CG2000

BSOD on Olympics Opening Ceremony!

2008-08-13T20:29:00.002+05:30

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Stand for the National Anthem of India.

2008-08-11T15:07:00.004+05:30

Congrats Abhinav Bindra, you rock!

Cuil - Cool - Cold?

2008-07-31T12:04:00.012+05:30

The wannabe Google killer Cuil (pronounced cool) failed to impress. Like many others on the net who did the same thing, I tried out ego-searching. What I found was that, it didn't even return 20% of the result what Google gives. Among the ones it returned, interestingly, it somehow associated one of my conference papers to a concentration camp memorial! (See the attached screenshot). Oh, please don't try to be too smart!!

However, as a bonus, when I did a similar search on google to compare, it unearthed a software that I had put on the web around 10 years ago, called Tcl-O-Scope, that I had totally forgotten. I still love you google :)

Oh btw, did I mention that I have advanced to the second round of google code jam 2008!

Cuil has a long way to go.. Unless it warms up and deliver results, it will become permafrost pretty soon!

Gelatin Balls

2008-07-13T12:08:00.002+05:30

Kevin was playing with these which my sister had bought yesterday night. Those tiny dull beads had turned into colorful globules after a few hours in water!

BSOD on a gaming machine!

2008-07-11T09:23:00.003+05:30

A Game machine in the Mayajaal Gaming Arcade showing BSOD!

Interview with Sir Clive Sinclair

2008-07-10T15:16:00.006+05:30

When I was studying in 9th/10th standard, ZX Spectrum was my object of desire. I used to buy whatever books on ZX Spectrum I could get hold of. Finally Dad bought me a similar Z-80 based home computer called Color Genie.

The above is a spectacular interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, the man behind ZX Spectrum. Following is an excerpt:

Interviewer: They required you to get to grips with how they worked. You have to engage in primarily things where you played around with programming, and even kids like myself, if you wanted to write a game on the Spectrum that played at a reasonable speed, you have to effectively teach yourself to write Assembler which took a significant degree of technical understanding about how the machine worked. Everything now is very much plug and play. Do you think we miss out in the terms of getting to know how these machines work as a result?

Sir Clive: Very much so, and I regret that, because you know, your generation really understood the computers and today's generation know they are just a tool and they didn't get to grips with them, which I think, I find it very sad.

Spot on Sir! Hats off to you for the incredible inventions! Your work has been immensely inspirational for me and countless others.

String Comparison Gotcha in PHP!

2008-06-24T23:48:00.019+05:30

Can you expect a mature language that has been around for 13 years, and powering many web sites to do basic string comparison properly? No, not really!!

$x[0] = "10000000000000000000001";
$x[1] = "11011000000000000010101";
$x[2] = "10101010101010101010101";

$toFind = "11011000000000000010001";
$k = array_search($toFind, $x);
echo "match is $k";

$p = ($toFind == $x[1]);
echo "match is $p";

Run the above code and see for yourself! It will match $toFind with $x[1]!! I got hit with this nasty surprise when calling the array_search() function for a programming contest problem. It appears like PHP is truncating these strings, which it thinks are numbers and comparing the first few characters. Can anyone give a logical explanation of what's going on? Am I doing something fundamentally wrong, or is PHP hosed?

Update: Jude pointed that using "strict" flag in array_search() uses "===", and hence gets rid of the problem. But the fundamental question still remains. Why would PHP do an automatic type cast to integer while comparing two strings?

Update 2: The fundamental issue can be traced to this single statement in PHP documentation - "If you compare two numerical strings, they are compared as integers." This was the root of all problems. I don't like that behavior, but hey this is PHP. I have a similar gripe with Tcl as well. Try this:

set x "072"
puts [incr $x]
set y "09"
puts [incr y]

It will print 59, followed by an error 'expected integer but got "09" (looks like invalid octal number)' as Tcl treats any string starting with 0 as octal - a tradition it borrows from C, but unfortunately, it overloads the string type!

My kids on mugs!

2008-06-23T12:49:00.009+05:30

Played around with POV-Ray, GIMP and the photo I took, over the weekend. Oh the joys of ray tracing! Credits to Ian Shumsky for the mug object!

