Archive for October, 2007

Naruto: Rise of a Ninja for Xbox360

// October 27th, 2007 // 6 Comments » // Gaming, Tech

Naruto Rise of Ninja!

Yep! Thats right. Naruto, the recent anime sensation, is coming to Xbox360 as an action packed adventure game with the title “Naruto: Rise of a Ninja“. Note that a Naruto game already exists for wii. The preliminary reviews of the game have been very good. The Xbox magazine gave an average rating of 7.5/10 for this game. With support for both single and dual player mode this game is already high on expectations from Naruto fans world over.

Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre: Action
Release Date: Oct 30, 2007 (North America Region)
ESRB: TEEN

BitTorrent and Net Neutrality

// October 26th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

I normally watch a large number of TV series. But don’t start guessing I’m a couch potato or something(though I come pretty close to being one). I don’t watch them on TV. Most of the TV shows are not even aired where I stay. I don’t have a blazing internet connection like the one that Verizon is offering now, 20Mbps/20Mbps FiOS symmetric service. So I do what most people do. Download them using BitTorrent waiting for hours, and sometimes days, before a single episode can be downloaded and then watch it with all the enthusiasm one could muster after such a boring wait.

Screen shot of µTorrent client during download

I observed that whatever be the download, be it Japanese anime or American TV series, seeds from US seem to be the most generous. They are the ones who seed for a long time even after they finish downloading and maintain consistent upload speeds on their part. I just want them to know, “I appreciate it dude(s)! I really do. The world would be a very selfish place without you guys.”. I always thought and expected internet giants like Sweden, where things like 1Gbps connections are everyday words, would be at the top of the benevolent BitTorrent users.

Hearing news like comcast throttling and faking BitTorrent traffic should be a cause of concern for all of us. Of course corporates should be able to rake in profits. But not at the expense of user experience. When they expect us to pay whatever they demand as the service fee for their pathetic service, we should have the right to do whatever we want with the connection we have. Net neutrality should be as basic a right as free speech. Why should anyone tell us what to browse and and what to breath.

Like one of my country men said, “Swaraj(Independence) is my birth right, and I shall have it!” – Net Neutrality should be everyone’s birth right.

Microsoft Gets Stake in Facebook

// October 25th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

Microsoft finally beat Google for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. Microsoft has to shell out $240 million for this small piece of current action. It puts the valuation of Facebook at a whopping $15 billion. Thats twice the market capitalization of AMD. Sometimes I wonder are these numbers really money? Are these companies really worth all that valuation? Some say they are, owing to the viral growth Facebook has shown in the last 12 month with about 200,000 new users each day.

Lets hope Microsoft did not bag the deal just to beat google out of the race.

Gmail IMAP

// October 25th, 2007 // No Comments » // Tech

Gmail IMAP seems to be talk of the town these days. IMAP is offers much better functionality than POP. POP is passive way of accessing your email, you download your message through your email cleint and then read it. IMAP actively communicates with your mail service provider and marking read items and deleting email when you do the same on your email client simultaneously. Gmail is rolling out IMAP functionality to all users in stages. I didn’t get it yet but would sure love to see what all this about.

This is what What’s new on Gmail? page tell you:
” Sync your inbox across devices instantly and automatically. Whether you read or write your email on your phone or on your desktop, changes you make to Gmail will be seen from anywhere you access your inbox. Don’t fret if you don’t see “IMAP Access” yet under the Settings menu. We’re rolling it out to everyone over the next few days.”

Whats interesting is that the page shows how to setup a device for IMAP service. This device happens to be Apple iPhone in particular, complete with a picture. Why is Google trying to be good to Apple? Are they forming an alliance at last? After all Yahoo and Microsoft are cordial if not too friendly.

Pretty URL’s in WordPress for Netfirms

// October 25th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Tech

I was literally banging my head since a week about my wordpress blog installation. I installed a fresh version of wordpress deleting my previous one thinking it might be faulty. But the Pretty Urls function of the permalink simply did not work for me. Suddenly it hit upon me that something might actually be wrong with my hosting provider. So I googled for “Netfirms wordpress permalinks”. And there were literally hundreds of resources waiting for me to rectify the problem. Even a friend of mine had the same problem. But getting them to work on my latest wordpress(2.3) took me a while since I had to go through all the updates. So here’s an updated version.
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