Bloggers Help Tsunami-victims' Relief Efforts

Its amazing how bloggers are helping the relief efforts for the regions affected by the Tsunamis that hit South-Asia last weekend. One important thing they are doing is spreading information about help-groups that need assistance - monetary as well as otherwise. At the same time, it is making visible the fact that many more people donate money than the people whose names we see in newspapers-lists of big contributors. I remember as a kid, when I used to go door-to-door to collect donations for social-service programs organized by my school, my friend's grandfather, who was also my neighbour, would ask me to come to his place first as he more often than not used to donate a larger amount than others. His rationale was that looking at the large donation he had made, other people might be compelled to make donations of a comparable amount too. Blogs, in my opinion, are playing a similar role now. Looking at the way people all around the world, even from countries not directly affected by the the killer Tsunamis, have been contributing to the relief efforts (Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware fame, for example plans to donate 50% of his company's revenue for this week to Oxfam, a UK based relief organization), is a heartening fact and has probably compelled many more people to contribute to the cause.

Listening to Music

Until recently, while listening to music, I normally paid attention only to the music and the sound of the vocals, not the lyrics. I liked a song not because of the lyrics, but because I like the tune and the harmony of the instrumental and the vocals parts. But as a friend to whom I had mentioned this once told me, this is only a stage. He is a drummer and he told me that he himself used to do the same when he first started listening seriously to music. But he added that this is only a temporary stage and soon I would start paying closer attention to the lyrics as well. I believe that is slowly happening now. Slowly but surely, I find myself trying to pay closer attention to what the singer is saying. If I can't understand it properly, I check out the lyrics on the web. The last few weeks, I have been listening to a lot of Rush, Robert Plant and recently Dream Theater. And I have found myself singing along while listening. I must admit it is a lot of fun when you are in a restaurant or a pub and suddenly hear a song and you know the lyrics of that song too.

Awake: Dream theater

I "rediscovered" Awake by Dream Theater (DT) over the weekend. I had heard other DT albums before - Scenes from a Memory (which was the first DT album I heard), A Change of Seasons, Images and Words. I have even been to a DT concert. But for some reason I never gave much thought to Awake... until this weekend. My favourite tracks are Space Dye Vest (a beautiful track composed by Kevin Moore - ex-DT Keyboard player), Silent Man, Lifting Shadows of a Dream and Scarred. I have been listening to the last two in repeat mode since yesterday. I think its a brilliant album. Do check it out if you haven't heard it before.

Got Myself a Domain Name

After months of hesitation, I finally went ahead and got myself a domain name and some web-hosting. I am currently trying out Nettigritty. The prices are reasonable, I thought. The new site is http://www.satchit-haridas.net. This certainly feels great! :-)

Categories Feature Added

Its 5.10 am on Tuesday and I am still in my office. I am waiting for the break of dawn so I can go home, get refreshed and come back for another long day at work. Waiting for the break of dawn and while listening to some great music by Robert Plant, Bad Company and Led Zeppelin, I just finished added a 'Category' feature to my humble blog. Blogger currently doesn't offer such a feature. So I used Del.icio.us instead. For those who are new to this or are not aware of how to go about doing this, I post each of my blog entries (OK! haven't added all. But I will do that by the end of this week, I promise) to Del.icio.us, adding meaningful tags for each post - for example for a blog related to the iPod, I used the tags sharidas/Apple and sharidas/iPod. The reason I used sharidas as well was so that it would be different from the much commonly used 'Apple' tags. Then I used the url of that tag on Del.icio.us - again in my case Apple related posts it would be 'http://del.icio.us/satchit/sharidas/Apple' to create a link for the 'Apple' tag in the sidebar. Now when users click on the 'Apple' tag, they will be taken to the site on Del.icio.us listing all the entries that are tagged with '/sharidas/Apple'. Because of the prefix - '/sharidas/', I hope the tags will be unique enough to show only or mainly my posts.

Because it was the first time I had to do all this manually as I would have to enter the tags myself anyways. But for my future posts, I plan to use Python scripts to do most of the things including posting my entry on Blogger as well as posting the URL of that post on Del.icio.us with the tags I will have chosen. The script will ofcourse also update the template. I plan on using the PyBlogger module for this.

To conclude this post, I would to mention that I got the idea for doing this from one of Jon Udell's posts on the Del.icio.us service.

The No. 1 Option

After having wasted hundreds of rupees over the last several weeks, travelling by auto-rickshaw thinking there wasn't a direct bus to my work place near South-end circle from my home near Yashwantpur, I was pleasantly surprized to find out that bus no. 1 (which starts from Yashwantpur Circle), drops me bang opposite my workplace and I mean literally. I just have to cross the road to enter my office building! And it costs me six rupees one way (probably lesser with a monthly bus-pass). So what if it takes about an hour to get here. The bus route seems to give a new meaning to word "circuituous". Starting from Malleshwaram, it goes by the IISc campus, then along Margosa Road, Crescent Road, Corporation Circle, Kalasi Palayam (yes, thats right, Kalasi Palayam), Ramkrishna Ashram, Gandhi Bazaar then for some reason backtracks a bit along the Shankarmutt Road, then goes by the Basavanagudi Police Station and finally via Netkallappa Circle (I hope I spelt that right) gets onto Southend Road. Phew! I probably will keep a stock of books in my bag because I am finally going to get the time to catch up with my ever-increasing reading-list. Also I am planning to catch an earlier bus, so I can get to work on time. But as they say, the good Lord acts in mysterious ways!

Correction: The Bus No. 1 Route goes via Hudson Circle and not Corporation Circle as I had mentioned above.

Flash-based iPod

[via Slashdot] TheMacMind (temporary-site) reports about a new Flash-based iPod, Apple is working on. While there has been no official press release on this, TheMacMind site says the news has been

"confirmed by a second contact at Apple."[TheMacMind]

The site also has an image of the device, comparing it with the size of an iPod-mini. This device which is expected to have a capacity between 256MB and 1GB, will have no display with only a flat joystick with the left-right direction to change the tracks and the up-down direction to control the volume. Pressing the center will play the song. Tracks are uploaded into the device through a Firewire cable.

If these reports are true, it will be a marked departure from other Flash-based designs. But I am wondering about how the lack of a display for even a 256MB-capacity device will affect its usability. Assuming 4MB for a song, the device will hold 64 songs. It is going to be quite something to remember the order of the tracks. The device can be worn around the neck and the possible target consumers for this are people who like to listen to music while working out. In this case, the display will not matter as people, who are jogging rarely stop to change tracks. They just load the songs in the order they want and press the play button. But coming from Apple, I will not underestimate its design and usability.

As for me, I am looking forward to the official press-release and launch of this device.