Jumbled Thoughts
Kannan's personal space (a.k.a. Views of a Patzer!)
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.
Top Ten George W. Bush moments
Apr 24th
Even after seeing this video for the 10th time, I tell you, I cannot stop LMAO. This video captures the top 10 goofy moments of George Bush. Really funny!
Xbox 360 damages discs – Be very careful!
Apr 17th
If you own a Xbox 360 you surely would have come across the famous “Disc not readable” problem. Whenever it happens, you are forced to take out the disc, clean it, sometimes reboot Xbox 360 to get the disc to play again. I was so scared the first time my Gears of War refused to play, even after repeated cleaning/trying…cleaning/trying ritual. I thought I had lost my Rs.2500 spent on that game. Fortunately, a quick Google search assured me I was not alone and it was not a major problem. But, I stumbled upon another serious problem that can happen if you are not careful – Xbox 360 can damage your discs permanently. This was scary! There are some sound advice on what to do and what not to do with a disc inside Xbox360. Though the problem has been root caused, people are still seeing random scratches. I can only attribute this to Xbox360 loving your discs so much it can’t stop itself from caressing them a bit too harsh 
Finally Microsoft has owned up to this and has rolled out a replacement program (Note that MS has its own list of Terms and Conditions). Luckily GoW is covered there 
Check out this video that shows Xbox360 scratching a disc.
Amazing human talents!
Apr 12th
It is a well known fact that the humans don’t make use of their brains’Â full cognitive abilities. The geniuses are set apart just by the extra neural circuits they have, I guess. Still, when you come across somebody who exhibits an extraordinary talent for something, say, maths or GK, your jaw hits the ground, right? Watch these videos. These show some of the amazing things out there in the world!
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The boy with the incredible brain
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This is the story of Daniel Tammet, a person of extraordinary mental abilities. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This part of the documentary is pretty amazing, especially, as the language he learnt in a week, Icelandic, is supposed to be pretty tough to master. On the way, the documentary captures him meeting other brilliant minds, like Kim Peek.
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Stephen Wiltshire: The Human Camera
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Stephen has the ability to draw complex things like a city layout, as seen from the helicopter, just after seeing them once. Mind you, this is not just a block diagram we are talking about, Stephen has the ability to draw everything….I mean, *everything* down to the number of windows in each building!
One common thing among these persons is all of them have Savant Syndrome. They have extraordinary mental abilites, but undeveloped social skills. They not necessarily show a high IQ quotient (like in Kim’s case), but have abilities that normal humans cannot even dream of! The video below shows the story of real Rainman, Kim Peek:
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Kim Peek – The Real Rainman
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Xbox 360 to support Windows Live Messenger
Apr 9th
Spring update to Xbox 360 is going to be rolled out starting May 7th. Some notable features are:
- H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
- Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
- Show folder hierarchy for video and other content played from all devices.
- The screensaver is disabled when playing photos from any source
I am happy they chose to include the folder hierarchy display and disabling screensaver. Those I am sure people would agree, were sorely missed. Now, I can easily play a movie from my movie collection (named xyz part1.avi, xyz part2.avi…) with out searching for individual files. A single “Play” click on the folder containing all these individual files should do the trick!
Another interesting feature (and the topic of this post) is the “Chat with MSN contacts”. Wow! Now, I can chat with my relatives, who don’t own a Xbox, sitting in the living room, with my parents besides me! This is a killer feature, I’d say. I am not sure if this Xbox update supports video chatting with MSN, but if only they do, man…nothing like it! The above picture is the new accessory Microsoft is planning to release this summer. Kinda bulky looking for a controller, but would make chatting painless. We should be able to use the normal USB keyboard too.
I can now finally leave my wife chatting with my in-laws, to go work on that Wordpress Chess plugin with out any disturbance
Myheritage.com: Find your celeb look alike!
Apr 6th
Myheritage.com provides an interesting feature, you give it your photo, it will tell you which celebs look like you. Interesting. Above are the people it told me I look like. Do I? Anyway, since I have Steve Jobs there, I’d say, Myheritage.com is doing hell of a job 
BTW, who is that Chang lady and Butler? I probably have to look up them in Google first.
Just for fun, I gave it a Dilbert photo. It couldn’t identify the face first, with little prodding it said “No matches found!”. Clever! Then, I decided to check that with some actual celebrities. See what I got.
Americans are stupid – Funny video
Apr 4th
Really funny video. Made me LMAO after a long time. I am sure if we do this exercise in other countries, we’d find similar, if not not worse, answers.
Cleaning up your Hard disk
Apr 3rd
Yesterday I took some time off to clean my office systems – a Dual Xeon desktop and a T41p laptop. The effort would have cost me at least 2 days, if not for the following tools!
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CCleaner – The best utility for cleaning up the temporary files, IE/Mozilla/Opera cache and lots of other junk. This used to be called Crap Cleaner, If I remember right |
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WindirStat – This tool allows you to visualize the file groups in your disk. There are umpteen number of tools out there that can do this, but I like the simplicity and effectiveness of this. Also, it runs off the shelf (no installation, I love it). Another thing I love about this small utility is its progress bars, it shows a pacman like character going from one end to the other, which is kinda cute! Check the images, click to enlarge. |
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Duplicate File Finder – However organized you may be, you will be amazed to see what this tool digs out. It can apply CRC32 or MD5 on the files in your hard disk to find out the same content in multiple files. It takes its own sweet time to run, but very effective and highly recommended. An analysis on C:\ (120GB) is still running, almost 45mins now. |
Let me know if you use some other tool not listed here.
Management Gibberish
Mar 30th
An effective way to stop managers talking!
If you don’t see the image above, click here. Some more of my images are availale here.
My first cartoon – Performance appraisal
Mar 29th
I stumbled upon this interesting site today. It allows you to unleash (?!) your creativity by creating simple drag/drop operations. Above is my first cartoon, which is inspired by the happenings in my company Do let me know what you think!
