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 !! :-)
31 May 2007
Bill & Steve
Check out an interesting interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, sharing the same platform after a few decades, during the D conference.
These videos run for a total of an hour or so, but definitely worth it ! I was particularly impressed with Steve when he says this about Bill, "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead", from the Beatles song "Two of Us". Throughout the interview, Steve comes out a person, who, in addition to being a geek, also has a social outlook of things.
I get quite a lot of mails from some random people asking me to help them with their final year projects, or mails from people saying they are bored and they want some stuff to work on.
Since I work primarily on *ix environments (Yeah, it is a no brainer guess), I will point to an interesting activity for others to work on.
XBMC (Xbox Media Center) is being ported to Linux. Which means, someday it will get ported to all other environments too. Now, do not ask me why does the Linux world need a media player other than the ever-reliable Mplayer. Linux, as always, is about choice ;-)
So, if you want to cut your teeth in some real work, head over to the XBMC Linux Port page.
Now that I have reluctantly managed to lay my hands on photo-shop, it is time to start toning up pictures like these:
Nature, it seems, always reserves its best for those who are willing to put that extra effort. These pictures were taken in a place close to Monterrey called Chipinque.
We managed to get really drenched in this crazy Monterrey weather when were walking up the mountains. When the rains stopped, we saw this amazing double rainbow, something which I have never seen, ever before in my life.
I have always wondered about this. I was thinking about this even yesterday. Why is it that when you walk into a Television showroom, no two different brands of television show the same programme ? Is it that the viewer would observe the difference between various brands and choose the one that looks/sounds good ?
It was a well deserved Milan victory. I think due to too much of a hype surrounding the English teams, I am never a supporter of any of the English football teams. Thankfully, Milan prevailed.
I hope readers of this blog will allow a bit of self-promotion ;-)
The paper titled "Compiler Directed Power Optimization for Partitioned Memory Architectures", which we (my research guide when I was a student here and myself) wrote has been accepted and presented.
Well, Super star Rajinikanth is known as Dancing Maharaja in Japan. Now, I need not even ask as to which other Indian actor enjoys this kind of cross border, cross continent popularity (Chandramukhi, dubbed into Zulu, was a big hit in South Africa, making it the first Indian movie to be dubbed into Zulu).
Anyway, here is a trailer for Chandramukhi. No, not yet another trailer, but a trailer in Japanese !
PS: I will be in San Francisco on 1st June, the day of release of Shivaji. Yeah, I know it is 31st May, but I am not sure whether the prints would be available in USA on the same day. Anyone game to give me company to see the movie ?
Bangalore Midnight marathon is scheduled to happen this week. Having run in a previous marathon conducted by the same set of people, I would suggest the runners to stock themselves up with water. I am not discrediting the volunteers who lined up during my previous attempt to give us water, but that was during the day time and this is during the night time. Another point to note is that there would be no shops open to buy something to eat. So, please stock up on some candy bars too ! Good luck to all those running and I am sure this would be an interesting experience. Just that I am missing it :-(
You know that the geek in you has arrived, when, instead of using a normal alarm clock to wake you up, you code a simple alarm clock that plays some song at random !
Anyway, in case you are using MAC, check here to get an alarm clock for MAC OS X.
Competition is a healthy thing. There is something which I remember having read sometime ago regarding competition and competitors.
Something like "You first ignore them, then you start taking note of them. You try co-operating with them to finish them off and finally, when nothing else works, you threaten them".
That is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do. It first ignored Linux, then struck a deal with Novell to distribute Linux and when that did not seem to work out too, it is now throwing the patent book at it.
Such a brilliant song by Raja (who else ?) has been mauled by pathetic picturisation.
"Pudhu raagam padaipadhalae naanum iraivanae". Need we say anything more ? IMHO, he deserves to say that line over and over again a million times.
On a more interesting note, does anyone have any ideas for making a video out of this song that fits in well with the quality of the song ?
By any standards, however high you keep, the music for the movie Nizhalgal was a landmark. All the songs were, to put it simply, plain masterpieces. 30 years later and you still feel the freshness in those songs. In case you are still skeptical, check out the violin preludes and the violin bits in this song !
As This article seems to suggest, the Harley Davidson may soon be a reality on Indian Roads. Well, not that I am pretty excited about that. I prefer something along 350/500 CC, which I can use, both as an everyday vehicle and a once-a-while getaway vehicle.
