Mike Davidson announced a Steve Jobs Movie Poster Contest on his blog a few days ago, and there are some really funny (and silly) entries posted already. Go take a look. :D

[Via Scoble]

Technorati Tags: Apple

James Kendrick has a great post today about QuickLook, an application specifically for the HP tc1100 Tablet PC that displays Outlook data on the screen even when the machine is off. He writes...

Tablet PC owners who come from the world of PDAs often lament the ability to hit a button and reference the PIM data immediately. While Standby and Hibernation speed up the process of firing up the Tablet and getting to Outlook it is still far from immediate. Wouldn't it be great if you could hit a button and see your Outlook data in a second, even if your Tablet is powered off? If you are the owner of the HP tc1100 Tablet PC you can, and it's a totally free solution.

Check out James' full post for additional details on how this works, including pictures of it in action. Very cool and extremely handy. We should be seeing stuff like this going mainstream starting next year as Microsoft begins working with IHVs to design notebooks and Tablet PCs that support Vista's Sideshow feature.

Technorati Tags: TabletPC, Sideshow, Outlook

The feed icon is not the only thing that changed. I've also made a few changes to the site's feed itself since yesterday that I thought I should mention here.

Firstly, I've enabled FeedBurner's BrowserFriendly feature, which basically makes the feed look more presentable in browsers like Firefox that simply display the raw XML data, unlike IE 7 and Safari. Of course, you can still view the raw XML if you like by using your browser's "View Source" feature. The new feed page also offers a way to conveniently add the feed to many common online and standalone aggregators.

At the end of each post, you should see two new links - one that allows you to email a link to that post to a friend (some people have actually asked for this for a while now), and another than allows you to directly add the post to del.icio.us, if you use it.

(Edit: I think I wasn't clear enough about this one. These links appear at the end of the post only in the feed, so if you're actually on the site, you won't see them. I'll look into adding them to the site too, if you folks think they're useful.)

I have also redirected the old Atom feed URL to the RSS one. I see no reason to confuse visitors with multiple formats when both of them essentially serve the same purpose. Moreover, since the RSS feed is powered by FeedBurner, I can keep track of useful statistics such as the total number of subscribers, the daily circulation, which posts are the most popular, what aggregators my readers are using, and so on. If you're currently subscribed to the Atom feed, you should notice no disruption because of the redirection, but I do encourage you to replace it with the RSS feed at some point.

I decided to try out the Performancing blogging extension for Firefox 1.5 today. Here's a quick description of the extension from the site:

"Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs." (It also supports TypePad, LiveJournal and MSN Spaces, btw)

I'm impressed with how light-weight it is, and at the same time how powerful. It splits the browser window in half, horizontally, so that you can drag and drop text, links and images from the webpage you're looking at into the composition area. Besides having most of the features you would expect from a rich-text editor, it also has the ability to automatically add Technorati tags to posts, save draft posts as "notes" and other nifty stuff. Definitely recommend trying it out if you have a blog of your own. In fact, I think I prefer it over many of the standalone blogging apps available out there.

Technorati Tags: Performancing, Firefox

If you've been keeping up with the news, you'll remember that Microsoft announced its decision to adopt the orange Firefox feed icon for IE 7 earlier this month, with permission from the Mozilla Corporation, of course. This was a great move since it establishes one single, recognizable icon for syndicated content. Because the combined marketshare of IE and Firefox basically represents almost the entire web-surfing population, people have begun to realize that this icon could essentially become the new standard in the near future.

Matt Brett has created a new site called Feed Icons where he provides a high-quality, vector version of the icon that people can download, resize and use on their sites and blogs. Matt explains his reasons and motivations for doing so in this post.

Good stuff. It's already replaced the old icon on this site since Thursday. :)

Update: Dave points out this site which shows you how to replace Safari's blue RSS button with this orange icon. How about Opera now? ;)

Since I saw pretty much most of what there is to see in NYC when I was last here, this time's trip is much more relaxing and laidback.

We watched King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia last week, and both movies were entertaining and worth watching. I know that both of them are hot movies this month, so I won't give anything away or build up any expectations (positive or negative) in your mind. With that said, I think most people will enjoy both flicks. :)

Last evening, we visited Bodies, a very unique and fascinating exhibition of the human anatomy. The level of precision and detail was just incredible. The human skeleton in a common sight in biology labs at schools and universities, but imagine looking at things like the entire nervous or cardiovascular system - every nerve and every blood vessel in the human body. Almost every organ you would want to look at. And these were real human bodies. It was unlike anything I've ever seen before. The picture on the site should sort-of give you an idea of what I'm talking about, but it just doesn't do it justice. If you're in the NYC or Tampa area, this is something you really should go and experience.

