Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

I feel good tonight because I fixed a mechanical problem with Shonali’s Dell Latitude laptop. The hinge on Shonali’s laptop (between the screen and the base) has been extremely loose for, oh, about the last year or so. I spent about 30 minutes this evening, took the thing apart (thanks in part to the service manual on www.dell.com), found the loose screws in the hinge, fixed it and now the laptop feels like new.

I’m surprised at xeni and boing boing for taunting India’s offer to help the United States with handling the aftermath of Katrina in this post. The post is entitled, “Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!” Hey Xeni, boing boing, way to propagate American arrogance to all of your readers in and outside the United States!

I’ve been using Gmail now for a little bit and it works pretty well — I’m impressed with the Gmail interface. There are still some things I need to experiment with like attachments and keyboard shortcuts (are there any?) but right now, I’m not feeling much pain after using Gmail for a while. I wonder if there will be pain associated with not having my calendar or tasks in Gmail.

One thing that I wish worked better: I’ve setup my personal and work e-mail addresess to both forward to my gmail account and I’ve also verified both against my Gmail account so I can send e-mails from personal/work addresses from with gmail. But one problem I’ve encountered is that Gmail doesn’t make any inferences about which e-mail address to use when replying to a message — it simply uses whichever e-mail address you’ve marked as default. In my case, I have my personal address marked as the default so when replying to work e-mails, I have to CLICK on other choices (under the from address) and then I have to CLICK and CHOOSE my work e-mail address. Three extra clicks, in my opinion. Hey Gmail product people: why not do away with those extra clicks?

For the past week (give or take) Outlook has randomly been crashing on me about 3-4 times a day, on average. What a frustration. I spent a little bit of time playing with GMail yesterday and with their support for third party verifiable e-mail addresses, I’m thinking about making that switch. It sure would be nice if Google had a client-side rich app, though I have to say that Gmail is pretty damn rich for a web app. Off to re-run Outlook. Sigh.

So here’s my quick review of slide, after using it for 15-30 minutes:

• I’d love to have the sidebar thingy as a feature of flickr or have it as a plugin to the Google sidebar (feeding off of my flickr photostream).
• I’d also be interested in the ability for the software to scan my local hard disk and just automatically find them and then, with the click of one button, upload them to a central site (I’d prefer flickr) for sharing or subscription by my friends (imagine this as a feature to picasa — it does most of this, it’s just the “upload to flickr” part that I’d want it to do).

All of my photo management stuff revolves around one software package: picasa. I’m starting to introduce a second service into the mix: flickr. I’m just not sure where slide fits into this.

One thing that Slide hasn’t done, in my 30 minutes of installation and expirmentation: it hasn’t found most of the photographs on my hard drive, which is weird. They are all in a pretty standard place (the My Pictures folder) yet it’s only found other, more obscure photos.

One thing that I find to be a bit annoying is how when I mouseover a photo in the stream at the left, it automatically enlarges the image that I’ve hovered over and then it takes a moment for that image to go away. The enlarge thing happens too easily — it’s almost like I have to avoid that section of my screen now because if my mouse rolls over there, I suddenly have this big pop-up taking up my screen (and covering up the slider and preventing me from browsing other images). And, if I want to see an even larger version of that image, I double click on that image in the enlarged slide window and it takes me to a webpage (slide’s webpage for some channels or a 3rd party website for some other channels). When I do this, I would expect for the enlarged slide image window to go away but it doesn’t. So now I’m looking at the enlarged-enlarged image in a web page, I close that, I have to go back and close the enlarged and then I’m back to viewing the slide bar. Basically, this whole (important!) part of the app doesn’t seem to be polished from a usability standpoint. The dynamics should be slightly different I think, at least for the way I want to use it.

Also the slide thing can be annoying and distracting. I used the Google Sidebar for a couple of days (before I decided it wasn’t a useful enough allocation of desktop real estate) and I like the alternating single image in its photo plug-in a lot better.

