Reviews
Who is the real worker & some personal tales!
May 28th
Its been a while since I posted. What have I been doing? Apart from the occasional tennis sessions in Wii, I am kinda stuck in the work (if you thought it sounded like "stuck in the rut", you have a warped mind! 
). Its already 12 in the night here, me feeling very sleepy. But wanted to finish up this toon below. I guess it is a reflection of my current mind state.
I read Matthew Reilly’s "Seven Ancient Wonders" last weekend. Book is on my favorite topic – Egypt!! Unfortunately this one reads like a kid’s book. The ease with which the main character of the book solves/crosses all those complex pyramidal snares/traps is ridiculous, to say the least. Anyway, I learnt something about the early water traps and Reilly’s description of Hanging gardens of Babylon was highly imaginative; I’d rate this book 2/5 – you can read it probably once, over flight or when waiting for your wife to finish her shopping 
I have started on his "Ice Station" next, lets see how it reads.
Last weekend, I also spent lots of time watching the entire 16 season of Survivors : Fans vs Favorites. I have never seen Survivors before, though I knew what the concept was. But, at no point of time I expected it to be so well made and so captivating! I thoroughly enjoyed the isolated environment, the idea of tribes/tribal council and the human dynamics that played out for survival. Wow…an amazing reality show. I personally liked Ozzie a lot in the show, very unfortunate Parvati fooled him in to quitting. I cannot wait for the next season to start!!
In the Wii front, today I got my Carnival games collection. My first impression: I don’t like many of the games included, hopefully multi-player will prove otherwise. Enough of my whining now…time for bed!
[Movie] Untraceable
May 16th
I have been watching way too many movies past 2 weeks, cannot even remember many of their names now. Last weekend I planned to go to Salem, but ended up in Fry’s (Wilsonville). I bought a Wii there and am thoroughly enjoying the games in it, but more about that in a different post. Amidst all these I am trying to finish up my office work too. See how hard working, I am? 
.
In this post, I want to talk about the movie Untraceable. I just finished watching it. My initial impression – "Great, that was interesting!". But now, after some 10 minutes, I realize all the holes and stupidity in that movie. But before I get to that, let me tell you what this movie is about.
![[Movie] Untraceable](http://kannan.jumbledthoughts.com/wp-content/upload/2008/05/untraceable.jpg)
******** Warning: Spoilers ahead ***********
Testing Windows Live Writer 2008
Mar 4th
Just now installed Windows Live Writer 2008 (Final); The installer they have there is just around 2.3MB, but it downloads the actual Live Writer binaries later. When you execute this "small" file, it scans through your computer for other Live programs (WHY??!!) and offers you a screen full of other Live programs that you *should* try…WTH??
Why is this installer trying to be smart? If I need other Live products, I will download them, just like how I downloaded this. Why MS should push down my throat all their other products?? Irritating!
Also, during the "Detecting other Live programs" phase, I was staring at the progress bar, for a solid 15mins??? Man…what the hell was the program doing at that time?? I should probably setup a VMWare machine and try installing this with Process Explorer/FileMon/RegMon/PortMon running in the background. Oh..btw, before someone starts pointing out that it could be because of my machine, wait…mine is a Core 2 duo + 965GF + 2GB RAM + 1TB RAID0. It is fast enough. Adobe Photoshop CS3 tryout starts in 3 seconds flat!
Anyway, now that Live Writer is finally installed and running (I am typing there, right? ), I want to try out the image scaling/uploading features:
I have setup Live Writer to upload my pictures to my FTP. If this works fine, I guess, one of my major reqs is met.
One cool thing about the way Live Writer handles pictures is, the ease with which you can create a thumbnail and all the possible effects (drop shadow / photo border/…) you can add to the images…Beats Wordpress’s post editor anytime!
Looks like things work as expected…Kudos to the WLW team for a decent product. If only their packaging / installer team could do something about the Live Installer, I guess WLW will make a pretty neat tool.
Oh..btw, did I tell you WLW supports Wordpress 2.3 seamlessly??! ok..not so seamlessly; Support for the new Wordpress tags feature is missing out of the box, but you can easily add it as explained here.
[Update: 2037 IST]
One nice to have feature: When you post something using WLW, it shows the following progress window:
Looks nice, but not informative. If it shows the current action being performed (like, "Uploading the image to ftp:/…." or "Authentication done. Posting now…"), it will be helpful for debugging (if a problem arises). These details can be hidden from the normal user with a collapsed expandable-section in the progress window.
Another MP3 search engine – Tagoo!
Feb 18th
On the wake of Demonoid’s demise (!?), the world is seeing many other p2p / file sharing sites being tormented by the likes of MPA, RIAA and all kinda of other alphabet soup organizations.
The recent addition is Tagoo, a new Mp3 search engine, with a RU domain. Since, another Russian site AllOfMp3.com just got virtually nuked by the Russian govt recently, I am not sure how long Tagoo will survive. But, who cares, eh?! If not Tagoo, something else is bound to come up.
