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.

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?!

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.

[Click the image to enlarge it] 

Indiatimes shopping has a decent search bar, prominently on top.  Whew, a good start. I typed in the name of the product I was looking for. I got a plain screen telling me that the search didn’t return anything.  

Ok, it couldn’t find my product, but why can’t they show me a helpful screen of related products? Or atleast, how about giving me other options for my search string, in case I misspelt it? Hmm…

My next stop was rediff shopping. It has a nice search box and wonder of all wonders, when I started typing it automatically showed me a list of possible search strings. Wow! I felt kinda optimistic, I was not sure why.

[Click the image to enlarge]

My search returned the following screen. It showed the results for “800is”, not for my product. Where is the product I searched for????? I pressed back, thinking probably I mistyped in the search box. With the correct product I was looking for, in the search box, I did the search again.

[Click the image to enlarge]

The same page X-(

Why cannot Rediff tell me at least that the product I searched for was not found?? Rediff.com looked to be in the other extremity of Indiaplaza.in, when it comes to reporting the search results. After having spent close to 1.30hrs in all the sites (Indiaplaza.in, Rediff, Sify & eBay) fruitlessly, I still haven’t found what I am looking for. And, with the sites in such a state, most probably won’t ever!

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

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!).

The Grudge is certainly not the best horror flick out there. Infact, it leaves you wondering why all Japanese horrors nowadays resemble “The Ring” so much!! Mere plagiarism or am I missing something?! I don’t know. The film’s plot: Bad things happen in a house & it causes a “stain”. Whoever enters the house is cursed and is eventually killed by the ghost. A caretaker (Sara Michelle Gellar) tries to find what actually happened. I was disappointed with the total lack of fright-factor seeing the films’s ghosts. C’mon, ghosts are supposed to be frightening, right?! May be I am getting used to Japanese ghosts (woman with her hair covering the face)!! If you are new to horror movies (esp. Japanese) or if you like horror movies a lot, go ahead and watch this film. For others, I suggest, go see SAW or Old boy again.

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.

As I said earlier, the film starts from the end. Firsy, you get to see Lenny kill John G! From there, the movie is in a rewind mode. There are actually two threads in this film: First thread takes you through this gradual rewinding, showing what happened before Lenny killed John G, in bursts of 10 minutes, while the next thread is in a chronologically correct manner. The second thread is shown in B & W. Slowly these two threads converge! This way of story telling, AFAIK, is (or atleast was, back in 2001!) very new. This could have easily left the viewers totally confused. So, every scene in thread one, has overlapping shots with the next 10 minutes burst. By some clever editing and a strong screenplay, director Nolan puts the viewers under a spell. Thinking about this, I remember one of my friends’ comments: “Your humor is dry. It makes you laugh immediately, but later makes you wonder why you laughed!” You can say the same thing here. You are gripped by the way story unfolds, or rather folds, but when the credits roll, you are left with so many questions unanswered. You will see that many innocuous looking scenes that you previous overlooked have a hidden meaning! These unanswered questions, I am sure, forces you to watch the film again I saw this twice and the second time, with the right perspective, I found many small things highlighted in the beginning that makes sense only when you have the total picture. The strong point of this film is, it doesn’t say that something happened this way or that way, it leaves that to the viewer to conclude. So, everyone gets to form their own interpretations! This is a clever way of involving the audience. Unlike other suspense movies, this one doesn’t straightaway give you the puzzle and its solution, instead it concentrates on giving you only the puzzle and many clues (or facts) from which the viewer can form any number of conclusions!! I loved this concept. Because of this, you think about this movie and its umpteen unanswered questions even after the movie ends! Isn’t this what every director craves for?! Audience remembering the film for a long time to come!!

Did Lenny kill the right John G? Has he killed people before? Who took the missing pages from the police file? Is Lenny saying the truth when he is talking about Sammy? Does Sammy really exist? Are Sammy and Lenny the same persons? How did Lenny’s wife actually die? Is she a diabetic? Did Lenny himself kill her? Did he strangulate her or just overdosed her with Insulin? Is searching for John G just a ruse for Lenny to be a psychopath? Woah! I need to see the film again!

Bottom line: This film has CLASSIC written all over it! Go see it. Do tell me what you think.

PS: Check out this page, which talks about the story telling technique used by Christopher Nolan. Excellent stuff.

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!!

4) Mr. Duraipandi is strongly arguing that the number of characters alloted to Tamil in Unicode is not enough. I found this article quite interesting; Mr.Duraipandi gives a no-nonsense introduction to what makes Unicode tick, especially the Tamil part of it. He complains that if only Indian government had given a proper set of characters to be included in the Unicode, we’d have been typing much easier in Tamil. As a Tamil blogger now for close to 2 months, I have to agree! If not for the excellent software, e-kalappai, I’d have given up by now. One small grumble though: Mr.Duraipandi could’ve avoided the usual “Tamil is not given proper recognition, we are always the losers, blah blah blah” whining!

5) Saw some 10 – 12 movies since my last [movie] post here. Nowadays, I see so much *junk* that I keep forgetting the good films I see, along with those junk. Some films that I wanted to mention were “7/G Rainbow colony“, “Bose” & “Bride & Prejudice“. For those who haven’t heard about these films, the first two are Tamil films and the last one is an Hinglish film. “Bride & Prejudice” (B&P) is directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend it like Beckham fame). This film portrays a Punjabi family, literally preparing their daughters to be given in marriage to desis & only Desis! I didn’t like the movie. Aishwarya was charming & beautiful as usual, the songs were great (except for the last duet song), some of the dialogues were good & sharp, so why I didn’t like this?! I don’t know; It simply is not the best effort by Ms.Gurinder. I have a detailed review of this ready somewhere in my HDD, might come around to post that sometime later (BTW, here are some Desi jokes). I think “7/G Rainbow colony” (7/G) is an excellent film by Selvaraghavan, director of “Thulluvatho Illamai” & “Kadhal kondaen”. If you haven’t seen this film yet, thinking that all Selvaragavan films are are always cheap and vulgar, you are missing a good movie; you have to see this film. The film was so captivating that I could not stop thinking about it for 2 days. If you think the songs are so good to hear, just see them in the movie in proper context, you will love them! I think Ravikrishna (hero) is a talented actor, but it is too early to say that. Sonia Agarwal has acted excellently. Yuvan shankar raja is fast becoming my favorite music director. I heard Karthik Raja, his brother, did the BGM for the movie, but who cares?! BGM is the backbone of this movie. It brings the emotions in every scene to life. Excellent work, again. Do not miss this movie. I read some reviews saying that only if you are/were in love, you’ll like this movie, *shrug*, probably true! “Bose”, I think, is one of those good movies that go unnoticed. It sucked for the first 15 or so minutes, but after that the screenplay really picked up pace. Srikanth copies Surya’s mannerisms to show himself as a tough commando [sic!]. Sneha is charming & beautiful, as usu…Oops, I said the same for Aishwarya, right?! quick, think of something! Ok, “As usual, Sneha is beautiful & charming” I have a biiig review written for this too. I will post it one of these days.

Some movies I have a review written and stashed (lost?!) somewhere in my HDD: “Mr. 3000″, “Beg!”, “Herold & Kumar go to White castle”, “The Forgotten”, “Office space” & some more I don’t remember now!!

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!!

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!

Click here for the preview