Rungta’s Webmarks

Nokia's iPhone ∞

I guess a “Finland, start your photocopiers” banner is due at Macworld. Oh wait, they already did. (Via TUAW)

Mac OS X Welcome Movies through the ages ∞

I’ve always loved these movies. (Via Impulsive Highlighters)

Pray for Tarun ∞

I just found out about this. My friend Tarunvir Khurana and three others (Akshay Tyagi, Rahul Agarwal and Satvik Bhan) met with an accident near Rajpura in Punjab early morning yesterday. While the other three were critically injured, Tarun has gone missing since the incident. I call upon everyone to pray for his return and safety and a speedy recovery for the other three. I am grief-stricken and still finding it hard to accept this news.

Ferrari, McLaren, Ferrari, McLaren ∞

Damn, I can’t believe I missed the qualifying broadcast! Fours hours back I stopped my BBC and ToI news feeds from being updated so that I could watch the qualifying session of the Turkish Grand Prix without being spoilt but only 9 minutes after the broadcast ended did I remember why I was sitting bored waiting for something. Ah well, can’t wait to watch tomorrow’s race after almost a month without any F1 action.

Sigh… ∞

More on the subject:

• Ork/Cut, by Varenya
• Guide to Orkut: Part 1, by Tapan
• Orkut, by Aditya

That should give you a pretty good idea of what I think about orkut.

Seam Carving: content-aware image resizing ∞

Interesting new technique for resizing images dynamically and non-destructively. “Seam carving” uses information from the image in order to preserve the important features. You have to watch the demo to see it in action to realise how cool it really is. (Via Elsewhere.subtraction.com)

But there's only so many ways to do something, right? ∞

Jason Fried:

As a web designer you have a lot more options and variables and possibilities than a watch designer. Build something that’s yours. Make something you can call your own. Make your own mark. Cut the excuses and be a designer.

Apple Mail Nicknames Bug ∞

This was one of my biggest gripes about Mail.app. I was shocked when I first realised that Mail not auto-completing nicknames to their matching addresses was not some error on my part — the damn thing didn’t do it at all! Of course I don’t use Mail anymore, thanks to the lovely proxies at Monash. (Via Daring Fireball)

Impulsive Highlighters II ∞

A short description of the blog’s redesign. More on how we went about redesigning it in a week and our thoughts on Internet Explorer on Karan’s blog.

PolarClock ∞

A new concept clock. Available as a screen saver and a dashboard widget.

Google India Labs ∞

Indic Transliteration and Indic On-Screen कीboards — Google’s new offerings that they hinted about on Independence Day.

Impulsive Highlighters ∞

Yeah!!!

The Bourne Ultimatum ∞

My favourite from the series. Oh and I recommend waiting to watch it in a theatre if it hasn’t released in your country yet.

Combine PDFs ∞

Simple freeware utility to merge multiple PDF documents/images into a single PDF file.

Apple’s One–Time Hardware Discount for Students ∞

[…] if you’re planning to purchase an expensive Apple computer like a MacBook Pro and also happen to be a student above 18 years of age, you’re in fine luck.

Just in case you meet the above description and are unaware of this.

“We’re In This Together” ∞

Daniel Jalkut (of Red Sweater Software) on the 3rd party Mac software scene:

The Mac is a really attractive, trendy retail district. If the shops don’t remain classy, then the customers won’t keep coming. So it makes sense to support our competitors. We’re in this together.

Nice essay about the Mac developer community’s current state.

Chaos Theory : In India, a Retailer Finds Key to Success Is Clutter ∞

Mr. Biyani says he soon figured out what he was doing wrong. Shopping in such a sterile environment didn’t appeal to the lower middle-class shoppers he was targeting. They were more comfortable in the tiny, cramped stores — often filled with haggling customers — that typify Indian shopping. Most Indians buy their fresh produce from vendors who keep vegetables under burlap sacks.

Not very surprising but interesting nonetheless. (Via Signal vs. Noise)

Ninjawords ∞

A really fast dictionary… fast like a ninja.

When they say really fast, they mean really fast! Uses Wiktionary as its source. (Via Daring Fireball)

BuiltWith ∞

Enter a URL and BuiltWith tries to figure out and report the technologies that the web page uses. See what Rungta’s Webmarks is built with. (Via Aditya)

Google says “Namaste India!” ∞

Happy 60th birthday, India! We can’t wait to celebrate, but we’re going to wait a few days for the formal unwrapping of our gift to Indian users.

Let the speculation begin!

Keynote’s Alpha Tool ∞

I haven’t had a chance to try it out myself yet but it does sound promising.

Daring Apple ∞

But the point I’m making is not about the quality of the software, but the quality of the decision that made it possible. It is daring to the core and completely the sort of thing that Apple does and why people love Apple.

