Exam stress

Apologies for not being in touch with the blog. I've got exams from Monday, and after that, I'll be more regular.

It was our last day (not including exams) yesterday in the university, the same day Farah Fawcett and MJ passed away sadly. RIP to them both.

Google's getting Binged quite quickly!

Just saw this on TechCrunch's article: Bing's share is nearing 12%, courtesy of comScore's stats.

I swear, this is getting quite interesting, after Microsoft taking out a makeshift patch for the prevention of explicit content from being automatically played over a hover.

I have to say, Bing ain't all that bad, y'know!

Your next birthday present: Wikipedia

Image taken from The Sun's article

News reports surfaced sometime early previous week (I couldn't put it up on my blog) that there is now an offline version of Wikipedia.

Really, you ask? Yes, really really! It's a book - with 5000 (yes, 5000) pages!

Some excerpts from the Daily Telegraph article are as follows:

Made by Rob Matthews, the book contains 437 featured articles from the popular internet resource and comes up to his knee when stood on the floor.

"It was difficult to produce, there was a little bit of trial and error when it came to binding, as I'd never tried to produce a book of that scale before". Rob, a graphic design student from Brighton, Sussex, took two weeks to make the book as a statement about how people are now dependent on the internet for information.

Izotope Ozone, anyone?

The average Joe may not have heard of this slick company, but if you're a real music buff, you'll know what these guys do.

In short - they make your sound sound better! You can browse their website and see their product catalog. The one I'm hooked on to is Izotope Ozone (currently running version 4.03 at the time of writing this blog). I use it at home, not with a sound editor, but with Winamp!

I could upload a preset here for Izotope Ozone, but not sure if that's acceptable. The software doesn't come cheap (around $250 or so), and you may find other plugins in the market that do a similar job (or better) but this is a 6-in-one plugin module. Beat that!

Oh - if you're not into multiband compressors, don't fret - I'll put up a small blog post sooner or later explaining the use of multiband compressors. You may want to check up Wikipedia and other websites. A quick summary would be: they make your sound clear and loud. They can be used to distort or enhance certain frequencies too - practically every radio and television station uses these (hence, the music on these channels sound better than they tend to do on your PC).

While I don't condone piracy, you can get a torrent from different sites for the key-gen (you can download the EXE file from Izotope's website, for free, but it'll run in trial mode till you key in your license)

Work load - almost ended

Today was a horrible day. So horrible that we had our presentations, and our entire project is wrong. First of all, our teacher refused to accept our project writeup because we forgot to insert one letter in his name - he says he's so particular about his name that he just cannot get ANYONE's name right in our class. A toast to hypocricy... but anyway, after fixing it, he decided to take it in.

Then came our presentation, and in the start, he asks us to show some of our excel figures. Guess what? Because one figure is wrong, the rest of the project is wrong. Yeah, WRONG!

Bad, BAD day today. We've been working our butt off (my group) for the last so-many days, and when this happens, I think we all need a major heat sink... the same ones used in the PCs.

And that's why I've been away right now. I've fired up Winamp and am now listening to Sophie Ellis-Bextor's "Mixed Up World". Coincidence, yes, cause I used a playlist generator.

Now I'd really like an impartial response here: what blogging platform would you prefer - Blogger or OnSugar?

And when you do poll, please state why in the comments. :)

Update: one advantage of OnSugar is that I get a nice name. On Blogspot, I have to use caffeinequirks.blogspot.com - which sorta loses it's essence: here, it looks like "caffeine ON sugar" in the URL - which is something I was aiming for got.

PS: the poll is on the sidebar of this blog. Please vote ASAP.

Fedora > Fed up

I decided to download the 700MB .iso package and put it on a CD.

First of all, I made a major blunder by writing the ISO file as it is onto the CD - and well - it didn't work (I've never written ISO files before, and Windows doesn't do it natively).

After getting that done, I decided to give it a spin on my system. The desktop is all nice and blue, but I couldn't really use it.

For starters, it took me a while to figure out the network settings. Windows has this pre-configured. Not sure about Ubuntu - I'll try it out someday.

I couldn't find the application manager (or I didn't look for it hard enough).

The LiveCD for Fedora was actually slower than Ubuntu's LiveCD (strange, but true).

Fedora's file manager/explorer is clunky. Have a look at Ubuntu's, and you'll know what I mean.

I read somewhere you can run Windows programs on Fedora without having to use Wine - since Fedora has some other compiler installed. I tried running an EXE - didn't work. I'm sure I did something wrong, but well - it wasn't in the applications menu.

So back to Windows for me. I lost patience that I couldn't do anything efficiently on it - heck, I wanted to see how fast OpenOffice was, but couldn't.

The best part doesn't stop there - when I wanted to quit (shut it down), it got stuck at the blue splash screen. Brilliant, eh? I had to force-reset my PC to get back to Windows (instead of letting it restart automatically).

Stinks!

Well - not the smell (though it is getting hot lately), but the amount of work I have to keep up with handed by our lovely university. Right now, I'm trying to finish the grammatical errors of a group member who has "finalized" a project. Not that I mind it (since I hadn't done much work myself) but when you have a backlog of tons of things (and when you're trying to make an attempt to be regular at your blog, things don't sum up that well).

Work stinks. The university stinks. So do my teachers - and the guy who travels next to me in the van (he smells!)

Need a way to beat the heat? First of all, travel in an air conditioned vehicle. Next, look everywhere but your university (or office, if you're employed). Thirdly, settle down for watermelons (no, I'm not hinting at anything...) - they're a good fruit for the summers.

Or go have some ice. Does the same thing, but for free!

Image credit: About.com

Google owns approx. 72% of the internet video streaming market

 

Image says it all!

Image taken from TechCrunch's article (read more on TechCrunch)

Pakistan's Outsourcing Light Shines!

Ok - don't expect me to give you an in-depth analysis of what this means (I could, but I think I have better things right now, and I'd like you to come up to your own conclusions). A BusinessWeek article says:

Pakistan has become the 20th most attractive outsourcing destination,  according to consulting management firm A.T. Kearney. Even as concerns increase about Pakistan’s stability and the growing displaced population due to ongoing military operations with the Taliban, the country made a significant jump on A.T. Kearney’s 2009 Global Services Location Index released May 18. Pakistan went from #30 in 2007 to #20 in 2009.

I know we're number 20 - but hey - what else can you expect? If you're in a top ten list, I don't think we'd ace anything... well - okay, maybe a few things. But this is good stuff. India's losing it's edge slowly (due to increasing costs, and the fact that not all outsourced agents can sound foreign... more to come on that later) and other countries are crowding in. I recall doing a project on South Africa, and I came across somewhere that Shell had a call center there!