Tech Tonic

Mark Zuckerberg seems to have given the Indian media the slip. Facebook PR assured me that he wasn’t giving any official interviews and it seems no one managed to win the TechGoss reward for snaps/info of him in India.

Well, if this was indeed just a holiday/spiritual tour, then history suggests the first thing he’ll do, when he gets back, is get embroiled in a controversy! Confused? Hear me out on this one:

1. Steve Jobs visits India in 1974 for some spiritual nirvana and bums around a bit. He goes back to Atari and (allegedly) shafts poor Steve Wozniak while working on ‘Breakout‘. The incident becomes part of tech folklore…

2. Jimmy Wales visits India in January 2008 and after an interview at IIT Bombay, tells me he’s headed to the Himalayas for a few days of peace and solitude. He comes back to the US and gets into a mess after (allegedly) trying to influence his (then) paramour’s Wikipedia entry.

(Image courtesy Gus Freedman of Wikimedia Foundation under CC-BY-SA license)

3. Google Founders backpack around India ‘like a couple of sophmores‘ in October 2004. They get back and Google is soon faced with an extended run of controversies.

So now that we officially have a ‘three-is-a-trend’ conspiracy theory, expect the Z to be fire-fighting soon (Does this count?) If he takes the advice of a Guru on the IPO as suggested by Joy of Tech, it would definitely be controversial …

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

If there’s one workshop I’m itching to attend, it’s a “DIY Case Modding” session. I’ve seen Parvez in action slicing through metal, though I don’t know of too many others who make a living out of it in India.

I’ve been avoiding getting onto Twitter for a long time now hoping to maintain one last bastion of sanity in my wired world. My colleague Aalaap, a ‘Twittervangelist’ of sorts,  recently conducted a “Why Are You Not On Twitter?” session at BarCamp Mumbai and even that didnt shake my inertia though it got me teetering on the brink!

It was this news item about Twitter coming to an arrested journalist’s rescue in Egypt, that finally had me convinced. I’m now well and truly on my way to a Twittered existence. Of course, I realised how “behind the curve” I was when, promptly, the very day after I siged up, TechCrunch officially declared the Web 3.0 manifesto - less Twitter, more peace!

follow abhi2point0 at http://twitter.com

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

From the discussion it seems that AMD is once again on the radar of hard-core gamers with the new Phenom processor range. A recent AMD exec I met told me that folks there have decided to forget that there was a year 2007 and are moving on!

Most people though don’t seem to be very comfortable with the thought of slapping on ATI graphics cards and I don’t blame them. We’re still to see the fantastic synergies that the AMD takeover of ATI was supposed to herald. Maybe AMD should also acquire a high-end motherboard company and sell pre-packaged combos instead of getting people to opt for trial and error?

Coincidentally, I bought my first graphics card today. I’ve always messed around on test PCs and somehow never got around to buying a card for myself. The task was complicated by the fact that I have a slim cabinet which can only mount half-size metal plates. I scouted Lamington Road in Mumbai and was met by puzzled looks! Finally Gulbir of Prime ABGB gave us the right street lingo, asking his guys to rustle up a “low-profile card”. The highest-end low-profile they could muster was an XFX 8400 GS with 512 MB.

Some commenters warned me that I could be violating the Google AdSense terms of service with the first ever “contest” post on this blog.

However, I felt otherwise and emailed AdSense support for some guidance. I got an unhelpful automated response and decided to leave it at that. Today though, I received an email from them threatening to shut down my account:

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. (Full email here.)

Here is my email response:

from Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan mail {at} techtonic {dot} info
to adsense-support@google.com,
date Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 3:51 AM
subject Re: Issue # 372209 Google AdSense

Dear AdSense Support,

Firstly, I’d like to remind you that I voluntarily brought this to your notice through query #258677301 some days ago.

Secondly, I have decided NOT to change the content of my post because in no way does it (in my opinion) violate the spirit of the ToS. It is clearly a sarcastic statement in a humourous context, clearly related to the content of that particular post: (http://www.techtonic.info/2008/03/01/march-08-contest/).

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who reads the post that there is no malicious intention to direct readers to clicking the ads. Nowhere else on the site, is there any attempt to encourage readers to click ads. My site has all original content and is not in the SEO business. I have no intention of changing the content and will gladly face the consequences.

Best Wishes
Abhimanyu

Agree with my stance? Disagree? Comments?

Here’s the Featured Thread of the Week from the Tech Tonic community on Orkut.com

Dell XPS series laptops seem to be the overwhelming favorites. Great customizing options on the dell.co.in website, occasional offers in the newspaper for discounts, great customer service (especially in the metros) and most importantly, support for an XP-downgrade!

Tech sites in general and Google products in particular seem to be take April Fools Day pretty seriously (nice roundup of 2008 gags here). Tech2.com had its own line-up for the big day; in fact the update at the end of the top story was added after NASSCOM called to say that reporters were calling them for quotes!

However, I seriously thought that this was an early Apr 01 joke from Google India though I doubted that AirTel was cool enough to pull off something like that. India’s biggest telco’s ISP landing page AirTelLive.com is nothing but a google partnerpage which anyone with a domain name can build absolutely free of cost.

Google India, on request helpfully pointed me to a page which has info on a special partner program for ISPs though details on pricing etc. seem to be skimpy. However, the newest version of Google Apps seems to have dropped the ISP Partner section altogether and all the features are available to everybody! I remember trying out Google Apps when it was first launched and it took me exactly 5 minutes to configure something like this.

Contentsutra.com shares the same sentiment, though its pretty obvious that the comments are being seeded by Airtel PR (see comments 2 & 3).

I mean, the least that they can do is basic URL masking so that airtellive.com is all that users get to see instead of partnerpages.google.com…  The “Register” link in the ‘My Account’ gadget at the bottom of the left column is broken. I know that Bharti has pioneered outsourcing of all non-core business (to IBM, Nortel, Ericsson etc.) but c’mon, this is totally pushing it!

Anyway, I have two questions:

1) Does anyone really want an email ID @your_isp.com when all these services are available for free on gmail or your own domain?

2) Why did so many news outfits actually take this seriously and carry it verbatim???

PS: This isn’t the first time Google and AirTel have collaborated! The last time they did, the consequences were pretty disastrous!