Thursday, October 04, 2007

लिनक्स पर हिन्दी

मेरे कुछ चीनी दोस्तों को "Chinese Simplified Input" पर काम करते हुए देख़कर मॆंने सोचा कि चलो देखते हॆं कंप्युटर पर हिन्दी भाषा में काम करना कितना आसान (या मुश्किल‌ :-) हॆ | लिनक्स पर अप SCIM और ITRANS के जरिए अपने English (U.S.) QWERTY लेआउट पर बिना कोई नए लेआउट सीखे आसानी से हिन्दी में लिख सकते हॆं |

हालाकि हिन्दी में "वोइड मेन (‌)‌ { इंट आइ = १२३; } "‌लिखने में कुछ समय लग सकता हॆं, याहू मेसेंजर पर पुराने दोस्तों को शुद्ध हिन्दी में गालियाँ देने का मजा कुछ और ही हॆं | :-)

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Christian the Lion- Reunion!

A lovely video where a man is reunited with the lion that he raised as a cub. While it's amazingly cute, I can't help but wonder how disturbingly unnatural it is. On a lighter note, I have no idea how you stand your ground when a 200-kilo perfectly-designed-to-kill carnivore leaps at you, albeit with benign intentions. :-)

Saturday, September 15, 2007

A Week in St. Nectaire - 1

Last week was interesting in many ways. Despite living in France, albeit in a remote corner of the country, I have seen pretty much nothing of the country. Save for a sightseeing Saturday I spent in Lyon last winter, nothing (I'm saving Paris for an occassion). Last week, there was a collaboration meeting (I work in an experiment collaboration at CERN that involves institutes and researchers from all over the world, and we meet once a year off-site from CERN) in St. Nectaire, a really small village in France.


This
is the route we took to St. Nectaire. It was a lovely route through the Jura mountains on to the other side, through and over villages located in and between the mountains.



After a while, it got flatter, and pretty boring. :-)



We were put up in the most luxurious hotel in St. Nectaire. On arrival, we took a walk around the town. In a 45-minute walk, we met _one_ local inhabitant. This continued over the next few days, over which we met a handful of locals, and hardly any young people.

I read about rural depopulation in Europe before I came here. This is a phenomenon where the population of villages reduces because younger people apparently have no reason to stay back, since tourism and agriculture are not lucrative enough as careers. Lots of buildings were for sale, some sadly going into ruin.

The French food over the next few days was great overall. Apart from the one disappointment where they served the boiled remains of an animal massacre, the food was great - the French have learnt a thing or two about flavour and do a good job (between bouts of amnesia).

The area is full of volcanic craters and mountains. It doesn't concern people much because the latest eruption in the region was ~7000 years ago. However, the craters still look like craters (more pictures to follow). The mountains are also famous for an old Roman temple (~2000 years old) and as a popular paragliding site. After climbing one of the neighbouring summit, looking at the town of Clermont-Ferrand from a height of 1400 metres was . . . satisfying. Of course, this was also the site of Blaise Pascal's famous experiment where he measured the effect of altitude on a mercury column (to prove atmospheric pressure).

Here's the first batch of photos.
St. Nectaire

Friday, September 07, 2007

Moore's Laws

Michael Moore's films are great. Sure, some people could argue that the facts are not completely true, and that his films tend to be somewhat sensationalist. But one thing we can learn from the Americans (despite all their numerous flaws) is that an outspoken journalist like him can actually voice his opinions. He has lots of opponents, who have websites such as moorewatch.com. Without leaning one way or the other, I think that it's important that we have a healthy intellectual environment where free-thinking and free-speaking journalists can go head-to-head and provoke the masses into some thinking of their own.

I'm sure everyone's read something or the other about the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America) and its move to combat file sharing. They've done things like sue a 6-year-old girl and her single mother, a little boy and his grandmother, campuses full of college students, and basically anybody who cannot afford a hotshot lawyer to defend themselves. To sum it up, these guys act like vultures preying on the weak. These guys don't really experience serious losses in any way, and if they were serious about pushing up their sales, they could drop prices and see the effect. Oh, just so you know, the RIAA is not some ghost organisation that does all these evil things - it's a consortium, whose members are Sony, EMI, Warner, and Universal. They would have you believe that for every movie you steal, another underpaid Hollywood star or impoverished Sony executive starves to death. The truth is somewhere in the middle - it's bad to steal movies, but they can fix it by a) getting rid of the obscenely high prices of media (movies/music), b) getting rid of region codes, proprietary media formats (I hate Sony), DRM, and c) basically try to not be the greedy bastards that they are.

