Funny Traffic Signal

Encountered a weired traffic signal near RajajiNagar Entrance. Was wondering what to do next: "Jump" the signal or face the wrath of the vehicles behind me :P



PS: I had taken the pic using my phone ( Nokia 6270 ) without flash and while moving and hence the bad quality ;)

-XP

Family Tree

I am very bad at remembering detailed family relations and for that matter even names :P When ever I visit my native place (which is very rare) with my parents, my parents/I make sure that I get a "crash" course on all the relations again ;). So being a tech guy, I wanted a tech solution and hence entered the domain of family tree. For long I had be wanting to find a site that would really simplify creation of the family tree. I had tried various sites like Ancestry, TribalPages etc, but none of them allowed me an "easy" or "flexible" way to create a family tree :( Couple of hrs back, Pavan ( Friend and Colleague ), pinged me with the URL to this brand new "web 2.0 family tree"!

It is called Geni( That is one short name!). The first thing that strike me was with the ease it allowed me to create an account ( No email validation to start off! But then we need to validate later). The UI is flash based and mind blowing. The whole experience of creating family tree is taken to the next level. It was so much of fun that within 30 mins or so, I had added over 20+ members to my tree. The product is still in "beta" and has couple of privacy issues to be answered ( Like mother's maiden name being shown, access control etc). But in all, I really liked the whole user experience. I recommend that you take a shot at this.

A sample tree


I also manage to find couple of other new Family Tree service

1. Famster
2. Zooof

But none the above has an UI that is as intuitive as the Geni's one

Update

• Check out the way they incite users to complete the profile.

-XP

Eclipse Callisto

I had been using Eclipse 3.1 for a long time. So thought I should give 3.2 a shot at. Eclipse site mentioned about "Callisto".

In their words

Callisto is about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle. By releasing 10 projects at the same time, the goal is to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

The best part I like was the customization that it allows to choose features from various projects. Further googling landed me on Yoxos. They provide an excellent UI ( Rich AJAX Platform )create a custom Eclipse installation.

1. Allows to create/share custom scenarios ( Eclipse installation)
2. Allows to pick standard features and 3rd party plugins.
3. Provides Yoxos Install Manager (YIM) which is an eclipse based update mechanism.
4. Provides 3 months free subscription. After that YIM will not work.
   

I created a custom ( warning: 500 MB+ ) Eclipse Installation ( I added every plugin that I could think of:P ). It is accessible out here.

Screenshots of features for my custom Eclipse




-XP

Resolutions

Have been thinking a lot to make life more exciting. Decided to "try" to do 2 things from now on

1) Wake up early and define a morning ritual ( Thanks to this nice read by Steve Pavlina).
I have been very erratic w.r.t to sleeping. These days I sleep at 2-3 and wake up at 11. I end up reaching office only around 2-3 :( Also alarm never helps :P. Need to bring some order back into my life. So decide to start waking up around 6. Yoga sounds a good idea.

2) Start blogging ;)
Set up my blogger account's template, widgets etc, yest night. Still not very happy about the template. Will change once I get hold of a nice template ( I really liked this page look )

-XP