I decided to try out Tagoo for some Indian (as in “Country next to China” & not “Native American”) music. Did a search for “India” & got all India.Arie mp3s…hmmm, fair enough. Its my mistake I gave such a vague term. Next I tried “Tamil” (yey!!) & got 4 results!! Hmm…I sure do lack basic searching skills 
[Spoiler] Harry potter and the deathly hallows
Jul 19th
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I am a big fan of Harry potter (HP)! I got hooked in to pottermania around 2001, since then I have collected all original HP books (all thoroughly earmarked) + audio books (US Version – Jim Dale) + first 4 HP movie DVDs. Like every other HP fan, I went ahead and booked the final installment – Harry potter and the deathly hallows – around June beginning. Indiaplaza provided an excellent offer, which I haven’t seen beaten by any of the other Indian stores yet.  My wife was like – “eh!? why did you spend Rs650 on a kids book?!”, what could I tell her? Certain things are better left unanswered, right?!
As all muggles know, the book is going to come out this Saturday 12.01am. Only two more days to go, yayyy!! This time around, the publishers have really beefed up the security, but still some goof ups did happen and couple of copies leaked out (Check out these torrents:  Complete text of the book, all pages (photographed) )
BTW, I noticed yesterday that the HP5 (Order of phoenix) movie was uploaded in Google Videos, couldn’t find it today though! Should be in Veoh or Youtube…check it out and let me know if you find a valid link
Though I was determined not to read any of the spoilers this time, today morning I gave in to the temptation and read the initial reviews of the final book here and here. Not much leaked there, compared to the more interesting spoilers in this page, telling us who dies when and other things!
I checked my order status in Indiaplaza and was pleasantly surprised to see the status as “ReadyToShip“. C’mon guys, what are you waiting for? Why not do a DeepDiscount and send me the copy today itself?!
Chaos!
May 25th
Lot of things happening right now in my life; Am stuck in the middle of a group transition, with the additional responsibility of arranging a function in my house (Ahhh!) + my pet projects demanding more and more time….Whew, I wonder how the company senior VPs and GMs manage to squeeze in some time for their family amidst their busy schedule!!
I managed to setup a full fledged media center last week, at last! I moved over from TVersity to Vista Media center, using my Xbox360 as the extender. Setting up transcode360 was pretty challenging though…I will post regarding this later. Also, fixed my old computer (a P4), so now I can use this as the download-station (?!) and leave my C2Duo for other important things (hmm…like, movie watching, browsing… )
Amidst all this chaos, over the past 3 weeks I managed to watch around 10 East-Asian films too, don’t ask me how!
- JennyJuno (Japanese)
- RPoint (Korean)
- The legend of the seven cutter (Kariseuma talchulgi) (Korean)
- Infernal affairs (Korean)
- Dog bite dog (Gau ngao gau) – Vietnamese/Cantonese/Thai
- Suicide club (Japanese)
- Death note 1 & 2 (Japanese)
- Shaolin soccer (Chinese)
I have the Infernal affairs (2 & 3) and Romantic Warriors DVDs, don’t know when I will watch them.
Finally caught up with the reports of Mtel masters 2007 by updating my Chess blog, today. Starting this Sunday, World Chess Candidates matches are also starting, I hope I get enough time to watch them live (I know, I know, it is too much to ask for!). One thing I haven’t been able to concentrate is my Chessvideos blog, will appreciate if someone can help me out there.
Chessbase Light 2007 Activation – eh?!
May 11th
I love the work being done by the good folks in Chessbase; IMO they have the coolest jobs, they get payed to develop software for CHESS Ohhhh, I wish I had some kinda day job like that! I know video game development is as interesting, but anyway gaming has never been one of my serious interests. Anyway, coming back to CB…I check the Chessbase site more than my Gmail, sometimes, which reminds me of the lack of RSS in their site…but I am not going to complain about that ever, as I feel it is worth visiting their site for the excellent articles they post. I am not sure if Fredrick Friedel ever thought of creating a business model out of the Chess news network they can easily build. Ok, again I am digressing…
I read with interest the article on their Chessbase Light 2007 software. It provides nearly all the functionalities of the full-fledged Chessbase DB software, one of their flagship products, for FREE. Of course, the catch word in the above sentence is “nearly all“. BW, CB Light allows only viewing, you cannot create databases or save games using that. For that you need to upgrade to CB Light Premium, which I guess is the same as Chessbase starter pack minus Bigdatabase 2007/Player encyclopedia/CB Magz.
The activation screen looks like the above screenshot (NOTE: I am using the screenshot provided by CB). When I saw this I was like ‘Eh?? What stupidity!!”…Do you see the captcha field in that window? Captcha are used for preventing the bots doing automatic signups, spams et al. Is there any sane reason why the user has to type the code shown in the image????
“Oh, ok…may be this code is part of the activation process”, I thought.
When I went to the site meant for generating Activation key, I didn’t find a field for entering the abovementioned captcha code. Then why the heck the CB Light programmers decided to show the captcha code in CB Light? Beats me!
