Minecraft – one of my favorite games this year (whenever little I got to play it). When it finally released to a full version, Notch (the creator of the game) had built dragons into it. Nice, I thought.

The books by Christopher Paolini – I finished reading Inheritance a few weeks ago – and one of the main characters is a Dragon (named Saphira). I like the four books quite a lot. Good reading if you like fantasy adventure type books.

Lord of Ultima – this one is a minor one – I checked out this MMO recently, and one of the magical creatures in this game is a Dragon.

Skyrim – last week, I played Skyrim for the first time on my XBox. And my in-game character is actually a “Dragonborn” who can absorb the powers of Dragons. And there are dragons all over the game.

I have watched re-runs of a number of Dragon movies on the Tele (How to train a dragon, anyone?).

Finally, a dear colleague at work highly recommended A Song of Ice and Fire (a series of novels which are all the rage in the US right now due to the highly popular adaptation of the novels into a TV series by HBO). I just finished reading the first one called “A Game of Thrones”. And while the book refers to dragons in the history all the time, it ended with one of the primary characters ending up with 3 real baby dragons. So well it looks like the next few books are going to see some dragon action.

And if all of this is not enough, the year 2012 will be the “Year of the Dragon” as per the Chinese Calendar. So, it looks like I am going to be surrounded by dragons for a while now. Not that I mind (as long as I am not in real life).

Well, I thought – nice, so Facebook is letting people with poor privacy settings in place know that they can actually do something about it (another problem with Facebook has always been that even though users can do better with their accounts settings – and protect their privacy better, sometimes they just don’t know about it).

So I clicked it wondering that what privacy options have I left open – and how nice of Facebook to let me know. Anyway, what I saw was not what I expected. It was a screen for the protection of my account (damn, that is what it said on the section, why wasn’t I reading; why did I think it was to do with privacy). Anyway, it was about the security of my account (you know, alternate email addresses, etc.). The reason I was getting this alert was that I didn’t have a security question configured for my account. You know those “what’s your pets name” questions.

Well, here’s what Facebook presented me with:

These are the only 4 options for questions “that only I can answer” as per Facebook. I don’t know about the others, but for three of them I will have to ask my mom. I don’t remember the last name of my first grade teacher (not sure my mom would, but she might). I have no clue where my mom was born – do people normally know this? And I have no idea about the street name where we were living when I was 8 years old. Seriously, if I have to ask my mom for the answers to these questions, then where’s the security.

And the last one – the 5 characters of my driver’s license – that assumes that I have a driver’s license (well I do, but not everyone does).

How difficult is it to have me define my own question to which only I know the answer.

I was installing iTunes recently on a computer (which is a 64 bit Windows 7 machine), and on Apple’s website, there is a special link for 64 bit Windows. So, I downloaded that. The file that was downloaded is called “iTunes64Setup.exe”. Now, I fully expect this to be a 64 bit app.

When I run the installer, this is what I see by default:

Notice how the destination folder is Program Files (x86). For those who don’t know what this is – it is the default location where 32 bit programs running on 64 bit Windows are installed.

Now two things are possible:

• Either the “64-bit” version of iTunes is not really 64 bit – so it’s being installed in the right place.
• Or, the developers at Apple didn’t even bother to configure their installer to install iTunes in the right place.

Either way, this is very irritating.

I found that effect very useful, and tried to put it in my next presentation. This is where things got stuck. PowerPoint doesn’t allow you to animate selective words in a text. You can apply animation effects to complete sentences only. This means that there needs to be a hack to get that effect which I saw. To clarify, I made a video of the effect that I am looking to achieve (embedded below the disclaimer).

Disclaimer: a lot of you may already know how to do this, but it took me a bit to figure it out (specially since I kept thinking how to do it natively in PowerPoint).

So, now that it is clear what I am trying to achieve, let me explain how I did it.

The trick is to first accept that you cannot do it using normal animation functionality of PowerPoint. Once I did that, it becomes quite easy.

Step 1: Identify the words that you want to highlight on the slide.

Step 2: Create text boxes with white background and same font size as your slide text for each of these words (you can see where this is heading).

Step 3: Position the text boxes on top of your words and center them horizontally (since if you are using bold emphasis, it would tend to move your text to the right) and align the bottom edge with the bottom edge of the rest of the text – use Ctrl+arrow key to nudge the boxes into position.

