If you are still reading this, you shouldn’t be. Get outta here and read this. (Actually just open in a new window, and continue reading this).

I guess it makes a lot of sense for a company like Google to have an install base of their own, and what better way than, what has become the primary application on most computers, the browser. With Google’s data processing and storage capabilities, I can’t begin to imagine the things that could be done with a browser like this.

Some unique things about (I stand corrected, David) Key features of Google Chrome (such a lame name .. come on guys you can be a bit more creative than that — too many Mozilla hackers @ Google?!), as mentioned in their cartoon booklet (if you care to read thru 40 pages), include:

• Tabs to the top (ignore that - such a cosmetic change) - Aparently this has been around for a while in Opera - thanks David Sheen
• Tabs as separate processes (that’s good in a way, but I’m not so sure about older machines)
• New garbage collection engine.
• New javascript virtual machine, that supports compiled javascript - I want to see the performance on that.
• Apparently, they have a huge testbed, that can test each browser build automatically using a hundred monkeys. (I don’t care too much about this, I just think this is over-engineering, but hey, this is me).
• Uses Webkit for page-rendering.
• Persistant tab state, and the tab can be detached as well, into a new window.
• Standard auto-completing address bar (Firefox 3)
• Personalised start page with your browsing history, google info etc.

As a write this, a huge array of ideas come to mind, that will surely come to be common-place in next few years. I’m throwing out some general ideas here, and maybe I’ll come back a few years and tick some of them down.

1. Personalised homepages with per-user google content (this is already present in their beta vision)
   
2. Single sign-on using open id and o-auth using google account information (read as identity management)
3. Social networking (submit to orkut etc), location aware
4. Voice calls from the browser (gtalk, jaiku etc)
5. Content tagging services, using collective intelligence (this could make google searches much better than they already are - something like mahalo + google, just that every click could potentially give google data, thereby bettering the result match for you.)

That’s my five things google could do. What do you think? What could Google add to their browser, that willl change the way we use it in the next 5 years?

Chicken Curry with Eggs served on Rice, originally uploaded by Shivanand Velmurugan.

Thank you Mr. Raghavan Iyer. This is the man, that wrote the book 660 Curries, that has initiated me into making proper Indian food. In the last month or so, since my return from my vacation to India, I have tried eating good food, and have found cooking a very rewarding activity. It helps you think more about what you want to put in your mouth and somehow, also makes you eat less!

I made some chicken curry last weekend, and here’s the recipe: (I didn’t have some stuff and used some substitutes instead)

2 tbsp of Canola oil
1/2 tsp. cloves (Didn’t have any of these )
4 green or white cardamom pods (I didn’t use any though)
2 fresh or dried bay leaves
2 cinnamon sticks
4 medium-size cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 slices of ginger (2 tsp of ginger)
1 large tomato, cored and finely chopped.
2 tsps of garam masala
1 tsp of salt
1 1/2 pounds of chicken thighs cut into 1-inch pieces
(thighs taste better, but I used chicken breasts instead - lower in fat)
1/2 cup of chicken broth
4 tbps of heavy whipping cream
2 tbps of fresh, finely chopped cilantro leaves and some tender sprigs for garnishing

Optional:
1 large onion finely chopped (I just wanted some extra flavour)
4 hard boiled eggs (my addition, ofcourse )

Here’s how you make it:
1. Heat the oil in a medium skillet, and fry the cloves, cardamom, bay leaves and cinnamon sticks until light brown (1-2 mins)
2. Add the onions, and fry until golden brown.
3. Add the tomatoes, ginger, garlic, garam masala and salt. Cook until tomatoes are done, but still firm to touch. (3 to 5 mins)
4. Stir in the chicken and the broth. Bring the curry to a boil and let it simmer until the chicken is done. (10 - 15 mins). Remember not to overcook the chicken breast, since it becomes quite rubbery and hard.
5. Fold in the cream, and stir to blend the cream in. Make small incisions in the hard boiled eggs and add them to the curry, and roll over the sauce. Cover and allow the curry to warm up again. Be careful not to overcook after the cream, since you don’t want the fat in the cream to separate.
6. Serve the curry with the eggs over a bed of steaming white basmati rice.

If you want to buy the book from Amazon.com or Amazon.ca, click below:

Before you start reading the rest of the post, there are few items, that could give away the plot. I wonder if one needs to worry about the plot in Batman. Here’s the short version of the review - watch it if you haven’t done so as yet. NOW!

Some things I liked:

1. The movie is a lot more serious than previous renderings of Batman. Finally, a Batman movie, where you don’t have to laugh at Batman.

2. The Joker (Heath Ledger) was truly amazing. I liked that he retained the southern sounding voice. Heath shines like diamond, and really stands out in terms of his performance. It is such a pity that the world has lost such a wonderful actor. He could have been this generation’s Brando or Pacino. He has set new heights for the Batman villian (Traditionally, the villians have been better actors anyway)

3. Batman is real, he gets hurt and has his flaws, and I don’t hear “kapow” or “zing” during the action sequences.

4. Makeup was wonderful - both the Joker and Two-Face, are more believable and frightening in their own ways.

5. This movie has one of the best casts in all Batman movies (For a franchise, that has always had a star cast, this one really get the right people for the roles - remember George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger anyone?!)

