Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

I’m reading through Marc Andreessen’s latest blog post about The Moby Dick theory of big companies and a little ways into the post, I’m kind of impressed at how he’s weaving these relevant quotes (all having to do with whales) into a post about the small company perspective on big companies — and at the same time, I’m not thinking much of the quotes. But by the time I get to whale quote number six or seven… Wait a second, what’s going on here? Does Marc have a whale fetish? Is he quietly building a killer search engine for people with a whale fetish? Is he some sort of whale savant? If it’s supposed to be a sort of joke, I love his sense of humor. Regardless, it works for the material and still makes for a… (wait for it) whale of a good post.

We were exhibiting SnapStream’s new enterprise products at a tradeshow in Los Angeles last week and being a photo wonk, I picked up a tripod and took sequential photographs of us tearing down our booth. Then I used iMovie to put this together:

Click To Play

My wife left her Macbook here in the States and her sister has one in India so we tried using iChat today between Houston and New Delhi and it worked incredibly well. My daughter wished me a happy father’s day through iChat, I virtually tickled her (I made my tickle approach from here in Houston while my wife took care of the tickle delivery in New Delhi), and I caught up with my wife for a good hour or so. And my daughter got to see and talk to her Didi (my eldest sister’s daughter), her Bua (my eldest sister), her Fufaji (my brother-in-law), her Dada (my Dad) and Dadi (my Mom). She also got to see her toys at home that she’s been missing. Nicer quality video would have been nice, but that’s just a matter of bandwidth and the video quality was still good. Apart from that, the experience was great. iChat just worked, the way any good product should.

Now I’m curious to try the new iChat features in Leopard to see how they extend a video chat like this in meaningful ways. I think I would have used the new iChat feature that lets you share a photograph or a browser window in your chat session — at one point, Shonali and I were each looking at the same speadsheet of things to do and a calendar that I created in Google Docs and Google Calendar respectively and I think the share-a-window-in-your-chat feature would have been perfect for that.

My latest favorite tool: Synergy. Synergy lets me control other computers with my primary computer’s mouse and keyboard. So it’s like having a multi-monitor setup across computers or like having a software KVM that works over the network. In the setup below, the laptop in the middle is my primary computer and with Synergy, I can drag my mouse cursor from my primary computer to the Dell laptop on the left and I can control the Dell using the mouse and keyboard on my primary computer. The setup could be easier, but once you have it installed, it just works. Another nice thing is that your clipboard is also copied across computers. So you could copy a string on one computer and paste it on another. The setup could be easier, but otherwise I highly recommend Synergy.

(from Slashfood)

I’ve been wanting something like Ultramon for a while. Now, when I get up from my desk at home or in the office (where I almost always use a second monitor with my laptop), I don’t have to laboriously disable my second monitor (it amounts to about 7 operations) through the Windows Display Properties to reclaim the windows that were on it. Ultramon has a one-click disable/enable secondary monitor. Nice!

The next step will be to find something that automatically detects the disconnect/connect of a second monitor and automatically changes my multi-monitor settings accordingly.

I wonder how the Mac handles this?

I was at an airport a couple of months ago with my parents waiting for a late night flight. My Mom had to take some medicine and all the shops selling bottled water were closed and the nearest water fountain was barely visible… probably about 100 meters away. And I didn’t want my Mom to have to get up and walk over to the water fountain. So I used some of my childhood Origami skills to fashion a glass for her out of paper. I was reminded of this today when reading “No Snack Cup? No Problem.” on Wired’s Geekdad blog. (Yes, I was quite proud of my paper water glass. )

I highly recommend the Geekdad blog, it’s kind of like Make Magazine but with training wheels (and no soldering irons) and you definitely don’t need to have any children to enjoy it.