Step 4: Add animation effects on each of these boxes. Now here’s what you want to play with to get the settings right according to your taste. I have an entry and exit effect on each of the boxes. The first text box entry effect starts 1 second after the slide is shown, and each subsequent word’s entry effect starts the same time as the exit effect of the previous word. I am using the “Fade” entry and exit effects. Here’s a screenshot of the timeline:

The exit effect is setup to “Start after previous” with a delay of 1 second. This gives the word being highlighted 1 second to stay highlighted before it is faded out.

Here’s a screenshot of the slide showing the text boxes on each word:

And here’s a screenshot that shows the text boxes displaced (to show that there is normal text underneath the text boxes). Note that I have made the background of the text boxes a little transparent for illustration purposes – in practice this should be opaque.

If there are other easier ways to do this, I would certainly love to know about them. But in the meantime, this is what I will be using.

If you would like to have the PPT file for this experiment, it is available at this link.

So, I decided to see how difficult it is to make a Google Chrome extension. It turned out that it is super easy to make one. So, I decided to make a very “Hello World” type extension which I would actually use as a fun tool in my current favorite browser: Chrome.

Presenting Tab Statistics:

So, what does this extension do? Not much really, but I see myself checking it out a few times a day. It sits in a corner of your browser, and counts the number of tabs you open.

Yes, that is it. Well, I wanted an escape, not another project, and so I tried to put together the simplest extension I could. The hardest part about coding this thing was actually creating the CSS for displaying the aggregated count, when you click on the button. So, a couple of hours of poking around later, I had my extension, which I tested for a few days on my browser. Then I decided that it’s worth the $5 that Google is charging me to place this extension out for the public to use. So, I did.

If you would like to install it, go to the Chrome Web Store. It’s available there. Below is a quick round up of what it does (not much):

As you can see in the screenshot, it does the following:

• Shows you a button in the toolbar which has the total number of tabs opened on the current day.
• Clicking the button shows you the total number of tabs that have been opened since the day of the install.
• And it also shows the largest number of tabs that were ever opened in a day.

Other than that, it doesn’t collect any personal data, and it doesn’t send any data out of your computer. All tab counts are stored locally on your computer. As I said, it’s more a fun app, than anything else.

If you would like to see improvements to this, then leave a comment on either this page or the Extension page on the Chrome Web Store. If you like it, please rate it on the store, and tell your friends about it.

Not only do these spell and grammar checks become irritating, sometimes they can detract you from observing other errors in your document. So, I asked myself the questions, can I turn off spell and grammar check for certain parts of the document? It turns out that I can.

Well, in an ideal world, I would simply highlight the area where I want to turn off the spell and grammar check, click a button and be done. The true solution is almost as simple, but you have to do a bit of work to set it up first.

Let me continue with my example of code in document being the most obvious target for this type of thing (at least for me). I often like to have code snippets in the document as a different font (as do most people), and towards that, I normally setup a quick style (Word 2007, Word 2010) called “Code” which allows me to quickly setup the desired font, indentation, and size for any part of the document that is a code snippet. (Here’s a quick Microsoft link for “creating a new quick style” – if you Google/Bing, you should get much more help there).

So, basically, I already have a way of marking parts of the document where I don’t want to have any grammar or spell check (all these parts are formatted under the Style “Code”). I can leverage the Quick Style feature to achieve what I need – I can tell a Style that I don’t want to check grammar and spelling for any text that is formatted as that style.

Here’s how. First go to the style and open the “Modify…” dialog box:

Now, click on the “Format” button and choose “Language…”:

Now, simply check the “Do not check spelling or grammar” option, press OK, and then OK to confirm.

That’s it. Now, whenever I format any text as “Code”, it doesn’t get checked for spelling or grammar.

Peace of mind.

The number one place we visited was Las Vegas. It is a great place, it really is. We loved the city, the hotels that we stayed in, the casinos, the shows, the restaurants, the decor, the people, and all the glitz. We stayed at Planet Hollywood towers, and the rooms there were very nice, the staff awesome, and the food delicious. They have a huge amount of shopping right outside the hotel which we made good use of.

