Thought Garage

A year in review. What the world has been searching through 2010 on Google . Search On : Searching through 2010

We only believe what we are comfortable with and what we can accommodate. Everything else is totally ‘unbelievable’. Either, we just ignore or suspect the Messenger as we think it must have been totally made up. But truth could be totally something else, many a times. Same thing with your own Dreams. Just like we discard that ‘incredible’ stuff, we discard and discount our own dreams too. So if you want to achieve something incredible, you must first get comfortable with the fact that it is indeed possible. Not just day dreaming. But real solid feeling that something could be done, whether you believe you may succeed in that or not.  That is the reason it’s a MUST to start working towards it ASAP.  More you spend time on that day dream, the more realistic it would become. And pretty soon, you will become comfortable and believe, “I CAN DO IT”. It would be great if you can find somebody that went through similar cycle or have done similar stuff. But, Do NOT let what ...

At any moment, I make a decision that is the Best I could do at that moment. So I have absolutely no regrets of any of my decisions. Some decisions turned out to be great turning points, some luckily worked out much better than expected and some happened to be utter failures. Good thing is that those failures remained as failures just for a while, precisely, until I realize they were failures. It is lot easier to accept failures, if you just live in the present and look out in the future. Once I realize, make my next decision that could correct or go completely in a different direction. And then, life goes on.

Cool infographic illuminating some differences between Web Designers and Web Developers. Source : SixRevisions

What an amazing concept and implementation. Probably the BEST application on iPad. The Flipboard application on the iPad can create a stunning and truly delightful magazine from any Twitter feed (or Facebook for that matter).   It looks at a tweet, access the URL and compose the original article in a beautiful magazine format. It also picks up images from the article and arranges them in various magazine formats.   If the tweet is not referring to an URL, then it nicely composes the tweet like a quote in a magazine. A little intro to the  Flipboard for iPad. Introduction to Flipboard for iPad Take a look at a couple of awesome screenshots of the Magazine created from Twitter feed of @inspions.

This is pretty cool online show application built  on Silverlight technologies. Silverlight streaming video, excellent typography, really cool art work,  slick animations and tons of relevant content synchronized with the video. http://everybodysbusiness.msn.com/   Content all spread out nicely.

Here is a great opportunity to learn more about Silverlight. A FULL day FREE Fire Starter Event on Silverlight on 2nd Dec 2010.  Great news is that the event is streamed online so you can watch from anywhere in the world.  Register for the event here .

Looks like Apple is beefing up for some announcements tomorrow, on iTunes. Will iTunes have an SDK too?

For the last couple of days, you may be experiencing problems in accessing Thought Garage blog as the servers hosted with SiteGround are under DDOS attack. Hopefully it will be clear soon.

Can an Employer offer part-time employment on H1B? Can an employee work at multiple jobs while on H1B? Check out this latest bulletin ( VOL. XVI, no. 46; Nov 2010, week 2 Posted : 12.Nov.2010 ) from Murthy Law firm that answers these two rather complicated and frequently asked questions.

With the financial and business muscle Tata’s have, they could have build just any other car for the new age, but they have decided to build a Nano, a car for everybody.  Just watched this video R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products - R.A. Mashelkar (2009) on Active Player , where the speaker was sharing a bit of the story and idea behind building Nano.  Engineer RA Mashelkar shares three stories of ultra-low-cost design from India that use bottom-up rethinking, and some clever engineering, to bring expensive products (cars, prosthetics) into the realm of the possible for everyone. Source : R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products - R.A. Mashelkar (2009) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched Uncle Ben goes shopping on Active Player . The Federal Reserve is trying to stimulate the economy by buying billions of dollars worth of bonds from banks. Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains how that's supposed to work. Uncle Ben goes shopping from Marketplace on Vimeo . Source : Uncle Ben goes shopping from APM: Marketplace Whiteboard ( Feed ) via Active Player

Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly.  Its always left to somebody to help us out. PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application.  And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed.  And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual. Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe.  Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here .  If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format. Active Player If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RS...

If you are tinkering on developing .NET Applications on Windows Mobile 7, here is a free eBook from Microsoft Press by Charles Petzold, that can get you started.  The book is available in PDF and XPS formats. Some more free e-Books for .NET Developers moving to VS 2010 here .

