Posts tagged Reviews
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.
[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?! 
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.
Carry on….
Sep 26th
I am a big fan of “Carry on” series of movies, esp I love watching Ken and Sid. I am collecting all the movies in this series. Yesterday, I got “Carry on Emmanuelle“. This is by far the worst film I have seen, in this series. Centered around “affairs”, this film lacks that traditional “Carry on” charm. Keep off this film, if you are new to this series. I suggest you watch “Carry on Up the Jungle” or “Carry on Cowboy” for some real carry-on fun!
Movies I have in this series:
Carry On Sergeant
Carry On Teacher
Carry On Spying
Carry On Cowboy
Carry On Cleo
Carry On Screaming!
Carry On Don’t Lose your Head
Carry On Doctor
Carry On up the Khyber
Carry On Camping
Carry On Again Doctor
Carry On up the Jungle
Carry On Girls
Carry On Dick
Carry On Behind
Carry On Emmannuelle
[Movie] MoviezzzZZ!
Jan 4th
I came back from my movie-less vacation last week only to be greeted by my “movies-to-watch” queue, overflowing with 23 films. What a way to start my work week!! I started off with Ocean’s 12, which was a major disappointment. Ocean’s 11 was so impressive, I was eagerly waiting for the sequel to come out, to see Mr.Ocean pull off one more of that “oh-not-possible-at-all” jobs, but the movie is a huge let down. The plot is so weak. No “wow! cool” ideas this time. No action scenes. Ahhhh!! The only consolation is Brad Pitt. He is his usual charming self. This movie is actually Ocean’s 2 or something like that, certainly not Ocean’s 12!!
When I started watching National Treasure, I expected it to be one of those boring, “shoot-at-everyone” kind of movie. I was happy that I was wrong. Storyline is simple: Treasure hunting. Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) is searching for the treasure-of-treasures hidden by FreeMasons. He follows a trail of clues, ends up stealing the original “Declaration of Independence”, fights goonies & finally, finds the treasure (What else!?)…Cage was good, adding a witty comment here & there, but I liked Justin Bartha (“Riley”) more!! This is a good movie, providing solid entertainment. Do see this (if you like these kinda movies, that is!). More >
[Movie] Memento
Nov 25th
I know this film is quite old now, but still, when I saw this again in DVD, I felt the same awe/confusion I felt when I watched it 2 years back!! This film can easily win a top-10 position in the most complex films ever made.
WARNING: If you haven’t seen the film yet, go see it now and then read this. This post is just a big spoiler.
All the mystery/suspense movies you have seen so far, most probably, had the story unfolding in a linear fashion, right? Like, he found his wife dead, got some clues, solves one clue and finds a fellow/object. From there he goes to the next clue blah blah blah, right? This film shatters that normal (!?) way of story-telling. Actually, this film’s beginning is its end. Confused? Don’t be, because there is still more to come Leonard Shelby is an Insurance agent. One fine day, his wife gets molested & killed by two men. He shoots one of them, a masked one, but the other one hits him with something hard. Leonard (Lenny) looses the ability to persist short-term memories because of this. Cops think that there was only one fellow; their version is something like, Lenny found a masked person molesting his wife and when that fellow hit Lenny on the head, he shot him. They don’t believe Lenny’s version of 2 men. Lenny remembers everything that happened right up to that incident, but nothing persists in his memory bank after that blow to his head. He knows his wife’s molester is still out there somewhere. He wants revenge, he decides to go after some John G, who he believes killed his wife. But how do you find someone, let alone kill him, when you keep forgetting things that happened 10 minutes back?! He comes up with an ingenious solution – keeping notes & taking pictures. He has seen one of his clients, Sammy, suffering from a similar disorder. Lenny believes that by repeating things/facts, he can condition his mind to recognize them. He uses a Polaroid to take pictures of persons/places he wants to remember. He writes notes to himself on back of those photographs. He also keeps a detailed map, putting all these photographs in to a macro perspective, to know where everything fits. However, notes and pictures can be lost! So, he tatoos all important facts about his wife’s killer in his body!! Since there is no memory of what he did 10 minutes back, he is vulnerable to exploitation by people who take advantage of his condition. Can he trust anyone? Can he find the killer on his own? These are the questions you get reading the story of a normal suspense thriller, but not here! This film totally produces a completely different set of questions. More >
Tidbits
Nov 23rd
Here are some things that caught my attention lately. Since I don’t think these things deserve separate posts, here we go.
1) First, this Science-based story by Jeyamohan. I didn’t know Jeyamohan writes these kinda stories too!! The basic story is about how different our Siddha Medicinal system is from Alopathy and how the system that we practise now is not the true Siddha. I got to know (learnt!?) a lot of things. Interesting read. But, after having read the story, I feel as if I went through a dense medical journal (“Siddha for dummies” !?)
