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From Joy of Tech

Product launch celebration in office; With celebrity singers, senior management, Mandira Bedi, FREE FOOD, psychedelic Matrix green laser lighting...and of course me.

Google YUCK!!!

Google talk...sucks!!
So I had a problem with my BIOS and accidentally set my date to 2007. And Google talk doesn't allow me to login. What SHIT is this?!!
Yahoo Messenger doesn't have any problem.

Intel's new logo has a Samsung touch to it with the swoop above and below.

Hmmmm....Intel's VP Sales and Marketing, Eric Kim was in Samsung before he moved.

Mobile phones have become ubiqitous. Rare to find a person without a mobile phone. And like email is the killer application on the Internet, SMS is the killer app on mobile phones, at times preferred to making a call. So much, that Yahoo Messenger IM client supports it.

SMS is pretty reliable, and delivery is not delayed..unless of course the receiving phone is off.
But has SMS usage been restricted to sending mostly silly forwards between friends? I feel SMS can be used for more. A simple example is a self monitoring and reporting mechanism. A device monitors itself...and if it detects a fault then a SMS message can be sent to the appropriate persons to take appropriate action.

One example : The traffic lights fail at some place and the policemen who are currently around the place can be informed. They can then go to the spot and manually direct traffic till such time the lights are restored.

Well now one can say 'what if the person who received the message repudiates'. That is a lack of professionalism to say the least and that is not the point of discussion here.

Second: Consider the case of call centers, where employees are picked up from home. If there is a change in the driver, who is to do the pick up, then all people who are supposed to come in that vehicle can be immediately informed by SMS. Use a simple app on the PC to send the message to a distribution list and then the s/w can handle the rest. Infrastructure? May be needed..i dont know. Maybe this can prevent another Pratibha incident.

Third:Building on the previous one slightly. RFID the vehicles. And when it gets near a certain point the person to be picked up can be informed tht the vehicle is near, so he/she can go the the designated pick up spot.

Issues of privacy, security etc....i have no idea. Maybe there isnt something so critical for someone to be alarmed about.

Rambling over!!...now coffee time.

Bangalore's "town planners" have either learnt their town planning skills from nomadic people or are nomads themselves and hence inherited the knowledge.
How else can one explain the arbitrary nature of solutions they come up with to 'solve' the city's infrastructure problems.

Happened to see the trailer of a new hindi movie called Fight Club. No idea what it shares in common with Brad Pitt starrer Fight Club (1999). Will it be half as good as the original?

Just an arbitrary question.....Had this Manjunath, the whistle blower on the petrol adulteration menace, not been an IIM graduate...would there have been the same hue and cry over his death?
Same question on the IIT graduate Satyendra Dubey who exposed corruption in roadworks.

Is it that only IIT-ians and IIM-ians have the integrity in the world?
Would the same noise be generated if the whistle blower had been from some less known institute?

Happened to see The Lion King over the weekend. For some reason...whenever I see Pumbaa the warthog, I am reminded of only one person (no offence meant).



Update :
This person reminds me of Timon the meerkat.



Hakuna Matata!!

Niels Bohr - 26
Wolfgang Pauli - 21
Werner Heisenberg - 23
Alber Einstien - 26
Paul Dirac - 24
Alan Turing - 26
Donald Knuth - 25
John von Neuman - 23

The number next to the name is the age at which the person obtained his PhD.
Going by those numbers.....I am a failure!!! :-(

Tour de France, or Tour de Lance?

Someone hit me. Hit me hard. Punch me in the face even.
I need the pain. I need it to take my mind of other things.

Book Tag Stuff

I got tagged 3 times over on this, by Sanket, Mandar and Ambar( All three were supposed to defend their Master's thesis yesterday. Hope this isn't an obit post to them :-D). So I finally decided to put up this book tag meme.

Number of books I own: I have no idea. Most of the books I have are those that I have borrowed.
Then there are Project Gutenberg, Univ. of Virginia online library and the Univ. of Adelide online library.
Why buy, when you can borrow or download.

