2007 September | Venkatarangan Blog

Twenty20 – India vs Pakistan

I was part of history yesterday (at least let me feel it that way), watching among millions through TV of course the first ever Twenty20 match played by India. This was the 10th International Twenty20 match. Having watched a cricket match after few years, I feel the 20:20 format has great potential and in all likelihood become mainstream cricket just the way One-Day did for Test matches. The four hours (half-a-day) is very convenient for audience to enjoy a good cricket match and sight-seeing all within a day.

In yesterday’s match (India vs Pakistan) it was good cricket with typical swings of a India-Pakistan match till the last ball. I really enjoyed watching the bowl-out which decided who got the 2 points with each side nominating 5 bowlers who bowled one ball each. Of course, the way Indians played left much to be desired!. One thing was obvious, though Indians may not be the champions in the game – Indian businesses (sponsors) are clearly who are paying for the tournament.

Kids DVD – Why commercials?

Regular readers who waste time reading this blog know that I have a 4 year son and I buy lot of DVDs (CDs) for him. We try and restrict his TV viewing to an hour or two per day, not easy many times and requires all tricks of parenting.

Few months back I bought from Amazon (USA) a series of DVDs titled “Max and Ruby“. This series has appropriate content for kindergartners, the main characters are two rabbits (Max the boy and Ruby his elder sister). Max is a usual next door mischievous boy and Ruby tries to teach Max lot of basic etiquettes and behavior on daily settings. My son loves the series and it reduces his time watching Chutty TV (Sun TV’s Kids channel, which most of the time has content not for his age).

OK, let me come back to why I started this post. These original DVDs that I bought should be ideally commercials free, at least not disturb me before the main story. The DVDs start with half-a-dozen commercials promoting other products from the same company (Nick Jr), which I will have to keep skipping it till the main story starts. With some other similar Kids DVDs they start with promotions for movies which are not appropriate for kindergartners. When the content producers and Hollywood keep complaining about piracy, they should understand to respect the wishes of a paid user.

Do you feel the same way?

Firebug and YSlow!

If you are a web developer you might be familiar with the great free tool – Firebug. Firebug is an add-on for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to easily inspect the HTML DOM/CSS for a page, edit them inplace and many other useful tricks. Recently I came across another useful tool YSlow -which is an addon to Firebug. YSlow is from Yahoo! which analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. Check them out!

Hotmail is now over 5GB of space

Nowadays I access my mailbox in Hotmail mostly through Windows Live Mail client. So I didn’t notice the increase in storage until I saw this post. All Hotmail users are supposed to have got their mailboxes upgraded to 5GB of space and Hotmail Plus (paid) users like me get 10GB of space. I thought 2GB in GMail was lot of space, now what do I do with 10GB?. Will GMail now give 100GB or like Rediff/IndiaTimes offer unlimited storage, let us wait and see.

Trees are gone!

Thanks to flyover (bridge) constructions in T.Nagar and Kodambakkam, the roads here look barren now. The few roads in Chennai that had trees for over half-a-century included North Usman Road and G.N.Chetty Road. Sadly all of those trees have been cut down by Corporation in the last few weeks. While driving I noticed the diameter of the trunk of some of the fallen trees, they should be more than 5 to 6 feet each. I was feeling sad to see them vanish. Isn’t any way to save them and still construct flyovers?

Get MSDN Magazine (Digital) Free!

One of the best way to keep in touch with the hundreds of technologies from Microsoft is to read the monthly MSDN Magazine. I have been a reader for more than a decade even when it was called MSJ. To get it in India it meant you paid prohibitive price for shipping, now all that is past.

You can now subscribe to the digital editions of MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs Journal for FREE!. Please click here to subscribe. Go to here to see samples of the digital magazines.

Is Apple the new bully?

In the 90′s Microsoft was felt closed and distanced from customers, but in the last few years the company has become very transparent. This was through active blogging from thousands of softies – senior level to engineers; community engagements; product roadmap shared early and regular CTPs (Community Technology Preview) of all major releases including Visual Studio, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. I believe no other large software company (even the OSS) has been so transparent in the last few years.

In this article of PC World, the author argues that Apple is the new bully on the block, using strong arm tactics with partners. Do you agree, post your comments below.

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