digital curry

"In a bizarre incident, more than 42 students, who had assembled to attended a Gandhi Jayanti function in Rampur district in Uttar Pradesh fainted while waiting for actress-turned-politician Jayaprada, MP at a public ground on Sunday.According to reports, more than 10000 students had assembled at a public ground to observe the October 2 Gandhi Jayanti function. The programme was supposed to be kick-started by ruling party leader Amar Singh and Jayaprada, local MP. The students, who had been brought in to the ground from their homes from 6' clock in the morning were forced to stand in the scorching sun for hours without food and water." It seems a shame to me what they have reduced Mahatma Gandhi to. Apart from the obvious odious criminal behaviour of politicians like this what is even more saddening is the fact that these people are slowly strangling Mahatma Gandhi for the younger generation. Not that I am a great fan of him but what they have reduced Mahatma Gandhi to is...

There is no dearth of people writing in about the IIMs and the IITs in india. So what do you do when you really have nothing much to write about : you sharpen your pencil and go IIT/IIM bashing ! There was this one person on www.sulkeha.com who had his post reach the top slot (judging on the comments he got) because he wrote something he thought was was a ridiculously funny description of life at an IIT (what was really written all over his blog was "So what I didnt get into an IIT ...its for losers anyway ! "). Anyway here is an article by someone a lot more responsible and somones writing I actually enjoy sometimes. She write an article which was published at quite a few places on indian sites about the IIM placement scene. Misplaced as i thought i article was I quote : "An IIM Ahmedabad student has reportedly bagged a job offer of $ 150,000 (Rs 50 lakhs). The news has made headlines in all the morning papers. And a million more 'I-want-to-attend-IIM A' dreams...

As a reply to a post of mine a little while back one of my frinds suggested an idea - which was really neat and we sat down and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts did come up with something that did seem to have a lot of potential. Surprisingly, i came across the google blog search today ( http://blogsearch.google.com ) ......looks like word of our idea did get around eh ;) . Well, ilooks like folks at technorati ( http://www.technorati.com ) were ahead of google here and looks like blogging is going to be a whole lot more of seroius fun ! Anyway as for the idea - it strengths our belief that the idea has real potential - and our idea wasn't quite searching for(or just searching blogs per se) - that would be too obvious right , hehe ! Got to start working on this idea seroiusly as soon as i get some of the more mundane stuff regarding projects and exams out of the way ! I ate too much at a birthday party today ! couldn't even go for my customary jog ! and have to go an...

not all who wander are lost .....and not all who are lost wander. things are moving real fast. I had my first simCAT today. I did well in the Verbal Analysis/Reading Comprehension section and screwed up the Data interpretation section. Well, so i probably wont make it to the top tier this simCAT ....did i hear someone say ......NEXT !!! the next simCAT's on the 18th of Sep ... i'm gonna crack the exam big time ! ;) hopefully ! I have to submit my Curriculum Vitae for a company that is coming for recruitment in december - and joining a company is the last thing on my mind just now. I mean i really dont see myself working in a company after a year implementing an interface for a mechanical engineering software designed by some dude sitting in korea ! (well i'm not sure thats what the job profile will be but whatever ! ) Then again, on second thoughts I really dont know what I want to do. I mean, its not that i am lost.....its more like i'm wandering about. Actually I know...

so sexy ...so google.... amazing VoIP even behind people with institute/organization firewalls.... perhaps the best solution for people with slow/clogged networks....its super fast ! have fun: http://www.google.com/talk/

so google ...so sexy.... cool VoIP , basic im functions and perhaps the best option for people with slow internet connections/clogged networks. have fun : http://www.google.com/talk/

