Do you want an iPhone? Do you hate standing in lines?

Well it looks like you can check the availability of the iPhone online. If you are lucky and you find a green status ball you can make a quick run to the apple store near you to pick up your iPhone.

The idea seems simple but actually making store inventory available online is a nice feature. I like it and yes thank you apple!

Update
The online inventory check that I was so proud of, does not seem to work. I have checked this at different times of the day but sorry there are no green balls of goodness!

July 27 2007

Songs from Sivaji The Boss

for my personal listening only

Here is a nice video review of the iPhone by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal,

iPhone video review

Feel free to leave your comments on the iPhone.

Recipe for Vegetable Guruma

Preparation time 30 minutes
Serving Size 4 people.

Ingredients for grinding [Araikka, in tamil]:

Green Chillis 2 pieces
Coconut [Grated] 1/4 Cup
Ginger 1/2 inch piece
Garlic 2 pieces
Poppy seed 1 table spoon
Cashews 4-5 pieces

Udaichcha Kadalai [pottu kadalai, Split Peas Dal, roasted gram, Dalia, sengapappu] 3 table spoons
Coriander Seeds [Dania] 1 table spoon

Vegetables

Carrots 1 (diced)
Beans 10 pods (cut to 1/4 inch pieces)
Fresh Green Peas 1/4 cup
Cauliflower (florets) 1/4 cup (cut to small pieces)

Frying [Thalikka] Ingredients

Onion 1 (medium size), cut to small pieces
Tomato 1 (large), cut to small pieces
Cinnamon bar 2 (approx 1 inch pieces)
Clove 2 pieces
Curry leaves 10-12 leaves

Other ingredients

turmeric powder 1/2 tea spoon
garam masala 1/2 tea spoon
salt to taste
coriander leaves
Cooking oil 3 table spoons

Preparation

Add all the ingredients for grinding in a food processor (mixer/grinder) and grind to a paste (add a little water if that helps).

Heat 3 table spoons of cooking oil in a deep pan (Kadai, wok) .
Keep the flame in medium.
Fry the Cinnamon bars and cloves till they splutter.
Add the chopped onions and give it a few minutes to cook, till the onions are transparent.
Add the curry leaves.
Add the chopped tomatoes.
After the tomatoes are cooked (after five minutes or so) add all the vegetables till they are cooked.

Add the ground masala paste, turmeric powder, garam masala to the pan and add 4 cups of water.

Add salt to taste.

Close the pan and boil the guruma for ten minutes. (Keep stirring the guruma every two minutes or so.)

Remove pan from the stove and pour guruma into a serving dish. Add finely chopped fresh coriander leaves to the guruma
before serving.

Here is the final result,

This goes well with Idli, Ghee rice and of course puris and parottas.

You can also call this as Parotta Guruma.

Zoho has released an online notebook application… It lets you create books and the coolest thing about it is that it lets you add sound “bites” and/or video clips if you have a microphone/camera to record audio/video. Thats pretty neat. Best of all the price is right, yeah its free!

Check out their youtube demo here.

If you are interested in a good text book on Information Retrieval a.k.a Search, here is one,

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~schuetze/information-retrieval-book.html

It’s online and oh yes you can’t beat the price!

I thought the captcha system for identifying humans and blocking bots was cool ! recaptcha is even more cooler. The image [challenge] presented has two words instead of one. They use the ”other” word to digitize books scanned using OCR technology. The problem with OCR is that it does not recognize all words but the nice thing is that it can tell you so. The “other” word is now presented to a human to be interpreted.

Check them out here recaptcha ! I give them a thumbs up.

Some random yahoo video that I want to watch. I will rate this after I watch the video.

http://www.yahoo.com/s/603013

I finally have my own wordpress server. Its running on an old Dell Dimension Laptop. Total installation cost $0! Well not really … if you consider the cost of the CD that I used to burn ubuntu.

Its a great feeling and discovering that WP as built using php is a pleasant surprise.