Ganguly hate site

Ganguly has gone to an extent of attracting a hate site in his name. Hate sites are very rare in India.
www.ihateganguly.com

Wi-fi access in Legend Koramangala

Just had been to the restaurant Legend in Koramangala. I am bit astonished to see that the restaurant being Wi-Fi enabled. It is free of cost. Carry your Wi-fi enabled laptop, get hooked to 512 kbps connection, carry on with your business while munching your lunch/tiffon.

Gmail Auto save feature

Gmail has a new Auto save feature. It is a boon. I use to loose mail contents that I had typed because of combination of enabling keyboard shortcuts and auto refresh of gmail.

Most of the time when I am mid-way typing the mail, a refresh would take the focus away from the TextField and Gmail web app responds to the keyboard enteries as shortcuts discarding the mail contents that I had typed.

The auto save feature saves a draft every few minustes and I will not be loosing contents badly as I was.

CCD advisory notice from Canon, Sony,...

Close on the heels of Canon's advisory notice to customers on faulty CCD in their camera's many other digital camera manufacturers have also provided advisory notices.

Canon
Sony
Fuji
Konica - Minolta
Olympus

Canon Customer Service responsiveness

As I posted earlier about my camera problem, I had been in touch with the Canon Service Center representatives in India. They are polite and responsive. Approchable through email and you get prompt replies. They have adviced me to give my camera for repair to M/s Deendhayal camera & co in bangalore.

I am keeping my fingers crossed till I receive my camera back with free CCD replacement or repair.

Darshan of Lord Muruga

Was on vacation over last week (12 to 16 Oct). Made a dashing trip to Palani hills to salvage the pilgrimage desire of my parents. The new addition to Palani is the Rope car facility (as I posted earlier, no photos due to faulty camera). Rope car makes the trek up the hill easier. It is the same one you see in movies that hangs and moves across valleys. The winch car is still operational, but used less as it is not that efficient in handling crowd.

The rope car is quiet fast as it takes 3 mins for one way ride and can carry 4 people. You have to shell out Rs 15 per head for the one way trip. Rest other things are as usual. Since this time there were less number of devotees, the place seemed a bit neat than I expected.

I had two good dharshans of lord Muruga.

Exporting RSS subscriptions using OPML

By now most of us would have got to know that Google has released RSS Reader beta. As usual I wished I could give it a try. I had been using bloglines for the past 6 months or so and wanted to checkout what google has in its store to offer.

Both bloglines and google offers you to export and import your subscriptions using OPML. Oh heavens..What a cool way to migrate things across products. I realized the power of open standards.

It will be really beneficial if even other competitive products start supporting open standards.

Combo pack

During shopping in large shops/malls you always come across combo pack or offer. Say for instance you can get three tees for some money rather than picking them individually. Price wise it always makes sense, since it gets you the best offer, but on the choice wise you are fooled.

Out of the three tees, I am damn sure that one will be useless (bright red / maroon/ yellow color simply which you can not wear). What a trick these marketing guys play with you? They rip your money by getting you a simply useless offer.

Canon Powershot A70 imaging problem

What to say... it is a pure coincidence.

I own a Canon Powershot A70 digital camera bought on Aug 2003 from US. It is pretty good in performance and quality of pictures. Over a past couple of months it showed me some signs of problem. Intermittently it failed to powerup properly, in the shooting mode, I will see blank screen on the lcd.

I guessed that it could be a problem related to Ni-MH recharagable batteries. After doing some research on the Ni-MH battery lives, I found that Ni-MH batteries do get crystallized over the period of use. Then I came to a logical conclusion that the batteries need to be replaced. I bought a new set of Energizer Ni-MH batteries for use.

Even after using the new set of batteries the intermittent problem still remained. Today when I powered on my camera in shooting mode, I saw a blurred image appearing through the lcd. That seemed to me as if the CCD has worn out. The photos that I took also came distorted.

When I started checking my bloglines today morning, I found from dpreview that Canon has advised users about the same problem that I am facing. They are offering a free service. But am I eligible is the million dollar question?

Since I bought this camera from Amazon through net shopping, I do not have a receipt for the same. I do have the order information and Voucher from Amazon. But still will it be a valid proof. I am planning to give it a try by calling their customer care.

Will update more as I go through this.

Sleep Deprivation

I had been under sleep deprivation for the past couple of days due to some pressing work. Over these days the deprivation had a detrimental effect on my concetration and energy. I felt dousy all through the day and over the end of day I had very little concetration left with me. This made me to miss a couple of important points.

Bangalored

Krish gives a new meaning of being bangalored in his blog post. Read through it.

Form factor

As per Moore's law, every 18 months computing power doubles. I found a similar empirical formula on the form factor. Every 24 months the form factor decreases by 2 folds.

Here are some comparisons...

Canon Powershot A 70 camera (bought in Aug 2003) - uses 4 AA size batteries
Canon Powershot SD 300 (bought in Sep 2005) - uses Lithium ion battery

Both cameras roughly has the same set of features, but the form factor has decreased by a factor of 2. Even in this case I could say it decreased by a factor of 3 or 4.

Similarly the CF card
SanDisk 256 MB CF card - bought in Aug 2003
SanDisk 512 MD SD card - bought in Sep 2005

Both has form factor difference of similar calibre.

Apple iPod Mini
Apple iPod Nano

iPod nano has really flattened everything that Mini had. Nano even had a special flattened pin for USB connectivity.