Nimbupani Designs blogs

Links for 2008-08-07 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

ShiftSpace » main page
A very nicely designed website with all the "web 2.0" features.

Links for 2008-08-04 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Singapore Print Making Courses

Links for 2008-08-02 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

YOUmoz | Link Building: Evolved Thinking?

Fight Climate Change, First get the Maths right!

divya — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:39:59 -0700

I found myself book-less on an MRT ride and looked around for something to do. I chanced upon the 10% Power Savings Campaign one of which claims:

Standb power can add upto 10% of your bill. Switch off appliances at the power socket to save about $50* a year!
* based on electricity tariff of $0.2388 per unit KWh, assuming 35W of standby power in a given home.

Now, it stands to reason that 10% of my monthly bill equals about $4 of power savings ($50/12) per month. Does that mean my monthly bill is only $40?

In an other advertisement in the same train, they claim 10% of your monthly bill can be saved by setting the temperature on the air-con 2 degrees higher than usual which comes to $50 per month. So now, my monthly bill equals $500!

I like maths, and am annoyed when people disregard maths just for the sake of a "10%" campaign. Would be a lot more effective if you give me the real statistics, instead of a fake 10% number.

Links for 2008-07-29 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

"Classic" Web Problems, Solved | Lullabot
Solving oft repeated requests of clients through Drupal and its modules
Eric's Archived Thoughts: Any-Element Linking Demo
Proof of Concept for a feature of HTML 5. makes life so much easier!
adaptive path » blog » Chiara Fox » Designing Search Checklist
a great list of items to include in any design of search and search results page
emastic - Google Code
A em based elastic layout grid

Links for 2008-07-28 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Free Spanish Typography
Chandamama
archives of all old chandamama magazines
AgencyTool Web Design Dashboard

Links for 2008-07-24 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

www.defcon-x.de » Textures

Links for 2008-07-22 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

SEOmoz | Manage Client Expectations And Reduce Your Risk By Including A Warranty In Your Client Contracts

Heart of Brightness

divya — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 02:40:20 -0700

I had long been fascinated with all things African. It is the only continent where you hear more about genocides than any actual development. It is quite unfair because there are actually peaceful nations in Africa and a lot of creative development goes on there because of the poor infrastructure of many nations.

I set about reading books/blogs on Africa to get an understanding of why/what of the current events in Africa. The book Africa: A Biography of the Continent is an excellent resource on the history of African nations since the origin of humans till the late 60s and 70s. I then read Emma's War which is about this foolhardy Aid-worker who marries a rebel commander in Sudan. That book was a good source of on-the-ground reporting of the war in Sudan and how it came to be so. Beware, none of these books are for the faint of the heart. The unspeakable atrocities committed by Africans on Africans is enough to depress you for a week at least! Another novel I read recently was Chinue Achebe's Things Fall Apart that talks about how the society changes after the coming of the missionaries. It has an interesting descriptions of the mythological beliefs of some tribes of Nigeria.

Here are some of the blogs that cover great news about Africa but most of which never gets into the main stream news:

E-Commerce solutions for Africa is a blog post that talks about the opportunities of payment solutions using mobile telephony in Africa. Mobile phones have great reach in African countries as they skip the government entirely and rely on private operators. Kiwanja has a project called FrontlineSMS which use SMS as a service to remind patients/farmers important information that can save time-consuming trips to the nearest doctors/markets.
Afrigadget has a great interview with Simon Mwacharo who runs CraftSkills a small business based in Nairobi that focuses on buildign self-sustainnig renewable energy projects in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Rwanda. (thanks to Thaths)
Afropop.org has a great collection and features on evolving African music and its ties to South American/North American music. They have a great podcast too (again thanks to Thaths).
Wildlifedirect.org is a charity that gives us the opportunity to follow the day to day activities of their partner parks/wildlife conservations (located all over the world) and to donate directly to the parks/conservations you support. For example, you could donate money to help pay the salaries of the park rangers of Mara Triangle.
Making Sense of Darfur blog seems to have interesting articles on Darfur and the recent possibility of indictment of the President of Sudan (via Chris Blattman who blogs about African news and opinions that is generally not visible in mainstream media).

That covers most of my sources of African news. Now, if only I could find a good cheap way to get there and see all these!

The Truth About Multiverses

divya — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:39:18 -0700

I have been reading a lot of Science Fiction/Fantasy books lately (as you might see on my list of books read). The common element among most of them seem to be the idea of a multiverse - Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), Ian McDonald's Brasyl and Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things.

While there is nothing new about Neil Gaiman's visualization of the existence of multiple Gods and their interference in the human realm, the other books are interesting in how they define "Multiverse". Philip Pullman's books have parallel universes where things that are scientifically improbable in one world seems possible in an other. Lyra (the female protagonist) and Will (the male protagonist) live in the same Oxford but in different universes.