When we got back, we had a game-night of sorts at here at my brother's place with a bunch of his friends. Played some classic group-games like dumb charades, fictionary etc. Wish we had enough people to play Mafia. It was a blast, and it just kept on going all night. We finally slept at around 7AM, after sunrise, and ended up waking up at almost 5PM. :P

Seems like there's some more fun stuff planned for tonight as well. More on that later.

Ever since I finished reading The Da Vinci Code two months ago, I had been waiting for some free time to read Angels and Demons.

I ordered the book on Amazon a few days before leaving for NYC and asked for the book to be delivered here. It arrived yesterday, and I'm planning to start reading it on the flight back to California next month.

And while on the topic of Dan Brown's excellent books, I thought I'd mention the new trailer for The Da Vinci Code movie, in case you haven't watched it yet. Looks awesome, and the cast is perfect. Should be a great movie. :)

Dare Obasanjo and Jimmy Grewal posted their thoughts earlier today about Microsoft's decision to end support for MacIE at the end of this year.

Dare currently works in the MSN division, and his post addresses the issue of Microsoft's innovation (or lack thereof, rather) in the browser space during the last decade. Jimmy is a former MSFT employee who actually worked on MacIE back in the day. He posts an account of what it was like working on the product and some of the reasons for its eventual demise.

Two candid, honest and well thought out posts, and definitely worth reading.

Time Magazine today named Bill and Melinda Gates and U2's Bono the Persons of the Year. The full article is currently available even if you don't have a subscription, and it's worth a read.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME's Persons of the Year.

This is not about pity. It's more about passion. Pity sees suffering and wants to ease the pain; passion sees injustice and wants to settle the score. Pity implores the powerful to pay attention; passion warns them about what will happen if they don't. The risk of pity is that it kills with kindness; the promise of passion is that it builds on the hope that the poor are fully capable of helping themselves if given the chance. In 2005 the world's poor needed no more condolences; they needed people to get interested, get mad and then get to work.

Landed in NYC last night and took the bus from the airport to my brother's place. Surprisingly, the weather wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. I'm sure it's going to snow more than a few times before I go back to LA though, which will be an experience in and of itself.

My brother has his last two finals tomorrow, so we aren't really going anywhere until then. Will probably catch King Kong or Chronicles of Narnia in the theaters tomorrow evening after he's done.

In the meantime, I'm pulling down the Vista December CTP (Build 5270) that was released this morning. Will be installing it later tonight. Looking forward to playing with all the new stuff. :)

Check it out!

If you're reading this and you don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is, you need a slap...or a handy link to Wikipedia!

Hoping to see some interesting posts from the man himself. If you look at the comments to his first post, you'll see people thanking him for the World Wide Web. :D

The move is finally over too. Took quite a number of trips up and down to move everything, and quite a bit longer than I had expected it to. You don't realize how much junk you've accumulated over the course of the year until you have to pull everything out, pack up and move.

The room is currently in an absolute mess - there's just stuff lying all over the floor. Argh! I can't live like this! :D I still haven't had a chance to put everything in place, and I'm not planning on doing that until I come back in January, so I'll just have to put up with the mess until tomorrow morning. I still want to change the arrangement of the furniture, vacuum the carpet and get everything cleaned up before I pull all the stuff out of the bags and put them in place.

Damn...what a pain! Oh well, at least it's worth it - the extra space, the nice view from the window, and an internet connection that doesn't die every other week (finally!) :)

And interesting thing of the week #3...


Now this is something I'm totally stoked about.

So I was talking to my roommate the other day about Tablet PC's and graphics tablets. I might have mentioned it before, but he's a grad student in the School of Film and Television here at UCLA, and he does digital graphics, animation and all that good stuff. At one point, I mention the desire to pick up a Wacom tablet at some point in the future (another new computer is out of the question so TabletPCs are a no-no), and he says - "Hey, I still have my old one. Want it?"

