Cross blog promotion... three new posts at Foodie For Life:

• Clubs and Burgers at Cafe Mocambo, Fort, Mumbai


• Amazing Indian food at Food Inn, Colaba, Mumbai


• Mini meals at Mocha, Marine Lines, Mumbai

Movielicious Weekend

Watched three movies last weekend. The perks of living bang next to a multiplex... heh :-) I saw "Loins of Punjab" and "Manorama - Six Feet Under" back-to-back. And I mean back-to-back. 1:30 to 3:15 was Loins of Punjab and 3:15 to 5:30 was Manorama.

Both the movies simply rocked!

Watched Dhol the next day. Or couldn't watch it for that matter - left it midway at the interval.

Loins of Punjab is a laugh riot. It's about a "Desi Idol" contest which apparently is _not_ a rip-off of hundreds of music contests out there today. The only catch being that it's open for all the South-East Asian in America. Amazing bunch of characters the script writer has cooked up. I just loved the hip-hop/bhangra surd duo and their "Khoon-karaba" number. Loins of Punjab is a must-must watch.

Manorama-Six Feet Under is also an amazing movie. Short and sweet. Very different script. Lovely cinematography. The director has paid attention to small details like the kind of clothes the actors are wearing. The decor inside the houses. The kind of vehicles people are traveling in. Everything. Abhay Deol is a surprisingly good actor. I liked him in "Ek Chaalis Ki Last Local" as well. Ditto for Gul Panag in Manorama and Dor. This too, is a must watch.

Dhol was a piece of shit. No other way to describe it. I mean, how many times can someone make the same thing over and over again. This time the gags didn't even elicit a tiny giggle. Had to leave it during the interval. Couldn't sit through the entire ordeal.

And the sad part was that Dhol was almost house full, whereas, Loins of Punjab and Manorama were almost house empty. Sad. Really sad.

Shit floats AND sells.

Test post

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The GMail Video...

...is finally out. It's probably been out for a while, it's just that I happened to notice the "Watch our video" link in GMail today. Go watch it at http://mail.google.com/mvideo. And watch my submission titled God, Adam, and GMail, which sadly didn't get selected :-(

Interestingly, no clip from India was selected and there were only a couple of submissions from thsi side of the world. Check out the map. The pin on Mumbai will lead to my submission again :-)

I made the video using GAP - The Gimp Animation Package. It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I'll probably write a small tutorial some day I find the time.

Orkut and India - A Love-Hate Relationship

Well, I hope this time the bigots don't go around chasing Orkut for dishonoring the national colours! I won't be surprised if there's a law hidden in some obscure act somewhere!

Enjoy your freedom while it lasts!

What does software and menstruation have in common?

At least two Ubuntu packages. I present to you cycle and mencal for tracking menstrual cycles. Immense entertainment ensues to think about the functional testing.

Man from testing team: Honey, did you have your period today?
Test subject: Get lost you insensitive clod!
Man from testing team: (Filling out bug report form) Prediction early by few days. Kindly fix ASAP.

Cycle

calendar program for women
Cycle is a calendar for women. Given a cycle length or statistics for
several periods, it can calculate the days until menstruation, the days
of "safe" sex, the fertile period, and the days to ovulations, and
define the d.o.b. of a child. It allows the user to write notes and
helps to supervise the administration of hormonal contraceptive tablets.

Possibilities of the program:
  - Calculate days of menstruation, based on the length of the cycle or
    on statistics of previous periods.
  - Calculate days of "safe" sex, fertile period and day to ovulations.
  - Definition of D.O.B. (Date Of Birth) of a child
  - Allows to write notes.
  - Helps to supervise reception of hormonal contraceptive tablets.
  - Multiple users allowed. Data is protected by a password for every
    user.

NOTE: This program is not a reliable contraceptive method. It does
neither help to prevent sexual transmision diseases like AIDS. It is
just an electronic means of keeping track of some of your medical data
and extract some statistical conclusions from them. You cannot consider
this program as a substitute for your gynecologist in any way.

 Homepage: http://cycle.sourceforge.net/

Mencal

A menstruation calendar
Mencal is a menstruation calendar written in Perl.

