This blog has moved!

The blog is moving...

2007-10-04T02:02:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a while since I've posted here. There really is no excuse -- I had all but forgotten about this blog! I was blogging at Wordpress.com and have now moved from there as well. If you haven't been reading my other blog, well something important has happened -- I'm currently busy starting up my own venture!

While I design and build a data center to host this blog (and run my startup!), I've temporarily moved this blog to my machine at home. Setting up something on home DSL connection with a dynamic DNS has been an interesting exercise!

I had a cheap old box lying around which is serving as the web server. It has all of 384MB of memory, an AMD 750MHz processor and is running Ubuntu server.

Since I have no traffic on this blog to speak of, the machine should do just fine. Please don't go and link any of these posts on digg, reddit, slashdot and other such places known to bring down even the heftiest of servers!

The new blog address is somewhat simpler and is:

http://www.gautamsworld.com/

Indian "Indie Rock" rocks!

2006-05-16T00:57:00.000-07:00

Infinity Radio is an Internet Radio station dedicated to playing original music by Indian Rock bands. Most of these artists do not have record labels behind them so you can't easily buy this stuff from a store. That's why an Internet Radio channel for this music is such a great idea and Infinity Radio is doing a pretty decent job of it. The quality isn't that great with their high quality stream at only 64 kbps (24kHz) but considering you might not hear this music anywhere else, its not bad! You can use most media players to listen to this station including Windows Media Player, Winamp and iTunes. So tune in!

Links

Reduce your mobile bills! (or try atleast)

2006-05-16T00:55:00.000-07:00

I just came across YourBillBuddy.com which aims at reducing your mobile phone bills by analyzing your existing bills and figuring out which bill plans from which provider suit you the best. The website only works with Indian cell phone providers but seems like a concept that could be used pretty much anywhere. What is does is analyze your call patterns (more long distance calls, more calls to hutch phones, more SMS than calls etc) and matches that against its database of bill plans from most mobile operators in India. The site then recommends a bill plan that will give you the lowest average bill per month based on your usage pattern. The site claims to cover the following operators Airtel, Hutch, Idea, Reliance, MTNL, Spice, BSNL and Tata Indicom. YourBillBuddy currently does not support corporate plans as the information about these plans is not publicly available. The only catch obviously is that you need to upload the bills to the website! There are some privacy issues here and if you're feeling concerned then you should read their privacy policy before signing up. Getting electronic bills should be fairly easy, as it was for me with my Airtel connection. Airtel lets your download your bills in a PDF file from their website which you can directly upload to YourBillBuddy. I'm currently in the process of trying it out and I'm glad to say, I'm already in a pretty decent bill plan :-). The reality however is that, in India, there are just too many service providers with too many bill plans. Its practically impossible to keep track of all of them and figure out the best one, especially since they keep changing the plans regularly! YourBillBuddy seems like a decent idea that if executed well could benefit a lot of people here in India.

Links

Opening Pandora's Box

2006-01-23T02:24:00.000-08:00

Pandora.com is an amazing music service that gives a Web 2.0 touch to internet radio. It's powered by the Music Genome Project and it can create music stations which play songs "musically similar" to tracks or artists that you suggest. The best thing I suppose is that - it really works well!

The Music Genome Project provides controlled tagging and categorization to music out there. The selections can then be refined by users while they listen to the songs. They can indicate whether they liked or disliked the track and whether they think the songs aren't musically alike! By giving everyone this ability, Pandora harnesses the wisdom of crowds and along with the opinions of the experts, can give you a really unique musical experience.

I've discovered more new artists that I liked in the last week, than I did all of last year! It taps into the long tail very well by slipping in great songs by lesser known artists. The closest experience I've had to this was when AudioGalaxy was at it's peak around 2002.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Links

Pandora.com

The Top Entrepreneurs Lies

2006-01-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

Guy Kawasaki has a blog entry with some of the top entrepreneur lies. A lot of these will be true for intrapreneurs as well. Here goes:

"Our projections are conservative."
“Gartner says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.”
“Boeing is going to sign our purchase order next week.”
“Key employees are set to join us as soon as we get funded.”
“No one is doing what we're doing.”
“No one can do what we're doing.”
“Hurry because several other venture capital firms are interested.”
“Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.”
“We have a proven management team.”
“Patents make our product defensible.”
“All we have to do is get 1% of the market.”
Robert Scoble adds one, "We don’t need a blog, we’re working on a Superbowl commercial".

