Whats your limit anyway ?

Yahoo has announced that Yahoo Mail users will get limitless storage space !!!

Its almost 10 years since I created my yahoo account. I remember creating it in my college. And in those days, creating an email account was like the most toughest thing on earth and you needed support from people to help you create it. And if you were the unlucky one who was late to join the party and didnt have an email account, you were looked upon as inferior souls who were missing the most important thing in life !!!

Well, in a way now email has become ubiquitous and is everybody's second identity [ or should I say first ? ]. Its really so hard to imagine a world without email. But hey, emails have been around, atleast in my limited world, for only about 10 to 12 years !!! Technology can certainly paint this world in a completely new color :-)

The interesting part of the announcement was in the details given there about how the industry has started creating goods that can just store more and more data. I liked the way he has depicted the growth in stages for the past 10 years. Imagine storing a 100 hours of video, thats like atleast 35 Hindi movies, in a small iPod that can fit into your pocket. Compare this with the delimma we had in college when we had to store 2 pdf files in our 1.44 MB floppy !!! Will one floppy be sufficient to hold them ? or should I just borrow another floppy from my friend ?

Moore's Law rocks !!! If anyone had any doubts in the value of compounding returns, they just have to take a mathematical look at how the storage space on a single device has grown from 1.44 MB to 80GB in a span of 10 years. Infact, on taking a more closer look we have even beaten the 18 month cycle and reduced it to 10 months !!!

Strangely enough, even with these huge jumps in memory storage capacities, I still find instances where I end up having the same delimma of less storage space I had in college. Will one memory stick of 1GB be sufficient to store these 2 movies ? or should I just borrow another 1GB stick from my friend ?

Parkinson's Law rocks too :-) Wonder how soon/long it will take for Parkinson's Law to dawn on Yahoo Mail's unlimited storage space. Is there anything bigger than "limitless" ...

Wah re bengalooru

Back to blogging after a long hiatus ...

In the past couple of months when I had been extremely busy, I had the chance of travelling outside Bangalore on a few occasions. And this time for a change it was in a bus. While travelling I realised the truth in the saying "A nation is as developed as its roads."

The national highway that connects Bangalore and Hyderabad is so very well done you wont feel any bumps and can have a very peaceful sleep even when travelling in a bus [ the hi-tech, non-volvo type of buses ]. Its a huge 6 lane road all along very neatly done.

There are quite a few other roads that connect Bangalore to other neighbouring states. Most of these roads are state highways. I was shocked to see the condition of these roads. They are so pathetic that no vehicle travelling on it can be in a good condition after a ride. The condition of the people travelling in those vehicles is beyond imagination and are left to the mercy of the driver's maneuvering skills on how best he can find the path with the least number of bumps. What was disheartening to see was that the roads were in this condition even as close as 30 kms near to Bangalore.

It goes to show the extent of neglection of the authorities. When they are not bothered to fix these things about 30 kms away from Bangalore, imagine the plight of the people living 300 to 400 kms away from Bangalore !!!

Everyone has problems with the crumbling infrastructure in Bangalore and all the money is being poured to fix this, as if this is the only place in the entire state that has problems. Even after all this fire fighting by the authorities, the people end up wasting their time stuck up in huge traffic jams.

In the same trip that i travelled on that pathetic state highway, it was such a relief to find our bus making less noise when we were near Bangalore. Within 15 minutes of this pleasure, we were welcomed to Bangalore with a traffic jam at a railway crossing !!! To cross that small stretch of 0.5 kms, we had to wait 30 minutes in the bus that was moving slower than a snail. I really pity the bus drivers who first have to drive the noisy bus on those pathetic state highways and then counter with such rude and senseless traffic jams. No wonder, these bus drivers are being taught meditation to have their emotions in control.

Vocabulary

Your Vocabulary Score: B-

You have a zealous love for the English language, and many find your vocabulary edifying. Don't fret that you didn't get every word right, your vocabulary can be easily ameliorated!

How's Your Vocabulary?

Demolition Man

Thanks to Ajay, I am back at blogging something here !!! Its been almost a month since i posted anything ... and I was once telling someone that they dont post so frequently :p Come to think of it, its been one of those very hectic months, where i felt being tied from 4 different directions and stretched to the limits. Strangely, its also been very enjoyable and satisfying month. No wonder, they say, only a busy man can enjoy his leisure.