And I end up paying 10 bucks...that's right, US$ 10, for a Wacom tablet that's never been opened. He moved on from the Graphire line to the professional Intuos series before he ever opened this box, so it was just lying around in his closet as a standby. I think this may have been my lucky week. :D

I was playing with it for a little while yesterday, just getting a feel for it and such. It takes some time to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it's a really natural input device. Just as a warm-up exercise, I created a couple of layers in PS and traced over one of my photographs to do a sketch. Here's the end-result of that 15 minute endeavor, resized for the web:



My plan is to eventually dig out some of the paintings that I had done a few years ago and "digitize" them. There's one of a giant panda that I'll scan and post here after I get back from NYC, if I can find it. Of course, I've never done digital stuff before, so it's going to take practice, but I'm totally looking forward to it.

Interesting thing of the week #2...


That comes in as a freebie, courtesy of Microsoft. You really didn't think I'd buy one, did you? :D

I've never actually used one of them before, and I'd consider it to be a novelty more than anything else, but hey, who knows? It might come in handy once I start using it...if they ever get around to releasing x64 drivers for it, that is. This is getting delivered to my brother's place in NYC, so I'll be picking it up when I get there.

Ok, so here's interesting thing #1...



Been using it for a week. A bunch of useful new stuff in this upcoming version including offline messaging, folder sharing (which is very cool, but seems to have issues right now), word-wheel search through the contact list, the ability to rename contacts (Patrick would be glad! :D) etc. The WLM team has a pretty comprehensive list of all the new stuff on the official blog. Take a look.

Now before anyone asks, I'm already out of invites for now. Sorry. :( Each beta tester only received two invitations yesterday - one went to my brother, the other went to a certain lucky person who will probably reveal his identity in the comments to this post so that you can send him hate-mail. :P

If and when I do receive additional invites, I'll start taking requests. Hoping to invite people who are willing to send me a list of bugs as they find them to ensure that we get a better final product. (FYI: bug reports can only be filed by beta testers and not people whom they invite)

Booyah! Here comes winter break. :)

So the countdown disappeared exactly an hour ago (probably right as I handed in my solutions to today's final) and as promised, here's the update on what's happening in the next couple of days.

Starting tonight and continuing tomorrow, I'm moving all my stuff into the new room on the 7th floor (I'm on the 2nd now). It's just about twice the size of my current room, but more importantly, I finally get to leave this awful wireless connection behind (good riddance!) and get a proper DSL line of my own. Huzzah! :D The view from the window is pretty amazing too - I get a full 180 degree view of the Westwood/LA cityscape and part of the UCLA campus, and on a clear day, I'm told one can see all the way to the ocean near Santa Monica. I'll try to get pictures of this once I'm back from NYC in January.

Later in the afternoon tomorrow, I have a bit of work to take care of here for a few hours before I leave for break. And then Sunday morning, I'm off to the airport for the trip across the continent. :)

So yeah, that's the quick update before I start packing and moving in an hour. A few interesting things have happened during the week that I'll be posting about later today or tomorrow too. Until then, all I have to say is - Woo! It's over! :)

So finals start tomorrow, and it's going to be one busy week. Omar calls it the Extreme Final Exam Prep Regimen™ :D

I'm also moving into a new room (way up on the 7th floor!) on Saturday, the day before I leave for NYC, so things might be a little crazy this weekend too. So until then, ciao, and see you on the other side!

ArsTechnica posted an excellent report a couple of days ago about tech companies expanding their recruiting efforts in India. Microsoft and Redhat both recently announced their intentions to invest billions of dollars in the country over the next few years. Other major corporations like Intel and Cisco, as well as JP Morgan Chase have also decided to expand their efforts in the country.

It's really great to see these companies giving some incredibly talented people back home the opportunities to realize their full potential. I love the last line of the report:

"The days of India as a pure outsourcing supplier are over; the big boys are moving in and hiring people directly." :)

As expected, Windows Live Local, the new version of MSN Virtual Earth launched last night. I had a chance to play with it for a few minutes in the lab between classes earlier today, but not enough to go into details yet. From what I did see though, there's some good stuff in this new release.

Anyway, until I have the time to type up a more detailed post (which probably won't be until after finals are done - see the countdown above), here are some nice samples of Bird's Eye view images that I picked out.

Empire State Building in New York city
The Statue of Liberty

And a little closer to home, Powell Library and Royce Hall, here on the UCLA campus. As you can see, the level of detail is fantastic. Try changing the orientation of the images using the N,S,E,W controls on the map. I imagine the aerial photographs of Las Vegas would be pretty sweet too. If only you could switch between day and night mode... ;)

Looks like people are enjoying these, so here's another link to a collection of some fantastic macro shots taken by Michael Swanson. They're all high-resolution images, and they're available in both 4:3 (standard) and 16:10 (widescreen) formats.