Number #2 is my favorite! Whats yours?

Links

The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

There is no killer app

2006-01-23T02:18:00.000-08:00

An increasing culture of customization and large variations in our sense of style, performance and value seem to limiting the birth of killer applications. Wikipedia defines a killer app as:

A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular piece of computer hardware, gaming console, and/or an operating system simply to run that program.

Seems like a reasonable enough goal for any new application. :-)

Killer apps were essential in the rise of personal computers and the Internet with things like VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe PostScript and E-mail. However it has to be said that most applications don't start out by being killer applications. They would mostly start small and be useful to a few users or in a lot of cases, just be useful to the author! If the application was well designed and implemented then they might end up being useful to a lot more people and thus achieve killer app status.

It seems the approach to take is to solve as many user problems as you can, and solve them well. If we keep sitting around for that big idea then it might never come - or so argues Ramit Sethi in his blog post, The Myth of the Great Idea. He says,

Success almost never comes from a mind-blowing idea, so sitting around trying to find one is a waste of time. Success comes from a basic idea executed amazingly well. Ideas are rarely found by thinking. They're found by doing.

So get those smaller ideas out again and start working on them! Now where did I put that darn paper napkin?

Links

The Myth of the Great Idea

Learning from the Web

2005-11-23T09:17:00.000-08:00

Adam Bosworth (Google's VP Engineering), has an interesting article on ACM Queue on unintuitive lessons that the web taught us. Here are the main points:

Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones.
It is worth making things simple enough that one can harness Moore’s law in parallel.
It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.
People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs).
Pay attention to physics.
Be as loosely coupled as possible.
KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid.

Compare this with Tim O'Reilly's core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, as mentioned in his article "What is Web 2.0":

Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
Trusting users as co-developers
Harnessing collective intelligence
Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
Software above the level of a single device
Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

You can see that a lot of the "lessons" that Adam Bosworth pointed out, have been learnt and are being applied by Web 2.0 companies.

Links

Understanding the 6th and 7th Media

2005-11-07T04:34:00.000-08:00

This is a great blog post by Tomi Ahonen which talks about the 6th and 7th media which are the Internet and the Mobile Phone respectively.

...the first five mass media [Print, recording, cinema, radio and TV] are all very mature, over 50 years old each. Even the sixth media - the internet - is well into its teens. The least understood of the seven media is the youngest, mobile phone, which became a media channel only six years ago when NTT DoCoMo first launched its revolutionary i-Mode service in 1999. i-Mode has in its very short life, as regular readers of this blog know, become the world's largest internet service provider, ie bigger than AOL, Yahoo, etc by paying subscribers, by revenues and by profits.

Links

Understanding the 6th and 7th Media

Search relevance

2005-11-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

Ethan Stock talks on his blog about the four fundamental ways to determine relevance in search results. These are:

1) Market/collective/algorithmic - Call it the law of large numbers, the wisdom of crowds, or statistical truth, but PageRank and similar "hubs and authorities" algorithms figure out, on average, what everybody thinks of a given site.
2) Expert/editorial - Roger Ebert on movies. Julia Child on cooking. Henry Kissinger on diplomacy. They've spent a lifetime figuring out what is the best, and the'll tell you so. Yahoo's roots are in this sort of directory/taxonomy/recommendation based organization.
3) Personal - Based on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, give them results that most closely match their tendencies. Amazon's A9 is the best current example.
4) Social - Based not only on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, but on those of all the people they know. This is a fascinating middle ground (possible sweet spot?) in between personal and collective/algorithmic -- you've got enough critical mass of opinions on key topics to hopefully eliminate outliers, but you've got a close enough connection to the user that you can bend your results to match their point of view.

The one that he left out that is getting important these days is location. All the major search engines have the concept of local search, which can retrieve results given a certain location either explicitly (user specifies which location) or implicitly (GPS device, Mobile network location etc). So for instance if I search for "weather", then the most important search hit should be the weather of the city I am currently in.

Medio is a mobile search company trying to incorporate location and personal data to provide answers to queries rather than just search results. The company came out of stealth mode earlier this year and has put up some information about their product on their website.

Links

Amazing list of web software

2005-11-01T09:07:00.000-08:00

I came across this amazing list of mostly free-to-use web software compiled by Phil Bradley. Since the list is quite new, all the links are alive and most of them are worth checking out, if you haven't already.

