A Temporary Technological Sabbath

Summer has been very interesting for me. Interesting for several reasons, primarily because my lifestyle has been very different than during the hectic college semesters. I wasn't planning on blogging as part of my temporary/partial technological Sabbath. Oh yes, I need to tell you about this. I have stopped using a cellphone since about a month after I got it wet and rendered it dysfunctional. No immediate plans to own a cellular device either. It is not the WHO report, linking cell-phones usage to a heightened probability of developing cancer from its radiation, that drove this change. It is primarily because I wanted to reassess the pervasiveness and impact of technology on cohesion/interaction among human beings.

The pace of digitization of appliances from analog has changed our lives pretty dramatically. We no longer produce analog acoustic waves for communication between us. Digital communication signals coded in 0 and 1 is what emanates from our devices varying from smart-phones to laptops. Communication has moved from being analog to mostly digital. Google is proud to service few billion search requests daily and happily lets tens of thousands of new users connect using its Android OS on smart-phones. Facebook too is adding millions of new members every month and Mark Zuckerberg (I don't care if I spelled his last name incorrectly) has vowed to eliminate privacy from our experience. Apparently, he believes there shouldn't be anything such as privacy. Amid this battle for digital attention, there are groups of secretive hackers expressing dissent by taking down websites of corporations and the government. What a world we live in, utterly confusing and digitized.

I am not against digitization of our world. In fact, as an aspiring and soon-to-be degree holding electrical engineer, I relish designing and thinking about novel designs for electrical and electronics products. If you have not noticed, my blog is titled "The DIGITAL Subway" and url also has the word digital. So, what is all this whining for? Well, I'm sure you know why. The ground has been shifting right before our feet. The very "laborsaving devices" that we built to free up leisure time are keeping us more occupied and busy. Staying busy has become the norm of hard-working and “intelligent” city-dwellers. The devices that we built to better communicate with our fellow acquaintances have overwhelmed us and captured all our attention. A typical workplace has become a 100 square feet of dreaded space with a computer. Seminars have transformed into webinars, meetings into conference calls, face-to-face talk into phone calls and small talks during lunch breaks into thumb swipes on touchscreens of smartphones for texting or browsing the web.

If you want to read more about how technology has changed us, I would recommend the book called, “Better off: flipping the switch on technology” by Eric Brende. Eric is a MIT graduate who took a break from his graduate education to live among a group of Mennonites to experience the life devoid of any motor-operated device which includes cars, cell-phones or any machine you can think of.

Note: More on this topic to come in subsequent posts. I actually decided to write something after a long time because I need some practice for my GRE essay; my GRE is in less than a week now.

3-Day Start-up @ Rackspace in San Antonio

This is what our board looked like today while developing ideas. Photo by: Digital Subway

Organized by Trinity University and hosted by Rackspace, 3 Day Startup event has been so intense yet interesting. Ideas about startups were pitched and among them six ideas were chosen to develop further. A basic working principle with marketing results, business model and expansion has to be developed for each of these ideas.

Sample of another board. These cool models were drawn by Dustin. Photo by: Digital Subway

I am working with the group that is trying to develop a "Collaborative Inventory Management" for local farmers in order to sell their produce efficiently. It is a really cool idea with an expanding market. This model is already working in Georgia state in the U.S. according to the research of Dustin Larimer. Since this is an idea for a tech startup, this is all I can tell you without diving into the details. I can't spill the beans. 

It's a lot of fun and a 3 day event, hence the name 3DS (3 Day Start-up). I am really glad to be participating in it. Let's see how tomorrow goes while pitching final ideas to the investors.

More pictures of 3DS. Photo by: Digital Subway

Now even I am a Proud User of Ubuntu

I have embraced Open Source software with open arms. This began after reading Linus Torvald's "Just for Fun" where his appeal for supporting open source software was convincing (I think). I installed Ubuntu on my PC and this blog post was typed and published on a Linux platform.

Have I told you about my new passion for programming and learning more about computer software? I have started learning C++ and also Linux. Windows is all good but I need to learn Linux because it is open source and thus offers flexibility to its users. Plus I am one of those guys who believes in open source, individuality and dislikes corporate control over intellectual property or strict regulation of copyright laws. You got the point.

Anyway, I will share an interesting troubleshooting story with you. After installing Ubuntu, I wanted to use Opera browser instead of Firefox. Don't even mention Internet Explorer, that's for old generation people who still live in dark ages. Do you ever think why people still use hotmail and yahoo while Gmail is available and it's free? I guess they might be afraid of giving too much control to Google that will link their browsing history with Gmail content. Or maybe they are just indifferent. One of my friends suggested Opera and have been using it in conjunction to Chrome. I realized Flash videos didn't work with Opera on Ubuntu. I also have Opera on Windows 7 so I checked if flash worked. It did. Flash also worked with Firefox on Ubuntu. So Flash only didn't work with Opera on Ubuntu. What a niche, you might think. A fraction uses Ubuntu and out of that even a tiny fraction uses Opera. So, maybe no one cared to fix the bug.

