It's been a while

I can curse myself or kick but it won't change the things. It's been a while and I have not written anything. I am talking this post as the one to start the good work again. So here we go. Let me write something I am listening to. It's a line from Pankaj Udhas' song.

"Intezar galat hai ke shaam ho jaye,
gar ho sake to abhi daur-e-jaam ho jae,
mujh jaise rindh ko bhi tuney, hashra mein ya rab
bula liya hai toh kuch intezaam ho jaye"

What an Irony....

Disclaimer: This post and for that matter any other post is solely my opinion (which might not have to be true/correct). Also, these opinions have nothing to do with my institute and my professional life at the institute. The opinions are very personal and cannot/should not be generalized to a group of people/users/students/others. These are strictly my personal thoughts which are not driven by motivation/influence from anyone. Readers of this post are free to use their comments on the post. However, I'll not by any means be responsible for comments from users on my post.

What an irony ! I just wished that we saw the world and the world of internet with a very open frame of mind. MDI (Management Development Institute) of which I am a doctoral student has blocked orkut.com. This is quite sad because of the wrong notion about orkut which most people believe is that it's just an online dating/relationship site, which is quite ironical because orkut.com is a platform where you also get to meet people of similar interest when it comes to your professional life as well. Say for example there are communities which are dedicated for "Doctoral Program in Management". Let me start assuming the reason behind the ban:

1. Just because it's a dating/relationship site.
2. Because people are wasting too much time on orkut (however the definition of wastage has to be critically scrutinized)
3. Because it's taking up too much of bandwidth.

Now let me start refuting the above assumptions based on further assumption (which are much closer to reality)

Assumption 2 that people are wasting too much of time holds no argument because there are countless other sites on internet which can cause the same problem.

Assumption 3 it's taking up too much of bandwidth holds no argument because there are other sites like youtube which has streaming videos and can cause a much larger collateral damage to the philosophy of saving bandwidth.

It's quite a sorry situation because I never thought that a matured institute will do something like this. The problem also is that Orkut is a big brand name. There are other sites like facebook.com which is also a platform to meet people and is not blocked. I am also pretty sure that the kind of filtering that is taking place based on either very well known restricted sites database or based on the heuristics/keywords matching in URL. There are countless other dating sites when you perform a google query:

online dating -inurl:dating

and will even have sites like http://www.socialfriendsonline.com/.

I am just hoping that this is a temporary testing that's been taken on. Otherwise we might have to even block google.com and other search engines which are gateway to stuff like the one above. Also, this leads to a more bigger and complex scenario. We all know that kids are smart enough to use web proxy (I am not going to suggest how it can be used because of the sensitivity of the issue) and this would lead to a 2 fold problem:

1. Bandwidth consumption: Proxy sites use too much of ads on their sites which clogs the network.
2. These sites are usually the ones which run on business model of downloading adwares/spywares/Trojans/viruses etc which compromises privacy of the user. You never know how long your online bank account password will be safe...

Let me just wish that this won't last for long because there is both good and bad side of technology and you have to chose whether you want to weigh bad one over the good one.

Peace!

Technorati Tags: orkut, orkutblocked, mdi, management development institute, research

My current Firefox extensions...

I have been waiting to write a post on one of the best browsers I have known. I am a great fan of open source and even bigger of Firefox; most people also call it mozilla which is pretty ignorant because mozilla is much bigger an umbrella which also has Firefox. But I'd safely be able to say without any offense to anyone that today Firefox is much bigger a brand has overtaken the mozilla brand. I can boast of the fact that I am a pretty old user of Firefox. Actually since Firefox 0.6 version and today it's 2.0.0.6. Of course 2.0.0.6 is the public stable release release. However there are alpha versions of Firefox available; code name Gran Paradiso. Earlier this project was code named minefield. Wow I remember the details :).

For all those who have little idea about what Firefox is; Firefox is an open source browser just like Internet Explorer (Actually much better than Internet Explorer from Microsoft). Let me not even bother to compare the two because Firefox wins it with no competition. However, Firefox is open source that means it's free and it's source is open for you to modify and customize. I won't do that coz of my sorry incapabilities to understand the world of coding. However, for coding challenged people like me, Firefox has something very unique called as extensions. I love extensions coz they make Firefox a unique and powerful platform to rediscover web. I also can boast that I have some experience in writing Firefox extensions. I have written one when I was in Google. Let's not discuss the details as it is deemed classified :).

Let me tell you something that there are thousands of extensions out there at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1

and it is impossible to test and try each of the extension unless you are crazy and have reached the state of being obsessed. Let me also tell you that your favorite list of extensions will keep changing as per your needs. Right now my favorite extensions (not in that order) are:

1. Google Browser Sync
2. Google Notebook
3. Greasemonkey
4. Live Page Rank
5. Real Player Browser record Plugin
6. Scribefire (I am using this to blog this post)
7. ShowIP
8. StumbleUpon
9. Zotero

Do I need to describe what these extensions do? I don't think so ! Let's see how many of you will try the extensions !

