I stumbled across this well written article one of the most masterful hacks of the financial system in history.

Definitely an interesting read about the pricing model used by some on the Amazon Marketplace.

A neat trick I learned today from Kevin Rose.

If you a using Gmail as you personal email and are giving it out to sites that you don’t trust, give them +@gmail.com instead. Use any word after the plus as your unique spam filter. So for example, periferral+jobs@gmail.com could be used to filter all emails when you apply for jobs. You can create filters based on from to easily filter spam.

Neat huh?

Everyone knows the volcano that erupted in Iceland causing havoc for flights across Europe. The question however is does anyone remember the name of the volcano that erupted. Anyone?

It is Eyjafjallajokull. I don’t even know where to begin. There a barely any vowels and fj all over the place. I’ll be calling it ‘kull’ and you better know what I’m talking about.

Update: I think this sums it up nicely

Update 2: Some further digging around tells me that in the Nordic language, eyja means an island, fjalla means mountains, and jökull means glacier. Eyjafjallajökull = mountains with glaciers on the island.

So I’ve considered, for a long time, to writing a post about the correlation between races and bad drivers. I never did because of the touchy nature of the topic, in spite the fact that I get 3 visitors a year to my site.
So instead this will be a car to bad driver correlation. So here is the definitive list

• Toyota Prius
• Toyota Corolla
• PT Cruiser
• Any oldsmobile
• Honda Insight (old)
• Most other hybrid cars

Now, you can just become a good driver by avoiding these cars. It is something that you are born with. For instance, if you hadn’t read this, you’d buy a Toyota Corolla. But just because you did, you go buy a Mini. That doesn’t suddenly make you a good driver. You are just an inherently bad driver. The reverse is also the same. For example, you really want a Mini, but you can’t afford it, so you buy a Corolla. Doesn’t make you a good driver. The fact that you chose the Corolla over the other cheaper cars out there makes you just as bad. You could have picked any Mazda and gone ‘zoom zoom’ or for that matter a Toyota Yaris or Ford Focus; all very ‘good driver’ cars. And in case you didn’t already figure it out, the Mini is the ‘best driver’ car. I’ve yet to come across someone who drives a Mini badly.

I’ve been talking about making the change out of QA into something more customer oriented for a while now. But like everything else in life, inertia and procrastination ruled.

I’m now a Tech Marketing Engineer with Riverbed. I couldn’t be more excited.

Here is a quick roundup of my top 5 android apps. I consider these a must have on any android handset.

WaveSecure
WaveSecure is the must have security app on your phone. It can help track down lost or stolen phones, remotely track the location of the phone/sim information, and even remotely lock or wipe the phone is needed. In addition, you can use it to backup/restore data on your phone. Finally, if your phone is stolen and a new sim card in inserted, WaveSecure will lock down the phone unless the secure code is entered.
WaveSecure is currently free for Android but costs $19.90 per year subscription on other platforms.

Contact Owner
You can never be too paranoid. Another security app that displays your (or anyone else’s ) contact information on the “lock screen” of your Android device, so that if you happen to lose it the finder will know how to contact you.

Advanced Task Manager
While there are other free task managers, this app is a step above and beyond. The user interface is well thought out, clean and professional. You can view process/system level information, memory footprints of currently running apps and if you have root access, you can terminate running apps. You can also white-list apps that should not be terminated.
Currently sells for 99c.

Google Voice
If you make plenty of long distance/international calling, this is a must have app. No longer do you need to call a central line, remember passcodes and then dial the international number. Just setup international dialing through voice, and dial away just like you would any local contact. International rates are very reasonable and sound quality is impeccable. In addition, messaging to and from voice is free and no text messaging charges apply. Check out the site for all the other goodies that generally apply to Google Voice and aren’t specific to Android.

Wifi tether for Root Users
This doesn’t apply to the community as a whole because you need to be running a custom ROM with root access. This app created a wireless access point to which you can connect your laptop to and then tether connections through your phone’s data connection. It couldn’t be easier to setup, supports encryption and in general works great.

There are many other apps that came close but didn’t make the top 5 cut. Some of them include Gesture Search, Juice Defender, Meebo IM, Shazam and Sipdroid.

This is how geeks do poker. Ben Joffe figured out a way where it doesn’t matter where you cut a deck, a cold deck can be designed such that a specific player always wins.

The life of God is pretty well documented. Their stories are of someone who didn’t behave the way you and I would when faced with adversity. Essentially they teach the readers to practice enormous willpower, strength, patience, courage amongst many such qualities.

If I come across something amazing, I’ll hype it up a little more when I spread the word. The next person who hears my version probably adds a bit more. Eventually the final story is just a super glorified version of the original.

Imagine what happened to the stories of the Gods over thousands of years and millions of people’s interpretations and hype. So was God just really someone between us? Maybe years from now, people like Ghandi might end up being worshiped in temples.

I was one of the early adopters of Windows Vista. My mistake was to choose a newly designed OS from the ground up and then choose it in a 64-bit architecture. There were two main reasons why my Vista love was short-lived. Lack of drivers and too many annoying security questions. I lived with XP ever since.

Windows 7 finally made it to my laptop about a month back. I’m very impressed. Drivers so far have been no problem but for some I did have to dig a little deeper. Jump lists, Aero peek etc are all new and exciting features all built in making the need for 3rd party software redundant. The UI is clean and stylish making it at par with Apple’s OS if not marginally better. Boot times are quick (though not scientific, I feel it is significantly faster than XP on the same laptop with the same configuration). While the default security options are quite obstructive and chatty, it was easy to disable (unlike Vista).

Other than the obvious features, there are some minor ones I really love. Since I didn’t stick with Vista long enough, its hard to say if they were introduced in Vista and I just happened to find in 7. For example, I love the fact when I can vertically maximize windows by pulling one edge to the end of the screen. Hovering over taskbar items shows a little preview of all open windows for that app and keeping your mouse over it for a while makes all other windows except that one disappear. You also see similar effects with Alt+Tab. Process handling is by far the best thing about it. If an application hangs, 7 will grey out the app making it clear to the user that it isn’t responding. Also if you try continue to use (maximize, close etc) an app that isn’t responding, 7 will prompt with a dialog asking if the app should be terminated or diagnosed for problems. This is much more convenient than having to bring up task manager and find and kill the app.

Overall, I’m very pleased with 7. I highly recommend giving it a spin.