New Orkut

Like a child that gets attracted to colorful new things, my mouse pointer often moves to my Firefox tab where my Orkut is logged in. Yes days back in the old UI, there was a faded out image saying New Beta UI. Now its in action. Haven't tried it out yet, play around soon. After carefully playing around with it here is my review.



Things I liked:

• The Layout - Its really a cool one. Highlights would include rounded corners, clear separation of various panes with enough space between each.
• Trusty, Cool, Sexy are neat. In the OLD UI they extend based on number of friends they mark it. Now its simple 3 level for each.
• Horizontal alignment of birthdays is good.
• Under 'Manage Friends' we can clearly find open invites.
  

Things I would like to change:

• When we accept a friends request, the separation of haven't met, acquaintance, friend, etc are good. But they have an old look of multi colored rectangles. They can be given rounded corners and clear separation.
• My communities pane is not getting refreshed with the latest updated community. If not frequently they could be done at intervals of 30 min or so.
• In case of landscape photos for profiles are aligned to the top, which doesn't look good because there is space between photo and name. The old way of alignment to bottom near name was good.
• Frequently updated users & communities like it happens in Youtube! Videos that are currently being watched.
  

Comment on what you think about the new Orkut UI?

Yuva

For a Cause!

Yes I think its a nice time to write about it. Lately, one of the Yuva co-coordinators were contacting me for fund raising. So I decided to write up in this space.

Here is an extract from their mission, We aim at universalizing the unprivileged access to, retention in and completion of quality education. We aim at :

• Building equal opportunities for education for all
• To progress the ideal of equality of educational opportunity
• Achieving the right to basic education for all is thus one of the biggest moral challenges of our times and we are committed to it.

What is all that we are supposed to do?
Enjoy a musical Saturday evening. Listen to sitar of Dr. Chandrakant Sardeshmukh. He is one of the very few practitioners of traditional Music Therapy using the 'Healing Music' of his sitar. Get a ticket, help a child's education. Extend your hand.

You can reach me at kvijesh[at]gmail.[com] or +91 9900185925

BCB4 Podcast

Well, I decided to move the podcast from the widget window to posts. Here are some of podcast made using a small transcend music player in Barcamp Bangalore 4. The audio recorded was bit low and lots of noise over lapped. But then with my best efforts I made some post processing using Audacity. Audacity is an open source music editing software. For basic users like us it helps a lot, unlike the proprietary Audio editors in demo version. Ok, now the audio is ready, initially I thought of using the space available in Google pages to upload the audio, But the tiny 100mb was insufficient. Then tried odeo. But for some unknown reason I was not able to save a audio in it. The script hangs or I din do them in right way. Then imeem came to the rescue. I upload was swift and playlist widget was cool. So here is the audio to listen.

Techbits Podcast: To my knowledge a podcast is streaming of audio in the web. It is a derivation of a webcast where only audio is shared. The popular podcast format is mp3. There are numerous site that supports podcast say odeo, imeem, last.fm etc. They also provide handy javascript players that help to embedded audio in blog, webpages.

Nokia BL-5C

Recently SMS are flooding with this text. "BL-5C" - It has been reported by Nokia that certain set of batteries manufactured by Matsushita Battery Industrial Co. Ltd. of Japan between December 2005 and November 2006, dislodge on some short circuit scenario. Relax, first lets confirm if its not a hoax! This official report from Nokia confirms that its not a hoax! Wait, now don rush to the nearest Nokia showroom for an battery exchange, your request might be declined. In Nokia's official announcement, he has given a simple way to check if your batteries belongs to a replaceable category. You can send Nokia your battery identification number and verify it. You can do that the end of this page. Fortunately mine, dad, mom mobiles are not inc in the replaceable list.

Mobiles have become part of everyones life. They always stay close to us than any other electronic gadget. When you talk of mobiles, here are few things to remember. Not just Nokia, anything.

• Never use Mobile in Driving (THUMB rule)
• Never use them in Gas stations.
  
• Never use them in when they are in Charging. Contradiction (When your loved ones are at the other end, you don wanna to disconnect the call by putting it in charge and cont speaking)
  
• Use branded chargers to charge them. (We have the habit of saving money by buying a duplicate, which ultimately can cost your mobile life)
• Replace damaged parts with genuine parts.
  
• Do not keep them in pant pockets (I don have a reliable source to support this)
• Do not keep loud weird ring tones and annoy others. (courtesy: Srihari)
  

You want to voice on any more things to remember, write a comment to get added in the list.

English Premiership

I second Srihari and write this post.

Disclaimer: You don't have interest in Football & sports, better skip this post. (Esp girls)

Yes, now I have found a useful way to spend my boring Bangalore weekends excitingly. If F1 was exciting, EPL is nerve racking. I love these lines from Sri's blog "Ohh ahhh , Wat a goal , hits the Cross bar , watta save from the goalkeeper". This is how this season is plotted for me. I'm behind the "Red Devils" - Manchester United. Cheering for them as never before. Still the 116th min goal in the last FA Cup final that took the cup away from us is still in my eyes. The Blues will pay for it. Clubs God Father Sir Alex Ferguson is leading the club for the record 21 seasons. The players are in good form. We got Ronney & Saha upfront, best midfield of the league with Scholes, Giggs, Ronaldo, hargreaves and solid defense of vidic, ferdi & O' shea. If you penetrate the ball those all there legs. You got one more big hurdle to cross Edwin Van der Sar.

The lows of this season would be missing the magic of Hendry who was transfered to Barca. The season kicks off today (fixtures) So far its been a wonderful season of sports, wishing to get more treat in the coming days. Wishing Man U retains the Silverware.

FOSS.IN - They Are Back

It was Barcamp last month! Here is one such announcements. FOSS.IN is one of the world's largest and most focussed FOSS events, held annually India. Over the years, it has attracted thousands of participants, and the speaker roster reads like a "Who's Who" of FOSS contributors from across the world. Held at IISc, Bangalore. Here is the official announcement. Subscribe to their feed more updates.

Note: Extracts from http://foss.in/

Inbox Zero

I write, read, label, filter, archive, DELETE my mails. But still I wonder whats happening. Even Google still claims their Gmail slogan.

Lots of space
Over 2885.658874 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.

Ironically we know boundaries will be reached one day.

Google came to my rescue with its techtalk. Thanks to Merlin Mann, author of 43Folders for his talk on Inbox Zero! You can listen to podcast or view this video.