Shift happens. That’s the answer to the did-you-know question. Found this video on youtube in my web journey today, but it was too low quality for my liking. So some more googling, and browsing later, found the blog of Karl Fisch, he created the original presentation for teaching staff how to cope with changing times that inspired so many remixes and views.

The blog post that talked about Sony / BMG approaching him for permission to create the video (that, in the end, I found on youtube) also linked to a higher quality .mp4 version of it, so I couldn’t resist downloading it and re-uploading it to blip.tv, which I find churns out much higher quality video than most of the other video sites. Wanted to do a review on that too, but that will have to wait for a later date - reviews take up a lot of time.

The Did you Know? / Shift Happens video presents unique facts about trends that can be seen about geographically distributed individuals and the Internet in general as well as astounding facts that I, at least, had no idea of.

Going through Karl Fisch’s blog also led me to watch this video, titled “Rise of the Rest” which is supposedly inspired by the Did you Know video, which is quite amazing as well. This is available in higher quality on google video (as a download) - found that link on the futuregroup wordpress blog.

Ah well, it looks like this year 2008 is finally coming to an end, and what better way to sum it all up than to see the trailers of movies that have been long anticipated to release in 2009!?

Star Trek

First up of course, is Star Trek. I blogged about this one way, way back in July 2006, and at least we finally have a trailer to watch, if not the movie.

Watchmen

Then, it’s another biggie, Watchmen.

Wolverine

And finally, Wolverine. Finally Gambit makes an appearance! Gambit is my second most favorite XMen, the first being Wolverine of course.

All trailers are courtesy of Trailer Addict, they really know their trailers (and more so, their movies, of course).

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of quotes. A quote collecter, even. Watching through Andromeda episodes, I’ve always paused and stared at the opening quote that is always shown. Couldn’t help but google for a quotes repository for the Andromeda opening quotes, and after quite some searching, and wading through weird-ed out tripod pages (people still do animated GIFs on their pages !?), and 404 pages and what not, I finally landed on the wikiquotes page for Andromeda quotes. And was quite amazed to find that not only is each episode opening quote present, but also that each episode’s key / notable dialogues are present as well! Amazing collection, this.

My (current) favorite quote out of the lot is still:

You might say reality is the result of complex negotiations between the observer and the observed.

But that is simply a point of view.

– Michio von Kerr, “The Apotheosis of Reason”, CY

Other fine examples (crowd favorites?) include:

We say atoms are bound by
Weak Attractions.
Why not admit the Truth:
The Universe is held together by Love.

Michio Von Kerr,
Wayist physicist,
CY 9942

and

“Those who fail to learn history
are doomed to repeat it;
those who fail to learn history correctly–
why they are simply doomed.”

Achem Dro’hm
“The Illusion of Historical Fact”
– CY 4971

The wikiquotes site also houses a page full of another of my favorite quote laden works: Fight Club. I have blogged about Fight Club before, but this wiki quote page for fight club quotes really does take the cake - there are enough quotes here to fully satisfy your apetite. And then, some more after that.

Bon appétit and, happy quoting!

The trouble with tribbles is one of my most favorite episodes of the original Startrek Series. And when I found thinkgeek on twitter and also the fact that they’ve actually gone ahead and made tribbles of their own, I couldn’t resist posting.

These tribbles are of course sterilized (according to thinkgeek at least! ) so they won’t multiply and over-populate the apartment like they did the Enterprise. They’re just too cute to not have. At least one. Or two. Or several.

CBS seems to have put up the full, original The Trouble with Tribbles episode on their site and then pulled it down for reasons unknown. So I found 2 parts of it on youtube - for those of you who haven’t seen the video - you MUST see this! It’s also truly funny apart from being the cutest episode in the original series. And then go and get the full original episode and watch that of course!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Other parts are missing, as far as I can see. Do comment if you find them and I’ll update this post.

At Cynapse, we recently released the latest version of cyn.in 2.1 (last week) and the response has been nothing short of amazing!

One of the (among many) cool things that we did in cyn.in was to put in microblogging collaboration. What’s that you ask?

Here’s the quote from Wikipedia:

Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates (say, 140 characters or fewer) or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

What’s different in cyn.in, of course, is that you can actually discuss each individual “Status message” (what we call each microblog post instance). I think that this is one of the key problems plaguing the world of microblogging as we know it.

While various ways have developed to solve this problem (You can @dhiraj on twitter, for example), there’s not many systems that support commenting like we do - off hand, I do not know of a single one. In cyn.in each status mesasge is a full-blown cyn.in item. Not being a second cousin to the rest of the applications means that you can actually go ahead and have fully threaded discussions on Status messages, among the many other things (like having them show up in Smart Views, for example).

If you use the cyn.in desktop (made in Adobe AIR) as much as I do, then you quickly realize that discussions are the norm, and not the surprising thing that it sounds. Yes, cyn.in desktop lets you type in a reply, or add a new message to a discussion so quickly that it leaves you amazed with that distinct feeling: “That’s all? There must be something else I have to do to get my message across.” Well no, there isn’t. It’s already popped on everyone’s desktop.

Take my word. Or have a look at the cyn.in screenshots. Either way, you should buy it - now that it has a reduced starting price of just $99/mo. You’ll be happier. Your day will be filled with bright sunshine, and you will go around smiling at everything / everyone.

Or am I just overpitching?

You tell me. I never know.

InContext Editing: A whole new editable web. All over again.

Adobe has just announced the preview of their upcoming technology, InContext Editing which purportedly allows Dreamweaver designers / developers to create static web pages and let their customers edit just parts of the web pages themselves.

