Which is India's first Wi-fi city?

Nowadays, my office hour opens with a little tech-geek talk with Abhinav. We share little tit-bits about the tech stuff each day we come across. Our today's chat was about Google talk and Wi-Max technology.

In the course of the chat, he pointed out two things.

Mysore is the India's first Wi-fi enabled city. It beats India's Silicon Valley Bangalore and other metros.

Secondly, India is much ahead in mobile-telecom and Wi-fi incomparison to US. The reason being that we haven't invested much on the conventional wired lines and we are free to embrace mobile and wi-fi now.

Google spreading its wings

The much rumored thing is happening again. According to news reported by Reuters in LA Times, it seems that Google is entering IM and VoIP space.

When there is a healthy competition, quality is on the rise. The end users of these services are going to benefit largely.

courtesy: Plaxoed

Update: Till midnight yesterday, it was rumor, but today it is a reality.
http://www.google.com/talk/

Web Popularity

You need not be a celebrity to be in a limelight, ofcourse it is a different kind of limelight. Being popular in Web world enthrals the same kind of experience.

With the search engine wars picking up, I tried to nail down "How popular am I in the web?", just by measuring search rankings of my petty blog contributions.

Search Engines:
Google
Yahoo

Preface:
I have been keeping this blog active with my own musings about the interesting stuff that I come across day in and day out. I haven't used any paid services or through other means of improving traffic to my blog. I have taken measures to popularize my blog only among a selected group of pals. I have added up Google Adsense to my blog which has started showing context sensitive ads very recently. Though I cannot confirm, google does seem to have a slight edge over other search engines in indexing my site.

With this setup, I used the same keywords in both google and yahoo search to analyze the search results. I have used both Web wide search and site specific search.

Keyword used:
rajakumar blogspot

Search Results:
Google Web wide search:
The first hit is a comment that I had posted in Govar's blog.


This blog came up in third place (Hurray, I am not doing bad in ranking it seems)

There were total 19 results, out of which just these two were related to me.

Yahoo Web side search:
The first hit is my bloglines subscription export xml url


The fourth hit is a comment that I had posted in Govar's blog


And on sixteenth hit is this blog


On the whole, the total results were 26 out of which 8 is related to me. To my surprise the index page of my blog has been indexed by Yahoo search and I could see my comments in Gops, Vig and Smart Senthil's blog.
Thanks to Vig for exposing my CGPA to world wide audience and I need not blow my own trumpet :-)

Google site specific search:
In Google's index there is just one entry related to my blog.

This proves that Google adsense doesn't have any relation with search index.

Yahoo site specific search:
Yahoo wins hands down here. There are 7 entries related to my blog


The analysis that I had done doesn't consider factors that influence any of the search engines facility. All I did is from layman perspective. With the results I do not denounce or appreciate google/yahoo. It is just an exercise to find the popularity of my blog with respect to search index.

Comments are welcome.

SuDoKu Program

I had posted couple of weeks ago about my intention to write a program to solve the sudoku puzzle. Now I have implemented it incorporating the Elimination, Naked Pair and Unique Member technique. I have also created a UI for the program to enable users to enter and solve the puzzles. I have to accept the fact that the UI is not that snappy, but it is good start to begin with.

Lang: Java 1.5
UI: Java Swing

UI Snapshots:
Puzzle fromThe Hindu (Dated 17-Aug-2005)

Shown are given values and the possibilities for the rest of the cells


Solution by using elimination technique

If you want to try your hand, do drop in an email/comment, I will mail you the binaries and the src code.

Spam in my blog comments

Oops! I got a spam in my comments section. Though I had intentionally prevented anonymous users from commenting, this registered spam user somehow slipped in. Hey blogger guys, are you listening :-(

Bloging captures Mangal Pandey

Mangal Pandey - The Rising is the latest historic movie from the bollywood releasing this week. It is no surprise that such a big-budget movie getting in all the hypes before reaching screens. The lead actor Aamir Khan has a blog about Mangal Pandey. Check it throu'

HSBC Preapproved Personal Loan

Today HSBC sent me a letter with a calligraphic certificate stating that being a priviledged customer, I am afforded a pre-approved personal loan. In that certificate they have stated my bank account number. Given the fact that this being sent in a snail mail/courier, it could have well landed in some wrong hands, exposing my account number.

For the sake of their marketting campaign, I cannot afford to loose my credentials. On the part of the bank's security lapse, I seriously condemn their carelessness in revealing customer credentials.

MS vs Google

I wonder why Microsoft is competiting against Google in all segments. I could see some relevancy related to Desktop Search. But not in mapping and other services. I guess that these services does not pull any major revenue.

Is MS afraid of loosing its reputation and ground to Google? Or does it sound MS to be incompetent in terms of services? What is that they are going to achieve?

Mapping service for India

In the recent times there has been a spurt in the mapping services all over the world. Mapping service is also the recent buzz word of the technology domain. First there were yahoo maps, then came the Google maps, and their hybrids. Google Earth was launched later. More recently MS launched its Virtual Earth to add to the competition.

Not just the mapping service providers has increased in the course of time, but also their content of the service. Initially yahoo maps were used for the travel directions. Now mapping services has advanced to show you real pictures of the places along with the road directions. Even traffic updates could be got through these mapping services, so that we could take up alternate routes. In the blog sphere, these mapping services are used to locate blogger community in the neighborhood. Probably this led to the trend of Blog-Geek-Dinners!

When are these services going to come to India? Are there any organizations heading up that way! I have no clue.

On a lighter side, I could not comprehend the complexity and confusions that will arise when we try to map bangalore using the addresses. The street where I live is addressed as 4th Main, 1st Cross, Maruthi Layout. The street opposite to mine is addressed as 3rd Main, Kurupanpalaya. Not to mention there are already two 1st crosses in the same area. God Save!

Gops states that Europeans are much ahead in mapping services from the rest of the world. He states that Taxis in Finland run with a mapping service and GPS installed!

Adsense magic

Hurray! Google adsense that I added to this blog has started working. It has started showing relevant text ads related to the first post I have in the page.

I need to reposition the adsense from the bottom left of the page to some where in the top. This should increase its visibility and usability (as adsense shows ad related to the first post in the page).

The ad-revenue share I have earned till now 0.17$ :-)

Wi-fi Hotspot at our house

Yesterday was a grand day(night) when we finally enabled Wi-fi hotspot in our house. As I posted early about our intentions of enabling Wi-fi in our house, it all got resolved yesterday.

Machines:

• AMD Athlon based Desktop PC (using ethernet connection)
• Dell D 600 laptop (Wi-fi connection)

Routers:

• Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B Cable/DSL Router
• Huawei Router (BSNL DataOne router)

WiFi on HowStuffWorks.
Blog post from Atul Chitnis on W-B setup using similar topology.

The network topology at our house











Until now, I haven't come in close proximity of configuring any network, this time I had lot of surprises and learning. The end result is that I understood all the basics of network setup and configuration of routers. Thanks to Gops for patiently answering all the intriguing questions that I had thrown to him.

The basic purpose of a router is to route the network traffic according to a fixed set of rules. In our case the Huawei Router (BSNL DataOne router) acts as interface between the public internet and our private network. The Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B Cable/DSL Router is used as internal router to enable Wi-fi. The linksys router acts as interface between the Huawei router and our PC/laptop.

The private network IP of Huawei router is 192.168.1.1 (default for most of the routers) to which the linksys router connects to. The linksys private network IP is set to 192.168.10.1 (luckily linksys allowed us to configure its private IP from default 192.168.1.1, otherwise our wi-fi intentions would have been grounded).

