The Kitchen Computer : If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute…
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: July 4, 2009
Chanced upon this very interesting trivia in the Wired article on the new book by Chris Anderson (FREE):
Honeywell Kitchen Computer Advertisement
“Honeywell Kitchen Computer, priced at $10,600″
…
“the Kitchen Computer was aimed at housewives and featured integrated counter space. Those housewives would, however, require a programming course (included in the price), since the only way to enter data was with binary toggle switches, and the machine’s only display was binary lights. Needless to say, not a single Kitchen Computer is recorded as having sold.”
The text of the advertisement read (source: Wikipedia):
“Her souffles are supreme, her meal planning a challenge? She’s what the Honeywell people had in mind when they devised our Kitchen Computer. She’ll learn to program it with a cross-reference to her favorite recipes by N-M’s own Helen Corbitt. Then by simply pushing a few buttons obtain a complete menu organized around the entree. And if she pales at reckoning her lunch tabs, she can program it to balance the family checkbook. 84A 10,600.00 complete with two week programming course. 84B Fed with Corbitt data: the original Helen Corbitt cookbook with over 1,000 recipes $100 (.75) 84C Her Potluck, 375 of our famed Zodiac restaurant’s best kept secret recipes 3.95 (.75) Corbitt Epicure 84D Her Labaird Apron, one-size, ours alone by Clairdon House, multi-pastel provencial cotton 26.00 (.90) Trophy Room”
Hmmmm …
Abir, Sancho and Lizzie
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: May 19, 2009
- In: Personal| books
- 5 Comments
Book cover of My Friend Sancho
“I should introduce myself now. My name is Abir Ganguly. I work for a tabloid in Bombay called The Afternoon Mail. I am 23. I masturbate 11 times a day. I exaggerate frequently, as in the last sentence”
Thus begins Amit Varma’s (of India Uncut fame) newest yellowback My Friend Sancho (follow this link for the Author’s homepage on the book, or the Facebook fan page). Abir, or Abeeeer as he is called by friends in a state of bacchanalia, relishes a full meal of online games everyday, and then passes obnoxious PJs, enjoys being at Bookends a bookshop in Bombay’s Eterniti mall (good nomenclature!) and covers the crime beat in Bombay when he feels like doing any work. Abir is imaginative, wildly, his hormones getting the better of him at the drop of every pen anywhere in the world, his testosterone-tinted glasses seeing through every fabric. He is a witness to a murder and then finds himself in love with the daughter of the victim, Muneeza aka Sancho, when he is pushed into an assignment to sketch her father’s life. The story is about how Abir’s life gets entangled with Sancho’s, doesn’t have the balls to tell her the truth, and when he does, as is usually the case he is spurned, and finds himself in the state of abject despair (of course, since its despair in love!). The fact that his room-mate lizard is in no mood to empathize doesn’t help either. What happens in the end … umm .. read the book!
The best thing about the book is that its a very light read, very quick — I finished it off in two sittings. To the credit of the book, it managed to hold my interest even as I kept watching the results of the nations greatest jamboree, the Lok Sabha elections 2009. As you navigate from one wisecrack to another, you wonder if Varma was under the influence of err .. something more influential that lends to more fluent thoughts (a la Coleridge in Kubla Khan?) — you wonder if the wry sense of humour can be achieved in sobriety. The plot is tight, quick — though the book is more in the prose than the plot.
I remember the last book I had read with an equal gleeful page-turning urgency was The Inscrutable Americans, and I hope this book reaches the same heights of success!
Of course, the best fleshed out character in the book is the Lizard. I don’t think you can find another book where a Lizard emotes quite as much.
The Common Man Bowls every Political Party
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: May 15, 2009
- In: Politics
- 2 Comments
The Common Man Bowls all Political Parties in India
Found this brilliant piece of work by Neelabh on the the Times of India masthead today, and deservedly so. It shows the way elections in India are a completely unpredictable affair — no amount of opinion polls and exit interviews can help. Every constituency is unique, every booth different, every election machine throws up surprises. Every seat is hotly contested, my booth had around 8 candidates. There is a mad scramble for votes, hook and crook both have their own role to play.
And the election results are always a suprise especially in national politics. Voters in India are confused about what is good at the national level, whats good at the state level — and many times your choice vary quite a bit based on the scale of the elections, and the candidate in your constituency. Besides, I am not sure if many people actually know the difference between the parties apart from the symbols. It’s a game of partnerships, with powerful sects, groups, communities with mass appeal, and if you pull the right leader, you pull all the followers with them.
At the end, it really is like the big fat bowling ball that is quite unpredictable, try as you might to place it. The pins, kings and men, can roll with equal probability, and the pins that stay behind become the kingmakers the next time. Horses are traded, donkeys get promoted to ministers, blatant foxes smile behind the curtains of power, a new set of people make money in the next 5 years, policies be damned!