The next best bill board could be just your car. If you haven’t seen enough Advertisement in any given day, well, you will pretty soon. Ads are coming to a car near you. Its called ‘Cash Ur Drive’. You can make your car a moving bill board. Read more here . Via Springwise

Windows Live Spaces, the Microsoft’s Blogging platform will be shutdown early next year (16th March to be precise) and is offering to migrate your current blog to Wordpress.com . The email I received announcing this is quite confusing. The email subject says ‘Changes coming to your Windows Live Space’. I expected that it may have been upgraded with more features.  But they are simply shutting it down, and they appear to have trouble saying it. We are very excited to announce our collaboration with a premier and innovative blogging service, WordPress.com , to offer you an upgraded blogging experience. We'll help you migrate your current Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com or you can download it to save for later. On March 16th, 2011 your current space will close . With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across our products. We chose to partner to provide our users with a fantastic blogging solution. However...

I read great stories and reports about Plano that Plano is one of the best and arguably one of the most affluent cities. I wonder why City maintains these volleyball courts in Russelcreek park in such a horrible and unsafe conditions for so long. One of our friends complained back in August 2009 about the plight of these courts. It appears nothing has been done and conditions have only gone worse since then. Looking at these grounds, I am quite sure that no city official paid a visit to these grounds since that complaint made or made sure otherwise these grounds are maintained well and safer. Hope at least they can take a look at these pictures and do something. Please do send an email to Plano city officials with these pictures or pass the URL to them. Hope, we will have better and safer grounds soon. The East Court : Hope this pole stay strong for few more days…! ( Pole on the east side) The East Court : West side pole. You can also see the condition of the net. We...

Groupon 's Unsubscribe screen asks you to ‘Punish’ a team member that recommended Email Subscriptions whenever you unsubscribe to those Email notifications. Nice, personal, playful and bring you back to interacting with their site, even after you decided to go away. Loved it.

A book published in 1825 about the Geography of the world, places, people, cultures and so on. I was quite curious to read how and what the people at that time imagined or came to know about the world and more about how they perceived it. Put the context that it was in 1800s and you will be rather surprised and shocked to read it. I loved it. Thanks to Hemanth for sharing the link. Link : Google Picasa Album : Geography Book

There is a good list of FREE books on Programming at Stack overflow here . Since they are available for FREE, you may be tempted to download all of them at once thinking you could read any time later. You may probably never even look at them again. So download one book at a time and read it like it matters. And Keep going. Good luck ! And one more link, just received in MSDN Flash, a collection of “7 Freely available E-Books essential for .NET Programmers and Architects” by Anoop Madhusudhan .

“ I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.” -- The Oath of Non-Allegiance, Alistair Cockburn Sold. And Signed.

Alistair Cockburn reading the poem, “ Every story has two sides.. ”

After a few hours with the iPad, I realized that I was feeling a sensation I'd only remembered once before: back in 1995 when someone showed me the World Wide Web. There's no dramatic new technology, we've seen tablets before just as we'd seen hypertext before. But the overall package was game-changer. I don't know if the iPad will be The Device, but I do think that this kind of device will make huge difference to how we read and watch things in the future Source : http://martinfowler.com/bliki/iPad.html

Why did China, India and Brazil all emerge so much more rapidly from the global financial crisis than advanced economies did? In a presentation in Denver to the National Association for Business Economics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, now of New York University, offered several reasons: These economies learned bitter lessons in the 1997-98 crisis that afflicted them more than advanced economies. They were in “a good initial position” with relatively low leverage, and thus didn’t get hit with the severe “balance sheet recession” that hit the U.S. They hadn’t any complex securitized financial instruments. They had built up large foreign-exchange reserves. Their central banks responded, much as advanced countries’ central banks did, with speed and agility to the credit tightening. Their economic managers displayed “a high degree of competence.” Source: WSJ

As per Nielsen report, Kindle owners are more wealthier, older and educated compared to younger and majorly male  iPad owners. Source : Nielsen

Just noticed that with Windows Live Essentials 2011 upgrade, Windows Live Writer also gets Ribbon style interface that became so famous and productive with MS Office applications. If you have been using WLW for a while but haven’t used any MS Office applications that feature ribbon style interface, you are in for a big surprise and little bit of confusion.  If you are looking for all your Picture effects, they are split into two different sections: borders and effects. Click on Image to make these Picture tools/Format section visible.

