Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Talk on fundamentals of AJAX usability


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This talk was given in GWT Conference by Kelly Norton

Condoleezza Rice blames Asians for food shortage

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to defend its government over biofules issue. Diversion of food in production of biofuel is causing global food shortage. In 2005 Bush administration embraced biofuels. Subsidized production of corn for ethanol reduced the amount of food grain cultivated. Result prices of food grains went up. They signed pact with Brazil in intention to form the "OPEC" like cartel of "ethanol fuel producers" (source).

Now she comes up with a master stroke blame Indians and Chinese for rise in food prices. According to her
"growing Indian and Chinese appetite is contributing to the global food crisis".(source). I personally feel that this comment is "politically incorrect" and some what heartless. What she is saying may be partially correct (although Montek SIngh Alluwalia is not agreeing with her). It looks like she making these comments to defend polices formed by her Government.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Amazon webservices tools (EC2 and S3)

1. Firefox plugin to visually check the EC2 a/c. You can see the available AMIs, see running instances, shutdown running instances, start the running instances.

check this link for more details
Elasticfox - firefox plugin

I found this tool very useful and saves lots of time.

2. Command line tool S3 tool for creating buckets, pushing data to S3 servers.
s3sync

This tool is very good in writing simple scripts to backup/store/bulk upload scripts etc.

3. S3fox - as name suggests firefox plugin for s3
s3fox

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Dilbert.com flash widget. Good example for How to screw up the UI.




To read a strip you need 3 clicks per strip. Looks like UI designer forgot fundamental rule of design (clicks are expensive).

Monday, April 14, 2008

Maoist Power in Nepal and India

Yesterday evening when I heard the news of Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) winning most of the results declared till now, first thought struck to my mind was this may be a moral booster for Maoist in India (Naxalites as they popularly known as).

WIth Maoist in power in Nepal cross border movements from Naxal affected states of India which are near Nepal like Bihar, Jharkhand,West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and some parts of UP will increase. This will be of some concern to India. Although CPI-Maoist have very small cadre in India they do control parts of Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand.

This will be an interesting twist in India's relationship with Nepal, we have to look forward how Indian diplomats handle this when most of India politicians busy with next General Elections.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Its Usability and not being funky

I stumbled upon this talk by Azo Raskin at Google Talks.
A must watch if you are involved with writing computer softwares and expects people to use it.



Also see this Sample Chapter from book Don't make me think