March 21st, 2009
5:43 pm
Geek
Browsing through the Straits Times this morning, I came across a photograph that was attributed to “flickr.com”:
Attributing the photo this way is wrong in a couple of ways:
1. Flickr is not the organization that “owns” these photos, it’s merely hosting them.
2. If the photo was licensed under a Creative-Commons license, the Straits Times should have attributed the photographer in the article, under the terms of the license.
I decided to look up who had posted this photo on Flickr to determine which license the photo had been made available under – that’s when it got really puzzling.
I couldn’t locate this image on Flickr and it was only when I broadened my search to Google that I located this image:
Blog post with original image.
Looking through the source of the page, I can’t find any link to Flickr – only to a Japanese-language webpage that has very little information.
So it appears that not only has the Straits Times screwed up how attribution should be done for photos taken from Flickr, they have actually sourced the image from some other website and forgotten to link to the correct website.
February 21st, 2009
2:54 pm
Asides
A note for folks who subscribe to the blog via RSS:
Thanks to the Google-Borg buying out Feedburner, I’ve had to change my Feed URL slightly. The new address is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Balajis_Blog . Please update your subscriptions accordingly (and hopefully you won’t take this as the oppurtunity to unsubscribe from my blog…)
February 9th, 2009
7:14 pm
Geek
From the Evernote archives…
Hollywood is well known for fake UI in movies – you know, “Unix is easy“ or the “VB GUI Interface“. I’d say most geeks get a kick of seeing just how removed from reality Hollywood computers can be.
I was very surprised then to spot a familiar looking application during a scene in the movie “National Treasure” (a fairly forgettable movie otherwise):
I think to myself “Wait. Isn’t that…?“. As if reading my mind, the Director zooms in for a closer look:
Yup that’s Photoshop alright.
What? You don’t believe me. Ok, I created a comparison image those of you who say “fake”:
If that’s a fake, that’s a damn good one. I wonder if Adobe got any royalties for the use of their software in the movie. If they didn’t, I’d say they have pretty good grounds for a lawsuit right there 
PS: That blue wallpaper in the background looks awfully familiar too. Any mac-heads can confirm/deny?
February 8th, 2009
2:29 pm
Blues
January 23rd, 2009
8:27 pm
Geek
A combination of events got me starting the New Year reflecting on attention and personal creativity.
The first event occurred while listening to an episode of the Brainy Gamer Podcast. At some point during the podcast, every journalist interviewed mentioned being on Twitter. Having found their viewpoints interesting, my first instinct was “Hey! I should go follow all these folks on Twitter”. But then the thought of adding another dozen high-volume tweeters to my already over-busy timeline just made me quail.
Even as I pondered what was my S/N cut-off for Twitter, I found myself in a fairly unique situation – without any podcasts to listen to or books to read on my train ride to and from work for almost 2 weeks. At first, I fidgeted and checked Twitter obsessively on my phone. But then a fairly remarkable thing happened – a number of ideas and observations started going off in my head. It seems like my brain has been itching to think on its own for months and I’ve been drowning it in too much information instead
Apparently, I’ve been deluding myself into thinking I could handle all the information flowing my way with no problems. Now, this is a pretty common complaint – “There’s too much to read!”. The stock answer is pretty easy as well – “That’s because you haven’t figured out how to filter the really important stuff yet”. AKA Filter Failure.
The lack of tools to help me build the right filters is something I’ll come back to later. But what I really noticed from this information overload was how it was affecting my own creativity. A constant minute-by-minute decision of “Read? Don’t Read?” that left me curiously unsettled after an hour or so of going through my feeds. As Laura Roeder put it:
After spending an hour-and-a-half going through my feeds, simultaneously twittering links and posting articles to my link blog, I’d find myself distracted and twitchy. To the extent that I would not be able to bring myself to start writing and dawdle at some website or the other until it was time to shut down the computer and go home.
It seems like I have reached an inflection point – I could continue as I had for the last year or so, adding to my reading list and twitter all the time ,while spending less and less time actually acting on all that knowledge. Or I could take a good hard look at what I was really interested in and focus on that instead.
