Adios personal web pages

Posted on May 7, 2009 by Ankur

Geocities shall be closing down this year…it made me also realize that I have recently completed a decade of my being on the Internet.

Here’s the Yahoo! Profile which tells that I am member since April 1999

Back then it was so cool to have a webpage on the Internet, naturally as a 15 year old I was so inclined to have one of my own. The debate used to be between Geocities, Homestead, Tripod or Fortunecity…finally it feels that the days of free web hosting are numbered thanks to Blogging and the likes.

Here you may have a look at my website (if you have the patience to explore you shall find a few gems out there): http://uk.geocities.com/ankur2130

Twitter…Connecting the dots

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Ankur

In the last week I managed to connect the dots of my Internet presence.

Today, as I write my blog a tweet�is automatically posted on my Twitter account by using Feedburner.

Now any new tweets�are then shown up as my status on my Facebook page. On the other hand, the same tweets are also shown up on my Orkut profile by this application called Twikut.

The only circular reference that doesn’t work now is the display of my twitter feed on my blog, which is now encrypted and cannot be shown on WordPress.com blogs (due to restriction of JavaScript widgets).

I guess the last straw would be connecting my GTalk statuses to Twitter, where any change in status would result in a new tweet being posted on Twitter.

Chandrayaan – India goes to the moon!

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Ankur

I am elated, excited, glad and exuberant!

As India starts its countdown for its moon mission ‘Chandrayaan-I‘ I can’t help remember the song “Chhodo kal ki baaten, kal ki baat purani” from the film “Hum Hindustani” released in 1960.

Chandryaan, which�comes from the Hindi words Chandra meaning the “moon” and yaan meaning “vehicle” is to be launched on Wednesday, 22nd October at 0050 GMT from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota.

The flight to the moon shall take 5 days, with the objective of�creating a 3D atlas of�near and far side of the moon. It shall also do chemical and mineralogical mapping of the surface for different minerals and metals.

Its imagery is also expected to be used by NASA for setting up their Moonbase in future. Built at a cost of US$76 million, the mission includes five ISRO payloads and six payloads from other international space agencies such as NASA and ESA, and the Bulgarian Aerospace Agency.

Click herefor the 3D model of Chandrayaan.

Wednesday would be a day for us to be proud of ISRO, it shall also be the day when we shall be witnessing an story worth telling for�years to come.

Naya daur likhenge milkar nayi kahani…

�

GTalk forgets to refresh names!

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Ankur

This is not a new observation, plenty of the users have noticed this in GTalk but it deserves a post…aren’t we all marketing Google’s products by bashing them around as well?

Anyways, if you haven’t noticed GTalk adds new contacts as per their names given on Orkut, and to top it it never refreshes them. So some of my friends here who used to change their Orkut names as a means to reflect their status (many still don’t use the status option in Orkut). The end result, the old names+statuses never go away(even when the Orkut names have been updated) until I decide to rename the contacts.�

Get Google Chrome-ified!

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Ankur

I am sure that plenty more bloggers have already posted their reviews of Google’s new web browser Chrome, many of them might be more technically erudite than me; but what the heck! Here’s my take on Google Chrome which I have been using since the last 14 hours now!

The striking observation on the first start of the browser would be the placement of Tabs on the top, there is no File Menu (hidden or otherwise) instead you have a file icon on the right side of the Address Bar.

The interface is uncluttered and sleek, and the browser opens in a jiffy quite faster than Internet Explorer 7.0 or Flock on my computer, which is very admirable.

Another great feature is that every tab exists as an individual process, so in case of an application crash (which IE seems to have often with Adobe Acrobat) only that tab dies and the rest are saved from annihilation.

There is no search tab �you do it only from the address bar, also I cannot figure out where to change my default search engine. Apart from this, this baby is loaded with all bells and whistles like Popup Blocker, Icognito tab (the browsing history is hidden in this case, something which we can notice in IE 8 BETA).

What it lacks is that most Advanced Options are so well tucked away that it can be a bit uncomfortable for seasoned users. It also has this constantly running process GoogleUpdate running in the background all the time, which seems utterly not critical to be running all the while.

I could also not see any support for add-ons the way Firefox does, hope its still on the cards.

Would I use it regularly? Well, I dont know…atleast till the honeymoon’s over. I do love the fact that this browser opens up in a split second.

The verdict is that Chrome shows a lot of promise, but then it doesn’t offer anything out of the world which would make you switch. Also, I am tired of Google’s perpetual BETA versions of services and software like Gmail(since 2004), Gtalk(2005) and now Chrome(2008)…what if they never cross the beta stage again?

You may download Chrome from�http://www.google.com/chrome