Not to be misled, this post is not about the celebratory status of the game or the cricketers. In fact, it could be quite the opposite.

Watching the intriguing fourth day play of the test match between India and England at Lords, some moments in the days play captured my attention. The way cricketers have come to celebrate mini and major milestones in the course of an innings has evolved over the years as has everything else. A batsman’s raised bat for a half century has now become a much more elaborate affair in recent times. The Australian method of the raised-arm-with-ball for a five wicket haul is setting the standards for the bowlers.

The way Kevin Pietersen celebrated his belligerent hundred, Monty Panesar’s excitement on picking up Tendulkar(is her ever calm after a wicket!) and Dinesh Karthik’s way of acknowledging his half century-these were the moments that caught my attention. A century is still a big deal in test cricket. A five for is also a worthy moment. But what about a half century? In an increasingly batsmen-oriented game, the half century moment needs to be placed with a little more perception. Any thoughts?

Here are a few pics that Shalin clicked of Sandeep Narayan and myself. The whole thing was planned suddenly, which left us very little time to get everything ready(the lights, props, and the likes!). Thanks to some terrific post processing work by Shalin, these photos have come out well.

For more photos, click here

• Near Perfect weather after some serious rise in mercury levels over the past few days
• Mind and body in place
• Some new and exciting work prospects around the corner
• Happy times with family and friends
• Marked revelations in the ever-evolving process of self discovery!

Ah….it’s a good day indeed.

I needed to access my email, synonymous to Gmail, and this is what I see.

And now I wait…

Presentation of helpDeskPilot at Proto.in

Our presentation at Proto.in

NZ came out victorious against the South Africans in the second match of the Champions Trophy 2006. The Brabourne Stadium witnessed a stern contest between the two teams, with the balance of the match swinging between both teams until New Zealand sealed it with an impressive bowling performance.

The pitch has been the talking point all through the tournament so far. It has indeed been surprising to see non-batsmen friendly wickets in India. The pitches have all had some variable bounce, have cracked up sooner than most expected it to thereby making it difficult for the batsmen. Though the initial swing and seam movement we have seen in the games so far, have been encouraging, the slow paced nature is something that is very difficult for the batsmen to adjust to. We saw that hapen yesterday in the first innings when NZ got off to a good start and then were pegged down by the dolly spin bowlers of SA. Robin Peterson will enjoy international cricket more often if he plays on pitches like this and Graeme Smith may be tempted to call himself an all-rounder if he bowls more on thes ekind of wickets. Such was the effect that these two spinners had in the first innings.

On the other hand, Stephen Fleming may well have defined how to bat in the first innings, for all the batsmen in this tournament. A kind of blueprint as Ian Chappell says. He believes that NZ are now good enough to qualify to the semis, and why not, they only have to win one more game.

Looking ahead to todays game, Pakistan find themselves on the backfoot even before setting foot on the field, by the loss of their 2 premier fast bowlers to the Dope test. Really, this must be a great loss and sure does dent their chances of winning this tournament. Pakistan cricket’s volatile nature to the fore again. First he Inzi case and now this….Sri Lanka will be aiming to extend their purple patch and have a good game today.

This is yet another attempt at keeping this blog going. I have found myself incapable of getting down to writing some posts, though there has been much to say in the past month or so. This attempt at revival was triggered by an old love. Something very close to my heart and something which is being celebrated by its ardent followers right now. I am talking Cricket, friends.

The ongoing Champions Trophy seems like a time of celebration to me. The entire cricketing world has gathered in India to clash heads for the Champions Trophy. Though the timing of the event, the format, the scheduling and other ingredients have taken some flak, I must say I am very excited at the prospect of the whole tournament. The wide range of international talent, some new and some old and some others rediscovering themselves-all this promises a good 2 weeks ahead.

To dive into matters straight away, the early qualifiers sprang no surprises, with West Indies and Sri lanka qualifying to the main draw quite comfortably. The lack of serious competition in the first four matches, raised expectations for the last match of the lot-Sri Lanka vs West Indies. What a non-gamer, that was! I for one, dint expect that match to be a real contest. Knowing West Indies’ nature of capitulating ever so meekly every once in a while, this had to come sometime. On the other hand, SL looks a very very well knit unit. Bowlers finding form, batsmen looking settled, and the captain seeming right on the button with evrything he does. No wonder, Barry Richards thinks they are one of the strong contenders to lift the trophy.