How does Michael Moore fit in here? Well, I saw a two-minute snippet of an interview with him on file sharing and movie stealing. I'm not really pasting from a transcript, but he said something to this effect. "Movie sharing? Well, meaning what happens if you buy a DVD of my movie and give it to your friend, who sees it without me making any money from it? That's called sharing, and it's been happening for a long time now for lots of things, not just movies. I do quite well, and I don't think I'd mind that - it's just sharing, something we've been doing for a long time. So long as you don't sell my movie again for a profit, I don't think that's bad." He may be controversial, but there are things you gotta learn from the guy.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Earth Colours

After browsing through blogs maintained by friends who take their blogging seriously, I thought I'd give mine a makeover. The header picture is something I clicked while hiking with colleagues at St. Cergue in the Jura mountains in Swtizerland. Remember the movie Jurassic Park? The "Jurassic" in "Jurassic Park" is the name of the period between 200 million years ago to 145 million years ago (at this point an idiot once asked me, "Is that BC, or just from today?"). The dinosaurs in the movie are from this era. And the name "Jurassic" comes from "Jura", which are the fold mountains that go through France and Switzerland, north of the alps. A lot of the limestone rock in the Jura mountains was formed during this period. Having digressed enough, here are some links to pictures from the Jura.
Hiking in the Jura - St. Cergue

These are fantastic hiking areas, especially in the summer. And from the bright blues and greens in these pictures comes my new colour scheme for this blog. Of course, I have to work with several limitations, such as a slight prejudice towards dull monochromatic schemes and a mild colour-blindness that the CERN medical service discovered in my first week here. Anyway, if you're a male, there's a 17% chance that you have some problem with colour identification. So when you get angry, do you see red? Or do you see a different shade of yellow?

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Songs from the 90s

I've been without TV since 2000 now. I have had a television set at home for about 2 years now, but I've never had cable. Basically, I don't believe in directionless viewing (or more likely, I don't want another bill that I can procrastinate over). There was a period when I did watch a decent amount of TV, between 1994, when we got cable at home, and 2000, when I left home. This is when I got my first taste of MTV. Of course, back then they really used to play music, instead of showing idiots doing idiotic things to other idiots (RE: Jackass).

So I tried to recollect what I remembered from back then, and tried to find good videos on YouTube to refresh my memory. Of course, this is a colossal waste of time, but hopefully it'll put me to sleep tonight.

1. There was this video I remember very vividly. A tall, dark lady walking and dancing in front of a white background. Very graceful movements and inspirational lyrics. A few searches later, I found "You Gotta Be" by Des'ree. This is a real mood-lifter.



2. Then there was another one I remember. Psychedelic, but there were these close-up shots of a woman with really lovely eyes, and "Crazy Cool" being repeated over and over and over. This was easy to find. The former LA Lakers' cheerleader, Paula Abdul. And I was right about her eyes. Check out the video, and you'll see what I mean.



3. A great Whitney Houston song with a nice tempo. It's the OST from "The Preacher's Wife", which isn't much of a movie, but this is one hell of a song. Wikipedia: This is a cover of an Annie Lennox song, and she has also sung background vocals to this song.



MTV was frowned upon as being a "western influence" back then. But there's no denying that they had great music. Today the music is mostly gone but if you see some of the movies that MTV produces today (Jackass is again a case in point - YES it is also a movie), and the shows that they do, I feel sorry for the poor brain dead idiots who actually enjoy this trash. Well, here's wishing them good luck (gratuitously assuming they can read).

(Wow, I'm ageing faster than I thought.)

Monday, July 02, 2007

"I Called Him a Bastard"

"I made some passing references to his questionable parentage."
- Capt. Jean-Luc Picard

Monday, June 18, 2007

Easy, Mr. Stallman!

Before I begin, let me explain - I love open source software. I have contributed to open source software, I have absolutely no Windows software anywhere on my laptop at home or on my workstation, and I don't remember the last time I worked with software that I didn't have access to the sources of (or maybe I do, but that's besides the point).