It is a simple variation of the well-known Unix command cal. The main
difference is that you can have some periodically repeating days highlighted
in color. This can be used to track menstruation (or other) cycles
conveniently.

Author: C. McCohy 
Homepage: http://mencal.kyberdigi.cz/english.html

I've read so many arguments and debates on why we don't have women in technology, especially software. And I never really figure out the real reason for it. But now I can say, at least we're trying!

Mother of all CAPTCHAs

Came across this Slashdot story about a "true random number generator that relies on the unpredictable quantum process of photon emission." QRBG provides high-quality true random numbers through a web service for which you have to sign up.

I laughed my guts out at the CAPTCHA:



Nice. Makes sure you're a human AND of a certain type.

For all those who're racking their brains out yaar, sine ka differentiation kya hota tha (I did that too :-)), here are some hints:

• (d/dx) sin(x) = cos(x)


• (d/dx) cos(x) = -sin(x)


• sin(n*pi)=0 for all integer values of n


• cos(m*pi/2)=0 for all odd (integer) values of m

Is stealing users a good strategy?

Zapak seems to have caught my fancy. I'm sure everyone would've seen the irritating (and offensive) "As fast as 1-2-3" ad campaign by Zapak. Close on the heels of that, I notice another web campaign from Zapak:



The first frame of the animated GIF has a purple Spidey holding up a placard that reads, "jumping_jack@tediffmail.com" (emphasis mine, apparent spelling mistake - theirs).



The second frame has the same purple Spidey holding up a placard with "spider.man@zapak.com" written on it. Why the dot, I wonder. Wasn't it about "reclaiming your name"? It's Spiderman, not Spider-dot-man!

I just don't get it. Zapak started off as an online gaming company with excellent advertising and marketing campaigns. I remember telling everyone about the "Get to the next level" campaign I saw in Adlabs loos. Or the "Your race begins here" campaign on escalators. Then it went off to focus on girls in gaming.

And then all of a sudden - free email? Which gets delivered instantaneously? Which is as easy as "login, compose, send"? I mean, wow! No one though of that before!

And then it wants people to reclaim their names on a website called Zapak.com? What would anyone like to give out on a CV - nanda_saurabh@gmail.com OR saurabh.nanda@zapak.com? And how long can you go along with this strategy? It's self defeating. You can have only one amit.agarwal@zapak.com or amit.singh@zapak.com. Your USP goes out of the window as soon as you have enough number of people signing up.

If you can't innovate at least don't try to steal Rediffmail's users. They have a phrase for this - "splitting the pie" or "dividing the pie"...

(Oh, btw, they've also launched a YouTube clone now - Zapak.tv)

Cross blog promotion :-)

Back with a bang at my Foodie For Life blog. Two posts (a) Tavaa (Bandra, Mumbai) and (b) Monsoon Malabaar @ Mocha

It's strange to be reviving my foodie blog while desperately trying to lose weight. Any guesses on the number?

Rename Trip: Hidden goodie

Personal & business related travel is booming and the number of trips a person has to make (or book on behalf of someone else) is increasing every day. Being the "internet whiz kid" on the block, I'm sure you would've been asked by a host of uncles & aunties to book them some cheap tickets through the internet :-)

The Cleartrip account pages are packed with lots of goodies to help you manage your travel easily and more efficiently. One of the personalization features I love is the ability to rename your trips to something immediately recognizable. So, instead of identifying a trip by the travel date or from/to airports you can rename it to "Mom's trip to Mumbai". Or "Going home for vacations". Or "For pinky aunty -- still to pay". Whatever.

Here's how you do it:

Log into you Cleartrip account. You will be redirected to your trips listing page. Click on a trip to get to the trip details page. Right below the "Trips", "Profile", and "Email Preferences" link you'll see the trip name and the "Rename trip" link.

Click on the "Rename trip" link to open the trip name editor.

Change the trip name to something more recognizable and hit save. Voila! You've successfully renamed your trip.
The new name of the trip will now appear everywhere (trip listing, trip details, mail trip details, etc.)