Wordpress Vs Blogger
Posted by admin on May 23, 2007
I am sure most of you guys are aware of the different blogging tools available online. Blogger is probably the only free blogging tool available and can afford to stay that way because of google. But I also found that Blogger is also the most basic blogging tool that there is. Even after the new beta, there is really nothing great you can do. If you look at the interface, it is the same old compose box except for the added tags. Even the settings and options hasn’t changed much. Even your templates look the same even though you can add a couple of widgets to the sidebar now when you had to tweak the template to do the same. But there is still a long way to go. One of the disadvantages of blogger is that there are no expandable posts. The whole blog post, no matter how long it is, will be shown on the page. Well ofcourse, you can add these expandable posts but it would require a lot of complicated tweaking. The new blogger template is not as easy to understand as the old one. The themes to choose from are very limited too. And I themes I found on other sites were not very pleasing either. There is only so much you could do here. I’m probably loading everything against blogger here but you would realize how cramped it is when you want to go beyond the default stuff blogger gives you.
Coming to Wordpress, there are two flavours. One is Wordpress.com and the other is Wordpress.org. Wordpress.com is similar to blogger, it is free and it gives you a
Well if you want all the goodness of Wordpress and more legroom, you need to get the wordpress blogging script that is available on wordpress.org site. Ofcourse, you will need your own hosting space and domain name. But it is the stuff made for bloggers. There are a million themes for you to play around with, there are umpteen number of plugins for every customization you need. It is just what you need to make your blog look professional like you mean business. If you are wondering how much it would cost to set this all up, well, you can get all this for free. Yes, I mean it.. FREE.. at no cost whatsoever. If you need to know how, just wait until the next post ;).
Will the real spiderman please put his mask back on?
Posted by admin on May 20, 2007
Spiderman 3 is one of the movies that I have been looking forward to see this summer, so badly. I’ve been checking for the availability of tickets online every day and I must say that I’m really really disappointed. I’m sure everyone who has watched the Spiderman cartoons and read the comics must’ve been really appalled at the way spiderman removes his mask everytime he has to fight someone. It is ridiculous because the comic book hero has always tried to keep his identity a secret rather than flaunt his face around to get attention. I wonder if this had to anything with the criticism from the first spiderman movie where the audience felt that Toby McGuire was not doing the spiderman stunts. If that is the case, “Please Toby, we believe you. Now be a good spiderman and put that mask back on.” Or we audience would want to boot you out of the series forever. 
Coming to Toby, this has got to be his worst showing ever. If the script is muddled with too many things, Toby Mcguire just makes it worse with his bad acting. Black spiderman was supposed to be uber-cool. But Toby Mcguire makes him look retarded and gay. Kirsten Dunst has gone from looking bad to worse with every movie. If you think she was bad in the second one, wait till you watch this one. Finally, Venom fans will be in for huge disappointment. Eddie Brock was supposed to be 6 feet tall and hugely built not lean and lanky “That 70’s Show” teenager. Then there is the track of sandman, Harry osbourn and his revenge against Peter parker/Spiderman, Mary Jane Watson and her failing career, the introduction of Gwen Stacy, Uncle Ben’s killer(not again!!!!). Thats a whole lot of things, even for our superhero Spiderman to handle.
Who would’ve thought that after such good movies in 1 and 2, they would’ve screwed a movie with Black spiderman and Venom. Even the way symbiote comes into this world is changed, worst thing is the way Venom dies in the end. Comic book fans.. just keep away, you are not going to like this at all. You will curse yourself for spending your hard earned money on this movie. Who would’ve thought that a Spiderman movie could get so bad? Just keep away from this movie guys.. unless you never knew or read of Spiderman until you saw the movie. Well maybe you will be able to survive the singing of Kirsten Dunst and the dancing of Toby Mcguire.