If you want to make some earth shattering claims like this one, please have some kind of proof, some kind of experimental results, or at best, some kind of way in which we can believe that claim. Talking in thin air never will work out !
Travel, as you can imagine, is always an exciting activity. It makes you do the unthinkable, bends you, moulds you, and most importantly, at then end of that travel,makes you think - did I do this ?
So, you can pretty well imagine how exciting traveling on a budget can be.
A group of guys have ganged up and started This. The idea ? Simple. Given a specific sum of money, what is the farthest point that can you travel ?
If you are of the kind who thinks that you want to "visit" places, you will think that this is an absurd idea. But, if you are of the "travel" kind, you would immediately jump at this idea, sign up and try it out.
How did Illayaraja manage to do this ? The song starts off as if it were a sad song, where the lady pines for her hero. And then in a flash, it turns into a rhythmic duet ! All without any noticeable jump in notes or tune or whatsoever. In perfect harmony. It is no wonder that he is god !
Every time I listen to this song, there is always this chill that runs down the bottom of my spine. As they say in Tamizh "Mei silirkuthu". Why ? Is it because of the music, or the simple but powerful lyrics, or is it because of Hariharan ? Or is is because of my tamil blood ?
Either ways, a stunning song.
Here are the lyrics:
thamizha thamizha naaLai nam naaLae thamizha thamizha naadum nam naadae
en veedu thaai tamil nadu endrae sollada en naamam indian endrae endrum nillada
thamizha thamizha naaLai nam naaLae thamizha thamizha naadum nam naadae
nilam maaRalaam kuNam ondru dhaan idam maaRalaam nilam ondru dhaan mozhi maaRalaam poruL ondru dhaan kali maaRalaam kodi ondru dhaan thisai maaRalaam nilam ondru dhaan isai maaRalaam mozhi ondru dhaan nam India motham ondru dhaan vaa...
And so what happened over the last few days ? If you were watching the online world closely, you would have observed something. Something that makes me all the more believe in the fact that the power of community is something that is there to stay.
Now, to give you a brief background, there is this HD-DVD player. These players are protected by a secret key, which makes it impossible for someone to copy stuff, even if you are the legal owner of these players and the HD-DVD's.
So, someone at the Doom9 forums found out that all this anti-copying stuff is controlled by a single sequence of numbers and publishes them. I have to side with him on this issue. Heck, if you are the owner of a media, you have every right to do whatever you want to do with that media.
Now, if you are the guy who decides to incorporate this anti-copying stuff into HD-DVD's, would you be such a jack-assed moron that you would assume that no one would try to detect how it works ? That is plain stupidity.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, the key sequence gets out onto the internet. The guys who invented the key sequence should have either tried to change the sequence, or keep quiet. No, but what did they do ? They went after websites which were having the key sequence and threatened them with legal notices.
That sparked the first of the forest fires.
Digg is a user generated news site. Someone posted the key sequence in that site. The site owners, naturally, were not in favor of posting this key sequence because they did not want to get pulled up by the authorities, and hence, they removed those posts which were posting this key. The users were so very against this behavior that they started flooding Digg with more posts that had nothing but this key. So, for how long can the site owners keep controlling this thing ? They had to relent and finally they gave in saying that they will not delete any more posts.
Now, the point is not that. The point is this. Google, that big fat web crawler, starts crawling pages and indexing them to give us our search results. A simple search for the key "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" (which happens to be the key to crack the player), gives me results which are increasing by the hour. About four hours ago, I had 368,000 results and now, I have 676,000.
So, what is MPAA going to do now ? Shut down the internet ? It would be interesting to see what their next move is going to be !
As the saying goes, the more you try to protect something, the more it comes out into the open !! Shame on you MPAA for trying to implement such silly and restrictive laws.
Update: This is a very interesting article that gives a layman's perspective of the whole controversy.
Steve Jobs, 
Bill Gates, 
D Conference
XBMC
Mplayer
Chipinque
Nature
Adobe Photoshop
UEFA 
AC Milan
Self Promotion
Rajinikanth
SuperStar
Midnight Marathon
Bangalore
Alarm Clock
MAC OS X
Joost
Gigaom
Can I Crash
Psephologist
Microsoft
Linux
Illayaraja
S.P. Balasubramaniam
Bowling For Soup
Fergie
London Bridge
Harley Davidson
Dijkstra
Shortest Path First
Travel
Adventure
India
Cycling
Tamizha
Hariharan
A.R.Rahman
AACS
MPAA