BrainBuzz

I'm starting a new website at www.liveash.com, and am moving this blog to the new address, blog.liveash.com. Haven't thought of what to put on the main site yet, but will figure out eventually.

Please update your bookmarks and/or feed URLs to point to the new domain.

Labels: site

Posted by Ashley at Saturday, August 25, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Links to this post  

The World Wide Web turned 16 yesterday.

No, not the 'Internet', which is an interconnected worldwide network of networks through which users connect to (and via) ftp servers, smtp servers, http servers etc. WWW comprises of the interconnected web pages we visit every day; just one of the services of the Internet, provided by http servers (a.k.a. Web Servers). The basis of the WWW (or 'Web') is the Hyper-Text Markup Language, HTML.

The Wired News Article is being copied here:

1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.

The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.

His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.

The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet.

Today's web is far more powerful and sophisticated than the research tool developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau but continues operating on basically the same principles they established a quarter of a century ago.

Labels: history, internet, link, TBL, WWW

Posted by Ashley at Wednesday, August 08, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Links to this post  

Thanks to Blogger Templates blog for the new design.

Do post your opinion in the comments..

Labels: design

Posted by Ashley at Wednesday, June 06, 2007 | Permalink | 3 Comments | Links to this post  

I have been putting this off for a long time; been using Geni more than a month now - So here it is: A review for Geni : The flash-based, easy to use family tree service.

Geni is not the first team to venture into genealogy, the study of pedigree (ancestry); which deals with the bloodlines which connect you and me. Others, like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, Genealogy.com, Genealogy.org etc. have been in the field for many years (See for yourself if you want; the basic services are free for all.), but Geni steals the prize by being simple.

Just seven weeks after going public in January this year, Geni caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of people through a simple, intuitive interface which far surpassed the interfaces of the competitors. Another major reason behind its popularity is its viral nature : you invite, say, 10 relatives, they invite 5 each, and so on - soon, your tree will contain hundreds of members you've never even heard of!

The service caught my sight when it was mentioned in Digit Magazine as a free service for building family trees. I was actually looking for a way to re-connect with my family members; its quite hard for me to remember the exact relationships when meetings are quite rare with distant relatives - sometimes, even close ones. So I didn't waste a minute and jumped online to www.geni.com...

Needless to say, I was instantly Hooked! Hectic days of compiling relations ensued, and within just 3 days I had added 500+ relatives to my tree (Yeah, I'm impulsive like that :) ), thanks to my parents who helped a lot by making dozens of phone calls to get names & long-forgotten bloodlines. (You don't have to do all the work yourself; inviting relatives to join is the recommended way to compile the tree.)

Here is a screen shot of the tree view:


You can add more members to your tree yourself, or can invite relatives to join the tree. Only those you invite to your tree will be able to see it, so there is no privacy threat. If a member joins Geni through your invite and chooses a password, their profile will become un-editable by others; otherwise you can edit any profile in your tree.

Every member gets a photo album by default. Uploaded family photos can be tagged with the names of those who are in the photo, which will automatically add the photo to their profiles. For example, if I upload a photo of my cousins, and tag it with their names, all the cousins' profiles will have the picture in their album. Nice!

Recently they added the option to invite your family friends to Geni, which will enable those who join via the invitation to see your profile and your immediate relatives (but not their profiles).

In the true spirit of Web 2.0, Geni carries a 'beta' tag; they are still working on many of the features frequently requested by users, such as ability to import trees from other genealogy programs, an option to merge trees, exporting the entire tree as a GEDCOM file (industry standard for genealogy information) etc. Expect much more, soon.

So why wait? Go to Geni.com and start your tree - maybe one day you'll beat the old-school members of ancestry.com, with over 30,000 relatives(!!) in their trees...

Labels: digit, geni, link, online tools

Posted by Ashley at Saturday, May 26, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Links to this post  

The above table is taken from the Wikipedia page for Byte - took me by quite a surprise.. I mean, have you ever heard of the word 'kibibyte'? I know I haven't...

Apparently, the hard disk manufacturers were right all along! I thought they were ripping us off by selling 80 billion bytes of storage, saying that its 80 x 2³⁰ - which I thought, was 80 Gigabytes (80 GB). Well, lets just say I'm so sorry for spreading that story among my friends, many of whom look up to me as the computer genius (a.k.a geek)...

On a side-note, Hitachi just announced a 1TeraByte Blue-Ray Writer; they had released a similar sized Hard Disk about a month back.

Labels: computers, link, misconceptions

Posted by Ashley at Sunday, May 13, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Links to this post  

The only reason I was using the Groowe Toolbar for Firefox was the 'Digg This Page' button, really. Being a coder myself, that shouldn't be the case - why should I tolerate all the bloat for a simple button?

So, I made a script to add the current page to digg - all you have to do is drag the link below to the 'Bookmarks Toolbar' in Firefox, or right-click on it and choose 'Bookmark this link' (or 'Add to Favorites', if you are using IE)


If you are a digg user, a click on the bookmark[let] will submit the current page to digg, and if the page has already been submitted, it will take you to the digg article itself.

If you want to have a confirmation before the actual submission (to avoid accidental submissions), you can choose to use the link below instead.

Labels: digg, OSS, script

Posted by Ashley at Friday, April 20, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Links to this post  

'Pi is Wrong!', says Bob Palais, Research Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at University of Utah - the article is an scanned copy of his own post in a magazine's readers' section.

He says the current value of 2π should have been assigned to the symbol we all are familiar with, π. He has all the arguments right, too - wonder why others decided they way it is now!

Labels: link, math

Posted by Ashley at Tuesday, April 10, 2007 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Links to this post