Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Musings

I want to write many thing but where do I start. Ok let me put them in the chronological order!

Date: 25th May 2007
Place: Madiwala
I was to board the bus from Bangalore to Coimbatore. Due to the heavy pour in the evening buses arrived late. Until then it was supposed to be a boring 60 minutes standing there. But then I noted the things around me and entertained myself. First thing I found mobile phone users. For every 10 person standing there 4 of them are talking in their mobiles. Talking with, their loved once, some engineers still helping & directing their colleges to fix bugs, some call their parents and inform their safe arrival to the bus stand and their arrival time to their home town and some even call random friends and have a talk with them to pass time. Next time try to observe people. :) Its fun.

Date: 28th May 2007
Place: Q-angle, PSG College of Technology
A most memorable day for us! We graduated on this day! We were declared as degree holders and took a pledge. I would never feel like saying our days in Tech soil are over. Its just a change in designation from Student to Alumnus. The Vice Chairman of Cognizant preceded over the function. Photos uploading delayed.

Date:30th May 2007
Place: Microsoft
My feed reader said, Microsoft Surface has been announced. With the usual inquisitiveness I opened a new tab. Once I went to all the presentations and navigated the site, I would say Microsoft Surface has taken users beyond their expectations. Its awesome. Do check out and find more. Yet another fancy stuff from Redmond after Photosynth is this.

Date: 31st May 2007
Place: Bangalore
Yet another designation change! New challenges, new crew!

Thursday, May 17, 2007

In Love of NUMB3RS

This post will definitely help fellow Bloggers to enhance their blogging experience and might motivate new bloggers!

Long since I have kept track of many Google's beta. Once such was this "Google Analytics". Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of Google Analytics's analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position. Today my older interface was automatically migrated to new Ajax rich interface. That I fell in love with immediately.

You get what you need. Thought I don host a commercial website, the figures that are displayed make me understand about the visitor who visit my blog. Some new features that caught my eye was Ajax rich User experience. The graphs and dimensional summary I get regarding my blog. My favorite of the all is the export as pdf option. For the report I give a perfect 10. Of late I was googling of how to upload files in blogger. The first link said bloggers disallow uploading files for security reason. But I din want to use third party servers to host my file. Finally with a little scratch of my head I found a method and uploaded my pdf report here.


Quick Glances:
  • I found this post on Universal search interesting.
  • Here is my Feed Reader. All news & blogs are read using it.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Zero's & One's

0's & 1's - for some this might look as a familiar title, for some its strange.

Yes today, I decided to write up what that actually surrounds us. In a warm up to this post, I asked few of my friends and colleagues as what surrounds them? One said "people", one said "system", one said "Nothing" :) and even one said, "anna... Heavy lunch... Thookam na...". So people have different view to it. Even some strange on me, when I asked them this question. But my view was different. I realize and see 0's and 1's surrounding us. My ethereal tracker said 95 packets crossed in and out of my Ethernet with my system in idle state. So everything are composed of 0's & 1's. For every Phone call we receive, Every mail we do, every song we listen its composed of 0's & 1's. So we haven't realized the importance of them. Now the question is are there sufficient 0's & 1's to satisfy our need? The present says yes, but the future?

Let me take up one small area the amount of 0's & 1's we consume daily. On an average a Software Engineer nerd, would go about consuming the following ways. So, I consider me as a test subject. I send up to 5-10 personal emails a day, it reaches around 30 recipients. I randomly chose a mail and found it had 382 characters, so its totally 8(mails) * 30(recipients) * 382(char) = 91680(chars). So its almost 91kb of data. Some increase exponentially as mail threads increase. I can recollect my class discussions going up to 80-90 replies. I atleast post a blog weekly. I get news alerts, my rss feeds, orkut scraps/communities Chat conversations I make, I lines of code (obviously less) and many more. So on an average an individual consumes/produces around 10-15mb of digital data. Now consider the average number of internet users. Billions! So think of the Digital data thats produces every second, its stagerring. Will there be resources to sustain it. We hope we have.

Now what if these resources get depleted one day! Is "The Matrix" a reality. yes of course, if we move at this pace. We might be ruled by others. Just because data and computation has increased around us. Research say, the average temperature would increase by 10 degree by 2080, some large ice caps melt and increase sea level. Where are we heading too?

Updates:
  • Interesting links are bookmarked in "Useful Scribbles" section at the right.
  • Many friends entered blogosphere.
  • In the verge of beginning my professional career.
  • Graduation May 28th.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Nandi Hills

Yesterday we had a trip to Nandi Hills, 60Kms from Bangalore. Morning mist was good, the roads were good. For all Bikers of Bangalore, its the first place to try out. We had the usual fun. It was interesting too. Also we managed food to be backed from my class girls house, only during lunch time we realized instead we could have gently starved. LoL :) Keeping it short, slide show tell you more!

~Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish!~

Spiderman 3

May 4th, the friendly neighborhood Spiderman is back on screens! I decided to watch it on the first day! Well we prepared earlier and peeps got the tickets in INOX, Bangalore. This 2nd film review in my Blog is divided into two parts. First one telling what the strengths of the film,

It’s a definite treat for “Spiderman Fans & Lovers”. The usual spide swing moving from long shots to closer shots was there in the film. A large number of spide’s web was flicked from the arm of super hero! The theme regarding the back substance was nice & new! Also Peter Parker with his black suit in and attracting girls was bit funny and credits to his acting. The special effect in the climax was really good, with the trashing fight scenes with the villains. The first sequence of fight was awesome.

If you ask, it’s a worth money spend for your kids! I doubt that. Since, there would have lost concentration due to the long conversations that were put in the middle of the film. I could realize in seats behind me! A group of kids occupied the row behind me, they started to kick my seat in front of me. Some got out of the seat and started to move around. Next, the villains, was not stamping and frightening like Spiderman 2 where the evil Dr was really good. Next character choosing, I guess the special effects team from “The Mummy” worked for this film for the “Sand man”. Since the effects was already used to the audience in ways of Mummy. Too many crooks, spoil the broth, it was like this with more villains at one point time! It really posed to be super natural to defeat them with Spiderman powers. :)

Many ask the question, is this end of Spiderman series? But my view is not. Since no sign of it was in the film. The definitely wanted to continue.

I give it 7/10.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Birds Eye View - WC 2007

Finally the most awaited World Cup Cricket has come to an end. Team Australia are crowned the champions. There is a lot to be discussed about this tournament, lot of take aways are there. On my view here I summarize,

  1. Length: This is not English Premier League or Formula 1 races to be played like a season. Its one-day cricket. The beauty of the tournament was lost due to its length. If teams liks India were till the end, injury scares would have been there at the end. The WC 99 was a perfect style, that would give opportunity to all position teams to perform.
  2. Shame: There was lots of shame circling around this tournament. But the murder of "Bob Woolmer" was the most shameful act in the history of this game. Also the ups and downs in the investigation is not creditable.
  3. Minnows: This was truely a sensational WC for the minnows. They proved that they were a team worth to play the WC. Both Bangladesh and Ireland proved their point. Their presence was predominantly talked on April 15th on Kensington Oval, which was supposed to a dramatic clash between Pakistan and India.
  4. Ground Staff: This WC was most affected by showers. But the ground staff in all the grounds made their presence felt in the efforts they took to resume the game as soon as possible. At one side it was a bats man paradise pitches. It was cheer for the crowd to watch.
  5. Toss: Sometimes people say, some captains are lucky in winning tosses. It proved to be a vital aspect of this WC. Many matches were decided by the toss itself. But there were few collapse with a winning toss, esp the semifinals between Australia & South Africa. The other semifinal also was the same case, who ever wanted to win the toss wanted to bat first.
  6. Farewell: It seems to be a big WC for the cricket lovers as well as emotional ones to watch their super stars to walk in for the final time. Inzy was a man with character. Cricketing world has lost him. What can you say about the next person Lara, One of the Gods of the game. We will be missing the spectacular with his bat. Next one was the most accurate bowler, I have ever seen. He was able to maintain that off-stump line for years. He's a batsman's nightmare. Glenn McGrath was his name, and was given a high farewell by winning the WC.
  7. Team India: Already made a post on the same note. Now BCCI has opened its eyes a little, the big guns are being dropped for the next Tour of Bangladesh. New format of the management and Sashtri leading the way. Lets see how far will this work out.
  8. Pakistan: Pakistan played poorer cricket than India, but their performance was over shadowed by their coach's murder. Soon PCB will be taking a look into it.
  9. Favorite: Some of my favorites of the WC would be Collinwood catch at point in the match against West Indies. He showed how catches win matches. Next best would be by Dwayne Leverock in the slips in the match against India. Favorite match was Group Match played between Australia and South Africa. I loved it because, the game showed good/bad bowling, some awesome batting from both side and finally thinking hat of the captains (Pointing), of how he took the power play and sealed the match. Since at one point when Devillers and Smith were on a roar, the target seems to be easy one!
  10. Bedi: Manthra Bedi was not so glamorous as she was for the previous WC. :)
So thats it to ramp up here. Hope teams win and loose, the love for the game never fades.