Just got back from a great weekend ride with Gaurav, Milind and Nikhil to Mahim beach near Kelve. Had great fun riding on the beach in pitch darkness then trying to find our camping spot again. Bad idea taking a bedsheet instead of a sleeping bag - couldn?t sleep because the bedsheet got wet because of dew.
Thanks to Nikhil, the best part was the off-road excursion off the Vajreshwari route. Some 2 kms into the road, there is a right turn towards the Balyogi ashram that?s all dirt track. The climb was mildly challenging, nothing like Arunachal, but dirttracking is what we really love anytime.
The best part by far was one of the most amazing views I?ve ever seen, right from the summit of the mountain we rode up. The panorama was mind-blowing, covering almost 180 degrees of my view. I could see hills down below which had seemed really high from the highway. From up there, I could even see the other side of those hills. It was easily over 2000 feet high. We could see the layer of smog over the whole region. On a clear day, the view would have been even better. Great place to build a house. The ashram people were laying down a new surface over the dirt track. Maybe they were planning to tar it as well. Such dirttracks don?t last forever.
We met another couple of bikers on the way up from the other side - one of them was an uncle riding a Bullet. He was totally frustrated with the track - but his face dropped further when I told him that the other side of the track is much worse. The other guy was panting as he was pushing his Avenger over the bad road.
Contrast to these dirt tracks, highways are so boring and monotonous. City car drivers drive on the highway exactly like they do in the city, cutting off people. switching lanes fast and what not. They are easily the worst on the highway because they?ve not been on highways long enough to absorb the unwritten code.
Rarely does something frustrate me so much that I want to smash it to pieces. Right now something did, and since it was not mine all I could do is hurl it on my son’s teddy bear.
But along with this frustration came a revelation. I just discovered the missing link in Darwin’s evolutionary chain. And they are alive today (unless they have committed suicide in shame) and are located somewhere in Redmond. These are the people that designed the Windows Mobile OS.
I have never seen such monumental stupidity in any software ever. Pathetic. I wish I could take a hammer to the HTC Touch I’m trying to configure unsuccessfully to connect to my home WiFi network. If it was mine, I would have first taken a hammer to my head for buying such a thing.
I finally decided to take the plunge yesterday and upgraded my first gen 8 GB iPhone to the 2.0.2 firmware. I used the excellent Pwnage Tool and everything went very smoothly. An issue with Mail not working was fixed using the BossPrefs app’s permissions fixing utility. All my worries of not having all my old apps were unfounded. In fact, between the App Store and Cydia, bar one of my old apps, everything else is covered.
What do I like? The best part by far is the App Store. Since my iPhone doesn’t support GPS, the location features don’t work, but that’s ok. There are some great free apps in the App Store and lots more are expected. In fact, I wrote the last blog post from the Wordpress app on the phone.
The iPhone is most definitely my best gadget ever.
So the prediction turned out to be true after all. But it appears that there was earlier news of it which was more or less a sure shot indication of what was to come.
What am I talking about? What the whole interweb is abuzz about, of course. Google’s shiny new browser named Chrome.
The comic book is sheer genius, and it makes a fine attempt at reaching out to the non-geeks. How much it succeeds, I don’t know.
But for me, Chrome totally rocks. It might even pull me away from my current browser of choice, Safari. The user interface is very well thought of and it really shines at getting “out of the way” and of course, raw speed.
As with Firefox, it’s the plugins that will determine the popularity of Chrome. Let’s see where things go with that. But what is clear is that this is a polished product that has been sweetly developed. And what I’m most excited about is how this is going to be the platform on which the interweb of tomorrow is going to run.
Even before Nazi-gate happened, I had given up on Indian newspapers. The usual male morning ritual of taking the newspaper to the loo was replaced with my iPhone. Google had a great version of their RSS news Reader for the iPhone and I used to catch up on news using that. Notice that I said had.
The new version is all AJAX’y and stuff, with spinning status indicators and in-line reading without page reloads. But is it better than the original HTML static interface? Alotofusersincludingmyselfseemtothink NOT.
The older interface had blazing load times, with the pages showing a snippet of the news which the user could click to read the entire article. The new one actually loads the entire post content in the background so it can snappily display the entire article when the user clicks on it. The older interface allowed quick navigation using relevant links and support for the browsers back button. The new interface greets you with a spinning wheel all the time. To top it all, the new interface defaults to showing the “All Items” view, which obviously means that load times are always high.
The users are clamoring for the old interface. Let’s see if the Reader team gives them what they want. Interestingly, this must be a deja-vu for them since a similar thing happened when they switched from the original scrolling Reader interface to the present one.
It is well known that the openness of the web has fostered many applications that have become indispensable to users. Indeed, most of my every day applications live in the internet cloud, so I can switch machines and operating systems painlessly. AJAX and RIA’s have managed to deliver a great user experience for applications of ever increasing complexity, but there are specialized apps that are tied to specific operating systems.
It’s a tough job for internet application developers, what with the myriad web browsers that have sometimes unique interpretations of published web standards. They have to carefullytweak their websites for each browser so they can keep their vast user base happy. This issue is fast becoming a major pain point for a lot of software developers, who have to waste time on getting their applications to work on various browsers. So what’s the solution?
Flash holds great promise, and Adobe’sdonation of the ActionScript runtime to the Mozilla foundation has very exciting ramifications, one of which might be the ability to run C and Python code in the browser. But Flash is not an open platform - developers have to wait till Adobe can fix bugs and implement new features. Google tried their hand with GWT, that promised to take away the issues related to cross-browser compatibility, but in reality that too doesn’t hold up every time.
So, do we need an open runtime environment supporting a rich API that will work on all platforms and browsers and will be available in various form factors? I think yes. Adobe’s already got the Open Screen Project running, which has the mission of “enabling a consistent runtime environment across desktops and devices”. But given its slowness in opening up the Flash platform (which forms part of future milestones) and the difficulties regarding search indexing, usability etc., it may make sense to have a competing platform from a heavyweight like Google that provides a consistent, high-performance runtime environment and is community developed.
I think they might just be doing an Android for the web.
Listening to Eddie Vedder singing the OST for Into The Wild as I drove to the office today, I started reminiscing about how much the movie had moved me. It’s an extremely unpretentious, no-frills, simple movie, reinforced by the one-band soundtrack, with Eddie Vedder providing all of the music.
There’s a wonderful relationship between the music and the visuals - both of them merge effortlessly together. The voice of Eddie Vedder is like a beacon in the ocean, something that allows the viewer to anchor on as the film progresses.
Sean Penn shows that he’s more than capable as a director, sticking to the theme of the film all throughout. He did have great material to work with, actually. The story of Christopher McCandless is very moving. As a fellow traveller, I can relate to the feelings of anxiety and euphoria that Emile Hirsch displays beautifully in the film. As a story, there’s something so real about it that it manages to affect the viewer without being over-the-top. I won’t sacrifice the plot here, better watch it and hear it yourself. I highly recommend both the soundtrack and the movie. Eddie Vedder’s comments on the soundtrack are also a very interesting read.
Just got back from a great weekend ride with Gaurav, Milind and Nikhil to Mahim beach near Kelve. Had great fun riding on the beach in pitch darkness then trying to find our camping spot again. Bad idea taking a bedsheet instead of a sleeping bag - couldn?t sleep because the bedsheet got wet because of dew.
Listening to 