Free telescope by Microsoft

Microsoft has launched a new software that is expected to create waves in the world of astronomy and Internet, WorldWideTelescope. However this is more of a surprise to most of us because you can download this free. Yeah you read it right.. It is absolutely free. It has been launched on May 13 2008 (Got the date from a news web site). The link was forwarded to me by a friend. I was curious to explore and started accessing the link.

Here are some of my observations with the telescope software:

• The website UI looks sophisticated and matured with the night sky in the background.

• The installation procedure is pretty easy but takes long time. The installation file(setupwwt.exe) is of size 20.8 MB. Download it from the website and run it. The installation file will in turn start downloading necessary files (Microsoft .Net 2.0 and others).

• The application has a very good, mature UI. Something I liked (I want to learn how you do such a good UI design :) ). But it was slow, memory problem I guess. However the screen too many options and you have get used to it before gaining some comfort level in navigating across the screen.

• Lots of images, I read that the application has access to around 12 tera bytes of data.

I heard about a similar venture from Google few months ago. Sometime back Google had launched a software Google sky which provides easy way to access to images of astronomical bodies. It is available as a plug in to Google earth or as a link through which you can start using the facility directly without downloading.

However I found that,

• You can easily access the facility. No need of any installation procedure. :)

• The UI is pretty simple. No unnecessary options. It is fast. :)
  

The images are good in both the applications.

At the end of the day, I would prefer:

For UI and looks: WorldWideTelescope.

For the ease of use: Google Sky.

Microsoft might have launched WorldWideTelescope as a response to Google Sky. However it has dedicated this application to Jim Gray, the brain behind the entire application. Jim Gray is missing since Jan 28 after he went on a solo boating trip.

That’s all for now. Happy exploring !!!

Links :

WorldWideTelescope

Google sky

Jim Gray

Tagged...

I am unofficially tagged by sady... so here it goes..

1. LAST MOVIE YOU SAW IN A THEATER

Aramane, a kannada movie. You could rate it as an average..

2. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING?

Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon


3. FAVORITE BOARD GAME?

none.

4. FAVORITE MAGAZINE?

Reader's Digest, India Today


5. FAVORITE SMELLS?

Smell of wet soil, petrol, nail enamel

6. FAVORITE SOUND?

Rain droplets falling on leaves and trees. You can experience this in places where the vegetation is dense.

7. WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD?

Betrayals and breaching of trust.

8. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU WAKE?

Morning already? wanna sleep for some more time :)


9. FAVORITE FAST FOOD PLACE?

Fast food? hmmm... nothing specific. Any place where they serve good fast food.

10. FUTURE CHILD'S NAME?

haha.. not yet decided. But i like the names, Parikshith, Kshitij, Menita, Vaidehi.

11. FINISH THIS STATEMENT. "IF I HAD A LOT OF MONEY I'D...?

First pay income tax, then buy few good modern gadgets and gifts for near and dear ones. Would invest rest of the amount in the fields which would provide good returns.

12. DO YOU DRIVE FAST?

No.


13. DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL?

No.

14. STORMS-COOL OR SCARY?

Cool :)

15. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR?

Yet to buy one.

16. FAVORITE DRINK?

Chilled mint and lemon juice, rose milk shake, strawberry milk shake.

17. FINISH THIS STATEMENT, "IF I HAD THE TIME I WOULD .....

Sleep and read a lot.

18. DO YOU EAT THE STEMS ON BROCCOLI?

Broccoli

19. IF YOU COULD DYE YOUR HAIR ANY COLOR, WHAT WOULD BE YOUR CHOICE?

Burgandy.

20. NAME ALL THE DIFFERENT CITIES/TOWNS YOU HAVE LIVED IN.

Bangalore, Kinnigoli, Mulki, Mangalore, Hubli and Mysore.

21. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH?

Gymnastics.

22. ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU.

Always speaks her mind :) .

23. WHAT'S UNDER YOUR BED?

Shoes, sandals and two buckets.

24. WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE BORN AS YOURSELF AGAIN?

Yup.

25. MORNING PERSON, OR NIGHT OWL?

For 5 days a week, I am a morning person. For the remaining 2 days, I am a night owl.

26. OVER EASY, OR SUNNY SIDE UP?

Sunny side up.


27. FAVORITE PLACE TO RELAX?

Bed.

28. FAVORITE PIE?

hmmm.. none.


29. FAVORITE ICE CREAM FLAVOR?

Black current.

