Here come's another

In the gushing flow of social networking websites, here comes another one. started by a bunch of "geeks". Similar to the boom of e-commerce sites in around 1999, this seems to me mini boom of social networking websites.

A few things about pownce

1. They have a desktop version developed in Adobe AIR. Coming to think of it do I really need a desktop version of a social networking website? Anyways the desktop version did not work for me but it at least gives Adobe another proof of concept for their AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) framework.
2. It charges you 20$ for a pro account and with a pro account you can design your own custom theme, ad-free, send more files (i can use my gmail account to do that) Huhh ??
3. You can create links of other profiles like orkut, facebook, myspace, 43things, etc and they are visible on your pownce profile.
4. You can create events and inform your friends about it. They appear as a separate note(s) on your profile (your profile is combination of profile and your scrabook (orkut) / wall (facebook) )so when someone hits your profile he can notice all the notes. Between these notes there will be advertisements which will help pownce to run till the mini-boom lasts :-). I think the interesting thing here would be if some share of the ad revenue is shared with the person who helps generate the revenue with his/her notes.
6. They say that everything is developed to solve a problem, so what problem is Pownce trying to solve? According to pownce folks.

Pownce is brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another.

This definitely sounds to me the most unresolved problem of IT and yes now the desktop version of the Pownce is some what justified so that i can drag and drop files, etc

5. Right now it is available only through invites. So if you need one, let me know. I have 6 invites pending :-) (reminds me of the early gmail days when we went around asking everyone for gmail invitation)

Good luck Pownce !

Still behind ?

Indian Ambassdor's Message

When everyone is driving on information superhighway the indian ambassador in his latest letter (informing about the outsourcing of visa process) invites for suggestions by means of postal mail or fax. Looks like email is still a naive entity for him.

Came across this comment at digg over this old NY pic. God damn hilarious !!!

"Please, trade in your car for a horse. Do you realize the environmental impact of the entire nation or world owning horses. They shit 9 tons of manure each year, that's about 50 pounds a day. You also have to stockpile their shit and you can't have it close to any water sources, so anyone living in rural areas with a well wouldn't have a place for that, if the water source comes near the stockpile, all local water sources will be contaminated. Then you have to worry about feeding your shitting horse, which requires approximately 25-30 pounds of dry food per day and we have to clear out significantly more land for farms to accomodate for our 300 million new horses (there are approximately 5.5 million horses in the United States) which in turn will destroy the environment and ecosystem as it is. Not only that, but your dumbass shitting horse can only go about 9 mph for 25 miles before having to break, it would take me over 3 hours to get to work which is 30 miles away from where I live instead of the 30 minutes it takes right now. So instead of an hour of driving every day, I'd have 6 hours of riding and 2 hours of shit stockpiling and 2 hours of feeding my shit factory. Not only this but I have to build an accomodation so it can shit all day, and buy a ridiculous amount of feed and have more land... but I guess I wouldn't care about money at this point since I spend 10 hours of my non-working day taking care of my crappy horse.We have technology for a reason and the environmental impact of 300 million horses, and 300 million horse pens and 2.7 billion tons of horse shit every year would be absurd... "

No gotcha company creates the biggest gotcha

Today morning I received an email saying the sun rocket service is shut down and i have 2 options to switch my service. Man I was just at loss of words.
SunRocket was the cheapest and the best VOIP service, Clark Howard was recommending it from many years. Even I experienced an excellent service, friendly website, very good customer reps, The recently updated their website to J2EE, with AJAX and provided tons of options.
Moreover all eyes were on Vonage because of the law suit on it and I was recommending people to switch to SunRocket :). Man, they just made a fool out of me.

crazy kiya re

Last 20 days , in my RSS reader every 2 out of 10 news items would be of iPhone, the other day someone in AT&T asked me "are you working on iphone ?" I smiled back and said to myself "yea my 5 lines of code change are going to be a part of it",
So finally the much hyped iphone launch was over today, the launch of a new industry I would say, iphone accessories are already out selling on ebay, people have started making money on the *iphone* domain names, people stood in the queue for others and made around 200-300 dollars. I was lucky to witness the launch in the apple store, north point mall, alpharetta.
There were folks who stood/slept/sat in the lane for the past 2 days so as to be the first few lucky iphone buyers. Looking at them I remembered those ration lanes or the railway reservation lanes of India, the major difference being that here you can't bribe the police vaala and fix your number in the queue. Anyways this is not the first time people have gone crazy over any electronic device launch, pretty much the same thing happened with the play station launch last year.





