Thanks to Jonathan Hardwick for posting the link over on Channel9.

If you liked any or all of the Vista 5259 wallpapers that I linked to last week, I'm sure you'll like quite a few from this collection. It includes the 5259 backgrounds, as well as several others, nicely categorized by type - Leaves, Grass, Sunsets, Animals, Snow etc. Go take a look.

The MSN Virtual Earth team today confirmed that an update is just around the corner. The service has been renamed to Windows Live Local to fit in with the rest of the Live initiative, and this refresh finally includes the sweet 45-degree "Bird's eye" imagery that we first got a glimpse of back in May this year. Actual screenshots are included in the Virtual Earth blog post linked to above.

You can go back and read my thoughts on the first (i.e. the current) version of MSN VE here. Let's hope this new release also addresses the issues that I had. Without inline driving directions, there is no way I can take this seriously. Of course, now that Yahoo! has joined the game with a very cool offering of its own, it's not just a Google vs. Microsoft battle anymore. They're all bringing in so many of their own little bits of great stuff to the online mapping space that it's difficult to settle on any one of them. But who says we need to? :)

It's always interesting to see how technology makes some amazing things possible. Wired News is running a report today about a group of researchers who have developed bio-ink and bio-paper, the first step towards making organ "printing" possible.

This is not something that's going to happen overnight, and as the article suggests, it may take more than five to ten years to start creating human organs, but it's a fascinating possibility.

...followed by a week of finals. I've turned the countdown on again, as I usually do toward the end of every quarter. Only 12 days to go! :)

My parents left for India earlier today, and they'll be there for about a month, so I won't be back home until January next year. I got my mom addicted to The Da Vinci Code before she left, so I imagine she's going to finish reading it before the flight lands in Bombay. :D

I'll be leaving for NYC to visit my brother two days after finals are done, and will be back on the 5th of Jan. Totally looking forward to that. Seems like the LA weather over the last couple of days is almost preparing me for the New York winter. Even though it's relatively sunny during the day, it's really windy and pretty cold at the same time.

As a last little bit of entertainment before we push full steam ahead towards finals week, a few of us from ACM are planning to go for a short "a capella" concert on campus tomorrow evening. It's not as big as the one we went to back in March, but it should be a good change nonetheless.

Good luck to everyone prepping for finals! It'll all be over soon. :)

I thought I had a post up about Transactional NTFS a long time ago, but I did a quick search last night and didn't find anything. Guess I was planning a post, but forgot about it.

Like some other people I talked to about this, you might be wondering what this Transactional File System (or TxF, for short) is all about. For a broad, high-level overview of the kinds of scenarios that TxF enables, take a look at this post that's been in my bookmarks folder ever since I read it back in April.

Then if that whets the appetite of the inner-geek in you, check out the Channel9 video on TxF that was posted just yesterday. I haven't had a chance to watch this one yet, but I plan to right after finals are done. Bear in mind that the Going Deep series of videos to which this one belongs go into very low-level details and are highly informative. They're some of my favorite videos on C9, so I'd definitely recommend watching them at your leisure, especially if you happen to be a CS person too. :)

The first release of Google Talk honestly hasn't been a particularly exciting product, but the one single thing that it does well - voice conversations - it does really well.

The Google Talk team is now blogging. Let's hope this one doesn't go the route of their Picasa blog, which appeared for a while and has disappeared ever since. I'm curious to see what's in store for the next release and when it's expected. Subscribed!

The folks over at JCXP.net have made those pretty Vista 5259 wallpapers available, and Jose Fransisco has mirrored them on his blog, XPSource.

Enjoy. :)

I've been waiting for this for a long time, and now that it's finally here, I can't actually try it out. I haven't tried installing my webcam on the Vista CTP, and my current connection is too piss poor to do anything other than the basics. My list of things to do when I bring the desktop back from home and get the new internet connection is January is growing...

In any case, has anyone tried this yet? How is the video quality? If it works well, MSNM 7.5 will have pretty much nothing left that Skype can't do better for me (apart from the important fact that I have about 10 times as many contacts on MSNM than I do on Skype).

So yeah, if you've tested it out, or are going to, I'd love to hear about your experience. :)