Offered without comment.

I usually never pay attention to the auto complete suggestions offered by Google, until now, when I found they can be quite amusing. What’s even more fun though, is repeating a search across different country specific sites, to get a idea of what the people of that nation are most worried about. Here’s a sampling, let’s start with India:

#1 certainly explains India’s growing population. We’re also quite obsessive about learning proper English (Outsour Singh is desperately looking to land that call center job) and hacking Orkut accounts. Now, for the Netherlands:

I guess the one take-away from this is that the English speaking Dutch population (which is quite large, mind you) are mostly looking for more info on some romantic comedy from Hollywood. I was also curious about the results for the USA:

Hmm, why are there so many Americans wanting to learn to “tie a tie”? “How to solve a Rubix cube” is about the only intellectual entry to appear on the suggestion list among all three countries, until you realize that it’s actually spelled “Rubik’s”. I wouldn’t be surprised if “Rubix” makes the dictionary soon.

The common theme for all countries seems to be: learning to kiss. Indians are confused between “losing weight” and “reducing weight”, which also explains why everyone wants to get better at English. Some Indians also want to gain weight, a term which is most definitely absent from American searches. Our Dutch friends have no interest in either, I completely understand why; they maintain a very healthy lifestyle by cycling all over the place. The Americans have apparently mastered the art of downloading videos from Youtube, while the Indians and Dutch are still learning the ropes. American women first want to learn to get pregnant and then quickly want to get rid of the resulting stretch marks, while Indian ladies don’t bother with the latter.

The geeks out there will notice the UI improvements on the US version of Google over the other two. I think I’ll stop drawing inferences now

Try your own fun searches to see what auto-suggest has in store! Suggested starting point: “How to use”…

I’m off to the beautiful city of Prague, or “Praha” as it is known locally, for the European MozCamp of 2009. Memories from the MozCamp last year are still fresh, and I’m definitely looking forward to this one!

On Friday, we’re going to be hosting a Labs Hackathon on Jetpack. This is your chance to get to know more about the framework that’s so easy to use that your mom could write an extension with it. Maybe not your Grandma though, you do need to know a bit of Javascript The hack session will last as long into the night as needed for you folks to come up with amazing ideas for Jetpacks and implement them. Drew Willcoxon from the Firefox team and I will be on hand all day to help you, so feel free to come and poke us. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that there’s Free Pizza involved.

On Saturday, I’ll be giving a talk on Weave. With 0.7 just released, we’ll be taking a look at our current state, what’s in store for the future, and maybe a few cool demos. We’re also especially interested in engaging with addon developers to see what Weave can do to make it easier for them to add sync functionality to their addons.

Be there!

Every Master’s student in a research university would have had to face this question at some point during their stay. For some, it’s been a no-brainer. Not for me, it’s easily the most difficult decision I’ve ever faced in my life.

On one hand, there’s the opportunity to work for a corporation, draw a handsome salary and help millions of people today by writing great software. On the other hand, there’s the opportunity to spend the next 5 years of my life with just enough money to survive on ramen, working on a really hard problem no one knows the solution to and derive satisfaction from the fact that my work might help millions of people tomorrow.

Computer science is also one of those fields where getting a PhD doesn’t mean you have to become a professor. Not that I don’t enjoy teaching, as a matter of fact I love teaching, but it’s comforting to know that you can always go back to what you sacrificed. The fruits of research in computer science typically reach mass consumption much faster than other fields, and several silicon valley companies specifically target doctorates for recruiting. Not to mention, you could always dropout — aren’t a lot of great institutions founded that way?

All of this tilts the scale a bit towards PhD, but this decision requires many more months of thinking! What are your thoughts on the matter? Have you had to make such a decision? What did you choose and why?

Today we had the pleasure of having Brendan Eich hosting a brown bag for all us interns, and he started out his talk with slides on the Golden Ratio.

I did have a vague idea of what the ratio was – but today I found out a lot more about it – like how it occurs in almost every natural creation or phenomenon. The mysteriousness of the universe is very humbling. Perhaps if we used a different number system that was based on 1.6180339887 instead of 10, everything would make perfect sense…

Anyway, one thing it definitely explains is my love for 16:9 screens as opposed to the old 4:3 ones

It’s been 3 weeks since I started my (second) summer internship at Mozilla Labs, and needless to say it’s been a blast! I’m continuing my work on Weave, besides helping out with the gamut of experiments that are currently running at the Labs. Weave is going to see some major strides forward in the near future, as we now have our very own Product Manager (Welcome, Ragavan!) in addition to the awesome Mike Connor joining the team

Within the first week of my arrival here, Mozilla made the move to the new office, which is possibly the sweetest workplace I’ve ever seen in my life. Check out selected pictures here.

