Vivek live and kickin'

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Its been almost 2 years since I last posted anything here. But now if I ever go through my old posts I can re-live those moments. The past year has been good and stable. I've been off Facebook and most other social networks. Its not that I've deleted my accounts there but I log in there once in a while. I've removed all the apps from my phone so that I don't get any notifications. That has made a lot of change in the way I think. I am not constantly trying to go back there and like a post or read something interesting that is in my notifications. I just don't get any notifications that can get my attention. I wanted to make a Facebook De-Addiction extension but that's on the TODO list for now and ever. My time on twitter is not more than a minute every few days. The growth on pics.fefoo has been quite a bit over the last few months and all thanks to the responsive style-sheet that I was able to add one of the weekends. Now half of the traffic is from Mobile ...

This year has been relaxed (lack of a better word) to say the least. Did nothing much besides work. For once in many years I did not work or passionately work on any personal project. The list of personal projects is still there but have not been able to find the right structure to get it done. And for once I really enjoyed being lazy at home. Hopefully I have had enough rest and get something going in 2013 as far as personal projects are concerned. There is the next version of pics.fefoo, fefoo.com and the windows based twitter client which has been languishing in the dark for the last 3 years now. Not sure if it will ever be used by anyone else but me. I like using it but still need to get the kinks out and reduce the number of features and make a public version that someone else besides me can use and test. Here is hoping I release something in 2013 and also streamline my webhosting accounts.

The previous theme was supposed to be there for a few months but it ended up being there for years. In this new theme I got rid of all the junk that had ended up in the sidebars. There are no advertisements as those were just distractions and since its a personal blog there was no real need to put them in. Also removed the twitter, soup and the other blog feeds. They were adding too much distractions to the content. Have got rid of search, rss feeds and a dozen other distractions that were coming in the way of the main content. This new theme is supposed to be a little better as it puts focus on the content. And hopefully with twitter going towards the dark side I just might end up blogging again. There are so many topics that are in the drafts mode. Whenever I get sometime to polish them a little I will do that. Overtime this blog has turned from being about technology to being about me. All the unpublished posts are about technology so lets see when they finally go public. Had plann...

Another year just went by and I never even realized it. This year was exciting and quite a bit happened. Moved to a new company and city. With each passing year I did have my share of birthday blues but this time I feel a lot more calmer. The title is there just to make it sound a little melodramatic and also keeping with the tradition of the birthday blogpost titles . In that sense this year I feel a lot more stable. I know where I am heading, though not sure when I will get there, but there is a plan . This year saw a lot of ups and downs in terms of where I was heading. Finally moved to Bangalore which is the last thing I would have ever imagined. So far not really regretting the decision. In terms of blogging and tweeting did nothing amazing. None of my blogpost were on reddit, digg or slashdot ( Since I did not write anything ). I made nothing amazing in terms of s/w or released anything that would be noteworthy. Actually there was one thing that I did release pics.fefoo.com . It ...

Over the last 3 years I've very rarely written about my work but I guess since its all behind me now I can talk about it. For the last 3 and half years I was working with Opera Software and in the coming days I will be leaving the job. I have met some amazing people at Opera and have had a great time working with the people there. The people who worked in the India office have been really friendly and I have had a great time working with you guys. Am still not sure what I will be doing next. I want to take a few months off and try to finish of my personal projects. I also want to learn something new and probably prepare for a new beginning. I was going to write a post on my birthday but there was so much going on that I got little time to write anything. Over the last one year so many things have changed. Even though I loved working at Opera over the last few months I felt that my work had stagnated and I had reached a point where I had to move on. Hopefully if I take the next few ...

Its been 3 months since I wrote anything here. A lot has happened since then and hopefully continuing with the birthday tradition will be posting something tonight or maybe tomorrow. Also want to write about a few technology posts that have been going on in my mind and been in the drafts mode for a really long time now. The birthday post normally set my goals for the year and somehow they also seem to work and get me to my goals. More when I write that post.

Its been more than a week since I got back from the trip. I got swine flu as a return gift from the trip. The fever is more or less gone but my throat seems to be paying a price for it. It still feels all clogged. I cannot sit in front of the computer for more than 15-20 minutes. I wanted to watch movies and TV series but have been unable to do it. For the last one week all I've done is sleep and eat. I got my car last week but have not even test driven it till now. I hope I get back to normal before the weekend. Its been 3 weeks since I met up with my friends. All my personal projects have been on hold for the last month now. I just hope I can work on them on weekends.

Its been one exciting month. Travelling meeting up with people. I have been able to experience quite a lot over the course of the month. All went well till I got pulled down by the flu. Its been 3 days since I got back from the trip and I've not stepped out of my place, except to go visit the doctor. And to top it all I've not even been online. Just sitting in front of the computer for more than a few minutes is enough to get a headache. I just realized that I've again started neglecting the blog. Hopefully a better post with all the topics in my head will be out soon. There is so much to write. My first car, trip to Scandinavia and meeting up with a few interesting people. Not sure when or if I want to write about it. Plus I also need to write about my often neglected projects :) Till next time and hopefully in better health.

Not really sure how to start with it, or what exactly is bothering me. I seem to have lost focus of what I want to do and how I want to do it. I never really thought peer pressure could ever be a factor in any of my decisions. But with time I've realized that I seem to be a little lost. I was talking to a friend right now and it really got me thinking if I was even doing the right thing. In the last few years I don't think I've grown much. It almost feels like I have hit a plateau. I've not fallen down but neither have I grown. This is raising all kinds of alarm bells in my brain. I need to do something which is fulfilling and makes me happy and helps me show my real potential. Have this nagging feeling that I am kind of left behind while the whole world seems to have moved on. I was talking to this friend after a very long time and I realised I am still where I was when we last talked and he seems to have moved on. Its really funny how John Milton's 'On His Twe...

In the last few years I have moved from Slashdot --> Digg / Reddit --> Techmeme --> Twitter / FriendFeed . The transition has been gradual in most cases. Hardly a day went by when I would not visit Slashdot at least 2-3 times a day. Going through the top stories seemed to be so exhilarating. And coming back to today I hardly ever visit Slashdot. I have the RSS feed on my feed readers but its mostly marked as read. I read the FML feed more than the Slashdot feed. Then around early 2005 I got hooked onto Digg, it lasted till 2007 and then out of the blue I stopped visiting the site. Mostly because the whole content shifted from being Technical to being just another news site. Now I hardly ever visit Digg. Having a Digg RSS feed had never made sense due to the sheer volume of the stories. Now Digg seems to have gone main stream and I've lost all interest in it. Around the time I got hooked onto Digg I was also looking into Reddit. Initially I did not like Reddit. It seemed...

Its been one month since the launch of fefoo.com . Initially there was hardly any response. Then in the last 2 weeks it was featured on a few blogs in France and Italy and there was a huge inflow of people. That lasted for a week and now things are again cooling down. Initially no one understood the reason for using fefoo . But, once it was on a few famous blogs there were quite a few people who seemed interested and the traffic surged. Thanks to all these people who featured fefoo on their blogs. The list is in no particular order. FeFoo, a Fun New Way to Search the Web FeFoo Search – put your Firefox search box on steroids Fefoo, Google 2.0 Fefoo, moteur de recherche tout-en-un Introducing fefoo, search made simple! Firefox awesome bar made even more awesomer with fefoo Fefoo multi search engine - Phil Bradley's weblog fefoo – not another search engine « (the) health informaticist fefoo – Best Multi Search Engine Tool fefoo - by Alan fefoo, 19 合一搜尋引擎 Ricerche veloci e rapide con...

I saw this image on posted on reddit . Videos of some of the hallucinations given in that image. Rubber hand experiment The pinocchio illusion According to the description the pinocchio illusion did not work for them. The Ganzfeld Procedure From the YouTube video description, "2 minute extract from a documentation of a ganzfeld experiment, conducted as part of a research for the performance project psi: mid space. The sender, receiver and experimenters are in 3 separate rooms, and the target image appears in the fourth section.". More information about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment .

