Kishor Krishnamoorthi’s WebsiteKishor a.k.a Mjuboy’s Blog

Even though I suggested in my previous post that I was going insane, I am pleased to inform you that I’ve come back to the world of sanity after a brief tryst with the dark side.

Christmas Dinners have started and like last year, the first Christmas dinner of this year was at the Gliding Club and it was a wonderful dinner indeed. The food was delicious as always, and I was quite stuffed by the end of the lovely three course meal. We did go Gliding all morning and although it was quite cold, the visibility was great and we did some really good flights. It was nice to see all the familiar faces again and as with tradition, we retired to the bar at the end of day and spent a good amount of time talking about things all around the world while we were merrily drunk. We spent the night there and I must say that I had one of the most well rested sleep in a long time. It was a great day out and did a good job to kick me out of the boring routine and show me that there is another exciting world there after all. We came back to campus next day morning, back to the usual life, back to a 2500 word essay due today morning which I successfully finished by midnight.

We’ve got more dinners, parties and socials coming up this week, all of which I’m looking forward to. It should be a good celebration before going back home for winter.

Amazon recently launched their DRM-Free MP3 Downloads for the United Kingdom which I totally approve of. Its a great alternative to iTunes and will also help in the fight against piracy. I was sorely tempted to buy some music just to try it out but financial restraints held me back. I did end up buying an Audio CD which was not available in the Downloads section and it was quite a bargain as well so there was no reason not to get it.

The CD was something I had been wanting to get for a long time now, it was ‘Pride: The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra play U2‘ and it came in the mail a couple of days ago. It is a beautiful mix of both of my favourite genres of music, classical and U2. (Yes, U2 is a genre for me!) I’ve been listening to it for most of yesterday and today and I cannot get enough of it.

I’ve also realized that I love getting handwritten letters, it has a certain personal touch and charm to it that technology can never replicate. I received one from my father last week and it felt really good to read that familiar handwriting of his. Another letter was surprisingly from the seller for the CD from Amazon who was kind enough to include a personal message along with the receipt. I’ve made sure that I left a 5/5 seller rating for him.

I got my hands on Lightroom 2.1 last week. It does have some nice features but since I havent done serious editing with it yet, I still need to get used to it. It also seems to run faster but then again, I think thats because I ran CCleaner which is pretty darn amazing software to get rid of all unnecessary things from your PC. It saved me 10Gig I dont know from where, but it did.

This week’s schedule looks a lot more relaxed than the past weeks which is a nice transition before I go home and do absolutely nothing for 3 weeks.

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If you have been using Google Maps, you would have noticed that recently, Google had introduced a new feature called ‘Street View’ for the major US cities through which, you can view the streets of the city. They aren’t live images, but they are pretty detailed and offer a high degree of flexibility and one can view the streets in almost any angle. Although it has only been released for the major cities of the United States right now, I’m sure you can expect this feature to appear in your city soon.

I’m personally quite impressed with it and you can take a look for yourself here.  All the streets which are marked in blue can be seen using ‘Street View’.

They did this using this camera which can take high videos from 11 different angles. They used a van for mounting the camera which can be seen here. A huge team of people have also helped the whole procedure and they are also featured on Google Street View as can be seen here.

This is certainly a very interesting feature and you can view some interesting and amusing findings on Google Street View here.

News,

The first Chinese panda released into the wild has died

New video footage of Loch Ness Monster

Man builds a living out of LEGO

Anti paparazzi shield – the paparazzi might be out of a job

Shrek 4 and Shrek 5 Announced

Amazing Photos Of Colored Water

9 Doctored Magazine Covers

The True Story of the Statue of Liberty

eBay Acquires StumbleUpon for $75 Million

Graph of Amount of Pirated Software per Computer By Country

One of the top 10 top spammers in the world arrested

New Palm Foleo Pictures

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I went to the ‘Fuji SuperSix Ignited Minds‘ photography exhibition yesterday. The place was empty when I went there. The photographs were good but the lighting in the exhibition was average. My personal favourite photographers were Daniel Yin Lea Hsiung and Syed Azher Qayoom. The others were good too, but these two were excellent. I took my own time admiring the photographs since noone else was present there.

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its new form of computing, Microsoft Surface where everyone can use the computer through the sense of touch. It will not feature a touch screen but rather have a projector and camera coordinated with each other. Sounds exciting, looking forward to more news about this. Read more here.

News,

Wii Becoming a Cultural Phenomenon

[Pics] Very rare, weird clouds over Nebraska

Top 10 Mysterious Diseases

Xbox 360 hackers get around Microsoft Bannings

The most hideous plant on earth?