What am I really interested in? That’s a hard, hard question – ask yourself this “What’s something I really, really like; have fun still doing; but don’t have the time anymore for?”. For me, a couple of things became obvious – one was Gaming and the other was Technology.
Gaming was my first big Geek love – I fondly remember those endless hours spent playing F-117, AoE, AoK, Caesar III… At the same time, I realized I haven’t played a game even half-way to completion in years. Gaming news tends to be a real fire hose as well- even if I limited myself to PC gaming, the updates would come thick & fast and often I’d barely glance at the headlines. So this was the first category to get cut – something made easier by the fact that I still listen to a couple of gaming podcasts.
So 13 feeds down, 289 feeds to go.
Making sense of my passion for technology was much harder. I had tried to compensate for feeds with endless updates by switching them to headlines-only mode. The thing is – once I switched to headlines mode, I’d find myself only reading articles that have “interesting” headlines. It felt like I was becoming that mouth-breathing, linkbait-sniffing Digg fanboi that I so detest. Or it could be I had just validated Sturgeon’s law – “90% of everything is crap”.
In the absence of a more scientific approach – I went with my gut instinct. I moved a few feeds into the doghouse (literally):
Once I’d done that – I forgot about them. Didn’t check that folder for days – kept hitting the “mark all as read” button. After a week or so, I realized that at no point did I feel like I was missing something by not reading these feeds. With that realization Lifehacker, NY Bits and a few others were consigned to the trash bin. A minor victory over information anxiety!
Earlier in this post, I complained about the lack of a scientific way of choosing which feeds I don’t want – and that wasn’t a joke. Buried within the FeedDemon UI is a way to check my “attention” score for every feed I subscribe to. When I did check this for my Tech feeds, I was extremely surprised – BoingBoing was first by a wide margin, with kottke and Daring Fireball in distant 2nd place. That pretty much told me the attention scores were all wrong, because here’s my “attention” gut-check:
I think what is missing is a more “semantic” attention score. What are the topics I read the most? What keywords are common across the article I’ve added to my shared folders? I think that I love reading about operating systems, design and odd facts, but do my reading habits support that belief? I feel like if I had this sort of information, I could simplify my reading list some more.
How long will this new approach last? Too early to tell yet – but certainly, being able to go through my entire feed-list in less than 1 hour last Sunday felt great. So does the Rescuetime graph that tells me I’ve spent just 30 minutes on average in my Feed reader during January. But if my notebook is any indication, I think my own brain is thanking me the most
January 12th, 2009
4:00 pm
Geek
A welcome trend that I’ve noticed in the last one year or so is that many binary/proprietary file formats are often using a more universal file format under the hood.
For example, Firefox extensions are packaged as .xpi files. But really, these are just zip files. You can rename the file with a .zip extension and check out all the files in an extension very easily.
The other file formats that I know of are:
Office 2007 formats (.docx,.xlsx,.pptx etc.) – Zip files
NZB files (Usenet Downloads) – XML files
EML (Email message files) – TXT files
Got any others that you are aware of? Share it in the comments!
January 5th, 2009
4:11 pm
Geek
Work
- Email – 4197 received, 720 sent (that’s 5.82 mails recd. for every 1 email sent)
- Projects Completed – 4
- Projects Completed that came back to life – 1
- Projects Kicked off – 1
IRL
- Apartments I’ve stayed in – 2
- Cities I visited this year – Taipei, Port Dickson [1]
- Efficiency Score of -.07 during Workday Workhours [8]
Will put a little more in this category next year.