30. OF ALL THE PEOPLE YOU TAGGED THIS TO, WHO'S MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND FIRST?

hmmm.... Sady is always the first to respond. But as she was the one who tagged me I need to wait and watch who among others will respond first.

New Look...

I just changed the look and feel of my blog :) .Looks great right? The page looks elegant and feminine now. One of my team mate forwarded the link to Pratima Jayaram's blog. The blogger uses a template powered by Final Sense. Navigating to the website, I found out that it is dedicated to provide variety of services. One of them is the free blogger templates. Clear steps are mentioned for using the template in blog. However the steps given are for blogs supported by Blogger.com. I don't know if they support LiveJournal or Wordpress. You can check it out. There are various categories in the templates like 3-Column, Animal, Architecture etc. I browsed through some of them and found this one to be good. This one is from the 'Women' category.

Note: Better save your current template before you migrate. The custom titles which you might have added will not be migrated to the new template. I underwent this and found that the blog roll list which was maintained is lost with the previous template. I have to add it once again :(.

That's one part of the change. Apart from this I have changed the url of the blog too.
The new blog url is http://mortalzlife.blogspot.com/. The previous url http://poornimaprabhu.blogspot.com is no longer valid.
The reason for this change?. Well, I really don't know. Just felt like changing and going underground for next couple of days. Moreover anonymity brings certain privileges you see :).

The blog renovation does not end here. I would like to plugin some more features site hit counter, feeds, messenger, shout box etc. Let me see how it goes. Thats all for now.
Btw.. I would like to thank Suresh, my team mate who forwarded the link to Pratima's blog and my supervisors for not assigning me any task for day. Without them I would not have been able to renovate my blog. ;) See you soon. Till then, take care.

One year in IT industry.

I recently completed one year in IT industry. I am recollecting my experiences as a fresher a year ago. Frankly I don’t know what to say. Shall I say that I have matured as an individual or shall I say that this exposure has brought me face to face with some truths of life.. I joined this software firm as a campus recruit. To some extent I knew what to expect as a fresher.Still, other facets were unknown. Anyways I coped up with this transition. I wont mention the regular training schedules and the induction into project which followed, as most of you might be familiar with this phase. But I would like to mention few things that I learned as a professional/individual. Some of them are…

--> When given an opportunity to do challenging things, do accept it. In the end what matters is not whether you execute the task successfully or not but whether you handled it well with responsibility. There is always scope for people who take responsibilities.

• Have the humility to take responsibility for failures.

• Don’t rely on people every time. Help yourself whenever the need arises. Have the courage to explore solutions beyond limitations.

• A ‘Yes’ can mean a ‘No’. But a ‘No’ always means a ‘No’.

• Whenever offered help don’t reject it.

• Learn to hear between words and read between lines. This will help in anticipating crisis.

• Have lots of patience as there are many dumb people here.

• Be humble enough to learn things.

• Apart from that you need to have the regular stuff, communication skills, presentation skills, networking skills and blah blah..

There are few other changes that have impacted my personal life as well.

• I have become an addict to chat engines gtalk and yahoo. Trying desperately to kick this habit J. My work place provides me with free internet (chat) usage. This explains all. Hey, I do work. It is just that I cant concentrate on work if I am not online… (Hope my PM is not reading this :D) Well this don’t reply to pings if I am busy.

• You lose touch with your mates and close friends from your college. This happens if you are not staying together or when you don’t meet during weekends. Meeting during weekends is out of question as you are occupied with other things ;) . Initially you keep in touch through mails/chat/phone calls, eventually this practice will fade away. Gradually they will be too busy to reply to your mails or you will be too busy to notice their messages (will write about this in a separate entry).

• You get into habit of checking mails every now and then.

• You eagerly wait for weekends .

Hmmm… looks enough for now. It is really hard to summarize the changes of one year in one page. Well, I did my best. This is all for now...

Please, leave a comment before you navigate away from this blog .

Guru Poornima at Hubli

Last weekend I had been to Hubli. My grand parents stay there and its been almost a year since I saw them. There was another reason for my being there. I had been there to take part in the Guru Poornima Mahotsav which is celebrated annually by the Sanatan Sanstha. Sanatan Sanstha is a spiritual organization which is striving hard to revive ancient Hindu culture. My granny and aunt are active members of this organization. Well I am not a staunch follower of the organization, but I do appreciate some of the values preached there. This was the third time I was participating in this event and it has become an annual ritual for me now. Every time I attend this event, life has posed a new turn for me. I remember, first time when I attended this event, I got a job unexpectedly.

