Kinshuk Sunil

Popular Professional Networking service Linked In.com, yesterday, got a much needed face lift. The New design is sleeker, intuitive. Widgets are in; so are drop down menus. Gone are the days of tabbed browsing.

Check out the official announcement here:
“On many past occasions I’ve blogged about incremental changes being made to the LinkedIn homepage design, so I’m really glad to announce the complete redesign of the LinkedIn homepage and am going to to walk you through some of those changes in a demo that you can find below. Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section of this blog post.” More.

Great Job Linked In!
What do you think?

Okay! I know this is old news! stale news! But I just stumbled Upon it. And I am not referring to the social bookmarking service.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 is under production, and is supposed to be revealed in the April Issue of PC Gamer, in an exclusive. Now thats revelation! Find more details at theAngryPixel and some screen shots at PlanetCNC.

Why does the Tesla dude look like a Big Daddy? Or is that a custom-made tesla-protected Bathysphere??? looks like, I gotta wait until April to know. (Isn’t my humor getting sicker by the day?)

In the meanwhile, folks who are really wondering what is Command & Conquer (aka the un-initiated folks; in other words: folks living on a different planet) google a bit and dont forget to check IGN, GameSpy and of course, good ol’ Wikipedia
I’ll help you though: Command & Conquer is the first true RTS Game, the one that spanned the genre (to be honest). Though this claim is a bit debatable (between Dune and C&C), yet it is the widely accepted fact. And Wikipedia Says:

“Command & Conquer (often abbreviated as C&C or CNC) is a video game franchise, mostly of the real-time strategy style as well two first-person shooter games based on the former. The Command & Conquer series was initially developed by Westwood Studios between 1995 and 2003, with development being taken over by Electronic Arts with the liquidation of Westwood Studios in 2003.

The first installment of the series was released world-wide on August 31, 1995 and was simply named Command & Conquer. The series is largely marketed for North American, European and Australasian audiences, though many of the games have been translated into other languages including German, French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese. The series is primarily developed for personal computers running Microsoft Windows, although some titles have been ported to various video game consoles and the Apple Macintosh. The latter games of the series starting with Tiberium Wars have also been developed in parallel for Xbox 360. The latest video game title of the franchise, Tiberium, is also being developed for PlayStation 3.” Read More.

I’ll just make a short note of it:
Listening to Linkin Park - Shadow of the Day (Minutes to Midnight), I had this idea of making music videos/open source videos using open source, fair use video clips and compiling a series of these to make a meaningful message.
The idea sounds promising to me and I’ve already seen a number of examples [refer: Linkin Park - What I've Done (Minutes to Midnight) Music Video, though its not open source actually].
So I am now looking for Online Open Source Video Clips Libraries, where I can get stock videos for the purpose. I have found these in my preliminary search and i hope to get something worthwhile out of these:

1. The Internet Archive: “The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.” (from the website)
2. The Open Video Project: “The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.” (from the website)
3. Video - Creative Commons (of course!):A directory of creative Commoned repositiories of videos is available here and i expect ot make the most use of it.
4. List of Video Sharing Websites:I make a note of this listing as I guess, I can find soemthign of help here.

But I don’t have much of an idea as to how such content can be generated. I guess, You Tube will be a good platform. Any Ideas? Where Can I get free licensed stuff?

The word love has many different meanings in English, from something that gives a little pleasure (”I loved that meal”) to something one would die for (ideals, family). It can describe an intense feeling of affection, an emotion or an emotional state. In ordinary use, it usually refers to interpersonal love. Probably due to its psychological relevance, love is one of the most common themes in art and music.

Just as there are many types of lovers, there are many kinds of love. Though love is inherent in all human cultures, cultural differences make any universal definition difficult to establish.[1] One definition attempting to be universally applicable is Thomas Jay Oord’s: to love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others, to promote overall well-being. This definition applies to the positive connotations of love.

Expressions of love may include the love for a “soul” or mind, the love of laws and organizations, love for a body, love for nature, love of food, love of money, love for learning, love of power, love of fame, love for the respect of others, etcetera. Different people place varying degrees of importance on the kinds of love they receive. According to many philosophers, the only goal of life is to be happy. And there is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved. Love is essentially an abstract concept, much easier to experience than to explain.

Read More.

Easier to experience than explain. Oh! Point taken.

So, How did you experience love? In English, Love has many forms and meanings… same is here… love for your family, kinship, the special one, nation, culture, your favourite superstar (??), err.. well… back to the point:

What is Love to you? How Did You Experience Love?
And yes: What Would You Do For The Ones You Love?

PS: Read this excellent post on first loves… [First] Love’s Labours Lost

Live in a coastal region? No? Inland? Continental? Never seen a ship all your life? Except the Movies and the TV? Oh! You live on the Internet? Great! So do I! Unfortunately, these days I am almost homeless. Why? A ship just disrupted my life. Some 2500 Miles away.

That’s Why!

Internet access in India and large parts of West Asia including the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia has been hit following breakdown of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea.

A ship diverted from Alexandria (Egyptian Port) due to bad weather has severed the Indian-owned FLAG and the SEA-ME-WE cables (more details at Tech Tree). Net Services have fallen down to 60-70% level of services. The problem is expected to continue for another fortnight or so.

And So I have decided to make use of that fortnight in a compiling a list of ways a ship can disrupt your life, no matter how inland you live. Here’s my list (will be updated):

1. It can make your Internet crawls.
2. Where is my peace?
3. It can make sending an email a tedious process.
4. It takes away the caek of your life.
5. Using messenger becomes a tedious process as it keeps logging in.
6. GMail is always unavailable.
7. It leads to cyber tsunamis.
8. It can make you write crazy blogs.
9. It can be a safe way to bring extremely unsafe creatures to your city.
10. Last time I was in a ship, I was ship-sick.

Know any interesting? Contribute please.

Note: No ships were damaged in the writing of this post. Neither will ever be.