Richard Stallman showed up at CERN today. The talk was on the Ethics and Practice of Free Software. Mr. Stallman has often publicly lamented the apparent lack of knowledge that Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel alone do not comprise a Linux distribution, and justifiably so. There's no denying that the Kernel alone wouldn't be much fun in the absence of gcc, binutils, emacs (I worship vi vi vi, but I'm religiously tolerant), and countless other tools that we don't even notice when we use a GNU/Linux distribution. Credit be given where due, Richard Stallman is a highly respected man in these circles - not only for his technical contributions, but for spearheading the cause of open source software, and ensuring that thousands of people all over the world can use open source software without fear of being sued. With this background, I went to listen to _the_ man.

He's not a particularly charismatic speaker. The hippie-nerd look does him a world of good, but not nearly enough. Several times, justifications in his talk were given by statements such as "it is inherently evil", or "it is bad", or "it is your fundamental right". He said in today's talk, and I quote, "Never buy a DRM-enabled media that you are incapable of cracking yourself." Of course, he hates everything from gaming consoles to TiVo, and thinks we should not buy any of those things.

The worst line of his talk was somewhere around the 40-minute mark. "Why should you not use Windows?" Of course, he said the standard stuff, about it being "inherently evil", spying on you, and sending all searches to Microsoft.com (apparently, the fact that google.com does this as well is not a problem). Here comes the best one - "A couple of years ago, in India, two people from the Al Qaeda were working at Microsoft, and they were caught attempting to insert trojans and viruses into Windows. Fortunately, they were apprehended. Who knows how many such attempts go unnoticed?"

Mr. Stallman, this is a piece of tabloid news. No respectable paper ever carried it in the form that you mentioned it. The company has denied it (well, that's obvious, I take it back). And the word was that the Al Qaeda claimed to have programmers working for them, not that anyone was apprehended. And to think, you quoted this specimen of cheap sensationalism as a reference in your talk, which you delivered at a prestigous location where many Nobel Laureates have addressed the same audience of distinguished physicists as you had the opportunity to. While I respect you and your contributions to open software, statements like these will only hurt your credibility.

Oh, and I'm sorry I walked out at that point.

Monday, May 28, 2007

Crying

I was just watching my favourite movie, Rang de Basanti on DVD. Each time I watch it, I notice something new that I like. For instance, this time I noticed how Aamir Khan performs in scenes where he has to act like he's crying.

From some personal experience, I see it more or less like this : when you cry, it's not just loud noise and moist eyes. There's an emotion that surges up from deep inside, gradually taking over you. In a few seconds, you're completely overwhelmed, and you have no idea how to deal with the swell of feelings inside you. Before you know it, you are completely in its grip, and your face grimaces and feels like it's going to explode. Finally you give in and shut your eyes, and that's when you feel the warm trickles of your tears on your face. And it comes in surges. Every time you vent out a little, you relax a little till the next wave takes you down again. Once you've let out enough steam, you're feeling much better. It's awesome how he pulls it off; I'm always wondering if he's not really crying.

There's acting for you.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

The Blue Man Group (or "I don't get American Humo[u]r")



They had reviews in the New York Times and pretty much every other magazine you could think of, which said things like "I laughed so much I had to go to the doctor" or "Rip-roaring hilarious", "Funniest 100 minutes ever". My poor, gullible better half fell for it, and paid (through the nose) for tickets to see them perform at the Birar Street Theatre in downtown Chicago.

After a day full of staring up at T-Rex skeletons, peering at mummified mummies and daddies, looking at exhibits on Indians who aren't really Indians, and then watching Spiderman 3 (which has more animation than "Toy Story", and by no means more impressive), we left for the Blue Man Group show. A short walk, a taxicab ride, and two bean burritos later, we arrived at the Briar Street Theatre, in time for our show.

The decor is impressive. You have this pseudo-industrial-look paraphernalia everywhere. Everywhere you see, there's dim lighting, neon pipes, hoses and wires, and water-filled tubes. Essentially, you see a lot of things that set your expectations high.

