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 !! :-)
30 October 2007
In Big Apple
I will be in New York beginning 1st November till 4th November. I will be running the New York Marathon on November 4th. The practice seems good. The temperature is just right enough. Time to set a personal best. I will be running this to honor two very important people of my life, for whom a very important day of their lives falls on this day ! More on that after I give all that I have for this Marathon ! Unlike my previousMarathons where getting the finishers medal was my main objective, for this one, getting the finisher medal, and setting a personal best is my goal.
Let's hope that things turn out the way I want it to be ;-)
This is a place holder for my travelogue on Los Cabos. But, till the time I manage to squeeze sometime to finish it, you can check out some pictures from Los Cabos here
Imagine if you, in all probability a windoze user, wants to share some important real time video info with, in all probability, a stubborn *ix (please include mac into that, will you ? ) user like me ?
Well, I had to do this to check some source code and stuff over this weekend. Skype refused to play nice over my friend's Linux desktop.
So, after some digging around we discovered these two pieces of fine software, openwengo and qnext.
Of these two, we preferred openwengo for the simplest reason that we had access to the source code and hence, we could do some optimized compilation to make the software work a bit better. The installer sizes are a bit of a concern for qnext, but, to our surprise, both these pieces of software played quite nice.
Both these pieces of software seem to play along nicely with jabber, though it remains to be seen whether you can call a windoze gtalk user.
But, all in all, highly recommended in case you want to do cross platform video and audio chatting.
Just managed to catch Azhagiya Tamizh Magan's remix song, "Pon Magal Vandhal" through Suryan FM (Opens in a media player). I must say that this sucks completely when compared to an earlier remix by Rahman, "Thottal Poo Malarum", from the Movie New.
Hariharan elevated that song to the next level ! Of course, it has Simran ;-), but that is besides the point !
I knew that Anu Malik was a copy cat supreme, but I did not know the extreme. However, we must appreciate him in a sense that when most people in India did not know about these kind of songs, he somehow had access to them !!
First, the Hindi song from Ishq, Neend Churayi Maine
And then, the original, Sending all my love from Linear
Wow ! What a co-incidence, both Anu Malik and Linear thought along the same lines ;-) :-)
First Look: I am almost sure that I cannot get the eye candy and other things under virtualization, but I am more interested in the new tick-less kernel and the applications/manifestations it can have, towards Dynamic Voltage Scaling, something I worked on when I was a graduate student in IISc.
2. Fiddling around with some code for Firefox memory management, based on a suggestion I made in their wiki sometime ago. Hopefully, the results should be out sometime this weekend. I still feel that the memory usage is perhaps, the main issue with Firefox.
3. After around seven months since I started some work on my project towards migrating to a new set of libraries, it is finally complete. Yeah, seven months is pathetically slow, but then again, living in Mexico, which essentially is a partying place, makes things a tad more difficult ;-). The next release should hopefully have the code changes that were made.
I was in sixth standard at that time. I think it was either 1988 August or 1989 January. The school in which I was studying, Jawahar Vidyalaya, used to have a unique system of engaging the students during the academic year, extra curricular activities, so they used to call it.
The activities were either cultural or project work types. Hence, we used to have things like fancy dress competition, music competition, quiz, debates and so on for one year and the next year, it used to be project work. It is a different issue that when I was in class eleventh, it was the silver jubilee year of our school and to comomerate that, we requested/begged/cajoled the teachers to have cultural activities instead of project work and hence, we had cultural activities for two consecutive years.
More on that in a different blog post. When I was in sixth, naturally enough, the twelfth standard students, being their final year in school, took part in cultural activities with great enthusiasm.
And in one of those music competitions, one of the students played this song on the keyboards. Sundar was his name. Heck, I even remember the song, the jam packed audience which was listening to him play this song on the keyboard, the encore he gave with a few more songs after winning the first prize, all of them are still right there, fresh in front of my eyes !
This is that song
The best part was that he had a classmate called Ayyasami, whom I later bumped into during several quizzes in Madras. He was ribbed around using this song, which incidentally also marked the debut of, what was perhaps the first kodi-katti-parandha (exceedingly famous) heroine from up north, Kushboo.
I guess there is no need to even guess the common thread that runs between these songs, King Illayaraja !
I was rolling on the floor laughing my ass out (ROFLMAO) when I read about the Australian cricketer Symonds crying about racial abuse. I was laughing even more when I read this news item in rediff. We should be prudent enough not to waste our time in investigating, why even giving a iota of thought to these things.