Long live Open Source and the power of Community....Amen!

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Extension, opensource, Vivek Kumar, Research, Research at MDI

This is not bad at all continued..........

Well, I can't hold myself from doing more research about my name and how Google us weighing it. I did some more searches today and was ecstatic to see stuff like the one below:

This is so cool. Search for vivek kumar google and what you get is my blog right on top. Now I am starting to think do I really have to continue my PhD. I can just start doing some SEO consultancy. Naaa..... I am just kidding. Anyways it's nice to see that I am getting popular :).

This is not bad at all...

I mean what is the importance of your name in Google. If found this pretty amazing today that my analytics suggested that people who reached my blog had 2 visitors who used vivek kumar as Google query. So I thought of checking it myself. I did a search on Google (google.co.in) and found that my blog with my name in of the posts features 49th in the result. I think it's not all that bad :)

Technorati Tags: vivek kumar, google, research at MDI, research

advanced search — query date range

OK if any of you read Matt Cutts blog, then you must have already seen a post on this new advance search feature that's been added to Google. If you haven't and want to read what the heck is this all about, here you go. The new feature that's been added by Google is to search the pages for a particular query using the operator as_qdr (tentatively stands for advanced search — query date range) in address bar of Google.

OK if that's too tough to understand let's take an example. Let's say you are searching for the query research at MDI and you want to search for pages resulting using this query over last 2 weeks. All you have to do is just type the following in your address bar:

http://www.google.com/search?q=research+at+MDI&as_qdr=w2

You might wanna check out the first result :)

Of course I have used this example to show that over the past 2 weeks google has indexed around 26000 pages and the top result is from my blog. This also suggests that Google has crawled my blog in the last week 2 week. I am smart and I have not used as_qdr=w1 because my blog hasn't been crawled in last week.

The parameters that the operator as_qdr takes is as follows (scraping it from Matts Blog)

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)

w[number] - past number of weeks

y[number] - past number of years

So next time you want to refine your search and impress your colleagues and/or your clients feel free to boast about your uncanny knack of being a smart Google operators user.

Technorati Tags: as_qdr, advanced search — query date range, google, research at mdi, research

And who said linux wasn't eye-candy..

Ignorance is bliss but not always. Definitely not when you have not tried any of the latest distros of linux. Linux beats the eye-candy effect of any of the operating systems. Be it Microsoft Vista or a Mac. Don't believe me. See for yourself.

This is not even close to my average level of creativity. What you see is my desktop of Ubuntu 7.04 popularly called as Feisty Fawn. There has been an alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10 code named gutsy gibbon. But I have not upgraded as the support for the repositories is missing.

The fading fire that you see in this picture is not part of the wallpaper but is a functionality of beryl window manager. When a window is closed it fades away like the one is above picture. I could not capture the wobbly desktop effects. This is a true master piece. More and more softwares are being supported. As you can see there is Adobe reader, skype and opera to name a few.

To capture the essence of what I feel about open source, I have made an entry for ubunutu in vista's boot loader as "Crusader of Free World".

Let there be piece and people get more chances of unleashing the power of community development.

Powered by ScribeFire.

This is a test Blog using Adobe Contribute

Adobe contribute,Resarch

This is new blog post that I am typing in through adobe contribute. Adobe contribute seems a lot of fun and user friendly. Will write mote once I have tested it enough.

Series of Unfortunate events...

I have been up with doing some assignments for my course in "Advances in Marketing Management". For my misfortune any topic that excites me has hardly any literature. For example topics like "Search Engine Marketing", "Advertising using RSS", "Blogs: A mean to achieve customer knowledge and brand Management".

May be it's such a new topic that it's been just practiced and there's very little literature on this. This excites me as well as scares me because I might have to give it up because there's no platform laid down by existing literature. However, I am not those types who give up. I am going to do my PhD in something related to above. Come what may....

Technorati Tags: research, research at MDI, Search Engine Marketing, Blog Marketing, RSS Marketing

Internet 2.0

I was reading this article on Internet 2.0 and how it can facilitate the next generation CRM. The article talks about the tools that'd emerge out of the Internet 2.0 era and will lead CRM into new directions. I am scrapping part of a paragraph and will associate it with one of the mails that I got from Citibank. I'll leave it to my readers to relate the Gartner's finding to the mail I got.

Gartner's findings:

"According to Gartner Research, the average business-to-consumer company can save $26 million per year simply by delivering bills electronically and convincing as many of its customers as possible to seek help on a Web site before picking up the phone. The stakes for failing to accommodate the service demands of customers remain high."

