Well, for want of a better title I chose this !
Gajabhuja in Sanskrit means the trunk of an elephant !
So, in short, the title means big/huge fundas !! :-)
27 February 2007
Interesting Article
And you thought corruption is there only in developing countries ? It is there everywhere and is an universal phenomenon ! Check This article.
Update: Vatsan points me to an interesting rejoinder to this article. No vatsan. Most of the arguments in that article are just hanging threads ! I may be wrong, but yes this smacks of corrpution !
Malaiyum Nadhiyum is a very very interesting song. Check it out Here.
It was released sometime in the 90's (I am not sure about the exact time) and was composed by Rajamaan (Heck, i have not even heard about such a music composer!!), for a movie named "Namma ooru Teacheramma". (Yes, i have not heard about the movie too!).
But, don;t be put off that it has no known music composers and stuff. Listen to it and be amazed. It is, IMHO, a brilliant song. Smooth and slow paced and rendered brilliantly by the "God of Low-bass voice" Hariharan ! And giving him perfect company is another melody song queen of these times, Sujatha.
As the Superstar said in the movie Chandramukhi, "Repeatuuu" (in the MP3 player) ;-)
Departed has won an Oscar. What is amusing is that the Master, Scorsese, has been given an Oscar for a work that, in no way, reflects what he is capable of. And that indeed is pathetic ! Check out my review of Departed Here. Tags: Oscar, Departed
Something tells me that the song "Idhu Oru Nila" (from the movie Tic Tic Tic), seems to be the first ever attempt by any Indian music director to compose a jazz based song. You can check out the song Here. Of course, the song was composed by Illayaraja (Who else?). The movie was released in the year 1981. If you know of any jazz based song that was released prior to this, please do post a comment.
After a series of posts in tamil, check out what Google had put up in its advertisements in my blog !
Check inside the circle. The advertisement has come in tamil. It says "Public advertisement from google. Click here if you want to advertise here". Well, this _is_ pretty interesting ! Adsense has some sense after all ;-)
And so many people ask me as to, why even when i am a staunch supporter of the "உடல் ம்ன்ணுகு, உயிர் த்மிழ்க்கு" (body for the earth, soul for tamil) philosophy, i know (read , write, and speak) Hindi pretty decently.
That is elementary folks.
Tamil is my eyes and Hindi is the cooling shades that i use whenever i visit the scorching and uninhabitable lands up-north of the Vindhyas ;-)
When i was in college learning to program, i came across this excellent book on cryptography by Bruce Schiener (Of course). Though i do not recollect the exact lines, the intent of the lines was that, as long as security is kept in a closed environment, it will never ever work. This was for a discussion on whether public key encryption or private key encryption was safer than the other.
Now, DRM has been cracked. Not just cracked in the hacking sense of it, but cracked hollow. A key sequence has been discovered using which you can play every Blu-Ray and HD-DVD ever released in this planet! Boing Boing has a write up of it Here. I particularly like their rail-road analogy !
Suppose you are trying out some program with Visual Studio and you get following Linker Errors (Full Error posted so that google will index it, and thus, it may help many more others who are facing the same problem)
msvcprtd.lib(MSVCP80D.dll) : error LNK2005: "public: __thiscall std::basic_string,class std::allocator >::~basic_string,class std::allocator >(void)" (??1?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@QAE@XZ) already defined in somename.lib
msvcprtd.lib(MSVCP71D.dll) : error LNK2005: "public: __thiscall std::basic_string,class std::allocator >::~basic_string,class std::allocator >(void)" (??1?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@QAE@XZ) already defined in somename.lib
The easiest way to solve it is to do this. Check somename.lib. It would be compiled with a different threading library. To check the threading library, do the following: 1. Open the project's Property Pages dialog box. For details, see How to: Open Project Property Pages. 2. Click the C/C++ folder. 3. Click the Code Generation property page. 4. Modify the Runtime Library property.
If the Runtime Library is set to /MT change it to /MD and vice-versa. Basically, the idea here is that the library of somename.lib must the same as the one you are currently using in your program.
Now, what puzzles me is that i need to build a program and link it with threading library. Why are there so many versions making life difficult for me ? Why not just give -pthread and be done with it as we do in *ix systems ? Does anyone have any idea about this ?
Many a times, people ask me about the weather in Mexico. Since i have not been to other parts of Mexico, i cannot pass any judgments. However, let me give you a sample of the Weather in Monterrey today.
4.45 AM. It is around 18 degrees outside and clear sky.
5.15 AM. A mild fog envelopes the city and temperature drop to 10 degrees.
5.45 AM. It starts drizzling mildly.
7.15 AM. Most roads are properly wet and the road outside my house has ankle deep water. Temperature is around 10 Degrees and yes, the air outside has a chill to it.
That, Ladies and Gentlemen, should give you a fair idea of Weather in Monterrey, Mexico.
Regular readers of this blog and his/her dog/cat/everything else would know my unabashed admiration for King Illayaraja. However, once in a while there are some efforts by other music directors which catch my fancy. One such song is this:
I kind of seem to like the slow pace of the song, the picturization and of course, the heroine. Needless to say, the Music Director could have used someone else in place of Sadhana Sargam (She tends to murder tamil words), but then it is his choice. Surprisingly, the music director (Srikanth deva, son of "Xerox machine" Deva) has done a pretty decent job !
And yes, Vairamuthu has also given some neat verses for the song. Check this out:
Virala idayai alandhaey Vega Thadaigal kadandhaey
And no, if i give out an english translation for the above, it would take out the charm !
While we stick to running marathons, this guy has completed the Badwater Ultra Marathon, the world's toughest ultra marathon. What is most inspiring is that even though he is living in US of A, he chose to run as an Indian. Check out his result Here.
What else can one say ?
K.Shyam PS: The most important point to be noted here is that he started running only in 2002!
After watching Azhwar, the latest Ajith movie, i was particularly pleased for a few reasons.
1. Unlike many tamil movies which tend to stereotype Brahmans as meek and submissive, this one has actually shown a Brahman being transformed into someone who tries to avenge a wrong committed to him.
2. The Police inspector gives out a neat justification for arresting the Hero. "All the people whom you have killed are criminals. We should have done that job. We are still arresting you, as we want to convey the message that no one should take law into their own hands." Again, a deviation from the normal Tamil movie practice which glorifies people who take matters into their own hands.
3. Surprisingly, Ajith looks and plays the part of a Brahman quite well. Is it because of his Palakkad roots ?
4. Finally, the disappointment was that there were traces of Ghajini in some of the scenes. Faux pas by the director ?
Overall, i would say that this is a movie that is worth watching once.
And Steve Ballmer says Vista is the most safest version of windows ever !!
Imagine this, vista has been cracked using, of all modules, the speech recognition module. You can speak commands which it will execute and thereby, if you visit a website that plays some song having some lyrics say "Erase System drive", booom your system drive is gone ;-)
I think they forgot the basic computer science tenet : Make the common things fast, the not so common things correct. And as the old adage goes, there is nothing wrong in dreaming sky high (read DRM and crap in vista), but one should always have their feet rooted in ground.
While many will claim that windows is a target for hackers because of its extensive usage, how does one explain the fact that it can be hacked by its own speech module ?
Read Here, Here and Here for the complete story of how it was done.
While i do agree that a bug free program is an abstract concept, these kind of bugs, are at best, schoolboy level programming errors.
Iraq, 
Corruption
Hariharan
Oscar, 
Departed