On retrospect, I find this not only because I had a lot of things to handle in parallel, but also because of a slight change in the way I work. I have now consciously started to complete the important things first when I go to office. Rather, I make a point to complete atleast something before lunch. This gives me a sense of feeling of accomplishing things. And once I have taken care of the most important work for the day, the less important works somehow find a way to get done by themselves. Writing down the daily activities and finding out the most important work for the day has definitely been of great help too.


Now .. back to the demolition man about whom I have been wanting to write since a week for now !!!

I was hoping to see a very well fought match in the Australian Open final between Gonzales and Federer. And it certainly lived up to my expectations. The first set, neither of them could break eachother. It had to be decided in the tie-breaker. The second set was not so great to watch. But, i thought that Gonzales started playing better only in the third set. And his customary backhand straight drive down the line, so much similar to Federer, was visible only in the thrid set.

Both the players had similar games and thats what interested me. Both were equally good at chop shots and backhand strokes. Gonzales really had a very good run the whole week beating all big timers with class and elan. His game looked very similar to Federer and I was wanting to see how Federer changes his game to Gonzales. Federer had one thing more than Gonzales, that got him the match. It was his confidence. Gonzales for some matter I thought was very nervous playing his first Grand Slam final.

This was the 10th time these 2 were meeting, and it was Federer who won it all 10 times and this was also Federer's 10th Grand Slam win !!! Perfect 10 .. maybe.

I would want to see Gonzales play more and more games with Federer and I am sure he would one day beat Federer. Wow !!! My first prediction, lets see if it will ever come true :p

Reading Trends

When i refreshed my Google reader today, i got a link for finding the trend of my how much and when i read the items in my Google Reader. I got some really interesting trends about myself on it. And yeah, apart from this, i also was shown the feeds which i have least accessed, thus helping me in unsubscribing those non accessed feeds.

First was the trend about the usual times of the day when i access my reader.



Its really interesting to note here that I tend to read more during the noon times and at midnight. Whats more interesting is that my readings increase seem to exponentially increase after lunch :D

Next was the trend about the usual days of the week when i access my reader.


Most of the trends were not surprising. I tend to increase reading more as the week progresses in a linear progression. But what surprised me most was that my reading time suddenly falls down drastically on Friday. But on some more speculation, I figured out the reason. Its certainly the one day when I happen to work the most !!! ... lol :p

Warne sets up the whitewash

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007 !!!

Liked reading this cricinfo article that clear describes one of the most famous days of the retiring trio of Aussies. [ well may be just two of them are mentioned in this story ]

Upgraded

After almost more than 6 months, I atlast found the time to go buy a new "Wetern Digital 160 GB Hard disk".

I already have a 80GB HDD. I had to now configure this to be the master drive and add the new HDD as a slave. It was fun doing it myself. Before I went to the vendor, i read this nice blog post and got some information on how the jumpers have to be set for different configurations of the HDD. While purchasing the disk, I asked the vendor to explain me about the jumpers. He was kind enough to explain me that Western Digital comes with 5 possible settings and not 4, as is the case with Seagate. That was some knowledge. The various jumper positions were very clearly written on the Hard Disk itself. So it definately made things a bit easier.

Came home and opened up the computer box, and took around 15 minutes to actually fix the hard disk into a proper slot. Then, I had to just connect 2 chords, one for the bus, and the other probably power [ not quite sure ]. Thats it, 20 minutes, and I had the HDD installed in my machine !!!

Now, I had to format this new hard disk. There, started my search for a disk partitioning tool for windows partitions. I primarily wanted to use the second disk as a back up disk and for my video editing sessions, and so it had to have a primary Windows partition with ofcourse enough spare space for all the various Linux versions i am planning to install and fill up the 160 GB space :D

While "googling" i came across this very well articulated cool solution about partitioning on Linux. Ofcourse, it didnt help me a lot, but was very good information none the less. It struck me that i could perhaps create a windows partition from my Linux partition !!! Well, i tried it and then realised that i could not format it :-( Also, it was recommended to always format the partition with the native OS. So, i didnt venture much into this.

I downloaded a trial demo version of Paritition Magic, and after spending an hour on downloading and installing and configuring my hard disk parittiions with it, when i clicked the option that actually would write the new configuration on the hard disk, it gave me a very innocent popup message which read something like ... "This is only a demo version. Please install a paid version to perform this operation." I was like, oh no, it really said "demo" version ... AAArrrgggghhhh X-(

After some more googling, i found this very good article that taught me to use the disk partitioning tool already present on Windows XP to create partitions on my new HDD. I was contemplating on buying a new software for partitioning and thanks to this article, i saved getting fooled.

Now, my machine is more fatter :-) upgraded and ready to go .......

Merry Christmas to you all !!!