Bandwidth

So we're back in Bangalore, & we're setting ourselves up with a rental flat & the assorted arrangements you need to make to live. Now, do not get me wrong, I know that what I'm going to talk about may not be an issue that affects all of India, or at least there are other, bigger problems which other Indians live with & I don't; at the same time, we're really facing energy crisis for fueling/sustaining our economic growth.

So what really is the bandwidth that your ISP provides for your home internet connection? Can you believe that Sify actually qualifies a 128 Kbps connection as Broadband , when the Government of India, rather lamely I must admit, defines a broadband connection to be at least 256 Kbps? Lamely beacuse, 256 Kbps is NOT broadband. Broadband is enough bandwidth to make a telephone call over the internet with no lags of any kind, enough bandwidth to view media-rich web sites as if they were all text. Internationally, anything less than 2 Mbps is not broadband.

I'm really struggling with getting a ISP to provide me good service at J P Nagar. I called Sify & they never called back. BSNL, I'm told, provide relatively hassle-free connections, but they take two-months. Reliance does provide broadband with speeds "upto" 2000 Kbps, though just about everybody I talked to advised me to avoid Reliance. And Airtel does not have service in the J P Nagar area.

And all this in Bangalore.

S!

Spinning the web

What if you could access all your contacts, all your photographs, all your music, all your videos & all your blogs from one digital dashboard? With multiply, you have now a single-sign-on dashboard for all your digital content.

And perhaps the web needs a third dimension? Perhaps your bookmarks should not be 2 dimensional list of websites but really an art gallery like setting which you walk through where each favorite website of yours hangs from a wall like a painting? Too good to be true? No. Welcome to the world of three dimensional browsing. And that of a three dimensional browser.

In effect, the web is no longer a platform. The web is an experience. The participative model of web 2.0 can be thought of as a byword for an idea which has political roots. While democratic governments represent people & the ramifications of that discussion are myriad & not always reassuring, the web 2.0 experience is the people it connects in ever more enriching ways.

The Blog Boom

I have this opinion that blogging as social networking platform is slowly eating away at certain other networking platforms such as ryze, or Orkut. Per this article, the total blogs in April 2005 stood at 50 million with approximately 1 million blogs from the Indian Subcontinent. Here are my reasons why blogging is such a growing medium, not necessarily in any order of significance:

• Your blog is the virtual you. There is no other platform which gives an opportunity to express the sum total of the person you are as much as blogging does. With blogging, you are not your resume or just someone who is interested in white collar crimes.
• Blogging is not need-based. It is wish-based. So while you'll be active on LinkedIn, if you're looking for a job or growing your business at any point, you can blog for much more mundane reasons like reporting what your dog did last Sunday or publicizing what is so weird about you.
• Content-type: While most networking sites go as far as letting you upload a photograph of yourself, with blogging you get: as many photos as you want, dynamic content like RSS feeds, videos, & sundry other scripts you can run for various purposes (like site meters). A blog any day is more dynamic, & more you, than your other networking profile(s).
• Customization: You can make your blog look the way you want to limited only by your exposure to web technologies. Even if you're not a HTML/CSS/Ajax wizard, each blog can be customized easily to make it your own. Other networking sites provide you with only a filter to differentiate public information about yourself from the private ones.
• Interactive: This is a very important reason why blogs are so popular. Blogging is essentially a communication platform & potentially develops into a community. I find that people whose posts receive a lot of comments also post more frequently than those whose blogs do not get too much traffic. With other social networking platforms, the extent of communication is limited by their very design (like Orkut scrapbooks)
• No sign-up required: Anybody can see your blog, & just about anybody can comment, depending on how you've configured your blog. Other networking sites typically need you to be a member to view a profile. With blogging, everybody is welcome to participate.
• Auxiliary technologies: There are a host of other technologies that support blogging. These include RSS which lets people subscribe to your blog & be notified when you publish. Technocrati maintains blogger profiles & lets the world discover the type of content they are interested in. You can also post from email.
• And finally, while you'd typically have just one Ryze or Orkut profile, you can have many blogs.

Blogger Beta

In case you did not come across this yet, Blogger Beta is here - full of exciting new features, & a cool set of blog customization tools. This blog is a blogger beta blog.

I'm watching you!

With Google Analytics, you can pin down the exact city in the world that your blog/website is getting a hit from. Those of you who are interested in web-analytics should really see it for yourself.

Python

Begin post:
I generated the Fibonacci series using Python this morning. Just two basic observations:

• I enjoy writing code, when I am not being paid for it.
• I haven't improved since first semester; its been seven years since. My basic logical faculties remain rather basic.

Should you decide to leave a comment or two on this post, please begin with either:

• # or,
• /

End post: