The Shifting Goalpost

Ars Technica has reported that Nokia is to buy Trolltech.

I would like to speculate that this definitely has something to do with the success of iPhone. And that Nokia wants to build a strong platform on the desktop for it’s phones. Till iPhone came into the market, the desktop interface to mobile phones was limited to the (not so friendly) syncing of the address books and a few other features.

What surprises me is the selection of the development platform - Qt from Trolltech, KDE and GTK/Gnome are predominantly Linux technologies. So does that mean Nokia is betting on Linux’s success on the Desktop.

Finally, I gave in to the temptation of the MacHeist Software Bundle and bought it. It is a collection of 14 Mac applications that, if bought separately, would cost $498.60. But MacHeist is running a deal for two weeks when they sell the bundle for $49.

Of course, I think most of the buyers would be thinking same as me - that even if a few applications are useful, it will be money well spent. I made the decision simply because of iStopMotion from Boinx Software which sounds a very fun application. And Pixelmator, 1password and Cha-Ching could be useful.

That is the same question I was pondering on about two years ago. In that post, I had mentioned “..another 100% gain and it will take the sensex to 22000.” Now, I had kept myself invested in stocks since then, but still I did not make a killing.

But with the global share markets tumbling down on Monday, if my other statement turns out to be true - “you cannot rule out sensex touching 6000-8000 again.” - I would so much love to invest more money in the market. Until then, what else can we do but to wait and watch, and read amusing articles and comments on various financial sites.

BTW, the above question can be asked at any point in time. But there is no time for anybody to give a confident answer.

You know how when you get too close to the edge of a rooftop, you can feel your mortality?
Or when you’re driving and you wonder, just for a split second, what would happen if the oncoming lights swerved into your lane?

If you are interested in comics, I would suggest you go and read the webcomic, Outside The Box by Brendan Cahill. The story, artwork and dialogues are thoroughly enjoyable.

5 seconds after I published my previous post, I checked the MaTa site and the issue is not even on the front page anymore. So, does that mean that MaTa has already given up on getting an apology from Guardian? For Marathi readers, the MaTa articles can still be found by clicking here.

Maharashtra Times (MaTa) has been trying to stir up emotions for Indians, Maharashtrians, Mumbaikars to protest against the British newspaper Guardian, for publishing the hilarious or offensive (depends on how you look at it) piece in its travel supplement regarding Ganesh festival in Mumbai.

Both the newspapers have gone beyond their journalistic responsibilities. Guardian has published a paragraph that cannot be backed up with any sort of data whatsoever and has refused to acknowledge that that is the case. And MaTa is providing unnecessary publicity to the article, which (according to me) is nothing but a filler in one of Guardian’s weekly supplements and would have been read by a few people and remembered by fewer than that (but I agree there might have been a deluge of Mardi Gras enthusiasts flocking to Mumbai in September and later getting together with Maharastra Times in bashing up Guardian for misleading them… hah).

A quick search for other contributions from the writer of this controversial paragraph, Chris Madigan, as a journalist brings up nothing but some travel articles on winter holiday activities. I am not even sure if that guy has ever visited Mumbai (I would expect a travel journalist to actually visit the place he writes about, but maybe Guardian or any newspaper these days are pretty relaxed about that - and I would also expect the journalist to actually interact with the locals and understand what he needs to write). But I as I wrote earlier, I think it was just a filler and neither the reader nor the editors care much about the contents in the filler. I stopped reading the British Sunday newspapers, when I noticed that some articles are recycled so very often (and they even cycle it through various supplements).

If MaTa is so genuinely concerned about the issue, I cannot understand why it has not got it’s sister (or rather big brother) publication ‘Times of India’ involved in this. After all, they (the Times Group) do claim that TOI is the world’s largest selling English broadsheet newspaper - it could be an effective weapon (possibly they have not been able to influence TOI but they do want an apology from Guardian - who sadly do not even understand cultures outside their country - or maybe the western world. Sadly the same can be said about MaTa not able to understand the cultures outside Maharastra - for that matter, some could even say the MaTa does not understand the cultures outside Mumbai). Apart from MaTa, nobody has carried this news and cause (that is really strange in today’s world of Star News and Aaj tak). So if they are really serious about this, MaTa needs to rethink about what would have been and should be the best way to address the issue.

There has lot to be said about the quality of media (especially the news media) and it is not very positive. But more of that later.

Ratan Tata has said the above in an interview and I am totally in awe of this great man. Won’t every person in India and elsewhere in the world benefit immensely if this simple advice is put in practice by everybody?

The unveiling of the Tata Nano could be a defining moment in history in many terms (and not limited to the automobile industry) - product design capabilities, R&D investment, transportation, environment, alternative fuel, social well-being and much more.

Being in UK, the possibility of a price point of owning a brand-new car at £1250 just seems unbelievable to me. And contrary to many who may think that Tata Nano has no place in the western countries, I think there is already an existing market which is catered by the likes of smart car and Tata Motors could be targeting this market.

While discussing Flickr and tagging with friends, realisation dawned on me that tagging could be used effectively in organising the numerous documents that are produced regularly in our day-to-day work in IT (adoption in an enterprise for other users will require much deeper thoughts - but I think for existing users of a Content or Document Management System, this could be the next enhancement).

The basic idea is to have del.icio.us for the desktop (or rather network or rather intranet). But the bookmarks not limited to web pages, instead the emphasis should be on documents (or files on the network). Of course, the success and effectiveness will be very much dependent on the contribution of each and every creator and reader of the document (hence the term Social bookmarking, isn’t it?). The del.icio.us network paradigm when applied to such a product can also be useful for collaboration.

My first impressions on using Sharepoint were very positive (it seems to be a real enterprise solution as compared to the online tools I had mentioned in my earlier post) and has loads of features.

But I had just started using it and I discovered an issue (I am not calling it a bug) with the simple upload feature in the Shared Folders - it does not allow the ‘&’ character in the file names. Well, I have never used an ‘&’ in a file name and I have no special affinity towards it (but my project has tons of files created that include ‘&’). I fail to understand - if Microsoft Windows XP allows a file to be created with a character, why does another Microsoft product not support it.

And when you select multiple documents for upload with file names including unsupported characters, it throws an ‘Access Denied’ error - now that, I think, is definitely a bug.

I am wondering how Microsoft’s Testing team looks like.