My twitter updates in the month of September.

September 2

Unconfirmed news says Andhra CM safe

September 5

RT @Chellaney Sino-Indian relations: Is China itching to wage war on India again? : http://ow.ly/o9Fo

RT @tweetmeme Free E-book by Rajesh Setty – Defiant: Practical Tips to Thrive in Tough Times | Lateral Action http://bit.ly/9kPA6

September 7

How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business http://bit.ly/vaFN4

Another Billiards champion from India: http://timesofindia.indiati…

September 8

RT @mashable Monopoly City Streets: Google Launching Online Version of Monopoly http://bit.ly/hjyAD

RT @tonyrobbins “Very few burdens are heavy if everyone lifts” Sy Wise Who could you help lift today?

September 10

RT greatbong http://bit.ly/3K9or While nation obsess over whether Bhajji pushed video man or not, a true hero dies for the country. Unsung.

September 15

Google fast flip is amazing: http://fastflip.googlelabs….

September 16

@vishwarath2000 Keep it up!

September 17

“awesomeness is the new innovation.” http://bit.ly/ECFrP

Why Fast Flip matters to the publishing industry: http://bit.ly/1hEVEg

Why package matters more than content: http://bit.ly/bPLXD

@amitvarma Hope our cattle-class politicians learn a lesson or two from your discussion

RT @Trumpette GoldTwitter,You Only Tweet Twice,Tweets are Forever,Live and Let Tweet,License to Tweet ,Twitter is Not Enough, #twitmovie

The twiter rush #twitmovie

To kill a tweeting bird #twitmovie

Read my post on Google Fast Flip: http://bit.ly/1hEVEg

September 18

Follow Friday @profsubramanian @amitverma @sanjukta @Chellaney @kunald @psam

RT @tonyrobbins “The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” Gloria Steinem

September 19

Keep your gmail clean and simple: http://bit.ly/116MP0

September 21

RT @mashable Project Retweet: Why It Will Change Twitter for the Better http://bit.ly/wgqYy

Eid Mubarak

September 22

RT @tonyrobbins “Do what is right. Be pure. At the end of the way is freedom. Till then patience.” Buddha

Reached double century with this tweet — my 200th tweet.

Add-ons have been key factor that really made FF so popular among the Internet users. But as Uttam and Phani have found in their study, majority of Internet users who use FF are not aware of the amazing world of add-ons it provides. It is very sad that Mozilla has failed to realize this all these days. But it is never too late and Mozilla should make every effort to bring awareness among users. Providing add-on packs suited to ones own needs is also a great idea.

Kudos to Uttam and Phani for their amazing work. On behalf of all the fans of FF, I wish them all the success in their endeavor to place Firefox on the top of every browser in the market.

Hoping to expect more suggestions from you regarding the steps that need to be taken by Firefox to increase its customer base.

How would you run an entire country without oil, without taking the help of any innovative technology, without any government assistance, and with a specific time frame to get off the oil completely?

Shai Agassi says he has a plan to achieve this wonderful feat. In fact, he is already half way through it. Two countries, Israel and Denmark, have already agreed to work with him in promoting electric cars. Inspired by his initiatives, Israel has already announced that it would electrify all its vehicles by next decade. In January this year, Israel announced that tax on electric vehicles would be only 10 percent of their price compared to 80 percent on that of gasoline vehicles.

Until recently very few people knew Shai Agassi. But he is now hailed as “part scientist, part visionary, with a lot of salesman thrown in.” He is listed in Times’ “Heroes of Environment 2008“. He is an Israeli scientist and entrepreneur who founded a small software company which was later acquired by the SAP, worlds’ third largest software company and largest vendor of enterprise software, for whopping US$ 400 millions. He joined SAP as per the sale agreement and soon rose to senior ranks mainly because of his out-of-box thinking. He was head of products and was in line to become the CEO of the company.

