I completed a short study for the Microsoft Hardware User Research team about a month ago. As a gratuity, they were to send me a copy of Office 2003 Professional. Just got the box in the mail today. \o/

As I mentioned earlier, there were 141 pictures in all. Of those, I have selected and uploaded 85 of the best ones here. Check out the new gallery on the pictures page.

Since there are so many pics this time, I don't really have the time to add captions to all of them like I did for earlier galleries, but if you read the posts associated with the trip, you should be able to recognize what's what, hopefully.

Some of the night-time cityscapes look much, much better at their full resolutions. If anyone wants them for wallpapers or whatever, I have 1600x1200 versions of them, so just ask and thou shalt receive. ;) I'll also see how best to get the video clips up sometime during the next few days. I'm worried they'll take up too much space and bandwidth, but we'll see...

I was looking over my RSS feeds today, and I found something especially relevent:

LOS ANGELES--The University of California at Los Angeles is using technology to discourage Net piracy of films or music, but it's holding off on playing campus snoop, a school official said Monday at the Digital Hollywood conference here.

As previously reported, UCLA has implemented a technology system to give notice and warnings to students who have been fingered by Hollywood studios or record labels as perpetrators of digital copyright theft.

An implementation of the Automated Copyright Notice System, or ACNS--an open-source notification software--the system lets UCLA instantly send notices of copyright infringement to students by e-mail and restrict their network access until they have removed the offending file.

Full Story: CNET News.com

Alright, I'm back from NYC after undoubtedly the best ten days of summer break. Now I understand what a boring place the Los Angeles and Orange County area really is. =P

Over the weekend, we visited Central Park, Ground Zero (the World Trade Center area), the South Ferry pier, Times Square, The Bronx Zoo, and the Statue of Liberty island. Yeah, two packed days.

If you've ever seen aerial pictures of NYC, you'll know that Central Park is HUGE. And when you actually visit it, you get to see just how active and lively the place is. People relaxing, playing sports, rollerblading, boating, dancing, playing musical instruments, selling stuff, playing chess...it's a place for everything. After seeing all those people having so much fun, I wished the day had 48 hours and that I lived in New York. =P

The World Trade Center site is obviously quite barren right now. Buildings around the twin towers were also severely damaged, and haven't been completely restored even today. But even without the towers, the place still looks very impressive with all those other skyscrapers around.

Times Square is one absolutely delightful place - we visited at night, of course, and as I stepped out of the subway station, it almost felt like daylight. The huge neon signs and billboards and the illuminated ads really light up the place. I have some awesome pictures of the area that I'll post with the rest of the collection.

The Bronx Zoo was very nicely done - I think the tigers were probably the most impressive animals in there. Got lots of pictures and videos of animals and birds. The videos are especially cool. I'll see if I can post those up too.

So yeah, that's a total of 141 pictures are 27 video clips of those ten days. I doubt I'll post all of them...will probably pick out the best ones and upload them sometime soon.

MoBlog MoMent: Taking the ferry to Liberty Island. =)

So as you could tell from the last post, we visited the Empire State Building earlier this week. Had a superb view of the city by night from up there. Got some fantastic pictures on the digital cam that could make great wallpapers. Again, I'll have them all up once I'm back in Cali.

Also visited the American Museum of Natural History near Central Park. I was a little skeptical when I thought "museum," but believe me, it was well worth the visit. The place has everything - space exploration and astronomy, cultural history, geology, ocean life, prehistoric dinosaur exhibits, etc. Aside from the awesome models and displays, there was so much information, it would easily take a couple of days to read all of it even if you spent several hours inside each day.

We played volleyball in the sand courts at Riverside Park last evening. Lots of people around...had a good time. This week we went to a Vietnamese restaurant that had some of the best Asian food I've eaten in a while. I also tried Ethiopian food for the first time ever...was an interesting experience - they serve your food with this type of flattened bread that looks and tastes so much like the South-Indian dosa! Of course, the rest of the food was quite different, but it was definitely very good. =)

Still have about two days here. Honestly, this place has me hooked - I really don't feel like going back to Cali now. Maybe if I had to face a few months of heavy snow here, my opinion would change, but as it stands right now, I'd pick New York over LA any day of the week. :D

MoBlog MoMent: New York City by night, as seen from the Empire State Building.

