Vishal Shah's Old Blog.

Two New "Walking" Batfish Species Found

New bottom-dwellers live in path of Gulf oil spill.

Main Content

One of the new batfish species found in the Gulf of Mexico (file photo).

via news.nationalgeographic.com

Posted via email from Web Stream - Vishal Shah (goldenV)

The Clean-Slate Guide to Simplicity | zen habits

Step one: Take all the clutter you’re facing, useful or not, and put it away. All of it. Put the pile of clothes in a box; put the old emails in a hidden folder. Now you have a “clean slate” to work with, but you don’t have to throw anything away. Yet.

Step two: Go about your business as usual. As you discover a genuine need for something (genuine being the operative word), take it out of storage with a clear conscience. No more agonizing over what to keep. Life will show exactly which things you actually need, and which things you only thought you needed.

via zenhabits.net

Posted via email from Web Stream - Vishal Shah (goldenV)

karawitz architecture: passive house, bessancourt

karawitz architecture: passive house, bessancourt

passive house in bessancourt by karawitz architecture
all images courtesy karawitz architecture

french firm karawitz architecture have developed a passive house in bessancourt, near paris, france.
the house is closed to the north to limit heat loss and opened to the south benefitting from
free solar energy. aesthetically, it is an abstract replica of a traditional house.
the second skin of the houses design is untreated bamboo which envelopes the frame in solid wood panels.

via designboom.com

Posted via email from Web Stream - Vishal Shah (goldenV)

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Ajaxian » text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; //Can you read me now?

via ajaxian.com

#html5

Posted via email from Web Stream - Vishal Shah (goldenV)

How to Use the Manual Mode on a Digital SLR Camera – PictureCorrect

To many people new to digital photography, just the words “manual mode” are enough to start their knees shaking nervously. Surely, one of the benefits of modern cameras is that much of the tough decision making is taken out of your hands, so that you can concentrate on picture composition, and actually taking the shot? Whilst this is largely true, there will always be times when ultimate control should stay in the photographer’s hands – tricky lighting conditions, for example.

via picturecorrect.com

Posted via email from Vishal Shah aka goldenV

Tokay Gecko Photo, Animal Wallpaper – National Geographic Photo of the Day

via photography.nationalgeographic.com

Posted via email from Vishal Shah aka goldenV

Archaeologists Find Ancient Weapon In Melting Ice Patch : Discovery News

Global warming is turning out to be a savior for archaeologists like Craig Lee from the University of Colorado at Boulder, who are finding ancient relics in recently melted ice patches.

Lee's lucky strike is the oldest known atlatl dart, an early wooden spear-like hunting weapon, in the Rocky Mountains (pictured, left).

The research team found the 10,000-year-old weapon in a melting ice in the mountains near Yellowstone National Park. The two-foot long birch spear still had markings from the original hunter.

Atlatls have been found all over the world. Researchers believe the weapon was transported to North American around 12,000 years old by migratory hunters from Asia.

via news.discovery.com

Something good came out of global warming.. More to come I guess.

Posted via email from Vishal Shah aka goldenV

Monday, May 31, 2010

Game Review: Splinter Cell Conviction on the Xbox 360

Splinter Cell Conviction is just an awesome awesome game. Thanks Ubisoft.

All that hard work just shows when you play the single player and co-op campaigns.

Sure, some elements are removed, a slight bummer for old SC fans like me, but I don't mind a slight change, its gorgeous, well thought out, planned and just plain fun. Realistic difficulty is the most fun to play with in both SP and COOP campaigns.

I was reading a review where the producers mentioned that they couldn't get the picking up bodies action item in this game. They ran out of time. But its cool.......

Add me as a friend on the Xbox 360 if you want to play coop.

V
-- About Vishal

Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Economics of Perfect Software

FYI – Very interesting Sunday read - The Economics of Perfect Software

Ask 100 CEOs of software companies if they want to ship software with bugs. What will they say? 50 won’t answer at all, saying something about how bugs are a huge problem in the industry that needs to be addressed; 40 will say “Of course not!” and promptly call their shark tank in preparation for a lawsuit; 9 will hang their heads and say “we can’t help it”; and that last 1 will look you straight in the eye and say “Absolutely.”

