Varun's Blogs

Factual accuracies in Vaaranam Aiyiram

2012-01-12T14:47:00.006+05:30

Its been a long long time since I last posted anything in this blog. So its time for one. Vaaranam Aiyiram is the recent one I saw and I decided I should blog about it. If you already know me, you are thinking I am going to b*tch about it, but you are wrong. I was quite surprised at the accuracies in the story. Let me list them for you:

1) Hero (Surya) gets Heroine1 (Meghna)'s number. Here is the clip:

The number is 510 555 3434. While 555 subcode numbers are often fictional, 510 is really area code that includes Berkeley. Great start for a movie trying to be accurate.

2) Hero says that he lived in University Ave for 40$. The story is assumed to be in 1995s. With US inflation at (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/), I calculated it to be 59$ ~ 60$. From: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/142.htm, I can at least see bunch of them in 60$ range. Close enough.

3) The story is set in 1995 and you can see while he "roams around the city" that there are cut-outs of Jayalalithaa (the current Tamilnadu CM) here:

Note that when this movie was filmed (2007?), Jayalalithaa wasn't the CM. So, at least they must have morphed, or they must have been super lucky to drive through one of Jaya's birthday cutouts in the city that are usually placed around her birthday - sometime in February.

While all of these can be dismissed as just being accidental, I'm giving a benefit of doubt for this movie.

OpenNI and Kinect

2011-12-26T23:54:00.004+05:30

OpenNI is a framework for Natural Interfaces. I started to get my kinect work for OpenNI. I followed the instructions in http://davetaz-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/installing-kinect-on-ubuntu-full-guide.html

and there were issues. Apparently, the stuff in Sensor/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Common needed to be copied to /usr/include/ni.

Also, I had to grep -R LIB_USED" kinect/Sensor/Platform/Linux-x86/Build and I needed to change LIB_USED to USED_LIBS in those Makefiles (there was only one instance IIRC).

Even after this there were issues. There was an error related to USB (Failed to set USB interface). The solution for it was to sudo rmmod gspca_kinect
(Apparently there is another kernel kinect module that needs to be unloaded).

With both these changes done, I was able to compile and get the sample program running.

I also tried compiling the python bindings for openni (thats called onipy). The guys at onipy already had made Makefile for linux, but it appears that the order of compilation is off in the final .so file.
I had to g++ -fPIC -shared -Wl,--export-dynamic -o OpenNIPythonWrapper.so ../../OpenNIPythonWrapper/Source/wrapper.o ../../OpenNIPythonWrapper/Source/OpenNIContextWrapper.o ../../OpenNIPythonWrapper/Source/OpenNIDepthGeneratorWrapper.o ../../OpenNIPythonWrapper/Source/OpenNIImageGeneratorWrapper.o ../../OpenNIPythonWrapper/Source/OpenNIImageMetaDataWrapper.o ../../OpenNIPythonWrapper/Source/conversionHelpers.o ../../PythonOutputStream/Source/PythonOutputStream.o -lboost_python -lOpenNI -lpython2.7 instead of the original one (where the -lboost_python.*$ would be at the beginning - as suggested here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3871724/using-boost-python-with-make-instead-of-bjam)

En Kadhale En Kadhale

2011-11-28T11:02:00.002+05:30

En Kadhalae En Kadhale by Varun Soundararajan

Please add your valuable comments :)

Thoda Thoda Malarndhadhenna

2011-01-24T02:09:00.002+05:30

Here is my first attempt at this wonderful ARR song. Pour in your comments/constructive criticism. Thanks in advance for helping me improve.

thoda thoda malarndhadhenna | Upload Music

Pudhu Vellai Mazhai

2010-12-29T04:01:00.001+05:30

This is my recent flute recording with my little sister Chitra M. Please provide your valuable comments :)

Pudhu Vellai Mazhai | Upload Music

Kaatril Varum Geethame - Trial 1

2010-11-04T11:17:00.001+05:30

Kaatril Varum Geethame (Trial 1) | Upload Music

My first trial at this song.

Kurai Onrum Illai

2010-08-01T08:00:00.003+05:30

Kurai Onrum Illai Original here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHVPTJlK3Zc

This is one of my good ones:

Kurai Onrum Illai

After posting, I went through the correct notes at the site here:

http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/Homepages/shivkuma/personal/music/kurai-onrum-illai.htm

It seems that I am playing the notes lower than I should. When I get time I will correct this and republish my recording with the right notes.

My latest experience

2009-12-24T11:57:00.005+05:30

All characters in this story are real and describes experience of one living person (myself).

I stayed on 19th at my roommate's friend's house at Chicago, met my senior (Vaishnavi) on 20th Morning and left for the 6pm flight at 2 Pm from house. Reached airport at 3 15 PM. After transiting from Terminal 5 to terminal 1, I stood in the line to check in. The helpful lady of united airways told me that most of Indian passports may not be scannable and so asked me to check in manually (some human will enter my details instead of using a self-serve kiosk). This line was not that long, but was not moving fast, I stood in this line for 1.5 hours and when it was 55 minutes to flight (5:05) I got my chance to check in. The cutoff time for baggage is 45 minutes, so I was already nervous, as you might guess :p.

She took my passport, ticket and then told me I need to have schengen visa to travel from AMS -> FRA (Amsterdam to Frankfurt). My ticket was in 3 legs, ORD (Chicago) to AMS, AMS -> FRA and FRA -> BLR. For the leg from AMS to FRA, I need a schengen visa, even though I only transit through the region, since both AMS and FRA are in schengen region and schengen to schengen region transits REQUIRE visa. She actually weighed my baggage and was about to check in my luggage (while on call with someone to check if I can be allowed). Then she told me that I can’t take this flight. Was the first great news to hear. Called up my parents and told them "my ticket has some problem, I can’t make it to this flight, and I will update you after I fix this problem, till then please pray for me". The "very friendly" airline guys told me to contact Orbitz guys, through whom I booked the ticket (in short - get off my lawn). Was very very thankful to United for their guidance. Then I came out of the line and sat in a chair calling up Orbitz. Given that there was snow storm in DC and NY, they were flooded with calls rescheduling their flights.

So I waited in the orbitz line, hearing their very nice tune. Felt glad that I missed the flight to hear that very nice tune. How bad I would have felt if I couldn’t hear this sweet tune waiting for someone to pick my call at Orbitz. Around the 20th minute on the call, I decided to call my roommate, who dropped me at Chicago and left to Lafayette (university). He had already left and was 10 miles off Chicago. To my bad, his cell had very little charge left. I hold my current call, call him and say "Ajay, I have a problem, please come back to airport"... Carrier lost. Call got cut. He somehow calls me back with his little charge and asks me what the problem is (I put my super tune orbitz line on hold and talk to him). I tell him there is some problem with my visa for the Amsterdam to Frankfurt leg and they booted me off the flight. So please come and pick me up at airport. He says ok, I will come, he said he will take some time as his phone has no charge, so he will go and pick his friend (whose house we stayed) and charge the phone and head to airport. (I came to know later that had I called 15 minutes later, he would have had 0 charge on his phone and I couldn’t have reached him). His call got cut by the time I was going to press end call, so I ended up cutting the orbitz call, so 30 minutes of hearing the sweet tunes got wasted. I call orbitz again and keep hearing this nice musik for another 20 minutes. With very little charge left on the phone (since I have been very happily hearing Orbitz music for an hour now), I start moving to a place in airport where I can find a power plug for my phone and laptop (which already dint have any charge). Chicago airport has no free wifi, so I get an 8$ wireless connection and start chatting with my periappa and sister, tell them the story while on call. Then after 50 minutes, I get lucky and find someone at the other end at Orbitz. Explain her, for her this is news, orbitz has no clue why this should happen to me. They ask me to contact airlines. I tell them the airline booted me and asked me to contact orbitz; I can’t cut this call and go another round of fun :p.

Finally Orbitz agrees after 30 minutes of fight that they can hold the ticket and I can use it to travel anytime in a year. Hah! Some breakthrough. Father calls me already 2-3 times to check what really went wrong. I dint put my orbitz call on hold and pick his, since anyway I had no worthy update. Sister tells father the details, since I chatted with her while on call. I call up my periappa after this (in the meanwhile I m on chat with him), tell him I will need a ticket to India and he asks me to give sometime so that he can find an agent. He tries quite a few of them and since its Sunday, it doesn’t work out well. He tells me not to worry, go back and we can get ticket tomorrow. After sometime, he tells me there are some tickets in air India for 22nd and I should go ahead and book it ASAP online. For some reason, my iphone's browser can’t select dates in Orbitz or Expedia and I give up.

In the meantime, my roommate calls me twice, and because of call with Orbitz, I don’t pick the call. He waits for 10 minutes in dept terminal (can’t wait more than that, or will be towed) and moves to economy parking. Bad luck at its best, while getting out of car, he forgets the keys inside and gets locked out from the car. He and his friend (whose house we stayed) comes to meet me, since I am in deeper trouble and tells me everything will get fine, except a small hitch, can’t go home in the car. :-))))).

I then call up AAA (some company that charges 100$ per year to help change tires, drained battery etc) and forward the call to call Chicago security who can help open the car. I tell them the parking lot number and they cut the call immediately and send their vehicle. We were in terminal 1 and it took 10 minutes to reach parking lot. On reaching the lot, we find no one, they had already come and couldn’t see anyone and went back. Huh! I don’t have their number to call them again and search desperately around in -7C with snow for shelter. Luckily, I find a place where I can call the Chicago security. It has a red button that says press to call Chicago security. Ah! Finally some luck on my side. I call them up and tell that I m the same guy who called sometime back. They say they dint find us and went back and tell me to stay there and someone will come there. I stand for a few minutes and the security finally arrives. We guide him to the car. He inspects the car and then asks to fill up some form and opens up the door. Ah! Second good thing. I start the car and put the heater in full and wait to warm myself up first. I ask Ajay (my roommate) to drive the car and let Sandeep to join him at the front and take backseat to book ticket. I try in the phone again to book ticket, but as I try, the airindia ticket for 2000$ goes off and becomes 2300$. Now I try to book that and orbitz stops listing air India and says no ticket available for the date. I call up periappa to ask him to book it online for me and he finds no ticket (in airindia.com and other sites). He calls me back and says he is unable to find one on 21st or 22nd or 23rd. Ah! I was thinking what else can go wrong. I call my cousin in Sunnyvale to help me out. He is away from home and would take 15 minutes to go home. I m 25 minutes from Sandeep's home on the car. I call up parents and tell them everything is under control and periappa is on the final screen getting tickets :p. Now, I just take a deep breath (what else can I do?) and wait to go home, I reach home and pull my 2 luggages to the apt from the garage, which is like 400 ft from home in -7 C, with snow and sleet (what a great weather to be at this time :D )..

At home, I start the computer and start searching online while my cousin is also searching for one. They too find nothing on 21st, 22nd and 23rd (on 23rd they find a 4000$ ticket). Luckily manni finds a sweet deal in makemytrip.com and tells me to search for one on 25th for 1.3k to India on etihad airways. I search and I get it, sweet! I start booking and finish booking. I get confirmation from the site, but my ticket is not yet issued. I m once again back nervous, since there is a clause that says, they can cancel the ticket if there is some unforeseen circumstance. Given that I have seen enough of them, was just wishing I have no more :-). Finally the next day evening 3pm my time, I get the confirmation mail from etihad that my ticket is booked and I get my ticket to India.

Ok, given this entire big story, the moral is:

1) Never leave the car keys in the car, you can get locked out. :-).

2) Keep your cell phone charged.

3) Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will definitely go wrong.

4) You need a lot of God's grace :-). You are just an actor in the system, when things really go wrong, just take it easy :D (Well you can’t do much either).

and of course: Plan ahead for alternatives (unlike me), when you make online booking, check with people, it seems that this is very common issue (schengen visa issue). More often, ignorance is not bliss; it can get you into lot of troubles :-).

and some obvious ones: Always check the visa restrictions on all legs of your flight, if you are booking yourself. Sometimes even being 3 hours before the flight may not help enough. You can be as early as checkin permits and take rest at the airport lounge.

On the positive side, I fortunately never lost my cool, except with Orbitz fighting with them for the 200$ airline change fee (which was understandable).

Preventing Gmail account hacks

2009-01-26T20:43:00.003+05:30

I no more work at Google, but just my two cents/paisa about the
whole problem about being gmail accounts being hacked. I am not a security expert, but whatever I have written here is rehashing basic stuffs to make more sense for your security.

The blog content below is a reply to this mail by my friend:
Anyone working in google now???
Few of my friends' gmail passwords are getting hacked frequently now..

And one of my frnd got her password back in orkut posted by that hacker under the name 'Ethical hacker' from australia.. he has included lotsa friends in her list by that time..
Any ways to protect the account from hacking?And can google track that person thru his gmail account?
Please reply

Reply:
In general, its not so easy to figure out if an account is hacked. If
the hacker is located at a different location (as in the case that you
said - like in australia) its possible to make an educated guess and
ask the person to prove himself. (Like show a prompt to say, what was
his mother's maiden name or something like that) However, it is
believed that more than 60% of all hacking attempts for passwords often
happen from same location/area (because, people in same area, or
someone who has interest in the account, is the one who often hacks
it). So, that also does not do much help.

Cases of email password hacks can be of several types:
1) Compromise at the user end.
2) Compromise in the network (man in the middle).
3) Compromise at the server end.

3) can be generally ruled out, since its not possible to hack into
Google network easily. There is enough infrastructure and security
audit done to assume that its near zero possibility to hack something
at Google end. This applies to most "good enough" email providers,
unless they are foolish enough to do something known in the industry
as a bad security practice.

2) is more common, because people generally dont enable https in their
gmail account. What that means is that, even though your username and
password is securely processed, once you get logged in, the
transcaction is through http. If someone can do "cookie hijack", they
can steal the session. Once session is stolen, one can change the
password, or do something similar to that.
So, the remedy (or closest to a solution) is to enable https (look in
settings inside gmail)

1) Compromise at user end is the most prevalent. There is no point
enabling https, when there is keylogger installed in the machine. Most
spywares are all interested in your keystrokes, since they need your
credit cards and other details. They would gleefully record your
keystrokes all the time and try to send it to some remote location.
Also dont download random software. Be cautious, when someone sends a
forward with ppt or pps and asks you to go through. Dont ever execute
an exe in your machine, unless absolutely needed. ask yourself 10
times before you click on joke.exe or something like that. If someone
sends the same message that he can type in email, in a word document,
discourage it. Avoid opening attachments in emails. Avoid using IE
when you goto unreliable sites.

Sometimes unsuspecting exploits remain. Let me give you an example of
Adobe Acrobat Reader. Most of us might have it installed. There was a
vulnerability in 8.0 version of it, that allowed remote attacker to
send a specific signature PDF and cause running of malicious code.
When any user who visits the site, since its a PDF file, PDF opener
will automatically open (more so in IE) and suddenly you will see
acrobat page, and you get infected. This is something that you cant
even press stop button and prevent loading, because more often it
happens quite quickly.

Install an antivirus, schedule a scan every week. More often, these
scans are scheduled at 12 AM on Sunday night. The problem is that most
of us never keep our computer on at that time, which means, that the
scan never happens. Also, keep your firewall armed all the time.
"Keep your antivirus updated".

