This weblog is retiring

I have been blogging here for just about less than a year now. By far, this was my longest stint on any blog service!

Not so surprisingly, this was my most successful blog too. I gained some good readership. It amazes me when I meet someone in the hallway who says - "I keep reading your blog".

Thank You readers!!!

I am now moving my blog to my own domain - http://blog.deobrat.com. The content on this blog will remain here and I have decided not to migrate my posts just to avoid spamming the search engines out there.

Please update your bookmarks and Feed Readers to point to my new blog.

GTalk is driving me nuts

I am very fond of IM systems and love the way they can help me keep connected with my friends and family. I use quite a few IM systems regularly such as

• Windows Live messenger
• Yahoo Messenger for Vista
• Google Talk (or GTalk as we all like to call it)

A few days ago, I installed FireFox to test a piece of JavaScript I had written. While installing it, I made sure I do not select FF as my default browser (it is still IE 7).

To my surprise, GTalk no longer respects my default browser setting, opening any link from GTalk fires up FireFox. This is really really annoying to me. The worst part is that I cannot change it anywhere :(

Folks at 'G' (and Mozilla)- is this some sort of a tactic to outsell IE? I refuse to call it a tactic. It is called annoying the user.

An imperceptive attempt of a reckless loser

I am a Mumbaikar and I am proud to say so. But in the recent past, the so called sons of the soil have tainted Mumbai's image in front of the rest of the world. For the first time ever in my life, I feel like hiding myself in a closet so that nobody can ask me an obvious question - "You said Mumbai is a nice place. What's happening out there?" Even the most concerned questions sound sarcastic to me.

The recent comments passed by Raj Thackeray on North Indians (specially on people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) are simply ridiculous. I am a north Indian by origin but I am a Mumbaikar at heart. I love the city and I do not think my love for the city is any less than that of a (so called) Maharashtrian. Hell. I AM a Maharashtrian. I have spent almost my entire life here. My family has been here since last three generations. Who the hell is Raj Thackeray to call me an outsider. I care for the city as much as he does. Or probably even more than him. I can not see blood on the streets nor can I think of fostering an environment that supports violence on the city streets.

He is playing the same dirty politics that his uncle - Balasaheb Thackeray used to play. He is using the emotions of the people and using them against each other to create a space for himself in the political landscape. Thackeray family has been doing this time and again. There was a time when I used to admire the Thackeray family for having a frank and fearless attitude on even the most sensitive issues. But now, I see a desperate attempt to come back to the political scene. And they have gone to an extent of using all dirty measures to ensure they return into the power.

I would like to warn all my fellow Mumbaikars - this is no social issue. This is a purely political game that Thackeray family is playing with our emotions. As I said earlier, this is a desperate attempt by the Thackrey family to come back into the power.

I don't know what more to say. I am aghast with the proceedings so far. I can only hope things get better and Mumbai gets back on track.

My first SilverLight App

It's been quite long that SilverLight was released. It's an exciting new technology that is going to change the way we create web applications.

I wrote a small and simple application using SilverLight. Here is what it looks like-

I can't see anything :(

If the above statement is true, you probably do not have SilverLight 1.0 installed on your machine. You can download it from here.

I see the smiley. So, what about it?

Well, if you can see it, you should notice that the smiley isn't really smiling. It's sad. Click on it to make it smile. Click it again to make it sad. Go on and on and on. Keep playing with it until you are tired of it :)

As you notice, the app does not do something great. Actually, it was never intended to do something really great. I built it while trying my hands on SilverLight. And it took me roughly about 10 minutes to do this stuff.

If you can do this in less than 10 minutes of effort, just imagine how much potential it has got.

BTW, I don't know if you noticed or not, one of my earlier posts used Windows Live SilverLight Streaming server to stream an audio onto the browser.

Looks nice! Can I get the source-code?

Of course yes! You can download it from the downloads section of my web-site.

The countdown has begun

If you are wondering what that timer on top of this page is for, here is your clue - I got engaged on August 26th 2007. Now do you want to take a guess what that timer stands for????

Correct! You got it right! Actually, irrespective of whether you got it right or wrong, I am still going to state it here in this post cause that basically is the intent of posting this entry. That was a lot of crap!!! Lets get straight to the point - today is January 11th and exactly after 100 days, on April 20th, 2008, 3 PM, I would be tying knots with Esha. To know a little more about Esha, you can read my old post about my engagement.

As everyone kept asking me about the date, I thought it would be a nice idea to put up a tiny little timer here on the blog. I had been thinking about it since last few days. One fine day, I sat down and wrote the timer. And now, its up here.

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Not surprisingly, some of my friends cursed me for not coming out of my geek hat even now. But I personally think its pretty cool! For one, it tells everyone how much time is left for my marriage so they can plan their travel etc. And secondly, I got to write some JavaScript code which I hadn't in about a year!

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UPDATE: The time of wedding has been changed to 11 PM. It was scheduled at 3 PM as mentioned earlier in this post.