"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.
Chris pointed out a discovery by eagle-eyed Google Maps users, who have spotted a 50-meter-long insect roaming the German countryside.
Slashdot contributor kdawson clarifies that a moderator at a Keyhole forum has ID’ed the bug as a thrips, about 1mm long, squished under a glass plate during scanning.
When I last wrote about Google’s new Notifier application for the Mac, I didn’t mention a shortcoming of the calendar notifier, which failed to notify me of upcoming events in shared calendars that I have subscribed to. This seems to have been fixed in the latest update for the notifier.
For those who may not know, the Google Notifier is an application that shows you alerts in your menu bar (on the Mac), so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser. I believe the Windows version of this program is still called Gmail Notifier, and is yet to see the integration of calendar events notification.
Event notification of subscribed calendars is a big plus for me, since my primary use of Google Calendar is to keep track of public-interest events (and not so much to record my own personal transactions), the Indian Public Holidays calendar (maintained by G R Prakash) being on top of my list.
Download Google Notifier for Mac
Indian Public Holidays Calendar links 
A few weeks back, the tech community forums were abuzz with the news about Kerala, India’s most literate state, having chalked out a plan to migrate all of its high school students to open source platforms over the next three years. While the computer market in India harbors its own sub-industry of software piracy, the prime reason for this is the fact that bloated software prices have been taking a toll on most consumer budgets. It is, after all, hard to justify paying a price for intangible software that rivals the cost of the hardware itself. The good news about the planned move to open source software, is the fact that budgets of educational institutions would not be blasted out of proportion by high licensing and technical support fees. The savings could be applied towards purchasing additional hardware (as an example, the Cotton Hill Girls High School in the southern city of Tiruvananthapuram has 4000 students and just 21 computers).
On slashdot today, slashchris84 mentions a BusinessWeek article about the growing role of Linux in the classrooms of India.
Amidst the sea of comments, those of humphrm (18130) particularly stand out:
There is another angle, though. Maybe you dismiss it, but to some India is one of the hottest technical development centers in the world. And this is a country that highly values education and generally does a better job of providing it to even it’s poorest constituents than the “Developed Countries”. Having just returned from Hyderabad, I witnessed kids crawling out of what could only be described by a Westerner as a mud hut, with a sparkling clean and pressed school uniform on, ready to go to school. In America, these kids would probably not qualify for most public schools because they don’t have an address.
Then, they go on to higher education… and guess what schools are being built fast in India? Technical schools. Lots of them.
My point is, your “backwater” country is doing a better job of educating it’s masses than most western countries, and the tools that these kids learn today will shape technology tomorrow.
Ordinarily, the thought of asking my mother to take a few pictures using the digital camera, zipping them into an archive, firing up a mail client and emailing the file over, would have been followed by the visualization of a long-drawn tutorial phone conversation that perhaps would never see the said task list brought to fruition. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is as enthusiastic as can be when asked to send me some pictures over the internet, but when the process involves anything more than switching three applications and a dozen clicks of the mouse, I know my mom’s no longer part of the audience.
To a geek like me, the process of say, setting up a simple web server is no big deal. I’ve done it many times before, on Windows of course. You begin with installing the latest apache httpd web server… oh wait, did I lose you as well? So you see the point. Every person who owns a computer would like to see it being used for so many applications, that are simply beyond reach - a majority of people end up purchasing computing power that vastly exceeds their needs. If only it were a bit more simple.
I got my mom to set up a web server yesterday. Yes, she is a web administrator now - it just took a couple of clicks, thanks to the Mac. I’ve always admired the power in the simplicity of Mac OS X, but today I’m a much bigger fan - for they’ve bundled an apache web server distribution with the OS.
All you need to do on a Mac, is this:
Thats it. You’re done. Your Mac is now running a personal web server. To check if its working correctly, fire up a web browser window and point it to the URL mentioned when you select the Personal Web Sharing option under System Preferences, which looks like this (see screenshot below):
View this computer’s website at http://192.168.1.2/ or your personal website at http://192.168.1.2/~aidoor/
You can even type in http://localhost/ at the same machine to check. To access your web server from any other machine on the internet, you will need the ISP-assigned IP address similar to the one in the note above. The easiest way to find your IP address is to visit http://www.whatismyip.com.
If things are set up correctly, your browser should bring up the default Apache index page. You can now build a website by designing and placing html files in a specific folder - under your main drive, select Library > WebServer > Documents
Each user account on your Mac also gets a personal folder for web sharing as well - for this you need to put your html files in the Sites folder located in the user’s Home folder. The URL for each user’s web account looks like http://your.IP.addr.ess/~username
The next step would be to register for a domain name using one of the many registry services on the internet (I use GoDaddy), so you can have a nice name to give out to people, instead of a 12 digit number.
