Chirag Desai

It begins..Happy Durgashtami to those celebrating!

The 6 Stages of Debugging: That can’t happen. That shouldn’t happen. Hmmm, weird. Why does that happen? Oh, I see. How did that ever work?

From @the_webhamster.

Oh how I can identify.

Silence, broken only by the click of her red heels against the pavement.

She reached out to find his arm, feeling like she would stumble if she didn’t.

He felt a light touch and turned to her, the surprise evident on his face.

Look calm, she thought to herself, flashing a smile.

He slowed down a little so they wouldn’t lose the new connection.

She withdrew the arm 15 seconds later, just as people walked by.

Hey, LinkedIn, why would I believe you this time?

I get a new invite every month, then a reminder that it’s the last day…then that I have it for another month. Plus after my experience with them overcharging me (severely) over an ads offer, I’m just not interested at this point.

Just came across this post. Fascinates me, this. Makes me feel almost below-normal. It speaks volumes on Jobs’ eye for detail. How many people would catch that at his level?

“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

The devil’s in the details

If you haven’t read about this hack already, take 20 minutes out of your day and read through the article attached below. While the importance of complex passwords, separating your accounts and more can’t be over-stated, there some simple things you should do right away, for example:

• Enable two-factor authentication in Gmail so that accessing it requires two items — your password and a one-time code — to make it tougher to get in.
• Facebook has a few security settings that you should make use of. Spend a few minutes, clear out unknown sessions and devices, and enable notifications when your account is accessed on an unknown computer/device.
• Don’t ‘daisy chain’ your critical accounts — ie, prevent making two very active accounts the recovery/backup account for each other.
• This one is for everyone that has asked me for this advice over the last 5 years — no, don’t click on a link or open an attachment to something you do not know or understand. If it was really important, the person will find a way to make sure you see it.

The article is a worth read to understand sometimes how simple it is to get access to your life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate of the web in terms of function, use and all that pretty stuff. But everything has its cons so let’s not be careless about it.

To the experts, I say we really need to look at some standardization. The line — ‬’[t]he very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification’‪ — concerns me deeply.

Meet Mat Honan. He just had his digital life dissolved by hackers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired. Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

…

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

Much like I did with Lion, I picked up the Mountain Lion upgrade to Apple’s OS X the day it was available on the Mac App store. I’ve already discussed it before, but this whole download new version of OS while sitting in your room is pretty brilliant. But I’m more amazed when I think of the 3 million downloads at $20. That’s $60 million in sales without a dime in shipping. In 3 days.

In traditional bullet point style, here goes.

• 10.8 is a massive performance upgrade. Everything just seems to run faster, and there are huge improvements to memory management (I use Free memory to keep an eye on available memory). But there’s more. The return from sleep is brilliant — seconds over what was normally a 4–5 minute return. The other improvement I’m seeing is when I connect over to an external monitor — the resolution shift/adjustments take seconds now as well.
• I think Growl probably kicked themselves in the foot (paw?) at some point by going paid, but regardless, the notification center is a great add-on. More apps will naturally integrate themselves, which will make it better. It’s great though that Chrome is Notification center-ready already. Twitter is so-so; it’s nice to get alerts but annoying that to reply it takes me to Twitter web, which isn’t a good UX. (No, don’t ask what a chirag sexy cake is).

• Quirk: Apple has announced that FB integration (at the OS level, and into notification center as well) will come by in the fall. But as I accidentally discovered, the packages are available within Mountain Lion already. Hmm.

• Firing up notification center takes some understanding (a quick google explains it though), but there isn’t a hot key with the magic mouse. I haven’t been bothered by this yet but it would have been nice.
• Fonts. I had the same problem with Lion — post the upragde, Chrome’s font rendering went for an absolute toss, and for the font-geek in me, I’m forced to use Safari when I can’t stand it. Let’s hope they fix that quickly.
• I like Safari’s zoom-out tab mode. It’s cool. I’m not sure it’s necessarily too useful though — I’ve never thought of it as a problem to navigate tabs, but it is pretty.
• Icons seem to have gotten a facelift — well, the Retina Macbook Pro is responsible for that, I’m sure. But it’s nice to see crisper, brighter icons around.

• The return of the Save As.. is a welcome one for most people I’m sure.
• It would seem that I can no longer view the battery life time remaining on the status bar — requiring a click to be able to see this information.
• Freeing up an additional 10GB of space post the upgrade? Sold!

Overall I’m really happy with this upgrade. The performance improvements alone are solid, and notification center is a good answer to a common problem.

Well there you have it. At least I didn’t do another ‘is Mountain Lion worth $20’ with a cost breakdown post, right?

For me the fun of traveling is getting to sample the local fast food and other cuisines.

To those unfamiliar with the term chaat is I northern India’s street fast food. Spicy, a mix of cold and hot, sweet and salty, crispy and chewable the famed street food of Delhi is one not to be missed. Popular joints such as Nathu’s, Haldiram’s, Bikanerwala all provide a range of delectable chaat that you can make a full meal out of!

Feast on pani puris, aloo tikki chaat, choley batoore, and so many things that I can’t even possibly mention in this post! Here’s a little sneak peak!

Note: I was given the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as a review unit.

‘You are so not getting this phone back’.

As far as first impressions go, I doubt it could get much better than that. More so since it comes from someone who doesn’t use a smartphone at all (no, don’t ask). Simply put, the Galaxy Nexus makes for a good looking phone. Like the impression someone at a party in a snazzy black outfit makes, before you speak to him/her, as the case applies. I don’t mean that the phone is bad when you do (or that the person’s a douche, yet), but you can’t know for sure until you have that conversation, can you?

Since the Galaxy Nexus reached me a few days before the acclaimed Jelly Bean update, we’ll hold off on the OS discussion until the update is done. At first glance however, the phone looks pretty stable. I’m not a fan of the back though — the approach seems a bit flimsy, and reminded me of those sets I played with as a kid. Unless that was the idea, in which case they did a great job.

The size of the Galaxy Nexus also takes a bit of getting used to, being larger in comparison to other phones, so this doesn’t seem like a device you can use comfortably with one hand for extended periods of time. But that’s not a real deal-breaker. On the flip side, this display is quite good and the extra screen space makes for better reading.

A nice display and a good churning droid.

The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to, and so far, typing with one hand requires active use of the auto-suggestions to be quick. The other thing that really got to me though was the position of the sleep and volume buttons that are on the phone’s side (say, in comparison to the top of the iPhone for sleep/wake). This meant I often hit the sleep button accidentally while using the phone, which can take some getting used to. Maybe I’m just holding it wrong.

If, like me, you live your life in Google’s castle from time to time, initial set up is snappy and the single sign-on with your (multiple like most of us…just me, you say? Okay.) Google account is intuitive. Email, contacts, calendar and browser preferences are sync’d without much fuss, the last once you download Chrome on Ice Cream Sandwich (I’m unclear of the logic behind Chrome not being default until Jelly Bean, but my theory is Google just doesn’t think like that).

The Android market — now the Google Play Store — is thriving in its own steam, so apps for most needs are easy to find. The experience over the first day has been positive overall, and the phone does justify its generally good feedback.

Stand by, a full review with notes on Jelly Bean will be here soon!

This write-up (by Jobs’ sister) still moves me, just as it did when I first read it, and each time I go back to it.

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

‘Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.’