Software can’t be written bug-free, so if you want to ship perfect software you have to fix the bugs that burrow their way into your code.

As you’d expect, the more time and money you throw at fixing bugs, the more bugs you’ll fix. But, unfortunately, our old nemesis from economics, the Law of Diminishing Returns, applies to this process. Formally, the Law states that “the marginal production of a factor of production starts to progressively decrease as the factor is increased, in contrast to the increase that would otherwise be normally expected.” In regular-people English, that just means that how much you get out of a process isn’t the same as what you put in across the board. Instead, you end up with a quick ramp on output at the low end of input, and a long tail on output at the high end of input.

For example, imagine a program has 100 bugs, and we know it will take 100 units of effort to find and fix all 100 of those bugs. The Law of Diminishing Returns tells us that the first 40 units of effort would find the first 70 bugs, the next 30 units of effort would find the next 20 bugs, and the next 30 units of effort would find the last 10 bugs.

PS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Earth Hour 2010 is TODAY - Take action for CLIMATE CHANGE

PLEASE flip off your lights today for ONE hour @ 8:30 p.m. local time to make a stand against climate change - Earth Hour 2010 -
http://www.earthhour.org/

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About Vishal

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Check out my new Chrome Netflix Extension!

Chrome Netflix Extension
A super-fast Netflix extension with integrated search and support for multiple categories.

Tip #1: Mouse over titles to see their descriptions as a tooltip!
Tip #2: The extension auto-fetches the latest titles from Netflix every half hour. If you would like to customize that or the extension in general, click on the "Customize" link at the botton of the extension popup.
Coming soon (a week): Custom Netflix feeds! - Your queue and recommendations (it's an optional feature - only for Netflix subscribers)

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About Vishal

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Google develops prototype mirror for solar energy

Google has developed a prototype for a new mirror technology that could cut by half the cost of building a solar thermal plant, the company's green energy czar said on Friday. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10460913-54.html

Posted via web from Vishal's posterous

Sunday, February 14, 2010

I got quoted! Back of Computer Systems - A Programmers Approach Book

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Social Search - Architecture of Vark and Ranking Algorithm

Very good read relevant to the ask community project – a paper (Architectural) out of vark - http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf

Has details on social crawling, indexing people, analyzing questions, and ranking. Also included is ideas on their UI and some examples.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

My Slickdeals Chrome Extension Published!

Check out my Slickdeals extension for Chrome. Hot deals @ your finger-tips!

Now you can keep track of the hottest deals in town, at the push of a button. The extension automatically fetches the latest deals every 30 minutes in the background, for blazing fast loading every time you need it.

You can even customize the extension by picking your favorite deals category. Many deals categories are included including the following - 

* Slickdeals.net Front Page Deals
* Hot Topics
* Hot Deals
* Freebies
* Coupons
* Contests & Sweepstakes
* Drugstore & Deals

Request your features or get support at this link - http://groups.google.com/group/chrome-slickdeals

Hope you enjoy the extension as much as I enjoyed developing it!

--
About Vishal

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Why I love Apple's philosophy

"And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through."

http://m.gizmodo.com/site?sid=gizmodoip&pid=JuicerHub&targetUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2F5346418%2Fsnow-leopard-review-lightened-and-enlightened%3Fop%3Dpost%26refId%3D5346418

Monday, July 27, 2009

Ask.com Google Gadget for iGoogle and OpenSocial containers

Check out my new project! If you like to search via Ask.com from iGoogle, you have some help!
Ask.com Google Gadget

Add Ask.com Search to iGoogle and OpenSocial Containers.
This google gadget makes searching the web via Ask.com easily accessible to iGoogle and OpenSocial users.

Screenshot

More information..
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About Vishal

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Play Classic GameCube games with enhanced Wii control!

Nintendo has some taken existing GameCube games, that show the potential for Wii like controls and released them as "New Play Control" games - by tweaking their controller interface mapping to use the Wii controls instead.

