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Monthly Archives: February 2006
Eggs: Vegetarian or Non-Vegetarian?
In a conversation a while back, Bahubali mentioned that chicken eggs are two kinds, fertile and infertile. Most of the eggs that are consumed are infertile. I didn’t know how that would be possible, but I have learnt to listen. However, this was a very interesting topic. And since it was a topic that dealt with animals and knowing more about them, I decided I would get to the root of the matter (most of you will know I’m a great fan of the cat family — and that I harbour dreams of having a pet tiger some day).
So today I sat down reading up on some websites that had information about eggs. While I got a lot of information in multiple sites, I found a site that has very good information about eggs and maintaining your own pet chickens. This site not only talks about fertile and infertile eggs, it also tells you how much space would you need and how many chicken to have a daily supply of eggs. Very nice indeed.
So what did I find out? I found out that once hens reach maturity, they start laying eggs. Irrespective of wheter there’s a cockerel in among the brood of hens. These eggs are infertile. Meaning they will not hatch and no chicken will come out of it. Fertile eggs are those in which a cockerel has had a part to play. After a cockerel has played its part, the eggs the hens lay will be fertile for about a week.
Also, there’s no difference in the nutritional value between fertile and infertile eggs.
I’m a vegetarian myself (who eats eggs once in a while). This indeed is very good news for me — I have the satisfaction of knowing that I still haven’t killed anything to fill my stomach. There’s always an ongoing debate about what’s considered vegetarian and what’s not — I don’t want to get into that again. I’ve had many of those. However, I’m just happy for what I’ve just now discovered.
Picture from a recent India-Pak cricket match
This also came up on the Times of India’s front page. It’s funny. No marks for guessing India had won convincingly thanks to Dhoni’s fiery batting.
Adsense
I’m trying out Google’s Adsense, the ad program. Not that I’ve written (or write) about anything that’ll fetch me clicks and / or money. (Except for the big ‘Get Firefox’ button on the top — I really want people to start using FireFox.) I just want to know what ads they display and how.
I’ve experimented with them for may be a month or two now. Changed layouts, sizes, colors, etc. This is just for my experimentation. If you think they’re too obtrusive, please point it out and I’ll do something about it.
Pictures from surroundings at Juniper
Juniper celebrated its 10 years of operation a couple of days back. The company that started out in 1996 as a router company held its own during tough times (2001-2002) and managed to stay ahead of the rest. Now, it also has security products in its portfolio (of which I’m a part). The future looks very bright indeed. The celebration tagline reads "Juniper, you’re ten" (a play on words on the usual "Juniper your net".
There’s some good views we get from Juniper. I’d like to share those. The I-Flex buildings, the lake, etc.. it’s pretty good. I’ve not done complete justice in all the pics, I’d like to hear from you.
All pics shared on my webshots page.
Shown here are two of them.
Update: On why Webshot sucks
- It doesn’t have static URLs for photos, so I can’t put them in my blog
- You can’t upload multiple images from the web at once
- The software you download to upload multiple images at once has several views: views of the local pics, views of pics on webshots, etc. You can use this software to download images from your cam, label them and store them. If you want to upload them to the website, it doesn’t remember anything. You have to give the titles, captions, etc., again.
- This is very, very poor and reason enough for me not to use webshots.
Flickr vs Webshots:
- Max. resolution Flickr offers is 1024×768. Webshots has 1600×1200.
Inconsistent GMail interface
GMail has recently made a few changes to their ‘standard interface’.
They were pretty annoying at first, as I was used to the older interface. Some against which I have the biggest grudge are renaming of ‘move to trash’ option to ‘delete’. This happened may be a month back. Now they’ve removed the ‘delete’ option from the drop-down list and made it a button instead.
So consider this:
Earlier: Go for the drop-down list and select the 3rd or 4th option in the list that starts with the letter ‘M’.
About a month back: Go for the drop-down list — and there’s no option starting with ‘M’. Suddenly, we see a ‘Delete’ option. Use that.
Now: Go for the drop-down list, don’t find either of the two options
there, then you realize there’s a button sitting next to the drop-down list marked ‘Delete’. Hit it.
And there’s more: I’m using a (pretty) old version of konqueror these days that isn’t supported by the GMail interface. So I get what they call a ‘basic interface’. This interface still has the same option in the drop-down list. To make matters worse, it is still called ‘Move to Trash’. Isn’t that great?
And there’s more. In the ‘basic interface’, they say we won’t have some functionalities. Notably missing from the list are:
- Ability to compose messages in HTML (which this post could’ve benefitted from)
- Auto-saving of drafts
They probably don’t want to implement these features, but please, document them!
Ah, I do like to work on the kernel, but sometimes I feel I can be a better UI person than the ones currently out there. Probably that’s the reason I tried addressing several issues I was facing with software a while back. Now that I (finally) have a (working) computer at home, I hope to get back to AudioLink development.
More Vidhana Soudha
Sunil has digitally altered the Vidhana Soudha picture I posted earlier. He’s used The Gimp to remove people and a car. The Vidhana Soudha definitely looks better with this one.
Nice touches, Sunil!