The Casino? Well, I ended up spending a lot of money there for a lot of gambling fun – the variety of slot machines, roulette, black jack – and poker. It was a lot of fun, and while I would have loved to win the jackpot, the only thing I won was a lot of entertainment. Um, did I mention the poker games – let’s just say that those were the most expensive.

Well, the other thing that is worth pointing out is the show that we saw by the Blue Man Group. THE BEST AUDIO VISUAL treat EVER (while others may disagree). Here’s a video:

Well, from there it was a drive out to the Grand Canyon. A BEAUTIFUL drive, and the Grand Canyon leaves you breathless with its grandeur. And makes you think. That’s all I can say. It snowed while we were leaving.

On the way back from the Grand Canyon, we stopped over at the Hoover Dam. Which was a nice spot too. But once again, the drive between Las Vegas and Grand Canyon is beautiful to the max.

In California, it was the Napa valley (a must visit, if wines (or vines) is your thing). The vineyards are beautiful in their own respect, and the wine great if you decide to taste any. We brought back a lot of food items from the Garlic capital Gilroy – suffice it to say that vampires are not visiting our home in the near future. The 17 mile drive (which is really not 17 mile long) is a beauty and we went there twice. Big Sur was as breathtaking as the Grand Canyon, and we couldn’t get enough of it. But the hidden gem was Monterey Bay. We fell in love with the old Fisherman’s wharf, and the aquarium there is one of the best that I’ve ever seen.

That is about as short a review as I can give without making these posts into pages long descriptions of the visit.

• Years ago, after getting fed up with IE, I shifted to Firefox. At that time of course, I used Internet Explorer to download Firefox and installed it. And that made Firefox my primary browser.
• A couple of years ago, when Chrome was released, I used Firefox to download Chrome and installed it. And that made Chrome my primary browser.
• A few hours ago, I used Chrome to download Internet Explorer 9 beta and installed it.

It remains to be seen whether IE9 will become my primary browser, but just after a few clicks in the browser, I am actually pleased so far. This post is being written side by side as I quickly take IE9 for a spin, and record my impression so far.

And wherever it is relevant, I will compare it to my current primary browser: Chrome.

Installation experience:

After downloading it, I ran the installer and was immediately presented with this screen:

I thought that it is installing some pre-requisites, which it might be downloading. After a while, it showed me this screen:

And there, we were done – a one-click installation. It didn’t ask me anything about making this browser the default, or anything else.

I would have liked to see more info, since this was beta, about what components it is updating, since IE9 is well integrated into the OS, I was worried it might update some core OS components with beta versions.

Anyway, I like the clean setup overall. Less work for me if I don’t have to digest any information during installation.

First look, I opened the browser

The first thing that hit me when I started the browser for the first time is this screen:

Note: this screen actually only shows the first time you run the browser, so since I didn’t capture it at that time, I had to copy this screenshot from the article that engadget ran.

I think this is brilliant. I have written before about how add-ons can really slow down Internet Explorer, and this basically makes that fact available to everyone in their face. Since IE8, Internet Explorer shows you how much time any add-on takes to load in the Manage Add-ons screen. Notice how it asks you to specify what your comfort level is for how long in total all add-ons installed on your browser should take, and it will inform you if the total add-on time goes above that.

My only crib with this is that in a couple of scans of the menu items and options, I couldn’t find where I can change that time on the bottom once I set it up in the beginning.

Moving on:

Here’s what Internet Explorer 9 looks like with only one tab open.

And here’s what Chrome looks like with one tab open:

Things to notice:

• I noticed that the logo in Chrome is smaller than the logo in Internet Explorer. I found it weird till it turned out that the HTML that was rendered is different in Chrome than the one in Internet Explorer, and both refer to different logo files with different image sizes.
• Another thing to notice is that the available space is a little bit more in Internet Explorer – as an effect of it combining the address bar and tabs in the same vertical space (this is however not always true, see below).
• I opened both the windows in Private Browsing mode (or Incognito as Chrome calls it). The indications for both are wildly different. Its very clear in Internet Explorer, and reflected in the address bar. In Chrome it is indicated by the icon in the top left corner.