"Look at that smile on your face ! I'm sure you smashed it ! " - I heard. "me ???? " "yeah dude ! how did you do ? " "screwed ! " i said .......smiling !!! I was totally bowled over by the exam. "so how did yours go ? " I asked. "worse than last time...and since last time i was my score was in the twenties you can imagine " he winked ! ok ...so maybe mine didnt go all that bad. I almost felt myself actually smile. Yeah it couldnt be that bad was it. I mean I hadnt really prepared for the quantitative part of it so it didnt go that well. And so what if i seeemed confused for most of the time in the Data Interpretation section. Verbal wasnt so bad. AAh who am i fooling...I screwed the exam ...and i was prepared ! Well at least i thought so ....until i matched my answers. I mean i thought i would get around 15 marks in the quant section ....i got 8 !!!!!!!!!! At least DI was better .....8.5 (damn !!!!) Verbal was pretty good ...

its been around 14 days since I arrived and I have not and I have not gone out of the campus once ! I just got in touch with an old friend a few days back and it reminded me of our days in the boarding. How we would crave to get out of the campus - even at the risk of dire consequences - even expulsion ! I remeber wednesdays - the day the canteen was closed - and how we would walk down to the canteen hoping that perhaps there was an outbreak of temporary amnesia and the canteen would open ( it did happen once ! ). And how we would stare longlnly at "bishtis" - a small shop outside the college gate that was "out of bounds ! ". Of course the staring was not without pupose (we werent exactly day dreaming idiots ! ). On some days when you were extremely lucky and the guard was not looking (or perhaps had pity on you ! ) you could signal to the person there and he would send a worker. The worker would take your order and money and quietly slip out of the gate and get yo...

Here some delicious bit of news i came across ! "More and more, companies find themselves involved in exploration," says Margaret A. Neale, a professor of organizational behavior and leader of the MTIS program at Stanford. "To be competitive, you have to be more creative." Stanford is doing just that by establishing a new Institute of Design that will teach design thinking and strategy to business, engineering, and design students. This "D-school," founded by Stanford engineering professor David Kelley, also founder of design powerhouse IDEO, may well give Stanford an edge over its B-school rivals as innovation becomes more valued for corporations striving to increase their revenues. " I wish Indian B Schools were quick enough to realise this ! ;)

Its interesting to note two very different apporaches that try to achieve the same thing : making learning more fun and possible in schools in economically disadvanteged regions/schools with very limited resources. While one is the high profile MIT media lab project of the $100 laptop, another approach which is already being implemented in india is the K-Yan. Yan means a flying vehicle in Hindi and K stands for knowledge - literally giving flight to your knowledge. The K-Yan has the functions of a multimedia computer, a large format TV, a DVD or VCD player, a compact disc writer, a projector, internet surfing facilities, video conferencing and visual audio studio systems in a single compact integrated unit, for just Rs.140,000 ($3,000) ( which is pretty expensive considering the target group !! - but a lot of the cost is due to the expensive projecter lens ). However with the K Yan you can teach a whole lot of students in a 'collaborative and (hopefully!) constructive environment...

Using the push registry to launch midlets : MIDP 1.0 specified only one way to start a MIDlet: manual activation by the user. However the MIDP 2.0 specification adds two new mechanisms to launch a MIDlet: in response to an incoming connection or at a scheduled time. While the process is not really difficult as explained in the papers and articles given on the net ( http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/questions/pushregistry/ ) The actual implementation of it is tricky mainly because of the practical difficulties and platform implementations. We needed to auto start a MIDlet each time the phone boots up and the most obvious choice seemed to be using the Java Push Registry Alarm method. Having read a couple of tutorials and seen the example code given it didn’t seem something too difficult to do – however, and such is the software jungle, overcoming the practical difficulties seemed to be the biggest hurdle. For example, in my case I was using Eclipse 3.0 with the java WTK ...