Yesterday’s India-England game promised a lot but it was pretty much decided midway through the first innings. England need to sort out their batting order to add some balance to the batting. It seems two natured with the aggressive talents of Freddie and Pietersen coming upfront and in case that should fail, the likes of Collingwood and Dalyrymple will do the reconciliation act. Whatever the order is, I belive these 2 should be certain things, Bell should bat at 3 and Freddie at 5. With Pietersen at 4 and Collingwood at 6, the batting seems more secure and if one of the top 4 get going, that provides the momentum for Freddie to come in and lauch himself later in the innings. The English bowling looked alright, considering it was the first game of the tournament. Harmisson will get better, Sajid Mahmood should find some rhythm as time goes.

India on the other hand looked in good touch with their bowling, though again, their batting order needs to be re-looked. Against strnger bowling units like Australia, South Africa, the current order will fail more often that click. Irfan Pathan at 3 is a definite no-no for me. There are far better batsmen in the team who need to be cast in early and No.3 is a vital spot. Agreed, he’s done well so far, but I have my reservatons on his success against better bowlers. Only time will tell.

Only time will tell as well, if this effort of mine was a kick-off to more blogging. For now, the Champions trophy is underway.

On a side note, a rather important one, Someone please take away Mandira Bedi!!!

A genuine enquiry on her well being, yielded the answer “Thin and Sleepy”. What an answer!

When was the last time you enquired about someone and heard, “Oh yea, he’s at home” or “He’s watching TV”. I thought a genuine “How is he” or “How is she” meant more than a situational piece of information. I hope to see her before I lose all the hair on my head. Seriously.

With the advent of Tiger(OS X), Apple included an application called Automator with the other software bundles. Though I have seen this before, its unmistakable robot with a ‘Bazooka’ icon, it was earlier today that I decided to play around with it.

Automator can be loosely called as a drag and drop programming language. With its well designed interface it makes it easy to automate certain regular tasks like checking Mail at every logon, open iTunes to listen to your favorite playlist, or open a set of webpages that you regularly browse and many more such tasks.

Our dear robot friend, with the ‘bazooka’ is nowadays being called “otto” and I will follow suit. I learnt today that it was not a bazooka, but a pipe, representing the power of the UNIX pipeline.

In Automator, a sequence of steps needed to complete a task is called a “workflow.” In other languages or programs, these workflows might be referred to as “macros” or “scripts.” Once you open Automator, by clicking on “otto”, you can see a set of applications that are “Automator-aware”(meaning, Automator works with them), and a set of Actions corresponding to each application. Workflows are created by adding actions of particular applications to the workflow area. A simple drag and drop will do. For example, to make a periodic backup of your gargantuan music folder or valuable photos folder, simply select Finder in the applications pane and choose the “Get specified Finder items” action. Here you can add a particular folder to perform an action on(Either your music or photos folder or some other one). Now drag and drop “Copy finder items” to the workflow area. Here you can choose to copy the selected folder to the desired location. Now save the project as a workflow, or as an application(If saved as an application, it can be assigned to run on startup/login).

Saving a workflow as a plug-in allows it to be used as part of a specific program. Saving the previous workflow as an iCal plug-in makes it available to, and behave like, part of iCal. You can save plug-ins as part of other programs as well.

Here I have made available a sample workflow that will create a backup of your iPhoto library on the desktop, iPhoto library backup.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Automator and its scope is concerned. Lots of other articles have been published explaining Automators functionality and there are several sites to even download workflows from. I hope to write a workflow that will play songs from my iPod, update the latest created playlists from my iTunes library, and play them again, as i slip into a deep slumber. Will keep you posted.

As Microsoft keeps delaying the release of Vista and along with it, the release of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, the only other worthy competitor in the browser market, has been steadily marching ahead. There were some doubts as to whether the popularity of Firefox had reduced, but this Macworld story, says that it has not.Statistics at OneStat.com have proved that the number of Firefox users has increased in the month of June. A rise from 11.79% in May to 12.73% in June, is a considerable jump. All this at the same time that IE use has declined by 2.12% to 83.05%.

Niels Brinkman, co-founder fo OneStat.com, says “We thought that Firefox growth had slowed down. It seems it’s increasing again. That’s a little bit of a surprise to us.” OneStat.com uses real-time Web analytics to look at which broswers are being used to view Web sites and to determine their popularity across the Internet, Mr.Brinkman added.
All eyes have been on the Mozilla Foundation the last week, expecting them to release the browsers next version. Firefox 2.0 Beta 1, has been released and has some new features. The early reports are that the new build, although in Beta is pretty stable. There are some screenshots here of the beta and it does look promising. The challenge for Firefox will come in adding more features to the default browser, while still keeping the developer community interested in writing more extensions.

With its growing popularity, everyone seems to like Firefox more than IE 6, Firefox does face a huge responsibility of keeping its audience attracted. With its next version out, more features, more security and an active user community attached to it(some like me are also emotionally attached to it!), it seems like good times are here for Firefox. At least for now.