Nelson on facebook

An interesting bit from Nelson Minar on facebook. The day i signed on facebook, i knew that i will delete it very soon. So far i have only invited only two friends to join on facebook because i thought the feed feature coupled with the movie i watched would be interesting to them. I am sorry for my adrenaline.

Facebook Ads

So now Facebook is directly competing with Google with its new Social Ads. I like this concept and i wonder what Google will do now.

An interesting quote from Dave Winer

Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!

Gym

Finally after one year I'm back to gym again. I ran for 1.5kms on the treadmill and was pretty happy about it. Then the instructor took some 7-8 of us and started doing some ground exercises. The guy almost killed everyone. All i could hear was groans and moans :). It was fun. With the help of this instructor and a paintbrush, i intend to become like SRK.

BTW, if you want real inspiration keep Daniel Craig in your mind while doing exercises (suggested by my ex roommate cum drinking partner)

Programming fonts

I use windows at work and use Courier New as the font for programming purpose. (It's the default in eclipse, visual studio 2005, idle etc). Now Microsoft has come up with Consolas, a monospace font for programming purpose. A monospace or a fixed width font is one whose characters have same width. Courier New is one such. A monospace font would look ordered and you can draw tables etc easily because all characters are of same size. Try setting your ide's font to Ariel or Verdana (which are not monospace) and see the difference. You won't be able to code in those fonts. One of the fonts which i loved coding was a monospaced font in Gnome Redhat 7.0. I believe the font was BitStream Vera. Anyway Consolas is the new font which i like in windows and it simply is the best. Try it out. Make sure that you have ClearType switched on. Below are some code in 3 different monospace fonts from my system. (blogger screwed the images totally, so better try it out in your system and see the difference).

Courier New

Consolas

BitStream Vera

OpenSocial

So Google today released the OpenSocial apis. Funny that the google pages look very similar to facebook developer pages. Google is using the atom format for data exchange. It's time to look inside atom.

past

i ran
i ran with the memories of the past
for the past holds the heaven
and everything else is just nothing
-dog

Battle without honor or humanity

From XKCD

That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.