That File extension isn’t what you think it is

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 …

2008 – The Year in Stats

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 …

What the Kindle needs for success

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 …

Things I like – Bitvise Tunnelier

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 …

Not even Prof. Muller can save you now

I’ve been listening to the “Physics for Future Presidents” Lecture Series and was amused to hear Prof. Muller state that while he does watch SF movies and can reconcile most of them with existing scientific theories, he simply could not wrap his head around “The Core” – which as I …

Spokeo and FriendFeed

Popular blogs covering the Web2.0 movement as well the larger web community seem to believe that Spokeo and Friendfeed are competitors. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that Spokeo is about the network while Friendfeed is about the community. Having now used both services for a …

Notes From Moving House

Those of you who are kind enough to follow my ramblings on Twitter will know that I was offline for a few days moving house. Random thoughts/suggestions from the same to follow: If you are moving to an unfurnished/semi-furnished house, get yourself a tape measure. The number of additional trips …

Taipei – Before I forget

Just a grab-bag of stuff from my recent trip to Taipei before it completely fades from memory: Singapore Airlines Business Class especially on the newer 777-200 planes (777-200 ER specifically) is wonderful – ample leg and seat room; power points in each seat; personalized service. The KrisFlyer Business Class lounge …