Although i dont really belive in this kind of stuff ...but this is what i got on a site .... the surprising thing is i didnt get the same result again with my name(guess the first one is the true one ;) ) In your past life you were : An alchemist.(hmm i sort of always had a knack for chemistry ...organic at least ;) ) In your past life you lived in: India.....(ahm...guess i'm in love with the country!) You died of ....: well who cares :P -.... here is the link your past life

I do think open source is great ! but there are instances when it can be a true headache. For instance, just the other day I needed to write a Java MIDIlet that could interact with a EXE Daemon written in symbian C++ (which lets MIDIlets acces native services -something which otherwise they have no access to . The full paper is at Arvind Gupta's site ). So i got into the jungle of IDEs, emulators and Wireless tool kits. I downloaded the latest Eclipse 3.1 and then the eclipseme plugin along with sun's wireless toolkit 2.2. Whimsically, the Eclipse 3.1 would not include the .jar files necessary for the project although the files were integrated into the IDE. After spending a whole friday and a good part of sunday trying to get the plugin to work, sense finally dawned and I downloaded the Eclipse 3.0 instead and it worked like a dream ;). so incase if you're eclipse 3.1 has problems download eclipse 3.0 insated ! the world wide web is becoming a super messy jungle of tangled ...

On the theme of innovating for the future, the OBWIous ( O ut of the B ox W ireless I ntellingent -ous) group -led by fabien- is currently working on a prototype for a Wi-Fi Hoover device. The device is being built for the internet 2 (backward compatibility with internet is still being debated though probably will not be built in.) The Wi-Fi Hoover device scans the radio frequency in the surrounding area to search for objects specified through an any criteria search mechanism. The Hoover can then create a virtual image of the object which is directly manipulatable. A ei-piPEs (Enhanced Intelligent Performance Improvement Performance Evaluation System) has also been inbuilt into the Hoover which allows the device to network with similar or compatible devices for real time collaboration. This would provide for a mode of collaboration where different users manipulate and can synchronously change real time copies of actual objects in the nearby area. The area range can be set allowing fo...

Here i have a snapshot of the first user testing of the organic helmet. The testing was done on a user who had a long and glorious history of crashing all sorts of software : from home made to commercial to open source. The only thing he was asked not to try to destroy was the organic helemt itself ! The game that was played for the test was "galaxies -2". The actual interaction was recorded and also displayed on a wall mounted display (visible in the pic) for people who were watching. The organic helmet is also capable of being networked with similar helmets for augumenting collaborative work or just for the thrills of playing network games in agumented reality !

my recently increased activity on blogger is the result of inspiration of some super active bloggers in our lab - and so any benefits and more importantly repercussions (read my grades next semester ;) ) can be backtracked to them - nicolas , mauro , and fabien (not necessarily in that order ;) ) Although, being inspired is not really being fair since instead of blogging about news from the world of research and technolgy that matters (for which i religiously scan their blogs everyday!) all i do is blog about ...err 'other stuff'. however i'm quick to realize that i must move on to more important meaningful things ......and hence as a result of a 'scholarly' discussion held one afternoon - over some delicious 'orange' wine !! -ok i'm new to wine ;) - my next blog will be a lot more academic. Its focussed on a futuristic organic helmet ( the first user test for which has already been conducted and i'm holding back posting details for some IP rel...

i'm very proud to post this piece of information here. " Dear Friends,It givesme pleasure to inform you that our students have won theprestigious Agilent All India Best BTech Project Award 2005.Students: S. Venkataramanan and Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury (ECE, BTech 2005)BTP title: EOG Signal Acquisition, Processing, Applications, andOcular Bio-systems ModelingSupervisors: Dr. Harshal Nemade and Dr. J. S. Sahambi The project was short-listed from 24 BTech projects from all over Indiafor the final presentation on 24th June at New Delhi. Venkataramanan andShubhodeep presented the work and went through an interview at New Delhi.According to the award, the cup to the IITG will be given in September in afunction at New Delhi. In addition, the students have an offer for a onemonth internship at the Agilent Technologies, UK or USA.A BTech project from IIT Kharagpur gets the second place. " and thats when our institute is only 12 years old and the youngest IIT ;) watch out !!!!!!

talking of travelling cheap ......i managed to finish my entire lugano trip under 15 francs . Yeah thats right....from lausanne to lugano ...a night stay by the lake and an entire day in lugano. Then fort exploring in bellenzona...all for 15 francs* well conditions apply ...but then they always do ;)... I'll be back with the details and pics later. In case you guys in india dont find 15 francs cheap ....travel in switzerland is DAMN EXPENSIVE ...and Lugano is FAR !