For the most part, this involves changing the control scheme mappings, but could involve some further tweaks that change the original control scheme significantly to make it familiar with Wii users - clearly a larger user base than the original GameCube one.

I am excited that Nintendo has innovated on this idea, and the only thing fans will complain about is more GC games to be reincarnated on the Wii - especially games like Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, The original Metroid Prime + Prime 2: Echoes and Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II.

Its interesting - the Wii now has along with standalone Wii games -
* WiiWare - smaller games available as downloads
* Classic games - from older Nintendo consoles
* And now "New Play Control" games

Just more games to feed your Wii appetite. But Nintendo has yet to implement my Wii wishlist -

* Better graphics and hardware with 1080p support (via HDMI)
* A better classic controller that is more Xbox 360 and PS3 like - some games can take advantage of dual control schemes
* Wireless nunchuck
* Better, ergonomically designed Wiimotes
* Motivated marketing folks to attract more 3rd party game developers!!

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About Vishal

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Great to see "Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot" (Japanese TV Show from the 60's) on Hulu.com

It's great to see "Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot" (Japanese TV Show from the 60's) on Hulu!! - http://www.hulu.com/johnny-sokko-and-his-flying-robot

Some background-

Giant Robo (ジャイアントロボ Jaianto Robo?), is a manga and tokusatsu series created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. It is similar to his famous Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor in the US), only Giant Robo has more fantastic elements.
The original tokusatsu TV series, produced by Toei Company Ltd., aired on NET (now TV Asahi) from October 11, 1967 to April 1, 1968, with a total of 26 episodes. The English dubbed version of the series was produced by American International Television as Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. [more on Wikipedia]

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About Vishal

Love this creative, japanese video on Google Chrome

Google Chrome, Japan

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

HTC Magic aka G2 - Android Phone Hands on Video Tour

You can watch in high quality by clicking on the youtube video.

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About Vishal

Friday, February 13, 2009

Enhance Twitter! Add a search box with search suggestions on twitter.com to search tweets instantly!

If you are a regular visitor on twitter, you might enjoy my new project -

The Problem -
Have you ever wanted to search tweets (on twitter.com) easily from the twitter.com interface?

The solution -
I have a written a script that does just that. It is a greasemonkey script and requires Firefox. To download the script, or for more information, visit the project page.

Update -
Now with search suggestions!!$#!

In the screenshot above, note the big search box on the top of the page. This is added by the script. More enhancements to twitter.com's UI are coming..

-- About Vishal

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Google Latitude

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Mini Ninjas - The game looks awesome!

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About Vishal

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Which one is more powerful - Xbox 360 or the PS3 ??

Gamasutra.com secured an interview with David Shippy who was the chief architect of the power processing unit for the Cell (the engine that drives the PS3). The chip began the research and design process in 2000 when Sony asked IBM for an "order of magnitude increase in processing performance." Ironically it was that very ambition and the design that followed that would one day be the foundation for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

When asked the flame war inducing question, "which console is actually more powerful?"

Shippy tells Gamasutra,

"I'm going to have to answer with an 'it depends.' Again, they're completely different models. So in the PS3, you've got this Cell chip which has massive parallel processing power, the PowerPC core, multiple SPU cores… it's got a GPU that is, in the model here, processing more in the Cell chip and less in the GPU. So that's one processing paradigm -- a heterogeneous paradigm."

"With the Xbox 360, you've got more of a traditional multi-core system, and you've got three PowerPC cores, each of them having dual threads -- so you've got six threads running there, at least in the CPU. Six threads in Xbox 360, and eight or nine threads in the PS3 -- but then you've got to factor in the GPU," Shippy explains. "The GPU is highly sophisticated in the Xbox 360."

"At the end of the day, when you put them all together, depending on the software, I think they're pretty equal."

Found this on IGN.

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About Vishal

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

A great way to seek thrills - Thanks, Andy for the link

Wingsuit basejumping --

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.
--
About Vishal

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Finished Call of Duty World at War on VETERAN dIfFiCuLtY

Wohoo. It feels like an achievement in life. Worst missions were Heart
of the Reich and Downfall - the last 2 ones.

