YANTHRIKAM

Hello Mars!

2011-11-27T22:04:00.002+05:30

It has been nearly two years since my last post. With fb, twitter, Buzz, Google Plus, I have posting around here and there! I have got back to India after three long years in the US and am slowly settling down in the garden city.

It is NASA's MSL that aroused my "curiosity" and kept me tracking it off late. The car sized rover took off on Nov 26th 2011 and is expected to get to Mars sometime in August of 2012 and make a landing on Gale crater. The rover has around 10 experimental instruments within it. They are primarily aimed at answering questions such as water on mars, microbial life, life sustenance etc. There's a host of experiments that the rover is expected to perform.

The project budgeted at $2.5 bn was initially slotted for 2009 and after budget cuts and schedule slippages made it in 2011(Thanks to Obama). The nuclear powered cells are of virtually infinite life. With Phoenix and Oppurtunity exceeding their life by way long, Curiosity would be expected to achieve new feats. Oppurtunity is in fact still alive and is currently exploring endeavour crater. The scientists at JPL have planned an entirely new kind of landing strategy for the MSL. This youtube video is a fanastic animation.

I guess I'll have to eagerly wait for the next 8 months to see those high-res panoramic shots. The official mission page has a nice timer and is located here.

Got a new Car

2009-08-02T01:17:00.001+05:30

Quite dissapointing that it took more than a year for me to buy a new car. I just got a 2003 Hyundai Elantra GLS Sedan. I got totally fed up of craigslist and all the scams out there. Eventually I got this through CarSoup.com. I bought the car from a dealer, so it feel brand new.

Too bad that I still can't drive it without a valid Drivers License.

Lake-shore Turtle

2009-07-19T08:21:00.000+05:30

Our office crowd had taken a day off and spent together at a lake shore along the outskirts of Minnesota. As me and couple of my friends were passing a small path along the shore we happened to notice a turtle. It was the first I got to see a turtle not under captivity. Got to take a few macro shots of it. Neat stuff. . .

Married I am . . .

2009-07-19T08:00:00.001+05:30

Don't know why I stopped blogging. Well, Hope I become regular again.

I am married now since MAY 27. I took off from work for a week and flew down to Bangalore. It was a quick one week with more of formalities. I enjoyed every part of it. Well, now I am back to work. She joined me couple of weeks ago as well. Its a good feeling to know there is someone back at home waiting for you. It becomes a good reason for you to want to go home.

For me it is a difficult transition from someone who prefers solitude to someone who shares his feelings and emotions. Its a challenge and I guess I am doing pretty good.

Fire in the hole

2008-10-05T03:15:00.000+05:30

My shopping spree just doesn't seem to end. I bought Bioshock the game. I heard it has achieved quite a bit on the graphics, gameplay, strategy etc. Apparently won the game of the year as well. I also love first player shooter games and the ones which are not exactly too fast like Doom, UT etc. Bioshock's got the perfect concept.

Sorry, I can't type anymore. Gotta try the game. . .

New Cam -Sony W170

2008-10-04T21:50:00.000+05:30

Got the next machine into my arsenal.Its a brand new Sony Cybershot w170. Its a whole lot of cool featurs. I bought the cam and a 4GM memory stick totalling to $294. Quite expensive, but indeed worth the deal.

Few of the noticeable features are as following.

=> 10.1 Mega Pix
=> 5X Zoom
=> Auto smile ditection ( with child priority)
=> Macro mode - Good for people having a good sense of photography.
=> Red Eye correction
=> Camera shake correction
=> 3.5 inch wide viewing screen

Baby! Do I have a toy!

"Rock On" - A good flick

2008-10-01T10:51:00.001+05:30

I recently got to watch the movie "Rock On" and I really loved it. I know I sound like just another unfortunate individual going through corporate trauma. The movie doesn't have any out of the world acting skills or direction. It was a real simple movie with some fantastic soft rock ballads. I was surprised when I was told that the music was made in just 3 days. Whoah! That's kool enough!

The most catchy concept of the movie is the memory of those old days in college. Definitely not all of us were rock stars back in those enigmatic days of life, but each one of us would have had a heroic stories to remember. With the thumping hormones and freedom - each one of us where rulers of our own worlds. I need to say this, I really pity those who spent their college lives in front of the books. They really missed the best part of their lives and will never have anything when they look back on themselves. I was warned by my brothers that college life is gonna be the most amazing part of my life, and damn yeah!!!! They were bang on spot!

I believe it would be the corporate guys to whom the movie would mean the most. That is where the second concept of the movie comes in. I am sure each one of us long sometimes to just yell and feel that freedom deep inside. I definitely do!! I kinda feel like dancing in the middle of nowhere. It is that feeling of freedom that we all miss. Tied down by corporate ties of deadlines, higher managements, messed up habits -- We all wish that sense of freedom. Wounded by the corporate ties we end up forgetting our loved ones and basic facts that makes homo sapiens - the social human. Blinded by the luring paycheck we might not realize it at this point of time. But it would be too late when we eventually do. . .

Warcraft III

2008-09-03T11:11:00.001+05:30

Warcraft has been my favorite game since day one I played it. The pre-medieval theme with demonic clans and everything is so damn sexy. I love the whole game and it's plot. Well, I admit that I used to be playing it in India without a valid licence. This time I really bought it. The WARCRAFT III BATTLE CHEST!!! The case itself looks awesome. I right away installed the game and played it continuing from the point I had left in India. Check out below a snapshot of the Battle chest.

The battle chest contains.

WC 3 CD with key.
Frozen Throne CD with key.
WOW online gaming free 14 day trial DVD.
Official Battle Chest guide for Reign of Chaos.
Official Battle Chest guide for Frozen Throne.
Game manual for Reign of Chaos.
Product catalog.
A small book on Reign of Chaos.

All together it is superb!!

Firing up db2 9.5 on Hardy Heron

2008-08-24T10:39:00.001+05:30

Please follow this link to my other blog to read this up.

Hardy Heron on XPS 1330

2008-08-24T10:37:00.001+05:30

Ubuntu has been a fantasy for me for around 2.5 yrs. But I was always falling short of the hardware to actually leverage the best out of the GUI entities of the OS. Well, this time things were different. I did the same thing as I used to do in India. Went to the Ubuntu ship-it web-page and placed an online order for the latest Ubuntu CD - Hardy Heron. Got it in a week in my mail-box.

I was really impressed by the installer itself. The partitioner recognizes your windows partition and lets you drag a bar and adjust the space to be shared between Vista and Ubuntu. Lovely!. Once I was done with the installation, I used the compiz package to enable the eye-candy. It was just awesome. In terms of the eye-candy I would say Ubuntu is way ahead of Vista.

New Bike

2008-08-17T06:12:00.001+05:30

Me and my roomie got ourselves couple of bikes. Each costs $85. Damn expensive. We grew impatient and couldn't wait for some sale to come up. Ironically, we bought it from Target store. The bike's got a lot of mechanisms which I am still yet to figure out. I still love those huge Atlas cycles with the bent handles. Here goes a pic of my new bike.

Settling down

2008-08-08T07:30:00.001+05:30

I am still putting myself together in yankee land. Bought a table and chair for $100. Its pretty cool.

Also cooking is going real great. I have been playing around with Indian delicacies and they all came out pretty well. But ironically I still haven't cooked a single vegetarian dish. The closest I got to Vegetarian dish was by cooking Egg Bhurji. Well, now that I am pretty good at it, I am thinking of considering an alternate profession. Especially in the US were Indians colonize, an Udipi mess, andhra mess or Kerala mess would be an excellent idea.

Hmmmm. . . . I am thinking. . . . .

Blog re-directed

2008-08-03T06:36:00.002+05:30

I had been trying since quite a while to direct yanthrikam.net to prabhudc.blogspot.com. Finally I gave up on it while in India itself. Today I just happened to try it again and awesome! It worked.
http://yanthrikam.net is pointing to this blog you are reading (which I doubt anybody is :-) ).

New lappy - XPS 1330

2008-07-31T05:41:00.002+05:30

Yeah baby! I've got a new lappy.
I really did like the one I had back home. I handed it over to my girl before coming here.

Well, If I buy a gadget I make sure I buy a beast.

This one is a Dell XPS 1330. It is small compared to my previous lappy, but this one's a beast.

Width : 13''
RAM : 4GB
HD : 320GB
Graphics card : NVidia Geforce 8400M GS
Processor : 2.0 GHz Intel core 2 duo
Other features : Finger print reader, high definition audio, ultra thin

To spice it up, it's really light and has got a sexy look of it's own.

Read up some review about it at http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3826

One month in the US

2008-07-19T06:13:00.001+05:30

It's been a month since I have come to the US. I still love India and the people there. The roads here are so desolate and lonely. Even the nights are too annoying. I find it real difficult to catch some sleep in silence and this place has absolute silence. I really feel India is an awesome place to live.

Moreover I am really missing my girlfriend( I still end up calling her everyday).

