Flock browser

Trying it out for the first time. In fact I'm writing this post in it's blog editor. Will it work? We'll soon find out. :)

Edit: Looks like it worked!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

StumbleUpon

I signed up to StumbleUpon a while ago, but have only recently started using it in earnest. I don't think I am deriving the full potential benefit yet.

One benefit is that I constantly run into articles or other web content I am interested in. The clutter up my browser's bookmarks, so this is a good place to keep them separately, and come back to read them when I have the time.

Another benefit is that by using the "Stumble" function you get random articles or sites that may (or may not) be of interest to you. As you use it the program progressively determines your tastes and interests, and (ideally) would be recommending content more and more to your liking.

A third benefit is through your friends lists you Stumble (or just view) articles that they are interested in, and hence "recommending".

So far I have mainly derived the first of the above benefits. The system still doesn't "know" me well enough and a lot of the content that I "Stumble Upon" is not of interest. I also have not added many friends yet, but am trying to increase their number. Maybe when that reaches some critical mass the third benefit will kick in more.

This is all mitigated by the fact that I really shouldn't be spending so much time reading stuff on the internet! It can be endless.

(This post was originallly a message I sent in StumbleUpon to my uncle Sanjit Sengupta, but I thought it summed up my thoughts on StumbleUpon sufficiently to share with others.)

NTT guys come by

NTT guys came at 10 AM and just left.
They did the following:

• Have me using a new switching machine in the pump room, was Machine 1, is now Machine 3
• New connection coming from switching machine to the point outside my room
• New connection coming from point outside my room to the room itself
• New modem. Same lamps as the old one.

Net connection goes down again

• Unplugged router and modem and restarted machine, to no avail.
• Eventually came back on its own.
• Called 0120-242-751 and spoke to a lady named Kawasumi-san.
• Confirmed that the connection was unstable around 16:45 but is back up now.
• She said a guy will come over tomorrow morning.

What's up with Firefox 3?

I started using Firefox 3 a few weeks ago and am immensely dissatisfied.

It seems to hang a fair bit. I try to start it up and nothing happens. I take a look in Windows Task Manager and it's there. I kill the process and try again.

Sometimes this fixes the problem, but sometimes it repeats itself. I kill it again, try starting it again, and so on. After a few cycles it may start up. Sometimes I just restart the machine which solves the problem.

I never had this issue with Firefox 2.

I also find it is generally slow to start up. The Bookmarks functionality has also degraded. When I go into my bookmark folders to select a link, I used to be able to right click there and there would be a "Sort by Name" selection. That's not there any more. Adding bookmarks is also very slow. The dialog to add a bookmark is now modal, and with no window title. It is really degraded, as if under development again or something.

I wonder what the hell they did to it?

Bookmarking

The past couple of years saw a great proliferation of bookmarking applications.

Of course del.icio.us has been around for a few years. It even seems to have changed its name to delicious.com.

Then I tried ma.gnolia. Actually I'm never sure where that goddamn period goes. That alone turns me off from using it. I don't know why they would go out of their way to come up with such a difficult-to-remember-precisely name. Unless they are exceptionally good, it's just suicide on their part. And I wouldn't characterize it as exceptionally good.

I have yet to really get into the idea of sharing bookmarks. They seem a bit personal to me.

So the main thing I use is Foxmarks, without sharing.

More internet connectivity problems

Were having problems yesterday.
First in the day. Solved by unplugging router and modem and restarting machine.
Then in the evening.
Then again repeatedly at night.

Called koshou center, they saw something fishy at our building's main device.
Guy came this morning and saw that it was OK, but did some routine maintenance.

Advanced Zoho-ing

Zoho Business takes things to yet another level. Definitely a must-see... at least a must-check-out!

Zoho Planner

I've finally settled on Zoho Planner as my To Do list of choice. The more I use Zoho's suite of products the more I come to appreciate it.

The planner doesn't support task hierarchies, but I'm finding I don't really need that. In fact I find it helpful to streamline one's thinking into single tasks, not large tasks with sub-tasks.

Of course you do want some degree of categorization. Zoho Planner lets you make multiple lists, that display very nicely on the page. They can represent different projects. I'm finding this is sufficient for me as far as task decomposition is concerned.

Red Bar in Miyamasuzaka

Here's a goofy cell phone camera pan at the Red Bar very near my office. I took it on Jan 25. I just created a Youtube account and this is my first upload. Yaaaay!!!

However the damn thing seems to have been clipped to just 4 seconds :(

Beginning Linux

I find I'm recently getting inquiries from various friends and business associates who say they want to try Linux. So I thought I'll post about it here. I'm not an expert by any means, and it's late at night and I need to catch some zzz's, but hopefully this post might help some.

So far I've used three Linux distributions (or distros): Xandros, Ubuntu and Gentoo.

Before I continue, the word distro just inspired me to write this post on my other blog:
http://arkaroy.blogspot.com/2008/03/ending-words-with-o.html

Anywhoo, back to my Linux experience.

1) Xandros is very Window-like. It was a good transition for someone like myself coming from Windows. However it is a very minor distro and the community is not very large. A large community results in more standards, more ports of drivers etc. so it is more usable, and there is more support. Of course the Linux kernel is the same regardless of distribution and thus most drivers should work across the board, but in practice most non-hardcore users are helped greatly by distribution-specific installers and availability on package managers.

2) Ubuntu was very pleasant. It has a great GUI and a large community.

Of course the GUI, like anything else in Linux, is customizable in any distribution, but in this post I am only interested in describing the state of things as they are out of the box. That is the audience for whom I write, and compared to whom I am not all that much ahead on the curve either.

I can't recall what may have been any minus points with Ubuntu. Of course, compared to Windows, there are several usability drawbacks stemming from the lack of drivers or application software for some specific pieces of equipment like printers, cell phone, iPod, etc.

3) Gentoo is not pleasant. I only use it because I have to for one of my clients. It is very bare-bones. The installation of major packages is extremely time-consuming because its package manager doesn't have binaries, just source so EVERYTHING has to be compiled. Firefox took ages to compile (whereas in Ubuntu I think it was available right out of the box). I've heard that installing and setting up OpenOffice can take a good chunk of your day. Some people like this DIY approach but I certainly have better things to do.

Of course the advantage is that you only end up with exactly what you want or need. Such zen-like minimalism may be aesthetically pleasing but let's face it, hard disk space is a cheap commodity, heading inexorably toward dirt-cheap-dom, whereas for me (and doubtless you too) time just gets more and more precious.

I will write more going forward on Linux, and hopefully this is a helpful start for some.

Ending words with an O

I've been in Japan all this time and in recent years I'm noticing back in the States (well, being Canuckistani I guess it is le sacrilege for me to say "back", but compared to Japan I suppose America seems sufficiently Canadian that it qualifies as a kind of "home turf") that people in the tech biz have a way of shortening a word and then sticking an "o "on its ass.

Examples

presentation -> preso
distribution -> distro (as in Linux distro)
algorithm -> algo
definitely -> defo

Any other major ones? Feel free to add them to the comments.

Zoho Creator

Just horsing around with Zoho Creator.

For starters, I made an embedded form which I've placed at the bottom of this blog that will allow you lucky people to contact me. Give it a try!

Although I can hardly claim to have "made" it, but rather selected something similar from their template of applications and tweaked it a bit.