A must read.

Aamir Khan's Blog ∞

I came across the blog today morning and even though I really liked it, I decided not to link it here. In spite of that, I found myself recommending it to two friends, so I though I might as well post about it here. The blog was created as marketing fodder for the Lagaan DVD release but seems to me like Aamir’s caught the blogging fever.

“Get the fuck out. Now.” ∞

Months of research and development by a team of India’s top physicists have resulted in an ambitious plan to get them the hell out of the overcrowded, impoverished nuclear powderkeg, sources revealed Monday.

I stole the title so I refrained from stealing the quote as well. (Via Karan)

P.S. - You’ll have to follow both the links to make sense of what I’m talking about.

Of Keyboards and Men ∞

Bruno Fernandes offers an explanation for the re-arrangement of the special function keys in the new keyboard. I’m still against this move because a) I’m a left-handed user and b) switching back and forth between my MacBook Pro’s keyboard and the new one would be a real pain in terms of muscle memory. (Via Daring Fireball)

An Important Message for .Mac Customers ∞

Khoi Vinh offers a more accurate version of the .Mac upgrade announcement.

Dear .Mac member

We’d like you to know about some changes we’ve made to .Mac. We gave you more disk space. Aside from that, the service still sucks.

Since we know you depend on .Mac’s Sync functionality, we’re looking forward to getting another $100 from you at renewal time.

Sincerely,

The .Mac Team

Apple's Strange Moves ∞

While Apple launched some great products at their Macworld mini, some of their decisions made me go “what were they thinking”. Rob Griffiths points out three such moves in the linked article.

While I’m not so bothered by his third point (“the unspoken upgrades”), their keyboard sort of tears me apart. On the one hand I think it looks absolutely gorgeous, on the other I see the number pad missing from the wireless one and the completely random layout of the special function keys. I can think of no explanation to why they would do this. More on the keyboard at Maniacal Rage.

Macworld First Look : Numbers ∞

Rob Griffiths takes a look at Apple’s take on spreadsheets—Numbers, the new addition to iWork’08 which was announced at Apple’s August 7th special event.

I love the Numbers approach of having a canvas with multiple tables (and other objects) on each sheet rather than the entire sheet being an ugly grid.

Galaxy Wars ∞

Dr Rines likened the collision to “four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere”.

The resulting galaxy expected to be formed by this merger/crash will supposedly be up to 10 times as massive as the Milky Way.

Fake Steve Unmasked ∞

You probably already know this if you follow FSJ but forgive me for sleeping at night.

MSN Censorship ∞

Adium developers have discovered that Microsoft censors IM messages with certain URLs (eg. ones with .info) in them.

The reason MSN gives for this censorship is that it’s to protect users from exploits that use certain URLs. The problem with this reason is that any URL could be an exploit URL; filtering by keyword just isn’t enough, because the attackers can always invent new filenames. The correct solution is simply to fix the exploits.

MSN mucks up URLs in other ways too. It wasted quite a lot of Karan’s and my time couple of years back when it was converting ftp.prateekrungta.com into ftp://ftp.prateekrungta.com. The program Karan was instructing me to use required the URL to be entered without the ftp:// prefix. Naturally it didn’t work. I can’t remember how we discovered that MSN was changing the instructions but I do remember that it left me with a bitter taste. I’m not sure if this is still true because I haven’t used MSN in ages and like the linked blog post, I recommend switching to Google Talk and convincing your friends to do the same.

Alonso stripped of pole for delaying Hamilton ∞

I shouldn’t have missed the qualifying session of the Hungarian Grand Prix yesterday because it was a very eventful one. Confusion between Massa and his engineers lead to his Ferrari not being refueled and landing him 14th position. Nick Heidfeld (BMW) outpaced Kimi’s Ferrari and finished with 3rd position on the grid. But the big controversy of the day was Lewis Hamilton being stalled by Fernando Alonso during their final pit stop not leaving him enough time for a final lap.

The Steve Ballmer Zune Ad ∞

Apparently, the Microsoft employee who created this got fired. (Via MacUser)

Document Palette ∞

Donationware that duplicates the Windows ‘New File’ contextual menu, Mac style. (Via MacUser)

The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema ∞

Should come in handy when you’re trying to decide which movie to watch next. ;-)

savvySeed : My first paid stint ∞

I’ve been working with Rakesh and Tony (the co-founders) for about four months now and am really enjoying it. The savvySeed website is the first bit of my work to go public, but that’s just the teaser (if I can use that term). Stay tuned for the real thing.

One of the funniest webpages I’ve come across in a long time ∞

Don’t forget to try clicking! (Via Pogue’s Posts)

Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac 2.0 Beta released ∞

I know a lot of people had been waiting for this.