Just a quick note. I'll be in India from the 2nd to the 26th of November. So if any readers (well, ok, any of you two readers) want to meet up, drop me a line.

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Yes, another meaningless post for your pleasure!

List of books to buy when in India:

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig (ISBN: 8120323823, Edition: 2)
  
  
• OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide To Learning Open Gl Version 1.4 by OpenGL Architecture Review Board et. al. (ISBN: 8129705486, Edition: 4)
  
  
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques And Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman and Ravi Sethi (ISBN: 817808046X)
  

List of books that I wish had special Indian editions:

• Fundamentals of Computer Graphics by Peter Shirley

These list will be constantly updated. Suggestions (fiction and non-fiction) welcome!

Time Magazine has released a list of 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. Here's what I've read from that list:

• Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Neuromancer - William Gibson
• 1984 - George Orwell
• Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Tried to read but couldn't finish:

• Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

As you can see, that's about 9 out of a 100. Obviously, I'm a lot less erudite than the Vikster, who's read 44!

Vikster, if you're reading this, I will suggest that you find and read the only graphic novel in the list - The Watchmen. Not because it's the highest reader rated book in that list (that's probably 'cause it's the most accessible to us proles) but simply because it's a great starting point to a brand new medium. If you like it, I would suggest:

• Maus - Art Spiegelman
• Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
• A Contract with God - Will Eisner (actually pretty much anything by Eisner is good.)
• and of course 10 volumes of Sandman - Neil Gaiman and various artists

(Now, I'm heading to the library. Gotta catch up!) (Sprechen, how many have you read?)

Just some random nerdy thoughts today:

This guy just brought to my notice that Firefox lacks a "Make available offline" feature like the one in Internet Explorer. (In IE, apart from the current page, you can also specify a link depth you want to download to, à la wget!) I must say, this is a pretty significant feature that Firefox is missing. Of course, if Firefox is missing a feature, you just look for extensions!

Initially, none of the extensions I found could add this functionality to Firefox. Then I found the updated version of Spiderzilla. (Keep in mind that Spiderzilla doesn't seem to be in development and the version I have linked to, has been repackaged from the original by someone on extensionmirror.)

(At this point, people will say I just should just use wget. Well, yes, I already do, but wget cannot do things like download CSS background images or images loaded by JavaScript. And if would be nice to have a tool integrated into the browser rather than hacking around on the command line each time I want to download a site. I should probably be looking at HTTrack which Spiderzilla embeds. Of course, the real solution would be to use Gekco itself to parse through the page and find all downloadable data.)

Among other things, Hotmail is beta testing a newer interface. (Ajax and all that!) I just hope that they make it cross browser, and compete using quality and not lock-in.

There seems to be a lot of new web-based RSS aggregators out there (My Yahoo, Google Reader and of course BlogLines) but the one I like the most is Start.com by Microsoft. Why? Apart from a very capable interface, it's the only one you can try and use without having to sign in.

Is being addicted to the Internet less harmful than being addicted to the television?