The idea exposed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is that of Virtual Reality (VR). One day the separation between the real and the virtual becomes so thin that people hook themselves up into VR as they are doing their tasks in real life. This is not a new idea, but the plot goes into how viruses in VR can cause a havoc in real life - the plot itself is very unconvincing, but the idea is essentially a great problem to think about. Is it possible that one day computer viruses can actually harm human brains?

The last of them is the Ian McDonald's Brasyl which draws on the ideas mentioned in The Fabric of Reality. The book Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch states a person is a set of copies in nearby parallel worlds. From Wikipedia, "This comes out in his analysis of free will: I could have chosen otherwise is analysed as Other copies of me chose otherwise."

What is interesting is that each copy chooses differently (since there are unknown number of copies there could be some with similar choices) and has a different life.

It is very exciting to think about such a multiverse. I presume religious believers will have trouble embracing multiverses into religion (though I am sure somebody is going to write in saying it is already a "fact" of Hindu philosophy).

I wonder what the other Divyas in the multiverses are doing right now?

Designing a Page

divya — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:58:56 -0700

A great video on the decision-making that goes into designing pages of a magazine.

With that, the first video enters nimbupani domain!

Conversion Metrics for your blog

divya — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:27:09 -0700

I caught Rashmi Sinha's slideshare presentation on How to Startup which had this slide in it. My interest was piqued because it equally applies to bloggers who want to measure the success of their blog. Just realised my blog is way behind any of these metrics and it is time I created my own metrics and set up Google Analytics to measure them. Some of the advanced features of Google Analytics are discussed here which help in measuring some of the metrics above.

Notes from Lifehacker The Book

divya — Sun, 25 May 2008 03:36:26 -0700

I read Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day which was surprisingly available in the NLB. A lot of it is already covered in The Best of Lifehacker in Upgrade Your Life (the set of sources for the second edition of the book). Here are a few things that were new and interesting:

Using Flickr to capture Business Card Details. Also tag them so that they are easy to search and make sure you keep them private.
Store fitted bedsheets inside pillowcases. A great idea to save space while packing for moving (which I am doing currently!)
Mirror entire websites using wget. The command is wget -m http://<website-address>
Using Google to look up synonyms.Use "~" next to the keyword you want to look up
Useful Bookmarklets are listed on Lifehacker

I would definitely prefer a PDF edition as the book is worth keeping as a reference. But the Lifehacker post - The Best of Lifehacker (linked above) - already covers most of the book.

Blogging with Drupal - Part 3

divya — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:21:42 -0700

Lhmdesign has an excellent write-up on how the website was redesigned with Drupal with great tips for bloggers using Drupal. A couple of tips I found extremely useful:

Listing categories in a sidebar - Create a custom block and set the input type to “PHP Code” and use this code to list categories
Removing "not verified" from guest comments - Drupal puts a "not verified" text next to the name of the comment author if the author is not a registered user. Here is how to remove “not verified” text if you are using phpTemplate as your theme engine.

Read the entire article to get great ideas on how to set up your blog using Drupal.

Moleskine Doodles

divya — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:17:50 -0700

I submitted my Moleskine doodles to the Moleskine Project about two months ago and they are finally public!

View My Moleskine Project Entry - Kiss and Tell

If you are a member, you can even vote for the doodle if you like it (hint! hint!).

Is the future of communication twitter?

divya — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:29:00 -0700

Just had a epiphany while reading Tantek Çelik’s Communication Protocols. A lot of people are complaining about the inefficiency of emails. What if we read emails like we read twitter statuses? What if we have e-mails incorporated as direct messages with file attachments as links?

The strength of twitter is the limit to 140 characters. If we force people to use twitter-like email clients (or a client that can provide a twitter interface), it will make people think twice before emailing anything - and email only what is necessary.

I see a great opportunity in this, at least I will use it, if it comes up in the market! :)

The Best of Vintage Nimbupani

divya — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:21:39 -0700

It seems my vintage posts were a lot better than what I post now - or so I think. Here is a trip down the memory lane, through what I think are the best posts of Nimbupani circa 2005 and earlier. A lot of what I have written are no longer in the "future" but still make an interesting read.

The Nimbupani Web Experience - in which I talk about what the future of the web should be like.
Touchpage On a Phone - 2004 and I was talking of a touchpad for mobile phones. Pity there was no iPhone then for reference.
Collaborative Documentation - explored, in 2005, the idea of location based collaborative services, which are now already in existence like Hungrygowhere.com
Tagging Along - an explanation for how tagging is as natural as breathing for humans.
Metadata - Not surprisingly, in 2005 I had (like other zillions of people) predicted the future is online.
Watch Us and Learn - my rant against Straitstimes website registration only viewing. Recently, it has made an extensive sections of the website free to use. Finally.