Routers provides a web interface to setup the configurations. The web application is a servlet/jsp application running at its private IP (192.168.xx.1). One needs to login as admin to change its configurations. The router comes with preinstalled OS which is used in routing the traffic (Cisco's Router OS is called IOS - Internetwork OS). Apart from the easy to use web interface for the configuration, the router also supports CLI (command line interface for configuration, mostly for advanced professionals) You can telnet to the private IP (192.168.xx.1) and connect as admin to get the CLI.

More updates will be posted as we explore the options in the routers...

Updates:
Now we are roaming around with 11 Mbps wireless connection. Configuring the Dell D600 laptop was bit tricky. You need to enable the WLAN adapter in the laptop using Fn+F2 key which failed to work. Finally we managed to install the QuickSet application provided by Dell to make it work.

Caveat:
Cisco VPN client failed to work with the WLAN for the first time. We need to uninstall and reinstall to make it work with WLAN.

Things to do:

• Enable security options in the Wi-fi (IP based filtering and encryption)

Gops,
Let me know if I have missed anything!

TOI bashing

I feel elated when people bash TOI. It is no worth to call it a national newspaper or even a newspaper for that matter. They make and retain huge subscriptions to their newspaper by thier tabloid supplements. The supplements pull all the strings on the celebrities and cover all the gossips going around. The classical example is the Bangalore Times which is added as a supplement almost everyday. If TOI stops their supplement, their newspaper revenue will fall down to earth.

It is no wonder that TOI published a half-a-page article on celebrities comments on not receiving TOI on 27th July when the whole mumbai realed under torrential rains. TOI nowhere reflects the sentiments of the people!

We all share the same sentiments that TOI is not even worth to use as TOI(let) napkin. Such is the shoddy nature of the paper.

Determination

Past weekend I came across a couple of incidents that stood for the determination.
One is about a Fat man walking across US to reduce his weight. More details at http://www.thefatmanwalking.com/

Another is about Lance Armstrong who survived cancer and became seven time World champion in the Tour de France. Photos at CNET.

SuDoKu

Offlate this japanese puzzle has caught a lot of attention! Thanks to all major leading news papaers across the sub-continent providing it as a daily feature. The Hindu has started publishing Su-Do-Ku in the main page. Like others it has also caught my attention and it has now become a habbit to solve it early in the morning. Now I can say that I am addicted!

I thought of writing a logic to solve any sudoku puzzle through means of programming. But it seems that I am defeated before contesting! Check the rediff news here.

Finally the rumble over college admission is over

It has been a long wait of three months for the students who passed out the higher secondary exams and the TNPCEE with flying colors. Though the results were published much sooner than expected, the rankings finally came in yesterday after a lot of deliberations. The single window system by which the students were admitted to the professional colleges has been on and off few times like every year throwing in a lot of confusions and questions to the students community.

Firstly now the single window system serves only 37K odd seats out of the 64K odd available seats, as the rest is under the management quota. The apex court ruled sometime back in favor of management of self-financing colleges to have their quota increased from 5% to 50%. You can see the peril of this ruling as most of the unaccomplished wealthy heirs could easily get a seat in any reputed self-financing colleges.

Every year something or the other comes up to jeopardize the admission system. This time it is the TN governments eleventh hour plan of demolishing TNPCEE effective from the current year to benefit the rural students. After a lot of arbitrations, the apex court came in to rescue the students and asked the govt to follow the old scheme.

The single window admission is set to commence on July 30 and will prolong for 30 more days. The colleges would commence in the first week of September. The settlement of all these legal issues took nearly 4 months which has thrown the students and their first semester into tangle.

With the admission system being juggled over by the political big-weights and bureaucrats, most of the self-financing colleges completed admission to their management quota and started classes for this academic year. The admission to these management seats are based purely on financial merit. Couple of days back, apex court ruled that the admissions to the management seats should be based on CET. The TN Self Financing Colleges Consortium which is deemed to hold the CET is now preparing for the exams on Aug 6,7 for the seats which are duly filled already. The CET is going to be an eye-wash!

Given the ranking, I wished if the students could know the tentative details of where they will be admitted, it would be great for them to decide on the alternatives. Luckily it didn't fell on the deaf ears, Anna university released the last year admission results in their website by which students can know in a particular college, for a stream and a quota which is the last rank.

Canon's beginner SLR site

Canon has come up with the novel idea of making its range of Digital SLRs popular with an educational site. This site is too good for a beginner to learn all the basics of photography. Canon has now become the market leader in Digital SLR category with its range of cost effective digital SLR. The prediction is that sub USD 500 digital SLR is not a distant dream. I am looking for the dream to come true!

http://www.canon.co.jp/Imaging/enjoydslr/index.html

My notes when I browsed through the webpages...

Digital SLR cameras have a reflex mirror that swings up when you press the shutter button. It allows light from the lens to pass through to the sensor. The picture is then recorded. Since a single lens and a reflex mirror are used, this type of camera is called "single-lens reflex" (SLR).

While shooting in SLR camera, the scene is not displayed in the LCD. You have to use the eye-piece.
(This is really surprising !)

The shorter the focal length (mm), the wider the view will be. And the longer the focal length, the more telescopic the picture will be.

Shutter button is positioned right at your index finger.
Will there be a customization for a left hand person?

Larger the aperture, lower the f number, narrower the depth of field
Smaller the aperture, higher the f number, wider the depth of field

The range of acceptable focus is called the depth of field.

Changing the sensitivity makes it easy to photograph bright or dark scenes. The sensitivity is called the ISO speed.

Low ISO speed for brighter scenes (lesser noise and finer image quality)
High ISO speed for dark scenes (more noise and rougher image quality)

For capturing indoor sports, you use larger aperture and slower shutter speed during to less light. But with slower shutter speeds you get hazy picture. So use higher ISO and faster shutter speeds in those scenario.

ISO controls how the sensor becomes sensitive to light.

Wide angle - lesser the focal length
telephoto - greater the focal length

The 50mm lens is called the normal lens because it gives the closest perspective as seen by the human eye. Any lens with a focal length shorter than 50mm is a wide-angle lens, and any lens with a longer focal length is a telephoto lens. A wide-angle lens covers a large area of the scene, while a telephoto lens covers a smaller part obtaining a telescopic effect.

Wide-angle lenses exaggerates perspective,while telephoto lenses compresses the foreground and background.

A wide-angle lens covers a larger area of the scene, the perspective becomes more apparent.

With a large sensor, the size of individual pixels is also larger. The pixel's larger area is more sensitive to light, resulting in better image quality.

To make white subjects look white,increase the exposure compensation.
To make dark subjects look dark,decrease the exposure compensation.
For bright colors like yellow, increase the exposure amount.

Diving into GreaseMonkey

In the recent past, I came across the GreaseMonkey (hereafter GM) jargon multiple times. I didn't immediately throw myself into the investigation of finding out what it is and what it does. Probably the reason being that it is a scripting extension and I have an aversion towards scripting.

With the advent of Google and Yahoo maps and their bitter fight to establish their mapping service, there had been lot of talk going around about GM scripts. For instance the Craigs List webpages can be overlayed with Yahoo maps using GM scripts. Ah.. two web services are integrated using GM script! This really kindled my interests in GM.

GreaseMonkey extension provides a scripting option through javascripts to make changes to webpages. There are lot more you can do with GM. Dive Into GM is a excellent site that provides enough insight into GM and the scripts that you can write using GM. The only caveat with GM is that this extension is only for Firefox and is not supported in other Mozilla clones.