If you haven't noticed this "Do The Math" widget already, Amazon appears to be offering a Textbook Buyback store where you can sell your books back to Amazon. Amazon is including the price at which a particular book can be bought back and showing the effective price you may have to pay if you just want to read it once and return to the store. Quite a saver for many books that we normally read just once and ready to return.

I have installed MS Office 2010 recently on top of Windows 7. Thought I would share a few first impressions and reflections here. Simply put, Office apps are lot more visually pleasing in Office 2010 and greatly productive as they have always been. If there is one functionality I would request in MS Office, it would be the ability to publish documents in to ePub format as well. PDF support is already built in, starting from 2007. I do not know exactly when the first office was officially released, but based on Wikipedia entry, it was some time in the fall of 1990. That would mean, it’s 20 years since the first release.  Lots of things have changed since I first looked at Office applications in 1995.   Source:  Page 50, Info World, 19th November 1990 via Google Books Of all software applications I worked on, MS Excel is still the application I love the most for its power, functionality and brutal simplicity while note taking application OneNote comes second. Outl...

I have been to Spice Rack Plano (2865 McDermott Rd # 105, Plano, TX 75025), quite a few times so far. And every time I visit, I will ponder over the same question, is it worth the hassle to go here? Short answer is, Yes. At least for now. Spice Rack is an Indian Grocery Store + fast food center. A medium to larger grocery store in size with a surprisingly larger kitchen.  On most occasions I see more crowd at the fast food kitchen than in the grocery area. May be that would explain the larger size kitchen. And you can get most of Indian groceries, vegetables and meat (chicken and goat) as well. On many occasions I found that groceries are relatively expensive here, so, unless some thing is essential and got no time, I won’t buy here. Having said that, almost all my visits to Spick Rack can be attributed to the fast food Kitchen. Its more or less close to South Indian cuisine despite the presence of varieties of national and global interest. And you get a wide variety of it....

Thinking Machine explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you. The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine. -- Thinking Machine [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Thinking Machine, thinking ..."] [/caption]

Just watched Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing - Dan Cobley (2010) on Active Player . Physics and marketing don't seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding. Source : Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing - Dan Cobley (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" on Active Player . Source : Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" from O'Reilly Velocity Conference ( Feed ) via Active Player It is totally surprising to see that Hotmail is actually better/faster in Safari browser on the Mac than any browser/OS. ( Source : PPT )

Just watched Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world - Seth Priebatsch (2010) on Active Player . By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce. Source : Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world - Seth Priebatsch (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless (2010) on Active Player . David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world. Source : David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Chris Anderson and Wired offer yet another riveting conclusion (sounds like a prediction for some of us) that the Web as we know is dead as we are getting more and more connected on the internet with apps and devices. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone. -- The Web Is Dead. Long Live Internet, Wired I agree 100%, as it is just a fact for how I consume content on the internet. Almost (99%) everything I do on the internet is done through a custom application (mostly on iPhone and iPad) rather on the web. Active Learning Suite In fact the applications I have been building as part of Active Learning suite exemplify the same conclusion about web.  Active Player lets you enjoy and learn from your favorite videos and podcasts without ever visiting a single web page. If a website doesn’t offer an RSS Feed, you can create your own RSS Feed of any content available on the internet with Active Feeds and help the rest of the world...

Listening now: Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is doing to our Brains on Active Player . Dr. Moira Gunn sits down with author, Nicholas Carr, to discuss the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live, through the pages of his new book, The Shallows: What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains. Source : Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is doing to our Brains from IT Conversations via Active Player

While posting through TweetButton , Twitter translates your URL to a short URL, say in this example, http://active-player.inspions.com to http://t.co/0toCfbl .  This is all but normal. But a nice improvement Twitter did was instead of just posting the short URL in the tweet, it posts a readable URL while still linking to the short URL. It totally cool improvement and makes tweets more readable. Compare it with this following tweet of this very post, but using Google’s short URL.

