The Chronicles of R

Driving In India : A Precautionary Tale

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:04:45 PST

For the benefit of every Tom, Dick and Harry visiting India and daring to drive on Indian roads, I am offering a few hints for survival. They are applicable to every place in India except Bihar, where life outside a vehicle is only marginally safer.Indian road rules broadly operate within the domain of karma where you do your best and leave the results to your insurance company.The hints are as

Love, Sex And Poetry

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:18:01 PDT

"Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is." - An Alchemy of Desire, Tarun TejpalLove has become a cliche,A reminiscent of the past.The greatest bond of them allIs not love but lust.I am happier than ever now,Your body has becomeMy daily bread.Love always had my limits set toA bottle of bourbon and,A piece of lead.[I promised myself not to write a poem on The Chronicles of R after

Label Clouds On Blogger!

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:24:44 PDT

Google has finally introduced Label Clouds on Blogger. Actually it's two features that they introduced yesterday, Label Cloud being one of them, Selected Labels being the other one. It was posted on Blogger Buzz by Wiktor Gworek, who is a Software Engineer with Google, who also posted a seemingly gibberish post, sans title, earlier on Blogger Buzz itself!Now about the new features, most of us

Digg Announces Reddit-Like Ad Platform

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:04:43 PDT

Digg has announced it's own ad network - Digg Ads, a Reddit like ad platform that they plan to launch in a few months. The Digg Ads would appear alongside regular stories. The sponsored content would look similar to the regular Digg content except that they would be clearly marked as a sponsored listing.The ads would be linked to various stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many

Bada Bing, Bada Boom!

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:39:41 PDT

Microsoft was always good in finding new names for their old piece of code. Wish only they would have spent an equal time improving it. No, not the name, the code I mean.Take Bing for example. Yes, Microsoft Live Search is now Bing and it has already received quite a buzz. Now the first thing I tried to search in Bing (India) was "hot indian girls". And it never came up with a result. Does that

Is DocCash Worth The Hype?

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Fri, 15 May 2009 04:33:26 PDT

Launched at TechCrunch40 by Jason Nazar and Alon Shwartz, DocStoc is a site like Scribd where you can upload your documents and share them easily. Very recently DocStoc has announced a revenue sharing program called DocCash, and with that the internet and social media sites have gone ga ga over it. So I thought I might check it out as well.With DocCash, you can make money from the documents you

How To Show Ads Only On Post Pages

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Thu, 14 May 2009 09:44:52 PDT

Earlier today Mohamed Rias posted a great hack in his blog for Blogger blogs. It is a modification of Ramani's expandable post hack which display a thumbnail along with the post summary. So for those who use pictures or photos extensively in their posts, this hack would be very useful. First, it would help increase the CTR as only as summary of the post would be visible on the main page, and to

Disciple : The MMORPG For Adults

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:36:00 PDT

I was too tired to go on playing MyBrute. Although it's simple and does not require any downloads, but it soon gets boring with it's repetitive gameplay. That's when I discovered Disciple.Disciple, from the stable of Resistor Productions, LLC, is a MMORPG targeted mainly towards adults. On Disciple, players are taken into the dark realms of a fantasy world known as Aphelion. Here players fight

The Matrix Runs On Windows XP

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:17:36 PDT

Finally the truth, The Matrix runs on Windows XP! Don't believe me? Watch this.

Prism 1.0 Brings Web Apps To Your Desktop

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:49:09 PDT

Google really wants everyone to use Chrome, very recently it had even placed ads on TV to promote its browser. But Firefox is here to stay, more so after the release of Prism 1.0 from the Mozilla Labs.Prism is aimed towards converging the internet and your desktop. It transforms web applications like Gmail, Facebook or YouTube, which until now could only be accessed through the browser, into a

Why I Shifted To Google Reader From Bloglines

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Mon, 11 May 2009 01:59:37 PDT

Last Saturday Bloglines was down for a long time. The Bloglines official, Eric Engleman said that the data center that Bloglines is currently housed in had some hardware issues.My day begins with reading somewhere around 500 feeds, it helps me to remain updated about the latest happenings in the world of technology and social media. So when I could not access any of my feeds the whole day, I felt

Bmlet - A Place To Explore Bookmarklets

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:16:44 PDT

You have heard about bookmarking sites like Delicious, where you can collect and save your favorite bookmarks. How about a site which saves bookmarklets!For the uninitiated, bookmarklets are small application which are stored in your browser.They allow quick access to lots of activities and tools that can help you in your daily work. For example, you can use the Posterous bookmarklet (which I use

Does This Guy Look Familiar?

