This is my 401st entry and I'm having a really good time – two unrelated statements, however, not obviously unrelated. It's good to finally have one week to simply do anything I want (which basically equates to "nothing"). A week of indefinite periods of sleep, indefinite amounts of pizza and a definite amount of DotA playing (which is, however, a close approximation of infinity). However, with an aim to not bore myself by recounting the details of what I've been eating for the past few days, I shall discuss some of the interesting happenings that have been happening recently.

Now, firstly, Microsoft has said that it will delay Windows Vista. Of course, I call it Vindows Wista, as I always subconsciously switch my Vs and Ws while speaking; mind you, I didn't even know that there was a difference between the sound of a V and a W before I came to this Woz-forsaken place! Getting back to Microsoft though, I no longer hate them. Vista no longer charms me as it did a year ago. As much as I'd like to deny it, and as much as Paul Thurrott (of WinSuperSite fame) would like to deny it, Windows Vista will simply include renamed and rehashed versions of features that have already appeared (in some cases, many winters ago) on other operating systems, most notably the OS X of Mac (pronounced 'ten' not 'eks'). These features include Aero Glass (debatable, but generally agreed upon as a "better looking GUI than XP's") versus Apple's Aqua, Gadgets versus Apple's Dashboard (itself a rip-off of Konfabulator - now Yahoo Widget Engine, though I believe Dashboard is smoother and better), Flip 3D versus Exposé, etc. The list does go on, I assure you. However, the list is of no consequence, for, it is important to realize that anyone with three pennies and a banana can switch to Mac OS X just as much as Dumbledore can come back to life (I've tested both the probabilities, and found them both to be highly improbable but, surprisingly, equal) and this is because of Apple's hardware-software locking business model. So, in the end, if Microsoft does not come up with a better OS, people are simply going to be stuck with an outdated OS (or Linux, but that would really be extremely masochistic). So, generally speaking, Vista is a "good thing" and I'd probably like to use it when Microsoft releases the public Beta 2.

Secondly, there's always some kind of Apple news by the time I write one of these entries and this time it's their 30th Anniversary which one journalist at C|Net is extremely worried about:

We've reached an interesting point in Apple's media-darling status when Joy of Tech runs cartoons (said cartoon appears below) in which journalists are driven to commit suicide on discovering that Apple will not be holding a 30th anniversary event. Personally, I'm there. I'm literally out on the window ledge. There is a collective fear that, come Saturday, the section of the wall-planner marked 'cover massive Apple announcement' will read like a cruel morality tale. Seppuku may be rather fiddly, but if Apple doesn't deliver, will there be any choice for the self-respecting hack but to die with honour?

As always, there are rumours of products: a touchscreen iPod here, a gamer's iMac there, an Apple phone -- but Apple hasn't announced a press event. Judging from the frenzy the rumour sites have built up, you'd guess that Steve Jobs will at least have to walk out onto the lawn in Cupertino, light a few fireworks and make some whooping noises. It's that or risk an international incident.

The keen-eyed reader might have noticed honour spelled… well… as honour. Yes, this is the UK version of C|Net and here is a link to the little article.

And if this wasn't enough, there's always the story I read recently with particular delight. The Register, apparently, has posted a followup to this past week's wonderfully humorous story about Tuttle, Oklahoma's technically inept city manager, Jerry Taylor. It appears that Mr. Taylor is not pleased with the publicity he has received due to the incident, despite his prior statement of, 'I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity.' He sent an email to the Register's marketing team asking that people stop emailing him and making fun of him. It's all quite hilarious. Do follow the links and die of laughter.

さよなら, अलविदा and all that jazz.

Labels: English

What I'm writing about has absolutely nothing to do with the title obviously. Such a silly thing that would be to do. In any case, for the uninitiated, it's a Russell Peters reference.

Moving on, the Final Exams have ended. They were 'okay'. I'm not satisfied with them, but I guess, it'll "be all right" 'cause we have about three chances to eff up the finals every year, instead of those unlucky souls who have only two. The quarter system is deadly. It's just so ludicrously fast! I'm like, hey, I don't even know the names of all the people in my IHUM discussion group and it's already the last week of classes. It simply doesn't leave time for any personal projects unless you do them during the 1-week break between quarters or you're taking like 15 (ha!) units.

