Niponwave

Firefox 3 created a history by clocking the max number of downloads and hittting the Guinness book of world records. This time Firefox 3.5 is going to take the web by storm with its lightning fast speed. Check out this screencast - Firefox 3.5 vs Firefox 3.0.9 rendering Facebook - to get a clue.

Watched the video? So you have the Flash plugin in your browser. Now, Firefox 3.5 - which is HTML 5 ready - can play embedded videos without a plugin (e.g. Flash, Quicktime). In fact, Firefox 3.5 treats videos just like any other element of the webpage.

Firefox 3.5 packs elaborate privacy features.  You can choose to surf privately a la Chrome’s Incognito mode. You can also wipe out all instances of one particular website from your history at one go. Then, there is also the option of deleting the most recent history - be it the last 2 hours, 4 hours or the day.

The Among improvements on the tab front, 3.5 allows you to bring back not just recently closed tabs, but windows as well. You can also create a new window by dragging out a tab or drag windows into tabs. The ’session restore’ has also got smarter - you can choose only those tabs that should be restored.

Firefox 3.5 supports location-aware-browsing (based on Google Location Services). By knowing your location, websites can offer content tailored to you.

Firefox 3.5 is set to launch in less than 12 hours. Get ready to grab the fastest browser!

The students’ union of our college have decided to launch its own website and I was given the responsibility to develop it. The site went live yesterday and here is the link - North Bengal Medical College.

Last month I wrote about the books I have been reading recently. I forgot to mention one though. The Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.

It is an epic tale and the first part of what is going to be a trilogy, called The Ibis trilogy, named after the ship Ibis which has set sail across the Indian Ocean. On board the Ibis are a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman, who soon come to discover that their destinies are strangely tied together.

To read Sea of Poppies was a real treat and as it came to an end, I wished it din’t! It is colonial India brought alive with all its richness and variety. I am eagerly waiting for the next two parts.

The Ibis Trilogy has its own website with all the informations and trivia the reader could ask for. From the reading guide on the site I found this list of further reading -

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Out of these I have read the first two. Plan to read Midnight’s Children some of these days.

RSS is a cool technology that lets you keep track of your favourite websites saving you the time of bookmarking sites and manually returning to them to check for updates. Simply put - if you subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog, you don’t come to Niponwave but let Niponwave come to you. The RSS feed will tell you when I update my site and you can read the new posts right in your feed reader.

There are many feed readers out there. Of note is the Google Reader and Bloglines among web-based feed readers and FeedDemon among the standalone softwares. Out of these two, I have found a comfy factor with FeedDemon.

FeedDemon lets you sync all your feeds to your NewsGator account. FeedDemon’s upcoming version, now in its beta release, will have support for integration with your Google Reader account as well which is really great news!

I have subscribed to a good many feeds from sites of various nature which constantly ‘feed’ me with the latest news, blogs, stories and gossip. I just glance through the headlines and read the full text if something interests me. Not all websites publish the entire article in the feed though, you will get a summary instead and you can click through to the source site to read the whole article.

To start with, you can subscribe to some of the feeds on Rediff site. If humor is what you want, subscribe to the FML RSS feed get your daily dose of FMLs!!

After much speculation about its fate, the circular finally came and interns and housestaffs will now get the hiked salary as proposed before.

It’s time to brush up my CSS (and PHP). It has been almost 3 years I designed this look for Niponwave. Now I am planning on a complete redesign. The nature of the web has changed. With the advent of sites like Twitter and such, the web has grown more social. Blogs have also become more interactive. Besides, this site has grown in terms of popularity. The way comments are displayed need to be changed. There is no point in displaying hundreds of comments in the same page. I might as well add a forum to take care of the never-ending questions of visitors to this site. What also lies ahead is a new design for Bong Buzz, the friendly group blog venture which uses a readymade template right now. The present look sucks big time, needless to say. Earlier it had the ancient brown look designed by me which was better but I changed it as it had a kinda oldie feeling and lacked rich colours. Somehow I seemed to prefer dull colours at that time, which also explains the color of Niponwave. In apparel stores, almost invariably, I ended up choosing outfits of dull shades. With a lot of scolding and convincing from my mother, I had to get rid of my color bias. Not just outfits, my Mom would even look at my websites and she was very sceptical of their oldish color profiles. Where were we? I was telling why I changed the Bong Buzz look. Okay. It is a multi-author blog with a very youthful writing team. Ace blogger in our team Trina has asked me to make it look fun. With mounting study pressures and my once-again-started gymming, I can worry about designing only in the weekends. So this is not going to be anytime soon.

Apart from tweaking existing sites, I will also start a new medical-related site. I am not very sure of the content right now. But once set up, ideas will start flowing for sure! This medical site is the idea of  Anjan sir - Dr. Anjan K Das who blogs at Reflections and some of his posts can be read on Bong Buzz too!

Right now, I am busy with setting up a site for our college students union, a job entrusted by the union on me and my very good friend Pratik. A few months from now, I might start working on the website of a Delhi board school in Siliguri the owner of which is a friend of mine.

Over the past few days, it has been pretty hot and I have been taking generous doses of Amul ice cream. I get it from Kyabla kakur dokan, the only store around NBMC known to charge the right price. Strangely, all other shops charge a rupee or two in excess of the printed MRP on cold drinks and ice creams, they call it ‘freezing charge’. While Walls remains my all-time favourite, I have developed a liking for Amul only recently. The first time I had it was not long ago. I was with Amartya and Subhodip in Behala, some time in last year, to watch a movie in Asoka, when my friends introduced me to the taste of Amul.

The label on the Amul ice-cream reads it’s probiotic! I don’t know if having probiotic stuff is really beneficial as claimed. An article on yesterday’s Daily Mail says it is.