The surprising new feature for me in Windows 7 was it’s taskbar. It’s excellent and very user friendly (still have some pains of shifting from old windows taskbar).
On Windows 7 Feature Focus, Paul Thurrot reveals about the revamped Window 7 taskbar. An excellent article. Read it.
Slumdog Millionaire is a nice movie. I’d appreciate Danny Boyle for his tremendous effort to make the film. Even it’s an English Movie, it contains all essence of an Indian Movie (not the essence of shit that Jamal had in his childhood).
If you believe or not, it’s the story of Millions of Slumdogs in India. I never heard such a guy came to reality show and won prize but it’s an interesting concept. Life in India not what we sees in Metros like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai.. you’ve to travel a bit far from metros or go and see slums. I never came from slum, in my short life experience I’ve met many people like this. I’ve seen and heard lot of related news. I’m not a person who truly explored to the poor India. From what I’ve been seeing for these years and experience I could say something. I’ve seen many people who’s struggling to make their day-to-day life. I saw people who dream to have breakfast-lunch-dinner everyday. All these are dreams for them.
Few months ago, I went to Bangalore as part of my examination and I had a small shopping at Brigade Road in a cool evening. When I was waiting for a friend of mine, I could see approx 10 year girl begging for money to a foreign lady. So tourist asked her back instead of giving money “you need ice cream? you need food? chocolates” she tried lot of different options but the girl resisted and started asking for coins (or notes) again. I’ve seen many children who are not genetically faulted but faulted by a strong racket to present them as true beggars. Indian govt. has lot of good initiatives to protect the orphan children. But still it’s hard to get them out of this racket. Few years ago I believe, Manorama and other dailies in Malalayalam had done a good investigation in this matter and stories we heard was really shocking. We can understand, it’s not because of poverty(it’s once reason in fact), All these are controlled by a strong big racket they can’t simply escape from this.
In north (sometimes in south) India you can see lot of riots in the name of Religion and cast. Even many governments silently supports these fucking riots(The recent Anti-Christian Attacks in Orissa). As Pakistan president Yusuf Raza Gilani said, poverty is the root for the terrorism. It’s true, people want to make their lives better. Then they will be dreaming more from their limitation which is smartly utilized by the terrorist and anti-socials against the countries. Now Indian govt. asking Pakistan to hand over the terrorists behind Mumbai attacks. Is it really possible for Pakistani’s to do this without support from anti-social Indians? In the movie Count of Monte Cristo, Napoleon Bonaparte says “People are either Kings or pawns”. These people are pawn who’s smartly used against the country external forces. They don’t know the seriousness of what they’re doing.
I know the topic is deviating from Slumdog millionaire. Amitabh Bachan criticized that, the film shows a poor face of India. Dear Amitabh Ji, you’ve to admit that it’s a fact and it’s India. If you see the Movie Swades, you can see the same situation. Villages without electricity, children selling glass of water for small 25 paisa (I’m not remembering the exact amount), parents who denies to send their daughters to school, the congested living of slums, prostitutes, smuggling, weapons, riots all these we can see in India. AND almost all citizens including politicians are aware about this. Rich remains rich poor remains poor. That’s the principle running the lives of many.
But there are no limitation for us to dream more, we want have good life, work for our country, make money to improve our lives, say no to terrorism. Dream, choose the right path, execute it and you will be the King , not a pawn. One day you will be a millionaire. Slumdog millionaire(if you insist to call yourself). The film is incomplete but still it gives lot of inspiration for the youngsters in India.
Brand new Google reader for iPhone has been launched by Google Reader team. It’s nice to see it and you can even enjoy it in your desktop Firefox or IE. I’ve tried it with both IE and Firefox (sadly I’ve no iPhone. It’s not yet launched in India). The rendering in IE 8 Beta seems not good. Firefox 3 RC1 renders it far far better for me. Anyway try it… http://www.google.com/reader/i/
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Google Reader
Sure! you can get it for free. nVidia making GPU Gems 2 available online. They’re not releasing the whole text in a single release. Rather they provides the whole text in subsequent releases.
Yesterday, I just downloaded and installed Google Toolbar v5 Beta. It’s really cool to enjoy the new features. But the incremental search really put a smile on my phase. I feel like shaming on Internet Explorer. It’s something like “We are even ready to take any kind of your search request even for the content with the content of your own[MSFT] browser”
In All other famous browsers like Firefox and Safari, the users really enjoying their cool Incremental search facility. Even in the latest version Internet Explorer 7 still lack this features. Even Scott Berkun who was Project Manager of IE has already switched to Firefox just two years ago. He frankly put the usability issues with IE in detail in his blog.
Beside incremental search, if we enter multiple words in the search box it allows to choose either of the words without removing or reentering in the box. Cool eh? Thanks Google for adding up a new cool feature to IE 6+ Browsers. it gave some life for them. On releasing the new version of Internet Explorer, they may-or-may-not include these features but what’s now is really important that past or features. Feel like MSFT has to learn more on playing with Web and other web stakeholders like Google.
Download: http://toolbar.Google.com/T5
One point to Google: That “Next” and “Previous” buttons in the increment search bar really sucks. It could be way better.
Have you ever checked the Refactor! Plug-in for Visual C++ 2005? If not, just check it out. It’s really cool have this free plug-in.
The Link provide detailed screen shot and operations. So that I’m not putting effort to redo the same think. Just check it out.