Everything's dark. There are a set of red LED panels near the stage which prompt the audience to do things such as "sound like a cowboy", "make like that guy on some XYZ show" , "say happy birthday to Marge in the audience", or "say hello to Adam because he's just a normal guy so he'd like you to say something like that". The audience _loves_ this. There's a small room above the stage where you see a small band, dressed in fluorescent skeleton outfits to contrast with the dark background. Then three guys show up on a dark stage. They're dressed completely in black, except for their heads and hands, which are a bright shade of blue. Two of them start playing on drums, while one of them splashes neon paint on the drums. The drumming is nothing impressive - I've played with better.

Then comes the humour. They leave their drums, and then toss marshmallows into each other's mouths - no mean feat given that they're nearly 30 feet away from each other. Then one of them rubs corn flakes all over his face, and another tells him how to get them off his face. Throughout the show, every now and then, they just stand still, staring at each other's faces with blank expressions. At this point, the audience is laughing, and laughing hard. Ramya and I are also staring at each other with blank expressions, wondering what the hell the lady in our row found so funny that she was practically choking with laughter.

The humour continued, in the form of a long-drawn serenade of a random (pretty) girl chosen from the audience to have a rather awkward simulation of dinner on the stage. It's supposed to be funny, because there are squirts of neon paint shooting out of small nozzles on the Blue Men's chests. At this point, Ramya starts apologizing for buying the tickets for this show.

Then comes out a huge instrument made out of pipes, that the Blue Men bang on to play music. It's like a xylophone, except that it sounds very different. They play some music for a little while with minimal nonsense, and it pretty much peaks there.

The finale is something that my particularly eco-sensitive better half and I found ridiculous. The Blue Men run to the back of the stage, and open up some panels on the rear walls of the hall. There are tens of toilet paper rolls inside. They pull out several streams of this paper, and push it over the audience, all the way to the front. Then they turn on black lights, and the white paper shines up. Yay, yippee. At the end of the show, we see huge 4-feet piles of toilet paper on the front of the stage. I'd say it was about a sixty or seventy kilos of paper at least. That's quite some, given that they do a show every day.

100 minutes of extreme neon-paint-slapstick-humour gimmickery were finally over, and we happily concluded that we just don't understand American humo[u]r - neither the concept, nor the way they spell it. :-)

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Great Expectations

I am trying to hail a cab from Fermilab. I pick up a phone, call the toll-free number for the taxi service. A very sweet sounding lady picks up, and asks for the address. I half-jokingly imagine the lady on the other side of the phone as an accent-trained Indian lady somewhere in Pune or Bangalore. "Fermilab", I say to her. "F-E-R-M-I-L-A-B as in Enrico Fermi, the scientist"?

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Gotta Love Skype

I wonder how the previous generation of Indian students going abroad used to manage staying in touch with their families. I can't imagine it being easy, what with trunk call costs the way they were, and VoIP and internet access facilities in India pretty much non-existent. I can imagine students pinching pennies just to be able to talk a little more to folks back home, and people at home just waiting by the phone at pre-arranged times to make the most of those precious few minutes, if that.

Enter today. With a better-half-to-be in the US, mum + dad + sister + lifetime's worth of friends in India, and my sorry self in Europe, I don't think I can spread my family thinner on the globe if I tried. Five years ago, I would have used instant messaging, now I can use Skype. Wonderful voice quality, free of cost for PC-to-PC calls (Yahoo fans, please excuse yourselves and try out Skype - do yourself a favour by using by some quality software, instead of the trash that Yahoo tries to pass off as voice chat). However, with three timezones spread over 13 hours, it's not always convenient for me to be at a PC at the same time as everyone else. Enter SkypeOut. I use my PC to call a phone, and even calling to the most exotic locations on the globe costs ~ 0.18 Euro per minute. To the US, it's a pitiful 0.017 Euro per minute (that's right, there's a zero after the point). Beautiful. I can call my mum when she's at work, which is when I just wake up. I can call my significant-other-to-be after I get home from work, which is when she's on her way to work. All this, at really great rates.

_Now_ the world's really smaller.

OK, now I'm waiting for all those smartalecky idiots who'll say "Dude, you look like you're advertising for Skype" or "How much is Skype paying you?".

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Bipedal Claw Robot



My first biped. It's what started out as a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but ended up becoming a blind, stupid claw that walks like it's had a drink too many.
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Saturday, January 27, 2007

Snow!


