Mohammed Jeelani

Michael Crichton passes away

at about 11.33am IST - Outlook Toaster pops up notifying of an email whose subject read "Michael Crichton passes away”. time froze; the second seemed to last forever. As the toaster begun fading away somehow gathered courage to click on it, Feroz was pointing me to a Wired magazine blog post.

disbelief struck ... this has to be a hoax! we were expecting a book this holiday season from him, not this news ... got to be a hoax. Read a few lines from the article... absolute disbelief... these wired guys are smoking something...

open www.michaelcrichton.com, and read the announcement... why do all good things have to end?

...as if the day wasn't sad enough already…

posted @ Thursday, November 06, 2008 12:51 AM | Feedback (0) |

Mind over (Digital) Matter

When I first heard about it - found it hard to believe, when I read about it on emotiv.com, found it hard to believe, but when I read about it on news.com and saw a video on youtube - this truly does sound revolutionary.

Emotiv has come up with an almost complete product which seem to have impressed everyone who has had a chance to play with it so far.

This is mind blowing - well atleast not literally for now, thank god for that.

posted @ Friday, February 22, 2008 10:42 AM | Feedback (1) |

R.I.P Netscape Navigator

Its finally over... Netscape pulled the plug yesterday on its browsers. Announced on a post on its official blog Netscape Navigator died a long painful death.

Though I'm a hardcore IE fan all through my Internet life (after IE4 that is), I can't help but take a moment, a deep breath and actually realize, its over for NN.

I was looking back all those years of the browser wars between NN and IE, here is an interesting graph on Browser Market Share from Wikipedia.

IE's dominance over the Internet is remarkable. It hasn't been an easy journey for Microsoft, reading through this article on Wikipedia on History of IE brings back so many memories and the hardships that the company had to go trough to keep the browser alive and keep the innovations going.

NN does deserve a huge round of applause and a standing ovation for its job in the browser space as it bows out. ...and we continue to look forward to IE to innovate more and give us the worlds best browsing experience.

posted @ Saturday, December 29, 2007 4:44 AM | Feedback (2) |

Windows Vista Clock

I stumbled upon this cool feature while meddling around with the clock on Vista. I recorded the below video which shows you how simple it is to look up a date in a different year/month. In this video I try to look up on which day does Jan 1st fall in the year 2084.

posted @ Wednesday, December 26, 2007 9:51 AM | Feedback (4) |

'JackAss 2.5' to premiere on Dec 19th

On December 19th, Blockbuster will premiere the first full-length feature film, Jackass 2.5, directly to online audiences on Windows and Mac using Microsoft Silverlight. Jackass 2.5 will be made available for free, for anyone in the US 17 or older, courtesy of Blockbuster at www.blockbuster.jackassworld.com beginning December 19th through December 31st, 2007

Silverlight is a 1.5MB cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for IE, Firefox and Safari users.  Details and download at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight.

The ecosystem around Silverlight is continuing to grow, with an impressive line-up of customers like MLB.com, BMW, Sony Ericsson, Baidu (#1 search site in PRC), NBA.com, Entertainment Tonight (CBS/Paramount) and UVNTV.com, to name a few.  See more at http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

posted @ Saturday, December 15, 2007 4:36 AM | Feedback (1) |

206.16.223.63/65

posted @ Monday, August 20, 2007 6:12 PM | Feedback (0) |

Need For Speed : Pro Street Announced

I just noticed that Need For Speed Pro Street has been announced - slated for release on 31.10.07.

http://www.ea.com/nfs/prostreet/home.jsp

From the video and screen shots - it fails to impress me so far ... maybe Need For Speed Most Wanted was just too good - its tough to make a NFS version better than that...

posted @ Sunday, June 17, 2007 12:39 PM | Feedback (0) |

Speaking at Tech ED India this Saturday

Rajesh Sampath and I will be speaking at Tech ED India (or Techmela as it’s called in its new incarnation, which is an amalgamation of Tech ED, Mix, MEDC and ITPC all happening at the same time, same place!). We will deliver a talk titled Model Driven Development using Microsoft Domain Specific Language Tools. We will start with a background on Model Driven Development, touch upon Software Factories and then dive deep into Domain Specific Language Tools, what they are, how you can create your own Domain Specific Language and at the end take a look at an implementation of a DSL within Microsoft IT.