Phil also has a page on search engines. "Which search engine when?", lets you know which search engine to use based on what you need to find and what you already know.

Links

Oracle Database 10g for free

2005-10-29T03:07:00.000-07:00

After Microsoft released SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, which is a free to use and redistribute, Oracle has also gone ahead and announced the release of the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. Beta versions for Linux and Windows are currently available for free download.

The limitations match that of SQL Server Express Edition exactly. It supports only a single CPU, 1GB of RAM and can contain 4GB of user data. It comes with a browser-based interface for managing the database and there's this nifty tutorial, complete with Flash animations (no less!), to get you started.

Well this size database seems good enough for smaller, more personalized applications. However, open source projects seem to tilt towards supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL. One reason is that these database systems are open source (and free) themselves and another being the fact that they're cross-platform (especially Linux support). But with Oracle now providing a free version (on Linux as well), I wonder if we'll see more of the smaller open source web and desktop applications supporting the Oracle database.

Windows XP Professional ships with IIS, MacOS X ships with Apache, Linux ships with the kitchen sink and now the major database vendors have free versions of their software. It seems like the time is coming for everyone to have their personal servers storing everything from their emails, IMs, browser history, identity etc. for easy access and cross-reference by any local desktop or browser application. Can I download the entire GMail web application along with my e-mails to my local server and use the offline version when I'm not connected?

Links

C++ Builder 2006 announced

2005-10-13T02:27:00.000-07:00

Borland has officially announced the C++ Builder 2006 product, due for release towards the end of the year 2005. Instead of a separate IDE like before, Borland is rolling out a single IDE, dubbed the Borland Developer Studio, which will play host to the Delphi, C++ and C# languages. C# will be .NET only, while C++ will be Win32 only. However using the Delphi language, you'll be able to target either runtime.

In my opinion, C++ Builder is the best C++ coding environment on Windows. So, if I had to write a C++ application on Windows only, I would never look anywhere else. It's one of those environments that you have to actually use to understand why it's better. Comparing it against Visual Studio or CodeWarrior etc doesn't really work because the way you attack problems in C++ Builder is quite different from most other environments. The fact that is uses C++ as the language is almost incidental - the real power lies elsewhere.

Using C++ as the language has the advantage of being able to use all the libraries that exist today including Boost, STL etc. The real power however is in the component model - VCL (visual component library), and the way components interact with and extend the IDE. Borland has mostly been focusing on this side of the functionality and has largely been ignoring the needs of large complex pieces of software. Well it seems the focus has shifted and along with some cool new VCL and IDE features, C++ Builder also gets enhanced build process management and a much more robust compiler and linker.

To see how the new C++ Builder looks and works, check out the following screencasts:

Links
C++ Builder 2006 Product Page

Identity 2.0

2005-10-10T02:46:00.000-07:00

I saw a presentation on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt (founder & CEO, Sxip) at OSCON 2005, and I must say that it was quite interesting. Sxip is trying to provide a secure, on-demand and universal digital identity.

The problem with digital indentities today are that they are bound to a website or a group of websites that you visit and use. So for instance a single Yahoo login can get you into most of the Yahoo sites, but you can't use the same login/password to go shop on Amazon or check your Google mail. Your identity is tied down to these individual companies. Microsoft tried to make everyone use Passport as a universal single sign-on, but nobody liked it and it only worked in Microsoft's servers and software so it's fate was sealed as soon as they announced it.

Digital identities need to follow some of the basic laws of identity, which are as follows:

User Control and Consent
Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user's consent.
Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use
The solution that discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long-term solution.
Justifiable Parties
Digital identity systems must be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.
Directed Identity
A universal identity system must support both "omni-directional" identifiers for use by public entities and "unidirectional" identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.
Pluralism of Operators and Technologies
A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-working of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.
Human Integration
The universal identity metasystem must define the human user to be a component of the distributed system integrated through unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks.
Consistent Experience Across Contexts
The unifying identity metasystem must guarantee its users a simple, consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.

Digital identity today is an interesting problem that needs to be solved. Sxip is just one of the companies trying to solve the problem. Their presentation at OSCON gives you a fairly decent idea of the digital identity problem. The presentation style is also very interesting and makes it worth watching, so check it out!

Links

Opera is now free!