This is a view of the football field from my apartment about five months ago.


This is pretty much the same view (with a bit of zoom) last week. Enough said. :-)


Pristine white in the morning after the snow.


This is what I look at when I daydream at work. :-)

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Los Angeles - VIII


Ending the day at Universal Studios: (From top left) The Terminator (with crushed skulls at feet), the two of us standing in front of a gigantic less-evolved cousin, the inside of the Shrek Superstore (you can buy great-tasting, albeit horribly named treats called "eyeballs" and "snails" and "spleen" there), The Mummy (and not her mummy) returns and attacks Minnie Mouse, sitting awkwardly in front of the statue of a filmmaker's crew at the Universal entrance, the neon sign in all its glory, a drunk cowboy mannequin in front of a restaurant, the iconic Universal Studios globe captured in horrible light, and a better version with an admiring onlooker.

Looks Familiar?


(Starting from top left:) The sign outside the Amity Island Beach from "Jaws", the plane crash scene from "War of the Worlds" (this is a real 747 that has been stripped to look like a crashed plane), the entrance to "Jurassic Park" (yes, there is a park, there is water, and there are 100-foot Brachiosauruses and menacing, attacking Tyrannosauruses, too), the captured great white shark from "Jaws", the house of Norman Bates' mother from "Psycho", a real-life Shrek walking the streets of Universal Studios, a passerby reading a sign offering a reward for an Ogre, the Incredible Hulk (and the incredible bulk), and the famous restaurant from the Flintstones.
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How to Create a Flood


A demo of a flood special effect at Universal Studios. First, we arrive at this deserted Mexican-looking town.

Then we just look around at the dilapidated houses and the quiet path leading up the hill.


Woah! Millions of litres of water come down the hill in a deafening gush!

And we have a flood! For what it looked like 10 seconds later, refer to picture no. 1.
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Los Angeles - VI


A spacesuit. It was actually used in missions, and is now kept at the California Science Center after restoration.

A used heat shield. That's what re-entry does to you. See the burn marks diverge away from a point? They're not diverging from the centre, which means that the module probably did not drop down with the shield perfectly perpendicular to the ground.

Thrusters of varying forces. The larger one exerts about 100 pounds of force. The tiniest one does exactly one pound. These are used for precise positioning of spacecraft.

Every man's dream vehicle - the Blackbird SR-71. This is a real plane, the only trainer ever built. For the uninitiated, this plane was built by Lockheed, is made almost completely of titanium, flies at Mach 3 at an altitude of ~29,000 m, and was used in reconnisance missions until its decommissioning in 1998. The best thing is it comes in black!
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Los Angeles - V


The Apollo command module that splashed down successfully in the Pacific after completing the Apollo Suyoz Test Project mission. You can see the partially charred heat shield at the bottom, and burn marks all over the module.

A (supposedly) real moon rock brought down by the Apollo 11 Mission. Disclaimer: If you don't believe that Apollo 11 landed, then the label should be "one of the props used in the most popular Stanley Kubrik film ever".

A one-man command module (don't remember which mission).

Cramped, isn't it?
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Los Angeles - IV


The Disney parade. Check out Santa's dancing reindeer, Ariel the Little Mermaid, Buzz Lightyear the toy astronaut, Santa Claus waving to me, Cinderella and her handsome prince, the walking Christmas tree, a dancing snowflake (watched eagerly by Minnie Mouse), and Snow White.
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Los Angeles - III


The legendary C-3PO at Star Tours. It's a real robot, not a guy in a gold suit!


Awww, isn't that cute? A robot repairing another robot.

Minnie Mouse, Mrs. Incredible (a.k.a. Elastigirl), and Mr. Hair.

R2D2 on one of the Spacecrafts at Star Tours. Beeps whistles and all.
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Los Angeles - II


They take a picture of you as you drop on almost all the rides. So you try to not look terrified while dropping 20 m almost vertically.


A Jedi master training some young Jedi knights in the ways of the force. . .

. . . when Darth Vader and the Storm Troopers pop up from the ground!

Darth Maul also wants to join the party (don't worry, the surprised-but-confident 6-year old Jedi Knights whup them all in the end).
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Los Angeles - I