Aarthi Ramamurthy

A full week away from Hyderabad and away from Internet access (mostly) left me craving for computer time. I took a hell of a lot of photos and have to filter and upload them and then post them here. That should take a couple of days. Maybe more.

Sooooo, the big thing that happened last week was the announcement of Microsoft Popfly - this has been under wraps for a while now and it's amazing how well it turned out to be. People call it a whole bunch of things - a mashup creator, a tool for developers, a social networking website and so on. To me, Popfly is just fun. Pure, unadultered fun.

Popfly is still an early release and there's a scarcity of invites, which probably means that a lot of folks wouldn't have been able to create mashups or poke around. I got a chance to play with it and here are screenshots.

This is a small mashup I created..




And this is how it turns out to be right after two mouse clicks ..



And this is a game of Whack-a-Mole mashed up using Pink (I searched for Pink at Yahoo! Photos and mashed it up with Whack-a-Mole game) pictures..



Popfly is probably the best Silverlight application I have seen so far. I really like the look and feel of the site and totally adore the About Us page.

And oh, I have an invite with me which I want to give out. If you want to play around with Popfly, send me a mail, and I'll send you the sole invite I have.

Labels: Microsoft, Microsoft Popfly

I finally finished reading iWoz today and to tell you the truth, the book is written as if Steve Wozniak simply narrated his life's story and someone just took notes and made copies of it and left it on the bookshelves. The language usage is down to earth and the book itself is very inspiring.

The book starts off with his childhood where Woz talks about his gang of 'The Electronic Kids' and their adventures in building circuits and gadgets. It moves on to give a very interesting account of Blue Boxes and phone phreaking (Captain Crunch anyone?) and Homebrew Computer Club and then to him designing Apple I and II (this is described in great details - fantastic read). Woz says the book was mainly written to clear a lot of misconceptions (such as the fact that he never quit Apple, he is still on Apple's payroll to this day).

Woz is your friendly, neighborhood geek who loves playing pranks (and good ones at that!), loves electronics and engineering and "whose head mostly floats in happiness even today" (paraphrased). The book also talks about his '81 plane crash and subsequent loss of memory, his life later on at Apple and CL9. He also narrates his version of the music concerts funded by him to "make people smile and have a good time" and his love for teaching.

Throughout the book, Woz sounds like a good natured, excited kid talking about computers at length (though you might think that he tends to brag at times). If you have read books such as "iCon" or watched the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley", you'll probably know a lot of the facts in this book.

Enough said! You can read a good deal about him at his site here. Definitely worth a read, whether you are a geek or not.

And oh, the "Woz Way" is actually a street in San Jose, named after Woz.

Update: Changed the image since I didn't like the old one. Also listed out the names of related book and movie (I had mentioned them earlier as "this book and this movie") on request from a very fussy reader :).

Labels: Apple, iWoz, Steve "Woz" Wozniak

You're probably trying to decipher what the title of this blog post means. Mutter is what my iPod is referred to (by me - sadly, not many people I know believe in naming their favorite gadgets). And why Mutter? Go figure!

So, I saw this post on Swaroop's blog and read about ion. The ion is an iPod charger that directly connects your iPod to a power source on the wall. I thought, 'Why not? Let's get one and take it for a spin!'. After all, my iPod takes a little less than forever to charge from my laptop and the most annoying part is, I'd almost always realize that it was out of charge when I needed it the most (like when you're at a really noisy traffic signal and your cab just won't move, or when you have reaallly loud fellow employees at work who loved to scream across (sometimes) phrases like "Can I TS into your machine now?" or "Anyone taking a coffee break?" or "@#%$%#! Found it!" (??). You get the idea.

Let's not digress. Anyway, I placed an order for the ion end of last week and in two days, the little package was on my desk! I connected my iPod to it right away (ok, I have to admit that I muttered a silent prayer..you know..just in case) and hey, it just worked!



So here's what I think

• The BEST feature was to be able to listen to music *while* you are charging the iPod. Killer!


• Knowing how iPod accessories are priced atrociously high, I thought the price was just great - Rs 399, all taxes inclusive.


• I don't know why, but I expected it to be a much smaller, sleek looking charger when I looked at the picture on the website (after all, we are talking about a charger for the iPod of all things). Turns out that it as as big as my laptop charger. Not a big deal, but I'm just that annoying when it comes to design.


• I really like the blue light in the charger - gives me a visual clue as to what's going on. And I like blue. Period.

On the whole, the ion is a nifty charger useful for folks who carry around USB devices and don't want to carry around laptops just to charge them. Yet another addition to my cluttered room of wires, and truly worth the money spent.

Labels: ion, iPod

Ever seen a Corporate VP's "official" bio picture like this? Read more about it here. And this is one of the reasons why I'm a HUGE fan of J Allard (known simply as 'J' to a lot of us internally) - great attitude!

Labels: J Allard, Microsoft

So this is it! After watching the streaming keynote video for more than 2.5 hours now, I can finally talk about what's been cooking inside a lot of Microsoft buildings.

Silverlight was announced a few days ago. In addition to that, in Mix '07 conference that starts today, we announced the RTM (or the final release) of Expression Studio. Trust me, the demos of Expression Studio will blow your mind away! Silverlight will now ship with a cross-platform CLR (a small one at that) which lets people write and run apps on browsers on both Mac and Windows.

My favorite announcement for the day is the DLR or the Dynamic Language Runtime along with IronPython and IronRuby (yes, it's called IronRuby) which allows people to go implement their favorite dynamic language which gets compiled to .NET bytecode. Waaaay cool!

So what are you waiting for? Silverlight 1.0 Beta and 1.1 Alpha lies here.
The blog posts are just rolling in and there is so much buzz all over Internet. You can probably catch the entire webcast here (with the terrific demos and Ray Ozzie + Scott Guthrie's interview with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch fame) in a while.

Whew! So there, I've just blogged it. Exciting times are ahead. Wildly exciting times.

Labels: Microsoft, Mix, Silverlight