Which is the optimal time to start doing your favorite work, your dream?

If you have any work you think you must do, anything that you feel you must persue in your life, you should actually stop doing everything else. Even stop reading this article. Start working for your dream now. Assume that your dream is X (replace X with whatever your dream is. For example, to run faster than everybody else or to start your own online business).

Don’t tell that you will start X next year.

Don’t tell that you will start X after gaining experience.

Don’t tell that you will start X when you have enough money.

Stop using all those words: next, after, when, if, later…….etc. Those are words used by ordinary people. You are not ordinary. You are exceptional. So start working now. To be on top, run. Fast. Now.

This is a post on how to connect your PC or Laptop to the internet using your vodafone mobile connection in India (It may work for other countries also).
You need:
(1) A vodafone connection in India
(2) A Bluetooth enabled mobile phone with GPRS facility.
(3) A Personal Computer or Laptop.
(4) Bluetooth Dongle.
Steps:
(1) Delete all the internet profiles (if any) from your mobile phone.
(2) Delete all the data accounts (if any) from your mobile phone.
(3) Send the message WWW to 52586
(4) Save the settings that you receive.
(5) Connect your PC/Laptop to the mobile phone using the Bluetooth software.
(6) In the software select the option resembling “Connect to Internet”.
(7) Provide the number to dial as *99***1# and dial.
(8) You will be connected to the internet.
This procedure was tested from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and it worked fine. If you know of any different procedure for any other locale, please comment below.

The field of distributed computing is a fascinating one, especially the online distributed computing projects. I have participated in some of the online distributed computing projects in the past just because of my interest in the field. I still remember the days when I was participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. My computer will search for a Mersenne Prime when I would sitting in front of it with my eyes wide open (and was hoping to win some prize and fame).

Distributed computing projects make use of processor cycles of computers over the internet. Now the problem is that we need to find a way to use the processor cycles.  In most of the projects, an application is downloaded to the client computers to aid the process. This application will perform all the computations that are necessary and give the results back to he server. The problem with this approach is that only a limited number of users will download and and install this software. So in effect, the distibuted project is not distributed enough.

Is there any distributed software that can actually do this work? Which is the largest network of software that can be used to harness the CPU cycles form different omputers all around the world? It turns out that there is one. - Google Ads.

Google Adsense Ads are shown in millions of webpages across the globe. Adsense ads are viewed more than the google homepage itself. If some javascript code can be inserted to each adsense ad, it can do very huge calculations faster than any other distributed system, and that too without installing any aditional software. The end users will not feel the difference in performance either.

If Google starts using Adsense ads for helping scientific calcuations, I am willing to view ads in all webpages I visit. Then I would know that even though ads are a distraction, they serve a huge prpose. The purpose of promoting the progress of human race.

Here is my first attempt on HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, using a Sony Ericsson W810i. The picture is not sharp because I resized it.

The photo was taken from Kondapur market, Hyderabad.

Here are the steps to make an HDR image using your phone camera:

• Take a photo using your mobile phone. Save it to your computer.
• Download and use Dynamic-PhotoHDR.
• Open the photo in Dynamic-PhotoHDR and play with the settings till you are happy.
• Save the HDR photo.

For advanced tips, visit the following tutorial (and see the great sample images): http://www.vanilladays.com/hdr-guide/

I have more than a thousand accounts in various websites. A majority of these accounts are inactive, while I use around 30 accounts regularly. Every day I sign up for 3-5 web services. So the accounts I own in the web are growing like nothing.

Managing all these online accounts is getting difficult for me day by day. I almost use the same username for the different accounts, but in some accounts, I have different usernames. And with different password for each account, it is getting really messy. Which username password combination for which account…? grrr…..

I need some software to manage my accounts. Who should manage my accounts?

My web browser. Not any third party add-on. Not any spyware disguised as friendly software.

If we have excellent mechanisms in the browser for managing online acccounts, it will be useful in designing protocols to create, edit or delete our accounts from a single window. This can in effect lead to great advancements in data portability.

Meanwhile, what are the browser vendors waiting for? I think Opera or Firefox should integrate a full fledged account management system to the browser. IE will follow.

IE8 supports standards mode by default. Great move from Microsoft. Here are some random thoughts about IE8:

The ‘Emulate IE7′ Joke

From the IEBlog:

For the Internet Explorer 8 Beta, we’ve added an Emulate IE7 button to the command bar. It will help you with everyday browsing and with quickly checking your site as you work on it 

Quickly means that you have to stop all your work and restart the browser to test a webpage in IE7 mode.

What is the need of the Emulate IE7 button? I have IE7 installed in my system.

Why should someone make a website for IE7 when IE8 is around? I can’t see any need. Make your websites to the standards. Thats it. There is no need to support any non-standard browser. It will make the already broken web worse.

Hopefully, the button will be present only in the IE8 beta.

Unstable

IE8 frequently crashed while I was using it. Having a session restore feature does not mean that you can hang my computer and lose my unsaved work.

Address Bar Woes

Microsoft has introduced many features to the address bar of IE8. But there is a problem that seriously affects my style of browsing. When I paste a URL to the address bar and change the tab (without navigating to the URL), the URL is lost. When I switch back to the tab, I see the URL of that tab, not the URL I pasted there. This happens to me a lot. It should be fixed. It is a simple improvement that I think is very much needed.

In Taking Your Users For Granted I mentioned the need of maintaining the quality of your products above that of your competitors.

There is a widespread strategy used to get around the problem. Lock-ins. Make the switching costs very high. Microsoft, Apple and IBM did that successfully. Facebook does that well. Most of the web services do that too.

But then, lock-in rarely pays in the long run.

Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Facebook can boast of great products. Lock-ins can complement a great product, but cannot make a lousy product successful.