

Supports playlist, album art, stop, play, pause, next track, previous track, volume. Implemented in flash.
Enough for a media player.

Check it out and you may like it.

A golden moment for the Indian cricket! Yay!
We won! WE WON!!!

All the criticism silenced by actions rather than words. Thats a great achievement.
Th match has been a great discovery in many terms. Form for some, Capabilities for some.
Finally Indians have come out as a team and conquered the Aussies yet again.

There's no one splendid performance in the match which we can point out for the win
but everybody's done their bit.

I am starting to like Kumble as a captain. Discovering the hidden aggression inside him
and displaying it when its required earns him more respect from me.
Infact I like him better than Dravid who was a passive captain I must say.

Whatever! A win that goes a long way to boost the Indian's morale.

I hope they would win the next match too and level the series...

If you haven't watched "Taare Zameen Par...", please do!
You wouldn't want to miss on something good.
And if you are going to be a prospective parent then all the more reason :)

You wouldn't get to see much when a superstar plays a second fiddle to a small kid.
Especially not if you are one of the khans. But an exception that probably only Aamir Khan could take.
A multitalented person, an actor, director, producer etc and the one guy in Indian Cinema who attempts to do something different everytime.

The movie is about a dyslexic kid, but not only about that.
It talks about the amount of pressure the kids these days are facing and how indifferent the parents are to the problems of the kids.
Its very important to create the right kind of atmosphere for the kids and this movie talks just about this.

Go watch !

Its fun having to talk all about the controversies in the Australian tour.

Ofcourse I am enraged and quite unhappy with the result of the match.
Also the bunch of jokers called umpires, referee and a farce called as Cricket Australia.

But what makes it interesting even out of all this hullabaloo is that the interesting points people come up with to argue and the statistics they can dig up to support their statements.
Also it makes interesting to see how the cricket boards in respective countries either back or chicken out of the situations.

The media especially the news channels and the TOI suddenly gets the share of masala they are just waiting for.
Yeah bring on all those retired cricketers who never played an international match and get them arguing.

The players making the "so called statements". Nobody ever knows if they are made or made up.

Some crap sissy players talking about racial abuses.

Some partial boards talking it up as if they are the idols to preach.

A team which can't last a couple of overs with 3 wickets in hand.

At the end of it all an audience who is confused.

Here's wishing everybody on my friends list a "Very Happy New Year" !
May the New year bring with it hope and happiness.

Multimedia experience on Linux sucks big time.
It might be because most of the movies are available in proprietary formats avi, wmv for which obviously the support in Linux isn't great.

I have tried vlc, helix, kaffeine and mplayer.
vlc somehow gives out a shaky picture on my Ubuntu (Maybe a graphics card problem). kaffeine works fine but gives me a degraded quality. mplayer is decent.

Moreover there isn't any good replacement support for real format. Real Player sucks big time on Linux.

I am not sure what others use. Would like to know which player works for you guys.

I can never imagine a working day without music.
Call me an addict but I need some music in my ears most of the time I am working.

I listen to a radio to avoid choosing the same songs over and over and am too lazy to get myself a collection.
A couple of songs I would like to recommend, those that I liked in the recent times.

The first one is In Dino... from Metro.
A movie about which I just heard passing by. Never saw.
I heard the song first when traveling in a friend's car and I instantly liked it. Excellent rendition of the song I must say.

Another one is the Jaane Kya Chahe Man... from "Pyar ke side effects..."
Another movie I let pass by but the song is an excellent one.

Give them a try.

There's one song that thoroughly entertains me musically as well as visually.
Thats the one pictured on Shahrukh Khan and Malaika Arora....

OK by now you would have guessed. Yeah it is Chayya Chayya...An excellent song I must say.
This movie was released around the time I joined my engineering. I just couldn't get that song out of my system.
I used to sing along the song all the while and listen to it over and over.

I love the video of the song too. Its pictured on top of a moving train.
Farah Khan choreographed it and did an excellent job at it. Malaika just was the icing on the cake.
She was gorgeous and danced awesome.

I tend to sway to the song inadvertently... and the song just sticks in my mind for the rest of the day.
Saw the song just now during the late night TV flipping. Excellent!

One of my friends scraped his knees trying to do the "jump and land on knees" routine of Shahrukh in the song ;)

Refresh your memories

Loads of things happening around.

Looks like its the time of marriages...
Everybody around me seems to be getting married or in love (or I am getting old ??)

One of my close friends is getting married this month end.
Also so many of my dad's colleagues are having their kids getting married and my parents seem to be attending them every week.

In between there is some noise being made about me but I conveniently ignore them.

And things seem to be moving super fast these days. I don't get any time out of work.
It doesn't help that our team has moved to the new campus and there is loads of work.
I don't get much time for leisure. (Except for the occasional dance and a party ;)

Had a few outings in between these schedules and we end up piling up more work :)

Had a barcamp last weekend. The interest seems to be dwindling with each one. I thought the turn out was also less this time.
Anyway I handled a collective for "indic languages" and it went well. Had a few things to learn and a few to share.

Meanwhile I fell sick for the past few days and still keep going to the office since its not extreme sickness.

One of these days I would just take up a whole week of vacation and sleep at home.

Oh meanwhile the Karnataka government fell twice and the week old CM Yadiyurappa resigns.

It was quite an excellent night yesterday.
It was "Company Day" and was totally rocking...

To add more to the excitement I was performing :) Yes I did.
I did perform earlier in front of a smaller audience when I was in college. But dancing in front of around 4000 people wow!
It was quite amazing and I was thrilled.

Pics later... as soon as I get hold of them.

And more there was Sonu Nigam performing live and was that a frenzy. Quite an excellent singer he was he got everyone of them on their feet to his songs.
It was two and a half hours of excellent swaying to his songs. We were thoroughly exhausted.

Ah! Excellent...