I had no intentions of stopping here. To try my hand, I wrote a small GM script for the Bug DB report that we have in our office. The report is a plain black and white html report. With GM script I have color coded the report based on the severity of the bug. It really improves the usability of the report. Just scan through the bug report you can get a feel of hot and cold bugs.

I least expected this utility to be appreciated. But on the contrary it was well received by enthusiastic firefox users.

Since our Bug DB being an internal tool, the GM script that I wrote has very less significance to be posted to whole internet community. If you are interested do drop me a note in the comments section.

Low Cost Computing

It has been the need of the hour. With everything going digital way, low cost computer should evolve to occupy the vaccum. This step will surely improve the computer penetration into the masses. Mobilis by Encore Software is one such computer built with such envisage.

Does this mean that India has done its contribution?

I feel we still have miles to go ahead. Though we have raised the bar of affordability, we still need to catch on the usability of these gadgets. We should improve our network infrastructure so that all these pretty instruments could be hooked on to netwrok to unlease the power of networking to the common man. We could do wonders with these little gadgets and having them connected to internet.

Online Tutorials

Came over this excellent tutorial site for all web related scripting.
http://www.w3schools.com/

Simple, elegant and to the point.

Perfect Long weekend

The longing for a long weekend ended in a perfect sense. Vasanth's marraige was on 27th June (Mon), so we used it to bunk office on Monday. Headed to Salem on Sunday, made a short trip to Yercaud, attended reception, night show - Anniyan, attended Muhurtham in the morning, lot of mokkai, cards and usual train journey back to bangalore with pleasent memories.

I guess only in Vasanth's marraige one will be able to see friends cutting across class, departments and batch. He is one heck of a guy who values and preserves so much friends.

Blogger supports posting pictures from desktop

This is a sweet surprise for photo-bloggers. I often wondered why blogger wasn't supporting this feature.

Post on google blog.
Help document in Blogger

Steve Jobs speech at Stanford

He says three stories and the moral of each story is

"you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life"

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

Here is the link to the complete speech.

Is blogging definitely male?

I got this weird thought while driving to office today. Firstly I am not a MC and this statement is not a fall out of such an attitude. I feel that there is a strong logical reasoning behind this thought. I have been following/reading blogs for a while now. I have been syndicated to 35 feeds in my bloglines (Pretty low, I knew people who are subscribed to over 1000 feeds). And there are no females in the subscribtion list. I haven't heard any girl blogging in my class or in my acquaintances. And so is the doubt.

I have seen some random blogs of females while I hang around the internet searching for good blogs. There are lot of people who blog (stats says that 20000 new blogs are added per day) on various topics and interests. I am yet to see stats on blog propotion based on sex.

Some people blog on official stuff, some their personal stuff, some their hobbies, some do a mix of all these (like me :-) ). While following the blogs you tend to get a feel of the character of the person. Since blogs are mostly non-commerical and pursued in self-interest, the information posted tends to be authentic. Bloggers remain honest to themselves on the facts that they publish.

Thus I had a chance of observing quiet a few people over the blogs and tend to get a feel of their character. But as I said, I have no female bloggers in my list. Wanted to know whether the same rules apply to them. All this just out of curiousity.

Let me know if some girl around does blogging. I would like to get subscribed.

F1 tussle

I follow a bit of F1, but I am not an avid geek to know all the nitty-grittes of it. I knew the pretty basics of the race jargons. Offlate, F1 has been hitting the news headlines in a different sort. With the agreement of teams ceasing in 2007, there are already issues brewing up on renewing the agreements. There were news sometime back stating that couple of teams has agreed not to renew their agreements but rather to have thier own F1 championships.

The rift became wider with 2005 US GP. 7 teams using Michelin tyres pulled out of the race stating safety concerns. With the rule to use the same tyres for both practise and race, there has been couple of accidents related to tyres. Though I am indifferent to the rule, the claim made by Michelin is not justifiable. If Bridgestone is able to thrive, then Michelin should be competitive enough.

But this fiasco has done enough damage to reputation and interests of F1.

What will be the future of F1?

More news at rediff, hindu.

Owners Pride Neighbours Envy

From the past month, I have been trying relentlessly to get my blog listed in the search sites index. There are couple of facets behind this effort. One is that your blog will be shown in the search results page. Another one is that you can enable blog search (site specific search) in your blog. The second one comes handy when you want to search your blog when there had been quiet a handful posts.

I am particularly interested towards getting my site listed in google's index. To get this done, one needs to understand how the google's spider / bots crunch the webpages and index them. One way is to get more incoming links to your blog so that the rank of your page increases (google's page ranking is based on the active links to your blog - this is the simplestic view). Another way is to use the ping service which sends a ping whenever you blog is updated. Third way to enable google adsense in your blog. Apart from increasing the incoming links, I have done the rest. But still my blog is unlisted in the index.

I saw Govar's blog listed in both Google and Yahoo search index. Kudos to him. Owners Pride and Neightbours Envy!

Gmail Notifier

All of a sudden, Gmail Notifier (ver 0.4.2) extension for firefox stopped working for me. It is a handy extension that enables me to remain logged in at gmail all through the day. It alerts you when there is a new message in your inbox. That way I save a tab in firefox.

Any clues how to get it back to work. The error message shown is "Failed to log in. Pls verify the username and passwd". But I am able to login to gmail using the gmail webpage.

Update:
There is a workaround available. Gmail has changed its address from gmail.google.com to mail.google.com.
Check the extension webpage here.

Power of hash

For the past two days, I was trying to improve the performance of a piece of code that I wrote, during which I learnt the power of hash in real numbers.

On a high level, the problem is about searching an ordered list of objects to figure out the position of the given input object in the list. There is no bounds on the number of objects stored in the list and also on the number of input objects. If the given input object is not found in the list, it also possible that given input object might be subset of any of the objects stored in the list. I was doing a linear search on the list (provided by the Java Collections API) which has a time complexity of O(n).

Profiling the code indicated the bottleneck and I was able to figure out the floppy logic. First I was using 'contains' API to check whether the given input object is found as such in the list and if found I use 'indexof' API to retrieve the location in the list. Thus both the operations were O(n). I updated the code and was able to cut down the time by 50%.

With this fix in place, still the performance was no where near what I targeted. A deep look at the problem revealed that for given 'n' input objects the time complexity of the linear search would result in O(n^2). After pondering a while on the plausible resolutions, I decided to change the data structure from ordered list to hashtable. In the hashtable the key being the object and value being the order that I need to generate. This improved the performance by leaps and bounds.

The following metric should reveal the power of hash in real numbers

No of objects in List: 10000
No of Input objects: 10000
Linear search timings: 255 secs
Hash based search: 25 secs

JS/UIX

JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping.

http://www.masswerk.at/jsuix/

Thunderbird

I migrated to Thunderbird email client today!

The verdict is that I did not feel appealing or awesome immediately. The reason I guess is that from where I got migrated.

I was using NS Communicator 7.02 previously and almost all the features that were present in NS is available in Thuderbird. So I guess I could not appreciate the excellence of Thuderbird immediately. Hoping that in the long run, Thunderbird would be my prefered email client.

The compelling reasons for the switch from NS is

• Close association of Thunderbird to Firefox
• Large memory footprint of NS (annoying)
• Email composer is not that keyboard friendly
• Email Composer lacks complete support for table (advanced options) and other complex formatting

I wonder there wasn't any migration support in Thunderbird for NS users. I did manually copied the local folders and mails to get it working. Yet to import my address book. Seems there is no straight forward way to do all these! Firefox wins hands down in all these nitty-gritties.