Updated review: Civ 4
Posted by admin on May 2, 2007
I probably rushed my judgement there. Agreed Civ 4 is a great game and has the juiciest graphics for a turn based Strategy game but it gets too boring and repetitive after awhile. You research more techs, build more farms and cities, build an army to destroy other civilizations and after that, what? You start another game, probably in another map and do all the same. There is ofcourse the challenge of terrain and other things. But these are small variables to change. It becomes awfully boring to watch other civilizations taking their time with their turns. Moving their tanks around in a 3 tile island gets awfully boring. While you know it, 5 turns took 30 minutes to be done with. Frankly those days when I can spend hours on a game are really gone now. I’m into those quick games where I can make decent progress in a couple of hours, save it and come back to finish it off later. So Civilization is not for me. I am sure Sid Meier is awfully disappointed now. 
Sid Meiers Civilization 4
Posted by admin on Apr 29, 2007
Sid Meier’s Civilization 4 has got to be one of the addictive games I’ve ever played. It is brilliant the way it is made. The way you build up your city in small square blocks and watch your borders grow is really awesome. You develop an unhealthy obsession to obliterate any civilization in and around your vicinity and spread your pink borders all over the map. You would want to go back to the game for another session of 30 minutes, do some more research earn more gold, think of the ways to make your people happy. Its awesome the way the game makes multi-tasking look soo easy. I’m not too far into the game but I can tell this is only going to get better when I invent nuclear technology. I’m getting wicked thoughts already.
Well, there does seem to be some kind of an agenda regarding the addiction that the civilization games cause. There is a site online called Civilization Anonymous. It seemed to some kind of a rehab for all the addicts. It is probably the first of its kind where there is an organization helping addicts of a specific game instead of the gaming in general. While, I agree the game is indeed addictive, I did not find it addictive enough to take all the time off my regular activities to play it. It is good but definitely not that good. So lets hope that everyone keeps it real and instead of blaming the publisher and the game developer for their weakness, it would be nice if they owned up to their irresponsibility and moved on. After all, its just a stupid game. How bad can it get?
300
Posted by admin on Apr 29, 2007
Alright, by now you’ve heard all the hype and probably read all the reviews or even watched the movie. Unfortunately, being horribly out of touch with the movie news of late, I’ve not heard any of the hype except for the abject dismissal by everyone that it was overly hyped. So my expectations for this movie were literally none, compared to an average movie goer.
Let me start off with the negatives of the movie. One of the things I really hated was the fact that the movie was really really slow. It was like watching the cricket replays in Ultra-motion, where the bat took forever to meet ball and the television people thought it was really cool but it turned out rather boring. Imagine a movie with battle scenes in Ultra-motion, spears being hurled, heads being cut off, blood being spilled.. everything in Ultra-motion. It seems pretty cool in the beginning but then it feels like its being dragged on and on. Maybe if the movie played out at regular speed, it would probably be done in little over an hour.
The good thing is that, there is not too much dialogue in the movie. When they do speak, they utter really brilliant lines. All the actors are brilliant and there are no misfits. Everyone does their job to perfection whether it is sorrow or glory. The story in itself is brilliant, 300 brave Spartans trying to stop waves of Persians from invading Greece. It is a story of freedom, bravery and the glory that is bestowed on the mighty and brave. Its awesome the way the battle scenes are played out(except for the ultra-motion of course :P).
For all the people who think there is too much violence. Well this a battle movie, and I dont know what you expect. And it is rated R, so this is no movie for families or little kids. If you think heads falling, arm cut off are a little too much for you to take, then you might as well watch some senti movie. This is not made for people like them anyway. I wouldn’t say this is a must watch but a good movie nevertheless. If you are bored this weekend and have nothing to do, this could be a perfect filler.
My Nerd score
Posted by admin on Apr 1, 2007
Geek Vs Nerd Vs Dork.
Posted by admin on Dec 26, 2006
(click for larger image)I ran into this table on Joystiq which differentiates a Geek, Nerd and a dork from each other. While many pride themselves in being a Geek or a Nerd, Dork is a downright insult. The table gives us enough reasons why dorks are dorks. Look at it for yourself, maybe you can add more to this table :).