Another long post coming up soon. Also have a whole group of pictures that I'll upload to the gallery once I'm back in California.


MoBlog MoMent: Heading towards the Empire State Building...

Yup, so I landed here in New York on Friday night.
Flight was on time and everything was smooth. Had my computer with me, so I spent the 3 hours or so on the second-leg redesigning the UCLA ACM portal and typing up a review of the 700m (I'll be posting that on a couple of forums shortly, and will link to them from here)

Friday night: Rain right from the time the aircraft landed...ouch. Came up to my brother's apartment from the airport, and headed off directly for dinner with some of his friends. Got introduced to all of them, and had a good time. You know you'll love a city when you see people walking on the streets at 3:00AM in the morning. *Thinks of Orange County/Los Angeles and cringes* =P

Saturday: Woke up ridiculously late, and went to this place called Ayurveda Cafe for lunch. It's a pure-vegetarian Indian restaurant that follows the principles of Ayurveda (ancient Indian medicine) to serve you a really healthy and balanced meal. Very nice place. It rained again, so we didn't feel like going anywhere. Just took a mini-tour of Columbia with my bro, then went up to the MRL lab to play Halo on the Xbox :D
Came back to his apartment and watched "Ghost in the Shell," an anime movie. The story and the dialogue was really deep...great movie. We're going to watch the sequel to it sometime tomorrow, probably. The animation in that one looks brilliant.
Had a short nap after that (the dull weather forcibly puts you to sleep!), and then went for a dinner/party. Was good fun...good food, good music. And it's always hilarious to watch drunk university students attempting to sing/dance, especially when you're not one of them. :D

Today: Thankfully, it hasn't rained since morning. It's cold and windy though. I have to say - New York sure has some messed up weather. :D
Had lunch again with my bro's friends in the afternoon. Now I'm just sitting here and relaxing for a while. Been a little tiring these past two days. Possibly going to go to a Chinese restaurant tonight, and then head up to Times Square, the Empire State Building etc. =)

MoBlog MoMent: Ready for take-off. =)

As you can see, the webcam section is back, along with the MoBlog MoMent tile on the right. The nice thing is it's not linked to TextAmerica anymore. =)

Here's how it works - I got this FTP app for my 3650 with which I can basically upload anything to my FTP server while I'm on the move via a GPRS connection. So I click a picture with the phone, fire up the FTP app and directly upload the pic. Neat, eh?



And yes, I'll re-submit my cam link to CamPortal sometime soon. ;)

MoBlog MoMent: My little cousin, Rhea, whom we visited up in the Bay Area earlier this month. =)

I think I may have found a way to get the webcam section back AND use my cellphone with it (i.e. without relying on an external service like TextAmerica). That also means I'll probably be able to get back on CamPortal again. :D

More about that tomorrow...

Edit: Yes, I have unmetered GPRS again \o/

Figured I needed to add a new theme, and I liked this "Media Center" version of the stock XP background, so here's the new theme: Bliss.

The splash of color sure feels good after using FluidBlack for so long. :D

Three more days, and I'll be off to New York.
Damn, I can't wait!

Yet another sweet video from the Channel9 Team.
Joe Stegman, the Lead Program Manager of the WinForms team, demonstrates how you can rapidly develop a complete Outlook 2003 like UI in 100 lines of code using "Whidbey," the upcoming version of Visual Studio .NET.


Set aside about 7 minutes, and watch the video here.

Remember that surge of visitors to this site immediately following the release of WMP10? Well, I checked the logs, and now I know why...


That's right - it's the fourth result on MSN Search, right after Microsoft's official Windows Media pages.
Crazy. :D

A few days ago, I made a couple of posts outlining some of my reasons for switching back to Windows Media Player 10. Well, I just discovered another significant one:

In iTunes, once you added a folder containing your music to the library, the links were all made static. Because of this, if you later moved some of your songs to another folder, or if you simply renamed the files, the links in the library would break, and you would have to manually delete the songs, and re-add the new folder or the songs with the new filenames to the list.