Check my achievements here.

The pain involved with the veteran difficulty.

Monday, January 05, 2009

The total 108 = Your birth year + age

Did you know, that the last 2 digits of your birth year + your current age is always 108 ?

--
About Vishal

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Start your new year with this quote

"Try and try until you succeed"

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About Vishal

Sunday, December 21, 2008

I like a good quote and as insightful as this is - it is quite intriguing

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

As intriguing as it is, it immediately clicks and it then it feels like a reword of what many others have said. The computers themselves are just the beginning. What you can achieve with them has no boundaries, sky is the limit.

I like to read quotes, hence I have couple good quote apps on my iPhone. One being quote of the day, which changes daily, from which I pulled this one. There is a random quote app as well.

I like to write my own quotes as well! Many of them, I don't share online, but maybe I will share some of the good ones someday.
--
About Vishal

Monday, December 01, 2008

Tilt-shift photography changes the game for miniature themes

Flight over Miniature San Francisco (Tilt-Shift) from Inoue_k3D on Vimeo.

Thanks to Andy, for sharing the one below -

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
--
About Vishal

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

How to Improve Your Luck (Reference - wikiHow.com)

Feeling a little unlucky lately? Want the secret to getting lucky? You have it already - it's you. The secret to improving luck is about perspective, self-belief and erring on the side of optimism. It isn't about winning huge pots of cash - it's about making the most of the wonderful blessings already surrounding you. Here are some thoughts for making your own luck grow... [more]

My favorite tip of all - Never stop learning.
--
About Vishal

TF2 - Mass A.I. (YouTube video)

Game engine mods for Valve's TF2

Monday, November 24, 2008

Visualizing time elapsed is always interesting

--
About Vishal

The extremely simple journal - Muji Chronotebook

Thanks to my dear friend Andy who shared one of Jack Cheng's article, which made me stumble upon this article - which mentioned an interesting diary / journal. It has an analog watch in the middle of the page and that basically is the genius behind it. A blank area around it lets you scratch and write whatever you want around it.

If you want to visualize the basic idea behind this notebook, check this link .

Use it as a planner, diary, journal, blah.
My primary use will be as a journal and place to jot down notes before transferring interesting ones to evernote .

Now if we can only search through this thing, easily - that is the only void I feel.

PS. It won a Muji design award. Dunno what is a Muji design award, but I was impressed by the Chronotebook for sure :) Lifehacker has an article on it as well.
--
About Vishal

Saturday, November 22, 2008

What is life ? (according to Hagar)

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/hagar.asp?date=20081121
--
About Vishal

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

What's wrong with Sitemaps?

Why are sitemaps maps? They are more like site lists. It probably goes back to that special page many sites have that serves to present a map of the entire site. The thing that clicks however about this page is that the list can organized using nested lists.

AFAIK sitemaps, despite being a XML based format, can not support neseted urls or urlset's. That I think is a fundamental disadvantage and something I am not very impressed about. Sure the major search engines support the current spec, but it has *serious limitations* in presenting the link/web page structure.

PS. Actually you can even use a text file with a bunch of links (one per line) and call that page a sitemap. Boring. How is the crawler to identify parent-child heuristics ?

--
About Vishal

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

SNL - Hilarious Interactive map skit

Monday, November 03, 2008

Love this project - Wikipedia Miner wikifier - Good potential and very interesting

A research progress picked up my interest lately! It's the Wikipedia Miner wikifier.

"It automatically augments web pages with links to relevant Wikipedia topics."

Try it out!
--
About Vishal

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Preordering Call of Duty - World at War (Special Edition) - Also a brief review of the multiplayer beta

I am excited about Call of Duty 5, and hence preordering Call of Duty - World at War (Special Edition) for the Xbox 360.

Unlike Call of Duty 4 (Modern Warfare) which was developed by InfinityWard, this version of the Activision franchise is developed by Treyarch.