P.S: If you like any of your photos to be on the virtual mug, send it to me and I'll generate a scene similar to this and send it to you.

AWS Meetup Chennai

2008-05-26T20:52:00.005+05:30

We, the motley crew from Impiger (Ashok, Abi, Ram, Priya, Umaima and myself) just returned from AWS Chennai meetup. It was a great evening and we were able to hear what's new in AWS from Jinesh Varia, the evangelist from Amazon.

One of the highlights of the event was the demos. The coolest, imho was from nboomi. It has some cool 3D models of homes which you can customize. It is flash based and the demo was fascinating. It seems they store the models in S3. When I tried it out though, my Firefox memory usage shot through the roof and I had to kill it. I'm sure they will fix those kinks pretty soon. Also, our demo of Boxcloud was received well. I also got introduced to Hadoop and TimesMachine.

One problem with AWS is the barrier to entry for developers, as they are required to sign up with a credit card. I suggested that Amazon lower that barrier by providing sandbox APIs. They can control it by clearing out the data periodically and limiting the number of hits from an IP per day. Jinesh is going to look into that. I hope one day it will happen :)

Funny (but true) Quote!

2008-05-24T12:47:00.002+05:30

Seen on the tagline of Slashdot user eldavojohn

"Can god code something so unusable even he can't use it? No, but I can and so can you: http://www.microsoft.com/careers"

*lol*

RoR Scalability

2008-05-04T17:50:00.003+05:30

I have written about this earlier. Now here we go again. It's about Twitter having problems scaling.

Volume Fade Out Sleep Timer

2008-05-04T17:06:00.012+05:30

I usually take a nap Sunday afternoons, and I like to hear some streaming radio during that time. I wanted something that would fade the volume down to 0 after a certain period of time (say half hour). I decided to give it a shot myself. It's Tcl and Snack to the rescue! After twiddling with the Snack API for 5 mins, here is the code:

package require snack

set line [lindex [snack::mixer lines] 0]
snack::mixer volume $line v1 v2

set totalTime 1800; # half hour
set delay [expr $totalTime*10]

for {set v 100} {$v>=0} {incr v -1} {
  set v1 $v
  set v2 $v
  puts "[clock format [clock seconds] -format "%T" ] - $v"
  after $delay
}

It worked out well. And for the record, after I woke up, I googled to check if there is something out there that will do the same thing. There were many utilities, but the one stood out was this, based on something called AutoHotKey. I 've never heard of that before, but sounds very impressive.

Disruptive Technologies

2008-04-19T19:47:00.004+05:30

The presentation I gave at SKP Engineering College on 04/18/2008

Disruptive Technologies

| View | Upload your own

SlideShare Link

My First Speeding Ticket!

2008-04-14T23:51:00.004+05:30

Today I got my first speeding ticket, after 10+ years of driving. I clocked a paltry 68kmph, when according to the traffic police, the limit is 50kmph. This was on the Rajiv Gandhi Salai (near Tidel Park), one of the best roads in Chennai, during a lazy mid-holiday-morning, when there was no other vehicle on the stretch except mine. The police officer was polite though, and I paid the fine of Rs. 300.

I love to drive fast, but I drive responsibly. I honor all traffic lights (it is a rarity in Chennai), be courteous to pedestrians and other drivers, keep the lane etc. There are people who drive rash. Mind you, rash driving is totally different from fast driving. Unfortunately, the police (CCTP) have no means or intentions to take away those rude mongrels off the street.

Drinking is not illegal. However, they urge you to "drink responsibly". I think speed limits should only be guidelines and drivers be let to "drive responsibly".

American Airlines - Bernard Jordan - False Prophets

2008-04-09T22:16:00.005+05:30

I was checking out the news article about American canceling 850 flights, when this paragraph struck me: "Bishop Bernard Jordan, a Harlem minister, was in a first-class line trying to catch a flight to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to preach Wednesday night". Contrast this to what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 9:3 -

And He said to them, "Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece." (NASB)

I have never heard of this man. Prodding further, I went to his site, the headline of which screams "FREE Prophecies are back!". Huh, when did prophecy come for a cost? It is so awful. Read about many of his antics here.