The technology seems to be based around a public web based editing service (that’s run by Adobe) to allow people to use (surprise, surprise ) just their browsers to edit the page’s content. The designer is free to use locked zones where (Dreamweaver’s template features will no-doubt hook in) to create their designs and to pre-designate editable zones that the end customers can directly modify at will. All they need is their web browser with the Flash Player installed (9.0.124+) and Local Storage enabled (for the InContext service to store temporary data, probably).

Will this usher in a whole new wave of pre-designed, (and thus, much better looking) web pages that can be cheaply designed by graphics and web developers to look great and yet be editable by the end users themselves? Sounds logical:

Web designers can concentrate on what they’re good at, designing graphical, good looking web pages. They can completely ignore the nitty gritty details where the “developer” needs to get involved, data persistance, and dynamic UI, which they’re not good at.

End-users can get much more direct access to their websites without being forced to pay the web designers an arm-and-a-leg to create all the dynamic infrastructure that is needed to allow them to manage their own content.

The developers can concentrate more on where they’re really needed (building Rich Internet Apps ? ) and like being anyway - I mean who really likes to code “basic” dynamic web pages, anyway, right?

Looks like a win-win-win situation to me.

InContext Editing is currently free, at least in this preview stage.

Links:

• InContext main marketing page
• Adobe labs page for InContext Editing
• Features page

Batman: The Dark Knight is the best darn movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. Top notch acting, direction, action, gadgetry, effects, storyline, everything just works!

And as expected, in Batman movies that have The Joker in them, the overshadowing of Batman’s character is almost inevitable. Christian Bale does manage to hold his own, but Heath Ledger’s Joker is the performance of a lifetime, sadly also his last.

Update: I just noticed that The Dark Knight has managed to top the IMDB Top 250 movies of all time, beating even The Shawshank Redemption. And it’s been what …. 3 weeks since it released? Amazing!

After the recent move to Ubuntu

…for my primary computer’s operating system, I’ve mostly been happy, but as always there are a few gripes.

I finally managed to eliminate yet another one: RSS reading. I’ve always been an avid RSS consumer, and while I retain GreatNews as my RSS reader on my now secondary Windows computer, I was unable to find one to suit my advanced needs for Ubuntu.

The one RSS reader that I knew would probably work out for my tastes, simply refused to do it’s job. I’m talking about the RSS Owl 2.0 reader of course, (known as boreal, to some). The main problem I was facing with this one was that it would simply would not show the posts in the main view!

RSS Owl looked like it was working fine - i.e. it was displaying the standard Eclipse RCP UI, progress bars, everything but it simply would… not… render.. posts. Nothing would happen when I would click an RSS feed. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what the problem was, but there was absolutely no symptoms as to why this was happening, so I gave up on it, (incorrectly) assuming it to be a bug with the (afterall preview milestone 8a) release and decided to wait for the next version.

Then, on a repeat round of surfing some blogs, and missing subscribing to them by an RSS reader, I re-visited the boreal, in hopes of a new release. Didn’t find a new release, but I did find an interesting post in the boreal FAQ, and I quote:

What are the steps to use Mozilla as Browser in RSSOwl?

Note that you can only use the rendering engine of Mozilla inside RSSOwl. Any other feature of Mozilla or Firefox can not be used from within RSSOwl. Download XULRunner for your operating system:

• Windows: xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.win32.zip
• Linux: xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz
• Mac: xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.mac-cocoa-pkg.dmg

Then follow these short instructions on how to complete the installation after the download. Make sure to restart RSSOwl. It will use XULRunner from now on automatically until you uninstall it again.

On a hunch, I did some checking, and found that while I did have a xulrunner installed, it was version 1.9.x and it looked like RSS Owl was expecting 1.8.x! Fired up synaptic manager and yup, found a xulrunner 1.8 that was not installed - installed that and…. voila! RSS Owl was showing up the feeds just fine!

My Point?

The fact that I solved my RSS reading problem is not really what I wanted to talk about here. I just wanted to put down, and this is especially true for open source projects depending upon support from the community:

NEVER assume that your users are all knowing. I did not realize that I’d be needing a separate component just for reading, and that too just on linux. And mind you, this is not a secondary function in a software that is meant to perform other duties, it’s called an RSS READER for crying out loud! If there is a dependency, it should be ideally packaged, or at least stated!

NEVER assume that when people have problems with your software, they will immediately stand up or raise their hands and tell you about it. At least 95% of people who face problems in “getting it to work” or even have questions will simply move on, and only if they really, really liked what they saw (or have a compelling enough reason - like no better alternative) will they ever even come back.

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

- Various Cylons, Battlestar Galactica.

Ah well, another engine move, dhirajgupta.com is now on Wordpress. Seeing how cyn.in v2 is doing great as an Intranet collaboration and knowledge management software, (as opposed to being re-purposed for my personal blog) I thought I’d take the time over this weekend to move my site over to a minimally customized Wordpress.

Hopefully this will mean I’ll blog more as well.

Stay tuned,
Dhiraj.

Watching Battlestar Galactica in DVD quality video has been a cinematic trip by itself, for me. To imagine the kind of triumph in visual effects, story telling and sheer drama on TV is insufficient, one must watch to know what it feels like - the budgets of the Battlestar Galactica franchise must truly be astounding.

Presented here is the much favorited season 3 finale of BSG (as it’s popularly known) and I simply cannot get the theme song out of my mind. This is a rendition by composer Bear McCreary of the much covered Bob Dylan original. Do go here to listen to the CD version on youtube as well - I recommend it. You could buy the original soundtrack from Amazon, as well (much recommended).

Lyrics
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

– All along the watchtower
Bob Dylan (1967)