I had spent the last 2 months in Shimla and it was a quite pleasant there, now am back in Panchkula. The last months were relaxing to say the least. I've never really appreciated that place before, but this time I was able to stay home and relax. Its been a week since I arrived and there is hardly anytime when I am not sweating. I've hardly been outside, trying to stay indoors to beat the heat. The monsoons were supposed to arrive a week back but there have only been occasional pre-monsoon showers. A week before I came here I also released fefoo . Though the response has been really cold so far. Guess no one seems to get the concept of commands , plus the help documents are sketchy to say the least. The videos I wanted to make about fefoo have been scrapped. Lets hope I can get some time in the near future and am able to do something about fefoo and get people to use it. As for me I cannot work without it now. The webmasters, tools, movies, twitter, blogs, imdb and music cate...

I have been resting and occasionally working on fefoo . I hope I can release it soon. Done with the help but am stuck on the videos. I have 10 more days left in my vacations and hope I can finish off and release fefoo before it. Other than that I have been gaining weight and have been skipping my exercise schedule which is not very good. Hope to get back to my regular exercise schedule from tomorrow morning. Also I wanted to make something in Python in these vacations but I guess that is not happening anytime soon. Maybe next time I am on vacations.

I have been planning to revamp the homepage for quite a while now. Finally I have been able to do something about it. I finished off the non-javascript part a week back. I was hoping to do a lot more with the JavaScript part but shelved any major plans for now. In the process I ended up with a leaner page, with less than 7KB of JavaScript. I was planning to use YUI but in the end got rid of it. The JavaScript part is an add-on and even if you turn off javascript you should be able to see the complete content. I wanted to use JSON and get data from all possible places and show it on the homepage. The main problem with this approach is that the website becomes dependent on multiple sources. Incase flickr, blogger or twitter is down the page will take a long time to load. To get rid of the problem all the scripts are loaded after the page has loaded. Even if any of the scripts fail the page does not end up looking broken.

Have finally finished work on http://vivekjishtu.com/ , at least the non javascript version is up. Have been doing quite a bit of designing and trying to get the right template for the website. Since I am anything but a designer I stole my own design I had made 5 years back. Its almost like going back to basics. I had a similar design for my homepage http://vivekjishtu.tripod.com/ in 2005. It keeps a lot of design elements from that page and adds a few more things to it. Have planned to add quite a bit of JS elements to the page. But thats got to wait I guess.

Its almost like a birthday tradition for me now. This is the 4th year I will be posting on my birthday. I was going through the earlier b'day posts and I realized I always want to launch a project or a site on my b'day but something or the other comes up and it ends up getting delayed. This year no such promises just work and release things as and when it happens. The project is already delayed by 3 years. It just shows that I should focus on one project and not try to put my hand into 10 different things at once. This year I want to take a long vacation and probably figure out things that have been going on in my mind for a while now. Lets see if I am able to take it. In the year gone by I achieved one major goal and that was to shed excess weight. I lost 10 Kgs but have gained 3 Kgs over the last 2 weeks :P, that still makes it 7 Kgs in an year. I now need a good fitness regime if I want to stay healthy. The last 2 months have been full of ups and downs. Mostly in terms of h...

Somehow today Murphy's Law : If any thing can go wrong, it will! applies to me. I woke up at 5:00 AM and was in bed again at 5:30 A.M. Just kept twisting and tossing around in the bed but could not sleep. Since I could not do much I ended up writing the last blog post. Got up at 6:30 and planned to go out for a walk. Something that just could not happen. I had planned to get rid of a few bugs in fefoo but I never got time for it either. By 8:00 AM someone came over and my plan to work went down the drain. I ended up fixing a laptop and that took another 2 and half hours. I had planned to be in office by 9:30 but finally got in by 10:30. Thats enough ranting for a day I guess :P. Here is hoping things would be a little better now.

This comic strip captures my frame of mind as of now. Guess I am going through something like this as of now. I still have a week to go but am still not sure if I've achieved what I had wished for by the time I was this old. Guess its just another number but then thinking back I had planned to do quite a lot by now and I am still quite far away from the goal. I finally plan to launch beta version of fefoo.com on my birthday. Its still an alpha release as of now and most things that should work are broken. I hope to clear up the pile of bugs over the weekend and get the site upto a beta quality. I am still hopeful that it would be possible to launch it on my Birthday.