Well there are a lot of posts to come, about my apartment, my cooking, etc. . . Read on . . .

First from my lappy

2008-07-17T05:19:00.001+05:30

This is my first post from the US. I bought a brand new lappy and typing out this blog from it. It's cool.

IT feels like freedom, getting back to the cyber world.

Lot many posts to come . . . Keep reading. . . . .

Boiled beans - Place for nerds

2008-06-01T00:17:00.003+05:30

If you think you are a nerd Boiled Beans is just the right place to hang out. Couple of my Collage mates - Devadutta and Srikant have come up with this innovative concept of daily quiz. They put up a neat and new question everyday. You can dig up the answer how ever you like and post the answer as a comment.

Winners are recognized with several kind distinctions and their names are displayed on the homepage. The coolest thing of the website is the concept of pie graphs, run-lengths, monthly toppers,hall of fame and badges. Very innovative indeed.

Think you could qualify as a geek? Give it a shot

US Visa interview experience

2008-05-31T20:41:00.004+05:30

On the May 30th I had appeared for my Visa - Personal appearance and cleared it. Here is the experience I had.

Mine was of type L1-B blanket. The appointment was at 10:00 AM IST.
The entrance is the one facing the Gemini flyover(Chennai). You won't be allowed to stand in the queue outside only until 15mins prior to the scheduled time. At the entrance they would check you Passport and appointment confirmation letter. Once you are verified you will be let in. Once in, you will be physically frisked for mobile phones,storage materials or anything. Once clear you will be let into a lobby.

You would see a series of counter and they would check your documents. They will group documents together and pin them and separate the unnecessary ones. Keep the docs in the same order that they organize and hand over to you. Once that is done you will be let into the Visa lobby.

The Visa lobby is an insane place. It is a small room with 7 counters and a huge number of people. You would have to wait in the chairs provided until its your turn. When its your turn the crew will call you to stand in a queue. The queue is insanely slow. This is the most difficult part. You will have to stand in that queue for around 3 hours seeing others getting rejected. You would get really tensed and worried as time passes by. Those three hours would be like 3 decades. It is ridiculous that that the consulate can't make a work around for this annoying queue. Anyways once your turn comes you will be guided to one of the 7 counters. He will fire a few questions and you will be good to go, with or without the passport.

Tips
1.Speak the truth. Do not bluff. Even if you are missing something and if you are truthful there is a very good possibility of you clearing the interview(They wouldn't reject your Visa, rather ask you to appear on another day with adequate documentation). End of the day even they are humans.

2.Do not walk in with an empty stomach. Had I been made to stand another hour I would have definitely collapsed. Have adequate food, not less nor too much. You wouldn't want hunger let you down on dooms day.

3.Keep your docs organized. if we consider the interviewers getting irritated in terms of levels of irritation, giving a disorganized set of docs to the interviewer will directly put you in the 5th level of irritation. He will definitely turn you down.

4.Be cool, he/she's not gonna eat you. Greet them in a very friendly manner. Any questions they ask look at their face when you answer. Always have a smile on your face, it increases the comfort level and confidence on you. Trust me on this, it works.

5.Body language is important. The way you present yourself, the way you speak to them makes a huge difference. Especially the male interviewers will look carefully at you when they ask a question. Basically they are seeing how confident we are physically on buttressing whatever we speak. If they have doubts, they would keep firing questions. I was very confident in my answer so the interviewer never went further after the first question.

6.Those who are going for masters, better have a solid proof that you could sustain financially your education. Oral confirmation does not help much, documents are required. If your dad is a big shot you better have all certificates, job experience certificates etc. to bolster your point.

7,In case you are applying for Visa after a significant time period after your graduation, you would have to have a strong explanation of each and every month after your graduation until the current date as in what you did. You need to produce documentation to buttress that.

8.Finally, Be cool! Chill! No worries! The cooler you are, the easier it goes!

The traumatizing week

2008-05-31T11:16:00.002+05:30

This week was very complicated for me, went through a lot of emotional trauma. The above graph shows my mind flow in the last week. Y-axis zero stands for absolute sadness and 100% stands for a very happy mood. Logically 50 means normal mentality. I went in to the week at 10% below normal. The thought of the Visa interview was the main cause

Monday
It all started on Monday when I came to know that my Mom was will. She usually falls ill quite often so I didn’t take it very seriously and continued my work. Later on, in the evening I came to know that things were really bad. She hadn’t had food for 3 days. I was scared and immediately booked my flight ticket to Trivandrum for Tuesday.

Tuesday
I flew to Trivandrum on Tuesday only to see my Mom in a very sad state. We organized an ambulance and rushed her to the hospital. It was really painful for me. Moreover the selfish bloody doctors… I detest them from the bottom of my heart…. I am proud to not have chosen that profession. Finally we got her admitted in a hospital. She was administered right away with medicines.

Wednesday
Wednesday was not any better. We did not see any much improvement in her. She was still ill. Constantly medicines were given to her. Her food intake was nill. I was really helpless.

Thursday
I could not travel to Chennai as I had planned earlier. I was really in a sad state when I got a call from my girl friend. She said “Darling, My mom has expired” and the phone went silent. I was really helpless. My girl was in a real bad state and I was not there to help her or console her. Things were just getting worse. Next day was my Visa interview day. I was really de-motivated and disappointed. That night I flew to Chennai.

Friday
I woke up early at 5:00 AM, went through my Visa docs. Had to fill certain columns, did that, caught a rick and left for the US consulate. I was still running at 0% mind alertness. At 9:45 I stood in the queue and was let in around 10:30. Surpassed around 3 annoying queues and got to my interview. Everything went just fine though and I cleared without much glitches. Friday ended at around 35% below normal mind condition.

Saturday
Still a bit sad today, but feeling much better. I spoke to my Mom, she seems to have improved a lot. I was really happy to hear that. Moreover, I spoke to my girl. She also seems to have overcome the grief and has got hold of the situation. She was speaking well and was looking forward to meet me in the next weekend.

A harsh week indeed! But, it’s all a part of life. Need to learn to face the troughs as well.

With great powers come great responsibilities!

2008-05-18T11:06:00.002+05:30

I am sure everyone would have seen the Spider Man part-1 flick. There was this conversation between Uncle Ben(Don't know his real identity) and Toby in the morning Uncle Ben gets killed. It was all about Uncle Ben giving advice to Toby and Toby not giving a damn and walking away. But, there was this one dialog which really captivated my thoughts. "With great powers come great responsibilities!!". Toby should have realized the meaning of that, perhaps his Uncle would have escaped death.

Well, My life is kinda like spider man's, except that I don't jump off buildings that often :-). Especially at my work place and family, there are great responsibilities bestowed on me. There are people who rely on me. There always is this fear whether I can live up to their expectations. How is it gonna be if I let them down. Devastating! It looks good to others to see someone having so many responsibilities and accomplishments under their belt. Little do they know of the trauma one goes through. Expectations from different people. Need to satisfy different point of views. Carefully play with human emotions at the same time. End of the day, we all live on Earth, can't extend the 24hr mark any longer.

Well, The tough ride is challenging and sometimes fun. Living at the edge has become a life style. It's like being dropped into enemy territory in a war zone. Do or die!

Life is a challenge! Let's take it that way!

Family | Very important to an individual

2008-05-10T22:27:00.002+05:30

Just another bad day at office, came home with a shrug on my face, marred with embarrassment, cursing the next day, probably gonna be worse.
Things were not gonna settle so easily that evening. I got a call from Mom and dad, bad news, my cousin's premature baby had passed away. I knew this cousin of mine really well.

There was this one time when he and I had gone to a sea shore to by fresh fish. I , as usual, confidently went and stood on a boulder jutting into the sea. That day no fishermen took to the seas as the waves were too strong. Imagine waves 15ft tall. People say you don't die of drowning, its the belting of the waves on you and the rocks that take your life. Well The overconfident me was surprised by a sudden wave that within a fraction of a second toppled me. I reached for air, didn't find anything, reached for ground , nothing, reached for anything, absolutely nothing! Finally I got hold of a rock and I gripped on it with all my life. Seconds later the wave receded and I was stunned to see myself hanging at the edge of the boulder. Below is 15ft merciless waves. Something else that took my attention was my cousin. He had thrown of his slippers and was all set to jump in to the waves thinking that I have fallen in. I was surprised to see that someone would go to that extent. That was my cousin.

His baby had been given birth prematurely when he was 7 months old. After that they took real care of him in the incubator. He used to keep the kid in his chest and sleep every night to imitate the mother's womb. But after 3 months tragically the baby passed away.

My parents called me and asked me to call my cousin and express my grief. That was one of the most difficult moments in my life. I really did not have the guts to call him up. May be 'coz I was brought up in hostels away from family. I really have lost the vitality of family. The corporate life is making things worse. There's been weeks when I haven't called home. Somehow I have prioritized work above family. That made things difficult.

Finally I gave in to mom's words. I called my cousin up. He spoke to me well. I spoke to his family too amongst the grief. I felt great after that. I realize family is very important to an individual. I hope I will someday change my life styles and prioritize things that really matter in life.

