Sunday, October 30, 2005

contradictions

I've always wondered about the inherent contradictions between two old sayings about using our past's experiences to make a present decision. One says that we should learn from our past experiences and mistakes whereas other one says: "don't let your past experiences and fears come in your way". I still don't know which is correct but second saying seems to be tougher one to follow. I feel it is nearly impossible to decide without thinking about the past and even more so if the present situation seems so close to a situation we've already been before. But isn't that what life is all about? full of contradictions, full of unexpected events and people whom we thought would never do things they did?

Thursday, October 27, 2005

My Yahoo or Google Home or start.com?

I've been using My Yahoo! since long to aggregate the information from the web on one personalized page and if am not wrong about 2 years back it was one of the very few sites which would allow you to aggregate content (then it was only limited to information from various Y! modules). With the advent of RSS/Atom it has further improved it's aggregation by allowing you to add rss feeds too & given the popularity of RSS feeds even other companies have jumped on the bandwagon including Google and Microsoft, MSN even has a nice screen screensaver which shows you the feed titles with post entry as tooltip in a screensaver. I've tried these 3 and honestly speaking for change MS' start.com is an outright winner, with Google perhaps second and My Yahoo! being at the bottom. So what makes start.com so good? well it's something that Google brought back from hibernation: AJAX. start.com has got one of the best implementations of AJAX, allowing you to even view the entire feed without having to leave the start.com site something which both My Yahoo! & Google lack, one good thing about Google & My Yahoo! though is it shows you your email information which I find to be pretty helpful given that I have yahoo! & gmail accounts. If you are really looking for a nice web aggregator and have a newer version of IE or FF then you would never regret having start.com as your home page.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Bless thy rings...

Few days back my ex-colleague and friend Avinash got married to Chaitra, having known him since 2 years I am certain it would be a pure joy for anyone to have him as her life partner. I wish the newly weds a happy and memorable journey together.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

wrong decision?

sometime back I had written a post in which I said there are absolutely no right or wrong decisions, a decision is a decision nothing less, nothing more. So then why do at times decisions which seem to be correct give undesired results? and should we never put any thought process before making a decision? well, a decision is still a decision but we need to see what prompted us to take that decision, what was the situation which made us take that decision. What does all this mean? Let me give one example: If I decide today to jump from 13th floor, I don't think it would be a wrong decision but if I decided to jump believing that somebody would break my fall then yes the pre-cursor was totally wrong and this case the decision that was made would give wrong & painful results. The only problem is most of the times pre-curors to a decision are not so obvious as the one that I gave in my e.g. and add to that our egos and emotions and you've got some real snarls to deal with. Remember, every event and person in our lives is not what it is, it's what we perceive it as, we always see everyone/everything through the lense of our egos & feelings and always try to project ourselves onto that person or thing subconsciously. coming back to the decisions, we always want to believe that our decision is the right one and we try convincing ourselves that that is the case, by perhaps asking people who are close to us for their opinions. here again, remember any person no matter how close he is to you, will give advice based on his perception, egos and priorities which might not be your perception and/or priorities....so the bottom line is to think about the pre-cursors before making a decision based on your priorities & perceptions and then have no regrets...remember there is nothing by luck, nothing by chance.

Google Maps Prototype

Nikhil Kothari's prototype of Virtual Earth got me interested into trying something similar on Google Maps. Using Google Map APIs is not at all tough once you get a hang of it, the only issue is with writing javascript, css which is cross-browser specific. As of now my prototype doesn't use any server side code. Everything is done on the client browser including xsl transformation..learnt it the hard way that xsl transform is handled in a different way in Ff(better) than in IE (crappy)! My first stab at Google Map can be seen at http://sachiniscool.somee.com/default.html..right now I have posted some pictures of Atlantic City, DC and Louisville that I took after downsizing them...comments/complaints are welcome.