Recently the tech book publishers, O’Reilly Media sent me an ebook iPad: The Missing Manual for review. As a new iPad owner, I thought I will read the book and see what I feel about it. 

As the name suggests, it is really the missing manual for iPad users. Apple only gives a short handout along with the new iPad. For power users like me, it is not even necessary. But for folks like my mom and pop who want to play around with iPad, they really need a good manual that walks them through the ins and outs of iPad. This book does exactly that. It is a great book for not so geeky users to get started with their new shiny iPad. Instead of doing a detailed review of the book, I would do a pros and cons kind of review here.

Pros:

• It is a great book for newbies to get started with iPad
• Even for power users like me, it gives some interesting tips. For example, I didn’t know that I can change the settings to make iPad inform me about the auto correction made in any editor. Small but interesting tips like this will make it worth the time for power users
• The book is not too long and it will get the readers started up with iPad pretty quickly

Even though I wouldn’t term the following as Cons, I would do it under Cons to keep the Pros and Cons format intact.

Cons:

• The price could have been a bit lower
• Some info about AT&T’s data plans are already outdated because AT&T unilaterally changed its plans one month after iPad was released. I think they will take care of it in the next edition
• More tips like the one I mentioned above for power users would have been good but, I guess, the Missing Manual Series is not meant for such audience

Overall, it is a must have book for any newbie getting started with iPad. 

That 20,000 sales figure is decent on its own, but it becomes much more impressive when putting it in context. Rohit tells us he’s had sales of about $100,000 from iPhone apps so far this year, and just $5,000 from Android apps.

Just quoted this one on one of the twitter discussions and people liked it. So, I thought I will just record here.

Abstraction makes IT irrelevant to humans and Automation makes humans irrelevant to IT.

Secularism In India

This guy is talking about unity and diversity, huh!!

Mr. Bhagwat said: “The issues and concerns of the Marathi-speaking people are justified. But to what extent will one go to get those addressed? Will it be at the cost of India’s unity?” He said India and her unity were supreme and above all other considerations.

“Diversity flourishes because it has the strong base of unity,” he said.

I love Sarah Palin for reasons like these

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Billion Shades of India - Ver 2

Another version with more photographs. Both the videos are worth watching.

Billion Shades of India - Ver 1

This is a collection of photographs taken by one Mr. Bhanu Sharma when he travelled 24,000 Kms in India for 5 months. Makes you feel nostalgic about the country.

Comparison of Flip SD and iPod Nano

Dataset and Mindset

Check out this amazing video on using data to understand socio-political issues. Some of the interesting titbits include his comments about the intricacies of social development and economic development and how some of the countries in Asia worked on social development first and economic development next (and, hence, the faster rate of economic growth compared to some of the “developed” world). He also identifies how the AIDS is Africa is NOT related to poverty and how we shouldn’t approach it with our current simplistic mindset.

Simon Wardley’s (of Canonical Inc) great talk introducing the idea of cloud computing at OSCON.

Call to those geeks who have had a chance to play around with Eucalyptus to help me understand. I want to increase the capabilities of my personal laptop to, theoretically, unlimited capacity by tapping into the cloud. Say I have an Ubuntu laptop and I install Eucalyptus on top of it. Is it possible to automate it in such a way that whenever I need a highly powerful computer, say to process video, my laptop should be able to tap into Amazon EC2 cloud and distribute the workload automatically to EC2 instances. Once the processing is over, it should shut down the EC2 instances and just work using the resource capabilities of the Laptop. I would like to know if there is any howto describing this process available.

Italian Soda at Pallinos

Bruschetta Roma at Pallinos

Lasagna at Pallinos