Sleepless nights coding away is no longer cool….

When I was in college, staying up 2 days straight and coding away in the lab used to work well. Partly because there was a bunch of other undergrad geeks doing the same thing, at the same time. There was even a place to take naps if you wanted to. For the Automata theory final I stayed up 2.5 days and crashed right after I gave the exam. (I passed). At UT I learned -a lot-. There was so much to take in that there just were not enough hours in the day, but for the most part UT Austin was a marathon not a sprint. A good routine with solid concentration would do wonders for your GPA.

Mac OSx Leopard VM running on my IBM T61 with Vista

have been giving alot of thought lately to moving to a Mac as a primary development platform, leaving behind my 12+ year associated with Windows and even my more recent Linux influx. I think the best ever Windows go to with XP..Vista has yet to impress, and maybe finding this as an excuse I decided to play around with the MAC OS, without standing for hours at an Apple store with someone store guy bugging me. After a few days of tinkering, here is the result: Using pcwiz’s VM release, I have a fully operational Leopard VM running on my Windows Vista laptop. (Yes, Leopard VM ON Vista, not XP/Vista ON a Macbook)

This works well if you want to demo/play with the OS but is slow and you will not get any of the performance benefits of a real Mac. I did this to see if the usability is as credible as the hype says it is.

disclaimers : This is a test I did for educational purposes only. Buy a Mac OS Leopard license , or a Mac box if you plan to use a similar technique for daily work in a commercial environment.

Windows XP to stay on…

Despite what the high-ups at MS may want, MS users have made it clear : We still want XP.  Hence, Microsoft will keep an OEM option to customers so that they can get Windows XP when they buy a new machine, well beyond the original deadline to June 30th 2008. So if you want to stick to a legal copy of XP , then get it NOW….

Smart move by MS. Give customers what they want, Vista has nice bells and whistes, but not enough to make me move. I had to get it cause my IBM T61 came with it…so now…

I have Vista. You dont want Vista. You want XP..if you’re going to hang on to Windows..and I need to move to a Mac !

Good morning and…

Thank you for the post , Seth Godin. Here’s his post that made my morning:

“

Waiting until the last minute

In a nutshell: don’t.

Bad situations to wait until the last minute:

• Catching a transcontinental flight
• Asking your secret crush to the prom
• Applying for a summer internship
• Setting customer expectations
• Studying for the SATs
• Saving for retirement
• Giving up smoking
• Asking for a raise
• Teaching ethical behavior to your kids
• Winning a primary
• Asking for directions
• Sharing an idea

And, for balance, two times when it pays:

• Bidding in an eBay auction
• Giving up hope

“

Firefox 3 Beta fixes the memory hog problem.

I love Firefox. I really do. It has its issues, just like your iPhone or laptop. But you love your iPhone despite its issues. But then again, your iPhone doesnt eat up 600mb of memory to show you 6 websites. Which firefox does, or used to do shall I say. After I installed the beta release of FF3, the first thing I noticed was that the memory hog issues were -gone-.

I’m done tinkering…

the first idea (called buzz.PK) is finally ready to jump into a public beta…took two weekends and a vacation but finally got done…go here to check it out :http://buzz.ittazee.com/

The second cool idea is still in dev mode in my little lab, if I ever find time from work i’ll get that out too…

let me know what you think about buzz.PK ….

Joel’s article at Inc Magazine

In the Spirit of the SI series, here is a great article by the well know Joel Sposky on the link between Innovation, ebay, wikipedia and naval gunnery:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080201/how-hard-could-it-be-inspired-misfires.html 

PTA blocks Youtube in Pakistan.

(also posted on ittazee.com)

I am SUPER pissed. I mean, WTF?! (excuse my french) Youtube has been blocked in Pakistan, leaving thousands of instructional, knowledge building , and great videos out of reach of 160 million Pakistanis. The PTA (Pakistan Telecome Authority, the watchdog basically) apparently (as per the news article) had blocked one objectional page on youtube, but ISPs have blocked out the entire site?!

http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=97814

Once again, we, by our people, are locked out of progress and change. I’m just ticked off now. Several other video sites still work, for the time being. If you remember, they also blocked blogger.com for a long time as well. That didnt last. I hope this doesnt.

I’m tinkering..

I’m building something in my little lab. tinker tinker tinker…  if it works out, i’ll post about it here soon.

Xobni keeps me from uninstalling MS Outlook..for now

I’ve given up on MS Outlook mostly. What started out as a massively innovative product several years ago is now just a deadbeat same ol’ problems again app. I’ve long since switched to Gmail for personal email. But the one reason I still live with outlook is that its offline. It allows me to keep tons of email close at hand, though its annoying to search.

So just as I was about to shut down my Outlook usage forever, here I find Xobni. (thats Inbox spelt backwards). In a nutshell, Its the equivalent of Google like search engine+analytics+more but for Outlook. It goes for outlook what google desktop does for the desktop, or Vista search for that matter. It also allows you to view your outlook emails as conversations, just like in gmail! yay!