Author: rakesh

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if this report that MediaPortal may have stolen code from an MCE plug-in developer’s code were true. The MediaPortal folks ran Google Adwords that contained our trademarks ‘SnapStream’ and ‘Beyond TV’ a year or two ago — which is perfectly fine. But a trademark owner has the right to ask Google to suspend any ads that use their trademarks in the United States — which is what we did in the case of these MediaPortal ads. So what did we see a week or two later, after Google blocked them from running those ads? MediaPortal was running the same ads, but with our trademarks mis-spelled to avoid the block that had put on their account. Sigh. The other thing about the MediaPortal folks that I’ve seen is that they (= their users, their developers) frequently troll blog postings and forums and often post just for the sake of promoting MediaPortal and not because they have anything meaningful to say.

UPDATE: The Mediaportal folks seem to be apologizing for their rip-off. Good for them.

While I’m as excited as the next gadget freak by all the talk of the new Apple iPhone, the mythical Google phone, and Palm’s next SmartPhone-move, the new HTC S730 (aka the HTC Wings) could actually be my next phone. I have the Cingular 2125 right now and the clincher for me is that the HTC Wings is about the same size and weight as my 2125 and it has a slideout keyboard.

Cingular 2125 size/weight: 116mm x 46mm x 18mm, 106 grams
HTC Wings size/weight: 100mm x 50mm x 19mm, 120 grams

For some reason, I don’t know of too many SmartPhones in this size/weight category. Don’t other people want something small that easily slips into the pocket without taking up too much space and can be held and operated with one hand? More info on the HTC S730 (aka HTC Wings) at PDA db.

I’ll be at SXSW interactive this week/weekend — if you’ll be there, drop me a line (contact information in the right margin).

After this past Wednesday’s episode of Lost, I had been thinking about writing something about how I thought Lost had ‘jumped the shark’ (thinking about writing a blog post is something that us newbie bloggers do a lot). But it turns out I don’t need to write anything because Dave Zatz has it covered. After the great television that Lost created in its first season, I’m sad to say that things have officially taken a turn for the worse and they’ve lost me as a fan.

As I mentioned here on my blog last week, I had Blurb print the same book for me as a soft cover and as a hard cover and while I loved the hard cover, I wasn’t so excited about the soft cover. I thought the only difference between the two books would be the quality of the covers. But actually, the print quality of every page of the hard cover was better than that of the soft cover. I had a friend ask me more about the quality difference so I went and scanned one of the same pages from each:

A photograph from the hard cover:

…and the same page from the soft cover:

Admittedly, this photo didn’t have the best lighting to begin with, you can tell that the soft cover provided a lot less color depth.

I just learned that Rice’s Dr. Ken Kennedy passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. Dr. Kennedy would alternate teaching Rice’s compilers course with Dr. Keith Cooper and when I took the class, Keith was teaching it so I missed have him as a professor. But I had meetings with him on a couple of occasions after graduation and was always impressed with his clarity of thought and friendliness. I had also run into Dr. Kennedy’s wife in the past months and I knew of his struggle with cancer. I’m saddened to hear that he’s passed away at the young age of 61.

My first experience with Blurb was a pretty positive one so I spent some more time 2 weeks ago and put together another Blurb book. This time, it was more than a test run. My new book had about 200 pages in it and this time I had paid more attention to light correction (something I still think Blurb needs to be do better in-software).

I also ordered both a softcover and a hardcover version of my book because I was interested in comparing the two book types (previously I had ordered only a hardcover).

What did I learn from my second order? I was surprised to find that the quality of printing for Blurb’s softcover books is significantly inferior to the quality of their hard cover books. The cover wasn’t as brilliant, which I could have excused, but the photographs inside the book had inferior quality and noticeably less color depth. Everyone I showed the softcover version too noticed the inferior quality right away. I recommend against making photo albums using the Blurb service’s softcover books. In hindsight, I’m lucky that the first book I ordered from Blurb was a hardcover because if it had been a softcover, I probably wouldn’t have ordered from them again.

While the soft cover underwhelmed, the hard cover was an absolute pleasure. Unlike my first book which I had thrown together pretty quickly, I had spent a lot more time with my second book and it included more than 250 photographs on more than 200 pages. See photographs of my second order below…

The package as it arrived at my desk in the office.

The two books were inside the package, each individually wrapped in plastic (the hard cover is shown on top of the soft cover here)

A photograph of the hard cover book

A close-up of the hard cover book’s spine (this is as close as my SD600 could get without getting blurry)

The soft cover book

The front cover of the hard cover

The inside flap of the hard cover

One page spread in the hard cover Blurb book

Another page spread in the hard cover Blurb book

The back cover of my Blurb book

Let me join in the hopes and pleas of others. I switched over to using Gmail for work about a year ago, I’ve been above 90% capacity for a couple of months now and I would jump at the chance to pay for more space. Why isn’t Google offering this? There’s the additional infrastructure problem that this would create, but my gut tells me this isn’t the issue. I’m guessing that giving users the option to pay for extra space in Gmail is waiting on another Google product release, like maybe their net storage product.