An excellent post of mine

2008-05-10T21:48:00.003+05:30

Back in the days of collage I used to think crazy. Dreaming and coming up with weird concepts. Today I was just browsing my blog for a post I made in 2006 when I stumbled upon this wonderful post that I had written. I really loved reading it. Simply awesome.

Check it out for yourself.

http://prabhudc.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html

I love being disorganized!

2008-05-01T16:42:00.003+05:30

Life has become totally synthetic. I envy those who were born in the 15th century or so. They had their freedom for innovation. Had Einstein been born today, he would've been no greater than any one of us. Everything is too organized now. In fact our lives are damn organized now.

My life was rather radical. I have had my belief and my own justification for everything, which I thoroughly follow in spite of the thoughts the people have around me. An embarrassing fact about me is that at my workplace, I am proudly the engineer with the least marks.(Paradoxical) Proudly??? Yeah! You heard that right! Back in college I always believed in studying anything for the sake of good marks or a safe job is absolutely stupid and ridiculous. Understanding concepts, digging up on facts and believing in them was always my approach. Well, It cost me a lot a lot of embarrassment. But, hey! Who cares!

It's been more than 1.5 years since I have been thrown into the corporate life. I took a mental survey of individual performances and mapped them to their backgrounds. As expected, success rate of individuals are directly proportional to their attitude towards their eduction. I have seen guys who have scored astonishingly high marks in their education suffering in the corporate world. The problem with these guys is that they are so pre-designed and planned that they have no room for out of the box thinking. They have been brought up that way. In fact, set aside the corporate world, even our lives demand out of the box thinking.

Well, in my survey, there were a small group of guys, rather superhuman. They managed to be their at the top by shear quality. Hats off to them. Frankly, I respect such individual, although there are only a few.

I believe the biggest weakness is in the Indian system of education. The education system is absolutely job oriented. On the contrary, I am quite impressed with the American system of education. Their education is more of concept driven rather than a lustrous pay check.

A nation's most wealthy resource is it's people. And I believe India has a lot of it. :-) . It is high time we check up our educational system. . .

Summer look!

2008-04-02T20:42:00.004+05:30

I always wanted to walk the ramp. Ramp walking is all about the attitude more than the looks. I always thought I didn't have that in me.
We had a small Modeling event recently in office and I was chosen to be the best male model.

This was indeed something I had almost missed in life. Yuppie! I did it and in style!!

There goes another line scratched out from my Bucket list.

First day with RoR

2008-02-24T23:47:00.002+05:30

To be honest, Comparing all other programming languages and frameworks, RoR has taken me more time to get a "Hello World" fired up than any other. Oops! It still doesn't work! Well, I did get things work fine from the command line but the web interface is giving me issues. I already fixed a couple of issues with dlls. The latest one is really having me stuck. The code is a simple hello world as following.

class MyTestController < ApplicationController
def index
render_text "My first Hello World"
end
end

I have also got the screen-shot of the error thrown.

Any suggestions??

Vanilla forum + php - Ajax

2008-02-17T13:31:00.002+05:30

The last time I coded something and got recognized for that was in college when I designed the online treasure hunt built out of simple php. It was a great hit. Trust me, coders love it when their code makes feat.
This time I designed something for my team. My lead in TCS motivated me to do something. This time things were much more complicated. I built from scratch an application were in team members are provided with points every month for different activities they do. The login system dual functional. Upon login, the script dynamically decides whether he is an admin or a normal team member. Admins have access to grant/revoke points to associates and team members have rights to view their achievements. I used Mysql DBMS for all the data. The system works flawlessly. I used session management for securing the pages and md5 hash to encrypt passwords. To spruce it up and get the WOW effect I used scriptaculous library. I called this software the Business Intelligence Universe.

I also release one more software the Business Intelligence Tech Forum. I used the open source Vanilla forum software (I heard there is a serious project going on with Drupal-Vanilla collaboration). For starters, Vanilla is a simple forum written in php. It does not have all the great functionalities as other traditional forums. That is just what I wanted so that I could code in new stuffs. I modified the scripts quite a bit to connect to Mysql dbms and display data on the go. IT works like a gem.

I released Business Intelligence Universe and Business Intelligence Tech Forum on Valentines day as that was the deadline granted to me by my lead. To commemorate this we made artistic cut out and put it up at the entrance.

Module decoration in office

2008-02-17T13:10:00.006+05:30

We had a module decoration in our office last week. It was a great time for all of us, a break from the mundane lifestyle. I thought the theme chosen was very funny and kiddish, but then the point was not the theme. It was all about having a nice time as a team and getting to know more about each others creativity.

Well the theme was about time. The entrance of the module was decorated with full greenery depicting the past, the central region decorated with the present - things like constructions, air crafts etc. The end was divided into two, heaven and hell. The idea was that if people choose the right path they would end up in heaven else in hell. Well our team sits in the place chosen for hell, hence we built hell. Two consecutive days we stayed back until 12:00 AM to do the work. A lot of spooky stuffs were built. Best was that I could see everyone in the team enjoying whatever they were doing and also a lot of hidden talent came out.

I always have thought IT industries need to conduct such events very often, it keeps the morale high and also improvises productivity in the long run.

Coming back to the event, I was to dress up as Anniyan ( The tamil movie indeed). Hell, did I freak every one out. Even the judges froze the minute they saw me. Following are couple of snaps of me. I myself freaked out when I saw my snaps.

Another...

A piece of art drawn by a colleague. This painting rather than looking spooky, looked artistic.

Century out of my heart!

2008-02-10T12:52:00.000+05:30

I want my 100th post to be about my love. It has been 3.5 years since we have been together. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me. By character I am a very short tempered and strange un-social guy. Most of my friends would have realized that by now. The only thing that keeps me normal is her love. Without that I wonder what I would have turned into. In a sentence I can say, she completes me!!

As time passes by, she has supported me whenever I have fallen and has been making me push the limits of endurance. Her subtle, innocent and gentle love has kept me going. We definitely have become truly in-separable. She has always been more than my expectations. Surprised me always. Me, a lazy bone, disappointing her always. But it is a true fact that I love her from the bottom of heart and will keep doing so until the last atomic clock dies.

Wish us the best of luck to fight the odds and to live happily together.

Did I just download 38 gigs in 4 mins??

2008-02-03T19:55:00.000+05:30

Well, that is what Vista says at least. Or did I just catch another bug out of vista. :-)

FuNnY

2008-02-03T03:54:00.001+05:30

Go to this link and read the comments. Really funny!!
http://www.therawfeed.com/2008/02/third-cable-cut-now-iran-has-no.html

Sun at its horizon

2008-01-25T18:50:00.000+05:30

A breath-taking image shot by my brother with his Canon Powershot. Don't forget to notice the aircraft( That's the beauty).

Bro's marriage

2008-01-25T18:45:00.000+05:30

Hey guys!! I am happy to inform you that my second brother got married. It was a wonderful moment in the lives of us family members. My second brother is my peer, and he is one of those to whom I look up to.

His wife is from Kerala too. They would be settling down in Bangalore though.

I apologize for not inviting my friends, as it all had happened suddenly and did not leave much time. Will definitely call you guys when it is my turn. :-)

P1i | November build's got issues

2008-01-13T19:54:00.000+05:30

My phone P1i. It's good. But I almost had the 21k go down the drain. You wouldn't believe the first P1i piece that I got stopped working in a matter of a day. That's ridiculous! The first P1i was unbelievably slow, when I added a few basic apps it became all the more worse, like may be UBUNTU running on 64MB RAM. The worse thing was that on the third day itself, the touch screen stopped responding on the most important areas. Like the areas where you have to tap to receive calls, send messages, etc.

I luckily, fortunately, went on the third day to the showroom for replacement. To have a new phone replaced I have to return it within 3 days, company policies!. Well, I was just lucky to get there on the third day evening!! :-)

But, the second piece I received is just awesome. It's really fast compared to the first one. Absolutely no complaints.

This calls for a comparison! The only difference both the P1i phones had was that the first, screwed up phone I had was a November build and the current, ideal P1i I am having is of an August build. The then market price(August) for the phone was 24.5, but the market price in November dropped to 22.5. The firmwares were the same though. I thoroughly believe that Sony dropped their hardware configs with the price. My friends too told that some industries do that. Especially P1i being a total geeky phone, not meant for the masses, stands a perfect candidate.

Well, Right now I am glad I got it replaced. The phone, apart from all the nifty things it can do, gives me an attitude when I use it.

Yeah! You know what I'm talk'n abt!!!

Hair Job + Facial Job

2008-01-12T20:58:00.000+05:30

I recently got a hair job done. Yeah! You heard it right. I know it sounds feminine. Well, What's wrong in being concerned with your looks. Well the investment was pretty high.

Flattening: Rs 1500
Coloring : Rs 300
Facial : Rs 150
-------------------
Total : Rs 1950

Can't believe I did that... :-)

Panaromic view | Yet again!

