My kids on mugs!

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

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!

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

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

Volume Fade Out Sleep Timer

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

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

Disruptive Technologies

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My First Speeding Ticket!

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".