As a member of “Young Golden Leaders,” he participated in a seminar held at a Swiss resort Zermatt to “make the world better place” by 2020. This proved to be a turning point of his life. He then began focusing on environmental problems facing the world. After deliberations with experts and a lot of research on carbon economy and energy  policies, he came to conclusion that only by ending the addiction to depleting fossil fuels could the world be saved. To achieve his goal, he targeted transportation sector as it is the major consumer of fossil fuels. With the limited time frame and less scope for new innovations, he tried to find a solution which could liberate the world from the oil addiction. The only solution seemed to replace oil-consuming and co2 spewing cars with electric cars. The problem of battery need to be sorted out before doing that. Shai came with a clever plan: a complete electric car system that will much work like a mobile phone system. Encouraged by the Israeli leader Shimon Peres, he quit his job and raised US$ 200 million for his project “Better Place”, which is considered to be world’s second largest start-up venture.

He separated the ownership of car and battery. He sorted out the battery problem by simply providing the option of swapping it away. The customers will not be charged for cars but for the electricity they spend. He proposed the concept called Electronic Recharge Grid Operator. A network of powerspots would be built all over the nation–homes, workplaces, downtown and parking lots–to top up the batteries. There is another option for those who want to go on long drive. The batteries can be swapped at battery swapping stations similar to gasoline stations. Shai claims that customers can own a  cool car which can go 0-60 km in seven and half seconds and with zero emissions if they can afford to spend US$ 500 per month which is almost equal to thier average current monthly gasoline bills.

Think of benefits accrued from saving huge sums of money spent on importing oil and saving the environment, the plan looks awesome. Shai claims that nearly 30 countries have already come forward to implement his plan to get off the oil. The auto industry is set for a complete change in the existing paradigm. However, the markets which are deeply entrenched in the oil may resist the change initially. The developing countries like China and India should come forward to welcome these oil-deaddiction plans and try to adopt in their countries. China has responded very quickly. Read this. I feel that this idea may not be suitable to large countries like India where power failures are a frequent phenomenon but they should devise necessary plans to  save their countries from excessive oil import bills.

I wish it is implemented in India. Maybe in near future, we could come across electric cars zooming every road of India, powerspots in every home and small-scale power generation centres spread across every village of India, providing clean energy and generating employment to millions of people.

Read more at: Wired Magazine.

Also, know more about Agassi’s ideas from his blog.

Also read this blog.

Google Chrome will support add-ons and user scripts à la Firefox Add-ons and Greasemonkey, Google engineer Ojan Vafai said during a panel discussion on the future of Web browsers at Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Friday.

The news that Google Chrome is going to support extensions and user scripts has raised the curtains to a new browser war between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The launch of Google’s browser Chrome has changed the landscape of the browser war. Prior to the launching of Chrome, Firefox was gaining popularity rapidly and everyone including me firmly believed that it will soon be numero uno browser. The record-breaking downloads of Firefox 3 had substantiated that opinion. The success of the Firefox is mainly attributed to its ever increasing, innovative extensions and plug-ins and the great support it has from the large community of open-source developers.

When Chrome was launched, most of the users seem to like its stability, minimalistic lay-out and the speed. However, most of them were not ready to make it their default browser because it was still a beta version and it had no extensions like in Firefox.

I feel that the competition between Chrome and Firefox is getting hotter with the fresh news leaked from Google camp. Mozilla may come up with more advanced features in its upcoming version of Firefox. Already, it is said that  Javascript VM to be used in Firefox 3.1, TraceMonkey, is much faster than V8, that used by Chrome. Moreover, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has already indicated that they would look at better process-isolation techniques than that of Chrome to improve security and integrity of Firefox.

Let us wait and see what this browser war has in store for us in the coming months.

Good news: It is the end-user who will be the ultimate winner in this war for supremacy.

