Deepanjan Nag's Magnum Opus

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Yahoo! must be mighty flattered. The redoubtable AOL has released a Beta of its homepage that looks remarkably similar to Yahoo's.

Don't get me wrong, I am one of the innumerable converts who have taken to reading news and blogs via newsreaders instead of jumping from URL to URL. Navigation is uniform across all site-feeds and the convenience is too much to be ignored. But after using some of the best newsreaders (both desktop and web-based), I've come to realize there's at least one critical flaw that's innate to all of them: the lack of hierarchy in news presentation. All news items get the same amount of coverage irrespective of how vital or trivial the issue might be. So India launching a foreign satellite for the first time is only as important as an unknown girl eloping with an equally unknown boy when viewed through a newsreader! The other flaw, those less critical, is the problem of redundancy . When you read news from multiple sources, you often come across the same issue being covered by more than one. Although the same problem persists if you prefer URL-hopping, a better alternative is

Okay, everyone who has had the ill-luck of coming across my blog and subsequently being subjected to its mass-produced trash is well aware of the typos that infest most of my posts. But my previous post has definitely set a new record with its utterly crappy literature and typos. I never revise my posts before publishing and I seldom go through my posts post publishing. I guess that's the culprit. I hope to be more scrupulous from now on.

A lot transpired over the past one week. I could have blogged on and on about them but...Blogger.com was blocked from my previous workstation and my short-term memory wouldn't last long enough. To make matters worse, I didn't (and still don't) have access to the Net from home either. Despondency had hit a peak. There was a high-profile showdown on Friday and I was the victor. I also planned to get Net connection on my mobile but the Hutch executive mislead me by saying that my phone didn't support XHTML. I gave up when he insisted that he was sure of it even though I remained skeptical. My feature-rich phone letting me down?!! No way! This was too much of an insult. I came home to consult the manual only to learn that I was indeed right. I felt like banging the head of the executive. Will do it next month when I revisit the shop to apply for the connection. I've been a Hotmail devotee ever since I started using the Net 9 years ago. But my loyalty to Yahoo! cannot b

We have a regional calendar according to which today marked the first day of the new year for the bengalis and probably a few other communities. SMSes exchanged in the morning made me aware of the special day. Mani was scheduled to take his computer away (sigh!) and I was racing against time to complete the Frank Sinatra and Keith Jarrett downloads. To make matters slightly more complicated, the computer's CD writer wasn't working. Reddy came to my rescue a couple of days ago and lent me his 40GB external hard disk to transfer my 3.7GB downloads. I halted the downloading in the afternoon when Mani came on his evil mission to whisk away his PC! Jarrett's downloads were over by then but Sinatra remained incomplete. Well, I can't complain. Possibly, the only good thing to have come of Mani's visit was Santosh finally visiting my dwelling after many months. It was great talking to him and I still wish my roommate of 3.5 years (not in 1 stretch) could come back. Mani lef

A first: I have a headache...a really bad one. I wanted to write something on falling sick (I've fallen into one today after many years today!) since long. Now that the condition is authentic, I'll too sick to write! Maybe I can pile up the memories by this weekend and commit them all to my blog. But that's only if lethargy and a hurting head don't get the better of me.

This happens to be the best selling jazz album of all time. Listen to one of the tracks ( Flamenco Sketches ) and discover why jazz is often called America's classical music.

Bought a book on Servlets and a 5-issue compilation of Amar Chitra Katha titles on Birbal! It's been so many years since I last laid my hands on Amar Chitra Katha , a magazine I used to voraciously read as a child. Many a plead to Dad to accompany him to the market was inspired by the prospect of finding a new issue of the magazine which appeared fortnightly (although I wouldn't count the passing days). And when the issue did surface, there was only one thing to do: buy it! The fun hasn't diminished one bit in all these years, although that special feeling is gone. Dad's no more and I need not wait for a fortnight to buy the new issues since a huge archive is now available at Landmark . Still, there was more fun in the fortnightly wait and mounting suspense. One issue I waited for a long time but never found was The Gita . The friendly competition that a friend and I used to have over the number of issues bought was implicitly a race towards possessing this untimate is