Land of the Netizen ...

The ARPA theme is that the promise offered by the computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic engine.

The world of the Netizen was envisioned more than twenty five years ago by J.C.R. Licklider. Licklider brought to his leadership of the Department of Defense's ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) a vision of "the intergalactic computer network." Whenever he would speak from ARPA, he would mention this vision.

Today what we see is a radical shift & quantum leaps into the webi-fi-ed world. I still reminisce the days where I wanted to get that all so important email a/c and boast ... well, I have an email address !!

From emailing, to chatting, p2p ...., social-networking to blogging, I find myself in a different world !!

The reality finally hits in ....... 'home-run' - I live in cyberspace & there is no denying it.

Addiction is for drugs - if I coin the same term for net - addiction, I would be unfair to myself - its just normal. Spending 18 hrs on the computer is not a sickness & nor is it geeky. (I was amused by a review I saw on one of the news channels stating that, spending too much time on the internet terms you as a geek. Gosh NO !! If it ain't tech-constructive it ain't geeky ... no matter even if you spend you whole life online.)

Coming back to net-ville, ... so where are we running with all this information & connectivity crap hitting so blatantly in our faces ? I still remember the group discussion I had for my MBA entrance ... 'does IT help a person become a good manager?' & all started rumbling & arguing just for the sake of it. Bottom line was that information always existed even before our IT friends came along and wired everything up, just that it was not that accessible to us as it is today.

I feel Google has really transformed the way we look at and use the web. They have taken simplicity & jazzed it all up into one beautiful package - be it the google reader, sets, trends, code search, video, etc. Umm.. there is the jazzed up complexity also in the form of maps, docs, gears, apps & the likes. The reckoning of the cyber city is here ... the world of mash-ups, interconnecting pipes and all the plumbing that goes into it ...RIA has finally dawned upon us. The layman is ideally oblivious to such change - he will either ignore it, use it or abuse it.

But living here as a techie ... well seems that life is finally getting good !!!!!!

g.HO.ST ..... boo to the OS [its virtual]

In my previous post on why one should start using Firefox, I had mentioned the following, "... we hopefully will have some sorta virtual operating system in cyber space to which all we need to connect is JUST a browser (or s/w based on it)"

Well today I seem to have stumbled upon something headed well in the same direction. Enter Global Hosted Operating SysTem a.k.a. G.ho.st

G.ho.st Virtual Computer (VC) provides the first real alternative to Windows – a complete personal computing environment hosted on the Web and accessible from any browser.

An excerpt on things - from what they claim on their website,

1. Available from any browser in the world instead of being installed on one physical machine.
2. The operating system, many apps, and the first 3GB of data storage and 3GB of email storage are absolutely free.
3. Software (namely Web-based software) can be run without installation.
4. The computer is always up-to-date, secure and backed up with no action or cost on your part.
5. The G.ho.st VC manages all your Web logins and all your web 'stuff' (e.g. files on different web services).
6. Because it is online, the G.ho.st VC provides new possibilities for fun and collaboration, beyond what is available on a PC.

The applications you can currently run off your G.ho.st are

• Email & messengers
• Photo editing
• Scrapping text snippets, stickies,games, mp3, calculator, etc.
• Google docs (Edit word documents)
• Communication (Social networking and micro-blogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.)
• Internet radio,
• etc.

But an application worth mentioning is the Office suite provided on G.ho.st by Z.O.H.O Well Google docs is there too, which is cool in its own rights, but Zoho offers - a cool wysiwyg editor, options to share docs, post docs to [blogs, face-book, etc.], auto-saving, spell checks, tag clouds & exports to popular formats. Apart from this, they offer a plugin which integrates into your MS-Office products to save direct to Z.o.h.o & vice versa to keep your docs/sheets in sync.

There are a host of other apps you may want to checkout at Z.O.H.O which is worth looking at. Ironically, there is a post on tech-republic touting z.o.h.o to be the next Microsoft (apart frm apple, cisco, etc). This article and associated blogged discussion is worth a read.(click here for it)

Take the red pill ... use FireFox !

Well for those who wonder what the red pill is ...ummm well u r still in the blue pill world !! (unquote the matrix)

First tech blog had to be the browser, because we simply cannot live without one & is the window to the internet world out there. (apart from geeky shell sessions)

Commenting on Firefox today, well there is loads to say about this versatile browser. Its an instantly likable browser without any frills & extremely easy to use. Performs amazingly fast & unlike IE, will not crash & burn often asking u to send a report to 'tfosorciM'

Common expected features like popup-dealers, tabs, integrated search, privacy, updates, etc all exist with calmness.

You can have it in 4 variants - Normal, eBay, campus and a cool portable edition courtsey PortableApps.com

[what.is.the.eBay.variant: well as its name suggests - all cool stuff with ur eBay a/c like alerts, bid updates, etc. etc.]

