Richard Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Petronas Ad

Petronas Ad. Enjoy!

Novell has come up with some cool Linux ads.







This is IBM's earliest Linux ad.

Kumaraparvata trek

Way To Kumaraparvata
Originally uploaded by Ananth Narayan S.

A bunch of us went on a weekend trek to Kumaraparvata near Kukke Subrahmanya. Pretty tough trek with a steep climb. The heat and humidity didn’t make it any easier. Walking inside the forest areas was better, atleast there was some shade. But the complete stretch past "Giri Gadde" (mountain grassland) was grueling. With hardly any trees, we were exposed to the sweltering heat of the midday sun. Reaching Bhattara-mane seemed to restore all the energy that had been spent climbing all the way there.

An awesome meal later and the trek resumed. At one point, the guys who were ahead stopped at a peak and started to cheer and clap. At last we had reached. No, not quite. At that peak, one person pointed to a flag in a distance and that the peak where the flag was planted was the place we had to reach. It was so far, I almost gave up. Well, somehow we all found the energy to walk ahead. Surprisingly the walk was not as far as expected.

Kumaraparvata - shrouded in clouds, sight to behold. We spent the night on the peak. No tents though. :-) The next day morning we were able to catch a glimpse of the solar eclipse. A five hour descent followed by an 8 hour drive by my bike back to Bangalore. An enjoyable weekend!

Outlook Error

Outlook Error
Originally uploaded by Ananth Narayan S.

This is the error message Microsoft(R) Outlook (R) spat out when I attempted to close a PST file. What a descriptive error message!!
But what takes the top spot is neat little popup message I got from Microsoft (R) Windows Media Player 10 (R) that said "God Damn Exception". I never encountered the "God Damn Exception" again.

Yahoo results and Google results for the query OUTLOOK SUCKS !

When I bought an iPod shuffle, I presumed that it would be like any consumer electronics device. Charge the device, copy the MP3s, start listening. Didn't know that the iPod needs to be "initialized" using iTunes software and iTunes is needed even to transfer MP3s to the device. It seemed that the device wouldn't even charge before the initialization. Pathetic!

The bigger problem is that there is NO version of iTunes for Linux. Running iTunes on probably Linux requires Wine or CrossOver Office.

Also, iTunes seems to multiplex songs before copying them to the iPod. Files copied through Windows Explorer are just files. Occupying space on it. This was another thing I didn't like.

DEATH TO PROPRIETARY INTERFACES!!!

Interesting, I haven't seen any 'open source' efforts to engineer an MP3 player. Well... such a player must also support Ogg Vorbis, maybe FLAC too. I am waiting. :-)