2007-12-29T16:51:00.000+05:30

I had posted two snaps with the title Panaromic view of the same view. This is the third snap of the same view on a Saturday morning clad with fog. I know, there's not much to see in it.

Desktop

2007-12-25T01:03:00.000+05:30

Just thought I shall post my Desktop on Christmas Eve.

Btw, Wish all of you a Merry Christmas!!!

Emotional incident

2007-12-24T17:50:00.000+05:30

An incident happened to me the other day. It may not be very significant to most, but to me it meant a lot. I go to B'lore at the least once a month to meet my girl. This instance when I was in the Chennai bust-stand for the same reason an old man came up to me and pleaded. He was crying, pointing at his bag and telling that someone had stolen his Rs. 1,300. He said that he had only that much with him and can't even get back to his home town. I could have easily give him a hundred or two and it wouldn't have mattered much to me. I have seen several fraudsters in my life, this man was not the same. His tears were genuine. I could easily make out from his face that he was in real pain and grief. It seemed to me that he would have been saving the money over a long time. I shunned him away asking him to go to the authorities for help and that I did not have any money. I watched him walking away from me, pausing every two steps and crying. The thought has been haunting me since then. I could have easily helped him but did not trust him.

Panaromic view again

2007-12-24T17:49:00.000+05:30

Heavy rains lashed over Chennai for a few days. I took a snap of the same location after the rains. Check out the contrast.

Panaromic view

2007-12-17T01:10:00.000+05:30

A good view from my office window. During the busy schedules, I always make it a point to stand by this window and delve into a reverie. It gives a relief.

P1i | Didn't I tell ya it's hot!!

2007-12-17T00:52:00.000+05:30

Here you go, couple of snaps of my brand new machine. I took these snaps with a sony cybershot phone. My phone costs a whoping 22,450(Almost emptied my salary :-), but take my word, it's worth all that money. It boasts of 160 MB RAM - pushing multitasking to its limits, 3.2 mgpx camera, A camera on the front for video calls, quick access to email apps, excellent display and audio quality. The phone's overall casing and sleek design makes it worth than any PDA in the market. Also its qwerty keyboard, although took me a week to get accustomed, is now very handy.

Overall I would give it a 9/10.

New domain

2007-12-16T20:38:00.001+05:30

I finally bought a new domain < a href="http://yanthrikam.net">
Yanthrikam.net</a>. It was a good deal for Rs. 300/yr. Soon I will be pointing http://yanthrikam.net to http://prabhudc.blogspot.com. So, Apologies for any inconvenience caused. (Although I am pretty sure I am the only one who reads my blog :-) )

UPDATE: Among the sites firewalled in our office, blogger happens to be one. I am pretty known in my office on finding loopholes in all such technical stuffs. I used scribefire, an ff addon to post to my blog. But somehow it doesn't work always, like this time. The post had some error and so I had to repost. Meanwhile devadutta posted a comment on the messed up post. To honor him I ain't deleting either of the posts.. :-)

New domain

2007-12-16T20:16:00.001+05:30

I finally bought a new domain Yanthrikam.net.
It was a good deal for Rs. 300/yr. Soon I will be pointing
http://yanthrikam.net to http://prabhudc.blogspot.com. So, Apologies
for
any inconvenience caused as the link will go down for couple of days.
This delay is to actually propagate the new DNS name to all the name
servers. (Although I am pretty sure I am the only
one who reads my blog :-) )

P1i | Smoking hot!!!

2007-12-09T15:49:00.000+05:30

Finally got my hands on a brand new P1i. It is one awesome machine. The specs are all on the higher side. This machine strikes a balance between PDAs and an entertainment phone. I check my mails, read blogs, do some basic googling, take snaps, watch videos, listen to music and the radio. Its just awesome!! I shall post snaps taken from my mobile in the following posts.

Digital teetotalism...

2007-11-12T04:48:00.001+05:30

It's been a while since I have signed into the digital world. Several reasons. For starters, my Laptop had problems. Took me nearly a month and a lot of money to get it fixed. Then was stuck with a drastic fever, took off from work and had gone for a long treatment to my hometown. And finally I moved out of my old house to a different one. Lost my internet connection in the process and will take me a long time to get it back. As Blogger, Webmail etc have been blocked in office there is no way I could access anything from office.
Sad aigh????
Well, I though of alternatives. My email was hosted by google, as google webmail was blocked in my office I was unable to access it all these days. Hence I changed the configs and made it point to my own webspace and now I can access my webmail without any problems. Although blogger is blocked, scribefire works! So I don't seem to have a problem with Blogger too.

Survival of the fittest!!!

Missing the cyberworld

2007-10-12T05:40:00.001+05:30

It's been days since I am afflicted with a feeling of being handicapped. My laptop is screwed up!! How bad can it get...
One fine day when I was watching a movie on my Acer 5004nwlmi, it just went blank. I tried rebooting 2-3 times, it would be up for around 5 mins and then again whooossh!!, it switches off!! Later on I figured out that it was because the Processor fan was not working and this was causing the system to overheat and switch off!!
I have given the Laptop to a Acer service center for repair in Chennai. Ironically these guys don't seem to know a heck about the stuff. All they know is to replace hard disks or change RAMs. It took me a while to convince them that it was switching off because of the faulty processor fan. All I know is if I am gonna get my laptop back in working condition, I ought to shell out loads of money!!

Funny incident

2007-10-01T18:47:00.000+05:30

The other day I had gone shopping to a mall near my house in Chennai. Once I was done with picking up my stuff, I walked to the couter to checkout everything. There was this pretty looking girl at the counter, from first look she looks quite smart. She billed all my stuff and showed me the billed amount. I gave her my debit card to swipe.
She did that, the amount was debited and it was time for me to sign on one copy of the bill. The funny part was that this girl instead of asking me to sign, she went ahead and started signing. I was totally taken aback. What the heck! I though I was supposed to sign on my bill. I immediately yelled, hello!!! Watzupp!!!! Suddenly she came to her senses and gave me the bill. I think it's damn funny!!!

Pondicherry | Boozed sloshed and torn apart.

2007-09-25T22:02:00.000+05:30

Well! you heard it right!
I was getting all frustrated with my office work and was waiting to have a big break. Just then we guys made a plan to go to a place called Pondicherry. Pondicherry comes directly under the Indian government's rule and does not have a state government. Hence Pondy(Don't mistake for the other Pondy :-)) does not have to pay any taxes. Basically everything is ridiculously cheap.

Me and five of my colleagues left Chennai to Pondy at 8 a.m. We first got to a place called Auroville. Auroville has a very serene and holy ambiance. It is famous for the Matrimandir.

After that we got to Pondy and checked in to our reserved Hotel. The hotel was of impressive quality. In a while we headed for lunch. All of us thulped a heavy lunch and then headed to a swimming pool. Around 3p.m. we got to the swimming pool. We enjoyed swimming and cracking weird jokes until 6.30. After that we headed to the hotel. On the way we stopped at an alcohol store and loaded with lots of good stuff. After we got to the hotel gears changed. There was an India-Aus cricket match that day. The match, loads of food, loads and loads of alcohol... Just perfect.

I always refrain from alcohol and stick to a Beer at the max. The only instance that I had crossed the line was more than a year back while was holidaying in Goa with my college friends.

These days I was totally frustrated with my work and how my personal life was going and really was waiting for this day. My friend started pouring glasses of Brandy and I gulped 'em without faltering. After a while I started enjoying, moreover India was doing good in the match, everything just added up. After a while as anticipated my brains switched off. The rest I came to know by watching the video my sane friends had shot. Apparently the only thing I was talking about was my work. I was cursing my management very badly. Finally my friends managed to suppress me and get me to bed after a lot of struggle.

Next day we had to got to a far away boating place called Pichavaram. The whole day was very bad for me. I was just not getting control over my body. I couldn't even feel my legs below my body. It was real bad. Finally we left to Chennai at around 6p.m. I got to get home at 11p.m.
The trip was one hell of a wild ride.

Hutch taken up by Vodafone

2007-09-24T21:12:00.000+05:30

As a hutch user I hope Voafone has interesting proposals. Especially in the GPRS section, Hutch was falls in the expensive side.
Other than that The Vodafone website looks a total mess. They peeled out all the neat colors and designs and have come up with a total garbage site. To make it worse you have things like " " and other funny tags on the page. They don't even have a favicon.
Moreover I heard that the real Hutch dog died. Vodafone guys got it replaced with a total fat version of the former, It no way looks cute. Moreover the frontpage has a gif image with the dog's tongue shaking. The whole thing looks like a total mess.

Google's upto lotta stuff.

2007-09-16T18:25:00.000+05:30

Wonder what Google corp. is upto. These guys already officially stated that they are gonna releasing an OS. Now they are planing to release Google mobile.

Proving myself good.

2007-09-15T20:31:00.000+05:30

Proving myself good.