Geek Life
- Hardware Purchased – Samsung i600, Holux GPSlim 236, Samsung F480, HP 2133 UMPC
- Email - 7655 received,222 sent (that’s 34.48 mails recd. for every 1 email sent)
- 177 Photos shot
- 60 photos published [2] (58 photos published in 2007 [3])
- 630 songs added to iTunes in 2008
- 34 Artists listened to [4]
- 266 Tracks listened to (including repeats) [4]
- 57 new passwords added to Roboform
- Blog posts jotted in Evernote but not written up – 10
- 42 books read in 2008 [5]
- 36 new Windows programs installed
- Operating systems learnt – Ubuntu, CentOS
Internet Life
- 20 blog posts [6]
- 457 linkblog posts
- 2728 Tweets (incl. @ messages but not DMs) [7]
- Feeds added to my Feed Reader – 211
- 237 hours of FeedDemon making it my most used app [8]
- 47% of my total time was spent on the Top 10 Apps/Sites I used last year [8]
- 3577 searches made on Google with a max. of 785 searches during August 2008 [9]
- Amazon S3 Usage – Transfer-In 3.23 GB, Transfer-Out 3.52 GB, Get-Object Calls 782949, Put-Object Calls 58432 [11]
- Lifetime uTorrent Stats as of end-2008: Uploaded 72.4 GB, Downloaded 57.8 GB, Share Ratio 1.253
Incomplete
- PC Games I’ve Played – Company of Heroes, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Spore, The Witcher *, Europa Universalis III, Mass Effect
- Most common work-day lunch – Indian Meal (8 times of the 68 days tracked) [10]
- 58% of the 68 lunches I tracked last year were from my Top 10 lunch choices. [10]
- Mobile data usage – 340.56 MB [10]
- Alcoholic Drink that I drank the most of – Stella Artois (8.5 Pints) [10]
- 10 different types of drinks Overall [10]
- Most Common Shirt Colour I work to work – Blue/White (Tie) [10]
Not Really Stats
- Site/service that I miss most – Google Browser Sync
- Site/service I wish would get it’s act together – Weave
- Most disappointed this year by – Anobii
- Favorite new site of 2008 – daytum
References:
[1] http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/mvbalaji/
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mvbalaji/archives/date-posted/2008/
[3] http://blog.balaji-dutt.name/2008/01/20/a-year-of-living-comfortably-2007-in-photos/
[4] http://www.last.fm/user/balaji_dutt/charts
[5] http://www.bookjetty.com/people/balaji_dutt
[6] http://blog.balaji-dutt.name/2008
[7] http://tweetstats.com/graphs/balaji_dutt
[8] http://www.rescuetime.com/
[9] http://www.google.com/history/trends?all=year&hl=en
[10] http://daytum.com/balaji
[11] https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html
Other Notes:
1. FriendFeed doesn’t any easy way to get yearly stats, so no info on Comments/Likes there.
2. The Witcher was far and away, the best game I played in 2008 and that’s why it’s starred.
3. A bunch of stuff in the “Incomplete” category will fall under IRL next year, but if you have any other ideas for things I could track in “Work” or “IRL”, let me know.
I’ll be posting a more qualitative look back at 2008 and what it means for my plans in the year ahead.
January 4th, 2009
12:08 pm
Geek
I was watching a video of Scoble interviewing Tim O’Reilly in which O’Reilly talks about the Kindle and his belief that it isn’t doing very well. O’Reilly ascribes that to the locked down software (i.e, novels) that ship with the Kindle.
Certainly early adopters don’t appreciate DRM’ed media, but it’s possible that there are other factors at work here. In my own analysis, the Kindle must do one of the following to be successful:
a. meet an unmet need – for example, travel comparison websites or online photo galleries
b. outperform an existing product by orders of magnitude – digital cameras comes to mind here; or
c. Be so cheap that the advantages of an existing product are completely nullified.
Those are the only USP’s that matter.
December 29th, 2008
5:43 pm
Geek
I’ve been on a Christmas-break of sorts and as is typical for such “holidays”, one chore I had to complete was procure parts for a vacuum cleaner – something I don’t have time for on most weekends.
After an incredibly long and with Sharp Singapore’s “Customer Service”, I tracked down a shop somewhere in Katong that would sell me that part. Since I had a little bit of time, I decided this would be a fine test of Internet directions in a real world scenario. I would rely on:
- Gothere – for directions and public transport instructions to this shop in Katong
- SBSNextBus – to figure out if I would actually make the bus or not
- Navizon – for on the fly geo-location if I did get lost
As should be clear from the array of tools/sites above, I’m not very good at navigating this city. Unfortunately, that did not improve despite all the preparation I had done.
