Chyrp has a great black design …

As far as I know there are only three styles of eating: hands, chopsticks, knives and forks (spoons are universal). And if you had to categorize what to eat with what, it would be Hands: most indian food, fast food Chopsticks: Oriental, South East, Asian, Japanese knives and forks: most of the western world So I find it pretty funny when people try to eat Indian breads which are flat and non porous with knives and forks.…

I have a bloody cold I read packrat parsers in Haskell [PDF], and understood only about 25%. I read 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' by Philip K. Dick and 'In search of Schrödinger's cat' by John Gribbin and understood both. I also got a deadtree version of 'Programming Pearls' by Jon Bentley I still have two exams to give. I am still having some trouble with parsing Markdown in factor.…

After two days of OpenSocial hacking, here is my app, which fetches the users Recent tracks and displays it on the profile. Now since there is no way to directly fetch the last.fm username, I had to resort to asking the user. Also 1.0 although usable has a few errors which aren't handled smoothly. But they do not pose security risks. For now its in the sandbox, if you have access you can view it here Last.…

I love to hack URLs to navigate the web, especially for sites with clean urls. What I'd love is if Firefox could hack the address bar text field so that the slash '/' is the default word seperator, instead of the usual space. This way just pressing Shift + Left/Right Arrow would allow power users to quickly select clean url tokens and edit them faster. This could even be improved so that the ampersand '&' is also a tokenizer.…

The past few months, the web has been buzzing with criticisms of OOXML. Every geek with some unbiased and proper understanding is against OOXML. Now the International Suckups Organisation has ratified it as a standard, which means people will most certainly use it if the decision isn't revoked in a few months. The thing is that for all the non geeks Microsoft is this demi-God and if it makes a standard they are going to use it.…

A big part of creating a good user experience is choosing the right defaults. A calendar is a particularly striking example. When you use a calendar widget to fill in a date, the context should determine a reasonable default date. If you were booking a plane ticket, today's date would be a nice default. But if you are entering your birth date, today is so NOT a good default, but it is seen here…

Microsoft, for their persistence in monopolizing (?) document formats, and hounding countries which reject it [1] And of course its associated allies in the NASSCOM, and the Indian media, who are Microsoft's pet dogs. China, for all the shit going on in Tibet and for all the human rights violations going on behind closed doors. Boycott the Olympics! ( Hey china? will my blog be blocked now? ) …

Java was the first language I learned properly. I cobbled together stuff in BASIC for a few weeks, but for Java I bought 2 books and programmed a lot of stuff. That was 4 years ago, I was young, not so experienced, and Java was God to me. It was cool, it had GUI libraries, and lots of people used it. And the WORA concept was quite cool to me then.…

Music has only recently become a great thing for me. Till age 14, I didn't listen to music. Then for two years I only listened to about 2/3 bands. It was only this year that I really got into music. And the indie scene just captured me, so almost all the bands below are indie rock/pop. I haven't listed all the artists, just my Top 5 and their Top 5 songs.…