2005-09-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

Opera have removed the ad banner and licensing fee and have made their browser completely free. This move was inevitable since FireFox has been commoditizing the Non-OS bundled browser market. Here's what Opera says about going free:

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera's growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today's milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

Opera will still make money by licensing their browser engine to others. For instance, Adobe uses the Opera rendering engine in GoLive to preview content for the desktop and mobile. The Opera for mobile browser is also currently still a paid product and even comes bundled with some mobile devices. Opera has most of the features a typical user might like including tabbed browsing, simple clean interface, download manager, mouse gestures, sessions, url shortcuts and skins. It has some additional features as well like an RSS reader, mail client, a very nice sidebar and an IM client.

Being cross-platform, fast, feature packed and now free, Opera should give FireFox decent competition and shake up the browser market share numbers for sure!

Links

Mobile credit cards: Now in India!

2005-09-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

Bharti Tele-Ventures, ICICI Bank & Visa have joined hands to launch mChq - a credit card on the mobile phone. In the first phase, the service will be available to Airtel and ICICI Bank customers in Delhi and Mumbai across 100 retail outlets. The service is RBI approved and VISA claims its safer than the normal swipe card.

Your SIM card stores your credit card information. Not just one, but potentially the information of all your credit cards. If you lose your phone, then deactivating the SIM card will also deactive the credit cards present on the SIM.

While Airtel customers subscribing to the service will be issued a new SIM card free of cost, ICICI Bank card holders will be issued an add-on card on the basis of their existing ICICI Bank-Visa credit card.

So now suppose you’re at a restaurant and need to pay the bill. Here’s how you can use your phone:

You write your cell phone number of the bill and send it back to the cashier. The cashier then sends the number to a secure server which then sends you a bill on that phone number.
The bill is picked up by an application on the phone, which asks you if you want to pay the bill. If you agree, then the application displays a list of credit cards whose information is on your SIM card.
Now you choose one of your credit cards, enter a PIN number and authorize the payment.
The application now sends encrypted data back to the payment server, which then follows a procedure similar to todays credit card swipe. The restaurant cashier gets a notification of payment received and you may get a printed receipt from the cashier and keep a electronic receipt on your phone.

Links

Movie Producers Get Open Search Warrant For All Of New Delhi?

2005-08-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

This is so outrageous that I just had to put this up. This is what TechDirt has to say:

This story is bizarre, if true, but apparently the MPA in India (the equivalent to the MPAA in the US) has been granted an open search warrant for the entire city of New Delhi to look for unauthorized copies of movies. The police are needed to execute the search and seizure warrant, but it was given to the MPA, who can now make use of the police force as if it were their own, by pointing them to suspected counterfeiters. No matter how you look at it, this move seems a bit extreme -- though perfectly in line with how the entertainment industry seems to view things.

From Blake Murdoch's article,

"The order is expected to be especially useful in facilitating raids on the (city's) notorious Palika Bazaar, where information about imminent raids often leaks before police can effect arrests and seizures."

Links

Nokia: Cell Phones' Future

2005-08-10T02:44:00.000-07:00

Thomas Jonsson, director of communications for Nokia Networks, had this to say in a recent interview:

This (in case you missed it) is the year of music -- the cell phone as a sort of iPod, capable of downloading, saving and playing thousands of songs. 2006 will be the year of television on your mobile telephone. 2007 will be the year for games on the phone and the capability to play them against other phone users. 2008 will be the year of "my connected life," when the years-old dream of cell phones that are Internet terminals will finally become a widespread reality.

The phone as camera -- that was 2004's theme -- is well established, though big technical improvements are still being made.

Keeping in with the year's musical trend, Nokia will soon release the Nokia N91, also known as Steve Jobs' wet dream. The N91 has a 4 GB hard drive, 2MP camera, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS/EDGE/3G.

Links

Maxthon: Power Browsing

2005-08-10T02:40:00.000-07:00

I've been using the Maxthon browser for quite some time now. It was called MyIE2 in the days before and was essentially just another IE based tabbed browser. A couple of years and 32 million downloads later, it is now known for it's power browsing experience.

