Mano’s Tech World

Last year, I created a simple gadget to fetch my Picasa albums. Since then, I have received numerous requests to provide additional features and functionalities. While I continued to support the gadget and provided simple enhancements, I couldn’t find time to look at the major ones. Finally, I did spend some time and I have just released an updated version with the following features:

• Display random photos from Picasa albums at specified intervals
• Display description of the photo
• Auto width and height adjustment based on screen size
• Display private albums
• Display albums for your friends
• Complete player controls - play, pause, forward, rewind

If interested, check this out:

Last friday (10-19-2007), I became dad for the second time. Our daughter SAHANA was born. We are all pretty much excited.
More photos

What do you do on Thanksgiving day when you don’t cook turkey, everything is closed, its raining and too cold to go outside? Say bye to Win-doze and welcome Ubuntu.

I’m actually surprised that it has taken a long time to make this move ‘cos I use Linux/Unix a lot at work. Now, it feels great for two reasons:

• Ubuntu is cool and I love it
• No more blue screen of death!

We just became proud owners of our dream house. The house is 2-storied with 4 bedrooms, has a welcoming front yard, a huge private backyard, great schools and a lovely community. We are all quite excited about this.I hope to publish more pictures and videos of the house in near future.

We had a great vacation at Niagara Falls and drove more than 1200 miles with Arvind. We crossed the American border and spent the next couple of days at Niagara Falls, Canada.The weather was quite pleasant in the lower 50s. The hotel stay was nice and from our room we could view and enjoy the falls.

We visited ‘Kingdom of Lost Birds’ - the largest indoor aviary in the world. Arvind had lot of fun chasing all pretty colored birds. We spent long hours at the Falls, walked a lot, took the boat ride, enjoyed the night illumination from the Skylon tower. Niagara is awesome!!

We also had time to visit other places of interests - Wax museum, Guiness world records museum, Ripley’s Believe it or not.

Enjoy pictures and video clippings.

The last two home videos that I created were about an hour long. While a lot shooting is required to make such movies, the effort and time required is even more significant.

For a change, I’m going to create very short movies (clippping) and make then available on the internet through my site. This way, I would be able to share these immediately with my friends and family.

Check out the Home Video section. I have added Arvind’s petfarm visit to it.

Hello Blog World! Here I come!!

Being a web savvy and software geek, I’m probably a late entrant to the blogosphere. But, better late than never.

Every day in software development, we encounter new problems and we learn new tricks and techniques to solve them. It is interesting to note that most of us have similar issues and are trying to solve the same problem again and again. So, I decided I will make an effort to share my knowledge hoping these would help somebody. While I’m not sure if I would find enough time to put my thoughts in writing, I’m going to give it a fair shot! (Believe it or not, playing with my 2 year old son is lot more fun than geek stuff)

Happy blogging …