Yet Another List of Ten Things To Do When Twitter Goes Down

1. Go to Facebook.com and try to use it like Twitter. So what if it is #fail

2. Did you ever notice how many birds are there in that Fail Whale Image?

3. Keep on pinging http://status.twitter.com and try to bring it down too

4. Inform @chetan_bhagat, even he can’t block this outage

5. Try to calculate how many others will be making a “10 things to do when twitter was down” list

6. Log on to Orkut

7. It’s a good time to see, if you can still reset those Yahoo and Hotmail passwords.

8. Call your girlfriend (If you have made one through Twitter) and inform her about the outage and impress her by revealing that you were the first to spot it on the twitter status page that there was actually a problem which Twitter admitted.

9. Revive your long dead blog. Like I did.

10. Try to set up a self-help group for all affected by the tragedy. Life has to go on – even without Twitter

Tribute: Rajan P Dev

One of Malayalam Cinema's finest actors, Rajan P Dev passed away earlier today at private Hospital in Ernakulam. The actor was known for his power packed performances and his amazing adaptability to perform various kinds of roles. Be it a negative role, a positive one or a comic one, he peformed it with great aplomb.

I personally loved his style of acting and will always remember his performances in the countless movies he has acted. He had this amazing ability to make you hate him when he performed negative roles. At the same time, in some other movies you just love the man. To say that his loss is irreplaceable would be an understatement. I loved many of his films and his performances in "Thommanum Makkalum", "Chanthu pottu" and many others. In fact, to list all his peformances would be a daunting task!

The Malayalam film industry has lost some great talents in 2009. If it was Lohithadas last month, we have now lost Rajan P Dev now, exactly a month later. You will be sorely missed sir! May his soul rest in Peace.

A recent Interview of the great man below.

The Tech Chronicles is now Techniclez!

That correct.. I am turning this into my personal weblog and will concentrate more on my new Blog Techniclez which was launched on 4th December 2008.

I had thought of importing all stuff over to Techniclez but chose not to do so because of the footprint that whizkiddreloaded had with search engines. So all previous articles will remain here.. No more tech posts here though.. this will turn into a personal musings page where I will talk all things non tech.

Head over to Techniclez then and let me know your feedback! Its still under works with some rough edges here and there.

Thank you for your support!

Maya 2009 comes to India

Autodesk, Inc.has announced the India launch of Autodesk Maya 2009, 3D animation and visual effects software, in celebration of the software's 10-year anniversary at Autodesk Developer Day in New Delhi today. Maya 2009 includes a wide range of advancements in modeling, animation, rendering and effects that maximize productivity, optimize workflows, and provide new creative possibilities.

"We are celebrating the work done with Autodesk Maya over the past 10 years by many artists and creative visionaries in film, television production and games, as well as in industrial design and architecture," said Marc Petit, Autodesk's Media & Entertainment senior vice president. "We designed Maya 2009 as a tribute to creative innovation and production efficiency. The new release will allow artists to raise the bar and deliver even more ground breaking computer graphics work."

Commenting on the features of Maya 2009, Vishal Anand, Visual Computing Labs (VCL), a division of Tata Elexsi, said “We are looking forward to the launch of Maya 2009 in India as it will change the way artists think about dynamics, rendering, compositing and pipelines. This new workflow will optimize render times for multiple render layers and, in turn, elevate the quality of work. Maya has an intuitive user interface, which facilitates customization and fine-tuning of effective workflows.”



Key Highlights of Autodesk Maya 2009

Complexity Managed

While the complexity and size of scenes continue to rise, Maya 2009 provides new tools to make them more manageable. These tools include the new Maya Assets toolset, which enables users to encapsulate a set of nodes into a single container and publish a view of the data suited to the artist's task. The release also offers a new Render Proxy feature in mental ray, and additional multi-threading work and algorithmic speedups that boost interactive draw, simulation and rendering performance for even the heaviest scenes.