WMP10, on the other hand, monitors your music folder for changes. In other words, the media library list is dynamic. If you move or rename files, the list is updated and you can simply double click your song to play it without any addition hassles. This was something I always wished for in iTunes, and Microsoft answered my prayer, it seems. =) I'm not too sure at what point it updates the media library, but I assume it happens when you load WMP, since I haven't seen any helper processes running in the background that could be monitoring the folders for changes.

Even with this dynamic monitoring, WMP10 loads up hell of a lot faster than iTunes on every PC that I've tried, as I mentioned before. Slick.
Too many posts in such a short span of time. I'll leave you to digest all of them for now. ;)

You guys are really tempting me to try out a new design too. Only problem is I don't have enough time to do it now. :D

I'm talking about Bilal's blog this time - "rejuvenated"
Check it out. It's really nicely done; very neat and clean layout, and I like the color scheme.

So last evening, all the Indians at the Co-Op decided to go for dinner to this South-Indian restaurant called Annapurna on Venice Blvd. Food was great, and we had a really good time there =)



So after most of us had finished eating, a bet was set up with Amar. Basically, we ordered a 6-foot long dosa (yes, 6 feet! It's supposed to be for a whole family), and Amar's challenge was to finish all of it (bear in mind that he had eaten before that too!) within 30 minutes. What followed was hilarious... :D



He finished a little more than half of it, which was still quite amazing. That's 3 feet of dosa after a meal. After watching the whole show, the owner of the restaurant stopped by our table and offered to pay for the six footer. :D

I've been trying out the NewsGator aggregator plugin for Outlook for the past few days, and I have to say, it's one of the nicest feed readers I've used so far.

I moved to KlipFolio a week or so ago from Firefox's Sage RSS reader extension because I wanted something that would automatically notify me when new articles were added to the feed. Sage was nice, but I had to check the feeds manually each time. Klipfolio was better and kept up to date all the time, but I was looking for something integrated into my browser or mail client. That's when I found NewsGator on Google.

The beauty of NewsGator is that all your feeds behave like regular mail or mail folders within Outlook. Just like the new mail notification feature that Outlook 2003 has, NewsGator notifies you via a balloon tooltip when any feed is updated. Another handy feature is the way it integrates with the browser. You can right click any feed link while surfing to automatically add it to NewsGator's subscription list. The built-in system works only with IE. I did a little digging on the NG forums, and fortunately found that someone came up with an extension for Firefox that does the same thing. =)


More screenshots...

Only downside is it comes with a price-tag, but I really like it.

Got back to LA last night after the weekend trip up to Nor Cal.

On Saturday, we visited some relatives who live right in Silicon Valley. Passed through the Cisco Systems headquarters on the way there. It was huge...almost the size of a small university campus! Made me imagine just how huge the Microsoft headquarters at Redmond must be. I'd really love to go check that out sometime too...

Looks like Omar opened up his newly redesigned site today. Check it out...it really kicks ass.
Well done, man! =)

I'll be heading up with my parents to the Bay area (San Fransisco, for those not familiar with the term) over the long weekend. Leaving early tomorrow morning, and returning on Monday evening, so I might not have a chance to post while I'm there. I'm considering taking the 700m along and watching a movie in the car. It's a long drive up, and even music starts to get boring after a while. Let's see. Will be interesting. :D

Catch you on Tuesday...

Seems I missed mentioning an important useability enhancement I just thought of in WMP10 in my last post.

Here's the deal:
Although the Library view in WMP10 looks and feels almost exactly like iTunes' library, there's one nifty extra - the "Now Playing List" on the right side of the library list itself. Now you might consider this "clutter" at first glance, but think about it for a moment and you'll realize the importance.
In iTunes, when you want to create a custom playlist that's a subset of the library, you drag the songs to the left-side pane, and a playlist is created. In WMP10, you drag your songs from the library to the right-side "Now Playing List" pane. The difference? The pane in WMP10 is always visible. Whereas in iTunes you'd need to click the playlist name to see what you've added and in what order, it's right there in WMP10. So you can actually order the playlist the way you want to while you're dragging and dropping. You'd need to switch between the main library view and the playlist in order to accomplish the same thing in iTunes.