Out of the box, Maxthon comes with an impressive set of features including:

Tabbed browsing
Mouse gestures (can't live without these now)
Super drag & drop (a feature I miss in every other browser)
Ad & popup blocker (works very well)
Multiple proxy support
URL hotkeys and aliases
Groups support (or sessions in Opera and Firefox - Maxthon did this first!)
Amazing customizability (an enormous but well managed amount of preference options)
RSS reader (including podcast support!)
Plenty of skins (applied without restarting)
400+ plugins (it supports most IE extensions as well)
Automatic Updates

If you don't care for the rendering engine provided by IE then Maxthon gives you the option to switch to the Gecko engine (the same rendering engine that Firefox & Mozilla use)!! Gecko support is built-in but you still need the ActiveX version of the rendering engine. Just download the "Mozilla x.x.x ActiveX Control Installer" from this site and install it. After that launch Maxthon, and in the main menu choose File->New Tab->Use Gecko Engine. Now restart Maxthon and voila, every tab now uses Mozilla's browser engine!

Maxthon downloads come in two flavours - Standard (1.9 MB) and Combo (4.3 MB). The Combo version include multiple skins, plugins and the AI Roboform form filler. One of the plugins you should download is the Easy Finder plugin. This enhances the default Find window in Maxthon which is the same as the one in IE (and which sucks). This plugin makes it as good or better than the find functionality in Firefox or Opera.

Links

Interesting Story

2005-07-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

The Japanese love fresh fish. However, the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever.The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring in the fish. If the return trip took more than a few days, the fish were not fresh. The Japanese did not like the taste. To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen and they did not like frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive. Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish. So how did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan? If you were consulting the fish industry, what would you recommend? Too Much Money...! As soon as you reach your goals, such as finding a wonderful mate, starting a successful company, paying off your debts or whatever, you might lose your passion. You don't need to work so hard so you relax. You experience the same problem as lottery winners who waste their money, wealthy heirs who never grow up and bored homemakers who get addicted to prescription drugs. Like the Japanese fish problem, the best solution is simple. It was observed by L. Ron Hubbard in the early 1950's. "Man thrives, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment." - L. Ron Hubbard The Benefits of a Challenge The more intelligent, persistent and competent you are, the more you enjoy a good problem. If your challenges are the correct size, and if you are steadily conquering those challenges, you are happy. You think of your challenges and get energized. You are excited to try new solutions. You have fun. You are alive! How Japanese Fish Stay Fresh To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenged. Recommendations

Instead of avoiding challenges, jump into them. Beat the heck out of them. Enjoy the game.
If your challenges are too large or too numerous, do not give up. Failing makes you tired. Instead, reorganize.
Find more determination, more knowledge, more help.
If you have met your goals, set some bigger goals. Once you meet your personal or family needs, move onto goals for your group, the society, even mankind.
Don't create success and lie in it. You have resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.

Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!

Relinquishing Control

2005-07-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

Just one day after Google opened its maps service to outside developers, Yahoo has followed suit with a maps API of its own. But unlike Google's approach, which relies on JavaScript to embed maps into third party pages, Yahoo has built its offering using XML and requires developers to link to its Web site. Specifically, Yahoo! Maps API employs geoRSS, which is an RSS 2.0 extension that adds support for location information. Yahoo has also stripped out the need for latitude and longitude coordinates to make implementation easier for developers by simply using an address. Homing in on your desktop, Microsoft has also released an API for their recently launched MSN desktop search. Along with the Windows Desktop Search SDK also comes a command-line interface so that you can also search for things faster from within cmd. Why API? Relinquishing control appears to be the secret behind the success of a lot of internet businesses. This includes Google, Amazon, eBay and Flickr, all of whom have done quite well by giving more choices to the user. To quote from an excellent essay by Peter Merholz,

Many designers find it remarkably difficult to relinquish control. Designers will go to great lengths to control the user’s experience — popping up windows or resizing them, placing everything within Flash, cueing music. They get so caught up in controlling the superficial form of the product that they neglect to appreciate the context of the experience. Relinquishing control is becoming a requirement in all aspects of Internet businesses. Customers demand RSS feeds so that they can have information brought to them, on their time, and in their tool of choice. Tags and folksonomies shift organizational control to users. Customers are generating content on message boards and blogs. Craig Newmark of the shockingly popular Craigslist regularly polls his membership on core issues of his business. Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways.