Let me start with finding a route – my first try at getting public transport directions from gothere gave me a set of directions that involved me taking 2 buses – including one to Changi Airport (!) and would optimistically take around 2 hours each way. I tried changing my starting point to another location a couple of train stops away and voila – a completely new set of directions that were much simpler and would take about an hour. Why the instructions would change so radically when all I had done was move my starting point a couple of stops along the same MRT line was beyond me.
The first stumbling block I hit was when I got off the MRT:
So here’s my thought process when I see this direction:
“Raffles Hotel is on Bras Basah Road? But I thought it was next to Raffles City Shopping Mall!”
“And isn’t Raffles City Shopping Mall on North Bridge Road”
“And isn’t Bras Basah Road near Dhoby Ghaut MRT?”
“Navizon to the rescue!”
So I launch Navizon and now I’m thinking:
“So I’m on Beach Road.. and there’s Bras Basah Road!”
“But wait the map shows Stamford Road running top to bottom and I’ve got Stamford Road in front of me left to right”
“Maybe if I walk down further…”
“Ok great, now I’m on Nicoll Highway!”
At this point, I swallow my geek pride and ask the Doorman at the Swissotel for directions, and he kindly points out I’m essentially standing 10 meters away from Bras Basah Road and the Raffles Hotel.
Internet 0 : Real World 1
I get to the the bus stop and check SBSNextBus for the arrivals. My faith in the Internet is restored when I see a bus marked as “Arriving” on the site and look up to see it pulling in to the Bus stop as well…
Internet 1 : Real World 1
After a short bus ride, I get off the Bus Stop that gothere has recommended and suddenly realize that the printed directions don’t have direction arrows:
I have a hazy memory that the main map recommended turning onto a road and walking down to find the place:
Note: Blurring above is to simulate my recollection of the map and is not a bug
So I look around for some clues and hey, whaddya know? A nice big road sign:
Perfect! I turn left and I should be there! After all, even gothere said I have to turn “somewhere”. Except, by the time I saw this sign, I was already walking the wrong way. That become very clear when after a couple of hundred meters, all I could see were HDB flats all around. I ask a lady for directions and she suggested I cross the road and take a bus.
At this point I’m thinking “Man, those gothere directions were just waaay off!”. Check SBSNextbus again and find out that the bus I’m waiting for is 35 minutes away. I concede defeat and hail a cab…………
…who drives me a couple of hundred meters past where I got down (see that map above?) to drop me off in front of the store #^&@! He also tells me “Don’t ask people for directions lah! They don’t know the place at all…”.
Internet –500 : Real World –500
Ok ok, not really.
Internet 0 : Real World 0
I pick up the parts and start walking back to the bus-stop for my return leg using gothere. SBSNextbus told me my bus was 10 minutes away, except when I turn onto the main road – there goes the bus I was supposed to catch. I know that SBSNextbus doesn’t claim to be accurate, but you have to imagine I wasn’t very pleased at that moment after all I had been through.
Get to the bus-stop and check SBSNextbus again, which helpfully informs me the next bus is 40 minutes away #^&@! I start going through the individual bus routes at the stop and finally figure out an alternative route that will get me near the MRT, but I would have to go an extra 5 stops on the train #^&@!
So 3 hours after I had set off from home (Remember that optimistic estimate of 1 hour each way that gothere had predicted?) I finally get back hot, thirsty and very very annoyed.
Internet 0 : Real World 1
Now I’m sure a bunch of you are rolling on the floor laughing and going “What a loon! He couldn’t read a goddamn map!”. But hey, most folks who look up directions on the Internet are looking them up precisely because they can’t read those goddamn maps.
Anyway, I wish the folks who provide map applications / directions consider a few things:
1. Orient the map to the way I’m standing and not the other way around – If you know where I am and which way I’m standing (that’s what the GPS tells you innit?), it should be relatively easy to flip the map around to match what I’m seeing in the real world no?
Obviously this isn’t possible for online direction maps but you can do one thing – you can tell me which way the map is oriented! Go back up and look at those gothere maps. Can you tell which way is up? In other words, if you are telling me to “walk down and to the right” you need to tell me in your map which way is up. Otherwise I’m going to look at street signs which probably don’t match your directions.
