This Place is Taken

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Dilwale is not for the Dimaagwala

 

I just watched this movie. It is an insult to the intelligent movie watcher. The only way to watch this movie is to leave your brain at home.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Its Live !! Open Live Writer now works with Blogger !

 

The OpenLiveWriter project has just released a new version, it now works with blogger !  I am using it to write this post as well. Download the new version from the site and run the installer. During the installation, choose Google Blogger as your account type if you want to use it with Blogger.

Taleo 2015-12-18 10 48 20

Taleo 2015-12-18 10 48 24

 

The installer will prompt you to sign in, and will open up the authentication page on your browser.

Taleo 2015-12-18 10 48 28

 

Taleo 2015-12-18 10 48 33

Once you grant access in the browser, return to the installer to finish.

Taleo 2015-12-18 10 48 44

Awesome ! It works, and the interface is pretty much the same as Live Writer (though I found the tags option missing).

Thanks ! to the good folk at the OpenLiveWriter project !!

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Climate change is Real

 

Chennai is recovering now. For two weeks, the city had been hit by the heaviest rainfall it had seen in a hundred years. And this was enough to bring it down. Not only was the city flooded, but it was also totally cut off from the rest of the nation. And while the state government itself failed miserably to handle the crisis, it was the common people, the citizens, who handled the crisis and saw the city through. The deluge was proof enough that climate is changing.

tmp73F4

India is witnessing multiple migrations that are unprecedented in its history. Millions are moving into literacy, similarly staggering numbers are migrating out of poverty and malnourishment, thousands are migrating to the IT world, and several millions are moving to urban centres.Blaming excessive rain or unauthorised construction for the latest misery is a very lazy analysis, ignoring the significant contribution of government institutions and political masters to the mismanagement of Chennai, and other cities. The adverse role played by them in creating havoc has grave security implications for the country at various levels.

Further North, another city, the capital New Delhi is putting together a plan to control its own ridiculous pollution levels.  From 2016, Delhi  will  implement a new rule to make sure private cars with odd and even number registration numbers get to drive in the city on alternate days. On one hand this decision is now being ridiculed on social media , logic dictates that right now any plan is a good plan. The time to think up and come up with a grand plan is long gone, and even the courts are getting in line to support the government move, dismissing PILs against the new law.

I chanced upon this website which tracks air pollution levels in cities around the world: plumelabs. They measure air pollution from agencies of countries and collate them all.

Check out Chennai's pollution levels in real time.

tmp9965

Delhi:

  tmp21B8tmpD61A

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And my own city of Bangalore is far better than Delhi.

 

tmp9583     tmp4726

 

 

But what surprised me was that most cities in developed countries were much better off than us. Check out New York.

 tmpF562tmp834D

Friday, December 11, 2015

Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer into Open Live


Yeaah !!! This is probably the best news I have head from Microsoft this year.Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer into Open Live Writer.  The latest binary installable can be downloaded now and the project is now on GitHub.

But unfortunately, Google too this update news to turn off legacy support of its authentication  APIs. So now, the new as well as older versions of Live Writer, cannot connect to Blogger. :-(


The product that became Live Writer was originally created by a small, super-talented team of engineers including JJ Allaire, Joe Cheng, Charles Teague, and Spike Washburn. The team was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer.
As Microsoft was planning for the version of Windows Live that would coincide with Windows 8 operating system release, the teams that built the Windows Live client apps for Windows were encouraged to focus on building a smaller set of Windows 8 apps designed to work well with both traditional PC input mechanisms and touch. With the rise of micro-blogging platforms and other forms of sharing, eventually this team decided to conclude their work on Windows Live Writer with Windows Live Writer 2012.
Even though there was no active development, Windows Live Writer continued to be a favorite tool of a passionate community of Windows PC users for authoring, editing, and publishing blog posts. Data from WordPress.com at the time suggested that Open Live Writer (even two years after active development ended) was the #1 app for authoring a blog post to WordPress.com from a Windows PC.

A few employees at Microsoft took an interest in reviving Live Writer as an open source project in their spare time. By January 2015, a group of about a half-dozen engineers interested in spending some of their volunteer time to help release an updated version of Live Writer had found each other and began work on getting this open source fork of Live Writer formed and ready to ship. In December 2015 Microsoft donated the code to the .NET Foundation and this passionate group of volunteer engineers rapidly assembled the first open source version.