Myths about the developing world

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks a few myths about the "developing" world. Rosling is professor of all international health at Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life

Leveraging India As India Stands Up

This video was recommended by kalyan. Very Inspiring. Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and was department Chair till recently. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras.

My Dad's Phd Student Acheived this feat (My Dad on CNN)

Prof Annaiah Ramesh, Lecturer in the Department of Applied Botany, Mangalore University has finally entered into the Guinness Book of World Records. Prof Ramesh had received an e-mail on June 23, which informed his entry into the Guinness Book of World Records and also stated that he would receive an official letter within 10 days from then. The name of Prof Ramesh is finally entered into the pages of Guinness Book of World Records as the "Longest lecture marathon". The statement on the Guinness Book of World Records stated "The record for the longest lecture marathon lasted for 98 hr 30 min and was achieved by Dr. Annaiah Ramesh (India) who talked on the subject of the 'Molecular Logic of Life' at the Old Senate Hall, Mangalore University, India; from March 22, to March 26, 2006." The 36 year old Professor Annaiah Ramesh is the son of B D Kamalamma and Annaiah, born on 2nd October 1970, is hailing from a poor family of Bangalore. Soon after completing M.Sc in 1994, he started teaching in Dept of Applied Zoology at Kuvempu University. After consecutive three attempts to lecture his way into the records since November 2005, Prof Ramesh, began delivering a lecture on the topic 'The Molecular logic of life' to a motley group of students that also comprised of subject experts at Old Senate Hall in Mangalore University on March 22, 2006. Although Prof Ramesh had planned a lecture of 101 hours, he had stopped only after 98.30 minutes as he was mentally unprepared to go further. With this Prof Ramesh had broken the record set by Narayanan Shivashankar for 72 hours and nine minutes.

An Easy way to Send large E-mail Attachments

Original Article on WSJ:
Pando lets you email huge attachments -- up to one gigabyte each -- to anyone, without breaching email size limits, or clogging anyone's inbox. It comes in versions for both Windows and Macintosh computers, available for downloading at www.pando.com.

Here's how you use Pando. First, you download and install the small Pando program. Then, you select the files you want to send. These can be any type of files you want, or even whole folders of files. Then, still using the Pando software, you type in the addresses of the recipients, the subject, and a message. The software then does three things: it creates a Pando Package, a small special file that instructs the recipient's computer on how to fetch the files; it sends an email containing that package file, plus any text you want; and it uploads the files to a Pando server.

On the recipient's end, an email is received in his or her normal email program containing the Pando Package as a tiny attachment (one huge 94 megabyte attachment we sent required only a 22-kilobyte attachment). The recipient just opens the Pando Package attachment, and it in turn launches the Pando software, which then downloads the files or folders you sent. The first time the recipient receives a Pando email, he or she will have to download and install the Pando software. There's a link in the email to the download site.

Once downloaded onto the receiver's computer, all Pando files can be found in a special folder that Pando automatically creates. In Windows, it's called My Pando Packages and is in My Documents. On the Mac, it's called Pando Packages and is in the home folder. The files are also listed in the handy Received list in the Pando software.

As a bonus, Pando can sometimes transmit these large files faster than your email program or Web browser could. That's because it uses a modified version of the speedy BitTorrent technology.

If you're tired of bounced emails, and of using Web sites to share your personal videos or photos, Pando is a straightforward solution that anyone can understand in a matter of minutes. It's a great solution to a vexing problem.

Intresting Idea

Excerpt from slashdot:
Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, earned a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet. Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels. The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100. He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, he issued a press release. That was picked up by the news media, spread around the Internet, and soon advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their own sites.

MusicBrainz a MusicMeta Database

From the past few weeks i have been working on tagging my MP3's. I have a lot of MP3's which are named as track[some number].mp3 which offcourse makes it hard to create playlists or sort by song genre. I was recently gifted an iPod Video by my friends. So naturally i wanted the tags sorted out. Kalyan helped me out here and introduced me to an software called MusicBrainz.

MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. MusicBrainz data can either be used by browsing the MusicBrainz web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your MP3 collections.

The main interface of the client has five tabs named Unidentified, Indentified, Pending, Saved and Error. Just import songs that you need to tag. The imported songs appear under the pending tab. The song is fingerprinted and if MusicBrainz finds a fingerprint which matches a song in it's database the song is automagically tagged and moved to the Identified tab. I set the automatic tagging for 80% or more similarity. Once done Write the ID3 Tags to files.Sometimes there are conflicts which need to be resloved manually. The software works great for English Songs but it was not so great for Bollywood songs.If more and more people use this software to tag Bollywood songs then the software is going to get better at identifying Bollywood songs

The one problem that i faced with this method was iTunes maintains a static xml file for libraries and playlists, so renaming of files by MusicBrainz(from say track1.mp3 to say Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein.mp3 broke my playlists.I am trying to find an automated solution for this problem.

Happy Tagging

First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

Watch Users Work:Too frequently companies base their designs on user input obtained through misguided methods. A typical example? Create a few alternative designs, show them to a group of users, and ask which one they prefer.If the users have not actually tried to use the designs, they'll base their comments on surface features. Such input often contrasts strongly with feedback based on real use.Spinning logos and drop down menus are indicators of bad design .These are the best rules of usability:

1>Watch what people actually do.
2>Do not believe what people say they do.
3>Definitely don't believe what people predict they may do in the future.

The more a design supports users in easily and efficiently doing what they want to do, the more they like the design.

Thought of the day

Great thought from Randy Komisar:
Question autority, question other peope's expectations,question convention. We live in a day and time when all things are possible for people who have the raw intelligence and energy and dedication to reinvent things that includes re-inveting themselves. It's a shame when smart people conform to the conventional expections and leave on living a creative life. First and foremost what you do should be purposeful to you.