2. Don’t pull a switcheroo – when I went to print the maps in gothere, all those friendly direction lines disappeared forcing me to rely on my recollection of the full directions. Again, if I could remember my maps that well I wouldn’t be printing out a set of directions now would I?
3. Offer alternates – Obviously, the algorithm that picked the route for me knew about other options. It’s possible that I might miss a connection somewhere. It would be helpful if you could provide an alternate for each connection in a second set of directions. 90% of the time I won’t need it, but that 10% I miss my bus? I would kill for having a second set of directions all ready to go.
So that’s my rant about getting directions on the Internet – or how I suck at reading directions (you choose). Oh and in case you were wondering, I bought plenty of extra spares for that vacuum cleaner.
Folks who run their websites on dedicated servers are familiar with SSH as a way to securely connect to their server from any location. A less well-known aspect of SSH is built-in support for tunneling – which can be simply explained as “built-in proxy server”. As the article I’ve linked to in the previous sentence succintly puts it tunneling “is a way to forward otherwise insecure TCP traffic through SSH”.
If you have ever been nervous about using public Wi-Fi for anything other than checking the news, you should definitely look at SSH tunneling. I use SSH tunneling to access websites that run on high port numbers (CPanel, HyperVM etc.) through my corporate firewall that only permits basic HTTP traffic otherwise.
On the Windows side, PuTTy is the most popular SSH client – being freeware and extremely light on memory and disk space are huge pluses. That said, I’ve found PuTTy to be rather lacking in tunneling support – 1) the application tends to buckle under several simultaneous connections and 2) it lacks any sort of built reconnection support, which is a basic requirement for proxying.
A little bit of searching around lead me to BitVise Tunnelier – a free for personal use SSH client that offers superb tunneling support. It also has a couple of other nifty touches that I like, but let me start off with the basic login window:
This is the second clue that tunneling is a big part of this program (the name being the first clue 
) – a log window of all active connections and traffic going through the application. Most of the other features in this window are available in PuTTy as well, but it’s definitely presented in a more accessible way in Tunnelier.
Let’s take a look at how to setup proxying in Tunnelier:
Ah, this is so much better than PuTTy’s cryptic “dynamic” port setting. Not much else to talk about here, so let’s move onto Tunnelier’s screen for setting up port-forwarding.
Before we get there, it’s worth noting that port-forwarding really is some technological black-magic and most explanations have left me pretty confused, so here’s my stab at clearing up what Port Forwarding is – through SSH magic, Port Forwarding allows you to connect to a port on a machine in your network and have that connection automatically relayed to a different server on another network that you would not be able to reach otherwise. I hope that helps , because that might help explain this screen a little better:
In my mind, this is probably the worst UI screen in Tunnelier – it wasn’t really till I understood how port-forwarding worked that I actually wrapped my head around this screen. I do wonder if maybe a wizard might have helped here.
As it stands, the screen asks you to define the port on the machine hosting Tunnelier that should be “forwarded” to the remote server and once it’s at the remote server, which port the traffic should be sent to.
To wrap-up this show-and-tell session, let’s look at the SSH/options window:
Just to point out that Tunnelier offers not one, but two different settings to ensure proxying doesn’t break – an automatic reconnect option and a Keep-Alive option.
Final Notes and Caveats:
- I haven’t used Tunnelier’s built-in SSH client, but for pure command-line work, PuTTy is my preference.
- Tunnelier also offers some very robust SFTP support – I haven’t used it myself, but my colleagues do and have only good things to say about it.
- Astonishingly for a free product, Bitvise still offers great support for Tunnelier – just post in their support forum and you should get a reply from the developers within a day or so.
- Some Network admins may not take kindly to your routing any traffic through this tunnel, essentially “hiding” your traffic from network devices. Check with your admins before doing this on an corporate network!
- Yes, certain parts of the screenshots have been blurred out – I’m paranoid that way
- Apologies for the horrible colour on the screengrabs – my Tunnelier instance is on a remote server, which is only accessible through a slow VNC connection.