Yes, elections in India are quite an entertainment, quite like the game of bowling!
StalkDaily worm hits Twitter
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: April 13, 2009
- In: CS
- Leave a Comment
Found a full post mortem of the latest worm to hit the Social Media scene – StalkDaily. Very interestingly, twitter allowed to add script tags in their profile, and 17-year old Mickeyy Mooney employed a cross-site scripting attack to not just post an update promoting his own site StalkDaily.com, but also added the same malicious javascript on the profile pages of who-ever visited an infected page. The modus operandi of the attack is described in more detail here.
This of course, made use of the authentication tokens that are present when you are logged into twitter – and while it couldn’t scrape passwords, it did its harm. Twitter is kinda more open than all others, since it reveals pretty much all its functionality through its API – it even gives the users the ability to even update their profiles. This, along with the fact that they allow Javascript inclusion in the profile (extremely surprising! why would they allow this!), makes it easy to do cross-scripting attacks here.
I was wondering what means can be employed to control this — and there are a few strategies that can be used here:
- Input Cleanup – Always clean up inputs when you are accepting anything from a foreign agent (user, website, api). This should include cleaning up script tags, cleaning up for SQL injection, etc.
- Secure Account Settings – Ensure that before changing account settings, users are at least made to put in their password once again, or it’s on a separate location (https) that prevents the same authentication tokens to be used. Yahoo/Google do that for all important account settings
- Sandbox External Code – If you do have to run any custom code that the user sends your way, run it in a sandbox. Rather than giving it access to all your data structures, create a new datstructure, populate it appropriately and let it spit out the results in some predefined format (say, XML). You can parse the results and display it again. Showing users’ code directly can be quite dangerous.
- Extra authentication for APIs – Give the API an extra authentication token, say an api key, that prevents the users to access your api’s without it. The challenge here would be distribution of this extra information. This can either be done by asking users to put in an extra api key when they give api access to somebody, or to make the software pass through a API validation step (a la OpenID, or Vista UAC) that only gives out the api key, after correctly informing the user.
Do you have any other tips?
The Crisis of Credit
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: March 9, 2009
- In: Economy
- 5 Comments
A very good visualization and explanation of the Credit crisis. All this while, I was unable to figure out how mortgages were related to CDOs, but this does a fantastic job of explaining. Worth sharing …
Indian Politics ki “Jai Ho”
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: March 6, 2009
- In: Politics
- 5 Comments
Can Indian Politicians ever stay away from capitalizing on anything that remotely smells of success? From India Shining (and subsequently whining) to Chak De Congress, Indian Politicians have always been lapping anything popular and successful in order to boost their political fortunes, in the hope that ordinary citizens will vote in elections the same way as they buy soaps (by watching commercials) and unfortunately many do!
This time around, Congress has bought the exclusive electoral publicity rights to the inspiring and lively Jai Ho song from Slumdog Millionaire for a whopping Rs. 1 crore from T-Series, and to prevent their arch rival BJP from using the song to their advantage. It’s a bitter rivalry brewing out there – Congress firmly believing that people will get duped into believing 5 years of hodge-podge rule has had a similar effect on India – a slumdog turning into a millionaire, and sing Jai Ho on railway platforms after Congress’ deafening victory in the political circus. Of course, the effect on India can not be predicted, but all the slumdog politicians will surely turn into millionaires overnight. Narendra Modi, BJP’s own bête noire, has pitched in with a new gem:
The credit for Slumdog getting Oscar awards should go to India’s ruling Congress party because without years of the Congress rule there would not have been slums in India
Not that the BJP is far behind in the circus. From going back to the Ayodhya Ram Temple chant to woo voters, to advertizements all over the internet for the only “stalwart in Indian Politics” – LK Advani, the BJP has been trying to do an Obama in India. According to “some” (mine) estimates, LK Advani has single-handedly managed to help the Indian online advertizing industry to survive in these tough times, since wherever I go on the net, his pic follows me like a pug.
It’s only going to be an interesting elections to watch – my personal prediction is a hung parliament (which I can bet my money on) and re-elections very soon. Last time around, the hand used the sickle to weed out the lotus, until it really seemed to falter midway, and the cycle had to carry it to the finishing line. This time, however, the elephant is marching to other states, trampling hands and lotuses, flowers, and sickles. It will be an interesting and worrysome experience to watch this elections. (link)
Jai Ho!
