These pictures are being brought to you courtesy photo blogging
The greatest innovation here being unlimited photo hosting :) Kidding..Hello is nice and makes posting photos on a blog very easy since it does the work of uploading the photo to blogger on its own..however does not work behind firewalls :( so eliminates the option of using office resources for personal gain :D

This piece of fundu english was seen at Chennai's Marina(?) beach which is also the place where the last photo was taken..

The sleepy man and the sea

More gmail niceties

1) One click replies..
Traditional way: read mail..click reply button..wait for a new page..then type..
Gmail way: read mail..click in the bottom input box..javascript/css magic..to/from/subject etc fields automagically on page and you can just start typing..

2) Threading..Something which is pretty useful for following a conversation..a thread of mails can accessed on a single page..you can expand and collapse individual mails...neat for a start.

3) Messages can be grouped together using labels. One can add more than one labels to a message which is neater than moving a message to a folder and only one folder.

Curiously though the stardard "marking" a message is referred to as "starring" a message.

I got a couple of requests for invites and so i scanned some gmail help. It says that invites ll be called for periodically and the opportunity shall be conveyed by a mail in my inbox. So there is still hope in your lives if getting a blogger account is too cumbersome a task for you.

Whats in, whats out...

1)
OUT:
Using Megha's digicam with a 128 Mb memory stick as a data transfer device between home and office.

IN:
Using a new 256 Mb SanDisk flash drive for data transfer. It was gifted by Megha's sis Snehal and her husband Sudarshan who arrived 2 days back from the US of A bringing goodies unlimited with them :)..ya chocolates, nuts and some Lime Margarita ready-to-drink alcoholic stuff too.

Will try and see if carrying a 3-4 yr old IBM Thinkpad (whopping 10GB of HDD and 484 or so MHz processor :), decent RAM though 512 Mb) from home to office and back, just to synchronize working files can also be put in the OUT list..currently looks like transferring whole source trees is slightly slow due to the USB-ness of the drive.

2)
OUT:
neerajbhope@rediffmail.com
IN:
neerajbhope@gmail.com

Even though these accessibility problems hold, credit shall be given for atleast thinking and coming up with some changes to the interfaces for web-based email. e.g. selecting messages was till now limited to clicking on little checkboxes one by one or using a "Select all" checkbox. Here I saw a select all, read, unread, starred, unstarred, none. I liked this one.

BTW the new blogger interface is also good. e.g.Posts editing and previewing can be toggled with just ctrl-shift-p which is very convenient. Both gmail and blogger are making efforts on the interface front which is nice.

3)
OUT:
Wearing 60-70 Rs slippers to office and other places of stature :)
IN:
Wearing slightly expensive 1000 buck-sish Red Tape leather chappal/floater kinds.

4)
OUT:
Grammar upgrading for various SQLs.
IN:
Writing actions for the updated grammars :((

5)
OUT:
Sanity.
IN:
Insanity. Cause I have to track down changes made by some crazy assholes to "add features" and "fix defects" to the earlier SQL parsers..which sounds not insane..but is because they did not change the grammar files but edited generated files :(( and have brought considerable grief to my soul.
Imagine thousands of lines of parser code emitted by the likes of javacc and nincompoops editing them and maintaining these changes by hand merging it every time :(( How did they sleep at the end of the day they stepped on this sinful path???????