digital curry

I watched "The Road to Perdition" for the second time today and now I am certain - Conrad Hall is a true genius. Watching each frame of the movie was like watching exquisite poetry in motion. I loved "The professionals" but "The road....." was way out of league even for the Conrad Hall ! Sometimes you just want the scenes to flow out and stay pasted on your walls. And the movie is not just a collection of a large number of beautiful shots - Each shot is beautiful ! I want to watch another movie by him soon !!!!!!

to strive, to seek, to find; and not to yeild................

she :"Stop staring at me !". me :"you're talking to me ? " she :"isn't that so obvious ? " me :"don't flatter yourself. you aren't that attractive." she :"i know ! you have pretty bad taste ;) " me :"well, i'll show you a thing or two about taste; you like coffee ?" she :"is that your way of asking me out ?" me :"see you've got to stop flattering yourself. I mean i can understand what a guy like me staring at you can do you raise your self esteem- but get real" she :"am I hallucinating or is your sense of humour better ? " me :"whatever! what i meant was I could show you what really good coffee is like." she :" oh ok, lets see. Where are we going?" me :" That depends how much you are willing to spend on both our coffee" she :" WHAT ? you expect me to pay for your coffee !!! " ...

"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 !!!!!!