Just got to know about Placeopedia, a simple site to connect Wikipedia articles about places like Ambala, Chandigarh to their geographical position on google maps. No points for guessing which places I have pin pointed :D

Ambala

Chandigarh

Punjab Engineering College

Please switch to Hybrid view once you are there. While in Ambala - try to find the air force strip, and in Chandigarh you can see the lovely Sukhna Lake. Too many fond memories associated with it. Here is a pic for your eyes

 

Create you places. Let us tag this round planet :D

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In a personal email thread on Gmail the geeks from CELPEC decided to mull over 5 things

1. What 5 things in the last ten years have really made you jump out of your proverbial bath tub and run through the streets all excited?
2. Corollary to (1), What 5 things have really been very useful for you in the last ten years?
   
3. What 5 things you see as absolutely neurotic, or useless in the last ten years which have come about and are just not dying out!
4. What 2-3 ( or more if your heart so desires ) things or innovations would really make a difference to your life?

Being a online community guy I decided to give it a shot on Beta Thoughts :D. So here it goes

Jump out of proverbial bath tub

• Wifi - from the day I started using this, I am in love with this. Now a days I even stream video from my desktop to TV with a notebook on wifi connecting to desktop
• P2P - This is just amazing. Have you ever looked at the Detailed view in Azureus
• Google Earth - While it did make me jump when Guru demoed it to me while it was still keyhole. I used it a lot for doing my apartment search. But now that the novelty has worn off. I am back to Google Maps, if only they would implement A9’s proximity images in it
• DVD Backup - How easy it is these days to do it and once the DVD is in on the harddisk opportunities to modify the content are endless.
• Modern Telecom - just the fact that I can talk, video conference, voip with any one with relatively ease still makes me jump from that damn tub. I talk over cell phone, AD conversion, communication with cell tower, base station, may be sattelite, may be fiber under see, voice reaches India, Ambala exchange, my home. All this in before I can count to 10 I mean wow.

Really Useful

1. All the above except Google Earth which is useful sometimes.
2. Cell phone is mighty useful
3. Gmail Conversations.

Neurotic and Useless

• Didn’t knew about 5 blade Gillette. But would be absolutely useless
• Telemarketing on Cell phones. God save me from them
• Healthcare as a bottomline caring business
• Apple’s stubborn persistence on single button mouse. But it has changed with Might Mouse

What would make difference to my life

• Netflix or someone going true video on demand
• Fiber to my home with at least 1 GBps
• Cheaper Hybrid SUVs with 50 miles/gallon efficiency. Toyota Highlander is a step in that direction
• Better cheaper dental floss devices
• 4GHz Dual CPU 8GB RAM 1 Terrabit HDD System under $500 I will use the home 62″ plasma for the display so don’t care about the monitor :D

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I have always wondered about the idea of Audio Books. I mean one grows up hearing the old adage the books are once best friends and such things. I never had a chance to try any audio book until now. See when you have to do an hour long commute on Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco you tend to find better use of that time. Besides many in the valley term the folks doing this kind of thing as having suicidal tendencies :D

Any way to better utilize the time I got myself this very famous book “Good to Great”. There is no question that the book is great (a review will follow some time later) After listening to 2 out of 5 CDs I have made few theories about the audio books

1. I miss the capability to easily read and re-read the passages I like.
2. How do I highlight the stuff I really like.
3. How about doing a very quick revision of what I have read so far
4. The impact of written word is totally missing. This may have to do with the our mind showing more love for the visual input.

Based on the above facts I think if you are a bibliophile AudioCDs are great for story telling books i.e. stories, novels etc but for the serious non fiction work good ol’ treeware books still rule.

Do you have similar experiences? It will be interesting to know..
 

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I am watching a documentary “The Corporation” talking about obviously modern day companies. The chief idea being, how corporations are treated legally as a person and how it is a bad idea. First it was interesting to know that the 14th amendment to the US Constitution which made to ensure equal protection to all persons of life regardless of race is used by corporations to protect their rights as legally they are also person. Quoting Chomsky

“These are special kind of persons which are designed by law to be concerned only for their stock holders and not, say what are stake holders like the community or the workforce”

Also of interest was what would be in ideal corporation and one of the definitions given was

The Eagle, soaring clear eyed competitive prepared to strike but not vulture, noble, visionary, majestic that people can believe in and be inspired by that creates a lift that it soars.

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What a joy it is to see one’s home town as a satellite image. I am sure every blogger worth his salt knows about the Google Earth. Initially it was cool to see Bay Area and see all the locations etc. It also helped me in finding my next apartment. One can see the neighbor hood etc using this. Then Ashish wrote in an email that he was able to get the long/lats for his home in Delhi using it. That got me interested that Ambala not as large as Delhi still be visible. And here is the shot of Ambala. I can find out GT Road, Ambala Chandigarh Highway, Indian Air Force Station and the air strips inside it etc.

My immediate reaction was to kind of draw on top of this image with the names of different roads etc. Too bad that functionality is only available in Google Earth Plus. This functionality would allow easy creation of online maps. I had discussed this with Vishal some time back. It would very cool to have “detailed” street lever online maps of India. May be this will become reality in near future.

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In one of my lives, while I was still in college, I did a lot of work on GIS (ArcGIS and MapInfo) or geographical information systems. As a group we digitized the Chandigarh and applied a lot of GIS techniques for Income Tax department, one of the local elections etc. When I came to US in 1999 it amazed me to see the Yahoo Maps and Mapquest etc. But these maps were essentially static. Today I saw the newest kid in the maps and directions world - Google. My initial reaction was GOOD! Using the stateless HTTP they have made interactive maps. I was impressed to the point that I created a little flash movie of Google Maps testing. Here is what I tried on it

1. Find an address near San Jose Airport
2. Zoom out to see more of silicon valley.
3. Pan to move around in the valley.
4. Finally go back to the point where I started.

[FLASH] http://pnarula.com/media/video/google-maps.swf ,464, 358 [/FLASH]

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I first read about “Feed by MT Anderson” at FutureSalon. I found it interesting and brought the book home. I didn’t read it for quite some time. But yesterday while at work in an elevator it came to my mind that it would be quite possible to get rid of keyboard and monitor. I mean come to think of it these are just one of the input and output mediums we use to interact with our intelligent machines :D The idea is not novel at all. Since I knew it is also the theme of Feed. This renewed interest in this idea led me to reading this little fiction for young adults.

Feed is about the few teens in future. They have some sort of chip implanted in their brains which keeps feeding them all this information about where ever they look. It was marketed as a great tool for the kids as they will have access to all information via the feed. I haven’t read the complete book. I liked it so much that I recorded one of the paragraphs where Titus, one of the teens after having lost feed in a hacking incident, is thinking about the past when people didn’t didn’t had feeds. Listen to it

Feed from the Feed

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