Orkut scrap made easy

The fact that orkut has caught on amongst the geeks big-time is illustrated by:
orkut scrap helper for firefox.

- Scrap those who have scrapped you in a single step!
- Persistant link to Your scrapbook

Fon

A very interesting development I completely forgot to record. This happened about 2 months ago, with the launching of the p2p bandwidth sharing startup called fon founded by the famous Argentine entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. It has this nice idea of sharing broadband internet over wifi for free or paid.

Was totally enthused because of the following - my brother and I had come up with the same model 2 years ago. We had written down a white paper describing the technology and business aspects of it. And neither of us had the time or enthu to follow up and implement it. So, when fon came up, we were very pleasantly surprised that we had an idea of a startup. This is cool. Looking forward to our own in hmmm.... 5 years. hopefully.

Link to the white paper - A Peer-to-Peer Model for Ubiquitous Broadband Connectivity Sharing. and the abstract

Abstract— Over the last few years, there has been an unprecedented growth in residential broadband access, and number of public hotspots. But, the average broadband bandwidth utilization at each home remains low for majority of the
subscribers compared to the bandwidth provided to each. The price of the broadband connection is high, but residents feel the need for it for the infrequent surges in bandwidth demand by some common applications. The public hotspot business model has also not taken off primarily due to additional cost of access for the user outside home, and having to take service from separate hotspot entities.
Peer-to-peer systems have created a storm in recent years, by facilitating robust decentralized systems for file sharing. We envision a peer-to-peer broadband bandwidth sharing system, to address the limitations pointed out in the previous paragraph. In our model, peers with already established broadband connection will share their connection with their neighboring peers either for profit or for altruism. The neighboring peers without broadband access will have on-demand shared broadband access for a low usage-based fee. The system will enable a ubiquitous wireless broadband
connectivity for the peers, by providing access on demand at competitive rates. We back up our technology with details of the business model that will make this competitive bandwidth sharing possible.

Ubuntu

Totally thrilled with Ubuntu. It is this new linux distribution for humans, not geeks. With all the microsoft bashing et al., I still had windows in both my laptops primarily for powerpoint, device drivers, and multitude of apps.

Finally, with the prospect of giving more powerpoint talks gone for the forseeable future, put in ubuntu. And its working like a dream. the most impressive part was, it recognized my flash drive and put in a little browsable icon on my desktop too. No more mount-ing devs. It has this suede image editor almost photoshop-like, called gimp. And also open office2 is a dream. If I ever feel like giving a ppt in life again, I still can. Messenger took a little effort to install, had to get a few libraries for debian distribution, and force install some conflicting libraries. But, the look and feel is terrific and am loving it. All of the apps were available freeware before of course, but this is real nice packaging. So, with redhat in office and ubuntu at home, freebsd seems like history now.

Sustainable....

Nice, very nice article. "civilization" and "humanity" are such oxymorons :(

On 5/2/06, Rajesh Mukherjee wrote:
Ami recently ei documentary ta dekhlam: The Corporation
Netflix e achhe...parle tora dekhish

Aar ei article tao pora dorkari
http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4192

daktar

ban geya finally and officially. Spent almost a week in Houston from 22-29 April to make the feat happen. A brief chronology:
1. had barely done office the previous few days frantically trying to tie up loose ends. boss in office had been very cool to give me unofficial time off for pretty much the whole of next week to wrap things up at rice.
2. landed up in Houston at midnight. yanjun was shocked to see 3 huge boxes with me. Nope, I was not moving back; just getting back my desktop to Rice.
3. So hot and humid in Houston. Glad to be in California now
4. Spent late nite catching up with anirban...woke up in the morning and started redoing presentation.
5. laptop conked off at nite. perfect timing. working with an attached external monitor.
6. Sunday: spent a Herculean 16 hr day with advisor mostly with content and powerpoint.
7. Gave one practice talk on monday. need to prepare more. defense at tuesday 9 am. also realized my signed title and thesis form from one of my committee members had not reached yet due to a guffaw by one of our dept secys. An additional thing to worry about now.
8. Had been sleeping 3-4 hours last few nites, so why not the same before defense. went to sleep finally at 3 only to wake up without alarm at 6.
9. Defense went pretty well. "speakers notes" of powerpoint is a nice feature for the first few fluff slides. no revisions. Committee happy. me utterly happy.
10. Nope, did not drink much. too tired. Albeit half a bottle of wine with apan.
11. wednesday. the coveted courier reached. with all signed forms. got signs from others in committee and had my big bottle of champagne from Valhalla in the evening. after a nice dinner treat from my advisor at my favorite Mi Luna - a tapas place - with our group, it was back to whole night of work for editing thesis.
12. thursday. submitted thesis finally in the morning at 10 am, making the customary rounds to graduate studies, library and registrar in order.
13. and thursday night was also a night out. and for all the right reasons... :-)
14. then took a early morning flight back to bay area straight to office. I must have been looking distraught.