Excuse me, Australian cricket team, there was a certain Mr.Muralidharan who routed you completely. He was subject to racial abuse in your own country. Haven't you heard of the olden adage "As you sow, so will you reap?"
You may be playing ruthless cricket and winning all the time. But, if you cannot handle a defeat, you are no more worthy of being called honorable winners. A true winner is one who is graceful even in victory and defeat.
During Barcamp Chennai in April 2006, after being introduced to Web 2.0, I was musing with some friends as to how difficult or easy it would be, to build audio and video into google's gtalk.
Now, a company called tokbox has done that. It enables you to have audio and video conversation without any software downloads.
Grr. Another of my money making killer-app ideas goes down the dust !
It was in 1992 that these songs, along with a few more, including the "raunchy" "yeppadi, yeppadi" took Tamilnadu by storm. There were/are no logical reasons for these songs taking the state by storm. These were blaring out from every local tea kadai's, the newly launched FM stations, the new launched DD metro channel, and even the 7.30PM to 8.30PM vividh barathi tamil songs broadcast.
Was it because of Prabhu Deva, or was it because of Deva who was trying to assert himself and his status as a musician to reckon with, no one would know. Rahman had not yet entered the industry at that point.
But yet, it still remains a largely unanswered question.
Check out the songs to see if you can make any reason out of it !
Once in a while, from all that crap that Hollywood dishes out, a rare gem, a fine dialogue does surface. This is from the movie "The Last Samurai".
Katsumoto: You believe a man can change his destiny ? Algren: I think a man does what he can, until his destiny is revealed.
Katsumoto is played by Ken Watanabae and Algren is played by Tom Cruise, who dish out good performance.
I somehow seem to think that the oriental (Chinese, Japanese) philosophy has lots of connection with Hinduism. After all, they are very much based on Buddhism, which in turn did take off from Hinduism. I think a leisure time reading is in the anvil ;-)
Whether it is Monterrey, Mandaveli, or Marathahalli, there will always be egoistic morons behind the wheels of a car, who is only too eager to hunt you down, and show who is the boss, when you overtake him on your motorbike.
Moral of the story: Morons are there everywhere in the world, irrespective of the traffic conditions
By all accounts, KamalHassan's movie Hey Ram, dwelling on the assassination of Gandhi, is a classic. The attention to detail, the minute directorial touches, yes, Kamal excels in all. Especially when Vasundhra Das speaks the precise Tamil Brahmin words "Pdathu nuta"(she said no). Just look at his choice of characters even for the minuscule roles, Hema Malini, Girish Karnad, YG Mahendran, I can go on and on !! Alwarpet Aandavar is at his finest ;-) Of course, who can forget "King" Illayaraja's, haunting background score ? Incidentally this was the first Indian movie to have the Los Klavos group performing the background score.
Just that there is one flaw in the whole movie. The average viewer is unable to make a conclusive case as to why the protagonist becomes a Gandhi lover from being a Gandhi Hater. I must try to get this movie with English subtitles so that I can distribute it to a wider audience.
I think the same situation was with Manirathnam, who made another classic called Iruvar, which dwelt on the Dravidian politics.
As the saying goes, a genius is never recognized in its time !
PS: In case you are interested, here is a trivia. Srinivasa Iyengar was a freedom fighter. He was jailed and fell ill while he was in jail. He was nursed back to health by his fellow inmate, Ayub Hassan, who later went on to become a cabinet minister in the first government. Srinivasa Iyengar had three sons and to honor the person who nursed him, he added the Hassan to their names. His sons were CharuHassan, ChandraHassan and KamalHassan.
This weekend we went for Mountain Trek and one of the guys who went along with us, Sachin, flouted the basic rule of trek; Stay with your team, and got lost !
Since we had to call the police to get him out, the news was flashed all over on Television. Check this link.
http://www.info7.com.mx/Video.asp?Nta_id=41268
Except that there is one big problem. The TV reports that I got lost, which is not correct ;-).
New York marathon 2007
Los Cabos
openwengo
qnext
Hindi Songs
Anu Malik
Plagiarism
Kubuntu
Virtual Box
Power Consumption
Nostalgia
Illayaraja
Cricket
Australia
Racial Abuse
Tokbox
Prabhu Deva
Deva
The Last Samurai
Buddhism
Hinduism
Traffic
Stupidity
Vijayakanth
Hey Ram
KamalHassan