LOST ..... and Found ?

In a 2 hour finale, the third season of Lost ends with an interesting twist in the tale (as has always been the case in the earlier seasons). For the first time in the series we see flashforwards in parallel to the story happening on the island. We are shown events from Jack's life, which at the end of the episode give a hint that Jack and Kate have been rescued from the island, while the fate of the other survivors is not clear.

In the climax its revealed that Naomi is not a part of any rescue team. If she is not sent by Penny, then how does she have the snap of Desmond and Penny. The series did not reveal much of how she had got that photograph. There could be one theory that maybe her group had been sent by Penny's father when they realise that Desmond is alive and Penny who is searching for him, can actually locate him. Maybe this team was sent to find Desmond and execute him before he is found by Penny. Well if thats the case then Naomi had plenty of time on the island to carry out this task before getting back to her boat. This plot could only be revealed in the coming season.

We are not sure if Charlie actually drowns or whether Desmond saves him yet again from the flooded station. And what had transpired between the survivors and Ben, when the Naomi's people come to the island. Is everyone rescued or are some people left behind. From the communication between Jack and Kate, it shows that Jack had done something which he regrets doing. There are several open questions left unanswered. There was no hint about the identity of the dead person in the funeral. Obviously it was someone both Jack and Kate knew and someone whom Kate detested. There are hints that Jack's father is still alive, then how does one explain the coffin he was carrying from Sydney in the pilot episode of the 1st season. On the island, the coffin is shown empty with no justification of the missing body. Kate is supposedly living/involved with someone whom she has to return at the end of the episode. We are not informed his identity either. Obviously the love between Jack and Kate seems to have been missing when they meet at the end of the episode. The details of the rescue would clear all these doubts and for that we need to wait till the next season.

There was an announcement that Lost could run uptill 6 seasons, which means the scriptwriters look in no mood to end the mystery surrounding the island. Lets wait and see till the next season, to find out what happened to the survivors.

Hike in the Dolomite woods

A weekend before along with some of my colleagues at work we had gone for a hike in the woods of Madonna di Campiglio. Its about 70 km from Trento and has some beautiful waterfalls. The stream of Sarca runs through the forests and creates the gorgeous Nardis Waterfall, which is an imposing 120 meters high at a gradient of about 60 degrees. These woods are reachable from the small town of Carisolo and are located in the beautiful Val di Genova, in the vicinity of the Adamello-Brenta Nature Park. As you drive through from Trento to Carisolo, you come across numerous cliffs and ridges which are a ideal location for rock climbers.

A lonely walk through the woods, made us feel stranded like Jack, Sawyer, Kate et al. Though I am not an avid climber like some of my friends here, I tried my hand on some easier tracks that day.

Yahoo flips Photos for Flickr

Yahoo has decided that it will do away with Yahoo! Photos in favor of Flickr. It has announced that the transition will occur by the fall this year. The erstwhile users will be directed to other sites like PhotoBucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery etc. Yahoo claims that the transition will be smooth with a 'single-click' operation and will occur in a time frame of 3 months. This decision vindicates the rise in Flickr's popularity over the last year. further reading ...

iGoogle - Personalized Homepage from Google launched

Google in an attempt to re-invent its homepage has launched the personalized version titled as iGoogle. This one is similar to MyYahoo (the personalized homepage offered by Yahoo!) who is currently the leader of customizable Ajax-based homepages, in terms of user base. With iGoogle, its users can integrate a large number of Google services, content tabs from RSS feeds etc onto their homepage. Google can also recommend interesting items to you, based on your user behaviour it learns from the past queries made, results viewed etc. Google has also expanded its Web History tool, where it can keep track of much more information of your web activity and not just the search history. Although users might find it irksome and invasion of privacy when they notice the amount of information Google knows about them, however there are options where the user can remove any of their personal information and constrain the logging of the history data. The other good part of the new homepage is that users can now embed their self-made gadgets (similar to Yahoo! Widgets). The users can design their own gadgets by simple tasks like form-filling and file uploads without much coding know-how.

With this, Google wants to take the personalization of its search engine to the next level, by discarding the notion of "one size fits all" and contextualising their results to the user's needs by considering the geographic location of the user (specified by the user in his/her Google profile). At the moment, Google is offering this personalized homepage service to about 40 countries and 26 languages.

This kind of implementation is termed as a push-based recommender service, where the system is pushing or enforcing certain kind of results onto the user, as opposed to the pull-based recommender service, where the user requests for results. A push-based system may not always work optimally. For instance, an English-speaking person living in Italy will have his homepage interface and the displayed content heavily influenced by the regional considerations. An example would be the Google News feeds, which would by default display him news from Italian newspapers, unless the user explicitly selects otherwise. The same argument can be applied to the result ranking in their personalized search, which gives a higher weightage to the previously viewed results and typecasting the information need of the user, which may not remain static over a period of time.

There is a visible bug in iGoogle at the moment, because in my case I was already using the personalized homepage of Google. After this switch to iGoogle, I found much of my personalized content missing and being replaced by regional stuff. I used to have RSS feeds from some sites which I had found interesting, but to my shock I found them to be replaced by some regional content being extracted from Italian sites. I hope Google fixes this one soon and I get to view my favoured content soon. This glitch also raises the issue, of how dependent a web user can become on Google. How much we rely on it for our day-to-day web activity and any minor blip on Google's behalf effects the web usage of an ordinary user.