We should be very careful about such people. There are many youngsters, and particularly women, who are deceived by these people and fall in their trap. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 7:15 -

"Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves."

Not Practising What You Preach?

2008-03-15T19:22:00.014+05:30

I have blogged about YSlow, a very nice tool from Yahoo, that gives performance indicators of your web page. Guess what? I ran it on their own page (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) and found that they got 3 F's, 1 C and 1 B. Overall score was a D (62/100). A case of not practising what you preach?

Performance Grade: D (62)

Google Sky is up!

2008-03-14T11:55:00.004+05:30

First google maps (earth) - http://maps.google.com, released February 8 2005,

Then google moon - http://www.google.com/moon/, released July 2005,

Then google mars - http://www.google.com/mars/, released March 12, 2006,

Now google sky!
http://www.google.com/sky/, released Today

Check it out!

Ext 2.0 Tips

2008-03-07T17:40:00.006+05:30

Ever since I started dabbling with Ext a few months back, I'm addicted to it. Ext 2.0 has wonderful API documentation, but there are many hidden treasures that are not apparent. I will start capturing some of these starting from this post.

Toolbar Tips

To create a separator between items, use '-' between the items. Hmm.., "|" might have been a better choice, don't you think?
To right align a set of items, use '->' as the separator.

I'm Learning to Play Keyboard!

2008-03-05T22:57:00.010+05:30

I have started learning keyboard! Last weekend, we had Kevin start his keyboard lessons, and I also succumbed to my long time craving for learning music. And, 2-3 hrs/wk was all I had to spend on it. Sounds too good isn't it!

Today was the first class. I used to play by hearing, but always wanted to be able to read notes and play in a formal way, especially to play the hymnals.

The 1 hour session was very interesting. The tutor was very knowledgeable and professional. She quickly understood where I stand and taught me the basics. I did some fingering practices for G and F clefs. Getting the keypress synchronized with the beat was tricky, but it came to me after several tries. Reading music and playing seems to be a mechanical activity. Atleast that is my initial observation. Let's see how it goes!

Some Interesting Quotes

2008-01-11T10:46:00.000+05:30

that I came across recently:

"Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good." - Joe Paterno

"Don't make someone a priority in your life, if you are just an option in their life" - Heard on talk radio.

"Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die" - Seen on the tagline of Slashdot user LarsWestergren

Diwali '07

2008-01-09T20:25:00.001+05:30

Diwali '07
Originally uploaded by rmadhuram

This is one of the pictures I liked the most, from the set I took during Diwali of 2007.

SOS

2008-01-05T11:50:00.000+05:30

Will someone please?

If you are interested in a rescue mission, this deeply distressed water can be found in the Spencers Plaza food court :)

Conversation with my Son

2008-01-05T09:46:00.001+05:30

Kevin: Daddy, do you want 25 or rhino?
Me: I want rhino.
Kevin: No no I want rhino. You pick something else!

Oh, and by the way, for those interested in numismatics, I found this excellent site when searching for the 25 paise image shown above.

India Breaks into Top 5 Supercomputers List!

2007-11-20T10:53:00.000+05:30

Can you believe it? India has the Asia's fastest supercomputer, and the world's 4th fastest! I first heard the news on All India Radio (AIR) while channel surfing AM stations for cricket commentary. It is named EKA and built by Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons. This is an wonderful accomplishment, in my opinion, as significant as the unveiling of PARAM in 1991 by CDAC. I hope this will trigger more indigenous research and development in basic sciences and attract more students to pursue high performance computing.

The Changing Face of Chennai!

2007-10-03T21:54:00.001+05:30

This is the second Cayenne I have spotted in Chennai!. You can see a grand old Ambassador peering through the rear view mirror in contrast!

Lane Discipline

2007-09-12T18:11:00.000+05:30

Nice sign, but er, where are the lanes?!!

Travelling Swordfish!

2007-09-12T18:07:00.000+05:30

How does a swordfish travel in Chennai? In an auto, of course!