There could be still zero day exploits lurking all the time. Consider
using Linux, if you just want to browse, and keep it updated too!.

If you are still paranoid, consider using VMWare and run windows
inside it. After you do your work, just reboot the vm image to a fresh
stock windows install. That way you just dont have to worry about some
spyware hurting your system.

Flip HowTo

2008-12-12T22:13:00.002+05:30

This is a very old idea, which I looked first at this site, and hence this post may not be that new, in terms of freshness of content. However, its always interesting :-).

Goto this site:
http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

type something there and you will get like this:
:sıɥʇ ǝʞıl ʇǝƃ llıʍ noʎ puɐ ǝɹǝɥʇ ƃuıɥʇǝɯos ǝdʎʇ

(-: ǝɯɐs ǝɥʇ ǝɔuǝıɹǝdxǝ oʇ ǝɔuɐɥɔ ǝuo sı sıɥʇ '(ǝɯ ǝʞıl) ǝɟıl ɹnoʎ uı sʇdıɹɔs ʇɟǝl oʇ ʇɥƃıɹ pɐǝɹ ʇou ǝʌɐɥ noʎ ɟı ˙ʎsɐǝ os ʇou sʇı lɐɹǝuǝƃ uı ɥƃnoɥʇ uǝʌǝ 'llǝʍ sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɥʇ pɐǝɹ sʎɐʍlɐ uɐɔ noʎ 'ǝsnɐɔǝq unɟ sı sıɥʇ

Technical details:
This is possible because of unicode. Unicode has a huge set of character set. People were able to find a similar, corresponding upside down character for each character in the english alphabet.

If you are interested in what those characters are, here it is:
This is copy pasted straight from the revfad.com/flip.html page's source code.

var flipTable = {
a : '\u0250',
b : 'q',
c : '\u0254', //open o -- from pne
d : 'p',
e : '\u01DD',
f : '\u025F', //from pne
g : '\u0183',
h : '\u0265',
i : '\u0131', //from pne
j : '\u027E',
k : '\u029E',
//l : '\u0283',
m : '\u026F',
n : 'u',
r : '\u0279',
t : '\u0287',
v : '\u028C',
w : '\u028D',
y : '\u028E',
'.' : '\u02D9',
'[' : ']',
'(' : ')',
'{' : '}',
'?' : '\u00BF', //from pne
'!' : '\u00A1',
"\'" : ',',
'<' : '>',
'_' : '\u203E',
';' : '\u061B',
'\u203F' : '\u2040',
'\u2045' : '\u2046',
'\u2234' : '\u2235',
'\r' : '\n' //thank you, Yeeliberto
}

So as long as you have all these languages in your unicode font, you are really good to go in terms of getting things done (i mean upside down). If you have a complex language script (like say tamil or hindi), such a feat would be difficult, since tamil has horizontal lines at the bottom when character is flipped (think க as ab example). so its difficult to find an equivalent character. Same with hindi ( think of का - or for that matter any char as there is a line at the top for every character).

Donate with AdSense

2008-12-05T03:54:00.009+05:30

This adhoc feature allows people to donate a part or whole of their earnings to Tides foundation, which will aid the relief efforts at Myanmar and China devastations.

Although I had some hand in this project as my small 20% percent, a lot of credit should go to Elizabeth.

See details here: Inside AdSense: Make your ad cents (and dollars) count

Go AdSense!!

gtalk2voip spams

2008-11-21T07:05:00.001+05:30

When I was happy that the heysan trouble was over, here comes gtalk2voip. I guess I registered for this sometime back and now they send an IM saying that they have updated things.

Off-line message from: team@gtalk2voip.com date: 20.11.2008 14:06:06

New feature on GTalk2VoIP:
Using Gmail voice chat to make or receive phone calls: http://www.gtalk2voip.com/gtalk_service_gmailvoice.shtml

When will companies stop using IM to spam. IMs are tooooo intrusive.

Heysan the IM Virus/annoyance/nagchatware

2008-11-12T22:41:00.003+05:30

If you are receiving a message that someone has tagged you in heysan.com, and gives you a link, please dont click it. It seems to be a virus/whatever. The bot pinged me through so many people in the last few days, while they dint know that the bot was doing all these.

What kind of messages do you receive:
abc@def.com tagged you in a photo on http://i.heysan.com/pfGZNO9Y
abc@def.com stole your cookies. To recover click on http://i.heysan.com/someSaltValue
abc@def.com uploaded a new photo on http://i.heysan.com/pfGZNO9Y
abc@def.com commented on a photo on http://i.heysan.com/pfGZNO9Y

Action:
None I know of, please ignore the message and keep moving. DONT CLICK IT.

Making libsvm work in Mac OS X - Matlab R 2008

2008-11-09T00:03:00.003+05:30

It was painful to get libsvm on matlab working in Mac OS X. First was a false error.

Matlab threw some weird error like this:
expr: syntax error
/p/matlab/bin/util/mex/mexutil.sh: line 13: [: too many arguments

and make did not work. SO I guessed that this was the error (which actually was not). On searching the net, I figured out that we should ignore this error and keep going.

The second was the issue with libsvm. The file make.m was referring .obj files while the makefile was generating .o files. So all .obj was to be search and replaced with .o. Things started working after that.

Hope this helps others who are struggling with libsvm and matlab in OS X.

Google News Blog: Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)

2008-08-08T00:59:00.001+05:30

Google News Blog: Google News: Now in தமிழ் (Tamil)

Let me point to the latest Google release for the (Tamil koorum nallulagam) market. :-).
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Google news in Tamil. Tamil news stories aggregated from various tamil news sources and seperate category for Srilankan news, Google News Tamil rocks :-). In case you want to know who worked on it, its my dear friend Kiran Gunda and his teammates.

Everyone I know who reads tamil liked it (myself and my father as of now ;-) )...

Thank you Google!
(Obligatory thanks to Google for all the good food that added 10kgs to my weight).

Trekking at Skandagiri

2008-04-06T21:59:00.007+05:30

This blog post is about trekking to a place called Skandagiri (aka Kalavarahalli Betta - Betta in Kannada means hill). Nandi Hills is something most people in Bangalore know about, which you can see from Skandagiri. This trek was done by myself and my college friends (totaling 15 people). This place is 6km from Chick bellapur. At the foothills of Skandagiri is Papaghni mutt. From the mutt, it takes 4-6km walk to reach the top. I will split the blog into two parts. During the first part, I will stick to general info, for those who are planning to go trekking there and are here through Google search looking for more info. The second part is mostly my experience there.

Map:

View Map

You should be able to see Chick bellapur here. From there ask for Papagni Mutt and from there, you trek.

What time is it best to go?
Good question, it is good to go during times when it doesn't rain. We had people skid even though it was totally dry. Remember that, if its gonna rain, you have no shady place to take shelter. If you really meant time, its nice to see sunrise, so do a night trek. The ideal climate for trekking is to have clouds but not rain. The clouds stick below the hill. So you can see sun rise above the clouds, which is something you can see otherwise if you were a bird ;). It is a great idea to trek on Full moon day mostly because its easier to trek, as you will have some natural lighting. On an average, during weekends, the guide told me that around 1000 people trek, which is a fairly large number, by most standards.

How do you go there?
Pack all these:
1) Torch - very very important if you do night trek. I got a three LED bulb torch that cost like 120 Rs. It was very powerful and I should say, the brighter torch you have, the easier it is to climb.
2) Water and Snacks - Pack as much snacks and water as possible. Remember that every snack you take up, you will have to carry apart from your body weight. So be choosy of what U want to take up. Please don't litter at the top of the mountain. We saw a lot of Lays packets at the top. Now that you have carried so much snack items to the top, it wont take a lot of effort for you to get them to the foothill. Collect all of them in a plastic cover, come down and drop them near the dustbin near the mutt. Its not tough to do. Also don't empty the water bottles on the way down. You could do better service to others than to make a slippery path for them to climb. (sorry for preaching, but we did face/see all these).
3) Shoes and Jerkin - Wear the shoes and go, keep the jerkin in your bag. When you climb, you will sweat, so its a nice idea not to wear it (I wore it, it was stinking when I reached top). Also check the grip in your shoes. No point if it skids - you are going to climb up the hill.
4) Cash - (credit cards don't work ;) )
If you are taking a vehicle (cab/ van etc), then the spending for you will be this:
Rs. 225 for trekking in wild - permit (We had 15 people climbing up).
Rs. 400 for the guide - You can find guides in the night waiting there on Sat and Sunday. Other days, it seems that they don't allow beyond 1 AM or something. So if u are trekking on a non-sat-sun, be early there. Our total expense per head ended up Rs 370. It becomes cheaper with more people sharing the conveyance expense.

How much time does it take to trek up from Mutt?
It takes 2 hours if you can climb up fast. If you are average climber it should take 2.5 hours. If you are slow climber, it should take 3-3.5 hours. More than that, check your health if you are young :p.

What do you do after you reach top (can be rephrased as: What to do there)?
Actually nothing ;) Once you reach the top, till the sunrises, you have nothing else to do other than eat and sleep (and probably star gazing which I will describe momentarily).

When should I get back?
After you watch the sunrise, get yourself off the mountain. Its going to get hotter and you will sweat. If you climb down with the sun overhead, its really not a pleasant climb down. (We started at 7 AM and reached down at 9:15 AM). By the time we reached the bottom, we were all exhausted and the sun overhead can be more irritating. Since you haven't had sleep the whole night, its even more irritating. So get off the cliff after the sun rises. Personally, I found that it was far more difficult getting down the cliff and your knee trembles. DO NOT do a free fall walking/running down the path. That is very dangerous.

PART 2 - My Experience:

Why is it not so easy to sell apples in ISS

2008-03-17T10:36:00.004+05:30

This post is as a result of watching a few engedu talks on space station (totaling over 3.5 hours).

Whatever technical details I describe are from talks that are a combination of what Edward Lu, Daniel Bursch and Jim Newman describe about the international space station, the Soyuz, MIR, space shuttle, weightlessness and other related stuffs. Whatever you read below will be minor(?) details for the actual content of this post: "Why it is not so easy to sell apples in International Space Station", even though there is a lucrative market :).

The International Space Station:
Well first of all, the International Space Station is the (only) inhabited place outside the earth. It’s the place to be, if you are not on earth. International Space station is a joint effort from US, Russia and the ESA (European Space Agency). The economics in the space station cargo transfer is like this. It is cheaper to take something into space (roughly $10000/kg) but its costlier to bring it back (roughly $30000/kg). So it’s cheaper to take apples to the space station, sell it, but it’s not so cheap to bring the empty bag back to earth.

Some extra info: The only vehicle that is capable of taking cargo on large quantities is the Space Shuttle. Space shuttle can carry cargo close to 10 tons(!) whereas the Soyuz module has very less cargo capability (typically in Kgs).

How do you reach there?
There are currently two ways to reach (3 in the future with ESA coming up). Use the Space Shuttle or the Soyuz vehicle.

About Space Shuttle and Soyuz: Space Shuttle is a billion dollar transfer vehicle. For a successful liftoff, we need to ensure that more than few hundreds of critical parts work without glitch. Edward Lu talks about "Simple is Good" strategy which the Russians adopted (partly due to the fact that they didn’t have lot of funding). There are several failure modes in Space Shuttle, whereas the Soyuz has very few failure modes, and is pretty simple to use (due to less complexity).

Getting Ready for Space to sell my apples:
Launch Preparation:
To get myself ready to sell apples, first I need to choose which of these two transfer vehicles I need to get to space. I will try to put the details first for both. We shall defer the decision to choose which of these vehicles at a later time (or when I actually go to space to sell my apples).
There are two roles in which one can enter the International Space Station (henceforth ISS). One could enter as an astronaut or as space station visitor(think of Charles Simonyi). As a space station apple seller, one could choose either of these roles. For the former, one needs to enroll in the Astronaut program. Well for the later, you need something like 40-50 Million dollars.

Reaching as a Space Visitor:
Even though you are just a space visitor, you are given a 3 months intense training in weightlessness (which usually comprises of weightlessness training, swimming, parachuting and stuffs like learning to operate the space shuttle/Soyuz control systems, learning how to fly them).

In general, the space visitor is not expected to fly the shuttle/Soyuz, but learn to get out in case of emergency. Most of the astronauts/cosmonauts are not civilians and are often skilled & commercial pilots. In fact, Ed Lu suggests that around 50% of all Astronauts are not civilians). In any case, you need to invest time and money to sell apples in space :).

Reaching as an Astronaut:
To enroll in the astronaut program, one has to qualify for very specific height requirements. Its much more stringent in the Soyuz. The shortest in the Soyuz is like 5'2" and the tallest is like 6'2" or something like that. In general, the Russian average height is lesser than that of the Astronaut limitations. In fact, the Russians have stringent limitations for leg length, arm length etc., the astronaut training program is for 2 years at least. The cosmonaut training is also for almost the same time. In some cases where you are an Astronaut commanding/flying the Soyuz, things get different (like what Ed Lu experienced). The Russians have a stringent training and an exam at the end. During the training, one is trained on a simulator located at space center near Moscow. At the end of training, the cosmonaut usually have a *formal* test. A chit is taken out of the chits on which is written possible worst day scenario. The cosmonaut is put on simulator with the scenario and they test the cosmonaut's response to the situation. Only those who are able to handle them successfully will be able to fly the Soyuz. Although the Astronauts in US don’t have such stringent rules, one certainly has to qualify the training.

Getting to space station through the Shuttle:
If you are getting to the space station from Shuttle, you have to be at the Florida Shuttle Launch center. Each astronaut is allowed to take a few kg load(s) of personal cargo. If we are going to sell apples after becoming astronaut, it’s pretty logical to carry those apples in the personal load. Ah! Did I forget to tell you that actually there are few apples and fresh fruit loads that are sent by the Mission Command on the cargo loads that reach the ISS! (OMG, we already have a competitor). Both the Space Shuttle launch and the Soyuz launches have their own rituals. Every space shuttle mission has a name like STS-# (e.g.: STS-109 etc) and they have a logo for the mission, which represents what the mission is. For example, if we could influence the Mission Command about our apple selling, we could have apple somewhere in the mission logo :). The other ritual is the Mission Commander getting down the space van and checking the weather before the flight. The Mission Commander/director usually gives this statement before lift off - "Good Luck, and God save you if you screw up".

A week before the actual shuttle launch one is quarantined. Hence, you should choose the kind of apple that you want to take to the space station before that. Also, it is important that you have someone you know all along, who is in the mission command around to provide you fresh apples before you embark on the space shuttle. It is generally said that the reason for quarantine is to ensure that the astronauts don’t catch any diseases and fall sick. Guesses are that the true reason is that the last one-week is crucial to a successful mission and hence one should not possibly be disturbed. Quarantine helps on that front.

The space shuttle is a huge vehicle, which is always kept facing the sky when it is assembled with the solid rocket boosters. These solid rocket boosters are fueled a day or something before the space mission. Hence, there is always a cost associated with refueling the boosters if one chooses to postpone the mission. There are huge cranes that transfer the space shuttle from the hangar to the launch pad.