speaking a language when you only know a few words in it can be dangerous, or hilarious ..depending on whether the other person has a sense of humour ;)...and writing even more so . I haven't yet had any experiences with french yet but some rather, hilarious/embarrassing depending on whose side you are on ! , experiences with Estonian :). So one fine morning, fresh with the hangover of a two hour french class and an informal estonian learning session the linguist in me took a deep breath and i felt the inherent urge to communicate. My landlady is swiss and she speaks some weird version of french which is so different from the one our french instructor speaks that i found it wiser not to shower my french on her. Iiris, the estonian girl, was still asleep. Never the one to give up, i picked up a pencil and wrote the only two estonian phrases i remembered. good morning -terrehomickunst and i love you (!!) - Ma armistan seent . (its a kind of joke between us so ;) ) and with the smug, ...

oh btw the first surprise was pretty sweet too...but will write about it a little later !

shit happens....and to be fair so do sweet surprises. Yesterday was one such day. i mean the sweet surprise one. I got two wonderful surprises and spent a lovely evening. And i didnt even have to ask ! Well this reall sweet estonian flatmate of mine asked if i wanted to join her to a cafe and then we headed out. The only problem we had no idea of where the cafe was, her only contact for the cafe was a geogian girl whose phone number she didnt have, and both of spoke little french. Err... the little here is sort of relative because my 'little' is two basic french classes ;) and her's was a lot better although she remembers hardly any french she studied(her view. i personally think she has a great french accent with no french vocabulary :D ). Not that i have not found my way to places i had idea about in a place where nobody understood what i was talking about ..but this time i was in no real hurry. And her georgian friend conveniently erased her number from her phone (talk ...

for some reason, well actually (and probably !) the reason is beacuase the blogger system recognizes my computer ip to be that from switzerland, it automatically shows me the entire site in french ! and whats worse i dont seem to have an easy way to reset the language to english . So much for smart systems ! and my last post ...quite aptly titled irrational ramblings was an interface failure (the user is NEVER wrong ;) ) for blogger - dont ask me how...it just was - and so i ended up with a post that says nothing - ah well thats irrational enough !

oh make up something will you !

i've been thinking for quite some time to document my trip to switzerland, however for one reason or another i have been unable to do so. And with evey day passing it gets more and more difficult to write about past events. I bought my first digital camera yesterday a Canon A-510. it was a tough choice to make between the other offered by Sony, Olympus, Nikon and of course Canon. The winning points for the Canon A510 were its manual focussing and the 4X optical zoom. The manual however was in french - but since i'm going to attend french lessons from the 20th i guess i should be okay ;). by the way if anyone else faced the same predicament of reading the manual in a language he's not well versed with despair not ! the manuals are avialable online as pdfs.... ;)

so i'm finally in switzerland and loving it. although i had decided to write and keep the blog updated from the very first day ......it was a little overwhelming getting used to all the new stuff here..my new place of stay....the lovely lab....wonderful people....and work ! but now that I have finally started getting a little comfortable with my work i'll write in more often. added two new modules to the e-learning platform today. php is pretty groovy once you know your way around it. this weekend ...hopefully will be going airboarding in mount titlis....!!!!!! gotta get my halbtax and gleis 7 made though.... deva says he'll come from yverdon today....this is the third time he's saying it and i dont quite trust him now ;)... on yeah the indian president was here today....heard him speak :). also went to the epfl library....quite impressive - like most things here ;)... more laterzz back to work for now

just returned from the farewell we gave to the four yearites. It reminded me of the farewell at school- class 12. That strange visceral feeling was back - that twang of nostagia. Although the two farewells were far from similiar in any respect - our school one was a very formal affair - with all of us dressed properly and extra care being taken for etiquette and stuff while the one at IIT was anything but formal. It was fun to see seniors tell "untold" stories about each other. A remarkable thing was in the way I saw some of the people today. The true spirit was being an IITan stared out at you as this bunch of young guys stood there ready to cross over the relatively protected environment of the college to the "big bad world !". I am not sure whether I was the only one who felt it, but in each person there seemed to be a new desire rekindled. Something that hadn't quite shown itself in these four years could be seen now as each of them prepared for different de...

