Blog About Technology

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A few steps forward, a few steps back...

Now that I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, I have to go backwards and try to tie up some loose ends I have left with some of the earlier exercises. The first is a little blog about technology (in 150 words or less)...

नो वहत वौल्ड यू लिके मी तो राइट अबाउट ? थिस इस कुइते अमजिंग, इसन'टी आईटी ? इ वोंदर हाउ मानी ओथेर पीपुल हवे प्लायेद विथ थिस...

That was a nice little exercise, don't you agree? It was a simple task made possible by tools available on this very page. But is it technology (टेक्नोलॉजी)?

Why on earth it has a Devanagari (Hindi) script and not Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Hebrew for that matter? Is that a sign of things to come? The above is a transliteration rather than a translation of a couple of sentences I just wrote, using Hindi phonetics. A transliteration back into English?

Now what else would you like me to write about? This is quite amazing, isn't it? I wonder how many other people have played with this...

And now to the point of this exercise, a word or two on technology: I have played around with other Hindi alphabet programs and found the one here to be much better. For starters, it is phonetic in that it will transliterate a word as it sounds rather than how it is written, taking the whole word rather than each individual letter.

My technology wishlist? At least in relation to my newly found टेक्नोलॉजी, I have been thinking wouldn't it be great to take a written work and just run it through a simple program to have it translated. A bit idealistic, obviously, but it'd be terrific, don't you think?

जाय श्री राधे!

You Tube, You Beaut!

There's so much to choose on You Tube, as I remember one the first 2.0 tutorials was posted there. So how to choose from the thousands of videos? What's the first thing that comes into your mind? Admittedly, I had to look around before finding this first good clip...

Holi festival in the sacred land of Braj (Vraja) in Uttar Pradesh, India. For some people these images may be familiar, particularly if you've been to the NGV recently to see one of the current exhibitions showing there, Krishna: Love and Devotion.

N.B. There's no sound in this clip, it's just a slideshow of photos.

And on a completely different note...

Here's a trailer for the latest David Lynch film, Inland Empire. I saw it at the cinema last week and in my opinion it's Lynch's most bizarre film to date (and that's saying something). Often Lynch's work needs a second or even third viewing to understand, but I'm not sure when I'll sit down again for the 3 hour marathon.

Discovering Web 2.0 Tools

There are plenty of applications/tools to choose from (200+), so how to make up one's mind?

I'm not sure how or why, but I did end up looking at one interesting literary site, a musical one and another that is environmentally conscious. I probably ended up having a look at these because these are different aspects of my life. Notably on that point, there were no listings that are spiritual at all. Is that asking too much or is it just a reflection on where everyone's interest lies?

onesentence.org was enjoyable for the humour and succintness, telling a story in the space of, you guessed it, one sentence.
pandora.com seemed like a good music site, but was its use was restricted outside the U.S. Hence, I found mystrands.com a better option, though because of restrictions on our work computers, I couldn't listen to anything (damn!)
Lastly, begreennow.com wasn't necessarily outstanding, as there are so many of these types of sites around nowadays, but it is instructive and interactive and obviously more conscious in many ways than quite a number of the tools that were given awards.

Zoho et al.

Zoho was a little bit of fun, I created a mock donation form and laughed many times. For the sake of PCness, I've posted it privately. That I was able to chuckle was a change, or at least a little relief, for this week has already been a very trying one (I'm sure a number of my colleagues would agree), and it's only Wednesday. Thank God I've got a few days off before Chrissy!

Maybe I'll need to come back to it though and spend some more time working out Deluge. That looks like pretty fancy stuff there... I found it much more straightforward, especially as someone else has done all the hard work already. If only they'd consulted me first, then I wouldn't need to customise.

Talking About Image Generation

Very quickly went to a couple of image generation sites and generated some images:



Ten points to whoever can tell me what card this is from the Tarot deck

Wikis

...good for reference, but can you trust 'em?