Google Page Rank

The following link contains details about the google page ranking strategy and how they distinguish legitimate websites from spaming websites.

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-10-2005-71368.asp

This page also contains links to other google related topics.

Handy Features - Titbits

These are nice handy features

In Firefox, go to address box and type more than one word separated by spaces and enter. Firefox will automatically search the string using google and shows the first hit of the search result (I'm feeling lucky option). You can get to address bar using F6 key.

In bloglines, go to a feed that you have subscribed. On the top of the page, you get to see the number of subscribers of that feed. Click the link to get all the public subscribers.

Jungle Look

http://www.thejunglelook.com

Came across this excellent site, refered by Chandan. The photos are exceptionally well shot. Clarity and focus is amazing. These photos thrashed my (bad) ideology that such good photos could be shot only abroad, as they maintain nature in a better state than us.

Apple shifting to Intel chips

This news is the latest buzz in the tech sector. Until now, I just under-estimated the significance of this news which was leaked a couple of days back before the official announcement by Steve Jobs in Apple Developers conference in SanFranscisco.

More details at CNET news.com site.

Link to Scobleizer's blog post on this news.

Shanmugha college alumini profile exposed

I was browsing through web to collect details about Shanmugha college. First of all the website was down. Shanmugha college is a part of sastra, which is a deemed university. It is really a bad example to take the website down at the crucial time of admissions. I feel more and more people are nowadays turning towards web to collect info about the college for which they would like to apply. The absence of apt information in the website really upsets a lot of people.

While continuing browsing, I got a link to SASTRA alumini network. I casually browsed through the site to check whether there are any other Shanmugha sites that I could use in the mean while. Secondly to check any available comments or feedbacks about the college. I was surprised to see all the alumni profiles exposed freely. The site requires a login and the guest login and password are supplied freely. You can get 684 profiles of students who have enrolled in the alumini site. You have a chance to get their full name, reg no, DOB, photo, email id, phone number, blood group, their current positions, etc. It is all exposed.

I remember a similar breach that happened recently with the stanford campus network, where info pertaining to students were exposed by a hacker. The university profusely apologized for the breach and took systems down to curtail the leak. It even promised to investigate further to prevent such future occurances. I guess, FBI were also involved in the investigation. See the personal info is given higher value in West, where as such info is freely available over here, without any hack. Will somebody act on this?

Over the weekend

watched "Kana Kanden" movie and did a short trip to Nandi Hills on Sunday. The details of trip and photos are there in my travel log blog.

Summer of code: Google's philanthropic hand to studs

Studs who are enrolled in the colleges should feel elited. Google has stepped up its philanthropic deed once again. It is now easy to get a summer internship. They are coordinating with lot of Open source projects who mentor the studs and their summer project. You get a chance to work on a real world project and feel happy to get an awesome stipend in USD.

More details at Code @ Google

XML file format for Office

MS Office (Excel, Powerpoint and Word) will be supporting xml-based file format. This is a radical move by MS from its traditional binary file format. Last time when they upgraded the binary file format without backward compatability, there were lot of compliance issues between users having various versions. The open source based format is welcome move.

More details from CNET page.

Usability: Change in Template

In our e-ottings group we had a "Big-Fight" about google's new perosnalized portal. Ppl argued about the various aspects of it. Some said it was brand new and some complained about it as the old concept. Inspite of all these difference in opinions, everyone agreed on the fact that the customizations provided by google is awesome from the usability perspective. Thus I learnt the significance of usability.

This blog was originally using "Minima Black" template and there were complaints about the dark background causing hinderance. To alleviate this concern and to improve usability, I have switched on to "Harbor" template. The contents part of this template contains white background with black text color. I even remember reading some where that this is the standard and recommended format for presentations.

Longing for a long weekend

The past weekend is a long weekend for people in US as this monday is memorial day for them. So there are less and less emails and blog posts. I have started longing for such a long weekend. The next long weekend in India is when we celebrate our Independence day on Aug 15th which falls on Monday.

Modem Picts

Huawei MT880 ADSL Modem


BSNL Phone and the Modem

Zero Visibility

For the past couple of days Bangalore is experiencing very heavy thunder showers mostly in the evenings. Right now it is raining very heavily with almost zero visibility.

Check the weather update here

Wi-fi @ our house - Proposal

We have come up with a nice proposal. With the advent of DataOne broadband at our house, we are seeking option to convert our house as Wi-fi enabled. We are planning to acquire a Wi-fi router and get it hooked to the DataOne router. Gops has some concerns on hooking mutiple-routers this way. Let me know your suggestions in case if you are an expert in this area or your experiences in this kind of seup.

Now I am concerned about getting a laptop to enable me work at home!

ADSL Broadband @ our house

Should thank Arun for taking initiative and all pains in bringing internet to our beloved house @ 63, 4th main. The speed is awesome and suffices most of our requirement.

Here is the arun's experience on getting this done!

Phishing + Extorsion = "ransom-ware"

Hackers have started using phishing techniques to lock your critical information in your system with some large encryption code and then demand ransom to unlock those for you. This has just started spreading and a new term has been coined to refer these kind of soft-extorsions as "Ransom-ware" .

More details at CTV.ca News

Update: This post is done from my home using BSNL DataOne broadband connection. How nice to get hooked to net from home!

OTIS Elevators: Suffers init problem

The power went off, when I was coming down in a OTIS elevator. When the alternative power was switched on, the elevator went straight back to the lowest floor and started again afresh. It seems really awkward when OTIS could not have a flash memory to remember the state and had to start over it again from the init. I name it the "stateless syndrome".

Philosophy: Man and Money

I am not sure how I picked up this philosophical idea (could be that I read about it somewhere).

Man and Money run in a circular path, trying to catch each other. So if you are desperate to get money, you keep running behind it and money tries to find you and keeps running behind you. It is an infinte loop. Neither you find money nor money finds you! Still a better visualization is a dog trying to catch its tail. Did you had a chance to see it!

But if you are not bothered about money and you run behind other objectives, it is a kind of linear! Soon or later money catches you! This my philosophy on man and money!

Phishing Paper

Came across this Phishing Paper from a blog post.

Know your Enemy: Phishing

ThirdEye

Today we just started with the project work of "ThirdEye".

So finally something concrete seems to be happening. This project is going to fulfill a couple of aspirations that I had.

• Build and deliver free software
• To delve in data mining area - decision trees

To begin with we created a blog for the project so that we can capture all the details of the progress.
Learning process is underway and let me see how we progress through it. Krish is also on board.

Indians rock in CA challenge

Came across this news in the Business section in Rediff.
Astonishing to see compatriot Indians toping the challenge...

http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/may/18ca.htm

Thinking in terms of solution

This is what blogging has done to me.

I have started thinking innovatively in terms of solutions. Nowadays I have started giving quick solutions (on top of my head - kind of) for any problem that I face.

Awesome, good improvement, so keep blogging.

Solution: Decissive Predicting from historical data

The topic of this post really sounds weird.

As noted from my previous posts, Sampath has just managed to score 210.79 as cut-off. Currently we are not able to determine where will he be enrolled? To which college, to which stream. Based on this prediction we would like to evaluate the alternatives.

We are really stuck at this point as we could not make an educated guess. Reason, historical data is unavailable for the prediction. It will be nice if we could know the last year admission results. A simple table of data would do..

Attributes of table: {Year, Rank, Cut-off, College, Course}

Given this table we should be able to predict reasonably what are his chances. I know there are lot other parameters that varies each year and alter the admission results. But to begin with these details should be sufficient.