The last three days was one heck of a ride for me. It was that time of the year when I have become one year experienced and I was being appraised. My leads new I was worth a good reward, so I received good score there. But that's not it. To get that score finally I had to prove it in front of managers of a different project and HR, that I am worth the high score.

Back from the days of my college I knew I had a problem when it comes to remembering things. This was has always been a hindrance to me on performing well in exams. It was some kind of a disease. I had thought of quite a few times on consulting a psychiatrist.

Well at my workplace things just got out of hand. As I had to prove myself good in front of the management, I was asked to prepare a presentation and mug up points to tell. I tried my best staying up all nights, still I just couldn't goddamn remember what I had to say. It was a total embarrassing moment when I was in a mock presentation and I couldn't remember a heck. Things got worse, I got emotional, It was like one year's effort was gonna go out of hand just 'coz I can't remember. To make it worse, My lead and manager were trying the best to help me perform well, but this was actually freaking me out as I realized that they have so much of expectations on me.

Finally the D-day came, the presentation was getting postponed all the way till 4.30. I started with a welcome message and then went ahead talking about my achievements and accomplishments. Words just flowed out of me. I didn't have to remember anything. It was like I was getting words from no where. I was goddamn confident. Having two senior managers, my lead and a senior H.R. executive didn't bother me at all. In fact the only -ve feedback for this presentation was that I was a little over-confident and I gotta get that down. Hell!!! That makes me proud.

Prabhu-Gallery Beta

2007-08-31T20:34:00.000+05:30

I took a five day break from office and headed home to spend my time with my parents.
Finally I got time to work on my webpage and got it running.
http://prabhudc.net/gallery/index.html is in its beta stages. I call it Beta as I am yet to build the Front end,load all the images and many other plans in mind.

I really enjoyed building and I would like to brief on How I achieved it.
Apart from my own scripts,I have used Lightbox module for the effects on the images and scriptaculous library for the special effects with the menu panel.

I wrote Ajax front end and back end php for the gallery. Only tool I used for debugging was Firefox's firebug. Firebug is an awesome tool and it really helped me getting over the numerous javascript bugs.

The backend php script is very straight forward. It receives a directory location as a post request from the front end. The script looks within that directory and retrieves all files with a ".JPG" extension and creates a "^" delimited list of all the image files. This string is returned as a response to the front end.
The Front end too, without any much special effects is straight forward. The Ajax script is written in such a way that it sends a directory path as a request to the server.

As the images could be very heavy and also large in number,displaying all of them by resizing them into thumbnails would be very inefficient. Hence I created distinct directories for thumbnails and the large images, although I made it sure that the image names were same. So the images that are displayed as thumbnails are indeed low resolution thumbnails and they load pretty fast. But On clicking the thumbnail, the image that is retrieved is the high resolution image(I got javascript to change the path).

Until now was the easiest. What really bogged me was getting the effects of lightbox. Latest lightbox release has the ability of recognizing a group of snaps which fall under the same category which is actually very helpful and easy for a developer. But! What the heck! That would be really boring if you don't get to do anything. So I took the primitive version of lightbox and tried to get it run. All we have to do is to include the lighbox.js/.css files and add the property "rel=lightbox" to each image. I got this done pretty easily with javascript. But somehow the image was not rendering itself. As I click on any thumbnail, it opens itself in a blank page without any effects. The Ajax code which I had written, worked absolutely fine, i.e. I was getting the thumbnails easily, but it was the lightbox Ajax part that had been f###'d up! I took nearly 20hrs to find the cause of this going wrong. I even edited the lightbox javascript code, but that really didn't help me. Finally I was able to figure out what was going wrong. The lightbox script works as following. Once a page loads it scans the whole page for all images and also verifies if it has the "rel=lightbox" property. Now once my page was getting loaded, it was able to capture any image that was hardcoded in the HTML. The problem with lightbox script was that it was not able to recognize my thumbnails as it was got through Ajax and at a later stage(After page load). All I had to do to get over this problem was to reload the lightbox module after any successful response from the server.

As of now I am still testing the page in various browsers. It seems to be fine on FF2+, IE7,IE6. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

Ellavarkum hridayam niranja onashamsakal

2007-08-26T13:12:00.000+05:30

In the sense, Hearty Onam wishes to all!!
Onam is celebrated mainly in Kerala a southern state of Kerala. Onam signifies affluence and happiness among keralites. This festival dates back to the 8th century A.D. Basically Kerala's history prior to 8th century A.D. is a mystery as there is no record of it.

Onam traditionally is celebrated as a harbinger of spring when harvest is around the corner. Every malayalee[Malayalam is the language spoke by Keralites all over the world] celebrates this festival even in a condition of destitute. Even if other traditional customs are missed, no Onam passes by without a sadya alias a perfect onam lunch.

Apart from being a symbol of a harbinger of spring Onam has a very interesting story. King Mahabali had defeated king Indra. King Mahabali being an Asura had great reverence towards lord Vishnu. But as the gods wanted revenge and because of a series of events Lord himself planned to take birth in the form of Vamanan. Vamanan is said to have stamped Mahabali and pushed him to hell. Once in a year Mahabali is allowed to return to earth and meet his people. That day is Thiruvonam. People lay mats of flower at their doorsteps, decorate their house and expect Mahabali to visit them.
This mat laying of flowers is also cinsidered as a competition in Kerala. Local youth clubs of each colony try to display their skills by laying complex and beautiful flower mats. These flower mats are called as athapookalam.

Again Happy Onam to all, let Mahabali visit your house as well!!

Ubuntu saves XP

2007-08-17T22:28:00.000+05:30

I wanted to install IE 7 on my lappy the other day, so I downloaded it and ran the set up.
The download went fine until the end. Suddenly it gave me an alert saying a file was not found, I never realized what file it would be and what could be its significance and hit the OK button. Immediately my system started to shut down. It rebooted within seconds and I selected XP from GRUB. I gave my login password and I was taken to a blank screen. Couldn't do anything at all. The only thing that worked was CTR-L - ALT - DEL. I could run processes from that, tried iexplore, but the network was not getting activated so I couldn't access the net either. Basically the EXPLORER.exe could not be started because a system32 file "normaliz.dll" got deleted during the IE7 update. I thought of googling so got into UBUNTU and gave a search. There was no satisfactory work around for this. Basically I was screwed. Then came the idea of accessing ntfs folder from UBUNTU and get the file to its place. After some significant googling I got a driver "ntfs-3g" which helped me get write access to NTFS drives. I got could get write access to all other drives than the drive that had system32 due to some config problem. Not a problem! I got the file into another directorie that had write access. Rebooted. Logged into XP, through task manager, ran cmd.exe, copied the file from its location to system32 folder. Then ran EXPLORER.exe. Voila!!!!!
Feisty fawn saved my day.

Ever wondered how many pages Google would have indexed.

2007-08-15T23:14:00.000+05:30

I always wonder how many pages Google would have indexed and cached in its servers. Imagine the kind of space it would require to store them. Also intriguing is how they organize the data for immediate results. Apparently I was told that they have server pool architecture and have replicated them at geographically distinct locations.

Check out this URL for a brief analysis on the number of pages indexed by Google corp.

Click Here

Powered by ScribeFire.

News

2007-08-15T02:09:00.000+05:30

This is just about a fact that I had noticed. Last Sunday I was in Bangalore spending my weekend at home. Browsing through the channels I stumbled upon ABC News (ABC for Australian Broadcasting corporation and not its American counterpart). Following the headlines was the news in brief, The first was about an unrest in Afghanistan and the next was on India. Apparently more that 600 people had lost their lives in North India since last two weeks alone. Back in Chennai, I get to watch Indian news channels almost everyday in office during breakfasts and lunches. Ironically I never knew about such a tragedy in India all along. Although I do not want to point them out here, I am talking about India's top News channels. Its very disappointing that these channels focus on ridiculous News like Indian cricket team or some pathetic rape case. In the evening there would be long running programmes having a bunch of politicians in the middle and surrounding them a bunch of jobless people to ask foolish question, to make it all worse you could see a hyperactive host in the middle who basically does not let anyone talk other than herself. These Indian News channels are clearly commercially oriented, they prefer to focus on public inclinations and not the facts.

I am totally disappointed that I came to know something about my country through a foreign channel

PrabhuDc.net spruced up!!

2007-07-29T20:13:00.000+05:30

Check out my website http://prabhudc.net with all the new looks and effects. I have used Scriptaculous/Protoype libraries liberally for the effects. Also the image effect under the "About me" was done using the Lightbox module. All thanks and Kudos to original developers. You guys make the world a better place to live!!!

