Thought Garage

It is most probably surprise you to know that for a full decade, Gandhi and Nehru got almost equal attention from the world of books. Between 1960 and 1970, based on number of times their names were mentioned, they both score about the same for about a decade. While Nehru went down-under, Gandhi remains at those levels even now. Gandhi & Nehru in the world of Books Can't believe, try yourself here . Tongue in cheek ? I guess so.

In many ways, India can only catch up with China in economic growth if China slows down. There may be other areas, where China is catching up with India precisely for that reason. One of those yardsticks is how many times it is mentioned in various books. Thanks to Google Books NGram Viewer, we can compare China and India based on how many they are mentioned in various books. View at Google's Ngram Viewer   Most probably this is not an intended use of the Ngram viewer or may not be accurate, but aligns with my earlier thoughts on how India can catchup with China in economy, so can't be an outlier :-)).

Has anybody tried Flight Search on Google ? Its pretty cool. Flight search is a feature that helps you explore air travel options for a number of cities, and plan your trip with just a few clicks of the mouse.

I started blogging back in 2004 on Blogger, went out to Wordpress.com and then moved to Wordpress hosted on my a host and finally came back home to Blogger at the beginning of the year. The convenience, unlimited flexibility and absolutely zero maintenance, I fell in love again. Did I mention, all this awesomeness is also totally FREE? Yes it is. Few weeks back, I switched to the coffee time theme as I simply loved the theme and customized with none other than Google's web fonts that add style to the blog even within the browser. IF you don't like the theme of my blog, for any reason, try http://thoughtgarage.muralim.com/view to see 7 other different crazy stunning formats that you can read this blog. Watch the following video or try it right away . An overview of the seven new dynamic views in Blogger that use to customize your blog. Built with the latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3), Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that will inspire yo...

One of the best info graphics that I have ever seen, and the only one on Org Charts.  Quite vividly illustrates the informal organization structure of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle. Just awesome.  via  Getting serious about your org chart

Finally here is a Blogger application on iOS devices. Primarily its an iPhone (iPod) application but can be run on iPad as well. Google announced the app on the blog and you can download the app from the App Store .  Read more about the announcement and features here :  Blogger Buzz: Announcing the Blogger app for iOS .  Here are a couple of quick screenshots from iPhone using the Blogger app. List of Posts Composer Screen Glad, they made it compatible with all iOS devices by making it compatible on iOS 3.2+. The work flow is smooth and intuitive to work with. However, the composer doesn't support rich text, so you will see all HTML markup when you are trying to update an existing post. But big deal for me is it makes life lot easier now to post pictures directly to Blogger blog. Emailing a picture wasn't working as Blogger has difficulty in parsing images embedded in emails.

David Allen speaks on GTD and the two keys to sustaining a healthy life and work style.

While searching for something on Github, I stumbled upon a pretty comprehensive  HTML5 Boiler Plate for Google AppEngine Projects . Looks great to use as the default Google App Engine project template. App Engine Boilerplate is a versatile yet minimalistic setup for new App Engine projects. html5-boilerplate 2.0  (including it's automated build toolchain for minification and concatenation of js+css) Beautiful OpenID login with  openid-selector Memcaching setup for requests and responses Flexible user-preferences model (with Gravatar link) Templates and template addons Tools such as  is_testenv()  and  slugify(url) app.yaml  configuration for admin areas, static files Released under the  BSD license The source is available on  Github . Will be using it in an App Engine project that will be kicked off towards the middle of the week and will share more about it. 

It’s a great news in many aspects, that Google is buying Motorola, the pioneer of Mobile handsets for $12.5 Billion dollars. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MMI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies. The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business. -- Google Press Release For starters, that will renew a fresh lease of life to Android market amid growing concerns of s...

Thanks a ton to Blogger, I love the new Template Designer. In a few clicks, my ‘ The 365 Day Cooking Challenge ’ blog got a beautiful, delicious juicy red tomato garnish. I’m loving it.

Google introduces a new feature on Gmail, called “ Motion ”. Now you can use your body gestures to communicate with GMail. The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion -- now you can control Gmail with your body. Don’t forget to Try it out. You will be pleasantly surprised at the feature !! If you encounter any problems while trying it out, remember to check your calendar.

Wonderfully simple and easy to read book for all ages, " 20 Things I learned about Browsers and The web " from Google Chrome team. Must read for all that would love and enjoy web. Wonderful book for all ages by Google  You can read it online right from your browser or download the PDF version of the book. If you are curious to know more how a browser really works, you may check this wonderful cartoon book from none other than the Google Chrome team itself :  The Chrome, Comic Book .

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

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.

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

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

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...

Every now and then I get curious about what Indians are searching for on the internet and go to Google to have a look. This time, I am totally surprised to see that Manipur tops in number of searches beating all other IT curious states. Top Search Keywords in 2009 The following screenshot lists out top 10 keywords originated from India in 2009. Note that these key words are not exactly what is being searched for, but these key words are part of searches. News, Jobs, Electronics and Travel For instance, ‘India’ is part of the following searches that tops the list. News Papers top the list, compared to 'movie stars’ last time I looked at this kind of data. Next most searched for was “Songs” This doesn’t surprise me at all, the next most searched for is a place to access, play and download songs. Manipur tops the list This is totally surprising to me, that Manipur tops the list beating those IT curious states in keywords related to India. Andhra Pradesh is no...

Google India recently launched Google Maps with navigation based on landmarks , with landmark information fed by the local community in respective cities. Its quite amazing to see how crowd sourcing could be leveraged where structural data is hard to retrieve. There is no doubt, that this kind of landmark based directions first introduced in India by Routeguru almost a couple of years back. But, I am quite excited to see Google doing this as I see so many other possibilities that could redefine maps for navigating Indian roads. Street Views For instance, what a huge difference it will make if Google could add "Street Views" to those directions? Landmarks in text is something. But a picture of that landmark really makes it the most intuitive way of looking at the map. Instant offers/coupons en-route Since directions are based on landmarks, that include local businesses, instant offers and coupons from those businesses en-route would be quite beneficial to all. So...

Google unveiled a labs feature called ‘Living Stories’ that organizes news related to a topic in a format that best fits the online reader and present all relevant information at one place. I love this new format. Online news should have been this way in the first place, but I am glad it is headed in this direction. Watch this YouTube video for a short demo of the new feature from Google Labs. Check out some of the hot topics of the day… Google Living Pages : Executive Compensation Page   Google Living Pages : The Politics of Global Warming