Not a new idea at all but imagine for a moment that life could have an option to "go back on an action" . Looking at it from an interaction design point of view - nothing better to do !!!! - I was wondering would an "UNDO" button be better or an " Rewind and Erase" function better. Well, perhaps this is due to the bias because of the "rewind and erase song" from the roxette - which i really like ;) -, I guess I for one would prefer the rewind and erase mode of interaction. It more of an intutive decision but here is a glimpse of why I believe it would be better. Undo kind of implies to me that the action is simply undone - its like denying that actions its place in time ! With rewind and erase its a conscious decision - you recognize the action has occurred and make an effort to go back and ERASE it. There is more of a psychological sense of coming back to the place where you were and starting fresh - at least to me. Its amazing when a seemingly...

Been reading up on the wonderful concept of Spatial Communication. I'm gonna be working on it this summer internship and it really seems exciting. Reading of the research being done there I really felt a desire to go into research but then there is always the lure of the mba .......what with all the big jobs and big money involved ! The bumber placements at iims dont help simplify my deicision either ! Sometimes i just stop and ask - what the hell do i WANT to do ? no clue ! i guess it either means I can be happy at either of the things MS or MBA or I am going to be clueless no matter what I do .......i prefer to think the former is right ....but then I might be wrong and thats a frightening thought ! the last month is getting hectic ! lots of projects to complete plus i've taken up freelancing work for a startup in delhi ! dont know why i do all this ....for the money ?? ;)

There are some movies that you like, some that you can connect to and some that hit you ......Hard. Hotel Rwanda is one of the latter type- at least for me. It was a totally moving experience. The simplicity of the terror and the nakedness of the ugly side of the human soul to so unpretentiously portrayed that it was all the more believable. Its also interesting how objectively you can assess things when you are not really involved. I don't think I would have been really THAT objective had I been seeing a movie on the Gujrat riots probably. I wonder if this movie should to be shown to all those people killing others out there - on second thoughts wouldnt do much good anyway. Worked hard today - both on assignments and in the gymn.... already sleepy. zzzzzzzzzz

why this topic ? cause tuppi - the dude sitting next to me said so ....... tuppi who ?? it doesnt matter who tuppi is you piece of trash ! ok ...so obviously you've figured that I have nothing much to write about ( the "you" here is obviously pollynaish optimism ) cause i guess this blog is going to be in the category of those esoteric refrence books in the library whom no one ever touches leave alone reads ;) usability workshop day one over ! prototype made \:d/ .... worked on my exhibition design \:d/ learnt how play two chords on the guitar ;) courtesy tuppi again ( you again wanna ask who ?? >:) ) slept and kept two seniors waiting for 4 hours in the lab >:) ~wicked laughter~ go get a life dude and stop reading this :P if you're a gorgeous girl please come back ! :D off to sleep !

ok ! this time its for real - that what i tell myself each time ...but nevertheless - i've heard optimism pays - just hope it pays soon cause i'm getting poorer by the day ;) - but yeah i guess i'm gonna write in way more regularly --- why you ask ? hmmm cause i'm overworked ! its 1:15 am here and listening to john lennon i promise myself to blog more often . I've got a usability workship lined up tomorrow morning, got three major projects to work on over the weekend and loads of other work abour visa and stuff to take care of! So i'm doing what any sane man overloaded would work would do - taking the time off to ponder over more philosophical issues ;) - triggered by everything and anything - at the moment its john lennon crooning "you gotta let it go ! " thats all for now - between usability think aloud techniques and the beatles and blh blah blah its me signing off do concentrate on more important work here : SLEEP !