Chennai (my city) proudly celebrates its 368th Birthday today. It was on this day on 1639, a British East India Company officer bought a strip of land and the city was born. I am proud to be a Chennaite - Happy Birthday Chennai!

One of my good friends is a doctor. Few years back when we were chatting he was talking about how Opposing Fingers (a.k.a Thumb) are very important to us humans. He went on to give a lecture on how Thumb as the only finger opposing the other 4 fingers helped apes/human ancestors in using Tools for hunting and eventually to invent Fire/Wheel, etc. I hardly gave this any thought, until few days back. Reason?.

An Infection few days back in my right hand thumb possibly through a cut or piercing I am not sure how. My thumb is swollen and entire right hand is numb and painful. My Doctor has assured I should be fine in next few days, but till then it is painful. This episode made me remember my friends comment and what little I can do with my right hand without using my thumb. For example, I can drive my car with my left hand, but how do I turn the ignition key without using Right Thumb?.

Uninteresting update (22/Aug/2007): After 3 painful surgeries to cut the infection(s), drain the puss and several tiring dressings - my thumb is healing. It should take another week or so for the thumb to be fully functional.

When you thought most of the basic innovations are done in the web search (at least to what is searchable on the WWW) there comes a new feature from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. That is the power of competition.

Last month it was Microsoft's turn, where Windows Live Search team posted about the enhancements they have done in their image search. This one is interesting - it allows you to look into the photos and describe about the image inside. For example I can say, show me only Black and White Images (filter:bw) or only images with face closeups (filter:face).

Google too has these features, but I found the face filter to work well in the Windows Live Search.

In Web today there are plethora of Encoding used for Tamil including TAB/TAM (Tamilnadu Govt. standard), TSCII (popular 8bit), TUNE and more. For each of these sites you need to download and install respective fonts, definitely a pain. Recently I found this Firefox Addon that aims to solve this problem. After downloading and installing this addon "Adhiyan" - press Alt-2 (for TSCII), Alt-5 (for TAB) and it changes the text in the page to Unicode. So without installing the respective fonts, you can read all the text in Unicode. Since it finds and replaces characters in the webpage, not all pages come out correctly. But still a very handy utility.

TiE Chennai usually brings practitioners & champions of Entrepreneurship to speak about their story in its monthly sessions. Recently it brought out one such session (29/06/2007) by the 2003 women entrepreneur of the Year Ms. Hemu Ramaiah, CEO of Landmark.

Hemu Ramaiah, who needs little introduction, shared her truly inspirational entrepreneurial journey especially the challenges & triumphs in setting up one of the leading and famous bookstores in India - LANDMARK. I have recorded my notes taken during the session as a PDF document here (352.53 KB)

Most of the times when you are asked to complete a feedback survey, you are left wondering whether anyone actually read it. It seems they do in some companies. Last Sunday (29/July) I was travelling to Chennai in Paramount Airways and completed a survey. Surprise!, next day Monday (30/July) morning I got an email acknowledging the survey. I guess all the survey gets into a system, generates an auto reply and goes through a workflow/BI.

Anyways, good job Paramount Airways, please keep it up.  

For the last 3 weeks, every Wednesday I had to go through this ordeal of a Dentist Appointment. Thank God, with yesterday I am done. I don't know what it is with Dentist (like any other Doctor they are also in a Noble profession), but majority of the people - Kids and Grown-ups dislike going to a Dentist. In the 3 hours of time that I was staring at the roof with my mouth wide open while the doctor filled my cavities I came up with this thought-provoking list of why we might be disliking Dentists (List is in no particular order):

• The pain while surgeon is operating, especially the drilling
• The thought of keep your mouth opened for long period
• The discomfort of so many instruments inside your mouth
• The fear that the dentist will pull off your teeth
• The idea that you will be told not to eat sweets/ice cream hence forth
• You are awake and the fact you have lost control over your body
• You can't cry or shout for help

To say it politely I am not for forwarding an email beyond the first level - there are few exceptions that warrant few levels of forward. Recently I got an email forwarded from a company, in that in between in one of the forwards it had unpleasant words. The person who sent me the mail should've deleted the thread and just sent the final items he had to say to me. Instead he forwarded without going through carefully, I objected to derogative words used which hurt me. He came back and apologized. This could've become a big issue when it is between companies and can lead to law suits.

I started to do this post to leave you with the screenshot below showing an email I received from one of my friends - which was forwarded to 12 levels. If I was interested in harvesting email IDs - I could've easily got about 200+ IDs from this single email!

Sometimes you want to identify a SPAM message source or just to find out who left that blog comment you might want to know to whom the IP block has been assigned. Though it is difficult to pinpoint it to an individual organization (especially SMEs who will have only few IP numbers or Dial-up/Home users where the IPs will be in their ISP's names) there is a service that can give you some information. You can American Registry for Internet Numbers Whois Service or Asia-Pacific NIC's Whois Service. Use one of the services and input the IP address for which you are interested to find the block owner.

My official (Vishwak) email is configured with Office Outlook for last 6 years+. My personal, blog and newsletters are with Hotmail. And I have been a paid Hotmail user for years, so I read my Hotmail through Outlook Express ON & OFF. When about a year back Microsoft came out with Windows Live Mail Desktop (now desktop is dropped and for short WLM) I switched to that. With Hotmail, WLM works great - it syncs up all folders in Hotmail including Inbox, Sent Items, Junk e-mail, Deleted Items, Drafts & custom folders.

I like a lot the new Yahoo! Web 2.0 Mail interface. This email ID is being used by me for a lot of my memberships including INFITT, so I wanted the convenience of using it offline with WLM. Yahoo! mail doesn't expose Web Interface, so you need to use conventional POP3/SMTP interfaces. Yahoo! requires you to be a Paid user for that - so I paid $20 or so per year. I could easily get the POP3/Inbox configured, but sending emails was becoming an issue. Finally here is the configuration that works for me:  

And recently when I wanted WLM to be moved from my desktop to my Laptop so that I carry the emails with me. Yahoo! mail works with SMTP, so it doesn't sync the Sent Items folder from WLM to Yahoo! mail online. Though WLM did have an export option, it didn't work - pains of using a Beta software . After few tries I found a quick 'n' dirty way to solve it. I dragged all the mails from Sent Items of Yahoo! account in WLM to a new folder I created under Hotmail account in WLM. Installed WLM in my laptop, synched my Hotmail account. Then I configured the Yahoo! account in WLM, did the reverse process of Hotmail folder to Yahoo! Sent Items. In short, I used Hotmail as a backup and restore for Yahoo! mail

In the fierce war on Search Engines this can be a new page - for all of you out there who are wondering what war, hasn't it been won by google I do believe it is not. Anyways, as the book "The Search" talks about how much can be known about you by Search Engine companies with your search behaviour/data. Accussing Google is doing this today and tracking everyone is rubbish, as it will take enormous processing power and no one has yet figured out a way to monetize that information for profit. But in the future this will become a possibility when computing power and data mining software become more sophisticated.

So online users worry about their privacy will become a genuine concern. I was happy to see a news today that Ask.com is planning to do something on this. They promise to protect your privacy by not storing information on your searches in their database with AskEraser (to be introduced by this year-end). If People like and flock to this feature, Google can implement the technology overnight - they have to stop doing their logging . But the challenge for Google is not Technology but business, because of the impact this will have on their advertisement business.

All said, privacy has every chance of becoming the next battle ground in search. It will be interesting to see any path-breaking innovation Google Engineers can come up with which protects Advt. revenue and privacy.

Till then, let us continue searching on the net as usual ...