How great it will be if we could take these data and put a (decision tree based) data mining model above this and derieve the current year admission trends given the cut-off marks. I would love to work on this solution if I am given the data.

Why not let me start with some dummy data? Simultaneously try getting the real data and plug-in to the system. I am also thinking with year after year historical data, the system should have sufficient genetic algos to update itself with the trends and give more and more accurate results.

Another mediocre performance by sampath

The results for the TamilNadu XII Board Exams came in today at 10:30 am.
Almost all the sites which provided the results had a huge hit as the server response was pretty slow. Like previous years, this time also results were made available through SMS. You can send in an SMS with registration number to get the results back.

The overall performance by Sampath was average. I really do not know how he managed to get 185/200 in language paper (tamil). The math score was poor again. Even Physics and Chemistry is not sufficient. He should have done the exam better than this. I blame his shoddy homework for all.

Eng - 173/200
Tamil - 185/200
Phy -181/200
Che -172/200
Maths -158/200
Bio -165/200

Total: 1034 / 1200

So his cut-off for the professional courses is 210.79/300
This won't be sufficient to grab a seat in CS/ECE stream in a reputed college. Right now I do not know what are we going to do with this!

Reading...

My reading habit has gone down drastically! It is high time that I take some corrective measure. Once when your reading habit goes down, you tend to loose concentration that you enjoy while keeping up the reading habit. So better to start sooner than later.
This weekend I grabbed and started reading "The SIGMA Protocol" novel by Robert Ludlum. It is pretty much interesting and it confirmed that I didn't loose much touch.

I always wonder, why I get lapses in concentration when I read something technical. I used to get all the distractions which never happens while reading a thriller novel. I need to improve upon.

Going forward I am planning to subscribe "The Week" to augument the general reading that I do. That should give me a fair insight about all the happenings in the country.

The next in the list is to go through a serious of basic technical books that are recommended by Alex Stepenov (Principal Scientist, Adobe Systems).

Some excerpts from his speech at Adobe India 30 Nov 2004

1. Study , Study and Study
- Never ever think that you have acquired all or most of the knowledge which exists in the world. Almost everybody in US at age of 14 and everybody in India at age of 24 starts thinking that he has acquired all the
wisdom and knowledge that he needs. This should be strictly avoided.

- You should be habituated to studies...exactly in the same way as you are habituated to brushing teeth and taking bath every morning. The habit of study must become a ‘part of your blood’. And the study should be from both the areas: CS, since it is your profession, and something from non-CS...Something which doesnot relate to your work. This would expand your knowledge in other field too. A regular study, everyday, is extremely essential. It doesnot matter whether you study of 20 minutes of 2 hours, but consistency is a must.

- You should always study basics and fundamentals. There is no point in going for advanced topics. When I was at the age of 24, I wanted to do PhD in program verification, though I was not able to understand anything from that. The basic reason was that my fundamental concepts were not clear. Studying ‘Algebraic Geometry’ is useless if you donot understand basics in Algebra and Geometry. Also, you should always go back and reread and re-iterate over the fundamental concepts.

What is the exact definition of ‘fundamental’? The stuff which is around for a while and which forms basic part of the concepts can be regarded as more fundamental. Of course, everybody understands what a fundamental means.

- Here are few books which I would strongly recommend that every CS
professional should read and understand.

i. “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” by Albenson
and Sussman
I personally donot like the material present in this book and I do have some objections about it but this is the best book I have ever seen which explains all the concepts in programming in a clear and
excellent way. This book is available online at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

ii. Introduction to Computer Architecture: by Hennessy and Patterson.
How many of you have shipped the programs by writing them in assembly? A very good understanding of basics of how a computer operates is what every CS professional must have. H&P Wrote two books on CA. I am talking about their first book, the introductory text for understanding basic aspects of how a
computer works.
Even if you feel that you know whatever is written in that book, donot stop reading. It’s good to revise basics again and again.

iii. “Fundamentals of Programming” by Donald Knuth.
The core of CS is algorithms and Data structures. Every CS professional must have the 3 volumes of Knuth’s Book on programming. It really doesnot matter if you take 30 years of your life to understand what Knuth has written, what is more important is that you read atleast some part of that book everyday without fail.

iv. Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest
This book should be read daily to keep your concepts fresh. This is the best book for fundamental concepts in algorithms.

Let me see how successful am I in this attempt.

P.S: The summary of Alex's speech in pdf format is available with me. I guess it should be there on the internet also. If you are not in a hurry and need it from me, then drop me a note (rajakumar@gmail.com).

Better Judgement

My Dad has proven once again in the past couple of days that he has a better judgement than me.

When we were checking up my mom's weight he just predicted it accurately. She is 48kgs. And my dad predicted 47 kgs.

Similarly my dad predicted 45/100 as Sampath's score in TNPCEE. He scored 43.54/100.

Disappointing performance by Sampath

It is a shoddy performance by Sampath in TNPCEE 2005. TNPCEE is the acronymn of Tamil Nadu Professional Course Entrance Exam conducted to Anna University. It is similar to SAT by which you enter B.E. or B.Tech engineering courses. The engineering course could be off any discipline. He has failed all hopes of entering professional course as he has just managed 43.54/100. This is way below the average. I am rather disappointed too much.

Split up of marks

Math: 18.54/50
Physical Science: 25/50

Reality Vs Mortality

Couple of days back I posted an obtituary message about my Uncle.
But still my mobile phonebook has his mobile number listed against his name.
See how things become unreal in this mortal world!! What should I do with his number now?

Hungarian Notation

Today I came across the topic of Hungarian Notation and its usages.

So here are some good links on what is Hungarian Notations

Hungarian Notation - A quick reference (from nscu)

Hungarian Notation (from univ of missouri)

There is also an article (Making Wrong code Look Wrong) today on Joel on Software on usages of this notation effectively to spot errors/bugs.

Phishing

Came across this neat blog post on phishing which clarified me a lot of things.

"Phishing is an electronic attack that combines social engineering with some technical aspects of software programs in order to trick you into giving up some personal information"

Read about phishing at

http://www.dolcetechnica.com/blogs/peter/archive/2005/05/04/2803.aspx

Obituary

My beloved Uncle 'Ramaswamy' passed away on 8-May-2005. He was a teacher turned business man. It is a huge loss for us as we lose a noble person interested in our well-being. I often turn to him for his advice on education. He is the one who made me to join GCT in the single window admission system. He is one who pioneered me to take up postgraduation. His relentless support to education is commendable. We will be remembering him for all his good deeds. We express our deep gratitude and condolences to his immediate family.

Health care system - First cut

When I was scuffling through the endless lab test results, I thought about digitizing the healthcare system. And this post is about the solution from my perspective.

The solution is not a deep-thinked rugged solution. It is just that on top of my mind. I hope that there are lot of benefits by building this health care system. With the advent of improved techniques in medical and cheap resources (system, storage), this soultion is practical.

First step is to provide unique number to each and evey individual in a state/country. There are many ways to do this. Let me not diverge to this topic now.Use the unique number as a patient number. Store every single medication or treatment or consultation in database. Thus we are going to maintain a complete medical history. This is going to take huge space and but it should be manageable. Every doctor should have access to this database to retrieve data and update. We need to somehow mandate this practise. Create and use a consistent software (standards can be set, so that different vendors follow it to the letter).