Source: Joystiq, Originally posted on Militant Geek
Cricinfo - Dravid not commanding enough, says Kapil
Posted by admin on Dec 1, 2006
Cricinfo - Dravid not commanding enough, says Kapil
Kapil Dev, the former allrounder and captain of India, has said that though Rahul Dravid is a brilliant batsman, he is not commanding enough, adding that he tends to “go with the flow”. Kapil felt that on the field Dravid looked like a captain from an altogether different era.
I am not sure where Mr Kapil Dev is going with this kind of talk. I agree he was the only captain who won us the world cup against all odds but was also one of the coaches who failed miserably. Inspite of his superlative credentials, he was pretty bad at coaching. The team never got going under him. And now he is bad mouthing the coach saying his experimental techniques will not work for Indians. Well Mr. Kapil Dev if you were so good and all knowing about the Indian psyche, we wonder why you were never able to get the team to win matches. If anything, you are remembered for shedding tears on BBC during that time. Well for your information, Dravid may not be the shirt waving captain like Ganguly but he is an acute strategist as was seen in several occasions in the way he used the power plays. Aggression is not all about waving shirts or bad mouthing opponents, its all about how you approach a given situation and how you deal with pressure. For the past few days, Kapil Dev has only talked trash, bad mouthing the coach and now the captain. This is highly immature coming from a someone who was considered a great player by everyone.
Its easy to be an arm chair critic. When things are not working, people always find mistakes. The same people who have been praising India’s methods about bringing in the young and grooming them for world cup are now going back to the old ways by bringing back the tried and tested old players in the name of experience. Irfan Pathan who has been the darling of the masses a few months before (when Sachin Tendulkar was showered with praises for pushing him up to No.3) is back to his No. 6 position. It is an interesting turn around. Lets see if the old horses bring some glory back to the beleaguered team.
Symantec and Adobe complain over Vista
Posted by admin on Sep 25, 2006
In the news, Microsoft’s Vista seems to have hit a snag even before it is released, with Symantec and Adobe complaining over Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior. Symantec’s complaint has been the inclusion of patchguard in Vista which stops software like rootkits meddling with the kernel. Their concern is that they require low level kernel access to prevent malicious code from running. While I understand their concern, I don’t quite understand what they are getting at. They cant possibly ask Microsoft to make less secure Operating system just to allow third party security vendors to earn their bread. I am sure if Symantec guys sat down and waited for the OS to be released, they will probably find a way to work with patchguard to solve the issue. Instead of churning out memory hogs with every update, they might as well try and create an antivirus software which attempts at minimizing the memory usage. All they’ve been doing over these years is to add several graphical bells and whistles every year instead of making a software that is efficient and light like Kaspersky.
And Adobe’s case is more like the age old Netscape-IE war. Since MS is developing is a new format called XPS, they feel that it might hamper the sales of their PDF software. I don’t know what is wrong in making their own format. MS is after all a software giant and they have the right to make softwares. People always have the choice of using a different software if they don’t like one. I’ve moved on from IE to Firefox long back. In fact I’ve never used IE as my primary browser. I’ve used Opera, Mozilla, Netscape because they all had tabs but never was a big fan of IE until IE 7 came out. So the software makers should stop worrying about MS is putting in their OS and start worrying about making their own software better because Adobe Acrobat reader has become increasingly stale with every release. I don’t think there are any new features added to it except for the security updates.
I think one should stop telling MS what to do. Nobody tells apple what to do. I think apple bundles its own software and tools with every Mac and nobody complains. Just because MS is the software giant does not necessarily mean that they will make the best software there is. And competition will survive if it is better than MS, like Firefox showed us.
You can read the whole thing here.
Wii on Foxtrot
Posted by admin on May 13, 2006
Foxtrot takes a dig at the new name for the nintendo’s new console “Wii”. Honestly I think i’m getting used to it. I dont mind it being called Wii. If it does cost as much as they’re saying it will, i would defnitely buy one for myself. It seems like soo much fun :). Especiall the tennis game they showed on E3 press conference was truly fun and amazing. It is something I can imagine my girlfriend wanting to play with :). Waiting eagerly for its release. For Nintendo’s sake I do hope Wii is a success.