Links How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control

The Ultimate Firefox Tweak Guide

2005-07-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

If you're a Firefox user and want to get more mileage out of your everyday browsing, well this is the guide you've been waiting for. The guide should also satisfy all those people who're wondering, "What's the big halla about this Firefox thing anyway?" (excuse my hinglish). It is by all means a comprehensive 11 page guide covering every functionality aspect found in Firefox, from the very basic appearance and menu options, to advanced customizations in Firefox’s behaviour such as caching, net connection handling, plug-ins and web page rendering. It also has a top 10 extensions (or plug-ins) list which is definitely worth checking out. A must read for all Firefox users. Techspot's Firefox Tweak Guide

Google Maps goes mobile

2005-07-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Mobile GMaps is a Creative Commons-licensed application that’ll run on your Java J2ME-enabled cellphone (or other mobile device) to display both Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery. Supported Phones

Series 60, 80, 90 Nokia phones (6600, 6260, 6620, 6630, 6670, 6680, 7610, 7710, 9300, 9500)
MIDP 2.0 Nokia Series 40 phones (6230/6230i)
MIDP 1.0 Nokia Series 40 phones (3300, 5100, 5140 — only map mode due to small memory)
Sony-Ericsson phones with MIDP 2.0 (J300, K300, K500, K600, K700, K750, P900, P910, S700, V800, Z500, Z800, Z1010)

With the recent API release frenzy, we can only expect more and more such applications on mobile devices with access to the internet. Links Mobile GMaps Download Page Mobile GMaps WAP Page (for mobile access) Mobile GMaps FAQ Mobile GMaps Documentation

YubNub: a (social) command line for the web

2005-07-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

YubNub essentially consolidates searching for information on the web in one growing command line style web application. It was created by Jon Aquino in a singe-day hackathon using Ruby on Rails. YubNub allows keyword based searches or access to information similar to what is available in the address bars of browsers like Firefox, Opera and Maxthon. In fact that's the reason YubNub came into existence! As Jon says in his blog,

I was tired of setting up the same Firefox keywords on each of the 5 computers that I use. By putting my keywords into YubNub, I can hit "am mark twain" for an Amazon search, or "gmap vancouver" for a Google Maps search, no matter which computer I'm on.

The beauty of YubNub is that anyone can help to extend it. If there is an existing web service with a submit form, they can add it pretty easily. But even more interesting is the adding of complex data-processing services (like validating an RSS feed, or converting webpages to audio using text-to-speech). There are already around 6000 commands available! To check out the list of commands, go to YubNub and type the command "ls" (what else!). You may also type "ls <search text>" to search for a particular command. For example the command "xe -amount 100 -from USD -to INR" shows a page which converts $100 to Indian Rupees at the most current exchange rates. YubNub can be accessed in many ways other than the web interface. These include a Firefox, Safari and IE integration, QuickSilver, a BASH script, a Windows command line application, a Dashboard Widget and even Emacs intergration! Trivia: YubNub means 'Hooray' in the Ewok language. (Ewoks are a fictional race in the Star Wars movies) Links YubNub.org - a (social) command line for the web YubNub applications 50 most used YubNub commands Jon Aquino's Blog Entry for YubNub

Power archiving with 7-Zip

2005-06-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

7-Zip is a free file archiver with high compression ratio distributed under the GNU LGPL license. It's native format is the new 7z format based on the LZMA compression algorithm. Some of it's important features are listed below:

Supported formats: 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB
For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
Self-extracting capability for 7z format
Integration with Windows Shell
Powerful command-line version
Options to perform incremental archive updates

7-Zip's high compression ratio make it ideal for backing up things on your disk. With the incremental archive feature, you can update only the changed files in the archive providing a quick way to perform frequent backups. You can get more information here, along with the downloads. There is also a Unix port (which works under Mac OS X and Linux) called p7zip. However this is only a command-line version. You may run the full 7-Zip GUI under Linux using Wine.

Email notification at it's best - POP Peeper

2005-06-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

For any person maintaining more than a couple of email accounts, this is an indispensible tool. It’s a notifier that sits in your Windows task bar and alerts you when you have new email. It works with POP3 accounts (including GMail) as well as web mail account like Hotmail, Yahoo, Rediffmail etc.

You can read mails (along with the attachments) and delete them from within the interface without having to open the browser or your mail client. It can even send email and it quite handy for sending quick replies.

It has a bunch of plugins, all of which are useful. The FAQ provides important information about setting up some of the accounts (especially GMail since it requires the SSL plugin). The developer is currently working on Bayesian spam filters for the mailboxes as well.

All this completely free of cost, so grab it!