Google Squared – Searches in Grids

Seems Google is taking the fight to Bing! Or maybe not! Given that this was announced more than a month ago…

Google’s new new search ‘tool’ (or call it toy) – Google Squared went live in the Google Labs yesterday and at first sight, seems a nifty way to categorize information. To quote their own help pages:

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes.
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you’re interested in.
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
• Save and share Squares with others.

So what they do is restructure the search results into neat little grids or squares, each with its own category & label. And the user can add/remove the necessary rows and columns and when they do so, Google automatically gets that information (if available) and populates the squares. One can add as many items or columns in one’s search and what’s more, can also save them for future reference. But of course, the information should be available on the web for Google to retrieve in the first place.

To illustrate that, I’ve saved myself a neat square for Hyderabad. Go to Google Squared and type in Hyderabad. The areas by popularity (or search results) will be listed out as items, with few attributes as columns. I chose to add items that included areas/places of my interest and also changed the columns to show the attributes that I needed and voila! Again, information I desired, but was not available on the www (like population or nearest chemist, for example) will not show up in the grids. Check out the image after the jump…

Movie Review: Angels & Demons

After what seems like ages (but was 2 weeks exactly) the much-awaited Angels & Demons hits the screens in India; only single screens though, no multiplexes…though how Prasadz counts as a single-screen-theatre beats me! Anyways, the movie’s kinda worth the wait and is a thrill-a-minute roller coaster ride. Well, not exactly thrill-a-minute since there are few scenes filled with long-drawn speeches and explanations. of the happenings in the past, goings-on of the present and expected events in the near-future.

Simply put, the Vatican has just lost its Pope to death and amidst the Conclave to choose the successor, it emerges that an old enemy – The Illuminati – has resurfaced and wants revenge. Death awaits the four preferiti or the preferred cardinals, each of them at four churches symbolized by the four basal elements – Earth, Air, Fire & Water. Added to that, there’s an anti-matter-bomb waiting to explode at the end of it all. Much against its wishes, the Church approaches Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) to help solve the mystery, and to balance the lead cast on the sexual scale, there’s Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zuerer), the scientist overlooking the LHC Project from where the Anti Matter was stolen from. Together they dig into the Vatican Archives, unearth seemingly invisible clues, trace the subtly hidden paths across Rome and attempt to save the four kidnapped cardinals and also save the area from being wiped off by an “explosion equivalent to 5 Megatons of ‘something’ ”

Have EMail, Will Post!

Lemme see…

• There’s a major system overhaul in progress and all I have on my notebook is the OS & Outlook (nope, no browsers..not even IE!) and am connected to the Web via LAN. i get this unsuppressable urge to blog. Can I do it?
• I get gifted an iPhone! I snap up some pretty pics with it but can’t wait to show them to people. Can’t wait till I connect the phone to the notebook, transfer the pics and then post’em onto my blog. How am I gonna do that?
• I receive an amazing email forward that just HAS TO BE SHARED with others. Sure, I can ‘forward’ the forward but it will sit in the inbox of people, idle and feeling unwanted! Best way is to post it on moi blog…but then I’ve to save the images locally, then re-upload them onto WP and write out (or copy-paste) all the text therein. Time taking and boring! Is there an easier way out?

YES! WordPress now has introduced the much-awaited and uber-useful “Post By Email” Feature….[Official Announcement] [How-to Page]

Of course, Blogger has had it for quite a while now but its good that even WP has it. Agreed, all of us have browsers and other blogging tools at our disposal (Windows Live Writer, for one) but isn’t it nice to be able to post a blog just by sending an email! Can be done from anywhere, anytime and with mobile internet being oh-so-prevalent, one doesn’t need even a PC/Notebook for that! Cool, isn’t it

And yeah, this post was er…um…posted from GMail!

CONfounded F*CKER!

Apologies for the rather crude title but I feel oh-so-angry! Not at the people behind that confounded thing nor at the preventers…but moreso at the moronic individuals who let it propagate to the extent it did! How old is the saying prevention is better than cure? I bet these morons never heard it or may have conveniently forgotten it

In case you’re wondering what I’m ranting about, please to do a Google News Search for ‘Conficker’. Its a darned worm that was out in the woods for sometime now but reared up on April 1st to say hello to the millions of fools all over the internet! I’d kept both my notebook and the PC up-to-date with the security patches et al but as they saying goes, one bad apple spoils the whole basket and in this case, led to the basket being kept away in isolation until the bad apples were identified and the bad portion cut off. I know I’m coming across a bit dense here but you see, I haven’t have any decent disclaimer about this place…y’know, the kind of stuff that reads somewhat like “opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and have no relation to any person, place or events elsewhere”. Wait, isn’t that from the movies? I guess I’m still seething with frustration…

Anyways, one irony in this milieu is that while a similar event few years back gave me reason to smile, this time round it started off a cussfest! What goes round, comes round, eh?

Random News XI

Some Random news that I’d like to share:

Sports:

• F1 rules amended so that the driver with most wins will be crowned champion…instead of the driver with most wins. (Via Geek Rohit). More…
• Arsenal join Manchester United, Chelsea & Everton in the FA Cup last 4 after they beat Hull. More…
• UEFA Champions League Quarter Final draw is on 20th March (Ppl. have been coming over to my last year’s QF draw post a lot!)
• India let NZ off the hook in their 1st test. NZ were 60/6 before recovering to post 279. India are 29/0 at the end of day 1. More…

Tech:

• IBM in talks to buy SUN?  More… (Via Twitter)

Blogroll (new additions):

• Shripriya
• Vikas Gupta
• Raja Sen

More later…

Safari 4 – Some Initial Observations

Apple released the public beta of its Safari 4 browser (which was made available for Windows users two yrs ago) yesterday. I’ve been using Safari 3 ever since it released but the usage is limited to WordPress (which, after its recent upgrade, looks much better on Safari than on Firefox), Apple Trailers, Flickr and few other infrequently-visited sites.

Safari 4 boasts of ~150 features amongst which there quite a few new ones…that is to say, new to Safari! Firefox, Chrome and Opera users will find these ‘new features’ quite ubiquitous. As is my habit, I’ll list out a few ‘sore points’ that make the Safari 4 experience a bit dampening (IMHO, of course):

GMail outage provokes mass frenzy!

It was just another Tuesday evening…with EoD deadlines looming large and the yearn to get back to home steadily growing bigger, I happened to glance at the TwitterFox icon on the statusbar and there were about 51 unread tweets. Now that might be not a big number for some heavily networked indviduals…but for someone with as small a ‘following’ list as mine, it sure was an ‘eyebrow-raiser’. A quick glance showed that almost all tweets were related to one thing – “GMail Down”

Windows Live Writer 2009; trying out few plug-ins

Long time since I’ve updated few of the s/w’s on moi laptop. I usually update the NIS and run Windows Update once in a while and that’s it! So I went on an updating spree today and downloaded & installed newer versions of some of the stuff. That includes the software from where I’m posting this! I Installed the Windows Live Writer 2009 today and going out on a whim, installed few of the plug-ins also. This post is just to tryout those and see how far usable they’re…