Being solid boosters to blast off, the journey during the initial phase with solid boosters is usually not really smooth. But once the solid booster phase is over, the ride becomes really smooth to the ISS. The space shuttle should orbit in paths same as ISS when it wants to dock. So, the space shuttle gets into the 200km altitude orbit. Also, generally the space shuttle does not dock into the ISS 2 hours after liftoff; it takes a day to get into the orbit it requires as well as ensuring all the necessary precautions are taken.

To tell about the space shuttle, it has 5 computers on board for running the space shuttle-by-wire. 4 of them do the same calculation and verify if the results are same and the 5th one is a different computer from a different vendor that is a failsafe (standby) computer that takes control when the 4 computers bluff. On a side note (about space station, not the shuttle), most of the Space station design ideas are flicked from Nuclear Submarine. Do you know the reason why? The Space station is subject to the same radiation problems that Nuclear Submarines face!. You write a bit as 1 in memory and after seven hours read it back, and it may not be the same 1!!!. Some astronauts have reported random bright lights in their eyes while sleeping, most of which are random retina neuron firing due to the radiations.

Docking into the ISS is a critical step in the whole apple-selling mission (you are reaching your market!). There have been previous incidents in MIR (Russian space station) where Soyuz cargo had collided with MIR at great speed! Also, the general rule of the thumb in space is, if you want to go slow, you should never speed down, you will go fast! (I don’t know why it’s that way). Space shuttles that want to slow down usually go at larger orbits than ISS and then return back....

Getting to space station through the Soyuz:
If you are getting to the space station through Soyuz, you generally have a 1-year training period, if you are the commander and a 3-month odd training if you are a traveler along. The launch assembly is at the Baikonur cosmodrome and the place nearby where the rocket launch pad exists. Flying on the Soyuz can happen only if you pass the training and the test. Assuming we have done that, there are a lot of Russian rituals that happen. Before blasting off to space, the day before, the cosmonauts visit the Kremlin, visit the graveyards of Yuri and the Father of Russian Cosmonautics, Konstantin and pay respect to them. After that, they sign the register in Yuri's desk.

In general, the Russian technology has always been to let the rockets sleep when they assemble (I mean to lay them horizontal). At Baikonur, there is a train track to move the rockets to the launch pads. They have little worry like the Space Shuttle to ensure that the shuttle is always erect when transported, as they are made erect only on the day of launch using huge cranes.

Getting into the Soyuz involves taking elevator from the top (uh! then its not elevating ;) )of the rocket. It is a two-hour wait after the cosmonauts board the Soyuz in their space suits and check their pressure/temperatures. As a shrewd Apple seller, one should just mentally count how many apples one has taken, and how to sell them once reaching the ISS (the market).

And then you blast off into space. The rockets are liquid fueled unlike solid boosters. Hence the journey is much more smoother. However, when one stage ends and the other stage starts, there is a 4G to 0G to back to 4G again.. The mission commander on board the Soyuz has a checklist that he has to keep ticking off to ensure that the launch goes smooth. As a Soyuz passenger, we are anyway in constant touch with the base to ensure that launch steps are not missed. Once you are into space, the travel is smooth and the only destiny in space is the ISS :).

Spending six months in the space station - What to do beyond selling apples?
Well, didn’t I tell you that you have to be in the space station for 6 months, as a part of the ISS crew apart from selling apples? (I know I didn’t ;-) ). If you came back immediately after selling your apples, you are going to stare at a huge "space flight" bill. So, it’s a wise idea to actually do something similar to an RA/TA thing for the Houston Mission command for 6 months and reduce the space flight bill. :) Words of Wisdom: A wise businessmen always reduces his liability. Once you are close to the space station in whatever (Soyuz/ shuttle), on docking, the first thing that is done is pressure equalization. Get the ISS habitants near the hatch, because that is the time they are going to smell something. When the pressure is equalized, make sure you keep your apples close to the pressure notch, so that the smell reaches the other end and your potential customers are enticed. ISS has state-of-the-art air purification system. Hence after a few minutes the smells vanish rapidly. People who have been to the space station tell you that the ISS smells like "nothing".

Once the ISS hatch is opened for you, get out and get your cargo (apples) along and keep it in some safe place. Get yourself comfortable and sell apples :). The better businessmen you are, the more you can sell. Sell all your apples and get ready to dump the empty bag somewhere in the station (ESA Cargo dock? what say?).

Now that you have 6 months at your disposal at the station, try out your luck at all things that you can do. Weightlessness is the best thing. Try the superman stunts that you cant do on earth. ISS is like a 1000 square foot house on earth, but remember that in ISS there is nothing called roof. Human has access only to the ground of a house. At ISS you have access to every corner and hence ISS might appear much bigger than that.

If you ever wanted to get out of the ISS on a walk (space-walk), you need to get your pressure down first. From 15 psi to 5psi on the Russian space suite and 4psi on the American space suite. The time to prepare for the space walk is usually 2 hours on American space suite. People usually have a heavy workout before space walk, to remove nitrogen from body. The Russian space suite requires lesser time to prepare for space walk. The American space suite has a thread that always connects to the ISS, whereas in the Russian suite, the astronaut has 2 prongs, each on one hand. The space suite has enough radiation prevention system to ensure that the inner temperature is in the 20 degree centigrade range. But the space walker has to face his own body heat. So usually, the space walker has water cooled under wears :D.. sounds cool? ;)

Other job that one could do on the space station is to take photographs of cities and sell them when back :D (oh! well, not really sell as all photos astronauts take are on public domain). Also, you could go over auroras and enjoy like being inside the neon-bulb. Auroras are of different colors based on the magnetic intensity and other factors (which I don’t know of). One naive thing most people do when on zero gravity first is to try doing somersaults on the gravity less surrounding, which sounds cool the first time being weightless, but gets natural (since you have already played all those games when doing your training in weightlessness on ground). For your entertainment, we also have a DVD player on the space station and some nice movies to play.

Six months is quite some time and people often start getting depressed in their 3rd month on board the ISS. It is important to understand that and get one's act together. After all, now that you have sold your apples, your idea now is not to quarrel among the inhabitants, but to reduce your space flight bill.

Flying back to Earth:
Flying back to earth can happen only when the next crew comes back to the ISS. Flying back can happen with the same 2 possibilities like the way you reached the space station. Either on the Soyuz or the Space Shuttle. The journey back to earth is much more dangerous than the other way (oh well you could say the other way as well). When any rock/item passes through the earth's atmosphere, it faces rapid friction and burn up on the earth's atmosphere. That’s why our earth's surface is not pimpled like that of the moon :-). Your space vehicle will not be spared, it is also going to be subject to the same thing. Temperatures outside the vehicle can get from anywhere between thousand degrees to around 4-5 thousand and beyond (correct me if I m wrong here). The space shuttle crews often seen bright light all along the sides of the shuttle (due to the rapid heat that burns outside) and a broken tile is an impending disaster, as the heat can reach the inside through the broken tile. No wonder Columbia shuttle mission ended up on a sad note.

On the Soyuz it’s rather less eventful, mostly because you are sitting inside a vehicle and unable to see much outside as a crew member (the commander can see outside, I guess). The attack vector of the Soyuz is much more than the Space shuttle. Hence, it is easy to maneuver the Soyuz in case of issue to few hundred miles on either side (or left and right). The last 5 miles in the Soyuz is always a guess, because there is a parachute involved and it can lead you anywhere in a designated radius. The Space shuttle lands in a standard space shuttle track and there is one on either coasts (Land on Mojave Desert or on the east coast). In the Soyuz, you take a few hours to get to a safe place, because you land in Kazakhstan, in the middle of nowhere and the Russian rescue helicopters get you into a make-shift tent to get you warm, you get a hot cup of coffee or something and then take you to the Space Center near Moscow, where they have the media circus and then they leave you home. It is common for local folks near the landing site in Kazakhstan come and see the cosmonauts, because they believe it gives great luck to one when one sees those "people from space" :).

[The Fun Part] Lets put the balance sheet for the business:
Time Investment:
As Astronaut/ Cosmonaut: 2 Years for Training, another 1 year (or a fast track 9 weeks) if learnt to fly Shuttle but end up flying Soyuz.
As Space Tourist: 3 months for training at Russia, 2 weeks on board the ISS and 6 months if you decide to stay there for 6 months to foot your bill. (In truth if you stay longer at ISS the cost gets higher, lets forget that for the moment).

Money Investment:
As Astronaut/ Cosmonaut: Several million dollars on the simulators in US and Russia. Your portion of the cost of blast off into space and well, cost for essential supplies that you use up on the space station (water, oxygen, electricity etc) and of course the apples that you took to the space station.
As Space Tourist: 40 million dollars to get to the space station for those few days in ISS.

Returns:
Wisdom: A lot of wisdom on space in general, which obviously cannot be a part of the balance sheet :(.
Selling Apples: Of course, we went there to sell apples, so our return on investment will certainly not be zero :). The shrewder businessman you are the costlier you can sell. The bigger problems with selling those apples are the point that if you were on the Shuttle to ISS, you won’t reach there so early to have fresh apples. But you can carry a lot more on the shuttle to ISS. If you were on Soyuz, you have very little space to carry such things. Another big problem is the fact that the customers on board the ISS may not be wealthy enough to buy your apples for millions of dollars to make the business viable. As they are also co-astronauts like you, they might end up to be your competitors.

What’s the final say?
It is not a viable business plan to sell apples on the Space station (as you might have guessed).

Why flying with Superman is dangerous

2008-03-05T10:34:00.003+05:30

This blog post is all about explaining why flying (as a human) with Superman (being carried by him), is a not so great thing. This post is basically about trying to reason something logical with illogical assumptions, hence does not hold any real world value, but a lot of fun value.

Assumptions:
1) Superman can fly and can attain super sonic speeds. There is something myseterious about his body and its perfectly aerodynamic - enough drag and lift to keep him in the sky(and hence does not retard his speed due to poor aerodynamics).

What are the problems:
1) Speed: Superman can attain supersonic speed. But there are problems that arise when he carries someone with him. Superman cannot attain Mach1 (1225 km/hour), because the Sonic Boom will cause temporary or permanent loss of hearing for the human with him (mostly because of the large problems associated with boom). Another assumption here: Sonic boom is usually associated with objects that are aerodynamic - and as said above, I assume Superman is aerodynamic. Another thing to consider with speed is the air friction. Althought I don't have statistics to quantify at what speed a normal human's dress would start burning, I can make a guess that air friction could burn out at high speeds. So, superman watch out when flying at high speeds along with a human. However, it is to be noted that superman is not subject to the air friction problem, because of some mysterious reason, his clothes never catch fire. :-)

2) Altitude/Height: Superman, as seen in TV, can even fly to space(where there is no oxygen) and come back with no issues. However, when he carries someone with him, he needs to ensure there is enough oxygen in air for the human. Anything above 18000 feet is death zone (roughly 5500 meters). There are other problems when superman flies with someone at higher altitudes. There should be significant radar signature for superman(with person). Hence, when superman enters a country's airspace, he could get picked up by defense systems. In the 1980s, a soviet airdefense personnel found radar blips, for which he did not inform his bosses about the blip and made a surmise that it cannot be US missiles, because he believed, if US had to attack, it would never attack with a few missiles, it would be a large fleet. It was eventually found that it was sunlight reflected from clouds (a false alarm). Read the story here. If Petrov had not been the air defense personnel in command and if Superman enters the air space of Soviets, he could even be one of the reasons for the cold war to have become a nuclear war.

What should superman do when a supersonic missile is fired at him? This is a tough question. Assuming that superman anyway cannot fly very high, he should make every effort to first reach the ground, drop the person and then go back to air and then fly hypersonic/ultrasonic/whatever and then destroy the missile, like he has been doing all throughout the superman story :-). The reason he has to fly back after dropping the person is that, if he doesn't, he would be hit by the missile. Being superhero, he does not suffer any damage :p, but the human will.. :).

In order to avoid the radar problem, superman has to fly at very low heights. In that case, he will have to be careful about the sudden change in topography, a gorge, a mountain etc. Also, there is this weird problem of having to be the target of some random AK47 or RPG when flying over Afghanistan. Hence, superman's flying with a person is not going to be that easy :).

My Maldives Trip

2008-02-06T18:07:00.000+05:30

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Get your own

The trip was between 3rd and 6th Feb 2008.

Something you cant do with your iPhone but on my Nokia 1108

2008-01-31T14:23:00.000+05:30

and the guy doing this is me :)

Go Green!!!

2008-01-23T10:31:00.000+05:30

A month back at the NGEF - Old Madras Road junction, I had a really memorable incident. The cab I was sitting was waiting to join the Old Madras Road. As usual there were quite a few 2 wheelers, cabs, buses all lined to join the Old Madras Road, as if there weren't enough vehicles already on it.

The traffic cop did something remarkable. There were quite a few cycles waiting on the left of the junction to join Old Madras Road(OMR) towards the city. The cop stopped vehicles both sides of OMR, gave a safe pass for all the cycles. A few of the two wheelers also tried to join the party, but were denied entry. Once the cycles were on OMR, the cop let traffic on both sides of Old Madras Road. After a few minutes he allowed vehicles from NGEF side to join OMR. I was really astonished. Its possibly the few times when I have seen cycles given preferential treatment. I was really happy that day.

I remembered my days at Cisco, when I used to cycle to work. It was always a big fight for a cycle near the trinity circle to justify its presence. There were vehicles all around who would keep honking even though there is no space on the left, because the cycle obviously was slow. Also, the amount of pollution and dust at these junctions put off cycle riders.

I know that the incident I saw was really sporadic and the probability of seeing a similar incident holds same probability of me winning the Lottery and distributing the amount to all readers of my blog :D. But, I sincerely believe that this is probably the way to go for a greener Bangalore and my best appreciations goes to the cop :-).

Interpreting Melakartha Chart

2007-11-24T00:03:00.001+05:30

This post is heavily inspired and guided from my talk with my Flute Sir: Shri. Bhaskar. My talk with him on one of my flute classes about Raagas in Carnatic music has instilled tremendous reverence in me for Carnatic Music.

Let me get the terminologies right first:
Raaga - The progression of swaras in some specific order. Each Raaga has Arohanam and Avarohanam.

Swaram - The fundamental constituent of a Raaga. There are 7 Swarams. Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni. Sa and Pa are called Prakruthi Swaras, for there is only one type of Sa and Pa. (its equivalent of C and G in Western Music). The rest has that many variations represented in brackets.
Ri(3)
Ga(3)
Ma(2)
Dha(3)
Ni(3).
Note that Ri2 == Ga1, Ri3 == Ga2, Dha2 == Ni1, Dha3 == Ni2, where "==" is the Equivalence relation.

Arohanam and Avarohanam - A raaga can have musical notes that either ascend or descend relative to current position. When you are in a note and you want to ascend, you should look at your current position in the ascending table and continue to sing the next swaram in the ascending table. When you descend, you just follow the descending table and continue to descend along the swarams defined in that table. The ascending table is called Arohanam and the descending table is called Avarohanam. If there is an anomaly in ascending of an Arohanam and descending of an Avarohanam, its called Vakram.

Melakartha Raagas - There are over 2000+ note progressions forming Raagas. All of them can be derived from 72 raagas called Melakartha Raagas. What’s special about Melakartha Raagas:
They are symmetric, in the sense that Arohanam.reverse() == Avarohanam.
They are complete, in the sense that each of the 72 melakartha has at least and utmost one instance of the 7 swaras in their Arohanam and the rule holds good for Avarohanam too.