I decided to fix this problem because I thought it would be a good practice to start learning Windows-Linux interoperability. This was certainly a start among several other incompatibility problems to pop-up in the future. I went online to seek a solution. Adobe forums did not have anything about it but Opera forum seemed to have a thread on this because other Opera users on Ubuntu platform seemed to have the problem too. The solutions were very geeky with detailed descriptions of using terminals to open directories, locate files and then moving files around. I tried this option but commands for displaying files in the directory did not work on my terminal. I could have been putting wrong commands. So, I tried to adopt the second route: locating system files and manually copying and pasting into plugin directory of Opera and Mozilla from Flash. Unfortunately, the system denied permission for me while trying to paste the required file into Opera and Mozilla plugin directories.

I did not know how to fix the problem. I was scratching my head. I mean dreadlocks. When I looked at the clock, it was 6:50 pm, and suddenly I realized that in ten minutes Coates (food cafetaria at Trinity) would be closed. I grabbed my Tiger card and ran out of room towards Coates. I made just in time but the guy at the grill certainly wasn't happy to see me. More work for him. After eating, I made my way to the room still thinking how to fix the problem. I opened up Opera again and loaded youtube site and magic- flash player started working. I laughed ecstatically sharing the joy with myself. Now I am sharing this joy with you all readers.

After reading this you might realize I am aiming to become a proper geek now. 

Invent, Baby Invent

Thomas Friedman talks about what will be the next big thing. He has made it clear that the world is flat. But the world is becoming 'hot, flat and crowded'.

The next big thing will be the Green Revolution. It's change or die. According to Friedman, the fuel that we were using we thought were 'cheap, non-exhaustive and benign' but in reality fuels were 'expensive, exhaustive and toxic-toxic to air we breathe and toxic to geo-politics'.

Friedman criticizes the stance of John McCain who was for 'Drill Baby, Drill.' He also counters the argument by China and India that since the US has been polluting the environment till now, it's now their turn.

Embedded below is an excellent video interview of Thomas Friedman with Fareed Zakaria.

Privacy Issue with Web Browsing

What would it feel like being stalked, everywhere you go and whatever you do, being watched by the eyes of the 'Big Brother' not unlike that in George Orwell's famous dystopian novel, '1984'? Horrible and scary, wouldn't it?

Do you realize that whatever you search for or browse on the internet is recorded? When you are running a Google Search, and if you are signed into Gmail, your browsing history is recorded. The claim of the Google founders, Sergey and Larry is that the search information is used to make the search better and that the information is not stored against their individual names but rather decoded with some random letters and numbers. But did you know that you could actually sign up for an option with Google Search that would let you see your browsing history since the date you signed up for. There would be a log of all websites you visited through the Search. How potential could that information be for corporations and agencies that are always looking for that kind of data to break into peoples' niche and sell their stuff.

Also, whenever you browse with the Internet Explorer, your browsing history is automatic stored and sent to the main server. It does not provide you an option to not store your browsing history unless you browse in another browser with 'InPrivate Browsing'. And if you open a new browser, the default setting is to store your browsing history meaning you would have to browse in another browser with 'InPrivate Browsing' everytime you wanted privacy. Internet Explorer does not provide any tool to permanently set your preference not to record your browsing history. Is it intentional on part of the Microsoft? Hell, yeah.

Google, on the other hand does provide you with an option to set your preference permanently if you want safe browsing without sending any browsing data. These browsers thrive on the fact that most ordinary people who use the internet do not realize this fact. And some, who do are too indifferent to care about this stuff. But this is an infringement of privacy. The ramifications of storing one's browsing data is immense. What one searches on the internet can tell a hell lot about the person's interests and personality. Potentially a very valuable source of information for their sponsors and advertisment agencies. There have been cases where browsing history has been used to pinpoint individuals, which in some cases can be very humiliating if the content of the searches are not very pleasant. Is there any public agency that is concerned about loss of peoples' privacy in this digital matrix?

Quantum Search seems to be coming up with a solution. Scientific American ran an article on the future of being able to browse without being followed and watched under the watchful eyes of Big Brothers like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

Frequent Mozilla Firefox Crashes on University Computers

          I don't know if you have noticed or not, but the university computers take painfully longer time, feels like almost ever to load when you log in. I asked some of my techie friends and they said it is because of Vista. But, come on, Trinity had Vista before we went for summer too. The load time has lengthened after we came back from summer. One of my techie friends suggested it is because all of the Vista programs are being loaded at once. This was not the case before we left for summer. And, think of the Java window that pops up everytime asking for your permission to continue. Try logging in with your username to permit it so that it stops coming and the error message is returned, asking for an administrator password.