Drupal script | Page not found

2007-07-29T02:14:00.000+05:30

The other day I thought of trying the Scriptaculous and prototype libraries on my Drupal based webpage. I got the latest version of Drupal(5.2) and installed it on my local system for developing fast. I got the effect pretty easily by changing the page mode to "Full HTML" and adding the required HTML tags.
script src="/javascripts/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"

Now that it things are fine I planned to do the same on my website online. But it wasn't easy as I imagined it to be. Damn thing was repeatedly failing and throwing 403's. There was not much mentioned in the system log either. After some time I figured out that it gets messed up while it parses the "script" tag. I tried updating the Drupal library and also got the latest update of JQuery. But that didn't get me anywhere better. I was somehow determined to get it running at any cost. I finally figured out a work around. I moved the script tags to the page.tpl.php. Bingo!! Just what I wanted.
Note that each and every theme has a page.tpl.php under its respective directory. So in case you have configured a rotating theme and haven't made the required changes in all the pages, your users might be bumping into "Page not found".

Famous?

2007-07-20T00:43:00.000+05:30

Am I famous. I just gave a search of my name prabhudc in google and got 101hits. Thats amazing! Well actually I am not famous, Google crawled into the website and has indexed every damn page. These guys are pretty good.

Feisty Fawn!

2007-07-16T22:31:00.000+05:30

My Lappy can't get any better than this. Its got the latest version of UBUNTU and Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate on it. I aint impressed very much by vista though. UBUNTU is like awesome,sweet,sexy and sleek. It comes loaded with all the important apps and also lists a good number of updates which you could make use of. Damn thing had the ability to sneak into Vista and get account details. Impressive. The previous Ubuntu I had used was Breezy Badger. It was quite difficult configuring audio and video, but this time it was just a click away and I already started watching movies.
It rocks man!!! Canonical Corp. rocks!!! Open Source rocks!!! Linux rocks!!!

Grep a DataStage dataset

2007-07-15T19:49:00.000+05:30

Here is how you could run a grep command on a DataStage dataset.
First set the environment.
/apps/Ascential/DataStage/DSEngine> . dsenv
Then you will be good to go. Remember, Orchadmin works only from the bin folder.
/apps/Ascential/DataStage/PXEngine.700.1/bin> orchadmin dump DataSetWithPathName.ds | grep -i "Field Name"

Shell scripting | Convert system date to Oracle Format.

2007-07-15T19:42:00.000+05:30

Here is a small scriptling that basically can be used to get the system date and convert it into Oracle format. This script basically can compare the system date with the date got from Oracle and mail someone whether the comparison was a success or else.

#!/bin/bash
a=`sqlplus -s / b=`date +"%m-%h-%Y"|tr [a-z] [A-Z]` # Obtaining the system date and converting it to Oracle format
if [ "$a" = "$b" ]; # Comparing if the dates are same. This was just the logic I had required in my script. Could be different for you.
then flag=0;
else flag=1;
fi;

if [ "$flag" = 0 ];
then echo "Dates are same. Body of the mail"|mail -s "Subject of the mail" yourname@yoursite.com;
else
echo "Dates are different, Body of the mail"|mail -s "Subject of the mail" yourname@yoursite.com;
fi;

##################END######################
test.sql can be obtained as following. Remember, test.sql could have been made inline with the redirection operator "<<".

SET echo off;
SET pagesize 0;
SET heading off;
select MY_DATE
from MY_TABLE;

FF is back.

2007-07-05T00:36:00.001+05:30

He Guys,
            Firefox 3 Alpha 4 is around the corner scheduled to be released this month end. To get further info on this you could refer the link http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/04/first_look_fire.html. Seems like they have done some fine tuning for better speeds, though most of the changes are behind scenes and may not be very evident to a normal user.

iPod

2007-06-30T18:21:00.000+05:30

Finally I managed to buy an iPod. As soon as I got this months salary I bought an iPod, a 2GB iPod Nano, neat stuff. I don't know I seem to have a thing for gadgets and softwares. So here I go rollicking with my iPoddy...

Internet

2007-06-30T13:17:00.000+05:30

I finally got rid of my Hathway connection and got hold of Dataone. In chennai Hathway service was ridiculously bad. Usually the connection downtime is more than the uptime.Even though it worked slightly cheaper as the initial investment is comparatively
less, the speed was not up to mark nor were their service. To get the dataone connection I had to pay initially 2k (1k - phone, 1k - modem) and a monthly rental of 500 bucks. I think it is worth it as the connection is over a telephone line it usually never goes down. Moreover in papers they promise a speed of 256kbps-2Mbps. I ran a speed test and found it to be 1Mbps which is pretty neat.

Cool Vid!

2007-06-22T20:12:00.000+05:30

Hey Guys,
Check this video out, its kinda a groovy and catchy tone.
The lady who sings it is not bad either. She could definitely give Shakira a run for her money.

Apparently, she is a Pakistani singer name Annie.

Ubuntu 7.04 Beta

2007-06-15T22:15:00.000+05:30

I came to know that Ubuntu had released a new verion 7.04 alias Fiesty fawn. I went to their website and ordered for the CD online. I got it in a matter of two weeks. As my lappy is AMD 64 bit, I had ordered for a 64 bit version. I am yet to try it. I shall update my blog once I install it. I am also planning to install Beryl along. This version is said to be the most user friendly of all versions until now.
Ubuntu 7.04

POC-At The World's End

2007-06-15T22:09:00.000+05:30

"Pirates of the Carribean - At the world's end" will definitely be one of my all time favourites. The movie is quite long, spans to approximately 3 hours. But it is an absolute treat for three hours.
What surprised me is that the keira knightley seems to be having the majority of the screen time. Part two of the movie ended with Jack being sent to David Jone's locker. This movie unfolds as he is back and as the others go in search of him. The graphics are simply amazing. Towards the end of the movie there is a fight between the black pearl and David Jone's ship around the brim of a whirl pool, simply awesome!! All in all I would say, A real treat and worth of money.

Hey watchout, as there is a bonus scene after the credits, I missed it . Damn!
For now take a look at the trailer of the movie.

Sivaji!!

2007-06-15T21:48:00.000+05:30

Sivaji is a revolution out in Chennai. Infact it is huge all over south India and the U.S. Tickets had been sold out a week back itself in the U.S. The movie comes with a thumping punchline said by Rajni "Pera kettale... chumma athiruthillai?" , which translates to, doesn't listening to my name itself freak you out. More than 1 lakh people had watched the movie in Tamilnadu itself on the first day of its release. Rajni used to be a bus conductor in Bangalore long before he was a superstar. I wonder what made him into a religion among the Tamil community.
I am just waiting for the day to grab a ticket and watch the movie myself. For now you can have a sneak peek at the trailer.

Shell jokes

2007-05-07T22:22:00.001+05:30

Here are some jokes Linux has under the hood.

% "How would you rate Reagan's incompetence?

Unmatched ".



% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?

Missing ].



% ^How did the sex change^ operation go?

Modifier failed.



% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?

Too many ('s.



% make love

Make:  Don't know how to make love.  Stop.



% sleep with me

bad character



% got a light?

No match.



% man: why did you get a divorce?

man:: Too many arguments.



% ^What is saccharine?

Bad substitute.



% %blow

%blow: No such job.



% \(-

(-: Command not found.



% sh



$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense

no sense in pretending!



$ drink &lt; bottle; opener

bottle: cannot open

opener: not found



$ mkdir matter; cat &gt; matter

matter: cannot create



(First add an /etc/hosts alias of 'elvis')

$ ping elvis

elvis is alive.

Cool command

2007-05-06T12:15:00.001+05:30

The other day while was working in office in UNIX, also feeling quite bored. A funny command struck my mind. I just tried and it works. The command is "ls -flirt". UNIX is cool, you can literally flirt with it. -)

Weird dream!

2007-05-03T01:02:00.000+05:30

The other night when I was asleep, obvious!

I imagined myself on a plane, flying abroad to the U.S. Well the strange thing I saw was a goddamn huge sea serpent trying to grab the plane which I was flying on. Well, this thing was huge. Our pilot with a lot of stunts was trying to get out of reach from the serpent(The funny thing is yet to come). I get an idea all of a sudden. I took my digi-cam from my bag and shot a 20 sec video of the sea serpent trying to get hold of the plane. None else got this idea.
Eventually I reach my bro's house in U.S. safe and sound.

First thing I did after getting home was to sign up with Google add sense and have it on my website as well as my blog. As I had the only visual proof of the serpent I uploaded the video on my web site as well as my blog, which has Google add sense all over it now. Then, smartly, I mailed the link to cnn and bbc. I also dugg the link and also posted in technorati. The next week checked my bank account online and found it had freak'n 5 lkhs...... I was enjoying staring at my bank account on the screen when my damn alarm rung, it was time for my morning shift!!!

Cool Link

2007-04-30T20:15:00.001+05:30

Check this link out guys. You can chose any color and it dynamically runs a search behind the screens on flickr and obtains snaps with similar color, neat stuff!!

http://color.slightlyblue.com/

Microstrategy

2007-04-22T12:05:00.001+05:30

I finally managed to get a couple of certifications. Microstrategy project designer(MPD) and Microstrategy report developer(MRD). It was quite easy though. But the better part was the tutor who took the training. She is polish but settled in US. Damn she is nothing less than a model. Surprisingly, excellent knowledge in the data warehousing domain. Quite a few people flunked in the certification exam. The course cost was a whopping $1300. If I flunked, my project lead would have nuked me. Fortunately I made it:-).