So if you are in Mumbai attending TechMela this Saturday (16th June) and are interested in Domain Specific Languages then do drop by for our session slated at 16.20.

posted @ Thursday, June 14, 2007 3:54 PM | Feedback (1) |

Gates vs. Jobs @ All Things D

What is it ?

http://www.dowjones.com/Pressroom/PressReleases/Other/US/2007/0220_US_TheWallStreetJournal_2683.htm

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/all-things-d-if-youre-going-lets-meet-up-263113.php

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/wsj/gates-and-jobs-to-share-stage-at-wsjs-no+holds-barred-tech--conf-238244.php

Holy $@#!, When is it ?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/29/jobs-gates-and-hawkins-times-in-approximate-for-tomorrows/

30th May - 7:15PM PST
Bill Gates & Steve Jobs 2getha 4eva

posted @ Wednesday, May 30, 2007 5:07 AM | Feedback (0) |

Joost Invites up for grabs!

Just in case you need a Joost invite, leave a comment on this post...

I dunno whats wrong but Joost just doesn't seem to work for me - keeps erroring out after playing a few seconds of video. Not very impressed by it so far though...

..anyways if you need an invite drop a comment with yr name + email address.

posted @ Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:02 AM | Feedback (9) |

Can't fight the (Microsoft) Silverlight...

LeAnn Rimes may have found geeks to have no problems to fight the moonlight , however, its tough to fight the Silverlight that Microsoft has unleashead on the Web. Truly Web v.Next has arrived - here is just a simple Flickr Mashup created using Microsoft Popfly rendered using Microsoft Silverlight (U'll need the lightweight 1.x MB download to view it).

posted @ Friday, May 25, 2007 10:38 AM | Feedback (0) |

Halo 3 release date announced!!

Halo 3 comes to you on September 25th...

Entertainment Event of the Year
"Halo 3 is much more than a video game release—it's the biggest entertainment event of the year," said Peter Moore, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business. "On September 25, we intend to deliver a finale that will go down in entertainment history and leave people around the world with an experience that will be shared and enjoyed for years to come."

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0515-halo3releasedate.htm?WText.camp=HR1a-Halo3News&WText.campSrc=Home

posted @ Wednesday, May 16, 2007 4:58 AM | Feedback (1) |

Charles in Space!

http://www.charlesinspace.com/

Space...
The Final Frontier...
These are the voyages of Charles Simonyi...
His first mission, to the Internation Space Station...
To seek out possibilities in Space Tourism...
To boldly go where few tourists have gone before...

:)

...Charles who led the Word and other office apps teams at Microsoft where he worked for 20 years before starting his own company, is all set to  blasts off into space in about 6 hours from now..He is currently blogging from Kazakhstan (yeup, I know - kk-kz and how difficult it is to code for that locale!!) on the Final Countdown on the above web site. Tune in to www.charlesinspace.com (btw - about time you blocked <yr name>inspace.com as well I guess :-) ).

Tune into Charles journey on charlesinspace.com

posted @ Saturday, April 07, 2007 2:52 PM | Feedback (1) |

One of the best event log messages ever!

posted @ Tuesday, April 03, 2007 6:35 PM | Feedback (2) |

Enter BOne – My first Lego NXT Bot

I got a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit last week – I was buried with work during the weekdays to give it a spin. It had to wait till last night for me to actually play around with it. Boy is it amazing! I managed to complete what’s called a “Tripod” robot – I nicknamed it BOne – short for Bot One – since it’s the first ever Robot that I created. Here are some pictures of Bone (excuse my messy desk – no it doesn’t always look so bad :) ).

Here are some Videos of BOne in action –

In the below video BOne is programmed so that it could tell the difference between colors – It detects the Ball colors correctly when I hold it out to him in the below video (with a slight bug for the Blue one).

Video: BONE detects Color!

We programmed the Ultrasound sensors to detect objects so that BOne can steer away from them (thats Amit in the video - blocking BOne's path with his hands). Also we have programmed the Sound sensor to tell BOne to start moving around when I clap in the below video.

Video: BONE detects Sound and Obstacles

In both the above videos I used the software that came along with the NXT to program it. I haven’t yet explored integrating it with Microsoft Robotics Studio or NXT#. Itching to see how it works especially with Microsoft Robotics Studio, however, MSRS can communicate with the Lego NXT only via Bluetooth and the Bluetooth radio on my Toshiba M5 Notebook isn’t compatible with the NXT :( – will have to go out and get a Bluetooth dongle sometime soon.

posted @ Saturday, January 27, 2007 10:41 PM | Feedback (3) |