6. Thankfully, no robin - nuff said.

Now for some things that could have been better

1. 2:35 mins - the show started at 10:00 PM and ended at 1:00 AM! 3 hours is way too long (even for Indians - we get an intermission for our 3 hour movies).

2. Two villians too big for this movie. I thought the villians didn’t get enough screen time.

3. Two-Face’s plot is quite unconvincing, and it’s a pity he’s killed with such little damage. Aaron Eckhart is no match for Tommy Lee Jones.

4. I hate the new Batman’s voice. What’s with the constant growling. I think that’s the only flaw with the new Batman. Christian Bale, should learn to show some emotion through his eyes (wrath, anger, hatred etc). I liked him much better in the first movie. He has shown good promise, and if he does a couple more, I can see him as one of the better Batmans. I must say, the best one (my opinion) was Michael Keaton. I always liked the quirky Batman. This more dark Batman, closer to the comic, impresses as well, but yet to prove himself. I think he needs a villian who really pushes him hard.

All in all, a very enjoyable 3 hours, if you have the penchant for Batman, and can hold the large Combo in your bladder long enough. Must see movie. Don’t miss it! Now, check out the trailer. (Kudos to Warner Bros. for providing an embeddable version).

Shooting Star, originally uploaded by shivanandv.

As I was rummaging through my old pictures, I found this one and liked the pastel colours of the evening sky. This was shot a few months back, I have over 3 months backlog of images to be processed. Let me know what you think.

In the last couple of years, there has been several attempts to normalize comments, across the blogging ecosystem, and several ways have been tried. Disqus, is a company, that is in the business of aggregating comments for your blog. Seesmic, a video communications startup, has partnered with them to integrate video comments. Even after all of these innovations, getting people to comment on a blog, is still pretty difficult. 

You need, 

  - an engaged audience (the kind that wants to comment)

  - access to a critical mass of such people.

  - regular compelling content, to keep your masses.

  - friends who are A-listers, willing to quote or refer you to their audiences.

Now, with Friendfeed, I see a break away from these restrictions. All you need, is the willingness to be read and comment on a lot of people’s content, which will enable a lot of people to follow you, which means you have their attention (one might argue the attention span is very less, but nonetheless, you have a chance).

Once you have a sizable following, all you need to do, is write that compelling content, that interests your followers (which should come by, as you comment more and more). Until now, to get people to visit your blog, your content has to compelling enough for them to leave the tool they used to discover your blog, and visit it, and then want to comment. Installing the worpdress plugin for friendfeed comments removes that barrier too.

That is exactly what I have done. So, from now on, anyone who follows me in friendfeed, can leave a comment in FF, and it will be autmatically part of my comment stream (although, it is not fully integrated into my comment feed etc)

How kewl is that?!

#cvs update . > filelist.dat

The problem with this, is that if there have been changes to other files after your last update, you will have to manually glean the files that you have changed. I tend face this, particularly during the last couple of weeks before a release, since you don’t want to risk updating your tree everyday, but still have to make 2/3 checkins. I did some googling today, and found how to find the list of files changed without updating your tree.

#cvs -n update . > filelist.dat

Thanks Jonnay for this. I should used man before I googled, but hey, I’m lazy today

I am at the fag end of my trip to India, and I will miss this fella sorely!

First thoughts go like,

“wtf?!”, … “hmmm.. interesting”… “I am a web 2.0 junkie?!

The likes

1. Simplicity of the UI interface - neat, allows lots of space for text

2. Integration of Flickr and Youtube (although I would love to see more such services)

3. Zero account creation overhead. (I wrote this post, before I created the account to publish it, and is a 1-click process.)

The dislikes

1. No keyboard shortcuts.

2. Too many formatting options. I would rather have more external services (quote pownce or twitter conversations, facebook, vimeo and other photo and video sites)

3. popups (need I say more.. in this day and age.. popups for functionality is a sin … almost).

4. A few irksome bugs. (undo doesn’t work in-order, flickr requires login name, cursor disappears after including a picture.. etc)

Conclusion

The service offers what should be part of any good bloggingsoftware. With recent improvements in Wordpress Dashboard and Editor, I doubt if this tool will be able to keep my attention for long. The whole concept of logging into one site for writing to another, seems a little weird. I don’t really understand the use-case.

Update: I found a few more bugs

- Editing an existing post, ignore all previous indentation (white-space).

- Tags set are technocrati tags, and not wordpress tags (I guess this is more like a feature request than a bug)

I couldn’t find a getsatifaction account for this tool, and hence have sent a traceback to their blog. Mark, if you come this way, do create and account for your product/company at getsatisfaction.com, and do set up some form of bug tracking system, so that your users can be your testers :). Btw, you are welcome for the bugs mentioned here. Ohh.. btw.. I’m using Firefox on Mac OSX.