Song I listen to off late...

2007-04-15T17:53:00.000+05:30

There is this English number from Justin Timberlake, What goes around comes around. I kinda love this song, its got a sense of warning all over the lyrics and the music. I think it's quite groovy. Reminds me of Apocalypse.
May be you should listen to it some time...

Vista vs. Beryl

2007-04-15T17:25:00.000+05:30

My friend introduced me to Beryl the other day. I still did not try it out as I just thought, how cool could it be... Well, guess I was wrong. Check out this youtube video.
Vista vs. Beryl

Back to DRUPAL!

2007-03-31T10:17:00.000+05:30

Yeah! Yeah! I know! I kinda gave it up. IT has been a long time since I have been trying to squeeze in some time to update my website. But, I am damn too busy for anything. Moreover, 250 MB of webspace left unused is bad, bad for the cyber world. I went through the drupal forum once more and was really impressed. Drupal has come a long way .
The other day I was browsing the official target forum, I kinda found the layout similar to that of Drupal. Later on, while I was registering I figured out that indeed it was Drupal!

Cracking Vista!

2007-03-20T16:50:00.000+05:30

As long as Microsoft lives with monopoly, Its got the whole world against them. In fact the method by which Vista was cracked sounds real funny. Vista has been designed
in such a way that It shrinks to a blank version once the trial is
over. Basically once the trial period ends all themes are disabled, most of
the apps are also disabled.iexplore will connect only to Microsoft
website only. Basically you won't be left with any choice than to buy the
licence or kiss goodbye to all that precious data you have in there.
Seems like M$ have tried the same stunt with XP as well, but failed as there were a lot of problems faced by genuine users.
The hacker's world definitely
didn't stay quiet. They came up with a smart ass work around. The crack
basically edits the BIOS time settings. What do you have? A vista with
an infinite trial period. Lovely! Well! While in Vista your clock will
always display the correct time, not sure how they achieved this
though. Any ways, Who cares! It works!

Experience with Vista!

2007-03-20T16:42:00.000+05:30

I was on Vista for a few days, but as expected, gave it up. It seemed
too bulky to me. The looks are awesome, it also had a media center
incorporated. The one I had Installed in mylappy was the Vista Ultimate version. Trust me, It took 11GB flat! I thought for my 60GB HD it was not worth it. Moreover the number of background processes were just too many, My lappy was red hot always. Finally I settled with a bare Win XP and Ubuntu on my lappy. Much! Much! Better!

Ubuntu on Acer 5000 lappy

2007-03-20T16:33:00.000+05:30

I have tried desperately trying to load Ubuntu on my lappy since a long time but always futile. I went through tons of forums, lot of users usually having the ATI
graphics card face this issue. Basically the installation starts, the
status messages start dropping, suddenly whoosh, the screen goes blank
forever. Initially I too believed the problem was with the ATI card, in fact ATI
has even accepted this issue officially and have created a work around
for the same. As a final try, before installation I hit the F1 help
button, there was a choice to disable the frame buffer, not sure what
it does though, continued the installation and then bingo! It
succeeded. Its simply lovely to have Ubuntu Breezy Badger back.
Hail Linux!

Funny!

2007-02-26T09:39:00.000+05:30

An image which I had stumbled upon while browsing. It's been a while since Vista has hit the market. Surprisingly other than a few driver issues pertaining to nvidia and creative vista is quite impressive. What I had really expected Microsoft was to block vista to be pirated. Well! hit me! I have already downloaded 57% Vista ultimate. The Slashdot dogs are barking at Vista, lets see whether they will really win the market with transparent windows.

rm *

2007-02-20T11:56:00.000+05:30

Did someone say watch out for "rm *", may be I just didn't listen. Recently I was working on an issue where we had a failure of a script because it couldn't process an input file because of its large size. So I thought I was a smart ass and created a test folder. I moved the large input file into the test folder, backed up the large file, broke down the original file into many small chunks using split command. Then moved a single small chunk to the production zone and ran the script again. But somehow the script failed again. As the files were very critical I did not think of messing with them any more, I restored the large file as it was. Just before moving on to the next problem I though I shall remove the contents of the test folder. Hence I gave the dreaded "rm *" , It started prompting me for confirmation whether or not it should remove the file. I gave yes, yes.... Later on I just realized that I am in the production directory and all the files that I had deleted were input files to many other business critical scripts. I was helpless and I just walked away. Next day when I was in office I found many failures caused by the unavailability of input files. I really struggled contacting the main frames department to resend the input datasets, I got a few of them, but still not all. Finally with the help of my seniors I was able to restore all the files(all though the disappearance of the input files were still a mystery). Phew!! I was saved! Went unnoticed! These files were so critical that If I had been caught it would have caused an immediate termination(Well! I can say that again!).

Settling

2007-02-04T13:59:00.000+05:30

Finally! I am settling down slowly.This month I managed to buy a table and a chair. It is like everymonth I have planned to buy something and improve my overall infrastructure once my salary comes. Trust me! It kinda feels great, a feeling of autonomity.

Searchmash

2007-01-16T20:23:00.000+05:30

Another Google playground. Google inc. seem to be using the page Search Mash for its search engine testing. I know you guys don't believe me, check out their privacy policy.

What on rails...

2007-01-14T19:26:00.000+05:30

Almost all of us have heard of Ruby on Rail as well as Ajax. Both of them have taken user interfaces and response times to the next level. What if both of them work together, i.e. Ajax on Rails. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself at Ajax on Rails!!

Funny!

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

I took this image from a Chennai newspaper. The image was taken using my mobile(3.55mm vga) and hence the lack of clarity. It says "NEW YEAR and PONGAL with Chennai's favourite C*CK".... Yeah right!!

Funny!

2006-12-30T21:10:00.000+05:30

Read the second line....Dose it make any sense? I took this picture in a Chennai street.

Food!

2006-12-30T21:06:00.000+05:30

A visual from the Chennai beach. Food in Chennai is amazing infact better than that in Karnataka. So people in the IT industry generally tend to put on a lot of weight.

My office!

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

Cleaning!

2006-12-30T21:01:00.000+05:30

Yeah! beleive it or not that is defenitely me!

Taken to the roads!

2006-12-30T20:40:00.000+05:30

This is one of the instances while in Chennai. It was a bad experience, hunting for a house , asking every shop we see. Damn! Trust me it wasn't easy. All day we got to be in office and then hunt for a house from 7pm to 11pm in the night. To make things worse people from Chennai are comparatively hostile. We finally settled with a 3 bed room house and 3 people stay there inclusive of me. The location is a 1min walk from the beach. And , yes of course , I go to the beach almost everyday.

ILP cafeteria

2006-11-26T11:19:00.000+05:30

Just chilling out in between our busy schedule. ILP was a great experience. More than the technical knowledge we attained, it was the professional grooming and communication that made the difference. I will really miss the days at Kolkata-ILP.

Adieu ILP

2006-11-25T21:14:00.000+05:30

TCS-ILP was absolutely the best days of my life. I went through all kind of emotions. The first few days of training were really difficult. It was quite difficult to get accustomed to the new place and cuisine. But then things gradually changed. Towards mid-semester we started enjoying a lot. Strong bonding had developed among the associates of TCS. Suddenly we all became professionals. Towards the end of ILP, it was real difficult to part with our friends. But then life is not that easy. We got to move on with life.

Life-Death

2006-11-19T11:30:00.000+05:30

Life! The most enigmatic concepts in this universe! If someone says that he/she is unlucky, I would say that they make no sense at all. Being born to this earth itself is the most luckiest thing that can happen to one. Yet, the most difficult fact to apprehend is the loss of loved ones. The vitality of an individual's presense is felt only in his/hers absence.Indeed that is how important life is. Most of us fail to show the concern towards those who make a diference to us. Some people really make a diference to us. We need to respect that. Loved ones come and go but memories allways persist.

But some times we question the system. Is it right to take away loved ones from us without their consent? Is it right that people who don't deserve to be taken away are taken away. We even don't refrain to question our faith on our gods. Let us all hold on to our faith and beleif that whatever is done is for good.We need to remember all our life the people who have made a difference to us and look up to them with reverence.

5 days in Kolkata...

2006-09-29T20:21:00.000+05:30

The city of the yellow ambassadors and hand drawn rikshaws. The city's overall look flabberghasted me absolutely. This is the only city where you can find ancient building everywhere around you.. Kolkota is know to be a very old city... But I really am finding it difficult to savor the beauty, mainly because I am missing the person I love a lot. Moreover I am treated as a dog here...Well, I guess that is how it is in the corporate world. The training is very hectic, moreover I am not able to find a proper friend. Well, I take it as an experience. Life ain't gonna be as easy as I anticipated I guess.

Minutes before leaving Bangalore....