The mail that I got had a subject "Help preserve the environment by saying yes to Statement on E-mail." Here's the mail:

Dear Cardmember,Thank you for paying your Citibank Credit Card bills at Citibank Online and/or for setting up Standing Instructions for the same. We appreciate the fact that you have adopted online payment for your Card bills at Citibank Online.You have been enjoying the convenience of receiving your Suvidha Account statement over E-mail (account no.xxxxxxxxxx). As a measure of our continued commitment towards making your banking experience more fruitful, we will henceforth be sending your Credit Card Statement for your Card no. xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx through E-mail, instead of the physical statement. As you may be already aware, Statement on E-mail* provides you with the following benefits: 1. You can download, print, save and archive your statements for future reference. 2. You get easy access to a soft copy of your Card statement through E-mail. 3. Secure, 128-bit encrypted statements, which always reach you on time. 4. You also help preserve the environment by saying NO to paper statements.However, if you would like to continue receiving paper statements for your Card, please login to Citibank Online at www.citibank.com/india or call 24-Hour CitiPhone to unsubscribe from the Statement on E-mail service.Warm regards,Citibank N.A., India

My readers are smart enough to associate Gartner's findings to Citibank's efforts :)


Technorati Tags: Internet 2.0, CRM, Gartner, Research, research at MDI, citibank

How about your favorite browser going campus

Yeah, you guessed it right. In case you wanna have your favorite firefox as a campus version either you can download it from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/ or just add three extensions to your existing version of Firefox which makes it campus version.

These extensions are as follows:

1. FoxyTunes
2. StumbleUpon
3. Zotero

I am not going to discuss these extensions. The reason is because the best way to explore these extensions is to explore them yourself. May be there will be a post on StumbleUpon at some point of time. I have already posted about zotero and deliberately decided not to explain each of it's feature. BTW one of it's feature is timelining your library collection.

How about something as sexy as this...

Caution: This post might lead to very addictive music listening habits. In case you are already one of those people who cannot live without music, this post might just make you transfer some funds to my account. I stumbled across a site called as musicovery.com. This site is about a music player right into your browser and you don't need to register or do any other kind of bullshit like downloading stuff.

This cool stuff just sits in your browser and plays the kind of music you want. I am still doing some feature testing of this and will keep posting about the stuff you can do. As of now it has to key features like genre of music and you can select option as per your mood in that genre. Then you have a time line and I find this out of this world.

Information to knowledge...

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

You must be wondering what makes me start the post with the mission statement of one of the fastest growing company in the history of business. Before I answer this. Let me get critical of myself. With a research lense (apart from the contacts I wear), I always put my way of looking at things in a very narrow perspective. This is 2 way beneficial. One it gives me a scope to avoid the problem of viewing world from just one perspective and 2 it allows me to listen better and understand the lens of others.

As promised now I come back to answering the scope of Google's Mission statement in this post. I was reading an interesting distinguishing feature (thanks to Prof Saxena) of information in relation to information. No! we are not discussing the classic aspect of how information becomes knowledge and so forth. I context here is that "information is descriptive in nature whereas knowledge is associative". This doesn't bring down the importance of information over knowledge. But as Google has been maturing as a company and is continually providing breakthrough services, it looks like Google is moving towards getting into organizing knowledge from the perspective of customers. The core still remains organizing information, but as you put on a lens that looks at Google from a customer's perspective, I know that Google is keeping track of each of my actions, saving searches and every kind of data mining technique it can think of.

Cautiously I am still keeping my perspective narrow so that I am open for a discussion and would love to be proved long. Meanwhile, keep open yourself to get overloaded with information. But see how much of it you can convert to knowledge.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge, Knowledge Management, KM, IM, information, information management, research, research at MDI

Never think that you are smart...

I know that we all are smart and there is no denying of this fact. But being over smart sometime makes you realize that it would have been better if you were ignorant. And if I can use the copyright phrase of my good friend Paul that "Ignorance is a Bliss".

OK coming down to the point. Well a couple of days back I tried something in which I thought I was a wizard. I tried installing Ubuntu gutsy gibbon (Thanks to Nikhil) without reading the instruction. I thought it was like a cake walk as it was in Windows XP. Now for windows XP you get good partitionning tools (thanks to torrents for the pirated stuff), but for Vista there is none. However, Vista has it's own tool called shrink. So, installing Ubuntu I messed up with my partition table and screwed up all the partitions. Thankfully I got back all the important docs doing some recovery.

Make sure if any one of you run the native partitions made using Vista, please follow the instructions at

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

May be you'll not lose your super sexy rare collection of songs from eskobar and other artists. Plus the tonnes of movies you have downloaded (why else do we need a laptop with 120 Gigs of Hard disk).

As the good saying goes "Better to be safe than worried (screwed up).....