Friday, October 24, 2008

This ain't a bomb ...

Did you try 'Minefield' yet? It seems good! I would not put in the same league as its predecessor yet, since it is still in the alpha stage. But from what I have tried since this morning, there have not been any problems with it.

Oh, by the way, minefield is the next gen Firefox (yepp ... built from the same mozilla base by the mozilla team) with a supposedly ultra-speed Javascript engine. One site (arstechnica) even went to the extent of putting it 10 times faster than Google chrome's JS engine.

An advantage with installing Minefield is that it installs into a separate folder from Firefox. Most (not all) of the firefox plugins I had worked seamlessly with Minefield automatically. Even in the Windows Task Manager, the process appears as "firefox.exe". The bookmarks and form passwords I had saved in Firefox also got transferred automatically to Minefield.

FF's themes however are not yet supported in MF. So, am going to be in the testing mode for next 1 week and see how Minefield fares as against Firefox on user experience. In fact, to update this very blog am using Minefield now. Will update my findings later ...

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Bitten by the bug

If you are thinking of love, well .. yes, it is love (and hate!) for me :)

It all started with my birthday when Abi gifted me a wooden chess board. Poeple might ask what is so great about a wooden board with 64 squares painted black and white. For me, it is a huge opportunity to do something I really like to do. For lack of ability to express better, I can simply say 'it is just beautiful' :) Chess has been a secret passion for a very long time now. I used to even sometimes envy people who were so good at playing chess .. may be that was a silent hurt - of not being able to learn that elusive art well!

Well .. so began my chess saga. Now, after about 2 months, Abi is just short of complaining that I am so lost in my games and chess study spending very little time with her or Isha. The truth of the matter is, earlier I used to spend so much time on the internet for which she complained and that time just got diverted into chess now!

Out of the blue, I downloaded the Kasparov Chessmate software and started using it. Abi's brother saw it and needless to say got bitten by the same bug. We started playing some serious matches within ourselves. Abi is not someone who witnesses from the sidebar for a long time. After all, she was the one who taught me the basic chess tactics of fork & pin while we were in the US! And mind you, she loses regularly but only if she is distracted with something or other - otherwise, she is a far better player. Am not ashamed of that, it as after all a great learning experience to play with a downright attacking player like Abi :)

May be I will write all my chess learnings and how one site led to another in this process sometime soon. But first, I need to study DSP (that is right - Digital Signal Processing) - the exam is nearing, hushhhhhhhhhhh!!

Mahashivratri 2019 - A fantastic celebration

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