I and the industry overall were excited by what InfinityWard was able to accomplish with CoD4. And a lot of us gamers were bummed out *a bit* about WW2 shooters and the announcement of CoD5. But after playing the multiplayer beta I was just about having as much fun as I had in CoD4 despite the WWII guns and environments. That was a joyful feeling. And Treyarch has taken CoD5 to the next level in various areas:

Better textures, lighting conditions
Gun Recoil feels to me, a bit more authentic than CoD4
More perks, levels and ways to achieve "XP" (stands for experience) points
Maps I feel are designed to allow a greater level of multiplayer action, I feel. Every nook, corner, area, post, open ground .. feel like they have been designed after putting a lot of thought into the process. CoD4 were awesome too. Yes, but CoD5 is everything CoD4 was, but a notch better

Concluding thoughts - CoD5 multiplayer beta seems intense and should be loads of fun for days or months, heck I can see myself playing it here and there even in late 2009, early 2010. It is no ground breaker in many areas. CoD4 is a tough nut to improve on. And WW2 settings are detailed, crisp and allow for intense action scenes. That just makes the game gritty and super fun. I don't think CoD5 will be able to rack up game of the year status by many editorial personalities, but it will rejuvenate the hearts of Call of Duty fans and multiplayer shooter fans in general. It's like that perfect sequel, which always the shadow of its ground breaking prequel.

I am "GooLagoon" btw on Xbox live. Feel free to add me to your Xbox Live friends list if you too plan to enjoy CoD5.

Oh, I almost forgot - Check this Treyarch webpage for inside scoop on how the flamethrower was modeled and brought to life by the game's designers.
--
About Vishal

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Google Gadgets everywhere!!! Making a Gantt Chart with Google Docs

Great way to visualize and add graphs to google docs!

Thanks for the video!!

And thanks Google, for gadget support in google docs. Awesome stuff.

Gmail now has some support for gadgets, google toolbar has gadget support - google desktop has gadget support.

gadgets everywhere...!!! Androids everywhere!!

Wooooo...

Monday, October 27, 2008

Gmail Labs and Innovation - Gadget support now - Soon maybe - Gmail customization API

Google and Google developers have shown immense innovation in the web based email client space - Gmail rules them all, and the new labs features are just plain adorable!

Oh, the Gmail team has given us capabilities to add google gadgets (holy!!) and some predefined google gadgets are available right off the bat - google calendar, docs.

Now, my prediction says, soon we will have an API for 3rd party developers to contribute customizations to Gmail and share with the community. Simple tweaks will be available, followed by more complicated plugins and extension features. Just wait and watch.

Thank you, Gmail team. I can not wait to write my own Gmail extension! Please give me access to the Gmail customization API.

More info on the gadget support at the Gmail Blog!

--
About Vishal

Super Mario Rescues The Princess: Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade

Funny.. Poor princess peach..

Source

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About Vishal

Saturday, October 18, 2008

This taco town segment from SNL is sooooo hilarious!!

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About Vishal

Monday, October 13, 2008

Call of Duty: World at War Xbox 360 Multiplayer beta (Got access token!)

Yay, because I was a member of charlieoscardelta.com, and a regular visitor at callofduty.com, I have access to the Call of Duty 5 (World at War) multiplayer beta for the Xbox 360!

Woohoo!!

More info here.
--
About Vishal

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

My most popular command line history items on my mac Terminal

[~]$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
95 c
74 l
67 cd
31 ssh
26 python
21 svn
19 cp
14 mv
14 dev_appserver.py
11 rm

PS. Inspiration
--
About Vishal

Monday, July 12, 2010

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Saturday, 10th July 2010

Saturday, July 10, 2010

What Tree Did You Fall From?

Two New "Walking" Batfish Species Found

New bottom-dwellers live in path of Gulf oil spill.

Main Content

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Monday, May 31, 2010

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Monday, July 27, 2009

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Friday, February 13, 2009

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Monday, January 05, 2009

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Monday, December 01, 2008

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Monday, November 24, 2008

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Monday, November 03, 2008

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Monday, October 27, 2008

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Monday, October 13, 2008

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

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