First book ever: The first few books I read were the Hardy Boys stories in school. The first fiction novel I read must be Kane and Abel.

Last Book Read:
Fiction: Animal Farm.
Non-Fiction: Get better or get beaten. Something to do with Jack Welch strategies for GE's phenomenal success when he was heading the company.

Five Books which mean a lot to me: Hmmmmm.
This seems to be a question out of the movie High Fidelity. Anyways...

Collection of O'Henry short stories. Currently reading. Very good.
Animal Farm.
Calvin n Hobbes: Collection of all strips from 1985 to 95. Best timepass.
The Emperor's New Mind: On consciousness. Combines lots of fundas from Computer science, Quantum physics, Mathematics, Chaos, Biology, Psychology...etc.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. How can I forget this. This also total timepass reading. For the eternal inter-galactic explorer!!


Now, the five people I'm passing on the meme to:
One more High Fidelity question!!

I have no idea. Do I have to? If i decide the list, I will update the post. Till then the list is empty.

Mail sent by me:
Hi xyz ,
How are u?

Reply obtained from xyz:
Hi,
This is with reference to your mail sent on 9th of June 2005, inquiring about my health. I would like to inform you that I am fine. Since I was not in town over the weekend I was unable to inform you earlier. My apologies.

Regards,
xyz

The Kasmiri Separatist "Leaders" are leaving for Muzaffarabad today. And apparently they also have been invited by Pakistan and plan to visit the country. And the separatists have been given Indian passports.
Good.
Let these fellows go and talk to the Pakistani government how to make Kashmir part of Pakistan. Once they come back, throw them in behind bars, charge them of treason (they are Indian citizens since they have Indian Passports and they are doing "desh drohi" activities) and then get them executed.
Kashmir Problem Resolved. Period.

No more Wintel, now for Mac-tel

A few days ago this Reuters article spoke about possible collaboration between chip giant Intel and Apple. Then came this Paul Otelini statement. Intel seems to be wooing Apple.
Why?

The last few Intel products for the desktop market have had a few problems resulting in recalls, the semi conductor industry seems to have hit "stable" or "diminishing returns" stage, MS Longhorn is asking too much from the hardware and integrated graphics can't provide it. In discrete graphics nVidia and ATI are leaders coming up with ever more powerful graphics processors, AMD is coming up with lower power laptop/desktop processors and higher performance in the server market. So the logical step....look for a new market.

We can extend this to take x86 processors + chipset instead of Intel alone. So in come AMD, Cyrix etc. x86 processors are most commonly used in desktops/laptops and Mac OS is touted as the best for end users (geeks prefer the command line of *nix clones, so they are not excluded).

So will we see the marriage of the two? Can an "Intel Inside" desktop have Mac OS X running on it? Lets see...
(Just hope it will be affordable if it does come up :-))

ISRO!! I salute.

See this link.
Why do people believe a stain caused by seepage to be an image of god. By the way, do they also understand the structural damage that seepage can cause? Or do they believe that God will save them if the roof of the underpass collapses?

• I want to quit my job.
• I want a real job.
• I want to pilot a Sukhoi.
• I want to drive a fast car and own it too.
• I want to drive a fast bike also.
• I want a search tool for exclusively searching the blogosphere.
• I don't want to use it though.
• I want to put up a project on sourceforge.
• I want lots of money.
• I want a life...so...
• I want to die!

Right to Freedom

Traffic snarls are the main complaint that residents and visitors of Bangalore have. I personally feel one can manage slow moving or heavy traffic but not indiscplined drivers, especially the 2 wheeler riders weaving in and out of lanes.

One of my colleagues was in M$ Hyderabad, had this incident to narrate and it beats most other bad driving examples:
Some motorist, while driving put on his right indicator but continued going straight ahead. Actually he did not stop till the next trafic signal, where a fellow motorist asked why he hadn't turned right though he was indicating he would. The first motorist replies "It is my bike and my indicator. I have the freedom to do whatever I want with it!!! What is your problem?!"

What can I say.