          As if this were not enough, Mozilla Firefox crashes almost every time I use it. And, more so when I try to close the browser. At first, I thought this was just happening with me and was purely a coincidence. But it started happening everytime and that is when I started smelling a rat. So, I checked online and this seems to be a problem with other users too. This is actually a problem of the new version of Mozilla 3 that they have launched without adequate testing. Certainly, everyone likes newer versions of free software but when it is full of bugs then, it gets very irritating. It seems I will have to live with this problem before Mozilla can actually correct this bug.

Google Scholarships

Google Scholarships

It feels great to see that Google actually gives away several annual scholarships to students to encourage them to do better. I was excited and had a look at the scholarships awarded to students and checked to see if I had a chance.

Unfortunately, I realized I did not qualify for any of those. It seemed that in order to be eligible for any of them, I had to be a minority of some sort, either a female pursuing computer related degree or belong to a less common ethnic group such as Native American. I am an Asian and a male. Sorry, no scholarships for you. How ridiculous! I am not against positive discrimination but at least others too should have a chance.

Indian Celebrities on Twitter

I have been using Twitter for quite sometime now. I do not use it profusely and neither do I have a big fan following. I guess, I have a little more than 85 followers, many of which I don't know personally, of course. But I like the concept of Twitter and am convinced that Facebook did use some ideas of Twitter when it introduced a new version of Facebook where not only friends' statuses but also other posts, such as photo posts, video posts and notes appeared on Home Screen. This concept was introduced by Twitter and after it became popular, was copied by Facebook.

Facebook has copied ideas from here and there, but that is not my point. I was fascinated to see quite a few Indian celebrities using Twitter to communicate with their fans. It was the unfortunate incident of Shahrukh Khan's detention at Newark Airport that brought to my notice the presence of hot and gorgeous Priyanka Chopra, an Indian actress on Twitter. She apparently tweeted about this incident and spit her wrath at the US Immigration Officials. Guess what; now, I follow her. She posts periodically about what is going on with her life. Knowing about what goes on in a celebrity's life interests everyone including me. Priyanka also takes time to reply to her fans' tweet replies. Apparently, she has never replied to any of my 3 tweet replies that I sent to her.

There are also other Indian celebrities like Dino Morea, Uday Chopra and Karah Johar (I hope they count as celebrities. Never mind).

Here are their twitter usernames:

• Priyanka Chopra : priyankachopra
• Dino Morea: DinoMorea9
• Karan Johar: kjohar25
• Uday Chopra: udaychopra

I will keep my fingers crossed that Priyanka will one day reply to my tweets :D

Apparently, there is rumor that even Shahrukh tweets but others deny it based on the mechanical nature of his tweets. Shahid Kapoor, Ram Gopal Varma, MS Dhoni (the star cricketer), Shreya Ghosal and few others too are on twitter. Good going Indian celebrities.

Facebook Wants to become the next Google, not MySpace

• Facebook has 250 million active users among which 120 million login at least once daily

• More than 30 million users update their Facebook status once a day, some do so more frequently than their underwear :D
  

I read a piece of article with the same heading that incited amusement and disappointment inside me. And the timing for the claim could not have been better, since Facebook recently bought FriendFeed, another social networking tool. Facebook is trying to stay ahead of the game and knows that it can leave behind Google in this race if it can make right decisions and cater to the needs of the future. And, Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page very well know this. Facebook can do to Google what Google did to Microsoft.

The official website of Facebook boasts a healthy 250 million active users and it also claims that at least 120 million users log into their Facebook account everyday. Wow!! Whopping numbers. Are Google duos losing the battle? Opinions vary. History is evident that socializing websites bloom and fade like seasonal flowers. MySpace, Linkedn and others are few of them. But, the case is not very different for search engines either, except for Google, of course. AltaVista, the once prominent search engine has become an endangered species after Google came into the ring. And, the same can be said true for web browsers too. Who uses Netscape these days? It was the only and the most prominent browser just a decade ago, wasn't it?

So, I do have my doubts over whether Facebook can really become the next Google. In fact, I have started to see Facebook users getting genuinely concerned over the potential misuse of the information and other private details. Media has been doing a pretty reasonable role in educating general people about the security loopholes while allowing Applications to pull out your profile information. Also, it is not uncommon to see people getting in trouble at work. Also, it has started to be believed that some company recruiters pull out workers' information from Facebook and also use it to base their decisions. A clean Facebook profile has started to become the popular slogan among wise Facebook users. If more and more users start getting responsible, careful and discretionary in uploading and posting images, videos or texts then, it should hurt viral expansion of Facebook users.

Facebook Statistics are very interesting to skim through if you are an active Facebook user. For instance, every user has on average 120 friends and 2/3 of its users are users outside of college even though it was originally created for students.

Check out the complete Official Facebook Statistics .

Messing with Photoshop

Another wild design