Tendulkar, Thin Slicing & Umpiring

2007-09-08T19:56:00.001+05:30

I'm watching the 7th ODI between India & England from the early overs. That typically means India would lose! Such is my luck :(. Few minutes back, Tendulkar was given out to a bad umpiring decision. Umpiring must be really hard, especially in a game like cricket where a single bad decision can cost the game for a team. Umpires have to make a split second decision using their senses of vision and hearing. In this particular case, Dar had definitely heard a sound, but it was the wrong one, one where the bat hit the pad. Using that, he had to thin-slice and determine that it was a knick. And probably, his aural senses overwhelmed the visual, as he missed to see no deflection in the course of the ball.

In case you are wondering what the heck is "thin-slicing", it is a term I learned from a book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. It is a really fascinating book I'm currently finishing up on my train commute. In a nutshell, it means an instinctive, non-analytical decision we make, especially when pressed for time. Umpires should also be experts at mind reading too, as the batsman or bowler involved typically knows what exactly happened, and would try to fake it to get the umpire's favor.

It is humanly impossible to get it right all the time, but I do believe having a human umpire is definitely needed. However, technology advances can certainly complement umpiring, as the Collingwood decision showed. That's why I think having a certain number of coach's challenges, similar to that in NFL would help. As I finish writing this, the third umpire has given the benefit of doubt to Powar. See what I'm saying?

Two minutes and a few balls later.. Oh crap, the spinning bat says he is out! It's not looking good for India.

Antichrist @ Greenpark?

2007-09-03T11:11:00.000+05:30

Paradox

2007-09-01T23:32:00.000+05:30

Saw this interesting note on a blog comment - "But then again... what in life is not a paradox... that the more you love someone, the more you'd be taken for granted."

Reminiscing Kinzan

2007-08-28T18:39:00.000+05:30

I was talking to my former colleague at Kinzan, Trent Barnes, today and he mentioned it was the 2nd anniversary of closing of Kinzan, which prompted this blog post! I had the privilege of working with many expert programmers there and learnt a lot. We did a lot of cool stuff on cutting edge web technologies. I miss you Kinzan!

One of the best part of working at Kinzan was to see our product getting recognized. I'm reminded of Robert Scoble's blog post that was such a morale booster. My personal favorite was when Randy Hudson and Pratik Shah (creators of GEF) came over to our booth at an EclipseCon and virtually exclaimed that our tool was the best application of GEF they had ever seen! Another one was when a product manager of RIM (creators of Blackberry) came to our booth and lamented that they had spent more than a year trying to create such a tool and weren't even half way there!

Also comes to memory are the countless games of ping pong we played (India vs. China vs. USA :)), endless cans of Coke, Kinzan Olympics, Beach party and the ever wonderful Carlsbad weather. I should also mention Garland, who is my mentor, friend and former CTO of Kinzan who inspired us all and kept us going!

I'm iNFp

2007-08-18T14:02:00.000+05:30

I took the online personality test based on Jung-Myers-Brigg typology. It classifies each person in one of 16 types, either

Extravert - Introvert
Sensing - Intuition
Thinking - Feeling
Judging - Perceiving

I came out to be iNFp (Introvert-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving). Scary - seems to be fairly accurate! One thing I'd like to find out is that, will getting to know my personality affect my personality?

Sign that don't make sense

2007-08-13T19:57:00.001+05:30

What sign do you see on the picture? If you said "FREE LEFT TURN", no marks for you! It actually says "NO FREE LEFT TURN". If you look closely, you can see the word "NO" in red. It is so tiny and what choice of a color is red over blue? This sign is on the Ashok Pillar signal.

Update 09/03/07: I got a better picture of the sign yesterday. I've replaced the old one with this. Also, the Vision Care guys seems to have got a really bad spot!

Loving Beauties!

2007-08-13T17:31:00.000+05:30

I just got a browser message on my phone that said: "Loving Beauties: Click here to capture", and I thought to myself, what an oxymoron!

"INTRESTED PEOPLES" can make more than Rs.60000 !!

