A Good one on SOA(?)

http://soafacts.com

I liked this one:

"Larry Ellison once died in a terrible accident, but was quickly given SOA. He came back to life, built a multibillion dollar software company, and now flies fighter jets..."

Google Webmaster Tools

I just looked at Google Webmaster tools.

My first impression: Pretty good and useful for Ego Surfing for a blogger. Google must be taking real pains to maintain such a vast historic data.

Deepak just started his new blog and we were actually looking at tools for getting some stats for blog. And the best we could probably see in 20 minutes was this Google webmaster tools. Unfortunately, he could not use that for his blog because Google Webmasters needs the site owner to add a meta tag or an html page to the site for verification and Wordpress supports neither :-(

But I just looked at mine and was pretty surprised.

It tells you the date when Google Crawler last saw your site. It also shows the sites linking to your site.

And best part of it is the Query stats. It shows you the top queries on google which return your site and at what position. I never knew the search query "saurav ganguly score" on google would show up my blog at #3 :-) and that too a negative article.

Anyway, a useful tool.

Shashi Tharoor on absence of Malayali chauvinism

After a very long time, I really enjoyed reading the Shashi Tharoor column in The Hindu. Though Tharoor's every other column has something about Kerala in it, this one is very much justified.

http://www.shashitharoor.com/articles/hindu/praisequestions.php

The justification of the fact that the absence of Malayali Chauvinism is something very puzzling, is very well written by Sreetilak, Editor-Viva Books. Sreetilak takes some 8 points for this justification. Tharoor very neatly wraps up Sreetilaks writeup.

...."social comedies of Sreenivasan and Satyan Antikkad". I'd add M.T. Vasudevan Nair and Ramu Kariat to that list, not to mention Santhosh Sivan and the younger talents now making their money in Bollywood and beyond. There was a time when Bengal could have vied for this distinction with Kerala, but today it's a no contest.

Talking about Malayalam Movies, I always feel, on any day they stand a level above any damn Hindi/Tamail/Telugu movie. These not so hyped movies are substantially low budget movies compared to those multi-crore Bolly/Kolly/Tolly movies. Neither would they have an official web site..:-)

After watching an average Malayalam movie, I always feel there is some very dirty politics going on in Oscar nominations from India. I can never digest some three hour video called "Rang De Basanti" getting nominated for Oscars... I read that Mohan Lal's Thanmatra was in the race with RDB. On seeing the recent nominations, I always feel that they probably think any damn Hindi movie has to be prefered over a so-called-regional(?) movie.. Totally Atrocious.