The vertical space in Chrome and IE9 is about the same when both are maximized though. This is because when Chrome is maximized, it moves the tabs to the vertical space besides the control box. The above screenshots are not taken in maximized mode. See below for what I mean:

The above is when Chrome is maximized, and the below is with Chrome in normal window state:

I have my browser window maximized and normal equal number of times, so I am guessing Internet Explorer 9 wins in terms of maximizing viewable area of the browser.

Speed test:

While this is not really a speed test proper, I went and clocked the speed of 3 of the sites that I visit daily, and did so 5 times each to get average speeds for start to completely loaded on a stopwatch.

I did this after clearing cache, and in the private mode so there is nothing stored in each session. Each time, I closed the previous window and opened another one.

Here are the average site load times:

• Reddit – Chrome 8.4s, and IE9 5.4s
• Youtube – Chrome 2.9s, and IE9 2.5s
• Cricinfo – Chrome 6.9d, and IE9 6.2s

While they are close (with IE being slightly faster), on reddit for some reason, Chrome was always taking much longer. I bet there are sites out there where Chrome would be much faster than IE9 too.

But IE9 is really fast, loads really fast, and feels really fast.

Minor annoyance:

The one thing that Chrome has that no other browser does is that a lot of thought had gone in its usability. The best feature of Chrome for me is that when I have a lot of tabs open and I want to close some of them quickly, I can basically click multiple times on the same spot, since Chrome doesn’t resize tabs when your mouse is on the tab bar. IE9 and other browsers do. If you don’t know what I am talking about, try doing this:

• Open IE9/Firefox and open 20 new tabs.
• Now select the first tab.
• Now using your mouse, start closing the tabs. You will notice that as more space becomes available on the tab bar, the tab sizes start expanding, which moves the location of the close button from under your mouse. So to close the next tab, you have to move your mouse.

Now do the same thing in Chrome.

There are other special things:

For example, the most popular sites ‘dial’ which shows on a new tab displays an indication (in the form of a colored bar on each site box) conveying how often you use that site. This bar seems to be in the dominant color in the site’s favicon. See below:

There are overall many improvements in terms of UI, and I like them all.

There are still some issues though in UI and usability:

• The options and menus can do with a complete overhaul. They are the same as the earlier versions, and a nightmare for casual users.
• Options being opened in modal dialog boxes.

There are many more things that are nice in the new browser, and I am certainly going to be exploring them (a big reason is that when I use software such as SharePoint, there are limitations when using it from Chrome). I am really hoping that this will be a good browser, and I will switch to it, completing the circle back to IE.

So, I downloaded the App Engine SDK, and then realized that I need to install Python – which I promptly did. Then I configured all the App Engine Started variables, and tried to churn out Hello World. First road-block, I didn’t have a Python IDE. So, I started coding this in NotePad++. Everything was smooth sailing till I started using some of the App Engine libraries, and had to start typing out long code sentences. For a guy who has done much of the coding on Visual Studio, you can imagine how I would be missing nice IDE features such as auto-complete and auto-suggest.

That is when I read somewhere that I can use Eclipse for Python development, and it will do some of those nifty IDE things that I was sorely missing. So, I downloaded Eclipse, and ‘installed’ it. And then I used the nice “Marketplace” feature to locate the PyDev plugin to install it (by the way, I am sure you already realize that to code in Python on eclipse you need a plugin such as PyDev since Eclipse doesn’t support Python out of the box).

So, here I was following a nice tutorial on how to configure PyDev to work with Eclipse, and after the first installation step, the tutorial asked me to go to the Window menu, and then click on the Preferences menu item; in the dialog that opens up, it asked me to find the PyDev. Here’s the problem – no PyDev settings were to be seen anywhere? I looked and looked. I uninstalled and reinstalled. I followed various methods to do this.

I was running Windows 7 64 bit, and I had downloaded the latest version of Eclipse (Helios), and I tried downloading the PyDev plugin directly from their site instead of the marketplace and install it. Nothing worked. Well, a lot of head scratching did reveal the problem eventually.

But first I curse the Eclipse developers to not show a proper error message when the plugin installation actually failed. The culprit was our old friend from Vista – UAC. When I launch Eclipse normally, the program doesn’t run at an elevated permission level. So, for some reason (I am newbie at Eclipse) the installation fails.

My solution was to run Eclipse as an administrator before installing the plugin. Guess what, worked like a charm. Now I go and see what more I can do with the App Engine (which is a whole different story altogether).