Just watched Lifecycle of a Wireframe by Nick Finck on Active Player . Wonderful session. Dive deep into the process used to create wireframes, a key deliverable for user experience designers. Hear about the principles that guide this process, how to create great wireframes (all the way down to the nitty-gritty page or screen level), and how to identify and deliver solutions that meet your clients' business goals and solve their problems. Walk away with a better understanding of what delivering awesome wireframes entails - from methodology, to process, to delivery - and how to do it yourself. If you're an information architect, interaction designer, visual designer, or regular old user experience-curious creature: this one's for you. Source : Lifecycle of a Wireframe from MIX 2010 ( Feed ) via Active Player While we can just start with a white paper and pencil to get started with wire-frames, We could also create great wireframes right in MS Power Point itself...

Just watched Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - Daniel Kahneman (2010) on Active Player . Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. Source : Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - Daniel Kahneman (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

There is a heated discussion going on at LinkedIn in .NET People's group about what is the most preferred .NET Programming Language : VB or C#.  I don't want to add fuel to the fire, but just wanted to point out search patterns for C# and VB.NET on Google. As usual, interpretation is left to you.

Look at this funny error displayed by Youtube when some thing went wrong on the servers. Is Google referring to its developers as monkeys? or am I missing some joke? “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, show them this information :”

While discussing about the trend charts of .NET Versions over lunch yesterday, the discussion led to ASP.NET MVC and how does it fare against Ruby On Rails (ROR). Ofcourse, we are just talking about Search Patterns here.  So here is the search Patterns chart between RoR and ASP.NET MVC. It is quite a surprising chart though. Try interpreting the chart and let us know your thoughts.

  Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life's most valuable lesson: "I can." Watch her students take local issues into their own hands, lead other young people, even educate their parents. Such a simple and inspiring motto : “One Idea. One Week. One Billion lives to change.”

The official Indian Currency, “Rupee” (INR) got its official currency Symbol now. You can use it now on web pages all over. Look how the symbol looks on a typical webpage  Picture Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rupee_sign

Listen to this wonderful conversation between Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson happened back in 2007 before we ever heard of ASP.NET MVC. Transcript here . Scott sits down with Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals and talks about beauty, making developers happen, the death (or life) of HTML, the future of Microsoft, and asks if we should care about Rich Internet Applications. DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, well-known systems architect and Extreme Programming expert. --- Hansel Minutes   So delighted to see such a bold and open discussion between passionate developers with completely different backgrounds and ideas. Some how, this podcast explains a lots of things that were introduced in ASP.NET after 2007. Not suggesting that this has anything to do with that, but probably things must have been already moving in that direction, ...

Listen to this wonderful presentation by Kent Beck on Developer Testing . Kent Beck is widely recognized as the father of eXtreme Programming and JUnit. Kent's other contributions to software development include patterns for software, and the rediscovery of test-first programming. He is the author/co-author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon. Source : Kent Beck on Developer Testing .

Wondering which .NET version is the most popular version? Which .NET version got the most traction in the industry? Which version is the most discussed in the developer circles? Well, I am not sure if we have any public data that could answer any of those questions, particularly the commercial adoption part. But I looked at trends of search engine traffic and I found that these trends tell a story that is quite consistent with general perception. Look at the graph below illustrating the search trends of various .NET versions , captured from Google Trends . The story I believe is quite familiar to most .NET developers. I am not at all surprised to see .NET 1.1 still alive even in our searches, many companies are still running on .NET 1.1 and I guess haven’t found a compelling reason (that totally justify their investments) to upgrade. You can also see from the snapshot below, Visual studio editions follow the suit more or less closely along with respective .NET versions. ...

How many times in your whole life have you ever seen individuals or organizations admit their mistakes point blank without giving a spin or excuse? Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong . Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. -- Letter from Apple regarding iPhone 4 And the letter confirms that gripping iPhone 4 in a specific way could hurt its reception and thought its a design issue of iPhone. But I didn’t know that its the same way for any other mobile phone.

Google's logo for the 4th of July with a Goldberg's machine (its also Rude Goldberg's birthday).