More pics at flickr

Cuatomize my install :)

- Looks like yahoo forgot to do a spell check ?, Came across this dialogue in one of the messenger upgrades

- a QA Slip ?

Google Calendar, still in its teens

A Month ago i added a calendar post for 14th November 2006 with a reminder set for 13th November. 13th passed, no reminder. 14th arrived, all of a sudden i remembered it (good for me), out of curosity i went back and checked my google calendar, couldn't see any event at all. Thinking that i must have forgotten to add the event i added another event and all of a sudden the event for 14th appeared like the hindu gods

bottom line - Google calendar, you still are in your teens, long way to go before you replace the Outlook Calendar

Macro Photos with S2 IS

Full credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/blipfish/
Ah... I've been at this point - it's just a process of learning a new camera, so have no fear - you'll be photographing the socks on a flea before long. ;)

I suggest opening the LCD viewer rather than the smaller viewfinder as there's information onscreen you'll want to look at while doing this.

1. Dial in to "M" (Manual mode)
2. Press the 'flower' button on the front, side ring of the lens housing.
3. Press and HOLD this button a second time... gets you from Macro mode into Super Macro mode - your display will show it go from an icon of a flower at the top to a flower with an "S" in it. You're now in Super Macro Mode.

It's at this point the fact that you're in Manual mode will probably show up... your scene might look way dark or too bright. So, use the 4-way thumb button (the one with the up/down/left/right arrows on the right side) to adjust the speed and exposure settings until you can finally see something in the viewfinder decent.

Now, let's say you're photographing an ink pen or pencil on your desk...

There's no doubt your camera needs to be right down there with it... your lens (now that it's fully extended since you turned the power on) can even touch the pencil... it can be THAT close.

Just turn the camera a little sideways now to begin looking down the length of the pencil. Notice how about an inch or so away from the lens starts to come into focus?

For a basic start - just press and hold the shutter button until you see the green box and beep - this tells you you've gotten a good focus.

If you were taking advantage of pushing the MANUAL FOCUS button and using the 4-way dial to focus (using that fuzzy square)... don't be surprised if all you have to do is dial it up to 1. This is super-macro, after all... it's close. You'll be able to tell this because a 'meter' scale appears on the rigth side of the display. It rises and falls as you adjust with the 4-way button.

Note: The way I found out that the S2IS has such a good SM mode is I had dust on the front lens and it was interfering with my focusing. I was actually focused on the dust on the glass itself! So, make sure your lens is clean.

This is basically what I did for the dollar bill shot that I took (linked above).

Manually Focusing would have given me more options as to WHERE the focal point would have landed on that bill (further away from the green emblem, closer than the emblem, etc.). So, you have a little latitude if you wish to use the Manual Focus feature as well.

Let me know if this gets you closer or not? It's a fun (and very nice) feature and there's no reason you won't be using it right away. :)

Girls in UK

Girls in UK doing bhangra. Pretty Good !!

Life's true meaning

It starts with...

One thing,
I don't know why,
It doesn't even matter how hard you try,
Keep that in mind,
I designed this rhyme,
To explain in due time,
All I know…
Time is a valuable thing,
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings,
Watch it count down 'till the end of the day,
The clock ticks life away,
It's so unreal…
You didn't look out below,
Watch the time go right out the window,
Tryin to hold on,
Didn't even know, I wasted it all just to
watch you go…
I kept everything inside,
And even though I tried,
It all fell apart,
What it meant to me
Will eventually be,
A memory of a time when

I tried so hard and got so far,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,
I had to fall,
To lose it all,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,