In an Jurrasic Park like tale, 100’s of Elephants found on a remote island

Top 100 Scariest Movie Scenes of All Time

The Fastest Production Motorcycles In The World

World’s Oldest Bowling Alley Found in Egypt

Super Hi-Vision puts HD to shame

[Pic] Playground Fun

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I’m finally running Windows Vista on Dual Boot with Windows XP. I partitioned 100Gb from my 500Gb Harddisk for Vista and installed as a separate OS since you cannot upgrade from Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista Home Premium.

Anyways, I’m on Vista right now, I’m still getting used to whole look and feel of it. I’m also transferring my settings, drivers and programs from XP so it might take a while until I’m completely used to it.

The things I like about it are -

• When I log into Vista, the partition on which its installed becomes ‘C Drive’ and when I log into XP, the partition on which XP installed becomes ‘C Drive’. Pretty cool.
• I can resize the partitions dynamically without affecting the data in them. This is amazingly useful.
• The eye candy. The whole interface is ‘fancy’ and a good change from XP.
• The Media Centre. Its pretty much like Windows XP MCE but integrated into the OS.
• All my programs are working perfectly and are completely devoid of problems.

One thing which I hate is the fact that I’m not able to access my external Harddisk. Although Vista detects its presence, its not able to read the contents but I’m sure I’ll be figure that out soon.

Overall, I’m satisfied with it for now. I’ll still have to use it to its full potential before I can rate it properly.

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Went out for a friend’s birthday today, food was good. Then hung around with a few other friends just talking and doing timepass.

And at an international forum I usually post, we all took a Internet Speed Test just for the fun of it and I was totally disappointed at my internet speed, here are a few of the speeds………

And finally mine,

If I had to get those speed in India, I would probably have to give up my entire family fortune just to use it for a month. Infact, it would be cheaper to fly to US, use the internet there and come back here rather than try and get those speeds here.

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versus

I couldn’t find a good comparison of the upgraded versions of the best online photo album so I decided to write one myself. This was originally meant for a friend but I thought everyone could benefit from this. Now lets get on with the reviews.

Space
One of the most important and basic features of any image hosting or web album service is the storage limitations. First, lets see the free accounts. In Flickr, there is a 100Mb upload limit per month but not storage limitations or thats what people think. There is a limit of 200 images with a maximum of 5Mb per image which means the limit is around 1000MB for a free account. In Picasa Web Albums, there is a specified limit of 1024MB or 1GB, and a limit of 10MB for each image. Picasa wins here because we can store as many images as we want within the 1024MB.
Now, lets move to paid accounts. Flickr has a fee of US$24.95 a year for a Pro Account. With a Pro Account, all your limitations are removed and you can upload an unlimited amount of images. Even if your Pro Account expires, the images will not be deleted and can be recovered if you pay for the next year. Picasa Web Albums has a slightly different approach with a increasing price for increasing storage limits. For US$25 a year, which is about the same as Flickr, we can buy upto 7GB of storage. This increases in 4 levels upto 251GB at US$500 a year.

Sets/Collections/Albums
A simple way of organizing your images is by putting similar images together in albums. This is very helpful in sorting out images. Once again we’ll observe free accounts at first. Flickr has a limit of 3 set in a free account and collections (a group of sets) are available only for Pro Accounts. Picasa Web Albums has no limit and you can add as many albums as you want but you cannot add sub-albums. But you only add 500 images per album. For paid accounts, there is no difference in Picasa but in Flickr, you can add as many sets and collections as you want. Sets can be defined as sub-albums and the collections can be albums.

Organizing
Flickr has a interactive AJAX Organizer for organizing the images. In this organizer, you can add or modify sets and collections, tag pictures, share your images with your groups, add geo-location tags for the images, edit the permission and captions for the images and do minor editing like rotating, etc. A batch editing feature is also available. Picasa also features a AJAX organiser for arranging images within an album. Adding of image captions is pretty simple and the images do not require a separate image title.

Layout / Viewing
In Flickr, you can alter the layout of the pages to a certain extent with pre-designed layouts. You have an option of 4 layouts for the free version and 6 layouts for the paid version. The visitor can also choose to download different sizes of the same image. Picasa Web Albums does not allow you to change the layout but while viewing the albums, anyone can dynamically change the size of the thumbnails which is pretty good and useful feature.The visitor can also choose to download an entire album which saves time. Even while viewing a single image, you can zoom into the image and scroll around it within the browser itself.

Slideshow
In Flickr, the Slideshow is displayed via Flash and you can choose to display it in a pop-up window or withing the browser itself. It does not cover the entire screen and you have access to basic Slideshow controls. In Picasa Web Albums the Slideshow is displayed via AJAX and HTML and you choose to display the captions. The Slideshow covers the entire browser viewing area and also has the basic controls.

