TechNayak(mirror)

Remember early 2004 and the release of Gmail ? The “ooh so exclusive, invite only” mailbox that was so cool. I remember. How hard I tried to get an invite, how I rejoiced when I layed my eyes on it; How I tried to figure out why is the page not navigating or how is that my contacts are autofilling the to field but I cannot find them in the source. How, almost after 4 whole months of searching, I learnt the buzzword that would graduate me from mere novice to a professional in the web space. AJAX.

After that started the GCraze. Almost any entity that had a G before it was sought out to be the most watched property on the web. This craze still holds; the only difference is that the craze has moved from web developers to general public. Most G properties are running only because of the G in front, sort of like the Y! of the late 90s. Call it fate or just too much popularity, I think a lot of people are coming the full circle.

Over the recent few days I have seen a lot of discontent among all the G users. I shall list most of the ones I remember, but you will get the idea..

- Mail : probably the most sought after mail service in the recent past has its own share of problems. The first being slow connections. You must see Gmail running at our university, when 250 people share a 16Mbps connection, Gmail takes on a life of its own. Mails dont open, conversations are not updated and the chat feature is a pure disaster. The biggest problem I have with Gmail are the intrusive ads next to my mails.
- Orkut and Google Talk: Orkut was the social network for India, so claim many people. But if it wasn’t for the G tag, I would have liked to see how far Orkut would have gone. I know this having competed with Orkut for a year with my social networking venture samparkh. The problem with social networks with no personal value add to it ( unlike del.icio.us or flickr)  is that, it tends to grow boring, and spam and other marketing material get the better of the network . You have no choice but to opt out. I consider Gtalk as a piece of art , a wonderful piece of software who got the design and the user experience part just right. But Orkut integration did one very awful thing, it increased my contacts on Gtalk from a mere 10 to about 200, which I really didnt want. Some say I missed a warning to the same, but now there is no undoing it. Lot of my friends are shifting back to Ymsgr and Windows messenger because they see more peaceful days there.

So thanks to these problems and more, there is a reverse migration to older properties who over time have become better and people are rediscovering their long lost loved ones. Google is doing all the right things with other properties though. I love the reader and just cant do without it and thanks to the sharing and the friends aspect of it, its almost like a new paradigm of use of RSS. Docs also is really cool, though I still like using Zoho, coz its home made and is just purely awesome. Thats about it I guess.

ps : Inspiration for this post comes from my valiant struggle for almost 2 whole hours to get Gmail to work only to see a “Your Account is experiencing Errors” or something. And then I try Yahoo Mail and its so wonderfully fast and awesome and guess what, hotmail works like a charm too.

update: My Jinx continues. I have the Gods pissed. I decide to look at my shared items page and I see my own blogpost has gone missing wtf

Tags: google, gmail, google talk, gtalk, orkut

So, I downloaded the latest installment of Firefox and tried it out. A brief about me, I have been a firefox user for a long time now and usually wait for newer versions of the browser to be shipped. The addons feature when launched was truly the best concept ever, then came the integrated search bar, spell check and a host of other wonderful features. I admit, I use firefox purely for its addons and nothing else (Actually the other reason is that my primitive designs really look good on firefox , IE and me dont really get along on the design playfield )
  Well the 3rd installment really didn’t get me excited. Except for the full text like search on the address bar, I really didnt see any difference. The so called great features of FF3 viz offline support and apis for the same, social features etc are completely missing. So there is faster javascript and stuff, but for people in the third world countries ( at least in terms of bandwidth) like ours, pages take an eternity to load and a slight improvement in JS doesnt really do much until underlying infrastructure is changed.
  The 3rd installment of FF has let me down. I still recommend people to use Flock. Their features and extensions on firefox are really great and do wonders for web users.

The World Environment day has again highlighted the energy crisis the world is facing and its almost certain that the next biggest market is energy. Technology for efficient consumption of energy, be it electrical or fuel driven, will be at the peak of global demand. Many companies are getting into the energy space in the hopes of cashing in on this phenomenon. Though we may not live to see the true implications of the energy crisis, its almost guaranteed that future generations will find it really hard to survive the energy crisis. There are some things that we as individuals can do to help preserve the environment – here are a few that are not all that hard to follow
 

•  Follow yearly maintenance schedules to ensure that your furnace and air conditioner run efficiently.
• Unplug rarely used appliances such as a TV located in the spare bedroom.
• Dry your clothes on a laundry line instead of using a clothes dryer
• Replace all incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFL). CFL’s last up to 10 to 15 times longer and are 75 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
• Turn off lights when leaving a room.
• Switch off your monitor or close the lid of your laptop when not in use. Remember always to shut down the PC before going home from Office.
• Set up your monitor to go to sleep when idle for more than 10 minutes.
• Reduce the brightness in your monitor.
  
• Do not unnecessarily leave electrical items like your phone, camera on continuous charging.
• Ventilate your room and use fans and Air conditioners sparingly.
• Always check the emission of your vehicle, remember to tune your engine optimallyto cut emission levels.
  
• Share a carpool or drive with a friend to work or college.
  
• Don’t waste paper, use a computer wherever necessary.
  

I also found out that I emit 3.056 Tonnes of Carbon dioxide every year   This is my environment day post