How did we arrive at 72?
Its basic combination: There is Sa(1) - Ri(3)- Ga(3) - Ma(2) Pa(1) Dha(3) Ni(3)
Ri2==Ga1
hence when Ri2 is there, Ga1 is not possible as part of melakartha scheme. Hence for Ri2 the Ga that can follow can be only Ga2 and Ga3.

It’s the same with Dha and Ni combo.

Hence,
Sa - 1
Ri Ga - (R1 G1, R1 G2, R1 G3, R2 G2, R2 G3, R3 G3) - 6
Ma - (Ma1, Ma2) - 2
Pa - 1
Dha Ni - (D1 N1, D1 N2, D1 N3, D2 N2, D2 N3, D3 N3) - 6

Multiply the possibilities to get the overall possibilities = 1 * 6 * 2 * 1 * 6 = 72.
Ok, so we now understood how Melakartha scheme is 72.

What is Janya?
A Janya is some raaga that is derived from Melakartha Raaga. The cookbook way of preparing a Janya from its melakartha raaga is : do a transformation (add, delete one or more swaras and change order) on the Melakartha. Note that when adding a new swara, that swara must exist on its Melakartha, you can't arbitrarily insert a swara that’s not in the melakartha.

We will now try to explore more about Melakarthas:
(Note: I have not devised them, I m just trying to spell out the requirements and trying to map the existing awesome solution to the requirements).

Now that we have the fundamentals, lets add some notation to Melakartha and make it systematic.

1. Lets put numbering from 1-72 to easily identify the Raaga.
2. Lets name them.
3. Lets devise a system to classify them easily so that given number, should be able to tell the Swaras in it (and hence the arohanam and avarohanam).

3rd can be achieved if 1st point is done correctly.

All Melakarthas already have names, so lets use them. For classifying, the chart below is going to help us tremendously:

ok,
Lets try to analyze the chart first and spell the notations in the chart. In the chart above you wont find Sa and Pa. The reason being it’s part of all the 72 Melakarthas and there is only one version of Sa and Pa. There are only 2 versions of Ma. Hence there should be 72/2=36 raagas with Ma1 and 36 raagas with Ma2. The remaining swaras are Ri Ga Dha Ni. (Sa Pa Ma are explored).
Each of these 36 raaga blocks should have Sa Ri* Ga* Ma1 Pa Dha* Ni*
(* denote raagas that can vary and non * are those that are fixed for those 36 Raagas).

Now, lets say we now break this 36 into blocks of combiations of Ri and Ga.
The Ri Ga combination (as we saw from the
Melakartha explanation) can be [R1 G1, R1 G2, R1 G3, R2 G2, R2 G3, R3 G3]. which is 6.
Hence the 36 is divided now it 36/6 = 6 blocks. Each of these blocks has one of the above combiations for Ri and Ga. Now for the third block of Ri Ga it is
Sa Ri1 G3 M1 P D* N*. In other words, the only variables now are Dha and Ni.
When we are in the 3rd block, 2 blocks each consisting of 6 raagas precede it. Hence the first raaga in this block should be numbered 13. Its swara signature is S R1 G3 M1 P D1 N1. (which is GayakaPriya).

This is found easily with the above chart this way. All melakartha raagas on the right hand side has Suddha Madhyamam (which is Ma1) and the raagas on left hand side has Pratha Madhyamam (Ma2). For Ri and Ga classification, we express different notation as:
R1 is denoted as Ra
R2 is denoted as Ri
R3 is denoted as Ru

G1 is denoted as Ga
G2 is denoted as Gi
G3 is denoted as Gu

The Dha and Ni combinations in order of [d1 n1, d1 n2, d1 n3, d2 n2, d2 n3, d3 n3] are the 6 raagas in each block.

Thus if you know the Swara signature, you can find the Raaga and vice versa with this chart.

So we have explored the combination of Swara Signature -> Raaga Number, Raaga Number -> Raaga Name (which is obvious with the chart) and Raaga Name -> Swara Signature, all with the help of this chart.

Lets say you don’t have this chart, how will you find the Raaga Number, given Raaga Name? This is also possible, but it’s not so direct though.

Take the first 2 letters of the Raaga.
Lets take Maya Malava Gaula.
first two letters as per sanskrit/tamil/kannada are Ma Ya.

Vallinam letters, with their chronology in brackets are : Ka(1) Sa(2) Da(3) Tha(4) Pa(5) Ra(6)
Mellinam letters, with their chronology in brackets are : Ga(1) Gya(2) Na(3) Na(4) Ma(5) Na(6)
Idaiyinam letters: Ya(1) Ra(2) La(3) Va (4) LA(5) Zha (6)

look at the chronology numbers for Ma and Ya. They are 5 and 1 respectively. Reverse them, so it becomes 15, which is the raaga number for Maya Maulava Gaula.

There are counter examples that don’t work with this. But, it seems that a similar grouping of letters in Sanskrit/Kannada seems to work to get the right number. (I need to find out what should be patched). In Tamil, each of vallinam, mellinam and idayinam have only 6 letters, where as the units digit of a raaga number can be from 1-9 and the tens digit can be from 1-7.
This has to be apparently fixed, after which it would be a perfect mapping :-).

In whatever case it is, the chart is useful at least to get swaras for a given melakartha raaga or to get the raaga give the swara and also to find the raaga number in both the above cases.
Hope my post was useful. Thanks a lot for reading till the end of the post.

Google Electric Scooter

2007-10-23T05:07:00.000+05:30

My Recent Flute Creation - Papa Kehte Hein

2007-10-18T07:21:00.000+05:30

My recent flute creation. Click on Play button below to play

If you did not like the background music, you can see the bgm less version here:
Click here
For a complete list of all recordings Click Here

My recent flute recording - Maalai Pozhudhin Mayakkathile Naan

2007-10-13T11:52:00.000+05:30

My recent flute creation. Click on Play button below to play

For a complete list of all recordings Click Here

My recent flute recording - Unna Vida from Virumandi

2007-10-08T08:48:00.000+05:30

My recent flute creation. Click on Play button below to play

For a complete list of all recordings Click Here

Singapore SFO Tour Videos

2007-09-28T12:44:00.000+05:30

Click the play button to play each one of them.

Nivio - Roaming Windows Logon Profile across the internet

2007-08-28T18:03:00.000+05:30

Have you heard of the WebOS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_operating_system

Typical drawbacks of such a system is the interoperability with Windows system. Most cannot run anything beyond whatever AJAXified applications that the WebOS author had written. In other words, anything complex beyond Mail, file Management and Photo Management, IM, Word Processor, Excel and PowerPoint is virtually impossible to be run.

Nivio draws a solution taking this into consideration. Nivio runs as a RDC application. What I assume they have written is to use the RDC library available in Windows and wrap it up as a ActiveX application in Windows IE combo. For Firefox and other Browsers + other OS combo, what they have used is to write a (supposedly)thin Applet to run RDC.
(Well, when in this world an applet was called Thin Client, for its bulky memory footprint? :p)

I assume that they have a Load Balancing System that can handle RDC requests from various clients and ensure some QoS on the requests. In my person experience, I have seen that RDC works well when the bandwidth is atleast 256Kbps+ (well it has worked in 64kbps as well, but running something complex that would change the screen often is ruled out).

The biggest question in this whole system is the scalability. How many users can their system scale. It is known fact that a system in RDC can reasonably handle double digit figures to few hundreds of connections. With a server farm of Windows Servers and roaming profile across them, i think they can sustain a decent lot.

There is also another way that they might have implemented. Throw a VMWare server farm, and put a load balancing RDC Connection acceptor that forwards connection to the VMWare Server Pool..

The 2nd one seems much more scalable as VMWare is much more proven than Windows 2003 Windows Terminal Server systems, but in any case, Nivio will have to shell out cash for each client connection (either now or at a later time).

Another question at hand is, when you play , say youtube video, how good will be the change in your screen? Answer currently is pathetic in RDC. It will be tough to see much change. The Nivio guys will ahve to sweat it out in this part, and significant space for innovative solution exists in this area.

There is another known issue with RDC. Sometimes when you see error messages, they are shown in the actual monitor, but donot appear in RDC Client. I have seen this issue when using RDC myself, although I cannot tell with confidence if this bug still persists in RDC, but I hope this issue might have been solved by Microsoft.

Well, thats it for the day. Ciao.

My recent flute creation

2007-07-02T21:10:00.000+05:30

Human Computation

2007-05-27T19:16:00.001+05:30

There are several cases where humans excel computers at computation. This is harnessed in Luis von Ahn's work on Human computation.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

If you want to see a demo, you can see here: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

I now see that some other implementation of the same thing, which is much more interesting and pragmatic:
http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2007/05/recaptcha-new-way-to-fight-spam.html

Interesting indeed.

Save Trees - Creative Advertisement

2007-05-18T20:14:00.000+05:30

A very creative advertisement that I saw at MG Road, Bangalore.
It tells that "No one ever attained enlightenment under a lamp post, Please plant trees. -WWF".

Letter Writing

2007-05-03T21:16:00.000+05:30

From,
xxxxx,
xxxxx,
place - zipcode.

To,
The Inspector,
Some Police Station,
Place - ZipCode.

Respected Sir/Madam,
Sub: Request to find lost bicycle - lost on 3rd May 2007.

I bought a new bicycle from (The proof of the same is attached to the letter). I lost it on 3rd May 2007, morning. On 2nd May 2007, I locked my bicycle at the basement. It was last sighted by Mr.XXX at around 11 PM on 2nd May. On 3rd May morning, when I came to the basement to start my cycle, it was not there. The watchman has no clue of anyone having come to the building after 11 PM, nor he says he heard any sound of someone opening the gates. The details of my bicycle are below:

Detail 1
Detail 2
Detail 3

I kindly request you to find my bicycle. I m having a tough time commuting without it. I would be very grateful to you for the same.

Thanking you.
Yours Truly,
Varun.

====================
How was the letter writing exercise?
Sadly my "lost bicycle " letter writing skills seems to have some use now. :(

what Math and life have in common

2007-04-16T17:49:00.000+05:30

I recently (around an year) saw a quote which said , life is like PI (3.141592654), Real but irrational. Recently I saw another contender for a similar quote :), but this time its PI and the imaginary number (i) who are fighting with each other.

The link is here
http://www.mightywombat.com/toons/numbers.gif

if you are lazy visiting the link, here is the pic:

Debugging AJAX and HTTP Requests for Web Applications

2007-03-02T00:02:00.000+05:30

You have an AJAX based or just plain old HTTP based Web Application. You want to see some way to know what transpired between the Server and your web client. There are several reasons to know this,

first in that case you can avoid printing lot of Logs in your server thus less burden on your server.
Another reason is quicker Code-Debug cycle, its lot more easier to finish off all the test/pick logs/correct in one system..and the deploy your code in server.
You really want to know if your request reached the server, what parameters you sent in your GET/POST query, what other HTTP headers you sent along (such as session Id/cookie info) in addition to whatever you want to know, such as when is the Content Expiration date..
You plainly have no idea what the application you have taken responsibility does, you want to know what URL your application launches, what it does, and use the URL to continue to debug, so that you can quickly reach the spot where your HTTP request hits the server and what process/whatever is called from there...

There are several tools that you can do.. with increased efficiency and productivity. All of the tools mentioned below are Free and mostly Open Source (Free!=Open Source)..

Lemme start from the most lame ones to the more specific ones and tell you which could be a good one..
1. Ethereal -http://www.ethereal.com/
Ethereal is more a network Packet capturing tool, however, it can be used to capture HTTP traffic alone. In the filter option choose the HTTP as the protocol. If you know which URL/port your client calls, it can make things more specific. Once you get the result, you start scratching your head about how you comprehend the packets that have been captured. You need to select all the packets captured and then choose the HTTP Response Data option (donno where its , but basically it appends the packets in sequence (even if they are out of sequence) to get the response data as a stream that you can copy somewhere and continue debugging). This is a good option, but over time, you will understand that, you need to have all your other applications that use HTTP to be out of the capturing system (by setting proper filter mechanism) or close all applications that use HTTP. Also, that makes things slow, because I assume Ethereal patches the actual TCP stack files in your system and would painfully process every packet coming to your system (or sent from your system), then apply the packet filter and then show in the window it has.
Time to grow up for a better tool

2. IE HTTP Headers and its clone in Firefox called LiveHTTP Headers: www.blunck.info/iehttpheaders.html & livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/

They basically sniff whatever traffic is sent from or sent to/from your browser. IEHTTPHeaders has a distinction for HTTP and HTTPS with colors and you can choose the colors. That way its a good tool. What its bad at is that, it contest with McAfee Virus Scan for the same API when sniffing Browser traffic and can cause your IE to crash randomly sometimes and usually when you exit IE (you will forget when you last closed IE without a crash)...
Live HTTP Headers seem to be good, I haven't had issues with that, but neither have I worked in a great deal with it to certify that it doesn't have problems. Both IE HTTP Headers have questions when a request comes early but its HTTP response is late and between that time window, some other smaller request is answered. There is no intuitive way to know that. Atleast in Live HTTP Headers, it seems to be better with a horizontal line. Its tough in IEHTTPHeaders.

Overall comment is: Well, this looks cool , better than just sniffing logs... but this too can be overwhelming at times, when you have quick several requests... Also I have seen Firefox Freeze (run at 100% for a long time ) a few times and I cudnt pin point on LiveHTTPHeaders, so I leave that to you to decide.

Time to pick a better one..

3. This was called Firebug. http://www.getfirebug.com

Its a Firefox plugn. It helps people to know whats the status of the curretn request(same as previous ones). But the best part starts when you have too many requests from the server, it can show the time frame window in it (for the requests for /from the client in server which could be concurrent or that 2 of them are waiting.. something will happen that way....This one shows the Firebug Sniffer logs only for the browser window its associated with. Hence, that way its quite useful. The more interesting ones are that can see how much time a particular request has taken. Also this gives you a picture of whats happening in client at any point of time..It also shows a DOM tree, you can use that to run through the DOM for the page, which is an effective tool for debugging fro the server for the web clients.

and quite a few other options. You can quite obviously see that I m interested more about the third one(Firebug). One bad thing is that its not available for IE. but the better part is that its available in Firefox... IE has a similar tool, but not as good as this (its more matured one, but at the same time, its kind of either missing or .. Its called IE developer toolbar. I see that it has the best options such as resolution, clearing cache for a particular domain etc. But its not a matured product, in which case, its wise to think 2wice before you used it(with occasional internet explorer crash event for free).

I will paste screen shot as and when I find time...

PS: I wrote this in half sleep towards end, if you find any mistakes do comment and let me know, I will change that

Random Snaps

2007-02-20T23:13:00.000+05:30

Evening Sunset

Typical Bangalore Gully

Temple and mosque.

Not my post: Bangalore Mail and Dreadful Journeys!!