So those are some scattered notes and first impressions.

In this post Robert Scoble wonders if Google is trying to recruit one of Microsoft’s researchers because there are Google Adwords on her name. Maybe, but what I think is more likely is that she’s well published in her field and they are ads targeted at other researchers who are likely to be doing searches for her work. I noticed this a long time ago because there’s a well known computer science researcher with my name at IBM and for a long time I’ve noticed that Google has adwords running on his name.

Hmmm, actually, now that I think about it, maybe their ads on “Rakesh Agrawal” are because of that great elevator algorithm I wrote in my operating system class in college that won me fame and adulation around the country! 🙂

I read two interesting articles this morning about Google Talk and the IM industry. First, Nugget’s livejournal post, picked up on slashdot. Thesis: Google’s not implemented s2s in their implementation of Jabber which means that Google Talk users are still in a closed system. What Nugget didn’t try to do is answer the question that this article lead me to: why isn’t Google supporting s2s? There must be some reason for this over there. I read something on one of their Google Talk web pages, where they talked about federation, about how they had federated with sipphone and earthlink because they ‘agreed with their philosophies about open chat systems’ or something like that. It sounds like there are some hints at the reason in that statement, but it doesn’t fully connect the dots for me.

And then there was this story that Nugget posted to about how Google Talk was shaking up the IM world and how this might accelerate some real competition and how that would be a welcome thing.

This is interesting. One of my cousins in India has just started using Ofoto’s UK site to upload photographs of their newborn daughter (lotta babies born in the past 2 months!). My first surprise was that I had to create a new account on the Ofoto.co.uk site. Hmm. I can type pretty fast and it’s not above my threshold of pain to create a new account, I guess, so OK, fine, I create an Ofoto UK account, wondering all the while why I can’t just use my Ofoto U.S. account. Now I can view the photographs, great.

So today, I decided I wanted to order a bunch of photographs from the Ofoto site and I wondered to myself, “Surely they have at least their back-end infrastructure setup so that the photographs will get shipped from their U.S. office rather than their UK office.” I’m probably wrong, though I’m not sure. It looks like the photos are going to get printed in the UK and then mailed from there — at least that’s what I’m left to conclude after the magnitude of the shipping charge I’m paying.

What are the implications of this kind of weak international infrastructure (besides the fact that it’s annoying to me as a user :))? It seems obvious to me that we live in an increasingly globally mobile society and that this is the type of user an Internet-based site should be supporting. It’s specifically within the grasp of any company, with technology and the Internet, to solve problems like these. Not doing so is bad operations, architecture and design.

Another perspective on this issue is that societies and communities that cross national borders are able to develop much more quickly today than ever before because of the Internet. Folks from all over the world have access to reams of data from other countries of the world. I can surf the website of Japanese companies, buy electronics from Hong Kong (like lik-sang), exchange e-mails with bloggers in the UK, etc. Look at how engadget has launched sites in Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. So even leaving aside people/communities/societies that are moving around, there are tons of people that are interacting across borders and societies and communities coming out of it. At the same time, I’ll temper these comments by saying that it is not like we live in a borderless world. There are still lots of things that stymie these cross-border societies and communities (language, probably a fair bit of culture, legal code, tarriffs). But the trend is definitely one that involves more global mobility and more cross-border communities and societies.

Two final observations:

1) technology companies should do what they can to cater to, where appropriate (like the ofoto / kodak gallery example above!), globalization trends because they are, I believe, up-and-to-the-right trends.

2) there will be exponential growth in technologies and services around globalization that will drive these trends and will be driven by these trends.

I came across the Koffka ring and the Checkershadow optical illusions earlier this morning. Very cool! Here’s the checkershadow in-lined:

(the square labelled ‘A’ and the square labelled ‘B’ are the same color!)

Seeing these two optical illusions reminded me of the rotating snakes optical illusions that I think were slashdotted a long time ago. He’s got a few new ones up that are as interesting and along similar lines as the original.