But in Win 7, I just can’t find that setting in the Control Panel, under the Network and Internet option (as you can see below):

So, what do I do? I didn’t know what to do and was getting very irritated day by day. Then I just tried doing one thing: I pressed the start key, and typed “Network Connections”, and voila, what do I see on top of the list? Here, see for yourself:

Well, then it was a matter of clicking “View Network Connections”, and then deleting the dial up connection from the window which shows up. Phew, no more pop-ups.

The Standard

The idea behind this standard is to have built-in capability in every cell phone such that all features can be turned-on/off by an external device which communicates with the cell phones through a standardized interface. These features can be:

• Ringer profile – allowing the cell phone to be put on a silent/vibrate profile, and restoring it to an earlier profile.
• Camera – allowing the cell phone’s camera feature to be turned on/off.
• Voice recorder – allowing the cell phone’s voice recording features to be turned on/off.
• Internet – allowing internet access to be turned on and off.
• Wireless networks – turning off access to various wireless features – cell phone network, wi-fi, Bluetooth, etc.
• Power – turning the device on/off.

This is just a small list, but if let’s suppose that all the cell phone devices that adhere to this standard have hardware level support for providing control over the above mentioned features. Further let’s assume that, there are control devices which can control various cell phones within their area of effect (each control device would have a presumably finite area of effect).

Under these assumptions, what good would such a standard be? Here are some problems (big and small) that can be solved, and the benefits that are gained by them.

Some benefits

• Onboard an airplane – Every airline can install one control device which turns off the power during takeoff and landing; and disables radio functions (cell phone network, wi-fi, Bluetooth, etc.) during flight for all the cell phones on board. The advantage is that in increases convenience of customers and at the same time increases compliance of airline security measures (whether real or imaginary).
• Meeting rooms, presentations, museums, libraries, movie theaters – there are so many places on the planet, where a ringing phone is most unwelcome. Control devices setup in such areas can be configured to switch every phone in their range to silent or vibrate modes. The benefit is that you won’t have to remind people to have to do this.
• Examination rooms, embassies, secure areas on airports, etc. – these are places where one is not allowed typically use a cell phone. Control devices installed here can be used to turn off any cell phones in range. Once again, this improves compliance, as well as allows people to hang on to their devices (for example, some examination or embassy scenarios ask you to surrender your cell phones to gain access).
• Corporate information security – once again, in a corporate setup, you can turn off the Bluetooth, camera, USB, and Internet features on the cell phones to prevent sensitive information to be captured and transferred through these channels. I have been to facilities which have asked me to leave my phone at the entrance for fears of espionage.

There can be tons of examples and applications if you just sit and think about it. Of course, the practicality of this approach is suspect, and a number of issues have to be resolved, but several times a day I think that if this kind of system was available, lives would be much simpler.

There are two things that I do, depending on whether I have already started typing the email to which I have to attach the documents, or if I haven’t yet started. If I already have started typing this email, then I simply select the files that I need to attach to the email (by select, I mean select them in Explorer) and drag them to the Outlook message window that I am typing my email in (and drop them). This of course adds them to the message as attachments.

If I haven’t yet started typing out the email, I can do two things. I can select the files I want to attach into the email message and right click them and choose “Send to”, and then “Mail Recipient” from the context menu. This opens up a new message window with the files as added as attachments. This, however, has the undesirable (perhaps not) side effect of text being added to the new message window (see picture below):

Another drawback of this method is that the new message window that opens is modal (for some reason). This means that till I close this Window, I can’t access Outlook anymore. This makes it not very usable for me. Since I am often doing multiple things at a give time.

So another method in this scenario is to select the files in your Explorer view, and then simply drag and drop them on the main Outlook window. What this does is that it creates a new message, and attaches the files to this message. This message doesn’t have any additional text, nor does it open a modal window, so you can access Outlook without closing the new message window.

Small tip, but it saves seconds several times a day.

Let me explain.

I use TwitterFeed to publish new posts I make on this blog to my Twitter account as tweets. In order to do so, I have to provide TwitterFeed with my RSS feed (which is already burned on FeedBurner), and then add my Twitter account on it (TwitterFeed initially did not support OAuth), and then I can configure my feed with various options such as how frequently should it check the feed for new updates, and how many tweets it should publish to my timeline, plus other things such as which URL service to use to shorten the link, and what text to prefix or suffix to the tweet.