2007-02-19T18:16:00.000+05:30

The text below is copy pasted from a fwd mail I received from Priyadarshni of my class. The original writer apparently is "Kartik". I was unable to find his actual blog, in spite of my googling it out.. If anyone can provide the actual link, it would be really really great.. this whole post is so so so close to what I m experiencing in terms of "Bangalore Mail" :-)

< start copy >
First thigs first.. I owe a big apology to all those ppl who have taken some time from their busy schedules , read my blogs and had commented "don make it too personal..". coz this onez the final bit of personal stuff i have with me.. and without this i won be doing any justice to my blog theme (banglore mail) at all.. Read on..
So there was yet another "S/w Engineer in the m(oc)aking" at banglore and it was none other than meee!! Initial days at office were all perfect and just like what i had always dreamt off. Days passed in a jiffy and i had made quite a number of pals by then. At last training ended and along with it our fundoo times too..It was show time then, we had to pack our bags an move on to projects... A bunch of us were interviewed by a PM and were successfully 'hardlocked' to a proj. Now for ppl who wonder whatz all this hardlock is abt.. Its yet another jargon used in this IT industry with which the PM'S glue u on to a seat in the project and make sure u are no more visible to the HR (an that expands to Highly Ridiculous), who usually are in dire straits looking for resources and are so desperate that they start locking evrybudy,be it the floor warden or the bay sweeper,never mind!!
Right then, First day at project and i realised that my dreams of becoming a "hardcore developer" were shaken up a bit and had underwent a li'l transformation by then. It now read "Hardware Keeper" .. That waz what the jobz nature, precisely was.. "AM GONNNA BE A SYS ADMIN, DEALING WITH HARDWARE !!!" Whoa.. Doesn it sound great, if not atleast for the first spell out!!!
What was more gloomy was i had persuaded my mates too, to take up this new assignment, citing that "this is going to be a gr8 challenge. We will get a lot of learning opportunities.. we'll hve helluva development work..blah blah" .. Poor ones , they had got convinced by tat speech , which usually a PM manages to give everytime, during indcution of rookies into proj and they do listen agaped and of course thrilled..

So a bunch of clowns aka sys admins were brain washed and were trained to become effective sys admins !!! To make situations more worser we were scoffed and ridiculed by some (not all, though) experienced ppl who were already present there .. Tougher times were those and some hom we managed to grit them out all with a steely resolve..

Days rolled on , we had slowly accustomed ourselves to the new environment and we were no more 'rookies'.. Boy, we did almost everything that even a few senior guys didnt try. Sooner those ppl who were laughing at us earlier and made a farce, now termed our bunch as "the backbone of the operation".. Its really funny when u realise how pplz perception change as time does..

So i was really engrossed during the weekdays and it was the weekends that put me down. Since i wasn living with anybody, weekends were damn boring , to say the least !! Just had the TV for my company plus the 4 walls.....After spending a few morose weekends there at bang , i finally took a decision. "I am not gonna stay here for the weekends, watever be the case.".. . Thats where it all started. I began to frequent the banglore mail and weekend speicalz , sparing those odd weekends where in i was bugged by my TL who forced to come for weekend works (crap !!)..

U won blv me , i wud have spent almost all my sal for weekend travelz.... Friday night was the best that i cud ever get and the sunday nightz were the worst.. Coming home on sat morning , freak out with friends, taste ur home food , meet all ur college pals , continue all those late night phone talks ..all these became a routine , rather !! On the contrary the sunday nigthz killed me..There were times when i really din wanna go back so much that, i used to check NDTV & headlines today constantly, hoping to hear something like "Rains lash banglore.. all trains leaving from chennai to bang cancelled indefinitely.." ....

But since we don dwell in a fairy land, where all ur dreams come true.. i'd pack my bags at snail pace and with not even the slightest of a smile , i wud leave for the station.. Through out the way i'll just be cribbing and dreaming of a transfer.. More agony would be waiting for me there at the station where i'd bump on a romantic pair who wud really be excited, unlike me, to travel together.. I'll let out a big sigh (what else can i do !!) and move on.. When i travel with mates , i wud rather be ok since we always had snippets & hot news to ruminate on ..

This became a vicious cycle then.. banglore-chennai-banglore.. Hold ur breath , u havta blv me . outta the total 1 year and 4 months , almost all weekends I_WAS_AT_CHENNAI , except for a coupla them (or +1 , thats the max). I had booked so much tickets between chn - bang , that the Indian railways later decided to issue a special railway pass for me (of course with concession!!). Go to the url irctc.co.in and i'm sure that , those chaps wud have mentioned my name somewhere in the site or atleast in the disclaimer.. sumthing like "Accept.. if over 18 years of age, first name not like 'Kartik' & travel plan definitely != chn - bang :-) ".. for the amount of transaction that i had performed over there.. Also If u had tried booking a ticket last year at the irctc and should u have experienced a "server busy error" ..hang on.."I_AM_THE_CULPRIT .."

As in a fable ,where everything ends on a positive note.. this blog is also gonna do.. After constant pestering , bickers and 'I_AM_GONNA_QUIT' threats , i managed to obtain a TRANSFER... Know wat, the first draft of the letter that i was abt to send to my HR , giving a reason for a transfer read some thing like ..

"Hi,

The reason for the exigency in my relocation to chennai is that, i am exhausted, boarding the
banglore mail and all possible special trains , that southern railways had introduced for
reducing the congestion between the 2 cities and have exceeded the quota for maximum
number of tickets that can ever be booked by a individual bet 2 stations. As a result of this i
have been denied a ticket to my home town. Sensing the ultimate danger that i could never
board a train back to chennai , i request you to kindly gimme a relocation asap..

Regards,
Kartik

p.s : I have attached a mail from the Chief station master, banglore city with this, that will give
ya more insights into the issue..

< / end copy >

Coorg Photos

2007-01-24T15:36:00.000+05:30

Coorg Photos

The Blogger Bug

2007-01-02T17:58:00.000+05:30

Recently I noted a bug in Blogger.com

It has to do with account migration. When you login with your google accounts login and then enter Blogger.com,

It enters www.blogger.com/start and then
goes back to the Google Accounts page (which hosts the Google embeddable login box), which returns a true (or whatever indicating successful login) and then
goes to www2.blogger.com/start (since I have migrated to the new blogger account) which
returns back to www.blogger.com/start (assuming that the user hasn't migrated - or whatever) and this continues.

The only way to get out of this infinite loop is to type www2.blogger.com/home manually in the address bar after canceling page load.

This page flow is actually a valid test case if you have not migrated your account (I guess).

Second Life Denied

2006-12-20T22:18:00.000+05:30

There has recently been a lot of talk about Second Life. It is a huge simulator, with a grid of computing muscle in it. It simulates 3D life, and it has a decent business model too..

From whatever I have read in Wikipedia and several blogs, it goes like this:

They have created a virtual world, which you can enter by launching their client (after installing it in your system). They stream the 3d Content to your client, which renders them on your screen. Each user might be playing around in some part of the Second Life.. It seems to be a good engineering marvel, as they will have to simulate the 3D environment in their Grid, render them and then stream them to the client. The client has to reconstruct them and show it..

It seems that of recent it has been receiving massive attention across the globe and access to the second life is getting difficult. I instlaled the latest binary from their site and launched only to see that SecondLife.exe was running 100% all the time.. On my desktop it wouldnt budge to connect (it loads the first screen where you enter First Name, Last Name and password) and says Unable to connect due to protocol (some thing)... and possible reason attributed for that is Internet connection does not exist. I m sure I m connected to the internet in my desktop.. Second life denied!! :(

Star Gazing with Stellarium

2006-12-05T10:59:00.000+05:30

Today, I did star gazing. My room mate, Rajesh accompanied me. I used Stellarium for Star Gazing. The sky was better. There were only a few cirrus clouds, which didn’t deter us from seeing at least a few stars. The last time I tried seeing, we had Rain clouds. So, it was difficult to spot even a few stars. But this time it was lot better. This time too, I made the mistake of not taking any compass with me. But, to my rescue, the Moon was bright and shining. The first thing to do was to orient the direction of Moon in Stellarium to that in the Sky. Once that was done, things became easier. Sirius was very bright and was the first star to be spotted easily. I was also able to find the Orion constellation, along with Betelgeuse, Canis-Minor. It was cold at the terrace, with the temperature around 15˚C. The best part I liked about the software is its maneuverability.

I am pasting the screenshot of Stellarium position of the stars below. All stars that I was able to see are marked with a white square. I gazed only with naked eyes; no sophisticated instruments were involved in star gazing except the laptop.

School Invitation

2006-12-02T21:36:00.000+05:30

Enclosed the invitation for all josephites..

The mokkai/movie called Sivappadhikaaram

2006-12-02T20:58:00.000+05:30

There are several ways in which you can waste your time.. The one way I got myself caught into was to see this movie. It is called Sivappadhikaaram (also spelt Sivappadhikaram ) .

Let me first tell you what is great about this movie:

It has some good story concept - based on Nattupura Paadal ( )..
The film is only 2.5 hours :-)... You really dont have to commit suicide for the predicament at the theatre, after all, just like every good thing has an end, every bad thing has an end too :D.

Nothing else...

The pre film events were great, I paid Rs. 70 for the movie at Vetri Theatre (went with my sister). While going to the theatre, I took an auto. I had a fight with the auto guy, since he demanded Rs. 15, while it was normal for me to pay only Rs. 10, because my house was so close to the track. That in itself was a bad omen, I should have taken that seriously and went back home. Pity me, I never minded that and I assume that was one of the biggest mistake I made before the movie. Another big mistake i made was swapping the movie ticket. I actually got the ticket for Rendu, then later decided to watch this movie and swapped the ticket.

The guy at the theater sold me saying that it was a back seat and not a front seat in the balcony. First After getting to the theatre, I found that it was irrelevant. After all, there were less than 20 people in the balcony.. huh!

To give you heads up about the film, we have 2 parts. The first part is supposed to show Nattupura paadal in the most interesting way (which it does, but makes you boring to the core). The second part is supposed to be action packed, but it ends up being fun packed (although I would say, the saving grace was the hero Vishal). I have seen Vishal's first movie, which was hit, and I think he deserves a good position as a "casual" hero in the Tamil film Industry. His acting was awesome in the first movie, but in this movie, nah! his acting cudnt save the sinking ship :(.

It all started great, the first to have entry in the film was the heroine. There was great whistles for her. I for one was perplexed to see how much popularity she had, only later to know that she was one of the saving grace in the first half. At the end of the film, you go out confused why the hell they needed a heroine, whose role in the movie ends unclear.

The hero entry is great, with a nattupura song. I generally skip songs.. and I hoped I had a remote when the songs came so that I can skip them :(.. But lemme tell you the truth that there were a few songs that were really good.. (but they dont find themselves significantly saving the movie when you watch).. I really wished that they also provide ropes for free for all those who want to commit suicide... seriously.. (it shdnt be more than Rs. 20) and they charge Rs. 70 for a ticket.

It was great fun actually commenting on the story.. After sometime, I felt something was troubling my leg; and yes it was a RAT. I probably think that the rat really wanted to find some place to hide itself from this "bleeding" story.. :(..

The second half was even better. All that it looked to me was comments on the film were more hilarious and intersting than the movie. In the story, Raghuvaran actually wants to compile a book on Nattupura Songs. There is a group of people, with Raghuvaran the father of heroine and Raghuvaran's childhood friends. They ask him what is the reason of publishing the book when no one would read. I think the script writer would have become enlightened, had he applied the same sentence on the film.. There is also a place where the hero says that there are 12 parts in the book and one of them was bereavement. I just hoped that they had it, so that I can cry out as much for sitting and watching such a movie..:((

I really wished to get out before the interval. The only reason I was in the theater was that I paid 70 bucks. :(...

Returning back from the film, I decided not to take Auto because i really dint want to spend even a penny more, even indirectly related to the movie :-).. and yes I walked home all the way
hoping that mokkai is not everything in life, and there exists a life beyond that.

I still swear that it is a great movie, although the script is flawed to the core. The hero is totally under utilized and I really pity the Producer. Coming out of the theatre, you get the feeling that they copied similar movie's script from Gentleman till Ramana. Makes you yawn..

Caveat: This review is my personal view of the film. It in no way is the final view.. If you really want to know how the film is, please goto theatre and see.. Tamil Film Industry needs people to see in order to improve its quality. Hence, you should consider my review a second thought, if you want to support the industry.

The film also has some good review. You can read that here:
Hindu's Review

Stellarium - Really Stellar Open Source Software for Astronomy

2006-11-18T10:41:00.000+05:30

Yesterday I installed stellarium-0.8.2 from http://www.stellarium.org . I should tell that it is the best software regarding Astronomy that I have installed.

How to use it?
Install the software. Launch the software, then define your observation location (like Chennai, Bangalore etc). This sets up the location, Time from GMT, current time (which is picked up from your System's time). Now it will basically show your sky. It shows the sun, if its daytime currently. My current idea is to take the laptop today night and goto terrace and then basically try to figure out the stars and the constellations. The software also has a feature that allows to show the graphic (figure) for the constellation. Thats an awesome feature.

Update 1:
The first day I went to star gaze, it was really a nice experience. It was as well disappointing. There were lot of clouds and I didn't have a clue of the exact directions, which made me guessing all the time. There was only one star that was bright and unfortunately it was not North Star. It was between North and East directions at an angle of around 60 degrees from the ground (i dont know how to technically give the values)..

The first lesson that I learnt was this: Never go star gazing without knowing the directions, or better take a magnetic compass, until you get yourself familiar with the directions. This really makes sense because, in the beginning, even though you have a rough idea of where east is, it wont help you much, if you see several bright stars (excluding me ). If its mostly cloudy, then you dont have great issues.

Convocation Photographs

2006-11-16T10:46:00.000+05:30

I had my convocation this monday (6th November). Governor Shri. SS Barnala gave me Gold Medal. To his right is Shri. Vishwanathan, Vice Chancellor, Anna University and Registrar of Anna University, Shri. Jayaraman. I received a Gold Medal, Cash Award and Certificate indicating me obtaining the Gold Medal. I had high fever when I attended the convocation (around 102 when I got the medal).. It was a very different experience on the whole.

Scanned copy of the convocation Photographs.

Tamil Movie tricks

2006-11-15T18:07:00.000+05:30

Tamil film industry is known to do acts that defy laws of Physics, including gravity. If at all Newton or Einstein see Tamil movies, they would commit suicide, knowing that all that they have invented could be wrong (assuming they are unaware of the fact that it was graphicified ;) )...

One good example:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=estfUXcGAZs
(thanks Balaji for forwarding the link)..
It seems, latest movie Dharmapuri, tamil hero has hit 50 people in one shot (i have not seen the film, and I dont intend to after seeing the reviews)..

Sri Hari Krishna

2006-11-13T18:47:00.000+05:30

Sri Hari Krishna , Sriram anna's son..

Convocation Photograph 2

2006-11-13T18:43:00.000+05:30

My first flute class

2006-11-02T10:19:00.000+05:30

Finally I joined the flute class. The first class was great. I told my flute teacher that I learnt something on my own.. tried playing Titanic Theme Music. He heard it and said it was wrong, showed me how to play it properly and said that the period that I learnt on my own was helpful in the context that, I now have good breath control (and nothing beyond that)... Well, in the right sense, it was true, since, I never had professional touch, and the way I played was RAW.

