JP Morgan Chase to acquire Bears Stearns

JPMorgan Chase announced today that it will acquire the investment bank Bears Stearns in an transaction for stock to stock exchange. On the basis of the closing stock price of March 15th, 2008 the value per share comes to merge $2.00 . Based on a report from BBC business site, Bears Stearns had a sub-prime loss of US$3.2 bn and lately JP Morgan Chase with the backing from Federal Bank of New York was to provide some emergency funds.

Another article on BBC says that Bears Stearns is(was?) the Wall Street's fifth largest investment bank and there where speculations that it was finding hard to come up with funds for its daily operations. The shares dropped 46% on Friday (March 14th, 2008) on the news that the banks is driven to insolvency by the hedge funds clients.

Looking back to my post i wrote on February 28th,2008 about the grim banking forecast, it looks like the reality of banks facing the sub-prime mess is hitting close to home.

Stars, moon & mars covered by Google

Google has launched a new website "Google Sky" where everyone interested in astronomy can be a star gazer under sun light :) armed with a browser and internet connection. If that's not all, you can now follow the Apollo landings sites on the moon and can visit the mars. Google has created a very detailed map of mars in alliance with NASA and Arizona State University.
I will like to thank its development team for doing such an outstanding job in showing me the stars during day time which otherwise was only possible by visiting a planetarium.

Google launches Calendar Sync. with Microsoft Outlook

Thank you Google for providing the sync. tool for Microsoft Outlook. Now i don't have to retype the events in Google Calendar if i had updated or entered few new events in Outlook, while away from internet. Yes, it does happen that i many a time while traveling cannot access internet. Now using this utility i can be more comfortable using Google Calender and Outlook for keeping track of my appointments.

Please, refer to the Getting Started page is full of all the details on how you can setup and remember its the primary calendar only that can be sync. with the outlook at this moment of time.

My wish is now to see when Google will release a sync. tool for Microsoft Outlook Contacts with Gmail contacts also, that will be the next best thing to sliced bread.

Lease a new life into an old laptop

I have a very very old laptop(Compaq Presario 1260) that is designed for Windows 98 and had been very handy until past few years. When the software environment started getting more and more resource hungry. I had to with a heavy heart retire this laptop as its resources where no match to the new softwares requirements. It has just 4.3 GB hard drive and cannot support more then 128 MB RAM. This was my first laptop and i'm still very much attached to it. The good old coding fun i had with it using Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 and then 5.0, PERL and C. I had to shelf this computer as i never would never muster enough zeal to drop it at Salvation Army. For past few years i have tried to infuse life into this laptop by using many different Linux distro's like Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and Ubuntu 7.0.4 then upgraded to Ubuntu 7.0.10 on this laptop. I was happy with Ubuntu 7.0.10 as i was able to use my ZyXEL Wireless card to connect to internet,but the performance was very slow and so i had to shelf the laptop or quite few months.
Then i saw the gBook laptop at Walmart, which is powered by gOS which is based on Ubuntu linux. I downloaded and installed the gOS on the laptop while i was watching the 1st final one day cricket match between Australia and India on saturday nite.
I liked the gOS's tight integration with Google Apps and i won't mind living out of my browser for this laptop. The interface is very clean with all the program icons on the bottom dock just like OS X. Now i can use a dedicated laptop to handle my blog and also use it for light weight internet app. The further test i want to carry out on this old laptop is if i could use it as temporary wireless coverage booster as gOS is based on Ubuntu.