Last week I lost yet another wonderful person from my life. I lost my father-in-law, Mr. Ghanshyam Maheswari. He was a good man, a good soul, a great father, and most of all, someone who lived his life - truly lived every moment of it. I can’t find words to express the loss I feel. As the hours on the plane ride half way across the world passed, I couldn’t begin to accept that he had really passed on. I guess, a part of me was expecting to see him at the airport, telling my wife and me that this was all just a dream.

Life, and not death, is cruel. It makes us experience a lot of things that we could do without. With the greatest regret and effort, I need to muster the ability to bid adieu, to a wonderful person that has enriched the lives of several who have been left behind. Mr Maheswari, may you find the big black table-tennis board in the sky. Keep a spot open, so we can finish the game we never played, when my time comes.

You can send your condolences either in this blog’s comments or to the following

Nimesh: nimeshmaheshwari [at] gmail [dt] com

Priyanka: drmishrap [at] gmail [dt] com

Ok. Sorry about the rant, but here is my problem: the download for wordpress 2.5.1 is around 1 MB, but what has really changed is only a few lines. However, according to wordpress, you have to go through a time-consuming process to get your blog up to date.

The only reason why the wordpress team would want to do this, is coz they do not want to write an upgrade document everytime. What they really need to do, is stop bothering their blog users with such small updates and allow such updates from within wordpress itself. This is precisely the kinda thing that should by now, be atleast a plugin, if not part of the system.

The famous 5-minute, 3-step upgrade says:

0. Take a Backup

0.5 Disable plugins

1. Actually it’s three steps in this one step

1. Get the latest WordPress. Either download and extract it to your computer or download it directly to the server.
2. Delete your old wp-includes and wp-admin directories.
3. Copy the new WordPress files to your server, overwriting old files in the root. You may use FTP or shell commands to do so. Note that this means *all* the files, including all the files in the root directory as well. If you use the default or classic theme and have customized it, then you can skip that theme.

2. Upgrade by calling the upgrade script

3. Turn back all your plugins on.

I grew sick of wordpress’ lazy-ass upgrade steps, and decided about a year back that I would only run the upgrade their way, if it really requires taking down my website, and started doing these simple steps instead. (Ofcourse, I have a script that does this for me )

1. Download wordpress to a temp dir on your server

[shvelmur@web24 wordpress]$ curl -o wp.tar.gz http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 1154k    0 1154k    0     0  5390k      0 –:–:– –:–:– –:–:– 10.8M

2. Extract the downloaded zipped-tar file to a new dir, called “wp”.

[shvelmur@web24 wordpress]$ gtar -zxvf wp.tar.gz

3. Do a diff between the two directories to see what’s changed.

[shvelmur@web24 wordpress]$ diff <current wordpress dir> <new dir>

In my installation this is the difference between wordpress 2.5 and wordpress 2.5.1

diff ../../wpress/wp-config-sample.php ./wordpress/wp-config-sample.php
11,12c11,12
< // so make it long and complicated.  You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
< // to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
---
> // so make it long and complicated.  You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
> // to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
Common subdirectories: ../../wpress/wp-content and ./wordpress/wp-content
Common subdirectories: ../../wpress/wp-includes and ./wordpress/wp-includes
diff ../../wpress/wp-login.php ./wordpress/wp-login.php
93c93
<     $key = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT user_activation_key FROM $wpdb->users WHERE user_login = '$user_login'");
---
>     $key = $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT user_activation_key FROM $wpdb->users WHERE user_login = %s", $user_login));
99c99
<         $wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->users SET user_activation_key = '$key' WHERE user_login = '$user_login'");
---
>         $wpdb->query($wpdb->prepare("UPDATE $wpdb->users SET user_activation_key = %s WHERE user_login = %s", $key, $user_login));
121c121
<     $user = $wpdb->get_row("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->users WHERE user_activation_key = '$key'");
---
>     $user = $wpdb->get_row($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->users WHERE user_activation_key = %s", $key));
diff ../../wpress/wp-settings.php ./wordpress/wp-settings.php
72,75c72,77
<         if ( $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] == $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] )
<             $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
<         else
<             $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] . $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
—
>         if ( isset($_SERVER['PATH_INFO']) ) {
>             if ( $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] == $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] )
>                 $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
>             else
>                 $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] . $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
>         }
332a335,342
>
> /**
>  * It is possible to define this in wp-config.php
>  * @since 2.5.0
>  */
> if ( !defined( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’ ) )
>     define( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 60 );
>

As you can see, the only change is in wp-login.php. Just copy the wp-login.php from the new directory to the installed directory. Update: Copy the changed file, wp-login.php and also copy version.php in <new wpress dir>/wp-includes, to the same directory in your installed dir.

4. Just run the upgrade.php (it updates the DB, and makes the dashboard stop complaining about the version).

If all of this sounds very complex to you, it is not. All we are doing here is finding out which files changed between two versions, and copying files that matter instead of re-write the whole application, which requires bringing your blog down.

P.S: If you are by any chance involved with wordpress, please get an auto-installer done and built into wordpress, atleast for just minor changes, which can be easily done using some script on the server.