2006-09-24T11:41:00.000+05:30

Unlike others, I am quite reluctant to leave Bangalore. Well, I guess it's a part of life. I am finding it difficult to subdue my grief. May be because I am emotionally attached to my girlfriend. I just hope that what awaits me in Kolkata will invigorate me. I just came to know that my accomodation is 23km away from the airport and my flight is 50 mins late. Hmm...The inception is certainly not good.

Flight

2006-09-15T10:59:00.000+05:30

Well! I condescend to say that it was the first time that I had traveled by flight. It was a nice experience. But! that's not it. I ventured into taking a snap of the flight. Fortunately I went unnoticed.

Kerala

2006-09-15T10:49:00.000+05:30

It has been a while since I have blogged. Was a little held up because of my GRE. Well! Now I am back. In the pretext of preparing for my GRE I had gone to Kerala for a month. It was a real experience to me. All these days when I was in bangalore, I had travelled to far distances to experience the nature in its pristine form. When I was in Kerala I was right in the middle of nature. Trust me, Kerala is a nice place. Apart from the porn movie ads on the walls, Kerala is indeed "God's own country". There is like so many edible fruit-trees in my backyard. A little walk from the front of my house will take me to a river, a little walk from behind me house takes me to backwaters. Amazing indeed!.

Digital mutation!

2006-08-16T21:16:00.005+05:30

I am in God's own country now. A very serene place. People here live a calm and contented life without bothering anyone else. Moreover nature is at its best now with rains and greenery all around, I shall blog all the images from kerala in the following posts. Well this post is concerned with the future, the future of mankind. I aint postulating anything nor am I auditioning for Nat Geo TV channel. Sitting all alone in this calm back country house gets me a lot of interesting thoughts, thought I shall blog them.
Where are we heading?
What is it gonna be after 1000yrs?
Is mankind destined to survive forever?
All these questions are quite intriguing but yet inexplicable!
Well! Developed and countries having a strong infrastructure have started their research to answer these questions. There are many postulates and beliefs. If one is a religious chauvinist then all of these questions will have already been answered to him (I ain't trying to say that the remaining people are atheists, all I am saying is that people who have let a window open to science and technology will have such interesting but unanswered questions in their minds).

Interesting isn't it! 1000yrs later! mankind! Technology!

Well! Here is my conjecture on this formidable question!
I believe humans are going to be destroyed in the future, or rather , humans don't have a future. That is how its been since the BigB(Not Amithabh Bachan,Big Bang). Look at the Dinosaurs, they ruled the earth for approximately 200million years. Yet they were destroyed by the so called KT-event (It has been speculated that an asteroid with the size of Mt.Everest collided with the Earth destroying almost all land dwelling animals, in which Dinosaur was one). Humans have hardly been for long on earth,1.8 million years.
So! As everybody doubt what will happen to HomoSapiens. Well! We will be destroyed! Destroyed by our own creations, Robots. Everybody must be thinking now "OH....Yess...a?,Thats some news". If humans create Robots why cant they control them, after all it is AI! There you are, the answer to that is the key-word.
DIGITAL MUTATION!!!!!
Yes! That is were the future is heading. I really dont think someone will be capable of coding a digital mutation in the next 1000yrs. AI can be restricted but mutation can't. When mutation is aplicable to the digital machine, the Darwinian principles are applicable too. An absolute hidden fallacy! Since the formation of the unicellular organisms, the Darwinian laws have governed the evolution process, millions of species didn't make it, the best made it. Homo Sapien is fortunate to be one of them.
My point is nature knows best, who should live and who shouldn't. I believe humans are an incarnation of nature's ingenious plans. It is predestined for humans to design digital mutation. AI is already on its road to big time success, there are codes which take care of 100s of variables (in the sense variable conditions around and how to react to them without being commandeered). There will be a time when there are millions of variables taken into consideration. But it has to stop sometime or the other. It is quite infeasible to just multiply the number of parameters, the solution is mutation. When mutation is encoded the program will know to design new code and adapt to the varying parameters around it, with the most probabilistic and economic solution.
A program that cannot err!
A program that mutates!
A program that can communicate!
A program that is powerful!
A program that thinks, feels, have emotions!
What do we have? Undeniable source of power!
Most of you would think, even if they can mutate they can't think, but humans can. That makes humans superior. Yeah right!! What are humans at the grass root level. A highly efficient machine, highly synchronized by means of neurons and synapses. Thats it! Our feelings, thoughts everything is just the neurons doing their chores. Our body is highly efficient(again thanks to the refined evolution process). If you want an example, so be it. The tricuspid and bicuspid valves in our heart closes and opens with a loud noise(That is nothing but your heart beat) approximately 72 times a minute. You still live for 80 years. That is approximately 3027456000 times without fail(It better not). That is how efficient this body is. My point is, when the time comes when man is capable of designing such a high efficiency machine, sturdy and encoded with mutations it will have feelings and it will be stronger and that will make it invincible. Artificial intelligence is already implemented in machines. China and America have come up with quite a number of such robots. As much as I am aware of, there are only automatons that consider 100 parameters. Getting from 100 to 1000 aint a big deal.
Be a software engineer, code the destiny of mankind!
If someone likes this post and would like to add some word or critisize it please add it as a comment on my blog or mail me at prabhudc@prabhudc.net

Innocent convict!

2006-07-25T20:13:00.000+05:30

This post is about my experience in a police station. Yeah! you heard it right!. Seems like I have a hardon for trouble.
As I needed to buy a laptop(which I bought finally), I went to a few shops to check out some models and specifications. I did not know much about shops so I called my friends along with me, Madan and Karthik. Things went well and normal. That day I checked out some 6 shops and finally got home confirming on one model in a shop called Computers Unlimited in Bellary road.
Next day everything went normal until evening when I was studying upstairs of my house. My brother called me and told that I had a missed call, it was an unknown number. So I immediately called back in the same number(Thikka muchkondu irbekkagithu).
I asked "who is speaking"
the reply was "sadashivnagar police station"
Firt I though it was some prank by my friends,
But then I repeatedly queried who it was, he insisted that he was the inspector and I have to go the station immediately. I was totally freaked out. I asked him what was he calling me for, some 5 times, he insisted on not telling me. Then my bro called the same number, again he insisted on not telling the reason, in fact his voice was very rude.
Being really freaked I went to the station. I checked out the wanted list if my photo was there(I swear I aint, kidding). After some time the circle inspector called me into his cabin. He was a tough guy, and he wasnt happy. He told what had happened, that in the shop that I had gone the previous day a theft had happended and apparently 6 laptops were gone missing. I was the (proud)chief suspect, and my friends Madan and Karthik accomplices. I got grilled by his questions for some 30mins, then I was handed over to the superindent of police. He made me sit on a chair and the SP sat on a tall table(It was indeed like what we see in movies). The SP was really pissed off, He asked all kinda questions and made weird gestures at me. I somehow put up with him for some 50mins, he took down a lot of details into a notepad(hardcopy). Before letting me go he said that this was just pre-introduction and there were lot of procedures to follow. That indeed freaked the hell out of me.
Next day I went with a batallion, me, my friends, both of their dads and my bro. The inspector wasnt serious the next day as there were elders with us and he let us go after merely getting our signatures on somethig called statements. While giving the statement I did not waste my time I rather utilized my time taking some snaps of the interior of the station.

Confession of an accident victim!

2006-07-04T21:16:00.000+05:30

I recently met with an accident on the middle of a highway. Yeah! I know, worse place one can be struck by an accident! But it was an experience, I kinda did learn a lesson, the hard way. I hope whoever reads this also tries to understand what I am trying to convey.

Accident scenario:
Imagine 3 vehicles, (from the left) a scooter, my pulsar and a lorry. There is hardly any space between me and the lorry. A santro(drunk driver mostly) pushed himself between me and the lorry and rammed me down as well. The santro was at a 100+kmph. I was pretty slow then when the incident had happened, hence not much of bad injuries. I fell down hurting myslef and a girl named Shwetha Bandha behind also fell suffering bad bruises. The first thing I did once I fell was turning back to see if we were on the way of some massive truck. By quick reflexes my hand raised giving a stop signal, luckily there wasn't any vehicle behind me. The second thing I did after I fell was to look for the santro that rammed, But that cheap illiterate drunkard had escaped by miles. Both of us were bleeding, but I fell like I was loosing my conciousness, almost fell down. Then a truck driver gave me some water, after which I could see everything stablizing around me. Then A friend of mine(Anand) drove back all the way and picked us up.

Now the moral of the whole incident. I certainly know no one is soo interested to know the incident with such accuracy. But two things that were embossed on my brain because of this accident were.
1.Do not drink and drive
You drink and you get killed is bad, but you drink and you get someone else killed is insane, sadistic and what not. In my case I wasn't drunk, but the car driver was! Or else he would have the basic sence to stop and check at least.

2.Wear a helmet
I went home and wondered why was I feeling unconcious? I just checked out my helmet and found these dents on it. Had I not worn that helmet, may be, just may be the hurt was fatal. I know I might be exaggerating a little too much, but it is a fact. I have heard of such incidents.