do you guys read news online? if so, where? do you check reddit/digg? am gonna dick play around and launch a clone of reddit (as the code is open) and need to come up with a name.

it can be boring like OurNews.in or something cooler but not something that is so slang that it will alienate a group of people (for example, older people, non-tamils etc). hence, it might have to be english. but not restricted.. and the domain name is ‘.in’. the only cool thing i came up with was buzz.in coz well buzz and buzzin’.. but some SoB has taken it. so, you guys got anything? and is hari not on this place? if not, someone do this offline with him coz my hopes rest on him, and mama. hmm, who else should i add to this message…
why am i doing it? am tired of trying to read news about india in shitty sites which are cluster-fucked cluttered with ads. and reddit works, and more importantly reddit is open source. so, i dont really lose much in playing around, except $70/month to hosting fees to amazon. which is worth it for an experiment.
eventually, if this works, it will become more localized etc etc but right now, am done talking and just want to get this out. i’ve been talking for so long about launching certain stuff, like my gmat app which will come out around the same time kamal releases marudhanayagam. so, gonna follow his philosophy and do something quick-and-dirty and sully the name but try and make some money out of it. wow, from a simple question this grew to a long list.

Finally, please do not try censor yourself. if you think something’s foolish, doesnt matter.. just throw it out here

nanri.vanakkam.

I watch a few TV shows, like Monk and Scrubs. I’ve always wondered about consistency in shows like that which spawn many seasons and how they are able to keep it that way. As a designer, you want what you design to be consistent, you want to tell the same story and with the same conviction and clarity.

And I think largely, this applies to TV shows too. Like Monk doing certain things, like not getting over his wife etc. But in the sub-plots, I think it is a lot harder to be consistent. Now, what is all this rambling about. In episode 2.13, Monk and the Missing Granny, Adrian climbs up a step-ladder in the law library to, obviously, put a book properly in the shelf. But in one of the more recent seasons, Natalie and Julie try to help Adrian get over a few of his fears – milk, bugs, playing the harmonica and height, if i recall right. And in that, he does not go up the ladder. Of course, if I were to argue against myself, I would say that the phobias have gotten worse as time went on.

CNN-IBN is one of the few decent news sites in India (that I know about). But of late, it is getting really irritating to visit that site due to the horrible user experience.

which looks like this when yellowed-out.

it actually gets a little worse coz the ad on the bottom right expands over to the left (where it says Ghajini is…) all the way till it is over the image (of Asin). and it does that when you hover over it. which you might do a lot if you are just moving your mouse about. horrible

I heard about this tool for mockups a couple of weeks back but never got around to checking it out. And I finally did today, and man IT IS AWESOME!

If you are like me, someone who thinks paper prototyping is the best way to get started, then balsamiq mockups will blow you away. no more taking pictures of all my whiteboard drawings and sketches on paper. You can do all of that, in almost the same time it takes, using this tool. Of course, it does lack a couple of features that will make it even better. For example, interactivity. Yes, while I understand that it replaces paper prototyping, the medium allows you to get rid of problems people face in the original form(paper). But no worries, the developer/owner/one-man army that is ‘Peldi’ is dwelling on it.

I ran into this lack of interactivity problem 5 mins into using it, as I had already created one mockup by then. And I wanted to make another mockup for another tab in my menu but wasnt sure how I would go about it. From a cursory glance, I think creating wireframes just became a lot more efficient. and once the interactivity feature (links and actions) is in there, presenting these will also become easier. So, go ahead, check it out at www.balsamiq.com. You can try it out by clicking on the big ‘Try it Now’ link. Or take a look at some of the samples. Or check out the video.

Even though I’ve used it for less than 30 mins, I think this will turn into one of my essential design tools, along with Photoshop and IHMC cmap tools.

Whatever your opinion on Arundhati Roy, she at least deserves to be read. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I find hers better than most, maybe a bit too judgmental and critical but it is better than the lack of back-boned opinions and stances of others. To read the article, click here

Some excerpts follow

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something’s going very badly wrong in this country.

and she talks about Narendra Modi. Really, how have these people not been convicted? And do we really want a person at the centre of the Babri Masjid demolition as the PM? Will we be secular anymore? In reality, I think we have ceased to be a secular country, which is pathetic.

Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said: “Modi is God.” The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister AB Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition LK Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.

and another para (these paras are not continuous, I just cherry picked)

 In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by LK Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998 the BJP was in power at the centre. The US war on terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.

and she talks about the context,

This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn’t surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).

and ‘the elephants in the room’,

Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?). We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minster VP Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of Upper caste Hindus pass without a mention.

and she ends with

What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

To get the full power of the article, you need to read it. It is worth it. And if you are someone like me who was ignorant and indifferent of Indian politics until recently ( a criminal stance in itself), this article could possibly spur you to dig more about where we are and learn more about Gujarat and Kashmir, beyond the superficial details.

Also, why is this appearing in the Guardian? Why isnt this in a leading Indian newspaper (well, am assuming it is not as I do not have access to Indian newspapers).

After a few months of training and two months of skipping training, I finally ran the Silicon Valley half marathon yesterday. Race report should be here.

Why Designers Fail – from DesignADay

Best one thing – Seth Godin. I like reading Seth, short and always makes a point. This article is relevant to designers as trade-offs is something we always have to make.

Optimization is the enemy of innovation – Pattern Hound

well, I have taken a long time in writing. Most of it is self-enforced. The noise pollution on the web is increasing. And do I want to add to it unless I have something really meaningful to say? No.

And this noise pollution triggered off this post. Over the last few months, and definitely after I moved to the valley, I have noticed a change in my reading habits. I am a voracious reader, my whole family is. Design books, Wodehouse, movie scripts, spy thrillers – I read them all. But ever since I started to subscribe to more than 10 blogs on my Google Reader, its been going downhill. I find myself reading less, and scanning more. And the amount of articles I LIKE or that add value is about 5%. If I leave my reader alone for 3 days, I have 500 unread stuff. For many people out there, that is probably little, but that is part of the problem. Information overload is well, not fun. As a designer, I have always been fond of simplicity and ‘less is more’ and projects like Ri-Ri have tackled things like that. I think this will be a private/pet design problem for me to think about next.

But for now, I am cutting on the amount of blogs that I subscribe to. I prefer the commitment of a book.

Wow!

http://blogs.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2008/05/the_end_of_the.html

In this article, he talks about one thing in particular that was of great interest to me ( and Christian Beck ).

The lesson here is that however brilliant the innovation, it needs to be appropriate to the context and the culture. It needs to fit in and not be imposed. And it needs coalitions, teams, to support it. In fact, in the case of education, which is extremely politically sensitive in every country, OLPC should have developed both the design of the computer and the pedagogy with the Indian and Chinese teachers and administrators, not for them.

In fact, this makes a better abstract for my thesis than the one I actually wrote. But more importantly, design needs to evolve as a field, and adapt to different contexts and cultures. Design ‘here’ is not design ‘over there’. It is a ‘duh!’ statement, but one that is not understood or accepted by many people. And from a personal POV, I am excited that I was on the right track