Archive for the 'Entry' Category

Tech Ka Masala. Episode 31: No sex on your iPhone

In this week’s episode of Tech Ka Masala, we discussed Apple’s war on sex, Europe’s war on Google, Twitter’s ad rumors and more.

The episode too was broadcasted live during recording on our ustream channel. The audio quality is a bit spotty in the beginning (my voice, not Aditya’s) but it gets better towards the middle of the show.

Listen Online:

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Or subscribe using iTunes, Google, Odeo or RSS

And of course, you can write to us for geek gyaan, anytime. We can be reached at techkamasala [at] theindicast [dot] com.

Happy listening, and see you next week!

Tabula Rasa

The Wordpress goddess issued dire warnings today, about hacks in the offing which forced me to do a rather hasty upgrade of my installation to the latest and greatest 2.8.4.[1] The upgrade meant a lot of stuff borking, and I’ve been able to bring this site back up only after a lot of heartburn and many disabled 2.6 era plugins.

Sadly, the purty look that this (micro)blog sported was also a casualty. The aforementioned was made possible by writing a custom scheme for K2 1.0 RC6, along with some theme-level hacks. K2 had to be upgraded to RC8 which rendered the layout unusable[2]

Fear not, however. The Dark Lord shall endeavor to restore this site to glory once again: at the very least, re-enabling the previous layout, or if he’s lucky, get someone to do a redesign.

  1. at the time of this writing ()
  2. it may not seem so but RC6 and RC8 are more than a year apart, in K2’s almost debian-like development cycle ()

Internet Etiquette #1: Don’t Digg Your Own Blog Posts

Of late, I’ve been a very heavy consumer of social media and eagerly look forward to links, pictures and other stuff that my friends share online. The reason I pursue such content is because I value my friends’ tastes and hope to discover new things through them. I click through to most reasonable sounding links in my social stream and am rewarded more often than not.

It then pisses me to no end, when some of my contacts digg stories from their own blogs, or share stories from their own blog on Google Reader. The entry title more often than not is ambiguous, and its hard to tell who wrote the article.

I feel tricked when I discover that the cool story that you just dugg or shared through Google reader wasn’t something good you found online but something only you believe to be great, and just want to plug. If I’m really interested in what you write, I’ll read your blog. Just stop spamming them pipes.

Don’t get me wrong – It is absolutely cool to plug stuff from your own blog into your Twitter posts or Facebook Notes, for example. Those services are meant for people to communicate with their friends and self plugs are fair game there. As a matter of fact, I suppose Twitter Tools is going to crosspost a link to this blog post on Twitter clearly mentioning it as such.

But then, Digg is meant for for people to indicate appreciation of other people’s stuff. Google reader is meant for people to share interesting stories written by other people. Delicious is meant for sharing interesting links that you come across on the web. None of these are ideally meant to be used as self-advertising platforms.

Abusing your social stream isn’t good internet etiquette. So stop when you can.

Announcing Vulturo’s News Clippings

Ever since I’ve almost exclusively taken to Microblogging, the feed for this blog has become sort of monotonous.

While I can’t tell If I’ll ever get back to full fledged blogging again, you can certainly entertain yourself with the Tweets that I post, the Pictures I upload on Flickr and the Links I publish on Delicious. Those are all spliced into this blog’s feed via Feedburner.

Meanwhile, There’s a lot of feed reading I still do, on a daily basis although the mix is now almost exclusively full of Geek News as against Indian blogs. I ditched Google Reader a while ago and use the NewsGator Service, synced with NetNewsWire on my Macbook and NewsGator Go on my Blackberry.

If you are interested in the news I read and share, you can now subscribe to it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vulturo/News. This is almost the DIY version of Google Reader Shared Items.

Anyways, Its enough goofing off already. Peace out, stay beautiful, and that sort of a thing…

A Status Update

This goes out to those of you, who are still wondering what will eventually happen to this website.

As always, with everything that I do, there is a feeling that things will not be seen through till the end. This time, there is no reason to be afraid, however. The reinvention of this website is well underway. I’m almost half ready with a layout. Till the time, we completely get there – bells and whistles included, here’s a mockup to feast your eyes on

The VultureKraft

Obviously, the bottom portion is yet to be done. It shouldn’t take much time to do it. Also, a lot of minor touches to be added here and there, but so far so good.

Cool, what? Opinions, if any, can be emailed to vsaket [at] gmail [dot] com