Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

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.

(We were all in deep thought at Chuck E. Cheese last week in Chapel Hill — Nitin, Ananya and me)

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.

(video shot with my new Canon SD600 and uploaded using Google Video, until the video goes live on Google Video, click here to view it.)

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.

I was on a flight yesterday and I saw something I had never seen before — someone watching a movie on an iPod Video. Maybe this guy bought one of the 1.3M Disney movies sold on iTunes:

I’ve wanted something like Callwave for a while now so when I read about it a couple of weeks ago on Lifehacker, I marked it as “keep new” in bloglines, planning to return to it… some time. Well, inspiration struck earlier this week.

Voicemail is a pain because

1. it’s not searchable
2. it’s not easy to access (Apple’s visual voicemail should help with this)
3. it’s not archivable (related to #1)
4. sometimes my cell phone won’t be getting good reception somewhere so it will fail to notify me about voicemails until long after they’ve been left
5. if I’m traveling overseas, I have to remember to make a long distance phone call to check my voicemail and once I’ve made that call, then I have to deal with #2.
6. I can’t forward a voicemail to someone in case I need to share a message

Over the past couple of years, I’ve moved all of my voicemail to email… My home voicemails get to my e-mail account courtesy of Vonage. My office voicemails get to me on e-mail via our office PBX. But my cell phone’s voicemails have continued to be locked up on my phone… until now.

Callwave’s setup was easy. I chose my provider, entered my cell phone number and Callwave gave me a command sequence to enter into my phone that changed where my phone would route unanswered calls. And, Callwave did a good job of anticipating my main questions before entering the command sequence: “What if I want to go back to my original settings? What if I need to check voicemails in my old voicemail system”. Answers to both questions were prominently visible at the right places during setup.

And that was it! Now, everytime I get a voicemail on my cell phone, I get an e-mail with the caller’s phone number, the caller ID (if it’s available), and the message as a WAV attachment. And if someone calls and doesn’t leave a message (even if my phone is off), I get an e-mail notifying me of the missed call with the caller’s phone number and their caller ID. Nice!

The fact that the service is completely free has me puzzled. A maximum number of messages per month? Nope. A maximum message length? The free version won’t send messages as WAV attachments? Nope. The pay version has some features that I can’t imagine myself being interested in (the ability to screen phone calls as they are being left and the subsequent ability to pick-up a call while someone is in the middle of leaving a message). I guess I shouldn’t complain about something being free, but it does make me concerned about whether the service will survive or not.

The only other complaint I have (did I really just complain that the service is free??) is that the audio quality is sub-par. I haven’t had any actual problems with it, ie all of my messages have been clear enough to understand, but I still wish the audio quality was better.

It would seal the deal on what is otherwise a perfect service.

I like Bob Garfield’s commentary on TV commercials from yesterday’s football game… what do they call it? Oh yeah, the Superbowl. His commentary on the Snickers ad: “Snickers… for macho young men insecure about their sexuality!” and his commentary on the GM ad: “We’re GM. Everybody gets laid off [even our robots].” I haven’t seen all the ads, but having seen those two spots, I have to agree with both comments.

I was doing some research yesterday and there was a specific article from the New York Times that I had read back in December (about a month and a half ago) that I wanted to re-read because it had some information in it that I wanted to follow-up on. For example, there were some people quoted in the article that I wanted to try and track down and talk to. So I did a search on what I remember from the article and the date range that I remembered the article falling within. With each search, I got one or two short sentences that matched the words in my query from each matching article and then I could click on each matching article and see a canned two sentence abstract.

Long story short, none of this was enough for me to figure out whether I had the right article. I was about to sign up for their $7 / month program that would give me access to 100 articles a month but then I thought, wait, do I really want to sign up for some recurring subscribes that’s going to run me nearly $100 / year. Why don’t I do a web search for the information I’m looking for?

Sure enough, one Google search later, I had far more information than what I was looking for in that one New York Times article. Assuming that the New York Times’ decision to maintain a paywall is a sound one (hard for me to analyze this since I’ve never been in the content business), there are things they could be doing better. Like on that 100 article / month limit — how does that work? Does it roll over from month to month? Can I see more of an abstract to figure out whether a particular article is the article I was looking for or am I limited to the same lame duck preview? Once I’ve “purchased” an article, up to how long afterwards can I view the article? Is there a place where I can go to view all the articles that I’ve purchased access to? Why not give me an all-you-can-eat option?

For me, it wasn’t even the actual cost of the service — my questions above would have been the same whether the service had been priced at $5 / month, $15 / month or $25 / month. It was more of the principle of it — when there’s so much information out there from other news outlets that’s “freely” available, is there really something that I’d pay to get just from the New York Times?