BSOD on Olympics Opening Ceremony!

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

Congrats Abhinav Bindra, you rock!

Cuil - Cool - Cold?

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

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!

A Game machine in the Mayajaal Gaming Arcade showing BSOD!

Interview with Sir Clive Sinclair

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!

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!

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".

American Airlines - Bernard Jordan - False Prophets

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?

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)

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

Google Sky is up!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.