Habitually Good

If you use Gmail then you must have noticed that sheer number of Spam email that Gmail filters out for you. It is particularly good at doing this. However, all this spam ends up as unread email in the Spam folder.

And I don’t know about you but at least when I log in to Gmail and I see this count of unread email beside the Spam folder, it bothers me a lot. There was a time when I used to simply go there and delete these emails every day just so I don’t see that number.

It turns out that there is a better way to solve the problem. We use Gmail filters to solve it. Here’s how:

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I have blogged before about a couple of ways using which you can have many different email Ids using your single Gmail account:

• Using the “+” symbol
• Using or not using the ‘.’

Today, I tell you about a third one.

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A while ago I posted photographs I had taken during a thunderstorm. Those came out nice according to my standards. This caused me to go back over other photos that I have taken in the past and put them up on the blog.

I have put together some pictures I had taken last year during a visit to Pattaya. These pictures were taken at the Millennium Park in Pattaya. These are not as cool as the lightning pictures, but some of them are pretty good (because of the way the colors have come out in them). Please leave your comments on what you think about these.

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Here are some very quick-fire statistics from my blog for a browsing period of the last couple of months. These statistics are revealing as they are a reflection of the type of users that visit my blog. And since there are not too many regular readers (more than 80% of daily visitors on this blog are unique, first-time visitors) on my blog, I think these statistics should roughly reflect the state of the users on the Internet looking to read technical content (that is what this blog is mostly about).

These statistics were collected courtesy of Woopra, a blog analytics tool that I have been using recently and graphs were drawn in Excel.

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The third installment of the Google Treasure Hunt is live. I have been through the first two challenges and been successful at solving them correctly.

However, the third one seemed as if it required knowledge of networking and how routing tables work. Of course, I have no idea about these things, but I think I have managed to solve this one nevertheless (of course, I am awaiting the result on my submitted answer). Here is the reasoning I used to answer my puzzle. It was pure logic.

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Zinio is a leading online magazine subscription provider. You can subscribe to online versions of your favorite magazines and read them from your laptop. Interestingly, Zinio offers you a free subscription to a select number of magazines if you are an iPhone user. Why I am interested is that this subscription includes one of my favorite magazines called Popular Photography.

Now, if only everyone had an iPhone, this would have been a great tip. However, that is not the case. Even I don’t have an iPhone, however, I don’t need one.

You can fool the Zinio site into thinking that you are browsing it from an iPhone, and here’s how you can do this simple feat (although I am pretty sure that Zinio will find a way around it soon enough, but till then you can enjoy).

You can do this through either FireFox or Safari as a browser. However, FireFox requires a plugin to do this and since I am using FireFox 3 RC1, this plugin doesn’t work for me, so I am going to show you how to do this for Safari. Run Safari (if you don’t have it installed, get it from the source and install it) and follow the following steps:

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The weather in Delhi has been super freakish lately (for this time of the year). Daily thunderstorms have become a norm and it’s getting to be quite a nuisance. However, for every dark cloud, there exists a silver lining. Last night when the rain gods were having a party, I decided to take out my camera and capture the silver lining. Here follow some of the pictures that came about from that effort.

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My recent attempts at playing the Google Treasure Hunt found me looking for ways to work with very large numbers. My solution to the first puzzle was consistently giving me the wrong answer. After a while I stopped looking at my solution for mistakes and started looking at the answer closely; it turned out that Excel (which is what I was using to generate my answers) lost precision working with very large numbers. Well, I decided to write a program in C# for this and it turned out that even here, we lost precision (and I guess that should have been expected).

Rather than write my own class which can manipulate large numbers, I decided to see if there is anything already available. Well, there is.

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Google is holding a treasure hunt and I took a look and decided to give it a shot. I probably won’t make it all the way through, because I don’t have any low-level Linux knowledge (since low-level Linux trivia will be part of the treasure hunt). But the rest is fun.

So, begins the quest by a fun first question which talks about a robot and his quests through a grid. For some reason, the dumb robot wants to know all possible ways to reach from the upper left of the grid to the lower right of the grid. Being a programmer, my first impulse was to write a program that calculates the number of paths, and that didn’t take long. And here in lies the first hint of this puzzle:

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While Google has been talking about how they have made things faster on Gmail, and how much quicker it is to load now, there is another little change that they have made to Gmail, which is much more useful.

It is the addition of a progress bar where there used to be a non-helpful, red, “Loading…” label. This label was useless. You didn’t know how much more time it would take to load, or if the connectivity was poor, it would simply stay forever. Now, however, it is much better since they are following one of the most common tips concerning usability. Take a look at the screen shot:

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