Have you ever wondered how much spam you may be receiving on your blog? Make it a point to look at it, you might appreciate the work done by systems and people that are helping to stop this spam like never before. I have been using Akismet to help fighting with spam right from the moment I heard about it. Thanks a ton to Akismet, otherwise, I would have to manually moderate 235,193 spam comments on this blog. Thank you so much, Team Akismet. 99.949% of comments received on this blog are spam. I am delighted that  Akismet could kill the spam and saved me and scared at the same to see so much spam. It is totally unnecessary to include this pie chart here, as you can guess, you can’t miss the point.  I put it any ways in case you haven’t read those numbers above. Looking at this scary % of legitimate comments, I was worried and looked at Akismet website to see how my blog fares to global average of all blogs Akismet currently protects. It seems, I am getting undu...

Wonderful illustration of history of human communication by Google. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before. Source: Google Voice Blog

TIME’s interview (questions collected from TIME magazine’s readers) of Manoj Night Shyamalan, one of my favorite directors. There are movies that anybody can make, and there are movies that are just meant to be made by Manoj. Such a unique talent, I just love his style.

Its a fact of life that " Our civilization runs on software ", as Bjarne Stroustrup said a few years back. Its no stretch to say, If we have to learn about any History, it must be the History of computers then. Learn how all this civilization began at Computer History Museum . I still remember looking at punch cards and floppies and writing my first Program in Fortran back in College. And running those programs on the latest and greatest computers then, a 386. The world of computers and software has changed at a spectacular pace since then. I am glad, I am part of it in my own ways.

In our time, many of us have been taught to strive for an insane  perfection that means nothing. To get wholeness, you must try instead to strive for this kind of perfection, where things that don’t matter are left rough and unimportant, and the things that really matter are given deep attention . This is a perfection that seems imperfect. But it is  a far deeper thing."  - Christopher Alexander , Iconic and Legendary Architect and Author that  created The Pattern Language It sounds so common sense, but unfortunately some of us just don't get it.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi An application to learn. A platform to share. For those, that loves to learn and inspired to teach. In private beta now!.

Indian culture and mythology is all about Metaphors. But, its quite rare to come across somebody that apply those teachings in real life, leave alone fight deadliest cancer with that power of metaphors. Salute to her resolve and unflinching belief.   Renowned classical Indian dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. She tells her personal story of not only facing the disease but dancing through it, and gives a performance revealing the metaphor of strength that helped her do it. - TED Talks

One of my favorites and I believe is one of the best of contemporary leaders, Jaya Prakash Narayan was recently at Google and shared his thoughts. His ideology presented in a context that most NRIs and the world could easily understand, aptly named, “19th Century Politics and 21st Century Economics”.    You may follow the speech with interactive transcript feature on the youtube site .

Apple Safari version 5 makes it easy on your eyes to read content on websites. It smartly figures out what is real content and just shows up that. And you can easily resize content and even print the content. Printing a webpage just with content, makes it my best feature of all. Its sure the best way to read content on the web. The best way to read on the web. Safari Reader instantly banishes those blinking and flashing ads that distract you from your online articles. Say you’re browsing your favorite news site. Safari can tell if you’re on a web page with an article. Simply click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article — every page of it — instantly appears in a continuous, clutter-free view. Email, print, or zoom with a click using convenient onscreen controls. And if you change the size of the text, Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader. - Apple

Everybody knows what Chiranjeevi said before the elections in 2009 about Congress Party and TDP. Now Chiranjeevi says, Praja Rajyam Party is identical in principles to Congress party , so they will work together in upcoming Elections, even though they don’t merge. He will lend his friendly hand to Congress. How hilarious? All for one Rajya Sabha seat? It confirms the once infamous news story that Eenadu.com ran a while ago, that Praja Rajyam party will close its shop and merge with Congress.  Praja Rajyam Party really thinks they are no different from Congress, or at least they hate TDP as much as Congress do. Also it appears, these talks of merger and alliances have been going on each time there is some kind of election. It is clear, he is struggling to find an identify for himself and the party as it has been a total disaster at the poll booth and everything he did after that. No principles. No core beliefs. Its just dancing to the wind. Before Elections, Chiranje...