[Found a blog with lots of elections09 coverage]
Snowflakes Templates – Blogs are the new media
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: January 29, 2009
Just came across this interesting post about Snowflake templates where you put a word with just about anything, and make a punchline. For instance, “X is the new Y”, or “In Soviet-Russia, X Y’s you”, and in Israel during the election campaign, a leader came up with “Not X. Y”. Some examples are:
- Dhoni is the new Tendulkar
- Laptops are the new supercomputers
- In Soviet Russia, water drinks you
- In Bollywood, dreams make you
- Not a blog. An elegy.
- Not a snowflake. A phenomenon.
- Rahul is the new Rajiv!
What snowflake patterns have you seen? Any common in India?
Hop onto the original post as well.
Co-incidences
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: January 17, 2009
- In: Life
- 14 Comments
Was browsing orkut, when suddenly I remembered one of the wierdest co-incidences that has happened to me. This was 2 years back — we had just finished one of the theater sessions in Bangalore and chilling at a coffee joints, and as it often happens when there are enough people and few topics, the discussion happened to meander towards the topic of birthdays. It was one of those early classes, and I was very enthusiastic, and immediately gave a shout with mine. Suddenly, the girl next to me told hers, and (yes you guessed it right) her birthday was on the same day, same year!
All this while, the guy on the other side, had been cut-off from the conversation since we had been talking about relatively boring things, or perhaps busy talking to his girlfriend. Suddenly, he decided to pop in, and this was really wierd, the most unbelievable thing to have happened to me — he was born on the same day, albeit in a different year! Three people sitting in a row sharing the same birthday. How many times has it happened to you?
What is the wierdest such thing that has happened to you?
Clay Shirky’s predictions about the future of Mass Media
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: January 7, 2009
- In: Business| Entrepreneurship| Tech| web
- 2 Comments
Just found this article on The Guardian site. Clay Shirky’s a professor at NYU and a scholar of Mass Media and the effect internet trends would have on them. Worth a read — I agree with some of his predictions (and presumptuously adding some of my own):
- Newspaper’s will diverge into 2 classes – magazines such as Economist which will exist for the people willing to pay for high quality coverage, and mass coverage of all possible news on the internet that will be available free and paid for by advertising dollars. Communities such as Twitter might help surfacing the right news.
- Niche newspapers and magazines will only exist online — the distribution costs for anything that doesn’t have economies of scale are not justified.
- TV will also change dramatically – The current state of the industry is that content is tightly controlled by the Channels, and hence to maintain quality, studios invest a lot of money (at least in India). We will see a lot of rise of amateur content, but only so much, since professionals will soon (and have, if I am not wrong) start publishing on YouTube and the like. However, the sudden loosening of the grip on distribution (since there are no longer any channels), will mean the quality of the content will change. Video distribution will be controlled far more by social networking sites (a la Facebook) than are blog posts.
- Books will be relatively less affected, at least until we hit a e-book reader that really rocks! My guess, though is devices like Kindle will improve a lot in the next decade or so, and might affect book sales greatly. Print-on-Demand will grow, but I am still not aware of how much it costs to print just one copy, so I am not in a position to comment. A large part of the cost if the cost of distribution, PoD will really succeed if the following equation is satisfied (since you will still pick up books at a store):
cost_of_traditional_book + cost_of_distribution_to_store > cost_of_printing_just_one_copy
The full article can be found here.
What is a *FREE* customer worth?
Posted by: kpowerinfinity on: January 6, 2009
I always wonder if companies should pursue community building with lots of users, or a few paid users. While both have their advantage, it is a question that can be better answered on a case-to-case basis. Many factors might affect the strategy a company might want to employ – funding levels (do you have money to invest through a franchise building phase?), maturity of the market (how many other players are there?), state of the product (is your product extremely well-defined, or are you tuning it still?), but I found this feature story by Sunil Gupta and Carl Mela that brings to the fore a new dimension and one I had not been able to quantify — indirect network effects — when you acquire a free customer, over time they might start buying from you, or attract other customers.
Gupta and Mela point out these free customers are extremely important for many businesses — from a shopping mall where they build up aspirational value and buy products later, or gaming consoles where it drives more developers and a wider eco-system leading to a higher monetization. They explain these in light of an online auctions house — where more buyers lead to more sellers and higher lifetime earnings even though the buyers don’t actually pay a fee. What’s really interesting about the report is that they have quantified these indirect network effects, explain how a penetrative pricing (low initially, and higher later) leads to higher lifetime earnings since it broadens the base.
Also reminds me of when I was talking to a manager in Shoppers Stop sometime back, and he told me that everybody walking into his store is a potential customer — they might not buy anything now, but the fact that they walked in shows that they are interested in buying something, and will come back and buy. Which is also true of brands targeting youth — they don’t have a lot of immediate spending power, but very high lifetime earnings, and so you are better off getting them hooked onto your products.
There is also a more detailed research report that I wish to delve into, and if you want to read the full feature, just search intelligently]
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