Anyway i faced some hang-up issues with Visual C++ under Windows Vista. Visual Studio 2005 has some compatibility issues with Vista. I’m not going to dig more into that but just want to use this free initiative.
Those who don’t know what’s refactoring: Wikipedia- Code Refactoring
I spent my last weekend at Tokyo Game Show(TGS). It was an awesome first time experience. When I was in India, I always dreamed of going E3 or TGS. The game show was open for public on September 22nd and 23rd . Actually I planned to go there in Saturday but my physical condition didn’t allow me to attend the event. Anyway I went to Tokyo to meet my friend Krishana Devan (KD) and supposed to go with him on the last day. I roamed through Akihabara electric city and Yokohama area for the whole day.
On 23rd morning, I started with KD from Yokohama to Makuhari Messe to attend the event. It took one hour to reach there. Just getting down from the railway station, we could see the banners and officials were welcoming people for TGS. Makuhari Messe looked like a calm hi-tech business point with lot of big hotels, convention centers, beautiful roads and streets.
There we could see long queue for tickets. Spending 30 minutes in the queue helped us to get the entry tickets costs 1200 Yen. On entering the hall, I first saw the KOEI teams’ area. They were demonstrating new strategic games. Then we moved to X-Box 360 area. The beautiful sexy girls were giving away Halo 3 adds. Also we could play it if we are ready to wait 60 minutes in the queue. Anyway I hadn’t that much time to spare as I had to cover the entire event within short remaining time. Lost odyssey show started at 12.00 Noon at Xbox stage. The initial cinematic scenes seemed to be boring for me and there soon.
There were many small Japanese game makers there in the event. Anyway the big queues are only there at Konami, Xbox, Play Station etc…
After visiting Square Enix stall I moved to another big hall to see the remaining actions. When I get outside, I could see many people came there dressed as game characters. Most of them are sponsored by the companies. There were lot of showy glamorous girls were there. I could see long queue of photographers at most sexiest people. Lot of professional photographers were there.
When entered to another game show hall. Konami was the first attraction. The demo of Metal Gear Solid was running in the big screen with great sound effects. Lot of people gathered there to see the game demo.
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| From Tokyo Game Sh… |
I could not see any game demo from Hudson team instead they introduced beautiful girls and some songs and dance at their area. Surely it attracted a lot of people. Those who do not have big game titles, I could see many sexy girls who’s attracting many people to their counter. In a way some stalls were really in girls show than game show. Microsoft had both beautiful girls and game titles.
Then I moved to Play Station area. They occupied the largest space in TGS. They had lot of game titles and lot of people waiting for playing games. I just played Spiderman with Play Station. Anyway I really dint like the graphics. The edges of characters were not smoothened enough.
I spent some time for take photos finally at 5 PM the event came to end. I took the photos of closing ceremony of many vendors… after that… again back to Yokohama with KD. ON the next day… reached back at Nasu.
Ultimate Toolbox from codeproject team has been published under open source. As per the license, we can use it anywhere in any form. It was a cool move from codeproject. Kudos for Chris and David.
Anyway, I’m first time blogging on a product. I’m a hard fan of Apple and Google and I could not resist myself from posting the incremental search feature of Safari. It’s really makes sens. Again new fresh ideas are coming from Jobs’ magic world. Safari may have many advantages and disadvantages. But one of the coolest thing I’ve ever seen an any desktop or Internet application is Safari’s Search.
If a document or website are so congested with rich text contents,gadgets, adds. Among this, if I do a search what could be the result? The browser may be showing the result highlighted, but from the eye-catching colors and contents, sometimes it’s difficult to find the highlighted search result. Safari does things in a different way. Just see the pic below!
The above file is the screen shot of apple Safari’s Search. It will put a gray light dark overlay and the search result will be visible in it’s position and all the other text will covered behind the transparent layer. The current search result will highlight in the orange color with a small animation. It’s really cool. You should try it… 
Update: Fixed many Typos, grammar mistakes, rephrased some sentences. Sorry and thanks for the pointing out the mistakes through comments.
Now the heat goes up with apple Safari font rendering and IE font rendering. In my previous post I’ve put some links and those guys are already discussed in detail about font rendering.
The inspiration for this post is Jeff Atwood’s post on IE and Safari font rendering difference
As part of my work, I will have to deal with Japanese websites and documents. Long time before, I noticed this glitch in Clear Type fonts while dealing with complex Unicode fonts like Japanese, Chinese etc. At that time there I could not see any other products using it’s own font rendering technologies, other than using built-in clear type option of Windows XP and later.
Safari uses comparatively higher contrast for font rendering. If you see the picture below, you can see the detailed sub-pixel rendernig even for the complex Unicode fonts like this.
Safari Normal View
IE – Normal view
Here it goes 6x zoomed version of these images. Click on Images to get the full sized images
Above Shows Safari Zoomed Image of Screen shot
Above shows IE Zoomed Image of screen shot
Are you doubting, I’ve not enabled clear-type in my machine? You can simply confirm it by checking the English Text just near the Japanese one.
I’ve used http://google.co.jp to analyze the difference.
You can check some interesting post and articles on Sub Pixel rendering
Clear Type (UnSung Hero of Windows)
How Sub-Pixel Font rendering works?
Joel On Software – Sub-pixel rendering and font smoothing