Accelerated Modeling Workflow

Maya 2009 gives modelers and texture artists unprecedented control over polygon modeling and UV texturing through powerful selection management features, efficient modeling workflows and precision UV unfolding and layout options.

Collaborative, Iterative Projects and Pipelines

Tighter schedules and budgets demand that projects and pipelines take full advantage of available resources. Maya 2009 supports collaborative, iterative workflows and promotes data reuse. The software has a new animation layering paradigm that provides animators with increased non-destructive flexibility, as well as an updated Render Pass toolset that offers precise control over render output and optimizes integration with Autodesk Toxik procedural compositing software.

New Creative Tools

Maya 2009 offers an innovative Maya nParticles dynamic simulation module and an extensive Maya Muscle feature set. nParticles is part of the Maya Nucleus Unified Simulation Framework, a ground-breaking approach to creating complex physics simulations that interact directly with each other. Furthermore, to help studios capitalize on the growing popularity of stereoscopic 3D films, Maya 2009 offers a flexible new stereo camera rig, complete with in-viewport stereo viewing.

For a complete list of new features and enhancements in Maya 2009, visit http://www.autodesk.com/maya.

The above is a press release from Autodesk.

Site moving to new host: Expect downtimes!

The Tech Chronicles is moving to a new host and the transistion might see a few outages with the site being unavailable for extended periods of time. I am working on the transistion to be a smooth one. But you never know!

It might be a while before the site limps back to normalcy as I do this between my work schedule!

Thanks for reading..

Obama's Tech Video woos Silicon Valley inhabitants

US Presidential candidate Barack Obama, in an attempt to woo techies released a last minute campaign video which shows him expressing his views on technology and what he aims to do once he is in power. The video contains excerpts from a speech he made exactly a year ago at the headquarters of Google at Mountain View, California.

Obama has promised to double the funding from federal agencies for basic research and implement policies in the speech which is almost three minutes long. Obama also assures broadband access to every American along with putting more government data online. It is a widely accepted fact that California -- especially the Silicon Valley has favored Obama against McCain ahead of todays polls. If thats not all, a recent study by blogger Robbin Harris from ZDNet has revealed that more than 90% of campaign donations made by employees of leading "tech" corporations have gone to the Democrats. These include giants like Apple and Google amongst others.



The US Presidential poll reaches its penultimate stage today when voters all across the US exercise their franchise and start off the Presidential poll process, which is set to culminate with the "Inauguration Day" scheduled for January 20, 2009. Post the voting, there is a rather long two-month gap before the world gets to know who the next US president would be!

Via: AFP

The Chrome-Microsoft nexus!

Came across this image on a site.. notice the uncanny similarity??


Here's one more for the conspiracy theorists to ponder about!

My Basic Intro: Alap Naik Desai

I will always prefer to write generally about tech stuff for the common man & his everyday use.

Few people will be very keen on "Large Hadron Collider" OR "Touch-Screen Laptops" which exists as prototypes.

However, a lot of enthusiastic & young technocrats will be keen to explore simple optimization techniques to improve their workspace, efficiency, i.e. make life a bit more easy, productive & fun.

To jot down a few topics which I would be writing about:

A low-down on Web-Browsers.(Believe me, I have tried them all!)
Ultra-useful plug ins, scripts, add-ons for Mozilla FireFox.(Now you know what I prefer ;))
The best Video-Playback software for the common-man.
A simple but super-efficient office productivity enhancer (& some fun too.)
The best virus-scanner & Spy-ware scanner

More to come!

*Please note that the views expressed in my blogs are mine alone. They do not reflect any hidden propaganda or marketing gimmick to push products. I do not write a blog/review about Technology until I have personally tried/tested it. It is at the sole discretion of the reader to lay faith on my views & use/purchase/subscribe to it. I will not be responsible for any direct/indirect loss arising after reading my entries.

That said, I have spent my ENTIRE free time pursuing technology. I am a B.Tech Plastics from UDCT with a passion for new/upcoming/cutting-edge & productivity enhancing technology.