Information is beautiful – My Week

Inspired by Information is beautiful. The site is maintained by David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer. And he says,

I’m interested in how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath. Or, failing that, it can just look cool!

Here is my week.

My week in numbers

I have also pulled up power point charts for some presentation. It is always interesting to see the graphs. But I guess, off late I started hating pie charts and bar charts. They are not more than mere spaghetti some times. There is a famous saying -

Information is beautiful, but it is often presented ugly.

Not with this guy for sure.

Few of the favorites -

• Big money spent on this, on that – a relative picture.
• If twitter was 100 people.

It is lot better then stick charts and pie graphs.

Urinal Protocol and Hilbert’s Hotel

There are two things I read this week and thought weird. One is about ‘Urinal protocol’.

Urinal protocol vulnerability

For those who don’t know what it is, read here. The point is, in a public rest room, every male should take due effort to use the buffer urinal. There are un-written rules, protocols people follow in using urinals. The common one being, using the urinal which is at the maximum distance to the one occupied already. Then, the point of using, allocating these resources effectively comes in as a concern.

Barbarians led by Bill Gates

Recently I read a book about Microsoft’s Operating systems – Windows.

This happened to be a good read if you have interests in product / software development. I have long cherished other operating systems, like Linux and other UNIX systems. Mainly for their ability to do things and robustness. Windows was never in picture. After I finished reading it, I had a complete new look towards Windows.

It is of like, poor chap, he has tried so many things. No wonder why he couldn’t be like Apple mac or Linux OS.

Few pointers from the book.

Coorg Trip

We have always planned quite a lot of trips but never made it. Eager to set this trend wrong, we decided to make this trip a reality. The biggest blocker was getting a day leave. We planned three day trip instead of two day trip. This meant, we need to take leave on Monday.

Train Journey to Mysore

We started from Chennai central to Mysore. Our train was Cauvery express scheduled at 2130 hrs. We took local train from Velachery to Central. Saurabh supposed to take train from Thiruvanmiyur. We were greedy in reserving a seat next us, but have to give in once crowd started building up inside. We messaged him after getting into train. We said, we are at the last compartment from front or the first compartment from last. I messaged from Faisel’s mobile at every station. When train stopped at Thiruvanmiyur and started with a jerk, there was no sign of Saurabh. For a brief moment I thought Saurabh missed the train. Later he came from the inter-connection of the coaches and we learned that he boarded the adjacent coach. We reached Park town and then central in quick time. Anyone who watched us would have wondered where we are going, because we were carrying big, thick rain coats in our hand, and it was scorching in Chennai. Geetha argued, we should carry this as he belived it is raining heavily in Coorg. Later we realised what a waste carrying it apart from the lonely use of keeping it for your head support in train.

Best 10 Jobs in and after recession times

Always one is curios to do the best job. With economy going southward, it is only normal for people to save their job. And if you are not doing good work, no matter what job you are in, you will be laid off. Having said all this, I am looking into some of the best jobs around, in this recession time and afterwards.

Top 10 jobs, 2009

A recent study listed the top ten jobs. They took several parameters to identify the ideal career. And here are those results.

Mathematics all the way – One, two and three

The top most job is that of a mathematician’s. Work is fairly safe and interesting. All you need to do is, to take couple of lectures. Guide few Ph. D scholars and publish papers if any. Unlike other branch of studies, mathematics doesn’t surprise often. Apart from people who are doing cut throat research, there is no need to keep learning much.

Aurora – New ‘concept’ browser from Mozilla labs

Mozilla labs has come out with a new browser. With the help of Adaptive path, mozilla has plans to bring out the new browser – Aurora. As what they call as, the concept series of browsers aims at the following -

The Concept Series aims to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

So, the future browsers are going to facilitate greater interaction between people.

Aurora – Concept Browser, Part 1

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

New user interfaces

Browsers have come long way since the first browser – Nexus. From plain interfaces to ultra rich user interfaces facilitating higher user interactions. When every thing seems like prototyped, here comes the new concept browser. It has so many functions and options in it, perhaps opening and running it up might require some level of expertise. Lets see how it works out.