Uploading & Comments
In Flickr, images can be uploaded through the browser, mobile phone, email or Flickr’s software for PC, Mac or Linux. The commenting system is fine, you can also subscribe to the RSS Feed of your comments. You need to be registered to post comments. In Picasa Web Albums ,uploading can either be done through Picasa or via the browser, a plugin is also provided for Mac users. The commenting system is basic but does its job. You need to have a Google Account to post comments.

Misc. Features
In Flickr, you can add notes to individual pictures which will be displayed when the user hovers his mouse over certain areas in the image. Flickr has a API which is useful for integration into websites. Picasa’s most remarkable feature is that it also supports the uploading of videos which can be viewed as a streaming video. Picasa has just released a API Feature so it will take some time before services are developed for it.

Verdict
For free accounts, go Google and use Picasa Web Albums. It supports more images and albums and even though it lacks a few features, one can manage without them. So, if you do not wish to pay and have a simple and good web album, use Picasa. You may opt for Flickr for a feature rich but limited album.
If you are willing to pay $2 per month, then Flickr is your best friend, with unlimited images and sets, there is virtually no limit to what you can do with Flickr.

Another different alternative is DeviantART although it is not intended for usage as a web album but rather as a showcase for your art. You may try it out but it will not have features like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums since it was not meant to be an photo album.

The choice is yours to make depending on your requirements and thoughts.

Thanks for reading this review, I hope you enjoyed reading it. If you feel that I may have missed out something that is worth mentioning, please feel free to post in the comments.

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Tomorrow is the 24th of March 2007, also known as the International Shutdown Day in which people all over the world will be switching off their computers for one day. It’s an experiment to find out how many people can go without their computer for 24 hours and how many just cant stay without using their PC. I’m also taking part and will try to got for a day without using my PC. Anyone can participate in this and I strongly recommend that everyone tries this out.

I’ve been partially using Google Personalized Homepages for about a few months. Google recently added dynamic themes to the pages which gave them a whole new look and a motivation for me to start using it full time. You can add your own RSS Feeds or select from the given RSS Feeds and various useful gadgets. Now, Google has given me a great reason to utilize Google Homepages to their full potential. Try it out here.

News,

Massive solar storm coming in 2012

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years

75 per cent of Google’s blogspot blogs are spam

16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn

Porn From the Inside: Part 2

Top Ten Flying Cars!

World’s Most Expensive Chess Sets

The most luxurious limousine ever built

Top 10 Action Hero One-Liners

Amazing Russian Graffiti

Beautiful Paper Art – Must See!

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I installed some news Firefox Extensions today which made my life as a web developer a lot simpler. They’ve simplified so many tasks for me thus saving my precious time and energy. Here is a list of them -

Firebug – You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Web Developer – This has so many features that I cant even list all of them here. It might be useful for non web developers too. People who surf the internet frequently should find this handy.

MeasureIt – Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage. It might sound as a simple feature but it cuts out a lot of extra work.

ColorZilla – Get a color reading from any point within your browser. Damn useful as you dont have to take a screenshot and open it in Photoshop. This can do it directly.

News,

Freestyle Powerizer Stilts – YouTube – Simply Amazing!

WinterBells – Flash Game

A Beginner’s Guide to Supervillainy – Funny as Hell!!!

The Official Winner of the “Not My Job” Contest

The Movie Cliches List – Must Read

The Killer Quiz – I got 9/10

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I’ve updated my library at LibraryThing. Its a really great website to catalog all your books. I’ve still not finished adding all the books, I’m still digging around my bookshelf for old books I’ve read. You can see Random Books from my library in the right sidebar.

News,

Top Google Execs stick with $1 Salary

101 Jobs to make you appreciate your own

50 Amazing Ads you havent seen

Incredible LEGO Arena

5 Quad Core Desktops compared

50 Most Important people on the web -Google Guys top the list

Nvidia ships out 128-Core Graphics Cards  to movie makers

Adobe CS3 Launch confirmed for March 27th

$1 Million Bugatti Veyron smashed

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Thats the media for the upgrade version of Windows Vista. I’ll only be installing it after my board exams since I dont want to invest too much of my precious time in it.

News,

How Hitler gained power

Sick notes to teachers from parents – Hilarious!

Bill Gates keeps his kids off the PC

How the US has its eyes on Russia

Top5 Movie Viruses

50 Greatest Female Video Game Characters

10 Most Misunderstood movies

Volvo to buy Nissan for $1.1 b

8 year old girl makes hundred 911 prank calls

Why Geeks and Nerds are worth being boyfriends – All girls read!

The biggest beetle ever – Creepy

33 tips to cope with JetLag

20 facts about sex

LineGame – Amazing Flash Game

87 excuses for not doing your homework

Canon’s first Live LCD DSLR

Movies that should have won Academy Awards

Why doesnt light make a sonic boom

5 unreleased video game consles you’ve never heard of

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