Significant enough, I think. Comments?

So they succeeded. Microsoft managed to pull me back over to WMP from iTunes with their latest v10 release.

I actually had to argue with myself for a few minutes before I ditched iTunes. It was a tough choice. The biggest reason I moved from WMP9 to iTunes earlier was the clean, simplistic organization of the iTunes media library. Plus, the all-in-one design of iTunes for ripping, burning and managing won me over in an instant.

Now WMP10 is back with a very slick new interface, and some neat new features. Is it really that much better than iTunes? I don't think so, but here are some of the reasons why I switched back:

- Responsiveness: iTunes always had this irritating delay everytime it was launched...on every machine that I've tried. It almost seemed like XP's prefetching feature, which works wonders for most other apps, did nothing for iTunes. I don't know why. WMP10 is fast...fast as in instantaneous. Click the icon, and it's up and running. Tagging large groups of mp3 files together also does not cause that hideous lag in WMP like it did in iTunes.
- Resource-usage: Less memory and CPU usage. A huge number of Windows users hated iTunes for it's resource hogging when it first came out. They still do. I didn't care before, since it was, for me, the best player there was, and I was prepared to face the resource hit for it. Now there's WMP10...look at the next point.
- Organization and Features: Quite simply, WMP10 does almost everything iTunes can (bar Rendezvous LAN sharing...I'll come to that later), and more. The media library can be made to look exactly like iTunes if you like...the same clean, simple layout. Even the rip and burn features have become extremely simplified. WMP10 rips high-bitrate MP3s like iTunes too now, in addition to WMA encoding, by the way.

Other less important reasons, but factors that counted, nonetheless:
- Native Windows look-and-feel: WMP10 looks like a native Windows app. iTunes (and Quicktime, for that matter) look completely out of place in the Windows environment, especially when it's not all skinned to look like OS X. ;)
- Availability of skins, plugins and extra visualizations: Quite self-explanatory, I think.
- The music stores and portable media player sync: Ah, this has come up time and again. To beat a dead horse, I don't like Apple's restrictive policies. I don't like closed systems. WMP10 integrates with multiple music stores and syncs with 70+ portable media devices. iTunes? iTMS-iTunes-iPod only. Apple, Apple, Apple.

The one feature I'll miss from iTunes (which is why I'll leave it installed) is LAN sharing. This was a beautiful feature, but ever since I've been out of the university residence halls, I haven't had a chance to use it - there's just no shared music on any of the networks I connect to now.

Good stuff. I'm currently using iTunes and I think it's a great player, but I have a few gripes. Let's see if WMP10 can win me over again. It definitely looks much more polished and less cluttered than v9, there are a bunch of other music stores you can choose from, and there's a free high-quality mp3 encoder built-in, in addition to the WMA9 one, this time. =)
Winamp -> WMP9 -> iTunes -> ?

The final build has leaked apparently, but I think I'll wait for an official release tomorrow. The MSN Music store is in beta. Looks very slick and organized. You can visit the store in your browser without WMP10, but it doesn't seem to work with Firefox. Not really a problem, considering that it's meant to be integrated into WMP10, rather than a standalone website anyway.

Also found this FAQ to be quite amusing :D

How can I get MSN Music downloads to play on my iPod?

Although Apple computers and Apple iPods do not support the PC standard WindowsMedia format for music, it is still possible to transfer MSN Music downloads to an iPod, but it will require some extra effort. To transfer MSN-downloaded music to an iPod, you need to first create a CD with the music, and then you need to import that CD into iTunes. This process will convert the music into a format that can play on the iPod. We're sorry that this isn't easier - unfortunately Apple refuses to allow other companies to integrate with the iPod's proprietary music format. If you are an iPod owner already and unhappy about this policy, you are welcome to send feedback to Apple requesting that they change their interoperability policy.