Note that I may be totally missing a valid reason behind having that captcha in a desktop program, if so I’d appreciate if you’d enlighten me!
Bang-kwa-hoo Ok-sang (See you after school) – Interesting film!
May 3rd
I love East Asian movies, especially Korean & Japanese. Yesterday I got a chance to watch Bang-kwa-hoo ok-sang (International title is See you after school). The movie plot is simple: Namkoong Dahl is a serial loser, in and out of the school. He even tries therapy, which is again a total disaster. Transferring for the umpteenth time to a new school, he bumps in to none other than the school bully during his first day there. Namkoong Dahl gets challenged for a fight in the roof-top after the school. Rest of the movie tell us the ensuing events of that day.
The movie is funny in its own way. If you have been ever left wondering, while watching a film, what the hell is happening, then I am sure you will love this film No complex plots, no need to exercise the grey cells, just plain pure fun. The events in this film unfold fast enough for you not to get bored. No fancy fight scenes, no gory octopus eating scenes, but still See you after school is extremely watchable, because of the way it has captured one full day of Dahl’s life.
Indian shopping sites – Need to improve a lot!
Apr 25th
I wanted to buy this shaver, but Amazon said it wouldnt be possible to ship this to India, due to some export regulation blah blah blah. So, I decided to check the local online malls. I am not new to online shopping in India, but It has been a long time since I visited them, especially Fabmall (now renamed to indiaplaza.in).
The site took sometime to load, but the thing that got my attention was - The interface hasn’t changed at all.  I guess the store name is the only thing that has changed (kinda like selling the same shampoo in a new bottle with the tag “New formula”). The site looked neat, though I personally hate fixed-width layouts. Why can’t they make use of all of my 19″ monitor space? A simple fluid layout would have been nice.
“Cut the crap, do what you came here for”, I thought. Since I couldn’t find something like “Personal care” or “Beauty products” (?!) in the available products section, I decided to do a shop-wide search. The real irritation started!
[Click the image to open it in a new window, enlarged. For convenience sake, I have put a dim filter on the image, except for the areas of interest.]
As you can see from the image, the top bar lists out more product categories than the items in the search drop box. WTH? Doesn’t Indiaplaza know how to search in the other categories? Or probably it wants us to manually go through all the product listing pages to find ours. This made me very curious, I decided to check out the other famous (or atleast, whatever shopping stores I know!) online shopping sites.
Wilbur Smith – Monsoon and other great books
Mar 28th
I just finished reading Wilbur Smith’s Monsoon, for the third time. Everytime I read one of his books, I literally experience a time warp, either watching one of the Courtneys shouting down “Belay the end, lad!” at his deck or looking up at Taita, the greatest of the Warlords, with awe! Having just finished the book, the images of Dorian Courtney dropping his Scimitar against Tom’s majestic Blue sword or Aboli watching Zama/Tulu are still dancing before my eyes. What can I say? Wilbur Smith’s characters always leave such a lasting impression! Unlike any of the lifeless characters you might have come across, Wilbur Smith has a way of making his characters extremely colorful and likeable. I agree he always depicts his heroes as macho men – battling with slavers and pirates & capturing the enormous treasure from them, killing mammoth elephants for the ivory, fighting successfully the perils of sea, adept at sword fighting and languages, seducing damsels…but I like them this way
“Monsoon” picks up from where “Birds of prey” left (you don’t have to read them in order for the story to make sense). It tells the story of Courtney brothers Tom/Dorian/Guy and their adventures, especially Tom & Dorian. Hal Courtney, son of Sir Francis Courtney and father of the Courtney brothers I mentioned, is assigned the task of capturing, either alive or dead, Jahangir a.k.a Al-auf, the bad one, who is terrorizing the East India company’s trading ships. Hal sets sail with Tom,Guy and Dorian along with his faithful mates, Aboli/Ned Tyler and Big Daniel. They find al-auf, but during the fight, Dorian gets taken by Arabs. In an effort to save him, Hal Courtney loses his legs. Tom gets Hal back to England, where he succumbs to his injuries. Tom has a fight with William (his step-brother) and kills him accidentaly. If you are still with me, you should go and buy the book. I am not going to let this post being a big spoiler. Mind you, this book is a big one, may take couple of days to finish, but I assure you, it will make a great read. Personally I felt, near the end, the book is kinda rushed – probably Wilbur Smith had to cut down some chapters because of publishing constraints, but an entertaining book throughout.
My favorites in Wilbur Smith’s books are his Egyptian novels – River God, Seventh Scroll & Warlock. The ways of ancient Egypt, their customs & beliefs, the way their lives are entangled with the Great Nile, the treasures they accumulate for the tomb, the wars they wage – Simply amazing! Makes you wish you were born at that time. Who knows? may be, I was Taita in my previous Janma
WS has released a new book – The Quest. This got released just 2 weeks back (Mar 14th/2007), in South Africa. I am not sure when it is going to hit the stands here in India, but one thing I know is I am going to pre-order it today in Amazon
