Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

LOS ANGELES – Michael Jackson, the sensationally gifted child star who rose to become the "King of Pop" and the biggest celebrity in the world only to fall from his throne in a freakish series of scandals, died Thursday. He was 50. Jackson died at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner for Los Angeles County, confirmed his office had been notified of the death and would handle the investigation. The circumstances of Jackson's death were not immediately clear. Jackson was not breathing when Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics responded to a call at his Los Angeles home about 12:30 p.m., Capt. Steve Ruda told the Los Angeles Times. The paramedics performed CPR and took him to the hospital, Ruda told the newspaper. Jackson's death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music's premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered...

Anything with Flash output is highly inappropriate for most situations. While great for games and other multimedia applications, Flash “web sites” have numerous usability problems such as: - Inability to deep link to a page or article (nobody else can refer to your content effectively - the fabric of the Web becomes broken!) - Limited indexing support by search engines (I understand this JUST started to happen despite Flash being around for a decade) - Nonexistent support by accessible (audio) browsers - how do the visually impaired surf your Flash “web site”? - Flash “web site” is not available to people of any other languages. Google and other services will translate your content on-demand for people from other cultures, I’ve used this many times for pages written in other languages myself and find it highly useful. This does not work with Flash. - Navigational paradigm is typically broken with Flash. This is left to whoever plays the role of designer / information architect - with F...

Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to glean meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the big guns such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete. We go off the trodden path and explore a few lesser-known Web analytics options. In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent and free tools and applications to help you gather and analyze data about your web content. 1. Piwik Piwik is an open-source Web analytics application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a "plugins" system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. Install only the plugins you need or go overboard and install them all – the choice is up to you. The plugins system, as you can imagine, also opens up possibilities for you to create your own custom extensions. This thing’s lightweight – ...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in Madagascar for the last few years, you undoubtedly already know about the All-Star open-source applications for Windows. I’m talking about applications such as Firefox , Thunderbird , GIMP , OpenOffice , and VLC . However, there are hundreds of lesser-known but highly-useful open-source applications available for Windows. A few of my favorites are below. These applications range from moderately popular to downright obscure, but all of them are open-source and FREE. All of them are worth the install time if you have never tried them. As a side bonus, many of them are cross-platform as well. Here they are, in random order: 1. ZScreen ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program that quietly resides in your system tray until needed. It can take screenshots of a selected region, the active window, or the entire screen. It can even send screen captures via FTP and copy the URL to your clipboard, all with just a single keystroke. Oh yeah, ...

AR Rahman wins 2 Oscars; clean sweep for Slumdog Millionaire gets 8 Oscars. It was a dream come true at the Oscars for India. Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire , won eight Oscar awards for best feature film, direction, original song, original score, sound mixing, editing, adapted screenplay and cinematography. Smile Pinki , a 39-minute short film in Hindi and Bhojpuri, directed by Emmy-nominated producer Megan Mylan won the best documentary short subject Oscar. Best Picture - 'Slumdog Millionaire' Best Director - Danny Boyle for 'Slumdog Millionaire' Best Actor - Sean Penn for 'Milk' Best Actress - Kate Winslet for 'The Reader' Best Supporting Actor - Heath Ledger for 'The Dark Knight' Best Supporting Actress - Penelope Cruz for 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' Best Original Screenplay - Dustin Lance Black for 'Milk' Best Adapted Screenplay - Simon Beaufoy for 'Slumdog Millionaire' Best Animated Feature - ...

Ramalinga Raju may face 10 year jail Satyam Computers’ chief, B. Ramalinga Raju, ambushed investors and Corporate India on Wednesday, admitting to long-running fraud of about Rs 8,000 crores in accounting and said the company did not have the money that it had claimed it had. He resigned later, saying his last-ditch efforts to fill the “fictitious assets with real ones” through the attempt to acquire Maytas failed. Mr Raju, who faces arrest, added that no other board member was aware of the financial irregularities. His brother and managing director, Mr B. Rama Raju, stepped down as well, days ahead of its January 10 board meeting. Mr Raju will still be the chairman of Satyam Computers till the board is expanded. The news sent Satyam shares and the equity markets into a tailspin. The stock lost 90 per cent wip ing off more than Rs 10,000 crore market capitalisation. Trading in Maytas Infra was stopped because of the size of its fall. The New York Stock Exchange halted trading in Satyam...

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