Me, my phone and my calendar!

Recently, I got the entry level HTC smartphone for myself. The 3400i is a VFM phone with all the bells and whistles one would need in an entry level smartphone. Whenever I change a phone, the biggest headache is moving around the contacts and the calendar information. I tend to forget and rely a lot on the calendar to remind me about important events like birthdays, marriage annivs and the likes.

I was looking forward to a dreary timespan trying to update my calendar on the phone for all those important events. Its just today that I read about GoogleSync for mobile phones. Via GoogleSync one can sync their googlemail contacts and calendar events immediately with their smartphone! I was sceptical but it was a total breeze. I just had to enter my gmail address details in ActiveSync (yes mine is a Windows Mobile phone - no bricks please :P) and lo-and-behold my gmail contacts plus all calendar events were uploaded wirelessly onto my mobile! Nice, I say :D

What are you waiting for, go get your mobile synced up!

Search Recursion

Something funny happened today. All of us google - ummm to search. Even I was doing it. I was trying to use the "screen" utility on my test machine, so that I could start my test and log out and get back later to it. When I gave the "screen -r" command to reattach, I got the following error:

Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check.

Some permission issue I guessed, so I thought I will search for the solution by googling. I searched by entering keywords like "screen, terminal, cannot, open" etc. etc. and clicked on the second link that came in (As as aside, which search link do you open from the search results? Should do a poll I guess :)).

I got on to that specific page and instead of getting the answer I get the following blurb:

"This is a common problem. Googling will help here"

Hmmm, scratch-scratch, I just googled didn't I? But I think instead of giving out solutions, people have actually started to say "google out and get it" nowadays. Will there come a day when all results we get be like the one above :P

Btw, a simple chmodding of the pts entry seems to help here for non-root users above..

Fancy this Jam?

Hmm, some people say Google has the potential to be the new evil post M$. But you got to admit, there are some things which they do pretty well. Amongst that list, is the Google Code Jam. I participated in it once 3-4 years back. I would say it is kinda favored to those who are used to heavy API based C++, Java programming. More so for string manipulation based programming. For me, who has been mostly doing do-everything-yourself C language coding, it gets a bit (not very though and this is not to discourage C coders at all!) tough timewise. But nonetheless its a pretty interesting activity to participate in. Click here for this years details. Happy Code Jamming!

IndiZeitGeist

ZeitGeist is originally a German Expression that means "time spirit" or in other words the spirit of the current times or age. Google captures the online version of it by tracking the most oftly used search phrases. It thus reflects the current online mood or the pulse of the online world.

I thought to seek out what is on the minds of more and more Indians who are getting online and hence was looking around for Google India ZeitGeist. Sadly they don't seem to have country specific ZeitGeists (you listening Google?), but it seems they recently compiled and released a list specifically for India. Here it is. Seems like Orkut, Deepika Padukone, Sania Mirza, Mahatma Gandhi (yes he is on the list!) are the flavor of the times :)

Google Reader at Cross Purposes with Google Adsense

Only recently I discovered about Google Reader. Like all things Google, the Reader is easy to use and nicely aggregates all your favorite websites, blogs and rss feeds under one location. Any updates to any of these sites are updated automatically, so you no longer have to wait and wonder about whether your favorite site or blogger has added some latest content or not. Here is my shared reader links.

My first thought was great - now I don't even need to keep my firefox tabs open all the time. But then I was like wait a minute! I wondered if this is actually good news for people who have Google Adsense on their websites. If a lot of subscribers just check out their Reader feeds and decide not to visit your homepage what do you do? Is Google Reader actually in some ways at cross-purposes with Google Adsense which would thrive on people visiting lots of sites and clicking through google ads eventually?