This year when I attended, I was put into a new and challenging project all of a sudden. I don’t know what you call this. ‘Miracle’ is too strong a word to be used to describe this. But I believe in and have faith in this annual ritual. Every time I attend this event, my instinct tells me that something exciting will happen soon. And this has been happening every time. I really don’t know weather it is faith or something else, but something does happen when I attend the event. Every one has their own faiths and beliefs and it is this that adds more value to every day life. Some times such rituals might seem foolish and useless, but you feel at ease when you perform them. Such rituals could be pertaining to divinity or could be relating to normal life. Whatever it may be, it helps in self actualization.

I am still coping up with the turn in my life this event has brought about. At the same time I am eagerly waiting for Guru Poornima next year and I am sure something more exciting will happen then.

Life, a paradox...

Life is such a paradox. Everything is a big Chinese puzzle to me. You prepare a fool proof plan and along the way of its execution you encounter unanticipated incidents. Well, if you are lucky enough you reach your goal (through ups and downs of course...).

Let us take my example. The project is in its final phase and there is no much significant work left. So I was happy thinking that I would be able to leave for home early today. My hometown is at a 3hr train journey from Bangalore. So I need to leave office early to catch a train/bus. More ever I have some tasks pending that need to be done this weekend. Thus, I have to go home this week at any cost. Though I can wake up early and go on Saturday, I prefer traveling on Friday. The plan to leave early was in perfect sink, until this happened. One of my team mate left for his native yesterday. Today he had to perform an urgent task here. Now that he has left that task was handed over to me for completion. That’s something good. Extra responsibilities teach you a lot. But see the irony. That task can be performed only after 6:00 in the evening. Poor me. I was thinking of leaving office at 5:00 p.m. Now I can only leave office at 6:30 p.m. if everything goes well. And to add to that I have been sitting idle since morning without any significant work. And the most important work begins only after 6:00.

Wah.. Kya life hai!! Now, either you can crib about life or curse your team mate for the transferring the task to you or write it down in a blog like me and kill time. I prefer the last option.

Sometimes even if you plan with accuracy, it can go waste. You can see what happened to me. You can still prevent this by being bit smart. But that does not help always and there are other drawbacks associated with it. I will talk about it some other time. For time being I am making frequent trips to cafeteria on top floor and loitering around. I tried bugging my friends who are online with nonsense tricks, but all of them are too busy to respond. When you are free and don’t have anything to do, all your online friends will be busy and they don’t respond to your pings. During such a period you don’t receive any chain mails or forwards that you would receive everyday.

That is life you see. You have to leave with it. Hey, I think it is time for another trip to cafeteria. I will go around and see if anyone is free to fall prey to my non sense tricks.

That’s all for now… take care…

Ps:
I just remembered one of the Murphy’s law :

If anything can go wrong, it will, and usually at the most inopportune moment.

Spectacles story

Phew!!.. after a long time I am able to relax in the office. It is 3:00 p.m. The pantry lad just came and served the tea. I am sipping the hot tea now. I can here some body shouting over the phone in the next cubicle. All my team mates are digging into their computers with wide open eyes. Sometimes this computer job can be bugging. But I was somehow able to take advantage of this. Want to hear it? The story goes like this…

I like to wear spectacles. Right from childhood I have been envying people who wear specs. I don’t mean the ones with thick glasses. I meant the ones with thin frame and thin glass. No matter how ugly a person looks, when he wears such spectacles he gets an appealing look on his face. Those specs always add an intellectual and scholarly value to his face. Looks like I am drifting away from the topic. Anyways let me come on the track. My job is computer related and requires constant interaction with it. I have to sit before the computer for almost 9 hrs. Just imagine the state of my poor eyes. Then I came up with a plan. I decided to buy an anti glare glass :). Here was my chance to wear glasses and satisfy my childhood wish. I went to few optical shops here in Bangalore. Happily tried few varieties (this is the only chance to try few exotic varieties to your heart's content.. free of cost of course!!! Well don’t think I am cheap but I am just normal.. :)) and finally settled for a good anti glare spec with thin frame and fiber glass lens. It cost me around Rs.1200. Well neither high nor low. For the past few months I am wearing my specs everyday. Most of them think that glasses don’t suit me. But who cares, I am quite happy wearing it. Why not.. after all my childhood wish has been fulfilled.. :)

That’s all for now..