Thursday, October 28, 2004

Picasa

If you have a lot of digital photos on your computer, here is a software that can organize it all for you. It's Picasa. It is now a Google company. I have installed it on my PC and I love it. Timeline feature is sleek.



Friday, October 22, 2004

India Call Center Video

Someone sent me this video excerpt from a Conan O'Brien Show. It was really funny. It is a 13 MB file. You can find it here (via),

Call Center Video

Thursday, October 21, 2004

I Yahoo

Yesterday I was reading Apercevoir's article about the birthday reminders and blue noses. :)

I suggested she use Yahoo for it. That got me into writing this post.

At Yahoo, I get a bunch of services under one roof and a single sign-on. Bill Thomson at BBC had an interesting article about this yesterday. I agree with him. I subscribe to so many websites on the internet that I have store to all the website accounts and passwords in a file. Being at Yahoo, I can avoid at least a few. For example, the ever annoying birthdayalarm. Did you ever get a birthday request from them? If yes, you know what I mean.

Here all the Yahoo services I use regularly,

1. Yahoo! Mail : Of course!. I have like 5 e-mail ids. :)

2. Yahoo! Groups: My school and ex-office-mate groups are hosted here.

3. Yahoo! Bookmarks: I store all my favorite website links on internet and available everywhere. Browser links are only available on the computer.

4. Yahoo! Calendar: I am not busy enough yet to use a calendar. But I use the events tab for storing birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other important events. And I get reminded about them.

5. Yahoo! Photos: I create personal photo albums that I send back to my family.

6. Yahoo! Briefcase: I backup my files over here incase my computer should crash.

7. Yahoo! Geocities: My personal websites are over here.

8. Yahoo! Addressbook: My personal address book available for lookup anywhere.

They have many more services that I never or rarely use.

One stop shop. Why would I go anywhere else?

Thanks Yahoo for keeping it free. Hopefully for ever. :)


Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Automatic Blog Checking

I tried to keep the title simple. Technically it is called "RSS/Atom Feed Aggregation". It sounds complicated, but it is a very simple concept. Please read on.

If you had asked me what RSS/Atom was about 2 weeks back, I would have had no idea. But now, I can say RSS is the best thing that happened to blogging world.

Without getting into too much detail, RSS helps me in checking changes in other blogs very quickly. Instead of visiting every single blog site (that interests me) and checking whether they had created any new posts, I use a Feed Aggregator to automatically do that for me.

I use a feed aggregator called Sage that comes as an extension in FireFox browser (both of them are free downloads). It turned out to be pretty simple to setup.

1. I installed FireFox.
2. I installed the Sage extension.
3. Restarted FireFox and started Tools - Sage.

Sage comes with sleek tool (a button) called "Discover Feeds". When you visit a blog, Sage can automatically discover the RSS feed and give you ability to add the site to your list. You can also manually add a feed by using "Manage Feed List" option.

Try it and you will discover more features. If you have any questions, add a comment, would be glad to answer them.

All this had made me a FireFox fan and so the link below :).

Get Firefox!

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Teakada found me

I don't know how Hemant found my page...Would like to ask him? But, Yay! someone read my blog. :) He had linked me on the TN Ad article. Thanks Hemant.

TN Ad on WSJ

The other day my boss brought a WSJ newspaper that had something good to say about Tamil Nadu. I was impressed to see WSJ doing such an article on my state. After some reading it turned out it was a government ad that got published. 'Amma' is bringing new business in. It is a good read. You can find it here (Needs Acrobat reader).