2) When I was looking for some interesting blogs to read (as if I didn’t have enuf already!) I stumbled on Sriram Krishnan’s blog, He is a student (Wow!) in Chennai, a nerd & more importantly, has excellent coding skills! Good to see such motivated talents. He is really in to search technologies. Though, directly not related to my current work, I got kinda motivated reading all his articles. No denying that his “How to write a search engine in 16 hours” post brought back sweet memories of how I had only an evening to make our OS, which we did as our final year project, understand Tamil Good old days. I doubt I enjoyed doing anything so strenuous lately. Professional life, for sure, takes out that enthusiasm and, sometimes, that curiosity to learn more, out of you. This is my personal opinion, of course. Let’s hope Sriram doesn’t feel like me after 5 yrs of being in the field. Microsoft/Google, if you are looking for a talent, with enuf enthusiasm/motivation & technical know-how, you’ve got the right candidate here!
PS: Rama/Prem, this fellow is good, do have a look at his postings.
3) Latest *big* thing (& here’s a going-to-be-a-big-thing! ) in Gollywood: Dhanush got married to Aishwarya, super-star’s daughter.
Don’t you think Rajini looks more like one of those ADMK ministers?? I can’t believe this is the same person who attacked Jeyalalitha so ferocioulsy back in 1996!! More >
[Movie] SAW
Oct 18th
I am seeing a lot of good reviews for SAW. From what I read, it seems, it is about 2 persons who are taken captive by a serial killer “JigSaw”. They need to use a set of clues to solve some problems and then escape. Did they both escape? (surely not) I think the story line resembles Cube, though there was no serial killer aspect in that film. The trailer looks good and the main movie site compares SAW with SEVEN..hmm..I hope I get this film’s VCD soon ! In the mean time, I suggest you go to the main site and have a look @ the trailer.
[Movie] Movies this week!
Oct 18th
After I got the DSL, I haven’t really bothered to go out and rent VCD/DVDs. Oh, don’ t get me wrong, I am not downloading all movies as DivX. With the always-on option available, you can really spend time doing this and that, not necessarily productive things, you know, kind of channel surfing in your TV and killing time.
But, yesterday I went out and got 3 VCDs: Exorcist, the beginning (ETB), Shark Tale (ST) and Sky captain & the world of tomorrow (SCATWOT). I was reading all bad things about ETB, looks like no body liked it and now I know why Really, c’mon, this is supposed to be a sequel to (technically, the story happens before the original Exorcist time. so, this is a “prequel” ) Exorcist, the movie that frightened even the die-hard horror movie watchers! This film certainly didn’t make me afraid and sweating. This doesn’t even come close to the first Exorcist. It is a “not bad” kind of film. Go ahead and see it if you are a big fan of the Exorcist film. It would only make your respect for the original Exorcist grow
Shark Tale (ST) was also a let down. I loved “Finding Nemo” (FN), so naturally I was looking forward to watching this, even though ST more or less created a feel of FN part 2. ST is certainly not FN 2. It is all about how a little fish lies that it killed a shark and its consequences. Will smith doesn’t impress with his voice for the lead character (little fish). He obviously didn’t see how good Eddie Murphy was in Shrek series of films. Infact, thinking of that, why didn’t the producers/director of ST choose Eddie Murphy for that little fish? The graphics was good, typical stuff from Dreamworks. But, poor screen play and uninteresting characters put this film in to “skip this” category of films.
SCATWOT was good with all its graphics and visuals. But, it fails to captivate the audience like any comics/fantasy film is supposed to do. It is all about Sky Captain and how he saves the world from an evil scientist. It looks more like a mix of some James Bond (girls drooling over Sky captain) and some part of Avengers (1930s feel & the scientists). BTW, Avengers is one of my favorite films. This film doesn’t even come close to that. But, do see this film, it has many unique characteristics – except the actors, everything else is CGI produced, the 1930s look charms you sometimes, the dogfight against giant robot in the streets of New York and more importantly, it has both Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie!!
[Movie] Shaun of the Dead
Sep 30th
This is one of those movies which cannot be simply assigned a category. This is neither a comedy nor drama nor any other genre you can think of. Does that mean this movie is a junk? Nope! This is what we call as “Masala” film, here in India. It has the right proportion of all the ingredients that make a great film – 4 tea spoons of humor, 2 tea spoons of love, sentiment & action each, gives this film a perfect 10/10 score. I am a sucker for comedy films, especially British comedy. I loved the entire “Carry on” series and “Lock, Stock and 2 smoking barrels“.
Shaun of the dead is a love story with zombies in it. I liked the way Zombies were used as a perfect backdrop for highlighting the main story line. Some scenes had too much gore, which changes the shade of this film. Especially, that girl in the garden, getting impaled on the metal pipe & Shaun shooting his mother in the head – Yuck! These scenes certainly could have been done with out! But I have to agree that these scenes help the movie achieve “Masala” nirvana.
Bottom line: This is a good movie. Go see it now!