This will avoid hussles of maintaing medical records in hard-copies and to carry them around while visiting doctors. Will alleviate the patients from bizare medical questions (in finding whether the medicine is allergic) and hard test for their remembrance (when did you last get this?) sort of questions.

Moreover if the patient goes to overseas for treatment, they could take their medical history in a easy-to-go media.

This system should not have all those performance constraints. Given the fact of unique patient id, we can surely index/partition on patient's id. The data should be replicated and should be highly available.

Anything more I am missing?

Is KG Master health checkup worth?

If you want to know the answer right away then it is "NO".

Last week, I took my parents for a MHC in KG Hospitals in Coimbatore. I did choose KG because of two reasons

1. We did a MHC five years back there and was statisfied then
2. It would be easy to compare the results with the past checkup results.

(The Week magazine, which did a review of hospitals gave a good rating to KG)

To the contrary of our expectations, KG's MHC is very shoddy this time. Quality has degraded way down. On the arrival at the hospital at 8:30 am, we registered at the reception. Their patient system faulted and could not retrieve the data. Some how they managed to recover the details and later to be found that the address is garbled.

Then we went for the series of lab tests (blood, urine, x-ray, abdominal Ultra-sound scan, ECG and spirometry tests). At the end of these tests, the results were scanned by a general doctor and a counselling session on diet and life-style. If you had any specific ailments, then you are taken to a specialist for consultation. Mind you are permitted to meet the specialist only when you have any ailments. This means that you should have been diagnosed prior to this check-up.

This way of MHC really spoils the spirit of health-checkup. MHC is taken as regular precautionary routine to identify ailments at the begining and take corrective step-us and thereby reduce risks, pain and suffering. Hospitals like KG promise all these tests done under one-roof so we need not run to various labs across the city to perform all these tests.

The same MHC, five years back, performed the same tests and let us meet the specialist in each field. We meet eye, ENT, dental, dermatology, ortho, neuro, general physician and gynecologist. Each of these specialist provided their views and advice based on the various test results. All this were missing time. Patients of MHC are given least priority and are treated as ordinary out-patients. (I even noticed an eye specialist shouting at his staff at bringing in MHC patients, though I do not know reason behind it). We even meet a dietician who adviced us about the food controls that we need to follow for betterment.

To keep up with the same advice, the canteen provided us awesome food (which is part of the MHC package). There were cereals and fresh green vegetables. In the five years the canteen has suffered the worst damage. Firstly the canteen wasn't neat. I felt as if I have entered a mess (makeshift hotel) and the food served was in poorest quality. They really lacked any green vegetable or cereals. It reminded me of the hostel food that I had while in GCT.

If food served to patients are this great (surcastically), then there is only a bleak chance to recover any soon. All the more it was shoddy show put up by KG. My verdict is just 2/5. It is very below average. I have decided to change my attitude towards KG. Next time it is going to be some other hospital for MHC.

SW engineers robbed

Published in The Hindu: Dated 04-May-2005

2 software engineers robbed

Staff Reporter

BANGALORE: Two software engineers were robbed of Rs. 2,000 and two mobile phones in Adugodi police station limits on Monday night.

Police said Binu Daniel and Xavier Nag were returning home after work when they were accosted by miscreants on two motorcycles near the drainage line in Potalappa Garden.

The miscreants reportedly threatened them with knives and took away their mobile phones and cash.

Of late, there have been several instances of software engineers in the city being robbed late in the night.

One was even murdered allegedly for his mobile phone at Koramangala four days ago.

Bangalore is becoming a safe heaven for robbers. Such incidents are cropping up more than usual in recent times. The city police should take a stern action against these ppl. Will they?

No post?

Am I getting void of topics? No, not at all. I am deprieved of free time in office which I could use to blog and do related things. Need to catch up a lot on the work front which keeps me busy all through the day.

Remedy...I need to get net access at my home to get this going back in full throttle.

Anyway these days I am following large number of blogs daily. Scobble, Jeremy, Mark Jen, Jonathan Schwartz, Joel, Google's blogs, etc.

My bloglines subscription has touched 18 feeds now. There are some more pending subscriptions.

I really envy the web infrastructure present in US where by ppl are able to get thmeselves hooked even from hospitals through wifi. Dishnet is comming up with such kind of public wifi network. I am not sure how fast and reliable it will be and how much they charge. Wifi is yet to unfold here.

Registration this short?

I have been reading few blogs for sometime now. When the number of blogs in your watch-list goes up, it is sure that you need a RSS Aggregator to watch, otherwise it becomes tedious to go to each blog and check daily whether there are any updates.

Bloglines is an online service which helps you to aggregate all the feeds that you like to watch. It helps you to organize and subscribe to list of feeds that you are interested in. So when you login you will be provided with the list of updates on each feed. This has really cut-down a lot of pain in following up the blogs.

An interesting thing I noted is that registration for bloglines is so simple, short and neat. It doesn't ask you all the head scratching questions. It just asks your email id and password. Nothing else. Rest all the info can be filled as you wish and no mandates.

Cure for Migraine

Couple of weeks back I had a spiteful attack of migraine and it drived me in search for a permanent cure for it. It is almost a decade that I am suffering from migraine. Also it is not the first time that I am searching for a cure. I had undergone many through checkups, consultations and medications. But none lasted long and did put a full-stop to migraine.

After much delibrations, this time I am taking up homeopathic medication which seems to be promising. Thanks to Arun for all the efforts in finding the homeopathic clinic. Btw he is also suffering from migraine for the past two years.

The homeopathic clinic is a voulantary organisation founded in 1987 and functioning very successfully until this moment. "Health for all" is the caption for this voluntary effort . It is located in DRDO township with a serene, peaceful atmosphere.

The consultation was really challenging as they try to understand what type of person you are? Lot of questions are asked based on which medicines are prescribed. So the onus is on the patient to give apt answers for the questions, so that they could judge you right. Better do a self-introspection before going to the consultation. When myself and Arun got consulted for migraine, totally different medicines are prescribed to us.

Medication based on character and behaviour seems to be core concepts of homeopathy. This is the first time I am taking up this type of medication. The real advantage of these kind of medications are that they are very much natural and zero side-effects. But the drawback is that it will take longer time to cure. The first course of my medication lasts for 50 days and three times a day, I need to take the pills (not exactly).

Brain Opener

With my maternal uncle hospitalised for a brain disorder, I spent few hours of this weekend in the hospital. It proved to be a brain opener for me. I had a little chat with my brother-in-law, who is doctor with MD (Gen). The inquistive questioning in me came to help and I really learned a lot from it.

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres (halves). The Left vs Right and each halves specializing in certain activities. Check out the comparison chart over here.

With the disorder in left part of the brain, my uncle has lost control over the right part of his body. His speech and languages tends to get affected. But still he would be able to retain his mother-tongue. Nature is really amazing.

More links about Left vs Right brain
http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/dominance/index.htm
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0857/is_n2_v10/ai_12206759

Fitness Freak

I have been doing physical exercises for the past 6 months regularly. The whole intention is to regain my fitness that I enjoyed while in school. The work out schedule is to jog for 20 minutes after warming up with the regular general exercises. I compliment the schedule with the standard abs exercise at the end.

While starting, it was really difficult to cope up. I use to feel tired at the end of the schedule. Nowadays I have got used to it. The work up time is during evenings on the weekdays and take off during weekends. This kind of physical activity has really payed me rich dividends.

1. I have regained my fitness back (now I could jog 3.5kms in 21 mins)
2. I have lost some extra weight that I had developed around the lower abdomen

I really figured out that my stamina level had really gone up, when our team went for an outing last Friday (8th April). We went to Eagleton resort off the mysore road. The whole intention of this outing is to play for the whole day and get ourselves exhausted.

