Abhishek Mathur Info

I have to preface this review of my past views on Internet explorer. I did shift to IE from netscape Navigator when it was just in version 3.0 and navigator was the big daddy of browsers. Navigator was slow, didn’t respond to the simplest of shortcuts and had all kinds of redundant items. I made IE my default browser and stayed. Fast forward to when IE 7 was released, I was ready to dump IE for Firefox and Chrome for the simple reason that they had fast startups and loads of short cuts for browsing.
When I first saw IE9 b1 I thought I would be ready to switch back, but alas, it may not happen. First they copied the Chrome interface(can’t blame them, even FF 4.0beta6 is doing exactly that). The thing that ticked me off most is the idea of having a resident copy of IE in the memory so that if it starts up the second time its prompt and maybe even faster than Chrome! Chrome last time I checked doesn’t hog memory that way although it could bloat after starting up. Of course another peev would be its lack of compatibility with XP which puts it out of use for most corporate networks. (This could be only a beta quirk of course)
All those corporate shill websites have been raving all about some unique drag and drop feature they put in, but I do not think its really relevant. For all the talk of cloud computing, MS has been really moderate on action. (yeah yeah, skydrive and office live isn’t exactly the biggest invention of all time) Let the websites decide what interface they want. Just keep the browser plain and simple. Thats the way to go!

I think we’ve already been informed sufficiently about Iphone4 various problems. From what I hear, the next version of the iphone is scheduled to ship possibly later this year with features that should have already been on iphone4. So people are just buying this only for the sake the prestige of owning an Apple product whatever that is. A new windows mobile product is due for release and if its anything like the difference between ‘7’ and Vista, then I would definitely recommend it. My preference in the smart phone market remains the Android OS due to the ease with which applications can be built for these phones.
I am mostly turned off from buying any of these phones in the US because of their attached contracts and the locked phone itself. I would rather pay more money for an unlocked phone and use it on a postpaid connection WITHOUT a contract of any sort. The FCC needs to seriously intervene in this matter if it wants any serious customer growth in the mobile sector.

Man, I sure have noo idea how to write a personal blog. All my blogs are about non personal activities. Well I must admit I do have privacy concerns and they are indeed very well founded with all of them chinese hackers. Well I must admit that my life doesn’t change a great deal over the days but its interesting enough for me. The best part is I get to tinker around with all the stuff that parents and other authority figures told me would get “spoiled” if I even attempted to see how it worked. I’ve proved them wrong then and I prove them critics wrong since. If curiosity killed the cat, I’d say it was worth getting killed for.
I believe that critical thinking is part of our instinct even if we are not people of science. That famous example of your mom being a chemist comes to mind. Humans or even other hominids were survivors long before they were dedicated philosophers, witch doctors, alchemists or scientists. We survive because we think. Oh rats, non personal again…scratch that!

Now for some local issues. Every year India goes through this conversation. And yet every year it happens again. For years, the drought and flood management has simply left out the people at the bottom rung of the ladder. They are left to wading in the water or waiting helplessly on rooftops fearing that the roof would collapse.
During drought, the dams store too much water and turn the deltas into salty marshes and during floods another thing happens. The dams in Karnataka and the Srisalam Dam in Andhra Pradesh started to store too much water without anticipating heavy inflows. As a result, a major town-Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh is now mostly underwater. Added to this the danger of a threat to the structural integrity of the Srisalam and Nagarjunsagar Dams not to mention the flooding of their power houses. What were the upstream engineers and flow monitors doing? Why wasn’t the water released in steps so as to not increase the water level too much AND not submerging the backwaters. And what happened to all those satellite imagery. The ISRO chairman was pretending that the military intended RISAT-2 had civilian uses to avoid flood damage. Well its time to deliver on the ruse. This is where we need you.
All fault doesn’t lie with the irrigation departments. Time and time again, there have beeen warnings to remove the settlements from the river bed which have gone unheeded. That place belongs to the river and unless u’re a fish or other water creature u don’t live there period.
Its time to buck up coz the loss of lives to a controlled river system is simply unacceptable.

What is up with this Usain Bolt guy?? Never mind the dope and gender tests plz count his chromosomes to chk if he’s human! Is he some Cheetah hybrid??
Installed Windows 7 over the week end so chk my hardware blog sooon for a review of the final version. http://a1gyaan.blogspot.com/
*******************************Spoiler alert**********: BUY IT NOW!!
Meanwhile its still summer in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. While India gets its share of monsoon, its sweating time in here. And this place looks way better snowed out believe me. Its no fun when u are sweating at 20 deg c weather when u have lived all ur life in 40 deg weather in India!
Just blogged on Bhuvan- the Indian google earth from ISRO-the Indian Space Agency.http://a1gyaan.blogspot.com/2009/08/bhuvan-smudged-pictures-galore.html

Looks like MS is ready to put the vista nightmare behind. Personally I have not much against it. I like visual details added to an OS. The only problem is that it is too high a hardware upgrade for most users. Anything less than 2GB of ram results in an unstable system. XP could comfortably run at 256 MB of Ram with minimum load.
While windows 7 I doubt will reduce any of the memory load, I expect it will reduce some of the problems. For one thing, the pesky User Account Control functionality can be disabled much more easily than the convoluted and potentially catastrophic registry modification things in Vista.
Google Earth has released its version 5 and it definitely has lots of improvements. So does Picasa3. But Gmail labs has really gone to the next level. Meanwhile many interesting web based applications are coming out. One shout out to Geni.com which helps to create and link family trees without a lot of hassle. Facebook, Orkut has always been using up my time for a few years now and probably will continue to do so. Till the next time Ciao!