Inversarium

In Singapore, its fun traveling in cabs. Apart from being better than the bus, some of the cab drivers jsut can't stop talking and while it can be a bit of a pain sometimes, its mostly a lot of fun listening to their views on the state of Sigapore and yada yada.

Today morning, I was coming back from a friend's and the cabbie, while tearing the previous date off the calendar on the dashboard notified me that it was the first of June and the MRT prices were going up nominally, also was the ERP, justified by hike in petrol prices apparently. Since I really don't read the newspaper, it was fun to get a a little news brief.

The funny part was he said that the ERP meant 'Everyday Robbing People'. It actually stands for 'Electronic Road Pricing'. Ha ha. I thought that was pretty funny.

Google just keeps getting better and better. Try Google Print. You wanna know what it is before that?

What is Google Print?
Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but much of that information isn't yet online. Google Print aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily – right in your Google search results.

How does Google Print work?
Just do a search on the Google Print homepage. When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you'll see the page of the book that has your search terms, along with other information about the book and "Buy this Book" links to online bookstores (you can view the entirety of public domain books or, for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only the title’s bibliographic data and brief snippets). You can also search for more information within that specific book and find nearby libraries that have it.

Where do these books come from?
The book content in Google Print comes from two sources: publishers and libraries.

Pretty cool really! Should help me with research for my thesis.

It's probably a good idea to use Vischeck when designing (accessible) websites. It shows you how your website will look to the color blind

Yes, its true. Just go here, login to your Gmail account and personalize baby! In the rare case that you don't have one but want a Gmail account, lemme know and I'll send you one, since there are invites with just around anybody who has Gmail left. Surprisingly, after personalizing mine, there was hardly any delay for the page to load. Kewl!

From FutureSplash to Macromedia Flash to Adobe Flash?

Here's the History of Flash by Jonathan Gay.

Haha. This one is real funny. Check whether you know what to do when you're in a crowded restroom. I only got a 3 out of 7. How much did you?

MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first class participant of the Web.

This is what W3C Director, Tim Berners-Lee said at the launch of its Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) three days back with the aim of simplifying the browsing experience from a mobile device to that of a computer screen.

In the US, personal Identity protection seems to be a thing of the past already with a lot of data companies breaking all the rules of data privacy!

"We must mandate that companies must reasonably protect this information collected on virtually every American,'' Nelson said. ''As a result of what we've seen so far, if we don't do something, none of us are going to have any identity left." Read the whole article here.

If you're daring enough, you may testdrive the not so soon to come PHP 5.1. You can download it from the PHP Snapshots page. Less than a fortnight back, the dev team at PHP announced release of PHP 5.0.4 and 4.3.11, which are more or less maintainance releases, resolving a number of security issues and fixing a few non-critical bugs.

Though partying is the only past time besides sleeping and college (studying... ha ha), I'm only gonna put in entries on parties I really like or think suck (or else I'll have to open a party blog). So here's a party the way I like it- Space Ibiza with Reche and David Moreno at KM8, Sentosa... open air, by the beach and into the morning.

Reche sucked bigtime but Moreno KICKED some serious ASS!! Yep, he played an awesome morning set with some really cool basslines and killa grooves. I loved it a lot more than Zoukout and this is probably the second party I've really really enjoyed here in Singapore, the first one being The Youngsters private party at erstwhile Lola where they played some wicked dark Detroit Tech in a place with good vibes all around.

Everybody is so fed up of PDF files opening up in Firefox. So was I, till I followed a really simple fix.

Well, here's the solution (works for Acrobat Professional 6 and Adobe Reader 6). This works for Windows XP. I tried it on my laptop.

1. Upgrade to Firefox 1.0.3.
2. Goto the installation folder.
3. Navigate to the 'plug_ins' folder. In the case of Acrobat Professional, navigate to Acrobat 6.0>Acrobat>plug_ins .
4. Rename the 'plug_ins' subfolder to 'plug_ins_disabled'.
5. Create a new 'plug_ins' folder.
6. Copy the files EWH32.api, printme.api and Search.api from 'plug_ins_disabled' to 'plug_ins'.

Any improvements? One thing guaranteed is that Acrobat will load up much faster than what it would before. And it fixed my Firefox problem too!