He pointed out some places where I had issues:

I wasn't holding the flute properly, my left hand thumb was way too close to the blow hole, which shdnt be. He said that I should be able to hold the flute with left thumb and the index finger.
My left hand little finger was always below the flute, which shouldn't be.
I was never using my right hand little finger.

I am now learning to play "Maya Mala Gawla" Raaga. I m learning to play each swara in one full long blow. It seems that this is the first lesson. I had problems in over blowing notes, which I m practicing...

After that the next practice was to play two successive notes in a single blow. Then it is to play four successive notes in a single blow. The whole idea of this seems to get familiarized with the swaras and ability to switch between swaras seamlessly, which gives great playing speed..

Cycling....Going Environmental friendly

2006-10-14T19:30:00.000+05:30

Of recent, a lot of things have been happening. I recently got a cycle ( Hero 18 gear cycle) and use it commute to office (which is around 2 KM from home)....

First Day: Entry into office basement, security asks: "Do you work in this company?" :-).. I show him my ID, he enters my cube extension, registers my cycle and I park at basement.. Things have gone better now. I explained to few of my friends..

There is one main reason why I took the cycle. I am not a sport buff, who thinks a regular GYM going keeps good health, or atleast, all these take lower priority with work.. So, it made sense to get cycle, to alteast have some work-out. I am sure if I didnt have a cycle, I wouldnt even have this basic workout...

Another guy in my PG also got a cycle (I am not sure if he was inspired from me, but he bought after me.. so I take false credit, even though I may not be the reason ;) )...

Another friend @ my office (Krishna) also now bought a cycle..alteast I am not the only one going by cycle to office now..

Playing the Flute Video II

2006-09-18T12:26:00.000+05:30


Playing the flute video part II. I just tried my hands at another song :-).. more on the cards soon, as I learn to over blow properly...

Playing the Flute - Video

2006-09-13T15:01:00.000+05:30

I recorded a song that I played in my flute and uploaded to google video. You can hear it at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3708834113060738179&hl=en

I took a picture of me playing the flute and have added it as the image.
The second line of my playing didnt go well, since I was too conscious that I am recording my play and made me a bit nervous :p.

Learning to Play the Carnatic Flute Part III

2006-09-13T10:01:00.001+05:30

Lot of help pouring in for learning the flute.

Mr. Ramachandran gave me a legend of the 12 swaras ( 7 ordinary and five half notes ) and their mappings on the flute.

I am pasting it here so that others who are searching for the mappings like me would benefit.

Please see my handwritten pdf here for the right one.
http://s.varun.googlepages.com/flutelegend.pdf

Learning to Play the Carnatic Flute Part II

2006-09-12T14:33:00.000+05:30

Recently, I started to get myself much more organized to play the flute, but in vain. I created sheets where I drew this and filled them with black color if it has to be closed and uncolored(white) if the hole has to be open when playing the flute. Unfortunately, I dont know what holes should be closed for which swaram. I have been able to understand that for Sa , the first two holes need to be closed and everything else open. My learning has improved to play any song to a decent extent that the listeners can understand that I am trying to play that song and can play comfortably quite a few songs.

I have also learnt a few things:
1) The eight hole (the right most) is never used .
2) The first three holes are operated with your left hand fingers and your right hand fingers takes care of the remaining 4 holes.
3) If you are in Ga in which you dont close any hole and want to move to a note/swaram above it, close all the holes and over blow. This is something that I have been having trouble with/havent mastered. I get overblown notes when i try to get to the lowest note (closing all the holes), but never when I really want to play the overblown notes:p..
4) Most of my song control comes from my breath, ie., controlling the blowing, rather than by closing/opening the holes. In other words, my playing ability in terms of controlling the opening /closing of the holes need improvement, which I hope will be done as I practice more......
5) I am seriously looking for someone who can give a flute legend mapping for the swarams, like what holes should be open/closed/half closed for which swaram.

Learning to play the Flute ( Pullankuzhal)

2006-08-21T10:58:00.000+05:30

Last saturday, I bought a bamboo carnatic flute which has 8 holes (+1 to blow) at a Handicraft emporium here at Bangalore for Rs.75. I have just been hunting all round for good carnatic flute tutorial / tutorials. There arent any/many that tell you how to map swaras to the flute. There are however a lot of tutorials that I found on the Western Flute... The only thing that was close to being helpful was http://carnaticwinds.tripod.com . A nice soul has tried taking pictures of how to hold. Its a good effort, though I would wish that there are ones that show the mapping in a way that can be printed out and tried at one's will...

Any good pointers appreciated.

Last, but not the least, I now know to play the Flute a little, learning of my own to play Cileon Dion (sorry if this spelling was wrong) Titanic Song, Malgudi days starting music and a few others.....

Back to Blogging

2006-08-06T19:46:00.000+05:30

Its been a long time since I blog.. There are several things that have happened since I last blogged. I joined a s/w company. My wrk atmosphere is great, great team.. I have already started real work..

I have been commuting to Chennai and back to Bangalore every weekends, enjoying my time back home... Hope this continues (which seems less probable as work gets better)..

Tour Pictures

2006-05-13T22:20:00.000+05:30

I didnt put the tour pictures here. Instead I have uploaded them to two spots:

1) Flickr.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/varunsound

2) Yahoo! Photos
http://photos.yahoo.com/varun.sound

Please have a look at them :-)

My Trip to Manali

2006-05-08T07:58:00.001+05:30

This should be the first time I am writing kind of journal in my blog. Kind of new to me as well, but thought it does make sense to write about the Trip. It was certainly one of THE BEST trip I ever had. In fact, not only was it cheaper (around $125 USD), it was extremely well organized, thanks to guys from our class, Mani Parthasarathy, Miennah Raja, Sathish and so on.

We started off to Chennai Central Railway . I started a bit early at around 2 PM for the trip, reached Hostel, joined Saravana Kumar (a.k.a Venna thalayaa) and reached Central. We were an hour early for the train and were the first to reach the platform :D... Slowly people of the trip started coming. It was also great to see a lot of other guys, who came just to help those who came for the trip and to bid them farewell, notably Senthil Nathan (a.k.a Senthil Maddy - Senthil don't think u are endorsed with the nick maddy - we know how you look :p ). I just had 2 bags and was pretty comfortable with my luggage. The first place we visited was Agra. The train started at around 4:30 PM on 25th Apr. We got 40 seats contiguous and the 5 coupe was full of our trip people. I was in the third one, with Balaji, Saravana and others... We had a great time.. Though the temperature was soaring, it was awfully hot inside.

We played cards, 5 cards, Ass and so on. Ass was the only game I knew, but enjoyed learning 5 cards, and it was a great time pass game. It was fun to get 50 points with a wrong deck :)). We also played a mutated 7 cards, which was same as 5 cards, but the number of cards are more and the penalty of a wrong deck is 70. :-). We had lot of time, so playing 7 cards meant we had more cards and time pass. When we reached AGRA, it was 1 AM morning. We went to a hotel there. There were 4 in our room (including me), Balaji, Me, Sai, Saravana. Sai and Balaji went (unintentionally) to some room which was not allocated to them, slept for a while and ended up being asked to leave that room (that's euphemism for you :p ). We then started at around 9 or 10 AM, went first to Taj Mahal.

Taj Mahal was great. I admired it a lot for its architecture, but my personal opinion was that it was too much a cost for the King's love. Spending up the tax payers money for his personal ends is typical Monarchy, but this seems to be too much of that sort. May be, the king could have built a dam there, making the area fertile. But of course, had that been done, we would never have got one of the wonders of the world; just my thoughts......

The next place we went was Agra Fort. It was the seat of power of India from 1000 - 1800 (well the years are approximate). There was mention about water in it. Aurangzeb had blocked Yamuna and the king there surrendered because the ground water/well water at Agra fort wasnt drinkable. True, when we filled water there, it really wasnt that good. It was too salty. Myself and Saravana went to the fort early, sat at a quite place and "bird watched" everyone entering the Fort :D.

Also, I shouldnt forget to tell about the Black Salt (aka Kaala namak). The road sellers there use Kaala Namak for Water Melon and Cucumber. It is a salt that is obtained from fertile water springs in North India, as opposed to normal salt, which is obtained from sea shore. The biggest deal of it is that it is very enticing. If you have one sip of Lemonade with this salt, it would entice you to have another. I got suspicious that it might possibly be a DRUG added to salt and called as kaala namak (just like brown sugar, is this Black Salt?? :)) ). I asked a few people there, who said that it was not so. I got relieved only after that. After seeing Agra Fort, it was time to do some shopping. I bought Agra's peta. It was supposed to be something special of Agra. Its a sweet made from Pumpkin. I bought one for home. But its kind of irony that from the date i came back , i have tasted only little (bad stomach).

After Agra fort, we went back to rooms, cleaned up everything and left to Delhi. We had a second seater when we went to Delhi. I should surely mention about the Soup matter here. I had a good hot soup abishekam. (Abishekam is a Hindu ritual that they perform to god, where the priest pours oil, sandal etc on the diety). We went to delhi at 1 AM and immediately entered the waiting bus. This is where we met the Tortoise master. He is the Tortoise driver. The bus never goes beyond 60 km... when we were back to Delhi, people from our crowd took video talking in tamil, which he didnt know at all, telling him that he was the slowest driver that we saw (well euphemism here too... just censord out other tougher words they used). The vehicle moved to Amritsar. It was long and tiring one.

After we reached Amritsar, we went to hotel had breakfast and then visited the Golden Temple. It was very very hot when we went there and was very crowded as well. The best part of it was that they poured cool water on the floor so that the people can walk on the tiles without heat. I came to know that people do this as a service for a day. I also saw a lot of golden fishes there at the temple tank. In all the floors of the temple, the priests there chant verses from holy book. I also heard that it happens 24 x 7 (except a few hour break every day). People take turns and do. From Golden Temple, we moved to Jallianwala Bagh. It was the place where the British left red scars (rather Red big scars) in the minds of Indians. A brigidaire by name Dyer, ordered dispering of 2000 people gathered there by firing them. There was no place to go and 2000 people died. Some jumped into the well and died. Others faced the bullet directly and died.

More details about it here

From JWB, we left to Wagah Border. Its the border area between India and Pakistan. I learned from the people there that parade happens every evening for sure, whether there is tension in the border or not. Very interesting.... we also saw some pakis on the other side of the gate. We took some snaps. Mani parthasarathy shouted "Long Live mother India" and there was a swift acknowledgement of the same from a Sikh military person there. Well, this reminded me of my opinion that the Sikhs are the most patriotic people.. When we went to Wagah Border, the parade was just over.. we missed it, though we took pics of Wagah Border. I was as usual telling some stale jokes like -
Q: Is Amritsar male or female ?
A: Its male since its Amrit'SAR' and not Amrit'MADAM' :-))

Nee thinnu(thinnu in tamil means eat) illenna thin aiduva

At wagah border, we met jawan(s) (jawan is a soldier in hindi). There was one jawan who was from south india (thirunelveli). We talked to him in Tamil, took some photographs, asked him if he saw Tamil Films and so on...spent some time...
we asked them how do they protect our nation's borders. They said they have high tension cables 100 meters from the international border line... and there are three levels of security . The Border Security Force (aka BSF) does do patrolling till the internation (buffer) border...

From Wagah, it was time to move to Manali. The superb driver (sarcasm) drove very well... He slept the night ...the bus dint move..and if at all he drove, it was as slow as a bullock cart. Though I should tell that he drove the vehicle very very safely. That guy drove the vehicle, stopped at a lot of places, and finally took the vehicle to Manali, by the evening. The first day evening we just spent time at the room.. It was great! It was really "cool" (cool in the sense of both temperature and place). We went for a small shopping with a few of my friends... While most of them spent their time looking for something, I didnt have any idea to shop for stuffs. So, went to browsing center, browsed for half an hour, chcekd mail. God, it was really slow.. they had a dialup and it seemed way too slow, since I am now kind of used to my 256 kbps broadband. Also, it was very expensive. While average cost at any browsin center is around Rs. 20 for an hour(40 cents), it was around Rs. 30 for half an hour... and it was terribly slow...goddamn.. I checkd my mail, mailed Mitch, a junior .As usual, i was forgetful when my friend gave username and password to check mail...goddamn, when will i remember everything?

The next day we woke up to goto the so called Snow Point... It was really really superb... We rented some Fur clothes for Rs. 100 (around 2.4$). They gave fur cloth, gloves, shoes for that amount. It was tough to go by bus to the snow point. So the guide had arranged Sumo ( a vehicle that looks like a jeep). I took skeeing shoes from the shop we rented the fur clothes. Unfortunately, i didnt use it, had to shell out a hundred bucks uselessly. It was the first time i saw snow.. so it was kind of very very interesting....we talked to the people there, who said that it was around 2 degrees centigrade when we went up at 10 AM in the morning.. We returned at around 3-4 PM from the snow point when the mercury had dipped to - 10 degrees centigrade. When we talked to the driver (who surreptitiously stole one mobile phone), he said that it is not recommended to stay at snow point for more than an hour, since we were seeing snow for the first time.
There were six of us when we walked the 2 kilometers to reach the snow point.. The vehicles dont directly go till snow point, since it would cause a lot of vehicles(traffic jam) at snow point making it lose its splendor (well thats my reasoning). They were, myself, Saravana Kumar, Balaji, Priya, Nithya and Jayanthi. The first thing we went was (kind of skating) on the bus tube...From the road, we skatd to the river below, it was kind of steep and enjoyed..(I am rolling on the floor and laughing about my skating..:-)) ). When balaji and saravana skated, they both flew when they left their hand, after almost reaching the end of the skating. Each one took individual photos before a rock, and then we left to the snow plateau of the snow point (well, slow plateau is my terminology :p). I first went for another Tube skating. Then i went for a Yak Ride. ride.

Then we took for skating with bala, karthik, kartheeshwari, sairam , sathiya narayanan , jayanthi, raja vikram (and a lot more people, i dont remember). It was Rs.100 for skeeing till we get tired. I skeed for an hour. It was great skeeing.. I fell a lot of time. If you fall down, it its really tough to get up. After an hour, 1) i really got tired 2) It started to rain/snow and the temperature started dropping. So I decided to QUIT ;-). It was terllibly cold, got a hot tea (which actually was a HOT water, though it dint matter, the hotness of the drink only mattered). After a hot tea, I had some noodles. It was all hot and great at that weather. Then me, balaji saranvaa formed huddle, putting each other's hand in other's Fur coat so that we get warmth. The gloves didnt have any fur or something in it. It was plain leather gloves.. so it was great doing that. Priya had a tough time, since her legs started to frost too much.. They poured Garam paani (Hot water) several times on her legs. She really had a tough time. While there were some people like this having tough time with frost, some guys of my class took photographs with no shirts (just trying to be brave :D ). They also found some alumni students of my college(MIT) and had a chat with them. I missed them.. though it was nice to know that our class pals met MIT alumnis. By that time we started leaving, it was getting tougher...the weather became inclement. We started walking towards the vehicle, which was parked 2 km down. I was almost felling that I wouldnt make it, since it was slippery due to the rain and my legs had long lost sensation. If i had a fall, it would have been really tough for me. I chanted Hanuman Chalisa. I usually never remember more than 2 paragraphs, accidentally I chanted 3 of them :-) ...It gave a lot of mental strength. By the time I finished chanting, the Sumo(jeep/car) driver had started driving towards the Snow Point and we met them half way. Kulanthai, his mom, nithya, priya, saravana, sai, jayanthi, me, balaji were in the sumo and we went back to Manali.