Also, I was thinking about this journal (all right, so it's an effing "blog") the other day (today actually) and I was wondering who actually likes visiting it. I mean, one day I'm writing about RTTI or something and the next day I start talking about my cat and how we were throwing paper airplanes at the chemistry teacher (highly recommended - the actual bit of throwing the airplanes, that is, not reading the entry). It's such a hybrid website that I doubt it caters to anyone's singular interest (unless it's an Indian from my school who's doing CS and loves Macs - a very finite set of people); how I manage to get >-1 visitors is beyond me. I mean, some times I do wonder precisely what five random people from Uruguay (yes, Virginia, that is a country - and, no, it's not in Africa) are doing on my blog… (if you're on a Mac, I've discovered that pressing Option+; produces an ellipsis)

See, now we switch to the tech part of this entry. The DotA-playing continues. Got two more people from my dorm onto the bandwagon today. Total is 15 now. Meanwhile, I installed World of Warcraft on my iMac and got someone to log me into their account to try it out, and although the introductory video is totally friggin' awesome, I was unimpressed by the game itself. The graphics are so-so (I maxed out everything!) and although I can see how people could get addicted to it, I'd rather not pay a monthly to play this. I'm definitely a fan of the "Buy Once Play Forevah!" model.

Also, Mozilla on the Mac sucks. Precisely what it sucks is irrelevant for this discussion (by Green's theorem). I just cannot use a browser as my primary choice if it cannot render Hindi as anything but a string of ?s with spaces interspersed amongst them. And this brings my Safari-alternatives list down to Shiira - which is also WebCore based like Safari. It's got some really neat features and a launch time that competes with or overtakes Safari's. Three of the features I found really cool were the "page flip" transition it uses to flip pages, the fact that it can access Safari's bookmarks natively and save to them and that it had an "Exposé for Tabs" feature that's actually both usable and elegant (a là Foxposé, but better). Check Shiira's website for videos demoing these features. Also, Shiira is a/the Japanese word for "shark fish" (as opposed to "shark"). Mac guys should give it a test drive. It's quite innovative and has progressed a LOT since last year.

On a side note, I've finished started making the website for my dorm. Check it out at http://chouse.stanford.edu/ [the Secret Snowflake pictures involve partial nudity and homosexual... umm... gestures - you have been forewarned (as if!)].

PS: the broken link with "my cat" was intentional as I do not have a cat.

Labels: English

Contrary to rumours that no one is spreading, this little journal of mine is not dead. Indeed, it was only taking a nice, long and well-deserved nap from the rigours of the Internet. Meanwhile, a lot of things have been happening. I started playing this computer game called DotA or Defence of the Ancients (which is basically a custom map for Warcraft III) and when I came back to Stanford, I basically spread it around the dorm like some virulent disease. We have games almost every day and they're not 1v1 or something; we have 4v4 and 5v5 games. Immense. And immensely fun too.

Apart from DotA, the Winter quarter here is coming to an end, with Dead Week at an end (today's the last day) and Finals week next. I have four Finals. Bad times. But I'll be over with them next Thursday. The maths I have taken this quarter is killing me. Really. Multivariable Integration is just not my piece of cake. Nope, not at all.

Meanwhile, my dear brother came all the way from far away New York to visit me and stayed here awhile. We had some good times and he got some good movies from the "City that Does Something Interesting" (I couldn't remember any other good phrase-name for New York City except the Big Apple).

Mac News
So, some people did get Windows XP booting on a Mac and the best thing I like about it is the boot menu which is done extremely elegantly, is really pretty and I've tried it out on my own iMac. The installation hasn't worked out for me yet because the installer freezes at a particular point. However, people are seemingly aware of the bug and are working on it, I've heard, furiously. There are a lot of driver issues though thanks to the fact that the Macs use EFI instead of BIOS and no one has got the ATI Radeon X1600 drivers to work on the Macs yet.

In other not-so-interesting news, I discovered the first Hindi localized program for Mac OS X, which is the Translation widget.

I was quite amused to find this out and I've kept Hindi as my first choice of language for the user interface just in case I stumble upon another Hindi localized program. Additionally, I should say that the translation widget seems to be localized in many other languages as well because I know there is a Tamil version and I've seen it.


Some more DotA-related news: tonight we played a 4v3 game with my computer acting as the host. However, it was the most "technologically advanced" game we've ever played and three out of four of my computer's communication ports were being used. We were connected as follows:



As much as most people won't care as to what our network topology was, I really got kicks out of the fact that we were playing on a network comprised of Wireless (orange, dotted), Wired Ethernet (grey) and FireWire (orange, solid) connections. The only network thingy my computer was not using at the time was Bluetooth. I think next time I'll have someone join over Bluetooth just for the heck of it, since Warcraft requires only about 500B/s of data transfer. It's the latency that really matters.

Until the next time.

Labels: English