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on”

The green-eyed monster can strike anyone any time. The attack would be swift and the damage collateral.  The savage monster can burn hearts and blind the minds of even the brightest souls on the earth. The most affected would be those who madly desire to be ahead of all their contemporaries  in every aspect of their life. Hypnotized by it, they lose all the civility and courteousness towards fellow beings. The fire of anger engulfs their minds and expresses itself through fiery epithets that blaze their way towards the cause of the disillusionment vitiating the surroundings with the poisonous fumes of hostility.

Beware of the green-eyed monster my dear friends!

Don’t let it suck all humanity from your souls.

Don’t let it suck all the warmth and leave you cold-blooded.

Beware of the green-eyed monster my dear friends!

Spring haiku

Recently, Freakonmics.com has conducted a haiku contest on Economics. It got huge response. By the way, do you know what Haiku is? Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. It’s noted for its minimalism. It is impossible to single out any current style or format or subject matter as definitive “haiku.” Some of the more common practices in English are:

• Use of three (or fewer) lines of about 17 or fewer syllables
• Use of a season word
• Use of a cut or caesura (sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) to contrast and compare, implicitly, two events, images, or situations

Do you know even our great poet, Rabindranath Tagore translated some Japanese haiku into Bengali?

It looks very simple but very difficult to write.  Here are some of the haikus I found interesting in the Freakonomics contest:

Haiku writers know
The opportunity cost
Of a syllable.

Demand curve slopes down
because the more cake I eat
the less cake I want.

A friend and I, jailed
We agreed to stay silent
(But I still confessed)

Black tulips were first
But not last, in a garden
of wilting bloom-bergs.

I borrowed too much.
Now I can’t make my payments.
It’s all Bush’s fault.

Economists talk,
But when laid out end to end
Can’t reach conclusion.

Capitalist pond
Frog bets farm on real estate
Market correction!

Cat ate all the mice.
Then tore up the best couch. Bah!
Externalities.

Elephants drink oil
Donkeys cannot unify
Economy cries.

As bankers get rich
Folks are in debt for life
Free markets for all

Invisible hand
gives all of us the finger
in a depression

Write five syllables.
Then write seven more of them
Leading somewhere else.

Finite resources
Maximize utility
Winter’s discontent

Earth’s resources cached
Crinkled colorful coupons
Buy info and coffee

Lonely at the top
Here wind blows at its strongest
Where to go but down?

Sales of ice cream seem
To correlate with crime rate?
Simply summer heat.

Although most of these haikus ignore the coventional principles of the verse, they do make an interesting read. After enjoying these short poems, I felt like trying my hand at writing a few. Here they are:

Hold mind, you lose all
Omniscient, omnipresent;
Grabbing misty air

Craving for stones
for the sceptre and red rose;
See lilly withers.

Do they make any sense? I hope they do not sound double dutch to your English ears.

Hope you have enjoyed. Expecting comments from you in haiku format.

Mozilla Labs calls it “An experiment into connecting the Web with language.”  I am talking about an innovative browser extension Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs which could revolutionize the way web tasks are performed.

With the simple language-based instructions, it lets users control the web browser. It provides you user-generated mashups with existing Web APIs. It lets “… you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more”- all on the run.

Mozilla Labs states the overall objective of this tool: “… connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” I believe that it is living up to its grand objective.

Yesterday, I added the extension to the browser. I was astonished to see the amazing functionality of this extension. I made a video recording of my trials. See for yourself how it simplifies web tasks and provides amazing online experience.

Here is my video of my Ubiquity trials.

Also see what Arstechnica said about Ubiquity.

To know more about it see its tutorial.

Hooray! 1000 hits!

I’d just like to take this moment to congratulate myself and my blog. My blog reached the first milestone of 1000 hits. I thank all the readers who helped in crossing this milestone in just two and half months.

Yang Peiyi

Source: LA Times

My heart sank after reading this post. What a shame! This is how China treats its children. Poor Yang Peiyi.

Also Read this post.