Rungta’s Webmarks

Earth Hour ∞

Join the world in showing their support for the environment by turning off your lights from 8pm to 9pm local time today (29th March).

Stupid htaccess tricks ∞

Handy reference for stupid htaccess tricks which can actually be quite useful.

O( Travelling Salesman Problem ) ∞

xkcd is the comic strip for geeks.

Rungta’s Site Map ∞

Site maps aren’t the most exciting of pages and very seldom (if ever) do I find myself visiting a website’s site map. Why then did I decided to make one for prateekrungta.com?

I can’t recall how, but a few months back I stumbled upon this blog entry by Dan Cederholm — Styling Nested Lists — in which he talks about how he used nested unordered lists (<ul>) to build a site map and went about styling them using just a single id and descendant selectors. I thought that was quite clever and got the urge to find out if I could use a similar technique to design a site map for my site. That’s how I ended up making a site map, and it was great fun developing and styling the page.

So yeah, I made the page and put it up online but didn’t advertise or link to it because of the aforementioned reason. It lay there, quiet and unnoticed…until I tweeted about it last Friday:

http://prateekrungta.com/sitemap - One stop shop for all the pages on my site. Very handy for searching.

Right after that tweet, I realized there was no way to carry out the ‘very handy for searching’ bit. So, I flexed my fingers, read up a bit, launched Photoshop, opened TextMate and two long nights later, the page now sports a sexy new search facility. Go check it out!

P.S. – I haven’t bothered testing the page in Internet Explorer. Upgrade, please!

Can we believe what people tell us? ∞

Interesting talk by Malcolm Gladwell that we had to listen to as part of the Systems Analysis and Design unit I’m doing this semester. He talks about how people’s preferences change for want of a better tool to express their choices, and how one should always be skeptical to the negative responses when testing a radically different product/idea on a group of people. How much of the feedback they give is actually true?

Australian Grand Prix 2008 ∞

What about the race, right? You probably already know the results (they’re linked, incase you don’t), so here’s the field report.

Well, it was HOT, in caps. The weather, the girls, the cars. You’ve just got to watch a Grand Prix live to experience the adrenaline rush the sound of an F1 car brings.

There’s more about the GP on my photoblog and I’ll be uploading photos from the event to my flickr account when I find the time, so keep checking.

Australian Grand Prix - Qualifying ∞

Like I said, it was too soon to write anything off based on yesterday’s practice sessions, and today’s qualifying showed just that. Its Lewis Hamilton on pole position, followed by BMW’s Robert Kubica, with McLaren’s Kovalainen and Ferrari’s Massa making the second row. Alonso will be starting from P12 while Räikkönen will be all the way at the back of the grid at P16 (due to technical issues).

I think this season’s going to be a lot harder to predict than the last few, which will only make Formula 1 even more interesting.

Earth + 6° = ?? ∞

National Geographic Short Video on the consequences of an increase in the Earth’s average temperature by six degrees. (Via Rashmi)

Australian Grand Prix - Friday ∞

The 2008 Formula 1 Season is here, and if you’ve been following this log since before November, you’d have seen this [post] coming.

• Practice 2 - Results - Report
• Practice 1 - Results - Report

That the Ferraris and McLarens were at the top was no surprise. What was surprising was Red Bull, with Mark Webber being the second fastest in Practice 2. If Red Bull has got their reliability issues sorted out, this could be a great Grand Prix for Aussie fans as Mark Webber is an Australian. Force India did quite good too. Renault and BMW were a bit slow today though. Its too soon to make anything out of this though, and tomorrow’s qualifying session will make things clearer.

Can’t wait for the actual race. I certainly hope it’s a lot cooler on Sunday than it was today (38° Celcius!) or hanging out at Albert Park until 5pm won’t be very enjoyable.

RetailMeNot.com ∞

Its like a discount booklet for Web stores, only better as it comes with a search box and doesn’t require any membership. Saving a few bucks never hurts. ;)

Avatars Address Book Plugin ∞

A nifty little Address Book plugin that lets you add a contact’s Gravatar (and other) profile pictures with a simple Command+G.

Apple Print Ads ∞

Mostly from the 1980-95 era. (Via TUAW)

The Men Who Killed Gandhi ∞

The author of the book, Manohar Malgonkar has done an excellent job of narrating the tale of events leading up to the assassination of the Mahatma. Being an adult who was staying only a bungalow away from Birla House (Gandhiji’s residence and place of assassination) during that period of history, and speaking at length to four of the remaining conspirators after they had served their life sentences (meaning they spoke as free men) certainly helped the author to get very fine details of most of the events. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, both as a piece of history and as a revelation to the conspirators’ line of thought and reasoning.

‘The Men Who Killed Gandhi’ was originally published in 1978. A new edition was released on the 60th death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, illustrated with quite a large number of documents ranging from photographs and statements to court orders and air tickets used by Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte. Highly recommended!

Code Signing and You ∞

It probably won’t make much sense to most of you, but to the ones that it does make sense, it’ll be a very important read.

Reliance plans to open 60 “iStores” containing Apple products exclusively ∞

This is certainly good news for current and potential Apple customers in India. What remains to be seen is how aggressively Reliance prices the Apple lineup, because that alone will be the deciding factor for most locals. The first one apparently opened its doors on the 5th of March and is located at Banjara Hills, Hyderabad.

How ironic that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is going about opening “Apple stores” all over the country whereas Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group does not even officially offer Mac compatibility and support for any of its tech products or services (including internet connections).
(Via TUAW)