Kunal, Avantika's - or Tika's as the "spunky monkey" likes to call herself these days - and Aditi's uncle won the Filmfare Best Director Award for HumTum on Saturday, February 26, 2005. February 26 also happened to be Tika's twelfth birthday. Kunal proved second time lucky on that very day. HumTum  was his second directorial venture, you see after Muzse Shaadi Karogi. We were all rooting for him, of course. He was telling Ashu and Ujwal and his mother Yash just a couple of evenings before the awards night that there was simply no chance of his winning. Maybe, that was his way of mentally preparing for the unknown. Do your best and be ready for the worst.

From what I've seen of him, I've always found him to be a cool, no-nonsense sort of a guy. Ashu was telling me that despite shooting his movies at exotic locations abroad, he never overruns his budget. When he received the Scene of the Year Award, Sonali Bendre mistook him for Kunal Das Gupta. Maybe he looked more a denizen of Bhadra Lok to her than the Mumbai-born Punjab-da-puttar that he is, a Kohli.

This, I reckon, is a symptom of how low profile he is. (For instance, Saturday's Bombay Times covered all the leading contenders but somehow overlooked him.) I'm sure Kunal will go places and - what's even more important - handle success humbly and diplomatically like the cool dude that he is. He has a good sense of humour, which gives him a sense of proportion too. And, he isn't the least bit hypocritical unlike most of Bollywood. Here at movies.dcealumni.com you'll find a bit about Kunal's next project.

OUTFOXING PHISHERS. Firefox's new fix

Chris Hoffman, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation, has this word of advice for all Firefox fans: "I'd encourage users to get this release, especially if they've been prone to phishing attacks or spoofing." The release he has in mind is Firefox 1.0.1 downloadable at mozilla.org. It addresses almost 40 issues, some related to security, others to stability and still others a result of user feedback.  No known cases where vulnerabilities in the browser have been exposed have been reported, though, according to Cnet. On December 30, 2004, Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, described Firefox in such glowing words as: "It is to IE in 2004 what IE was to Netscape in 1996 — the upstart that does a better job."ptech.wsj.com.

The Mozilla Foundation's press release about the new version is at mozilla.org. The other good news is, SC Magazine, a leading security magazine, recently awarded the Mozilla Foundation with its Editor in Chief award. Also see: techrepublic.com.

A9'S BIZARRE BEHAVIOUR. Patenting behavioural search

Nick Wilson, publisher and founder of Threadwatch.org, a group blog or forum, has this intriguing report to offer ('Fun And Games With Search Patents'): "On Tuesday, the United States Patent & Trademark Office published the Amazon.com subsidiary's patent application No. 2005003380. 'Server architecture and methods for persistently storing and serving event data,' filed in July 2003, describes A9's method of personalizing search results by including an individual's past searches and other behaviour. The same application is on file in the European Union.

The patent application discloses what is likely already Amazon.com's de facto search architecture, both for A9 and the e-commerce site." Wilson who confesses to "getting just a little sick of patents" wonders whether, "If this goes through", does it mean that "nobody else can improve Search in such a manner"? searchnewz.com.

AND THE WINNER? A freelance Iraq war blog

Freelance NBC News correspondent Kevin Sites, 42, recently won Wired 'Rave' first 'Blogger' prize for his reports from Iraq. wired.com. The Technology award winner was Bloglines' founder Mark Fletcher, 34, for "An RSS reader that make Really Simple Syndication even simpler." wired.com. Also see Mark Fletcher's personal post at wingedpig.com.

Ask Jeeves recently acquired Bloglines, incidentally. And: Fletcher's next big goal is targeted advertising modelled on Google's phenomenally successful AdWords serving low-key come-ons with search results. "But we have better data," he says. "We know who subscribes to what feeds." PS: It's seems to be award time for blogs. The 2005 Business Blogging Awards too were recently announced. These awards are the brainchild of Jeremy Wright, a technology journalist and Darren Barefoot of Inside Blogging.

This is a blog consultancy that works with companies helping them to integrate weblogs into their communications strategy, implement the technology and sometimes write content for their blogs. Top honours went to Media Guerilla (best PR blog), JSLogan (best marketing blog) and PFBlog (personal finance). For more on the 2005 Business Blogging Awards, have a look at billives.typepad.com (Portals & KM), tradermike.net (Trader Mike) and siliconvalleywatcher.com (Silicon Valley Watcher). Also don't miss the Business Blogging Awards Web site businessbloggingawards.com.

NEW FROM IBM. Serrano.

"eWeek reveals IBM is developing a new version of its WebSphere Information Integrator. The release, code-named Serrano and already in a restricted beta, is due for a public beta later this release (sic! - he probably means 'year') and a general release in the fourth quarter," writes Andy Beal ('IBM Releasing Serrano Enterprise Search'). The eWeek report in part reads: "By opening its corporate search technology to partners, IBM wants to turn enterprise search into more than a way to find documents, e-mails or data by keyword... also... to extract meaning from unstructured data," citing Nelson Mattos, IBM's VP Information Integration." The idea seems to be not to compete with Google or Microsoft in the Web search business but to focus on "the problems of enterprises to find relevant information across what they have, as well as information that is available publicly," again in Mattos' words. searchnewz.com.

EXPERIMENTS WITH OPTIONS. In online journalism

On Sunday, 6 March, the University of Missouri School of Journalism plans to launch EmPRINT. This online weekly gives the readers the option to either download, print and read or download and read onscreen with audio/video elements and interactive forms. In the test period till May 8, subscriptions will be free. columbiamissourian.com. About a year and a half ago, Rocky Mountain News rockymountainnews.com under the direction of Roger Fidler, the digital-news-tablet pioneer also behind EmPRINT, launched a PDF book format online newspaper. More details on this experiment are available here: usatoday.com.