There’s been the usual slew of intern activities, including, but not limited to: Canoeing, Movie nights, Birthday celebrations, Music discovery, and even a few dungeon runs on WoW

Look for more posts on labsy stuff in the near future. Peace!

Ok, this post is way too late – but in my defense, I’ve probably never been this busy! I guess this is a good time to post, as today marks the 3rd anniversary of my blog. Wow, 3 years just flew by. As I go through some of my older posts, I can see how I’ve changed so much. I guess it’s useful to have a blog, some way or the other.

2008 was simply a phenomenal year for me: Glendix was born, I graduated from college, had an amazing summer at Mozilla, joined a masters programme at Amsterdam, and visited 9 countries. Phew

After winding up my only exam for the semester, a couple of friends and me headed out to explore Europe during the winter vacations. The experience was extremely overwhelming. Instead of writing anything, I will let some pictures do the talking. We visited 5 cities in total: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg and Paris. Christmas was spent ice-skating on a nice, snowy night in Munich; New Years eve at the Eiffel tower. I wish I could say there were great fireworks, but I would be lying

After returning to Amsterdam I was greeted with deadlines for programming assignments, so I spent most of the month writing a lot of code. Now, February has come,  it’s a new semester, bringing a whole new wave of course load (taking 6 subjects at the same time!). I’m seriously considering cutting down on a whole lot of extra activity and focus just on the essentials: College, Mozilla and Glendix (in that order). Maybe it is time for me to retire from all the other FOSS projects, I just don’t have the luxury of time I had as an undergraduate student any more…

In other news, I am now pretty good at cooking a basic meal: rice and dal. I’ve also made Ghee from butter with acceptable results twice until now, and the latest attempt even resulted in some delicious ‘nei kasandu‘, a typical tamilian snack made from the remnants of the ghee-making. Oh, and I’ve also picked up a little Dutch; basic phrases like ‘Hello’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Pardon me’, ‘I don’t understand dutch very well’, and ‘See you later’.

I can’t even begin to imagine what 2009 has in store for me, so I’m not going to bother. Here’s to a great year 11 months ahead!

P.S. You may have noticed I’ve added links to archives of both technical and non-technical blog posts on the sidebar. This should help all my non-geek readers sift through to the posts where I don’t talk about programming or technology (for the most part, at least!)

Today, after roaming the earth for 21 years depending on someone else to cook my food for me, I made a giant leap: I cooked my own meal. Right from buying groceries to cleaning up the dishes afterward

Here’s a picture of the modest beginning:

It looks a lot more delicious than it really was: just boiled vegetables with garlic bread – dressed with salt, pepper and a dollop of butter – rather bland for an Indian tongue. But, oh well, it’s a start

I was going through Last.FM’s Best Music of 2008 charts when I came across Nine Inch Nails’ album Ghosts I-IV. What really caught my eye was not that it was 4th in the top albums chart, but that the music was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commerical-Share Alike license!

In addition to the slew of albums available under similar licenses on Jamendo, it is heartening to see more mainstream music opting for this method of distribution – even Radiohead experimented with it not long ago.

The best way for us to fight the RIAA is by encouraging this type of music distribution, which directly pays the artist. Let’s not forget that associations like the RIAA are chiefly responsible for several draconian laws that plague our society today, and are also the primary driving force behind DRM technologies. Gone are the days where you need large amounts of money to produce and distribute your work of art. As I said earlier, the whole point of technology is to make things cheaper, faster and better for everyone involved, cutting out the middle-man wherever possible.

This holiday season, play your part by going and buying DRM-free music directly from the artist. It’s the least we can do to show that this open form of distribution actually works. My recommendations: Ghosts I-IV and The Raghu Dixit Project. Or sample music from Magnatune and then buy tracks that you like! Alternatively, pick out music from Jamendo and then donate to artists of your liking. A meal at your favorite fast-food restaraunt is all you have to sacrifice for the act

Just dicovered Typealyzer via Tejas. This post makes a nice successor to the previous one: Typealyzer analyzes a blog and tries to predict your Myers-Briggs type based on it. My result was ESTP (The Doer) as opposed to INTP (The Thinker) returned by other traditional personality tests (such as 41 Questions, covered in the previous post).

It’s interesting to note that while I’m an “introvert” in real-life, my blog posts are generally “extrovert” in nature. Though I wonder what an introvert blog looks like – most people maintain a blog because they want to express themselves, no? Also, I’m apparently more Sensing than iNtuitive in my writing, as opposed to real life. The other two characteristics: Thinking and Perception remain the same.