What Google Socialize does is pretty much the same. It lets me connect my FeedBurner feed to my Twitter account through OAuth, and then lets me setup similar parameters. Both support more or less the same configuration options (except that Google also supports inserting hashtags based on post category).

One advantage that TwitterFeed has is that it allows you to publish to more than just Twitter (it supports Facebook, Ping.fm, etc), but to me that doesn’t matter – all I care about is Twitter.

The biggest advantage that FeedBurner has on the other hand is that it doesn’t ask you for a polling frequency. As long as your blogging setup is wired to ping their server via XML-RPC (which is how mine is, and most people who use FeedBurner have that), the tweet is sent out as soon as the post is made.

Actually, to me even that is not the biggest advantage. The biggest advantage to me is that it reduces the number of services that I have to deal with by One. I no longer have to deal with TwitterFeed, and as a result I have deleted my feed from there. When I post this article, and you see it in your Twitter Timeline, it will be courtesy FeedBurner’s socialize feature, and not TwitterFeed.

Here’s the post by Google about Socialize.

I noticed today that on that blog, there is a rating widget below every comic, through which the users can rate the comic on a scale of 1 to 5. I thought, I would use the widget to tell Saad if I like his comic or not. I am guessing that the purpose of that rating widget is for him to get feedback on what type of comic is more fun to his readers, although I am not entirely sure he would care – since the premise is that he has this comic for his own entertainment, and everyone else’s entertainment is collateral gain.

Anyway, back to the rating widget. When I went to rate a comic, the options that it gave me for rating were:

• 1 – OKish
• 2 – Not crap
• 3 – Nice!
• 4 – Totally Great !!
• 5 – OMG! F***ing Excellent!!

So, now here’s my dilemma. Why is it that there are no options on the lower scale such as: boring, sucks, crap, not good at all, and so on. I am not saying that was the rating that I wanted to give, but still.

Typically, I would imagine a scale to cover both sides of an argument. So, what is Saad doing here? Is he asking his readers a Loaded Question? As per Wikipedia, a loaded question is a type of a fallacy, which is often asked such that:

“the question limits direct replies to be those that serve the questioner’s agenda.”

The rating scale, then, looks like a pretty good example of this. With these choices, at worst his comics would be rated OKish – which is not bad at all; for example, for movie reviews, OKish movies are good enough for a one-time watch – on this page the reviewer is calling SRK’s six pack abs in Dard-e-disco as OKish, or a commenter on this page rates the music of Slumdog Millionaire as OKish.

So, is Saad asking a loaded question by limiting the spectrum of choices, so that even the worst choice is actually not that bad?

Or maybe, it is Confidence. He is supremely confident that anything that his creative mind puts out is good, and even on a bad day, it will still be OKish. Well, his success certainly backs this up, and his popularity on Twitter probably also helps this mindset. Maybe, that is it; maybe, he thinks:

Anything that I create will at least be OKish!

I don’t know him personally, never met him, so I have no idea what his mindset is like. So, it is possible that it is neither of the two options above because of which the rating scale is skewed. Could be something else all together?

Anyway, I think the ratings scale should offer a balanced set of choices. And as I wrote this, something just occurred to me – maybe an OKish rating for Saad is as horrible as “this is crap”, and so in his mind the scale is balanced. Maybe that’s it.

Anyway, back to the topic. It looks like Google Wave is getting desperate for adoption.

I am a user of EtherPad which Google purchased sometime ago. For those of you who don’t know what EtherPad is, it is a web-based word processor that allows for people to work on a single document in “really real-time” and it really does work in real time like you wouldn’t believe it. Their real time technology is of course interesting for Google Wave.

Anyway, today I got an email from EtherPad:

The email contains an invite to join Google Wave (I don’t need it because I already am on Google Wave). Could it be that they are not getting enough traction so now they are trying to get people who already are used to working with real time collaboration applications (such as EtherNet) to use their product?

By the way, here’s a very interesting re-tweet making the rounds about Google Wave:

Google Wave was built to show younger people how older people feel when they try to use the internet.

Not sure who is the original person who made it. Anyway, if someone can explain to me how to use Google Wave to do something useful, I will start right away.