Obituary to "Common Sense"

An Obituary printed in the London Times - Interesting and sadly rather true.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, *Common Sense*, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.

*Common Sense *lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from
school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition. *Common Sense *lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. *Common Sense *lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. *Common Sense *took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

*Common Sense *finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. *Common Sense *was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his
wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers;
I Know My Rights
I Want It Now
Someone Else Is To Blame
I'm A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.
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Via agrasen.blogspot.com - "Facts of Life" - Original Post

Google Docs now to be in Google Search Results!

Yes, thats for real. Now Docs and Spreadsheets from Google Docs that are publicly published will now be crawlable by the search engine. For this, the document should be published publicly and be a part of a public webpage that is already indexed by the webpage.
Here's Marie from Google who on Thursday wrote in a blog post that "in about two weeks, we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines...This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people."

She added that the crawling for search results "only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the 'Publish as Web page' or 'Publish/embed' option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled Web page" (documents for which users choose only to "allow anyone with the link to view" will not get crawled. Also, the users can choose to un-publish the documents that they don't wish to be indexed.

Some users of the search giant's suite of online productivity applications expressed concerns about the plan, suggesting better labeling of potentially crawlable documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. For example, how would you know definitively if a publicly crawled Web page has linked to your published document? Is the only way to ensure that your published document does not ultimately show up in search results to actually unpublish it


As noted by The Register, "Google Apps master view does not tell you which docs are publicly published and which aren't." While it may well be obvious to most users how publicly available their Google documents are--and many of those published documents may well be intended to be as publicly available as possible--this seems to be another area where Google needs to find the right balance between transparency and data accessibility.


Respond in the comments about what you think about this move from Google.


Source: CNET News - "Webware"

So, What's new about Facebook Lite?

Facebook Lite is here. So what's good about it? Simple. The Slimmer the better.
The new "Lite" Facebook is available for users of US and India.
Try it out for yourself here - http://lite.facebook.com
Facebook Lite at a glance is really clutter-free version of the Facebook "Classic". Newbies and those who find the original Facebook to be just a bit too noisy, will feel at ease with this newer look. It also pushes the old-school Facebook apps off a cliff, which is just as well for the newest Facebook-connected services.

Some visual changes include the deletion of the left navigation panel alongwith the removal of the bottom taskbar. The overall look and feel is quite soothing and uncluttered. The input box is removed with buttons like Write, Post Photos and Post Videos and these pop down only when needed.
Birthdays and Friend Requests are shown right on top followed by the normal news feed.

Here is a view of the two pages of the same account:
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
Facebook Lite Version





Facebook Classic




Other small hard-to-identify tweaks include that the "Friends" tab is missing in the navigation bar. That is replaced by a small Events link.

All pages are cleaner, faster and easier to read, thanks to the Facebook team.
Part of the game is the HTML optimization Facebook's been working at. Advertisements are low on FB Lite but you never know once this thing begins rocking!

Better still, its fast, its efficient, what else do we need?
Something else...reply in comments.

Google just got bigger! Its a bigger search this time.

Google's just got bigger!
Not that it wasn't a giant after all, but Google has recently increased the size of its search box that the company says "will make it easier for people to use".
Google's vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, said this teenie-weenie change to the Google hompage symbolizes Google's "Focus on Search". She says that these tiny adjustments to the search box's height and width would make it "even easier and more fun to use."
Google said in an e-mail message that the new search box is "roughly double the size of the (original) search box." The company also made its search buttons "more similar" for those viewing Google "on different operating systems and browsers." Even with a larger search box, the company's search still only allows for up to 2,048 characters in a single query.

Here's a side-by-side view of the two looks of Google: [Click on image to view larger]

Gmail Fails, Google Apologises

Reference: Techdare.com

Google's Electronic Mail service GMail recently crashed on Wednesday, the 2nd of September for an astonishing 100 minutes! The outage nearly killed the Tweety Twitter again!
But isn't just Google a vast spread network of its never-out-of-run servers. As everyone kept wondering whatever happened with Google and GMail, the service kept responding to the Sign-In requests with the erroneous (but quite friendly!) message:

[Credit: GearDiary.com]

Of course, why do we have to worry????

Better still, 'twas good seeing Google publicly apologizing for the unhappy incident.
Looks like they've got everything tangled, and this one was big!!! Real big!
Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.

That was a big Oops! Better still, GMail is online again.

Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.

Let's hope Google sticks to its commitment

Apple rolls out Snow Leopard; Win 7 still waiting!

Reference: CNET News

Seems Apple is in real hurry!

While Microsoft has released plans for its Windows 7 this week, Apple has rolled out its Mac OS X Snow Leopard, a little earlier than expected.

According to CNET, the new OS doesn't sport many new features, rather Apple is deep into refining the exisiting code of the Operating System. Apple reports to have worked on 90 percent of the Mac OS X code for the Snow Leopord release. It does have a good box cover too! [image:Left (Credit:Apple)]

Here's the CNET Teams review for the Snow Leaopard. The team gave it a review of Excellent in its Test:

"Interface enhancements like Expose in the Dock and better file and folde viewing in Stacks make finding apps and files much easier. A completely overhauled QuickTime X now sports a cleaner interface and recording tools. The much-anticipated Exchange support across Mail, the Address Book, and iCal is huge for thise who take their Macs to work.

CNET Reviews Team however notes that Snow Leopard will work only in Intel-powered Macs; PowerPC users are out of Luck!

Experts note that Snow Leopard could have more features on the Security side, which the OS is said to be lacking. About the Popular belief that people have more Mac, that it is much safer than the Windows counterpart, experts deny. The Mac is merely safer as malware writers do not prefer to target the Apple Platform than the Windows one, according to Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, co-authors of The Mac Hacker's Handbook, which came out this spring.

"Apple hasn't implemented all the security features that Vista has," Miller said. "They made some improvements in Leopard, but they are still behind."

Better gear up!

Salman Khan cancels US trip after SRK episode

Source: Rediff Movies

Learning lessons from Shah Rukh Khan [ Images ] episode, Bollywood star Salman Khan [ Images ] has cancelled his upcoming trip to New York to promote his latest movie Wanted, besides participating in the auction of his personal paintings to raise funds for his charity.

Organisers and promoters associated with the event cited Shah Rukh Khan's episode at Newark Airport early this month, where he was questioned by immigration officials and taken for a second screening, as a major reason for Salman to cancel his New York trip scheduled in early September.

The event was scheduled for September 3 in New York. The promoters were also in talks with local organisers in cities like Chicago, Houston and Dallas for his other events.

"However, after the Shah Rukh Khan event, Salman informed us that he would not like to take the risk of coming to the US at this point," an informed source involved with the planning and organising the September 3 event told PTI.

It is understood that Salman's decision was also propelled by what his aid alleged "the hard time" being given by the US Consulate in Mumbai [ Images ] in approving the visa of his close associates, including one of his family members, whom Salman wanted to bring along with on this promotional trip.