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:19:12 PDT

Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr posted this video, although he couldn't come anywhere near to deciphering its actual meaning. The video is titled and captioned "lalala omg wtf haha" and "Best video evar!!!!" respectively, so no one can make head or tail of it from the titles.But one look at it and I knew what is it all about. This is exactly what you would do and how you would feel when you would

Kim Kardashian Is The Latest Frienderati

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:07:22 PDT

The latest addition in the list of Frienderati is, Kim Kardashian. Yes ladies and gentlemen, you heard it right, Kim Kardashian the Armenian Princess has migrated to FriendFeed from Twitter.MG Siegler a.k.a. Parislemon wrote on TechCrunch that right after Kim joined FriendFeed, she added 35,000 users as friends. Although at the time of writing this, only 607 out of those 35,000+ people have

Digg Integrates Facebook Connect

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:17:15 PDT

Digg has finally integrated Facebook Connect, which would allow the 200+ million Facebook members to login and start Digging and commenting right away. If you are already a Digg member, linking your account makes it easy to cross-post, sharing your Digg activities on your Facebook home page.This new feature would allow you, as a Digg member, to automatically follow your Facebook friends on Digg,

Posterous Makes Group Blogging Simple

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:16:22 PDT

Posterous, the simplest blogging platform, has introduced a new feature using which you can create and maintain a group blog right from your inbox, be it a publicly maintained group blog or a private blog.Once you have created your blog on Posterous, simply claim your blog and edit it to add the email address of all the contributors of your group blog. There is no need for these contributors to

Disqus Introduces Tweeting Comments Feature

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:18:16 PDT

Disqus, the popular commenting system, has finally joined the bandwagon and integrated with Twitter. Yesterday Gianii, the Community Manager for Disqus posted on their blog that now commenters would be able to tweet their comments. Once the service is activated, every time you leave a comment it would automatically tweet the comment along with a trackback URL to the original article on your

3 Answers Men Are Afraid Of

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:52:19 PDT

1. WhateverMen: What to have for dinner?Women: Whatever.Men: Why don't we have steamboat?Women: Don't want to, once I ate steamboat and later got pimples on my face.Men: Alright, why don't we have Si Chuan cuisine.Women: Yesterday we ate Si Chuan, why eat it today again?Men: Hmmm, I suggest we have seafood.Women: Seafood is no good, I ate it once, then later I got diarrhea.Men: Then what you

Google Apps Connector For BlackBerry Enterprise Server

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:48:23 PDT

Using Google Apps on your BlackBerry was not really an easy job. But things are about to change soon as yesterday Google has announced the upcoming release of the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server would allow Blackberry Smartphone users to access their Gmail and other Google applications using the Blackberry

Google Contact Manager

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:50:08 PDT

Google has finally separated it's contact manager from Gmail and other Google apps, and made it into a separate standalone application.On May 1st, Debbie Leight (Google Apps Marketing Manager) announced that the Google Contact Manager is not available as a separate standalone service. So in order to access your contacts, you need not be logged into your Gmail account. Just as with the Gmail

Is Wolfram|Alpha The Next Google Killer?

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:33:56 PDT

Since the word leaked out a few weeks back about Wolfram|Alpha, it has taken quite a hype. In many camps, it's being dubbed as the next Google killer. But would it really live upto it's hype? Let's first see what Wolfram|Alpha actually is before we start drawing conclusions.Created using Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha is not a conventional search engine. Rather, it's a computational knowledge engine.

Seesmic Desktop Is Tweetdeck With A Facelift

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:13:05 PDT

It's time Seesmic should stop trying to imitate Tweetdeck and remain what it is. But that is exactly what it is failing to do, and this fact has become more eminent after the release of the new Seesmic Desktop.The Seesmic Desktop is Tweetdeck with a facelift. It has almost all features similar to Tweetdeck, and a few less. The only advantage I see that the new Seesmic Desktop has over Tweetdeck

Google Business Cards, Have You Got Yours?

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Sat, 02 May 2009 07:16:45 PDT

After introducing vanity URLs for your Google profiles and including them in Google Search results, Google has gone one step further in promoting Google profiles. Google is giving away business cards, all for FREE.Google has tied up with iPrint.com, and is giving away 10,000 sets of 25 business cards to all those who owns a Google Profile. And all this for free. If you go to your Google profile,

Google Employing Goats!

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Sat, 02 May 2009 00:02:52 PDT

Okay, hope you are ready for this. Google is hiring goats. Recession maybe, of course everyone has to lower their standards sometimes. But good news is, they are not being employed as developers, so you still have a chance in Google.According to Dan Hoffman, Director Real Estate and Workplace Services, Google has hired about 200 goats to mow their fields. And so, being the green company they are,

Twitter Search Makes The Front Row

rajtilak.bhattacharjee@gmail.com (Rajtilak Bhattacharjee) — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:51:07 PDT

For those TweetDeck/TWhirl users who haven't seen their Twitter profile page for ages, very recently it has got a facelift. Twitter has added Search and Trending Topics right on your Twitter home page.The search results are displayed on the main page in place of your Twitter stream. You also have the option to save your search results, which would be displayed below the search box.Just below the