[what.is.the.campus.variant: combines the Firefox browser with streamlined access to music, research sites and research tools]

[what.is.the.portable.variant: leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, carry your favorite bookmarks, etc. with you wherever you go]

Well, this post is not about browsing, but a glimpse of the integrated browser - the future of things to come. When we hopefully will have some sorta virtual operating system in cyber space to which all we need to connect is JUST a browser (or s/w based on it)

So, talking about the cool gizmo's that I have encountered with Firefox, here are some of my favorites,

For the Google appetite,
GoogleReaderNotifier: This firefox extension shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account in the browser status bar.
GSpace: This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them online.
GUtils: Adds 55 Google Utilities in your Firefox Menu and Toolbar.

Sprucing up the browser,
Email This: Email This! will send your recipient the link, title, & highlighted text of the page you are viewing using GMail, Google Apps GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Stand-Alone Mail Clients like Outlook Express, Thunderbird, & More!
Blue Organizer: Blue Organizer is the new smart-browsing technology for Firefox. It automatically recognizes things like books, wine, travel destinations and offers contextual shortcuts between your favorite sites.
Research Word: Search any word on a page via context (right click) menu from a variety of resources, including: Wikipedia, dictionaries and media sites.
AJAX Yahoo! Mail: Adds AJAX support to the classic Yahoo! mail.
DownThemAll! :The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!
Cookie-Swap: Cookie-Swap enables you to easily swap all your cookies so that you can be logged in to multiple web e-mail accounts (like Gmail and Yahoo! mail) at the same time and quickly switch between them.

Getting a more productive browser,
CoolIris: Just mouse over any link, and the Cooliris preview window immediately appears to show you the content. Using this preview, one can email, open it in a new tab, etc. etc.
ClipMarks: With Clipmarks, you can clip the best parts of web pages. Whether it's a paragraph, sentence, image or video, you can capture just the pieces you want without having to bookmark the entire page.
SaveImageInFolder: Easily save images in personally customized folders.
TabCatalog: This shows contents of all of tabs as a thumbnail-style list.
CtrlTab: Instead of directly changing tab it works some thing like Alt+Tab on windows. It views preview of the tab and you can change directly to the tab you want to or just go through all tabs to see what you got in them.

SearchEngine buttons for your tool-bar

Techie assist,
FireBug: Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page...
GreaseMonkey: Allows you to customize the way a web-page displays using small bits of JavaScript. More info here.
FireFTP: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

For those who like to create their own plugins, this is a good starting tutorial or probably this website can assist further.

2nd post...and growing !!

...well, i seem to have graduated out of my first blog-post ever and posting further. Honestly, blogging seems to grow on you (at least thts wht i'm feeling as of now on my 2nd post) Its really surprising, how simple things get by you & go un-noticed so easily - the simplicity of posting ur thoughts in cyberspace is one such example since we r on tht subject.

Sitting & working in a foreign country really puts soo muchhhhh into perspective that life has to offer apart from work, work & that excuse called - "work".

I have never walked for pleasure in my life, nor have i cooked to experiment .... small stupid things which help u say - well today i did something nice, something relaxing ! (Apart from responding to work emails, glaring at the pixels on my screen, figuring why simple business logic transcends into complex technology & the rest of the nonsense)

And the best part .... its all done everyday inside the 8 hrs work throws at u !

[...repeatability at its best - 6sigma in my life ...im gleaming !!!]

my 1st blog .. ever !!!

So, here goes - my 1st blog (gosh!! im way past overdue 'the overdue date' to start bloggin tht im wondering why im doin it now)

Thought i'll make my first post cool n jazzzzy with cuttin jargon words and undue promises to blog regularly, blah blah...blah + some more blahhh

But then who am i tryin to impress?.. jus myself !! *yea sucks* *so lame*

With Taxonomy & lexical parsers devourin blog-posts all over the big-beautiful, all so jumbled & insane w.w.w. maybe i decide to use my own defn.s & jargon, but then enter folksonomy & probably one/some/all of my words will/may get tagged & i may see myself eventually bloggin indirectly on del.icio.us or some site like tht.

Enuf of crap talk !! - at the end of it i just wanna look back at my blogs one fine day in my golden years and wonder ... man was this guy dumb or was he intelligence waiting to be discovered !!

Along the way if any one of u happens to start followin my blogs, keepin tabs on me et al ,
... well its gonna be mostly a tech trail of utter nonsense, which - if u relate to, can be termed as knowledge else just gibberrrrrish !!!
[If i use references i will surely make it a point to include a link to tht so its more informative.]
Bottom-Line - i'm jus doing it for myself coz i want my "gyaan" online (& in the process may help some poor soul get enlightened)

If i get depressed/frustrated ...umm, i do not vent such stuff outta my system. Calmness is d word !!
But maybe a few insights into life i may encounter along the way will dot my blogpost as i keep bloggin !!!!!

wow - end of first blog !! *sighhh*