Heres a a good initiative

With all the political ruckus in the country here is a nice initiative by a group of students and some young working professionals to try and remedy this. They have come up with a website to educate the educated section of the society to go out and vote. They also have some data which shows how narrow some of the victory margins in past elections were.. which means every vote counts. Here is the website. www.voteindia.in

And now reservations for IIT faculty..

Can you imagine reservations for IIT Faculty?
Reservations for students is a big issue as it is and now this. A below standard instructor would lead to the whole batch being potentially substandard.
The biggest fear is that if IITs adopts such a policy it would fuel a race among the other educational institutions to join the bandwagon.
Heres a link to petition opposing this move by the HRD department Revoke IIT Faculty Reservation Petition.
Do sign it. This is an important issue.

firefox v3 first impression

i was waiting for FF3 to go live. After trying to connect to firefox.com for an hour.. (yes it went down under briefly) i got my new firefox.. All the promises made.. and kept.. My first impression its blazing fast.. kudos to the firefox team.. still have to try all the plugins but its so much more satisfying to browse the web.

Move over from outlook to thunderbird

After using outlook for a very long time I finally thought about moving on to thunderbird. The process of setting this up turned out to be surprisingly easy..

After downloading thunderbird the installer automatically imported my existing outlook psts from my desktop(my biggest concern about the shift was loosing my old mails).

It did not migrate my email accounts though. However adding my gmail account to thunderbird was a breeze. Unlike setting this in outlook there was no need to set up the incoming/outgoing servers.. just my account id and password did the trick.

My next concern was i could not minimize thunderbird to tray icon like i was used to for outlook. A google search led me to this nice plugin which fixed this..

Importing my contacts from outlook address book was straight forward too.
Thunderbird asked me on start up whether I wanted to use it as default. Marking this as yes means i can right click any document and now the send to email recipient uses thunderbird instead of outlook.

One thing which nagged me was all that all my old mails showed as unread.. A simple "ctrl a" (select all) and right click followed by mark as read in each of my folders solved this issue.

As a final word i love what i got.. Its really light and does not bother my machines memory the way outlook used to.. Next am going to try using open office.

The definition of language

A few years back in the year 2002 I was completing hand written applications for my first job . There always was a field called languages known. My standard entry was English,Hindi,Marathi followed by a joke to whoever was around "can i enter C as one of the options?". Usually this resulted in a light hearted banter.

Fast forward to 2007. Am on a website filling up job applications. Theres a drop down titled languages known. What do i do? I start looking for Java(by pressing J repeatedly.. its a drop down you know) and then i see that the options started with Afrikaans.. "J" got me to Javanese..

I thought of that incident 5 years hence. It brought a smile to my face. The world has come a full circle or is it me who has?

Strange things technology makes you do or should i say strange things technology does to you?

scrubit unavailable...

i was using scrubit proxys as my dns.. today around 430pm est all my webpages started showing 404s.. after some debugging found that scrubit was down.. had to change my dns to local to make my internet work... was a dreadful hour being without internet

Battle Star Gallactica....

Let me begin by saying that BSG is simply the best series out on the tube right now. I watched the series so far in rerun and liked it immensely. Not only does it cater to a thirst for sci fi but also has a strong drama.. a story which could as well be unfolding at capitol hill…

Humanity and tenants of its behavior may not change just because of advancement in civilization is a significant point this series puts forth, looking back at our history so far makes it seem plausible...

Past sci fi series like Star Trek portrayed an advanced civilization (including humanity) as an enlightened race... free from sins and with higher sense of morality. However how much have we changed in the past 500 years or so of our advancement? We still wage wars for trivial reasons; look upon life as expendable and with a patchy view of morality.

BSG builds on this fact in a very realistic manner. Looking forward to the final season this Friday….