The Dingo Times

Cash Cows

adhingra — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:49:33 +0000

Financial breakdown of Microsoft’s cash cows. What happens in three years, when most folks buying new computers will be selecting ARM based mobile devices?

CHART OF THE DAY: In Case You Had Any Doubts About Where Microsofts Profit Comes From.

Mad TV’s iPad commercial

adhingra — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:17:43 +0000

Well done sketch by the folks at Mad TV. I wonder if Steve will play this at next week’s big event?

This Dilapidated House: Deck Construction

adhingra — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:58:23 +0000

Gerry and I complete the framing for the floating deck.

This Dilapidated House: Season 1, Episode 2: Deck Construction from Anand Dhingra on Vimeo.

Mobile Bing on iPhone fails to deliver

adhingra — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:39:05 +0000

Microsoft just announced a Bing refresh for touch phones, including support for iPhone. According to the announcement, the new mobile bing brings some great new features including Movie listings, NFL player stats, and flight stats.

I didn’t try any of those: I tried the single most important thing a mobile search must provide: directions.

Home Page

The styling is a bit meh, but the brunt of the criticism is on the actual “touch” usability.

Mobile Bing home screen on iPhone

There are three things they really got wrong:

Can’t get location from iPhone GPS. Google’s mobile search, which is also a website running within Safari, can query my iPhone for it’s current location.
Bing logo doesn’t link to home page. Instead, you have text links at the bottom which are a bit too small to touch effectively. One starts to think this was really built for a stylus. The comical thing is that the logo is on every screen, is a nice, fat link target, and they never thought of using it.
Delete key. After filling in a search query, an X gets placed to the left of the search icon. Better tap carefully, otherwise all the text you just typed will be wiped out.

Directions

Since bing didn’t know my location, it prompted for a start. I applaud Microsoft for fighting the urge to put a Windows logo next to “start”, but at least they finally realize they need to build a fresh brand for Search.

I wanted to go from Faniuel Hall to Redbones in Somerville; two well known local locations. Notice the “X” adjacent to the Search. I can’t possibly figure out why someone didn’t insist on putting the search button beneath the text area.

After carefully pressing the search button, I was brought to the “end” screen to type in my ending location. Note that I misspelled Somerville. I didn’t bother to correct it, since search engines know I’m a bad typer.

And, here we see the results. 404.

Google Check

Here’s the same misspelled query in the iPhone’s Map client, which sends its queries straight to the Googleplex:

Instant results. In addition to the directions, I get realtime traffic.

Back to bing, and we type in the correct spelling. Still, no dice.

So, I went back to bing’s web search, and typed the same misspelled destination, and I get results:

What’s this mean?

Looks like their directions aren’t plugged into their search engine.

This Dilapidated House: Deck Demo

Anand — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:56:19 +0000

The back steps finally get some attention in this episode of This Dilapidated House. In this episode, Dingo dismantles the steps, performs a structural analysis, and uncovers some cultural artifacts.

This Dilapidated House: Season 1, Episode 1: Deck Demo from Anand Dhingra on Vimeo.

Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software

Anand — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:59:06 +0000

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Lemonade

Anand — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:48:01 +0000

Lemonade

Ingredients

1 cup sugar (can reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 cup water (for the simple syrup)
1 cup lemon juice
3 to 4 cups cold water (to dilute)

Directions

Make simple syrup by heating the sugar and water in a small saucepan until the sugar is dissolved completely.
While the sugar is dissolving, use a juicer to extract the juice from 4 to 6 lemons, enough for one cup of juice.
Add the juice and the sugar water to a pitcher. Add 3 to 4 cups of cold water, more or less to the desired strength. Refrigerate 30 to 40 minutes. If the lemonade is a little sweet for your taste, add a little more straight lemon juice to it.

Search, share, and cook your recipes on Mac OS X with SousChef!

Aaron’s Motorcycle Ride (wheelie madman)

Anand — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:14:11 +0000

Aaron decided to take my Flip video camera and attach it to his handlebars. Here he is tooling around East Dunstable Road:

Happy Birthday, Brother!

Anand — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Happy Birthday, Vivek from Anand Dhingra on Vimeo.

Ballmer on the Zune, take two

Anand — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:37:35 +0000

In the case of music, Apple got out early. They were the first to really recognize that you couldn’t just think about the device and all the pieces separately. Bravo. Credit that to Steve (Jobs) and Apple. They did a nice job.

But it’s not like we’re at the end of the line of innovation that’s going to come in the way people listen to music, watch videos, etc. I’ll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we’ll get him to own a Zune.

I’m not sure what Ballmer is implying here: will Microsoft craft a Zune player that appeals to senior citizens?