Blog has moved

New home for my blog:

http://aburad.com/blog/

I am using wordpress for hosting and its fun playing with it. Please update your bookmarks and feeds. Also I have shifted my homepage to http://www.aburad.com

New Webpage :)

Hi everybody....
As I'm graduated from IIT bombay completing my B.tech in computer science, so my webpage there wont be available for long. So I have taken a new web domain : http://www.aburad.com with hostmonster till now services are good for what I paid. Right now i have just shifted my iitb page there, but soon will be posting new stuff...so watch out !!

Visit: http://www.aburad.com

Chart API for webpages

Cool....Great yet Simple..

Embed charts in webpages with one of our simplest APIs yet

We actually built this originally to use internally - we use it on Google Video and Google Finance for example. It seemed like it would be a good thing to open up to other users too. You can find out all about it at on the Google Chart API homepage and there's a Google Chart API group for questions and support.

Google publishes chart API for web pages

A single HTTP GET request with parameters is all you need. You can even use the URL as the src attribute on an img tag.

Also Read:Programmable Web: Google’s New Chart API

India To Offer Free Broadband by 2009

Economic Times: Broadband to go free in 2 yrs
Economic Times: Broadband initiatives: Speed it up

The government proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009, through the state-owned telecom service providers BSNL and MTNL. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business as we know it.

Read disscussion regarding this on Slashdot.

India leads Asia billionaire club

"India has the most number of billionaires in Asia with a total wealth of $191bn between them, according to Forbes magazine. With 36 billionaires, India has overtaken Japan's 24 billionaires, after two decades of Japan topping the Asian rich list."

Forbes' 2007 ranking of worlds richest.

Read More : India leads Asia billionaire club

Lakshmi Mittal, 56, is the fifth richest person in the world, according to the magazine. The other Indians in the list include Mukesh and Anil Ambani of Reliance, Wipro chief Azim Premji, Bharti Group chairman Sunil Mittal and Aditya Birla Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla.

Check who made it to list from India (Asia)

Also check The World's Billionaires

Creative Commons, India launched on 26th Jan at IIT Bombay

The project celebrated its official launch today at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. The launch is part of Asia’s largest technology festival held in Mumbai – Techfest. Now in its tenth year, the two day festival offers a smattering of workshops, exhibitions and lectures to students to explore advances and opportunities in modern science and technology.

Speakers at the launch event:

Mr. Joichi Ito [Chairman, Creative Commons]
Dr. Catharina Maracke [Creative Commons, Global Coordinator]
Mr. Nandu Pradhan [President and Managing Director, Red Hat, India]
Mr. Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai-CSDS]
Prof. Deepak Phatak [KReSIT, IIT Bombay]

Mr. Ito will speak about the importance of Creative Commons for a growing global digital culture in light of the launch of the Indian creative commons jurisdiction on January 26th. The intimate interaction between technology, law and culture in digital products is creating new challenges for enterprises, individuals and other organizations. How is the digital landscape getting altered with the emergence of licenses such as creative commons?

For more information about this project and its launch, visit CC-India’s website. To learn more about this year’s Techfest, click here.
Read More :
CC Licenses Launch Today in India
Creative Commons Launch
Creative Commons India
Creative Commons @ techfest
Joi Ito's Web: India[Chairman, Creative Commons]

Indian Farmers Go Hi-tech

When an Indian state government wanted to acquire the land of farmers for building a Special Economic Zone, the farmers used satellite pictures from Google Earth to prove their land is fertile.

Watch the video @ http://labnol.blogspot.com/
Read more >>
Also at Google Earth aid for Maha farmers@ IBN Live

Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock

Whoooops !!!

Source : Google Press
Scobleizer's Blog
I still think Google is crazy :)

Kerala (Indian State) to go 100% Linux

After the cola ban it is now the turn of Microsoft to log out of Kerala. Children in 12500 high schools in the state will not be taught Windows. Instead instructors are lining up Linux for them. Kerala has 99.9% Literacy.


read more | digg story

Blogger in beta

Try it at : beta.blogger.com
With the beta you can:

• Categorize your posts with labels
• Control who can read your blog
• Change the appearance and content of your blog with your mouse instead of HTML

Read more : Techcrunch
buzz.blogger
Source : Techcrunch

Pesti-Cola Scandal: Pesticide Claims Shake Up Coke and Pepsi

After allegations of high levels of toxic chemicals in their subcontinental sodas, the companies face bans amid a media uproar. Welcome to the India installment of the fabled cola wars. Global soft-drink heavies Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are actually on the same side. In short, this is shaping up to be a public-relations calamity of the first order.

read more | digg story

India's biggest life insurer opts for Linux

All of LIC's 2,048 branches, 100 divisional offices, seven zonal offices, head office and subsidiary offices will be covered by the deployment. Along with this all of LIC�s desktops will also simultaneously be converted to Linux. Approximately 60,000 users and five to six thousand servers will migrate to RHEL.

read more | digg story

Blogs are back !!

the ban by indian govt on blogs has been lifted !!

High-profile India satellite launch ends in disaster

An Indian rocket veered off course after takeoff Monday, scuttling the launch of an Indian satellite that was to be used for broadcasting television signals and transmitting data, media reported.

"Things have gone wrong at the separation stage. We have to analyze the data (to know) why it went wrong," the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, G. Madhavan Nair, was quoted as saying by Press Trust of India news agency.

Rocket veers out of control during satellite launch
High-profile India satellite launch ends in disaster

The Myth of the New India

"An NYT op-ed on The Myth of the New India reports that only 1.3M Indians are participating in the so-called new economy of BPO, leaving 400M have-nots without a piece of the pie. Despite recent gains, nearly 380M Indians still live on less $1 a day, setting the stage for rural and urban conflict."

From the article: "No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already."

Few Comments :

A Dollar fetches a lot of things in India, and i'm surprised that a lot has been assumed and written about without checking the facts. as of today, a dollar equals about Ruppees 45.84 (that was yesterday's rates). a Dollar fetches a lot of stuff, in fact i will give 2 examples - one for the metropolitan poor man with a dollar and the poor man in the rural india

Source : Slashdot

State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry posted Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth at technorati weblog:

The State of the Blogosphere is strong. The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.
The Facts:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

The blogosphere tracked by technorati is doubling about every 6 months, as the chart below shows:


read more

Itrans_Prv : Project Page up

An Emacs Plugin for previewing Itrans and Latex File

Project Webpage Up.
Webpage has Image Previews of Itrans_Prv working.
Also embedded a Flash intro of how the package works.
Embedding of flash done by vnc2swf screen recorder.
Image Previews

Preview1

Preview2 Preview3