Unbelievably simple. My mom loves it.
(Screenshot of System Preferences window)
From The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):
Her new name is “Mrs. Right Place, Right Time.” When shopper Elizabeth Rodriguez walked into New York’s flagship Apple Store this past Saturday, she was showered with a MacBook, iPod, iPod Hi-Fi, and an Apple ProCare membership, all for being visitor # 1,000,000.
Color me green of course, but my congratulations go out to Liz and Apple. I was at the store last weekend, if only… sigh 
Some pictures I took at the store:
Mike pointed me to this NPR report (audio) on the centennial year of India’s favorite national song, Vande Mataram. The song was written as a rallying call for independence from Britain. But since its inception, the Hindu-inspired lyrics have fueled a debate about whether the song ignores India’s large Muslim population.
Vande Mataram has a special place in our hearts - so much so that some have even expressed the desire for it to be redesignated as India’s National Anthem, replacing Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana. While I believe this is a ludicrous idea, as are the controversies that even circulate on the Internet these days about Jana Gana Mana being inappropriate since it was written in praise of England’s King George V that would be sung on the occasion of his coronation ceremony.
While Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram has a clear historical and cultural significance in that it glorifies the Motherland and was the national cry for freedom from British oppression during the freedom movement, it is the focal point of an age-old controversy that has been refreshed today in the light of the move to introduce the song in school assemblies across the nation. The controversy arises due to the fact that Muslims, India’s largest minority, are restricted by their faith to sing the song, as Islam requires its followers to sing praises to only one God - and therefore, the Motherland cannot be glorified to the position of God in prose or verse. Quoting Wikipedia:
“… The song was also rejected on the grounds that Muslims felt offended by its depiction of the nation as Ma Durga—a Hindu goddess— thus equating the nation with the Hindu conception of shakti, divine feminine dynamic force; and by its origin as part of Anandamatha, a novel they felt had an anti-Muslim message.”
The NPR report concludes on a note that depicts the strength in India’s secularity - by mentioning A R Rehman’s rendition of Vande Mataram, a song that gained immense popularity independent of religious affiliations, across the nation.
China launched the first seed-breeding satellite of its kind from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center today, carrying 215 kilograms of seeds of plants and fungus, the largest-ever such payload since 1987. The mission is part of a plan to help develop space-enhanced produce to feed the country’s 1.3 billion people. The country has been researching the effects of cosmic radiation and microgravity on seeds for many years, giving rise to the theory that fruit, vegetables, and grains such as rice and wheat cultivated from seeds exposed to space offer increased yields. A rapid decline in farmland due to industrialization is a significant problem in India as well, which increases the importance of following the findings from this research effort even more closely. While food irradiation as a method of preservation has been adopted for a long time now, the potential health risks that might be associated with vegetables treated with cosmic radiation need to be strongly investigated.
It seems certain that in the not too distant future, Earthgrains will witness a completely different breed of competitors (Spacegrains?) lining the shelves at Wal-mart.
Feedmap.net is a new blog-related service that brings a geographical perspective to blogs, and is an addition to the vast array of web mashups that seek to add a mapping overlay to just about every online service conceivable - the most useful of them (in my opinion) probably being HousingMaps (which marries Google Maps to craigslist.org real-estate and housing ads). Strictly speaking, Feedmap is not a mashup as it does not really produce a confluence of services, but it gets pretty darn close, given that most mashups do use Google Maps as their main ingredient. ProgrammableWeb.com, which tracks mashups, has an interesting grid view of the hybrid services available on the Web today.
Coming back to Feedmap (also called Blogmap), the service lets bloggers create buttons for their sites to indicate neighboring blogs and feeds available on the internet (although I’m not quite sold on how much the popularity of blogging in a neighborhood would matter). Also, the service would find popularity with bloggers who would not mind revealing their geographical location in their blogs, which I would guess makes up a smaller part of the web-trotting community. Most bloggers use their online journals as an outlet for the escapist in their minds - adding the geographical overlay only pulls them back to physical reality. Nonetheless, the service would be useful enough for the rest of us (myself included) that do list our identities on the web. It would be interesting, after all, to learn of the blogs that get published around us and from specific parts of the world.
From the Blogmap About page:
Here is a list of things you can do with BlogMap:
* Geo-code your blog feed using the submit page (and get your own BlogMap badge).
* Browse blogs by location using the browse page.
* Search for local blogs using the search page.
* Find bloggers in your neighborhood!
* Get local BlogRoll in OPML format.