2007-07-26T13:53:00.000+05:30

I took this picture when getting off the electric train yesterday night. It says "Job Opportunity" at the top, and a categorization of how much an individual can make depending on their education:
* Uneducated - 6,000 to 20,000
* 6th to 12th Grade - 7,000 to 30,000
* Diploma & any degree - 10,000 to 40,000
* Computer & typewriting & JOBLESS - 15,000 to 50,000

AND Finally,

* INTRESTED PEOPLES - More than 60,000 !!

Maybe I should quit my job then :)

P.S: I'll try to get a better picture if I get to board that same train again..

Once Upon a Friend

2007-07-26T13:40:00.000+05:30

Once I had a friend,
who made me feel special.
Little did I know
she has many other friends
and I was just "Today's special"!

Why no parachutes on planes?

2007-07-24T18:22:00.000+05:30

I've always wondered why there are no parachutes on airplanes, sort of like lifeboats on ships. There is a nice discussion on slashdot today that pretty much answers my question.

Oh what a week!

2007-07-02T20:17:00.000+05:30

Pretty eventful I'd say. Last thursday, RKM and me hit the road early morning for a 280km drive to Mayavaram to attend a wedding of our friend's sister. It was a nice smooth drive upto Pondicherry, but after that we had to make our way through lots of small towns and dirt roads. We made it to the wedding just in time when they tied the knot.

When returning, I shot this photo through my mobile camera. It's hilarious. On the top, a notice says that anyone who posts notice on the bus will have to spend an year in jail and pay a penalty of Rs.5000. Beneath that is a poster of an event (debate) sponsored by local politicians!! Talk about double standards..

Anyway, I got to drive the better part of the route from Pondicherry to Chennai. To add to our adventure and drive time, we were greeted by the onslaught of torrential rains when we reached Mahabalipuram. It was so gusty that branches from palm trees were falling on the road. It was a little treacherous, but RKM's Fiesta was handling it with ease. We were still cruising until we got to the city where the traffic was so bad that we reached office around 7PM.

Yesterday, we made a trip to Bangalore. Took the early morning Paramount flight. Flying on Paramount is always a delight. Their tagline, "fly on business with class" is absolutely true! They are so professionally organized, their jets, very comfortable and the food, delectable. After lunch we met a few people at the Royal Orchid and when coming out, a surprise was in store for us!

You don't see Rolls Royce's everyday.. I have seen just one in my entire life, that too at La Jolla, the most expensive part of San Diego. But here it was, a huge Phantom, right in front of us. I thought of snapping a picture of it, but felt a little awkward. Just googled and found a video of the Rolls in Bangalore. I don't think that is a taxi, as the poster mentions it. I remember reading somewhere that if you import cars in India, you need to get a yellow number plate (as in taxis). Is India getting rich, or just the rich getting richer?

Visit to Nazareth

2007-06-20T18:03:00.001+05:30

The weekend before last, I was in Nazareth, my native place. Nazareth is a small town, around 45 kms from Tirunelveli. Here are some of the snaps I took during that trip.

Today's Attraction on GST Road

2007-06-18T16:51:00.000+05:30

Today morning, around 10:15 AM, I was driving near Saidapet, and something unusual caught my attention and made my head turn to the left. So did the hundreds of motorists on two wheelers. It was a blonde white guy on a bicycle! He must have certainly looked different to people in this part of the world.

Whoever you are, welcome to Chennai!, and be safe - this isn't like the bicycle tour you can take in Paris. If you happen to see this blog, share your Tour de Chennai experience :)

Tamilnadu

2007-06-16T23:39:00.000+05:30

Just wanted to test tamil fonts..

செந்தமிழ் நாடெனும் போதினிலே
இன்பத்தேன் வந்துப்பாயுது காதினிலே!

Sivaji - The Movie

2007-06-16T19:32:00.000+05:30

Today is the day after the over-hyped, much anticipated movie Sivaji was released. And to the delight of our dear colleagues and friends, we (Impiger) had booked an entire 700 seater theatre, Rohini, for a private screening at 11 AM. I'm not even a casual movie goer, and my last experience with the Rajini movie, Baba on the opening day in San Jose, was not a very enjoyable one. Hence, I didn't know what to expect, but certainly thought it would be fun to watch this with my friends and colleagues.

