Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

Orkut has in the last 24 hours added some new features and this list features one of the most requested feature that many have been waiting for, that of being able to delete multiple scrap’s at one go.

Here are a list of new features that I was able to notice today:

• Option to select multiple scrap’s at a time and deleting them.
• Option of being able to view either 10/20/30 scraps at a time.
• A new Reply button for each scrap means that you can reply to scraps from your scrap book itself. This was a a feature which was until now enjoyed by firefox users with the Orkut ScrapEasy extension.
• Now one can choose to get friend requests from everyone or only from people that speak the languages that one has set in the profile.
• In the messages sent to communities, i now find an option to ‘Ignore this person’, which means you can block messages from reaching you when the ignored person posts to the community.
• Here is something which i have not tried but may be of help if more coverage of India is done in Google Earth, visit http://www.orkut.com/Map.aspx when you are logged in to Orkut.

Though these may not represent all the changes that may have been performed, I am still wondering why Orkut does not have any mention of these in the ‘news’ of the site. Strange!.

Recently when I was watching the CNN-IBN news channel, I saw a report, today I found the report/article on their website, here is an excerpt of it:

Raigad district (Maharashtra): Roughly 140 kilometre from Mumbai, farmers are turning to technology to fight for their rights.

Four months ago, the farmers of Pen taluka in Raigad district were told the state government was acquiring their land to help build the 25,000 acre Maha Mumbai Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

That’s when an activist of the SEZ Hatao Virodh Samiti, Arun Shivkar, logged on to Google Earth.

“We used Google technology to prove to the authorities that the land is fertile,” said Shivkar.

Read complete >> Google Earth aid for Maha farmers

It is nice to see the farmers taking advantage of the feature that the internet offers. Google Earth through its satellite imagery has many uses, it is nice to the use of the technology to help the poor farmers claim for their rightful share. Congrats to those who thought of using Google Earth and bringing it to the notice of the farmers.

Michael Schumacer at the post race conference after winning the Monza GP had an announcement to make, he said: “…we feel this is the right moment to make it assured in a way that this is going to be my last Monza race I am going to do. At the end of this year I have decided together with my team that i am going to retire from racing….It has been an exceptional really exceptional time…”
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Three more races to go…MS just 2 points behind Alonso (who did not score any points after blowing up his engine 10 laps to go)…the season is at the hottest point, and by far the best season in the past 3-4 years.

It would be a deserving championship for who ever takes it…7 time champion MS winning it and then retiring would be a great and just end to such a fabulous career. Go Schumi..Go

Update: Following the announcement of Michael’s retirement, Ferrari confirmed Kimi Raikkonen is given a three year contract along with Massa, whose contract is extended for another 2 years.

Lessons from Project Management: 101 ways to organize your life
http://www.projectmanagementsource.com/
Project Management (and life) Wisdom straight from the mouths of the horses – oops, I mean project managers:
Leadership
Keep your approach friendly: People are not looking to make friends at work, but refraining from an aggressive approach towards your employees is a good idea. The whip - your - team - into - submission approach worked with the “Pyramids of Giza” project – but it is outdated now….

I-schools to be the next big thing
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1914044.cms
I-schools, or information schools, are tipped to be the next big thing in the knowledge economy, after B-schools. The logic behind it is that the country, which is witnessing an industrial revolution of sorts, is in need of information managers.
India has made a quick plunge into the movement and is getting its first I-school — International School of Information Management (ISIM) at the University of Mysore. It will train students in all aspect of information handling — internet technology, data mining and data warehousing, natural language processing, project planning, scheduling and management, information management and security.

Rules Are No Obstacles for Committed People
http://www.stevepavlina.com/
A good reading about the life of the person named Steve, who writes the above blog. He begins the article from the time when he was 7 years old and tells us how he has always been committed to whatever he wanted to do. How this has helped him and brought success.

18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work
http://www.davecheong.com/
Over the years I have worked at many client sites and a variety of office layouts. On one project in particular, we had as many as 80 people in a project team, seated via an open plan arrangement. It was pretty difficult trying to stay focused in an environment like this. These days, the projects I’m on are typically smaller, but there are still a number of distractions which frequently interrupt my working groove. So what are some of the things we can do to minimise such interruptions and distractions?

Software Carpentry Course…
http://www.swc.scipy.org/
Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives writing, debugging, and maintaining software, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this effectively: after a couple of introductory courses, they are left to rediscover (or reinvent) the rest of programming on their own. The result? Most spend far too much time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.

This site presents an intensive course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers. Its aim is not to turn biochemists and mechanical engineers into computer scientists; instead, it introduces them to the 20% of modern software engineering that will satisfy 80% of their needs.

All of the course material is open source: it may be used freely by anyone for educational or commercial purposes, and research groups in academia and industry are actively encouraged to give it a try. The source is available via Subversion from http://swc.scipy.org/svn/swc; if you would like to contribute material, please contact the project lead, Greg Wilson.

Kerala logs Microsoft out
M SARITA VARMA, Financial Times - 26 August.
After the cola ban, it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12,500 high schools in the state, India’s most literate, will not be taught Windows. Instead, instructors are lining up Linux for them. This is because Kerala has chalked out a plan for migrating its high school students to free software platforms in three years.

The India Online 2006 report, prepared by Juxt Consult is out and, here are some of interesting points which the report makes:

• Only 60% users have English as their preferred language. Rest prefer Indian language websites. 40% visit Indian language websites.
• Only 50% users come from metros, 22% come from Urban uptowns, 15% from emerging towns and 13% from other towns.
• The proportion of women net users is now has increased from 15% to 26%.
• checking blogs has become second most preferred online activity after e-mailing.
• 51% Indian users come from low-middle class with less than 10k monthly income.

I am mainly surprised by the last two points, that checking blogs is the second most preferred online activity, strange considering not many people whom i know check blogs regularly, but you know it depends on the awareness about technology that matters, obviously people who use internet more find interesting sites and blogs and visit it.

On the other hand the last point mentioned truly shows how the scenario is changing very fast, now almost everyone uses internet. Cost is no longer a barrier, i still remember the days when internet browsing was a real costly affair and was too slow. Now the rates have come down and the speeds have increased leaps and bounds when you consider what providers offer. Things change pretty fast huh! or is it that I am getting old really fast!!! I hope it is not the latter.

Source: thehoot.org

Well! Well! Well! What’s this Firefox Bus you may ask, i also did, a person named Kalyan in his blog entry has shown images of a bus which has the Firefox logo beautifully painted all over it, the image shows, the bus travels from Mangalore to Bellary, know what i would love to see if the bus really exists with the Firefox Logo, since i stay in Mangalore the job will be easier. I will update you all once i see the bus.

Link for the Firefox Bus post by Kalyan