The next day we went to the two temples. I had a bad stomach. So I went to Hadimba Temple and came back to room, slept till 2 PM had lunch and then the vehicle started at around 4 PM to Delhi. climbing down from the hill, it was dizzy and I already had bad stomach. So it was kind of

food leaving the body in both directions :p. The next day, we were at Delhi, Karol Bagh.. We went to Qutb Minar (QM). QM was boring. May be, if I were a muslim would have admired it and enjoyed it much better. Then we went to Lotus temple (of Bahais). It was great, the architecture was great and it had news for all the religions of the world that it is harmony between religions that is required.

That evening we went to shopping at Karol Bagh. It was the first time I did serious shopping. I had called my relative at Chennai about Karol Bagh, who said me to start bargaining for any item at 1/10 of its price. It was rediculous to hear at first, but I understood it when I started bargaining. There are two markets at Karol Bagh, one for whole sale market. It is also called as Tank Road market. Jeans, T-Shirts are available ther. The other is the Karol Bagh market, which contains all retail items. It was funny and puzzling at first to bargain a product which he first said as Rs. 400 for say Rs.40. After sometime, It started to get boring... aah! I got a travellers bag and a belt for my dad, a purse each for my mom and sister. It was simply great. When we were back to our rooms and talked with our friends boasting on how great each's bargain was, we found that each one had been cheated/duped in atleast one bargain. :)) :))

The next day we made to Metro train. Took metro train from Karol Bagh to Rajiv Chowk. I also got a Souvenier ticket token to show to everyone that "yes yes, i went in Delhi Metro train". It was fully air conditioned. It had LCD screens and audible messages saying which was the next station and which side the doors will open and so on....was certainly a new experience... We went from there to Paalika Bazaar. Me , Saravana, Balaji, Priya went there. We did some shopping. We almost would have been duped by a duplicate 50 rupee note. We went to Jantar Mantar, a place where there were several instruments of Astronomical importance (of which I could comprehend the sundial and a few others). From there we came back to our rooms, had food and then everyone started to the train at 6 PM. Before going to the train, we went to India Gate. I went boating with saravana. Sairam, Nithya and Jayanthi went for a three boat ride. Priya and Balaji went for a two boat ride. My boat(with saravana) had a nice dashing game with Balaji's and we took some pic there. When we reached Delhi Railway Station, it was all fun...people took videos with the bus driver (which I wrote earlier), took some snaps and we moved to the platform (IIRC it was platform 10).

There was only one person who's relative had come to Delhi station to give a send off and it was Jayanthi's cousin. We had chat with him for sometime the same morning, when he came to meet Jayanthi. He took her, Sairam , Nithya with him for showing them Delhi.... Well I should tell lucky Jayanthi and unlucky him :p.

The return journey wasnt that comfortable, since the whole 40 tickets got split in 2 compartments, and the whole students became two discrete groups rather than one. We had slam books, each one spent the time in the train filling other's slam books and exchanging addresses and contact numbers...With that the whole thing ended, and we reached the day after at chennai morning 7 AM...

There are a lot of positives from the trip. First, my level of interaction with friends has increased considerably... Though late, its the latest from my side... I made a few good friends(notably Jayanthi, with whom i have never talked much before the trip), Karthik (who has become fan of my mokkais), extended my depth of friendship with others (Saravana, Balaji, Priya, Nithya). I have been in touch with them always, much closer after the trip. With saravana, i have always been much much closer. :-).

Well I think i have written much more than what I would have typed in a week... This is a really great experience writing a BBBBIIIIIIIGGGGGG journal.

The Cisco Trip

2006-04-18T21:11:00.000+05:30

During transit to ITC Hotel

The Cisco Trip

2006-04-18T21:10:00.000+05:30

Morning Break Fast or the next Fast? eh!

The Cisco Trip

2006-04-18T21:09:00.001+05:30

The cute guy at the right in Blue shirt is Varun

The Cisco Trip

2006-04-18T21:09:00.000+05:30

Varun is somewhere in this picture....

Cabtain at his best

2006-04-03T15:40:00.000+05:30

I was reading the review of Cabtain's sudeshi film here:
http://pravunplugged.blogspot.com/2006/03/sudhesi-must-watch.html
Just thought why not google for his party "Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam"

I did google up, but the result was very very funny. I was laughing like hell on the result...the snapshot is below.. have a look at it..

HAHAHAHAHA
I was really tempted to click Did you mean: Desiya Murukku Dravida Kazhagam link .. :p

Bye
Varun

MSN Hotmail Banner Ads suck

2006-03-06T17:17:00.000+05:30

Recently the standard of banner ads that appear in Hotmail have gone for worse/worst. I saw an ad that i really thought was inappropriate (was kind of semi n&*^) and offended me. Another reason why I should never care to check my HOTMAIL and instead continue using my GMail. I think the email providers should seriously think of avoiding those banner ads and instead go for text ads like GMail. I really love them. Also they are more appropriate. When i send a mail about my project, i always see something interesting and relevant to my project (in the links on the right side). I am just hoping that some day these banner ads die for the good of mankind :-).

Varun.

My first Gaim plugin - எனது முதல் கைம் ப்லகின்

2006-01-29T16:51:00.000+05:30

Hi,
This is my first GAIM plugin. I wrote it in 'C' with glib. I hope it is helpful for at least a few.

Installation
1) Install GAIM first. See here-> http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

If you use windows download the gaim-1.5.0.exe link. After downloading, install gaim.

If you use linux get the source tarball here gaim-1.5.0.tar.bz2 .:). After downloading do

./configure
make
make install

2) Once you install GAIM, the next step is install the plugin. Download the plugin here -> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=235&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;atid=390395&file_id=165342&aid=1417844
First unzip the file.

In Windows, you have to copy paste the engtota.dll file to C:\Program Files\Gaim\Plugins directory (assuming you have installed Gaim at C:\Program Files\Gaim directory).
In Linux, you have to copy paste the "C" file to the plugins directory in source tree and compile. :).

3) The next step is enabling the plugin. Choose the plugin first.
4) All done... lets start தமிழ் typing....

This is what you type. When you press enter, this is what you get:

Thats it!

What could go wrong?
Gaim doesnt compile in linux, Gaim doesnt work in windows, can you help?

The short answer is that you can hunt at #gaim for help. Installation is something that I never had great luck with. For compiling gaim in windows cygwin, i got help thru #wingaim.

The gaim plugin that you have screenshotted isnt being recognized as a plugin even after i copy paste the plugin DLL in the plugins directory. Why?

Please restart gaim. That should make it appear in the list of plugins available for gaim.

I am not able to see the transliterated tamil text..I think there is some problem with the font. Can you help me?

This is very common problem. If you have linux, you usually have some UNICODE fonts, or you can install one. The same applies to windows. It comes free with a font called Latha.ttf (in windows XP). Have a look at the README.txt file in the zip file, it should help you out, or see here for help installing UNICODE fonts for windows.

I cant understand the tamil text. Can you tell me how the transliteration is done?
The transliteration is based on the tool here -> http://www.jaffnalibrary.com/tools/Unicode.htm. I have also attached a pdf file showing the transliteration. You can take a printout of it and use it for reference. After sometime, once you pick up some speed, i am sure it wud be easy to type. But initially you will have problems on how the transliteration is made. For example in the above snapshot, you must have seen the english text to be "vaNakkam". the capital N is because you want "moondru suzhi naa". If you want "rendu suzhi na", you can use small n. Before you start typing just have a go through of pdf file. That will be of immense help.

My problem isnt documented here. Can you help me out?
Sure, you can comment in this post, or at sf.net, where I have submitted the plugin. You can also mail me at {initial}.{name}@gmail.com where my {initial} is "s" and {name} is "varun". Of recent, I have been receiving hits on how to compile gaim plugin from Google. If you are stuck with some step and are unable to proceed, you can mail me. I will try to reply/debug the issue.

Acknowledgements:
1) Sridhar Ratna, who gave me inspiration to write the plugin.
2) Suratha.com, the transliteration tool i use often. I usually used to type in english, get the tamil text and copy paste in windows (texts like காலை வணக்கம் etc).
3) thomas at #wingaim, who helped me out to compile the plugin properly.
4) seanegan, whose codeinline.c plugin, i have made modifications.
5) last but not the least, people in my messenger list, talking to whom I tested the plugin, which includes Karthik(crescent), saravana, priya, nithya, senthil, vijay(jr). All of them were victims of some unreadable tamil text, which I too could not understand :).

Thanks to all of you who are using this plugin and giving me feedback.

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Computer Geek / Nerd Quiz

2006-01-22T00:59:00.000+05:30

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Computer Geek / Nerd Quiz

Check this out and tell ur score :)

தமிழ் ஊடகங்கள் கூடுமிடம்

2006-01-22T00:31:00.000+05:30

தமிழ் ஊடகங்கள் கூடுமிடம்

தமிழ் எழுத்துருவம் எழுத இதனை பயன் படுத்தலாம். இது எப்படி இருக்கு? சூப்பரா கீதா?
I typed "thamizh ezhuththuruvam ezhudha idhanai payan paduththalaam. idhu eppadi irukku? suupparaa kiithaa?"

to get the above tamil text. :). you can use this to type and create all tamil text quickly on the go. I use it to type something and paste it in messenger(yahoo,gtalk supports unicode, so tamil fonts will work).

Bye
Varun

Bug vs Feature

2006-01-21T23:58:00.000+05:30

I saw this in sridhar's computer. "A picture speaks 1000 words". :)
My interpretation goes like this "Features are dressed up bugs"
Bye
Varun

GMail adds Delete button

2006-01-21T20:43:00.000+05:30

When there was no Delete Button directly, i had it using the GreaseMonkey Script here . But now google has updated that in Gmail itself. Thank you Google.

SiteAdvisor blog: The Web's Download Disasters, Inaugural Edition

2006-01-15T21:34:00.000+05:30

SiteAdvisor blog: The Web's Download Disasters, Inaugural Edition

This site is great. It has the list of internet's worst spywares. They have automated testing and have tested around a million spywares. The top five software sharing the honor are above. I came to know that those silly IM emoticons were spyware only after reading it. I see it often in most sites as ads. (i can remember greetings site showing them often).

mini-itx.com - projects - mini-itx cluster

2006-01-14T23:24:00.000+05:30

mini-itx.com - projects - mini-itx cluster
This one is certainly cool. It is a 12 node cluster, however, its total power consumption is comparable to what our desktops are. All hardware are off the shelf... so its very cheap too...

The Meaning of Life

2006-01-12T00:35:00.000+05:30

The Meaning of Life

This is a great one! i really enjoyed, hope you can interpret what it means.

Bye
Varun.

Firefox 1.5! The Bloatware

2006-01-10T19:00:00.000+05:30

I am writing this post from Mozilla Firefox on Windows. It is the browser that i really love! I love it not only because it is an OSS, but also because it has a gamut of scripts that i can add to customize to my taste. I use greasemonkey scripts to add delete button to my gmail threads, remove Google AdSense Ads and add MP3 player to all links that are MP3. But after upgrading to Firefox 1.5, things have changed a lot, though i still love it. It has become like a one sided love affair. Its trying to become bloat ware no.1. Previously IE used to be the top contender for Mr. BloatWare.It is probably because of some memory leak or something like that and I hope it would be corrected soon. (Firefox developers, anybody there, echo!). The worst thing happens when i run Java over it!. It bloats to 70MB odd, once i have even seen it at 100+MB :( . Have a look at my task manager.

Windows WMF exploit

2006-01-04T23:49:00.000+05:30

This is a nasty bug. Details of it was out at secunia.com on dec-28 itself. It was due to the age old WMF format. During those days of Win 3.11, people thought it was easier to add executable code inside WMF file so that in case the WMF didnt render the file properly, the code is executed that takes remedial measure. This ability to add executable code to WMF still persists, as a part of WMF standard, in the age, when VIRUSES comes free with Windows ;) . The worst part of the exploit is that when you download an image from a site, its extension doesnt matter(as in UNIX there was nothign called extensions). It is based on the file headers and the magic value in it. So even fi the file linked to is a .jpg file, it just needs to have WMF's magic value and the virus/adware payload. In other words, you simply have to goto to xyz.com and see the site. The <img> link in the page will load exploit.jpg, which has the WMF file in its contents, with the adware/virus payload in it. Once the page is rendered in IE, IE calls Windows Picture and Fax Viewer's dll file (shimgvw.dll) to render the WMF file.

When the DLL fails to understand the WMF file, it issues a callback command and executes the executable payload in the WMF file and voila, your system is infected. What does this mean? your internet browsing itself is not secure! you simply have to visit sites to get infected. While this is the case with IE users, Firefox and Opera people dont have a breather either. For firefox and opera, the only thing that favours them is that, since WMF is an external component, firefox will ask you if u want to open it with Windows ... and Fax Viewer, if u say yes, you will get infected. Perfect way to get infected and u can curse yourself for clicking YES.

What is the quick but dirty remedy? Unregister the shimgvw.dll file. It will cause u not to load any WMF file (or rather view them or their thumbnail). Its like since you have dirt in your nails, you should cut off your fingers, so that there is no more nails to have dirt. :)
The command is:
regsvr32 -u %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll

If you want to re-enable the WMF viewing for legitimate purpose other than infecting your system ;), you might want to re-enable it by issuing the following command:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll

Microsoft, as it has to support helluva lot of versions of IE, obviously needs time, and it is taking its own time while the exploit is wild. :-( . I also read that an individual has made a patch for it and it seems to work!. Thats certainly not good news for Microsoft. I installed that exploit from here:
http://www.hexblog.com/index.html
although i have not tested with a vulnerable site and i dont want to do!.

I have summarized in my own words what this exploit means for us here. I read them from the following URLs:
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-exploit-blows-by-fully-patched.html
http://www.websensesecuritylabs.com/alerts/alert.php?AlertID=385
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2005/12/exploit_release.html

Linux and Mac users are not vulnearable. Please post your comments too in this blog...

My last 2005 post - About the email revolution that google made

2005-12-31T23:44:00.000+05:30

Remember those puny 2 MB mailbox that hotmail had?
Remember that 5 MB yahoo had?

hotmail now has 25 MB and its 250 MB for US users.
yahoo has 1 GB. All these web mails reinvented themselves due to the tremendous offering from gmail. Gmail was a late entrant from google in the already very competitive web mail market. There were free providers like yahoo, hotmail, fastmail and paid providers like Juno (i dont know others ;) ). The best of the paid providers gave around 100 MB and the best of hte free was around 10-15 MB. But it took the market by storm. It had a slick AJAX based interface ( i have already blogged about this here). It had 1 GB at the first instance. Google already has a name for being reliable and its redundant fault tolerant servers do just that. Yahoo found that its users need more space only after Gmail gave 1 GB and hotmail seems even stubborn!. Now gmail has around 2GB+ and its growing continuously.