Though the initial 2 hrs of cricket in sunny and humid out-field drained our energy a lot, I did not feel completely exhausted and had enough energy left to play badminton for another hour and half or so. After a refreshing lunch, I did play badminton for another hour and did swimming for another hour and half.

Even after this extensive work out, I did not end up in body aches. I could get back to shape within the weekend.

If I am looking like a fitness freak nowadays, for this I owe a lot to gautam, my friend, who really makes me to go to gym daily.

Good Sleep - Errata

In the previous post on this topic, the facts that I wrote is a common mis-conception. After going through the article on Sleep, the following are the facts that I learned...

"Sleep isn't just a form of rest! Sleep plays a critical physiological function, and is indispensable for your intellectual development! Those who do not respect their sleep are not likely to live to their full mental potential!"

"During sleep, the brain works as hard as during SAT or GRE exams"

These facts really shatters the common misconception that every individual has on Sleep.

p.s: The article has lot of references to other contradictory research articles. The facts stated in the article is not scientifically proved. So take this article and its facts on face value.

Get-together

It really happened after a long time. Though invites had been sent to all the friends in bangalore, only eleven of us did turn up for the get-together on Sunday. We met in jayanagar Nadhini for dinner and did catch up with updates from everyone. It was back to good old college days with all the famous gossips and lot of heads rolling.

Hope that we do continue to do such get-together more often.

Good Sleep

I consider, Sleep as a boon that animal kingdom has been blessed with. Sleep helps us to recover from physical tiredness and get mental peace. But the fast pace of ultra-modern life has made us to turn down our daily share of sleep.

A friend of mine passed me this article on sleep.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

It is the source of this rant. Go read...

Bannerghatta National Park (25-Mar-2005)

Did a quick trip to Bannerghatta National Park. See here for details

News: Pak releases Indian fishermen

Nowadays it has been a common occurrence that Indian fishermen being confiscated by Pak navy for charges of venturing into Pak waters for fishing. Finally they are released after spending some time in Pak jail.

This incident is not something specific to Pak, this happens in South India particularly TamilNadu, which is very close to SriLanka. Srilanka is just 35 kms off the Indian coast from Dhanuskodi. Since countries defend their boundaries so religiously, government should do something to protect fishermen from falling prey to crossing boundaries. With SriLanka, the effort to bring back the lost fishermen is easy as the diplomatic relations are well above the mark. But I guess it is not the same with Pak all the time.

I am not proposing that every fishermen should be provided with GPS instrument to navigate. Something from the technological point of view could be done to prevent venturing into neighbour's waters. This will safeguard our fishermen and their families to a greater extent. I believe that these fishermen are not those who have left hefty bank balance for their families to use in their absence.

Another point at this juncture is that I had never seen a news item stating that India has released Pak fishermen who had been confiscated for venturing into Indian waters. How does Pak prevents this from happening?

Migraine and its deadly attack

Yesterday I had been under the spiteful attack of migraine which ruined my complete evening and peaceful night sleep. I had been suffering from this for almost a decade now and there is still no respite.

A web glossary defines migraine as

A vascular headache believed to be caused by blood flow changes and certain chemical changes in the brain leading to a cascade of events - including constriction of arteries supplying blood to the brain and the release of certain brain chemicals - that result in severe head pain, stomach upset, and visual disturbances.

The dreadful part of migraine is that there is no cure for it. Just the pain killers to give temporary respite from the nerve-whacking single sided headache. It is really terrible to withstand the head-ache alongside with other symptoms like vomiting sensation. If a single attack is so deadly, then think about having two consecutive attacks. This is what happened last night and it is nightmare.

This piece is out of my analysis and experiences with migraine. This claim is NOT supported medically. There are specific triggers for setting off migraine. Say for instance, in my case eye-strain due to bad light / harsh light conditions is a triggering point. Try and avoid these triggering conditions. But still there are some more triggering points in me which I could not still find out. Another point to minimize the aggravation of migraine is to try and minimize stress. Avoiding stressful conditions or controlling your emotions under stress helps a lot to avoid migraine.

Let me be optimistic and hope that this would end soon.

Some links to migraine related sites

http://www.neurologychannel.com/migraine/

http://www.achenet.org/news/impact/life-work.php

http://www.relieve-migraine-headache.com/eye-migraines.html

Nuptials with saxophone

Last week march 13th, I had been to my cousin's wedding. Apart from the all the traditions and customs, what stood out is the saxophone. It is custom to have miruthangam (closely related to davul) (percussion instrument) and natheswaram (wind instrument) in the marriage ceremony. They play these instruments at the time of marriage. In my cousin's wedding the primary instrument played was saxophone. It really sounded different from the traditional music. It gave a touch of western to the traditional karnatic music played. I really enjoyed it.

Westernization has surely left its mark in our nuptials.

Macro flower

A macro photo of flower in the sofa cushion

International Women's Day

March 8th is celebrated as International Women's Day. This post is about the most influential women in my life. It is none other than my mom. I am dedicating this post to her.

I owe her a lot and my entire life and not just this petty post. I really admire her for her awesome qualities and hard work. Her mental strongness is one that I wish to possess. How ever the situation worsens she will not loose her composure and keep everything under control. I have even blasted her a couple of times out my anguish for which she could not be blamed. In all those hard times she has listened to me and kept her nerves under control and helped me to recover from it.

She has helped us a lot during school days, right through the daily chores to helping us in our studies. She had done this all, keeping up her work. There was very meager support from my dad as he mostly works in a different place and gets transferred most often, leaving just his weekends for us.

I hope and pray that all those grueling hetic days be over once for all and wish her a happy time for the rest of her life.

p.s: For all male chauvinistic people, all the rest are Men's Day. Believe me this is what came out in Radio City today.

Building Vocabulary

Communication plays a major role in professional life. If you want to get a good job or want to raise in your career, then you need to communicate effectively and efficiently. To improve your communication, a lot of home work needs to be done. This post is about the various facets of improving your vocabulary so that your communication clarity increases.

There are various ways to build your vocabulary, the following is the one that I formulated and followed. Thus I did practise before preaching. The ideas proposed over here are my own and I do not hold responsibility if it doesn't work for you.

1. Learn new words
The best deal is to go through dictionary or GRE booklet and learn few words everyday. There are multiple software tools (Vocabulary builder, hangman) available to help you learn words by word play. Keep learning say 10 words per day. Keep revising so that you could remember.

Learning new words means understanding its meaning and its usages. Some words do even have primary meaning and secondary meaning which differs based on the context used.

You can also use "Word Power Made Easy by Noram Lewis". It is an excellent book that explains you the etymology of words. By practising this book, you can easily identify the roots of the words. Thus for an unknown word, you can do a educated guess of its meaning by the decomposition technique.

For instance...
Caligraphy - Kallos (Greek - beauty) + Graphos (Greek - writing)
Thus it means beautiful writing or artistic writing
Cacography - Kakos (Greek - bad) + Graphos (Greek - writing)
Thus meaning - bad handwriting.

2. Usage of words
Read news papers, journals, blogs, novels, etc to see how the words are used in different contexts. By this exercise you can refresh the words.
For instance, when you read a thriller novel you can see the usage of concur

"Do you concur with me?"

Concur means agree.

Thus keep on improvising on what you had learnt in the step 1.

3. Try using it
With step 2, you are just mid-way. Mind, communication is two way response. So it is not sufficient that you understand what is conversed, you should reply back in the same fluency. To get this talent imbibed, start using the words.

