I just watched Michael Phelps win the Gold in the 100m butterfly by .01s, followed by Usain Bolt’s incredible 100m and 200m victories. All these events were absolutely amazing, and exactly what a sports and Olympics fan would like to watch and re-watch at any time. Thanks to the Olympics coverage on the Windows Media Center [...]

Last weekend I updated the ROM of my HTC Touch (Sprint Network) mobile phone. I have been waiting for this ROM upgrade for quite some time. I will break this part of the post into installation, few of the features, and end with my summary. As and when I get to additional features, I will add [...]

Just saw that newegg is selling the Xbox Live Gold 12 Month subscription card for $39.99 (original price $49.99). Definitely something to pick up in case your subscription is running out. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16874103030

I am currently working on a project to redesign the web platform of my organization at work. I am closely working with a UX and Site Management team for this purpose. I saw the following rap song in YouTube, that is very relevant to what the UX/Site Management team has been advocating. This is definitely one [...]

Sweet announcement at E3 - Netflix movies can be streamed on Xbox 360. This feature will make me move away from Blockbuster online, and get a Netflix account. The advantage of sitting at home, and getting access to the Netflix collection of movies that can streamed online far out weighs the ability to return the [...]

  (This blog has been moved from previous blog site) I was pleasantly surprised to notice that http://maps.live.com (Live Search Maps provided by Microsoft) shows the traffic alerts in some of the major local roads in Greater Seattle Area. Most of the online traffic or map services only show the Freeway and major Highway traffic.   This is definitely [...]

Amazing video made by my cousin Meera for my nephew Ashrith. Ashrith was diagnosed with infant acute lymphocytic leukemia last year when he was 10 months old. He went through treatment and chemotherapy at the CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) since last March (07). I am overjoyed and ecstatic to say that Ashrith has been off [...]

(This blog has been moved from previous blog site) Demo -   Savas Parastatidis (architect of the Microsoft repository platform) created a demo for Open Repositories Challenge 2008 that shows the ability to pull data from two repositories, create the appropriate relationships and display the relationships in a WPF based network graph. He pulls the relationships b/w [...]

  (This blog has been moved from previous blog site) <EDITED UpdatedDate=”Apr 4 08″> Slides - http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/84/1/Research_Output_Repositories_-_Microsoft_Initiatives.pdf  </EDITED> The Presentation at the Conference today went well (Monday session was held by Microsoft for interop b/w repositories, with a few known members of the community). This session was open to all members of the conference - we had a decent [...]

(This blog has been moved from previous blog site)   Project Info - http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/03/24/19a7fa4a-560d-47b4-bbea-9a22e9824bb8.aspx    Microsoft presentation of the Scholarly Communications space and Research Output Repository platform on Monday (3/31) went very well. this was followed by presentation by leaders/members of other repositories, protocols in the Institutional Repository space. There was a rich discussion around repositories, interop between repositories, [...]

(This blog has been moved from previous blog site)  Link to gadget download - here Well finally I got around to playing with creating Vista Gadgets, and my first try was a gadget to search the Microsoft Research Web site. I personally like the concept of gadgets in Vista. I love to have gadgets for actions I [...]

(This blog has been moved from previous blog site)   ‘Build an information site around the community, and not the community around the site.’   The internet is a common meeting ground of communities, and in this world of communities I stumbled upon http://www.librarything.com (LibraryThing). This is a community built around people interested in reading books. Users can upload [...]