Unbelievable.

Thanks to Google , now any web developer can have stylish designer Fonts on their web pages. As simple as including a <link> tag to a CSS file hosted on Google’s servers. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed. Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers. The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using a...

Here is the tweet of the day. I have no clue what .NET developers think of Ruby on Rails (ROR), until now. (:-)) I don't see what the big deal is about ruby on rails. It's basically a clone of asp.net mvc  via Twitter Ha ha!

Education system, like agriculture ought to be customized, nourished and organic.  In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

This video was recorded about 6 years back in 2004 on MSDN Channel 9, where Eric Gunnerson was talking about challenges for Programmers then, around 2004. One of the biggest challenge used to be about keeping up with the pace of technology around you. Not surprisingly, I feel, nothing has changed since then. It is still one of the biggest challenges programmer face. Ask any .NET developer what do they think about .NET 4.0 and a whole range of other new stuff released this year alone, you can feel the overwhelming anxiety. They are more confused and I should say more scared at the pace of .NET platform evolution, than before. Not surprising at all. Link to the Video here. Don’t forget read comments on that page. There are a couple of important aspects  in those comments. Here are some excerpts from the comments: It is a good philosophical observation about the way people work when they're abstracted away from semantics, and I think we're seeing now what was orig...

Source : darkgreyindustries.com , thanks to Arvind for the tip

Just a few days back (on 12th, April 2010 precisely) Visual Studio 2010 was released along with .NET 4.0.  While most of the .NET developers are excited to see an improved version of .NET framework and itching to try the latest and greatest of all, it is totally a different ball game for businesses, for they prefer  and wish a stable framework that doesn’t change, well, forever. As every new version comes with a new set of challenges and often hit bottom lines pretty hard. A new version is always quite an expensive proposition Its not at all a surprising fact that even today most businesses are running their business applications on .NET 1.1 or even some still run on classic ASP. Because, more often than not, upgrading to a new version proves to be quite expensive and doesn’t offer enough benefits or improvements that justify the cost of upgrade. A new version comes about once in a year. If not a new version altogether, a new SP that fixes a whole bunch of bugs a...

Trying to download a Wordpress plugin and saw this cute error thrown by Wordpress. When something doesn’t work in software, you often get annoyed and may well get infuriated some times. But errors like this immediately put a smile on your face and let you forget all the hassle you have been going through. More over, you are more likely to love the software, a bit more than ever. Goshdarnit! Something has gone wrong with our servers. It’s probably Matt’s fault. We’ve just been notified of the problem. Hopefully this should be fixed ASAP, so kindly reload in a minute and things should be back to normal. Yet another reason to love Wordpress.

Cricket Lovers, here is a great news. You can now watch IPL semi-final and Finals on Youtube LIVE for FREE. Willow TV’s Announcement on the Offer As part of Willow TV's continued efforts to bring widespread exposure to the sport of cricket in North America, we have partnered with YouTube to bring the Indian Premier League 2010 semi finals and finals live on YouTube. These matches will be available live and free of cost starting on April 21, 2010, at http://www.youtube.com/ipl . The matches will be available in the same high quality streaming experience available from http://www.willow.tv . This is the first of many other such initiatives from Willow TV to popularize cricket in North America, with a particular focus on highly entertaining Twenty20 format. Please stay tuned to Willow TV for many more exciting announcements in the near future!

Thought Garage is my personal blog featuring seemingly ramblings and dabblings, but otherwise quite invaluable insights. About software, India, technology, politics and Entrepreneurship. And a little bit about how the world could be a better place if it ever listens to what I say. Here are some thought lines that I have been working on for some time, which are set to be released as Books: The Road Not Yet Taken : My tray of Ideas/thoughts on how to make Democracy in India really work. The Off-beat Investing : An accidental investor’s game plan of making sense and money using often written off investing strategies/tips/tricks. In-Vested Interests: Thoughts on how capitalism influences human behavior. The Silver Lining : Getting real with developing Cloud Applications. Steps.NET : Strategies for Winning in the market place and realizing Career aspirations with .NET Technologies Here are some of my social and/or business Id...