Happy new year everyone! I hope 2006 brings the best for everyone (and best out of everyone 
) and their loved ones.
2005
31
Dec 05
Happy New Year
23
Dec 05
Long Time, No Post
It has been too long that I have not written anything. One reason is that I was very busy. The other reason is that I have not felt like writing anything. This is partly to do with the change in my feed reading habits. I have not been reading my feeds for a long time now. I am mostly checking memeorandum for news but I am starting to feel like it used to be more useful to me. My reading off memeorandum also declined lately. My other source of news has been Digg but I have also started to question the quality of the stuff posted there as well. I think the change in my feed reading habits effected my blog posting habits. I am hoping to get back on posting here.
In all that time that I was not posting anything, a lot was happening. My research work is progressing nicely lately. I have also been traveling a bit. I have been to Chicago for a research meeting in mid November and we took that opportunity to stay couple more days to enjoy the “windy city”. Two weeks ago, I went to Geneva, Switzerland to visit CERN for 4 days for another research meeting. I did not have time to wander around the city but the meetings were very productive.
In other news, I have now about three months to write up my area paper. My research problem is clearer now but there are of course some vague points which I will need to clarify. As you can imagine, I still have lots of reading and researching to do, I am currently busy working on a workshop paper due on January 5th. I still have a lot of working to do on that paper.
20
Oct 05
Flock Developer Preview
I was in the list of people who wanted to try out Flock as soon as it was released as a limited beta. I recieved my invitation email two days ago and I was happy to have the opportunity to try out this anticipated new browser. Before I posted my review, I waited for a while to read what others had to say about it. Here is the list of posts about Flock on Technorati and the most recent posts tagged flock. As far as I can tell, the initial reaction to the browser is “very cool”.
My first impression was similar in that I thought Flock was cool. It is basically a browser built on top of Firefox with tight blogging, del.icio.us, and Flickr. Granted, Flock makes it dead easy to post to del.icio.us and access to the tags and bookmarks with the bookmark manager. In addition to that, it is very easy to post to your blog from Flock. It asks you a minimum number of questions about your blog settings and then does the rest to fill in the remaining settings. The blog posting window also has a topbar which displays Flickr photo strip from any username, or the previous blog post (I find this one very useful). There is also a box where you can supposedly drag a portion of a text from a webpage to automatically quote it. I say “supposedly” because this does not seem to work in this beta release. Neither does the indentation and linking buttons on the toolbar seem to work yet. There are lots of screenshots of Flock on Flickr.
One thing that I thought when I started playing with Flock was: “Why do I need another browser? Could not all the integration be achieved by a Firefox extension?” As I was thinking this I came across Chris Messina’s comment on this Flickr photostream. He basically says the functionality they wanted to implement was more than an extension could provide. So, I will take his response for that for now since the application is in its very early stages and I am sure they have a bigger vision for it.
The most fresh news about Flock is that it is now available as public beta as it is announced on the Flock webpage.
20
Oct 05
Vanderbilt Adds FreshTracksMusic to VUMix
Vanderbilt is offering Napster as a legal download option to students (and faculty and staff) for a rate of $2/month during the academic year for at least a year.
Vanderbilt Register reports that the university is starting to offer FreshTracksMusic as a new legal download option. The difference of FreshTracksMusic from Napster is that, FreshTracksMusic features independent and usigned artists. Moreoever, unlike Vanderbilt’s Napster offering, subscribers will be able listen to the tracks/albums they have purchased either on their PCs or portable music players, and burn them to a CD without any limitations. This sounds very much like the business of eMusic. The low subscription fee will be $3/month for this unlimited service.
Vanderbilt will be the first customer of FreshTracksMusic whose cofounders are Vanderbilt alumnus. The service now seems to be added to Vanderbilt’s VUMix website. FreshTracksMusic’s Vanderbilt page can be reached here.
Technorati Tags: Vanderbilt, music