My verdict, until the half time was a thumbs up, but my interest kind of faded during the second half. Some of the messages the movie tried to send were good. Here is my summarisation:

1. The central theme of the movie is to eradicate black economy, the huge sums of money amassed by wealthy businessmen evading taxes. Though the message itself is good, it is ironic that Shankar, the producer of the movie himself was raided by authorities.

2. Though Chennai has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade, not much have been done to improve the pitiable living conditions of the poor. This was highlighted in a couple of scenes.

3. The idea of someone living in the US, working for sometime and coming back to seek his roots and culture resonated with me. Some of my friends have done the same. Countless others have such desire, but being caught up in the rat race of American living, are not able to make a decision. I pity them.

Coming to the entertainment factor, all of the songs, save the first one were crap. The movie had no plot, and was too predictable. The fight scenes were Tom and Jerry'sque and the stunts were absolutely ridiculous! Whatever romance they tried to incorporate in the film, peppered by songs which were done on magnificent sets and nice locations throughout the world, such as the Guggenheim, was totally a joke. One saving grace in this regard, is the highlighting of how horoscopes are irrelevant today.

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience, being seated next to Riyaz, who has a great timing for jokes. We were making lots of comments and laughing! Ashok was trying to out-shout the wretched audio system, and succeeded most of the time.

At JAX India 2007

2007-06-08T14:49:00.001+05:30

We were at JAX India 2007 conference last week. It was a great experience to meet many like minded people under one roof! We had a booth representing our company, Impiger Technologies. The guys with me, Sai, Mahesh, Ashok, Umaima & Kamlesh were an enthusiatic bunch. We were busy throughout (well, for most part :)) and presented cool demos of the technologies and products we have created. I also gave a talk on Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF).

The weather was great in Bangalore. It was even raining during late afternoons! We stayed at the Capitol hotel. The room was pretty decent, but the bathroom was not clean for the kind of money they charge. The massage chair was great. Got a 20 minute back massage once. However, the internet connection sucked big time. They charge Rs. 600 (around US $15) for a day for a connection that barely makes it to 100kbps. And on the day of my presentation, the Murphy's law took effect. I thought I could do some final touchups in the morning and woke up to find that the internet connection that I had subscribed for is broken! Called up the lobby to find out that it will be only back by 11 AM. Duh!

Anyway, I gave the talk with whatever I had and it turned out pretty well. I gave a demo of how we can start with a domain model (of a state diagram) and construct a full fledged graphical editor using GMF, with minimal effort.

Finally, as always, our Air Deccan flight to Chennai got cancelled and we were put on a late night flight and got back home at around 1:00 AM!

Moving to Blogger...

2007-06-05T23:22:00.001+05:30

After being on JRoller for a while (my first post was dated Jul 24, 2004), I decided to switch to Blogger, primarily because of the tools that are available and the neat templates. I have named this blog in honor of the first computer I owned in 1989 (thanks Dad!), called the Color Genie CG 2000. This cute little computer had 32KB RAM, and 16KB ROM (yes, Kilobytes). I had to connect it to a television set for viewing. The data storage medium was cassette tapes. I had a special Phillips tape recorder that had a counter. I would carefully note down on the flap of the cassette cover, the count position for each file. That was the filesystem!.

It came with some exciting games like Donkey Kong, Eagles, Blitz etc. I was totally addicted to my Color Genie and started my programming career with it. The only software I bought was a Z-80 assembler, as converting to opcodes manually was a pain. It booted with Basic language. It was a lot of fun writing programs for the Color Genie. Recently I found it in the attic and dusted it off. The wires have been gnawed by rats and it sure is not in a working condition. However, it is currently sitting proudly in my office! Drop in some time if you want to see it. I will be glad to open it up and show the various components of this amazing machine.

B	1. Make fewer HTTP requests
F	2. Use a CDN
F	3. Add an Expires header
F	4. Gzip components
A	5. Put CSS at the top
A	6. Put JS at the bottom
A	7. Avoid CSS expressions
n/a	8. Make JS and CSS external
C	9. Reduce DNS lookups
A	10. Minify JS
A	11. Avoid redirects
A	12. Remove duplicate scripts
A	13. Configure ETags