The way to go is to write travel-logs, diary or blogs of your interest with emphasis on using new words. This way you will put a lot of learnt words to real use and you get used to it. Finally it becomes a habit and you become an effective communicator.

One of the primary reason for me to blog is to improve my communication.

Virulent Fever

Yes, this is the reason for my absence in registering my presence in blogspot (aha rhythmic).

I was feeling febrile almost for the entire week and it didn't subside even after swallowing the pain killers. There was also mild head-ache accompanying the raise in temperature. Consulting a general physician brought me jitters as he suspected the symptoms leading to mild Typhoid. Usually blood test should reveal its presence. But the catch is that the blood test should be performed after a gestation period of five days.

The suspicision brought me the worst nightmare I faced two years back. I suffered from an advanced form of Typhoid, which affected the spleen. I had to be admitted to hospital for 10 days and had to go through severe medication. I lost almost 7 - 8 kgs of weight.

Weighing all the options left to me, I decided to return to my hometown so that I could consult my family doctor (who treated the previous typhoid attack) and also get solace from my parents. This time the respite came much sooner than I imagined and the doctor confirmed that it is not a typhoid and it is the seasonal one. A couple of days of complete bed rest brought me back on track.

Agrarian duties

I was depressed over the past week's developments and was trying to recuperate and come over it. Spent a nice time relaxing at home. Tried to redistribute my attention to various other personal issues at hand. Took a couple of indoor shots (mostly macro), enjoyed my time relaxing and lying on the brand new sofa set.

It is a teak wood sofa with thick 6 inch cushion and provides hard support to the lumbar. This makes comforatbale sitting. But I felt that the cushion is bit hotter and leads to sweating.

So what is the title upto? After the pretty relaxing stuff, thought of helping my dad with his agrarian duties. For the first time, got into cultivation field and took care of irrigation of the fields. We are cultivating oil seeds. Our farm comes under LBP (Lower Bhavani Project) irrigation scheme. In the mean while also learnt the internals of this irrigation scheme.

1 Acre Land = 1 hr of water for irrigation (Though it is insufficient still have to manage with it).
Rather than time based control, the irrigation should be based on quantity. There are lot of negative factors that plays spoil sport.

This scheme provides water continuously for every alternate 10 days. This should continue until end of april to complete the cultivation (but this depends on the water level in the bhavani reservoir and the mood of mighty politicians). The irony is that everthing is controlled by idotic politicians who are devoid of skills to adjudge the situation and are narrow minded with selfish attitude.

There are 51 acres of cultivable land associated together and we get the turn to irrigate every 51 hrs. So it is going to be hard time for my dad as he need to do it over the night.

Photo post

Ok, This is my first photo to the blog. I just downloaded picasa and hello. It is seamless and intutive. So from now on, my travel logs should reside in blogspot.

Aero India 2005

I just came back from the Aero India 2005, Yelahanka, Bangalore. I went to witness the Aero show. It was awesome. Indian fighter jets showing their pweress, acrobatics and maneuverability.

This show really proved some subtle points which I thought could be done only in movies and is mostly camera tricks. All those drills where performed live.

In the helicopter category I saw, Advanced Light Helicopter(Dhurv) and Chetan. 3 ALH did fly in a close formation. Really can't believe the angle at which these monsters took a turn. The agility was put to real test. I was stumbled when I saw them going backwards (reverse gear), floating in air and nose-up flying and nose-down flying.

Fighters jet included Sukoi 30 MKI, Mig 29, Sea harriers, Jagurs. All of them were amazing, performing incredible drills, which I had to believe. I was awestuck when I saw a free fall of Su30 with revolutions. Jagur was in perfect speed, unable to track with the naked eye. Sea harrier showed us the creeping landing (Reminding True-Lies movie in which Arnold takes off the Sea harrier landed on the road). Su30MKI power was incredible, it passed us with very low speed and at very low altitude and then suddenly zoomed up at an amazing speed.

In the foreign flight category, there was Hawk jet from British (It is a stage II trainer, which India is planning to buy). LCA(Tejas) the indigeniously build super sonic fighter was also displayed. There was display of various trainer jets like AJT, Navy copters, and army's version of ALH. Army performed a drill of airlifting and dropping troops and their machinaries using their helicopters.

Then came the Suriyakirans (a set of 9 flights in formation). 3 planes took off simultaneously. They performed various formations and I was dumbstuck when they flew direct opposite and took a 90 degree turn away (Reminds me of Pearl Harbour movie). There did lot of drills and formations. The best and the timely one was drawing an artine and arrow (Valentine's day spl, using colors from their exhaust).

Akash Ganga team concluded the show with their brave display of paratrooping.

Rat Hunt

As the clock was ticking towards 12 midnight, I was preparing the bed for my sleep. I was reading Angels and demons relaxingly. Suddenly I felt something creeping on the bedside. Something came running and i was awe stuck, it was a huge rat. Then started the Rat hunt drama.

The shocking sound from me, made everyone (even sleeping roommates) to awake. We made a plot and decided to let the rat escape. Closed all the doors and kept one door open so that the rat can take a safe passage and get out of the house (without bothering us too much).

Everybody was trying to scare the rat so that it will run out of the house. But the rodent took all this is in opposite sense and was trying to hide itself. I was having a bat and trying to hit it in the ground to scare the rat. All of the sudden, the rat came right between the bat and ground and got a hit. I guess, the hit was huge and it would broke its skull, leading to some kind of brain haemorrhage. It twisted and died in seconds. Though I did it unintentionally, the unlucky rodent had its end from my hand.

Assimilate the learnings

This thought was going in me for quite some time now.

I tend to forget the things that I learned a few days back. When I go through it again, everything looks fresh as if I am seeing it for the first time. Though we tend to forget the facts and learnings, I feel that this is quite unnatural. Some where in an artcile, it was stated that the facts/learnings stored in our memory gets faded out day by day and hence refreshing the memory in time is quite important.

When I did a self analysis about this, I found that I missed an important step while learning something. There was not assimilation. I learned something (in a fast pace) and found that everything is understandable to me and never bothered to absorb the learnings. The facts learned were in a kind of temproray memory and got quickly erased. Hence I forgot it sooner and looked fresh to me.

From now on, learning should happen at your own pace of assimilation! Otherwise there is not fruitfulness is learning something.

Peaceful weekend

After a good work-filled week, the weekend was also good and peaceful.

Over the weekend, spent time just relaxing at home, eating sleeping and reading 'Angels and Demons by Dan Brown'. This novel has a similar plot like Da Vinci Code, but still the author keeps the thrill.

Every period cannot be completely green altogether, there will be black spot. Even this weekend too had one... had a spiteful attack of migrain on Sat night. Somehow this time I recovered soon with just a night sleep. The usual hangover that remains for a day is not there this time (lukcy me !)

Incomprehensible question

Last weekend I had a chance to meet some of my (rarely met) relatives, whom doesn't get apprised about my current doings. After the usual exchanges of well beings and wishes, the first question that I get is "what am I doing now?" Unfazed, I answer them promptly (according to their level of understanding) that I have started working. The immediate next question (without any exceptions) is that they ask me how much do I get as a compensation? I had to patch, blabber and get something out to answer it.

I am really stumbled when everybody asked me the same question. Immatter how close/known they are to me? Why the hell do they want to know my remuneration? Are they going to judge me based on my remuneration? They are not going to any financial dealing with me! Still without any reluctancy they ask me that?

Now I have decided to answer the question with another question? "why do you want to know ?"