One thing, I don't know why,
It doesn't even matter how hard you try,
Keep that in mind,
I designed this rhyme,
To remind myself how
I tried so hard...
In spite of the way you were mocking me,
Acting like I was part of your property,
Remembering all the times you fought with me,
I'm surprised it
got so(far)…
Things aren't the way they were before,
You wouldn't even recognize me anymore,
Not that you knew me back then,
But it all comes back to me,
In the end...
You kept everything inside,
And even though I tried it all fell apart,
What it meant to me
Will eventually,
Be a memory of a time when

I tried so hard and got so far,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,
I had to fall,
To lose it all,
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter,

I've put my trust in you,
Pushed as far as I can go,
For all this,
There's only one thing you should know,

I've put my trust in you,
Pushed as far as I can go,
For all this,
There's only one thing you should know...

I tried so hard and got so far,
but in the end,
it doesn't even matter,
I had to fall,
to lose it all,
but in the end,
it doesn't even matter

My new passion

My new passion
Originally uploaded by Khalsa.

Finally after 3 months of long wait with endless driving of rentals, I finally got my sedan baby, my (Vijaya please read Our:)) my Passat GLS 18.T. Having driven Porsche Porsche 911 Turbo on NFS tracks, this in the first tim I am driving a real turbo on the roads of Alpharetta and Charlotte and truly its awesome. One of my criterias in selecting the car was it should be quiet to quite an extent especially on freeways. Passat definitely is better than Accord and Camry if not Lexus :)

tej 

parvinder 

parminder singh 

chote bache 

H.A.L Campus - place where i grew up

Kino Theatre 


H.A.L Community Hall 


H.A.L Stadium 


This use to be my playground 


H.A.L School 



H.A.L School, Jr , K.G Section



H.A.L School 


H.A.L board 


H.A.L School 

Natives Lie and Visitors Speak Truth

Came across this puzzle in one of the sites.
In an Island the natives lie and visitors speak truth. A man wants to know
whether a salesman beside him in a bar is a native or visitor. He asked him to ask a woman
beside him whether she is a native or visitor. He replied “she says she is a
visitor”. Then he knew that the salesman is a native or visitor. salesman is in which
category , native or visitor?"

Carelessness, Inhumanity, Corruption

Totaly Wrecked


Titanic 2005 !


The village (Khusgaon) child looks at it


the spot where it was burning , near to the lonavla exit


The junction

One more incident of corruption, carelessness, inhumanity

India desires modernity; it desires computers, information technology, neural networks, video on demand, express highways but still when it comes to government services, corruption it has a long way to go to improve themselves. This is a narration of an accident which happened with my friend Prashant with his black indica.

Date: 01 June 2005
Time: 4.45 am (Raining mildly)
Venue: Expressway (Pune - Lonavla Exit- junction)

A confused truck driver takes the decision to make a left turn (towards lonavla exit) right at the junction, gets his truck to a complete stop and then takes a left turn, meanwhile the indica which is coming at a speed of around 45-50 kms/hr behind him crashes into the truck (quite obvious) and his front bumper gets stuck in the rear of the truck. The truck driver doesn't care about it and drags the car along with him until the effort is made by the indica drive to get the car to a compelete halt and get out of the clutches of the truck. The truck with a cool frame of mind goes ahead without any care or humanity.

Just then there is a spark observed in the front bumper of car and it catches fire. Everyone gets out of the car and stay at a distance watching the car catching flames. The police is being informed immediately and they come with firebrigade assistance only when the car is turned into ashes - the typical indian movie police is actually a reality.

India is progressing by leaps and bounds

Journaling in MS Exchange

Journaling is the ability to record all communications in an organization. E-mail communications are one of many different communication mechanisms that you may be required to journal. Therefore, journaling in Exchange has been developed to enable the messaging administrator to feed messaging data into a larger journaling solution, while using minimum overhead.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/library/journaling.mspx

How to Enable the "Message Journaling" Function for an Exchange Server Mailbox Store

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;261173&Product=exch2k

Selective for MS Exchange 2000/2003

GridBag Layout

Interesting Animation
http://madbean.com/blog/2004/17/totallygridbag.html