Gmail is growing much better. To compare in a few lines, yahoo has everything in it, the best list of features, integrated account for all purposes (store, games etc.,) but its AJAX based slick mail interface still in beta. Hotmail? where is it? huh!. I have a hotmail account, just because i dont want it to cease existing.

Lets hope this new year brings much more new things to the digital lifes of people around the world.

Happy New Year

2005-12-30T23:20:00.000+05:30

A happy and prosperous new year to everyone.

Bye
Varun

How to use Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM, MSN behind proxy.

2005-12-24T18:42:00.000+05:30

This is a very interesting post about AJAX, the stuff thats currently getting quite a lot of both web programmer and media attention.

The site is called meebo.com. Its slick and cool!!!.

Certainly its one of the best example of AJAX in action that very very cool (apart from GMail and Google Maps).

you can login and chat as you would do in Yahoo Messenger or with MSN. Its just a beginning, so you can see some hitches (it logs off due to network error) and lacking features (it doesnt yet support BUZZ!!! feature). It recently upgraded itself to support invisible feature. Its really really cool. All you need to have is a working browser that can support Javascript!. HuH...Way to go!

With such innovations we are sure to see full fledged applications targeted directly for the web, instead of a particular OS platform.. certainly not a good news to the M$ end. (I for one, welcome our new AJAX overlords )

Acknowledgements: Priya Natarajan showed me this site.

Guido von Rossum moves to Google

2005-12-24T18:32:00.000+05:30

This was one of the funniest post i have read at slashdot.

<start >
The winning offer was the one that had first-line indented paragraphs.

We just love a guy that gets so wrapped up in his work!

We've got penguins, we've got pythons, and we've got a lemur with a minigun...this zoo rocks!

After hearing the report, Ballmer threw a Hissssy fit.

Someone reported a problem with a mouse at Google Central and the recruiter got to work on hiring the python guy.

With a keen eye on competition, Google is just trying to catch up to the number of reptiles employed by Microsoft.

</end>

கூகிள் கைடோ - க னா வுக்கு க னா.

ஹி ஹி........

from google import guido

Kaun Banega Crorepati 2

2005-10-08T22:37:00.000+05:30

This is a nice tip. The contestant has said the answer, computerji has locked the answer, but Amitabh says a "BREAK" and pleads you not to go away, leaving you thinking whether the answer was right or wrong?. You now have a shortcut, and i have checked it several times and confirmed. May be you too can see for yourself at the next episode of KBC2 and confirm it. Ok, all BLAH BLAHs apart, lemme document it!

I have highlighted in yellow a block there.
The result of the answer locked appears there.
The cameraman usually shows all the 6 rectangles (or atleast the top 3 rectangles).
The third rectangle of the first row shows the answer.

Watch KBC2, check whether this works, and comment here.

Bye,
Varun :)

Google Print dissected

2005-09-27T00:14:00.000+05:30

I was thinking what the problem is with google print, when its a nice idea to digitize books. read about author's guild sueing google print here

On fiddling with google print, i found out a method which people can use to read the entire book, provided they have the patience to do so.

This is my first few pages. I reached page 4, i am unable to move further. What to do now?

There seems to be some solution ....
scroll down

here i look for something important in the text, here it is the next topic heading (2 Our Clustering Method)

What to do next? OK, search for that word (i searched for Clustering methods) and clicked page 4. Now i have access to Pages 4 - 5 -6.

Now once again i reach page where i cant move forward. Answer: Use the same logic. There are instances when it asks u to login thru ur google account. No big deal. Use one of your gmail accounts, or get one from your friends who have gmail account and create a few. (most ppl have 100 invites in their accounts).

Disclaimer:

please dont use this method to read. The author of the book might have worked for years writing the book, its a bad idea to read it for free, when the author deserves monetary credit.
by gmail's rules, you are not supposed to create more than one account. having more than one account will be against the terms & conditions that u agree, when u register for gmail service.

Bye

2005-09-25T21:49:00.000+05:30

my childhood picture

2005-08-25T18:07:00.000+05:30

Pretty happy with my placement result. Should start preparing for GRE.

The effect of LSI

2005-08-16T00:29:00.000+05:30

It was widely rumoured that LSI- Latent Semantic Indexing was strongly integrated into google. see here for some blog saying the same.
Now, i got some tangible proof with my own name as experiment. Sometime back, i got my slashdot profile as the first result in my search. I did not take snapshot. When i searched later, things were back to normal, with my page back in first spot. so i thought that its my dream (to find my homepage knocked off from the first place).

Today, i saw, my blogger profile gain first place, knocking off my tripod site, which is (supposed to be) my established homepage (although its truly outdated), and yes!, there are no backlinks associated with my blogger profile (but there are as far as my tripod site is concerned).

Bye
Varun
PS: chances are good that in the future, this page might come somewhere in the 100-200th pages when you search for Latent Semantic Indexing :-) (and may be on top 10 if you search for "latent semantic indexing backlinks blogger profile homepage" or something like this)
dependant heavily on googlebot indexing me :-S

Star Gazing

2005-08-10T23:23:00.000+05:30

Star gazing
I recently stumbled on this site:
http://www.heavens-above.com
In this site, when u register, shows you the satellites that are visible at night in your place of living. have u seen some star (like object) moving in sky when u were in ur house terrace?. now its a chance to glance the sky for moving objects systematically. When u register in this site, and provide ur location, it will show the night sky map with the stars marked, and the time the satellites will cross the sky and the position, u can now wait for say 9 PM and see the satellite and come back to ur room. not only that, i was able to get the exact lat and long for chrompet. Chances are good that you can get for your place too.

2005-08-08T22:38:00.000+05:30

Viruses and Social Engineering
I got a virus in my mailbox, the subject tempted me to read the mail although i knew it was a virus.
From: abuse@gov.us
To: my-email@yahoo.com//
Subject: Illegal Website
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 23:33:06 -0700

You have visited illegal websites.
I have a big list of the websites you surfed.

+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Bitdefender AntiVirus - www.bitdefender.com

Attachments
Attachment scanning provided by:

Files:
readme.scr (31k)
Scan result: Virus "W32.Netsky.P@mm" found.
These days, the virus writers are betting heavily on social engineering on spreading viruses, and of course, they are successful in most cases.

The Return of the shuttle

2005-08-07T22:17:00.000+05:30

NASA is having a tough time. I read in a paper that the shuttle has around 200 critical(moving) components while the SpaceShip One has around 20. It looks like a terrible nightmare for the managers at NASA, not to mention, Griffin's status, although i read that he is more stoic, showing little or no emotions. Hmm... Lets hope that this bloated vehicle finishes building ISS and retires as quickly as possible.

Some sources you can read about the space shuttle:
http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/main/ (the official site)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

STS-114 is the current mission to send supplies to ISS. See here about it

The Nigerian Scam

2005-08-07T22:05:00.000+05:30

Have you heard of Nigerian Scams? This is the latest:
A sample letter here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_fraud
(but this is American Scam ;-) )
Just thougt might be interesting..., look here http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158277&cid=13260934

2005-07-29T23:45:00.000+05:30

Joke of the day:
News: ESA discovers ICE on mars
sarcasm: Now that we know there's ice there, we can tell the Canadians and they'll get a hockey team up there ASAP
(take from slashdot)
Bye
Varun

Map of Chennai

2005-07-24T21:19:00.000+05:30

Looking at chennai with MSN virtual earth:
Click here to view chennai with MSN Virtual Earth
Looking at chennai with google maps:
Click here to view chennai with Google Maps
Assignments to you (in order of difficulty):
1) can you show me where katthipara is?
2) GST road?
3) Chrompet
4) Radha Nagar main road
5) My house ;-)

i request you to wet your feet/fingers at the keyboard, and point me where these are and post the results as comments

your last smile

2005-07-24T21:06:00.000+05:30

usually for my cliche jokes i crack, most of my friends overwhelm with smilies like this :-) . Now it seems thats imperiled by our software giants.

see here: Link here

Bye, Varun

2005-07-23T22:39:00.000+05:30

820 MB over, i have around 20 MB per day usage till this 31st. :-(
God save me!

2005-07-01T23:20:00.000+05:30

vettifying..... nothing else
Bye
Varun

there is nothing called Free Lunch

2005-06-30T22:42:00.000+05:30

there is timorousness in the air, with BSNL finishing its unlimited meals, i am now into "alavuch" saapadu(limited meals), 1gb per month, not sure if it wud be enuf, lets hope it wud be. There is a saying "Free-as in freedom and not free- as in free lunch". It looks like i am gonna miss both.
-Varun
-----------------------
How does a physicist threaten people? I will have to understand rheology by experimenting your face.

The effect on Anniyan ;-)

2005-06-30T11:50:00.000+05:30

Dear { America, Russia, China },
If you are in need of { Astronauts, Cosmonauts, taikonauts}, please consider our tamil film heroes. They can already do zero gravity stunts at normal gravity. Hence, you can safely assume that you need not provide them the rigorous training required for a manned space journey.
Thanking You,
Yours truly,
Tamil Film Fan.
PS: you can also substitute James bond instead of Tamil film heroes (thanks Yogesh for enlightening me). Prosaic industry, what elss, hmm..., nothing original, and the ending too is too banal.

Remote in action

2005-06-25T11:29:00.000+05:30

My remote, i am pressing a key, you can see the IR rays! You can use this method to check if your remote is working, or rather if the batteries in your remote has not dried up. (i saw this idea in some forum, tried it out and you are reading it now. This is possible because, webcams also capture IR rays apart from visible spectrum).

The normal remote (no keys pressed)

2005-06-25T11:28:00.000+05:30

My remote, no keys pressed!.

Whats gonna happen tomorrow

2005-06-09T22:38:00.000+05:30

Something shd happen tomorrow, if u know what i am saying here, decode it and keep it with u, dont let out the secret.

Miscellaneous C Questions

2005-06-05T14:05:00.000+05:30

1. How to find if a stack is progressing in forward or backward
direction using a C program?

//This code relies on the fundamental idea that function calls uses stack.


#include<stdio.h>
int* globalvar;
void myfunc(void);

int main()
{
        int i,*x=&i;
        myfunc();
        if((globalvar-x)>0)
                printf("stack progression forward");
        else
                printf("Stack progression backward");
}

void myfunc(void)
{
        int j;
        globalvar=&j;
        return;
}

2. How exactly are \c and \v used in C. when i give them in a printf
statement, strange characters are printed.

according to K &R, any non standard (ie., the one's for which \(char) form is not defined, the result of printing such a thing is undefined!)
for \c ->test.c:6:16: warning: unknown escape sequence '\c'
for \v -> it prints this character - ♂ !! i read here \v stands for vertical tab and is not working (in windows gcc).

3.typedef struct{
char *;
nodeptr next; //this should be nodeptr* next; (updated from algo-geeks)
} * nodeptr;
what does nodeptr stand for?

the purpose of typedef is to provide a compile time new name.
typedef int* integer_pointer; (will allow u to write integer_pointer a; , "a" now is a pointer to an integer. )
you can understand this as:
typedef (structureinfo)* newname;
this causes nodeptr to be a pointer to the anonymous structure defined above.
Although technically right, this declaration is useless!, since the structure is anonymous.
correct me if i am wrong somewhere.

-வருண்
சௌ . வருண் அங்கு ஜீஅஞ்சல் . வணிகம்
;-)

Interview

2005-06-04T22:01:00.000+05:30

Quoted from interview101.com about stress interview:
I have heard a story about a candidate being asked to jump from a window. The candidate proved he was good enough for the challenge by climbing on the window and jumping inside the room (nobody said jump out of the window!).

really liked this one, that i want to post it!

Learning C

2005-06-04T00:03:00.000+05:30

Few things that i learnt from K & R today.
1) (Page 148) quote from="K&R" A union may only be initialized with a value of the type of its first member: thus the union u described above can be initialized with integer value
The truth is that in spite of all these words by K&R, this code works

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{

        union{
                int ival;
                char cval;
                float fval;
        } u;
        u.cval='a';
        printf("%c %d",u.cval,u.ival);
}

2) (Page 150) Bit fields *should* be only integer, i never learnt much about bit fields, but now i understand their importance.
3)sizeof is a compiler directive
4) you cant create pointers for a register variable, although i knew this, i think, its nice to jot it down here
5) Crooked examples of pointers:
char (*(*x[3])())[5]
x: an array of [3] of pointer to function returning pointer to char of array[5] (you cant get worser than this)
6)typedefs when properly used can save a lot of head scratches!!!. I rarely(when did that rare even happen?) use typedefs in my code.
7) (this one from venks)

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
 int main()
 {      while(1)
        {
                fprintf(stdout,"hello-out");
                fprintf(stderr,"hello-err");
                sleep(1);
        }
        return 0;
}

Now i try to compile and execute:

[varun@localhost a]$ gcc test.c
[varun@localhost a]$ ./a.out
hello-errhello-errhello-errhello-err ..... i get this continuously.
[varun@localhost a]$

The question is, why the hell am i getting this? why dont i even get a string of hello-out?
Answers happily invited..

Morse Code-Dash Dots

2005-06-03T18:11:00.000+05:30

Hi
I saw a really obfuscated C code, that given the text converts it to dots and dashes

-------------codestart---------------------
#define DIT (
#define DAH )
#define __DAH ++
#define DITDAH *
#define DAHDIT for
#define DIT_DAH malloc
#define DAH_DIT gets
#define _DAHDIT char
_DAHDIT _DAH_[]="ETIANMSURWDKGOHVFaLaPJBXCYZQb54a3d2f16g7c 8a90l?e'b.s;i,d:"
;main DIT DAH{_DAHDIT
DITDAH _DIT,DITDAH DAH_,DITDAH DIT_,
DITDAH _DIT_,DITDAH DIT_DAH DIT
DAH,DITDAH DAH_DIT DIT DAH;DAHDIT
DIT _DIT=DIT_DAH DIT 81 DAH,DIT_=_DIT
__DAH;_DIT==DAH_DIT DIT _DIT DAH;__DIT
DIT'\n'DAH DAH DAHDIT DIT DAH_=_DIT;DITDAH
DAH_;__DIT DIT DITDAH
_DIT_?_DAH DIT DITDAH DIT_ DAH:'?'DAH,__DIT
DIT' 'DAH,DAH_ __DAH DAH DAHDIT DIT
DITDAH DIT_=2,_DIT_=_DAH_; DITDAH _DIT_&&DIT
DITDAH _DIT_!=DIT DITDAH DAH_>='a'? DITDAH
DAH_&223:DITDAH DAH_ DAH DAH; DIT
DITDAH DIT_ DAH __DAH,_DIT_ __DAH DAH
DITDAH DIT_+= DIT DITDAH _DIT_>='a'? DITDAH _DIT_-'a':0
DAH;}_DAH DIT DIT_ DAH{ __DIT DIT
DIT_>3?_DAH DIT DIT_>>1 DAH:'\0'DAH;return
DIT_&1?'-':'.';}__DIT DIT DIT_ DAH _DAHDIT
DIT_;{DIT void DAH write DIT 1,&DIT_,1 DAH;}
==============code end===================
from
-----http://www.ioccc.org/1986/hague.c-------

The nice part of it is that the source itself looks like morse code text ;-) dit dah!!!
-... -.-- . ---.. ? ---.. ...- .- .-. ..- -.
(guess what this is?) Put the answer in comments