I feel lucky that wikis, along with most internet technology, weren't around when I was studying. Recently my brother, who is tutoring at the moment, told me about two students who were failed for plagiarism. This particular instance showed just how stupid some people are. Imagine it, these students ripped something straight out of wikipedia (reliable?), didn't acknowledge it and submitted it as a piece of academic work. Apparently the lecturer for the course gets sick and tired of the work that goes into monitoring plagiarism. But I suppose that's a side issue...

I have actually been looking forward to this exercise, as it gives me a chance to tie in a little project I've been working on...



Using wikipedia as my reference too, I've looked up simply the number 108. The entry contains quite a few good references to the significance and special power of the number (would you ever have known 108 was a tetranacci number if you hadn't looked it up on wikipedia?) Funny on that point that the link is actually to an article on fibonacci numbers, or one step better "similar integer sequences".

And my project (in case you're still interested)? I started a little while ago taking some photos with my camera phone whenever I came across the magic number. In the course of an ordinary day I have photographed street numbers and car number plates. To date I only have a few photos but had an idea at the outset to build the number up to 108.

This seems something of a trend with artists and poets and for some reason I've noticed in particular photographers. Among others, Allen Ginsberg published a book of 108 of his own works. It seems people with at least a hint of Eastern influence tend to do so... There is also a straight-edge hardcore band who call themselves 108. In my opinion they are pretty atrocious, and for that reason I won't be posting any links to anything to do with them.

Marking

Bookmarks

Ever get that deja vu feeling? I know I've been here before. What was I doing? Must've lost my notes.

So, Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool? I suppose that makes it pretty obsolete for me, at least the social side. And Technorati? I thought we'd just been through all the search engines there were... Pretty flash though, with regular blog updates right before your eyes!

I know I used these sites before, why is nothing coming to me?

Searching High and Low

Rollyo

I am guilty as anyone for using Google as a standard search engine. The Rollyo is a good exercise as it can be selective and obviously will pick up more personalised and arguably more relevant information (for personal interest) than a general google. Again, with time working against me (only 15 minutes left to complete this exercise), I've managed to include just a few sites to run my customised searches through.

Oh, and books!

Library Thing

Thought we could get away from Spydus and library catalogues? Think again, and then we have to review books... Searching for titles in my head, I could only come up with the most outstanding ones I've come across in the last few years. If you want to know what I've read, though it ain't much, you can have a look at my library link below. When there's more time and I've read a few more (good) books I hope to add some more titles. And of course, as always I am open to suggestions...

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/jardinangelou

Real Simple, Stupid

RSS & Newsreaders

As with my other ventures into these new technologies, I am left a little behind. I did set myself up on Bloglines with some RSS feeds more than a month ago, and now writing up my account and personal evaluation of my RSS experience, I realise that I didn't really select the best of feeds.
After nearly six weeks, the four feeders that I chose have only returned a few posts between them. That is without newspaper feeds from the subcontinent (quite prolific, that one).
I was happy to receive a couple of podcasts through the feeds, but after opening the feed folder just once and trying to access the podcasts again later, they are nowhere to be found and I didn't even have a chance to listen to them. Sigh.
All I could do was re-up to the podcast page of original website I subscribed to, which sort of defeats the purpose of the feed, doesn't it?

...and then came the image

Photos and Images

After a long hiatus, Jardin Angelou has returned to his blog. Already behind the eightball, let's start this blog again with his contribution to the world of photography and imagery...



I've never really been much of a photo-taker. This time last year I went overseas and with my trusty Canon IXUS took all of about 30 photos in 5 weeks. For the purpose of the second exercise (namely images and Flickr specifically), I have posted just a couple of the photos I took in India here (and one as the header of this blog).
I had uploaded some more photos to my Flickr account, but was hoping that there would be a way to link that with my blog. Unless someone would like to show me, I have led myself to believe that they are not workably interactive.
The above photograph was taken at sunrise at Vishram Ghat, on the Yamuna River at the ancient city of Mathura. Below is, perhaps fittingly at the end of today's post, a sunset over the village of Mayapur in West Bengal, which itself lies on the other sacred river of India, the Ganges, as it flows nearing the Bay of Bengal.

In the Beginning There Was the Sound...