I’ve been using the Indian Railways website for booking e-tickets online for a really long time now. Every time I have to use their website I need to keep my fingers crossed. I also need a hell of good luck to be able to book tickets smoothly. Sometimes it take an awful lot of time to load. Then there are times when the so called communication failures crop up for hours. Apparently they have scalability issues. The poor server is supposed to dance to the tunes of the entire country trying to book tickets online and through railways reservation counters. The server is left with no juice at times. So it starts crying and people like me suffer. Indian Railways is not able to invest in a proper back-end solution despite the huge profits they generate every year.
Forget scaling. Here’s another issue I’m experiencing. It’s 1130PM and the railways website is not even letting my print my previously booked e-ticket. Now that is weird! I understand that booking is permitted only from 5AM to 1130PM but I should be able to at least print my tickets now! WTF!
I guess this is the time the server gets some sleep. And they don’t want anyone to disturb. Wake up moron, I have a train to catch early morning tomorrow!
I am supposed to come up with something for a Summer Training project. I can’t bang my head into Java (that’s actually what I am supposed to do) so I decided to play with Facebook instead. After a little reading and a lot of head banging I am finally there! All that time spent earlier on developing in PHP, MySQL and JavaScript finally paid off. The application is for movie reviews. I plan to integrate it with an upcoming venture in the future especially when Facebook Connect has been announced. The application is still in an Alpha stage. A lot of work needs to be done. That’s on my agenda for the entire next week. Wish me luck!
Ex-Googlers have got together to bring out a new cool search engine called Cuil (pronounced cool.) The last time it’s developer Anna Patterson developed something similar it was purchased by search engine leader Google Inc. This time Anna says her search engine is not for sale. She quit Google in 2006 to develop a new comprehensive search engine. Backed by $33 Million in venture capital, Cuil has started processing search requests from today.
Cuil’s search engine index spans a whopping 120 Billion web pages. That is roughly three times the Google search index and ten times the MSN Search index. What makes Cuil different from Google and other conventional search engines is that it drills down the content of the page and doesn’t lay stress on ranking the quality and quantity of links on the web page. Cuil displays search results in a horizontal magazine fashion along with images. There are sidebars to further refine the search results. Whether Cuil will be a Google Search killer or not might still be a long distance ahead but it could certainly give Google a run for their money. Cuil joins a list of other search engines currently trying to grab the attention of web users. It includes start-ups like Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, recently Powerset which was acquired by Microsoft this month. All the best Cuil!
We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
Yes. Google thinks I’m a bot! Got this screen while using Lively. I didn’t do anything to bomb their servers, I simply clicked on Sign-in. Ok. I’m scared now. What if the next time I try to sign-in and they tell me I’m an alien or something?
Google recently launched Lively, a virtual world service that it plans to deploy on social networks on the web. Using Lively, a user can create an avatar and a virtual room. These can then be embedded on any web page, blog or a social networking profile. Lively shall be heavily deployed in various social networking platforms. Your personal avatar and virtual rooms will be integrated with your Google accounts. These can be used on all Google’s services in the near future. Here’s how Lively works:
Download Lively:
To get started you need to download Lively first. It is a browser plug-in. You’ll need to have a Google account to start using it. Once you’re done with downloading it you can start creating your avatar. You can customize various attributes such as skin, clothes, hair color, eyes etc. This makes to eligible to enter the various virtual rooms at Lively.
Virtual Rooms:
Just like avatars, Lively lets you create your own virtual rooms as well. You can customize your own virtual rooms from the wide array of options available to you. Once you have created a room you can embed it on any web page.
Interact:
You can chat with other Lively users once you’re in a virtual room. You can check out several user created virtual rooms on Lively. Once you are inside a virtual room you can interact with other users in the room. You can build your own buddy lists by inviting your friends on Lively. Engineering Manager Niniane Wang hints that Lively would be integrated with major social networking platforms.
So here’s another way to kill time online. Although ambitious, this might just take a lot of time for it’s users to get used to it.
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