Last.FM Album quilt

Here is my Last.FM album quilt - a collage of my most-listened-to music albums.

Incidentally, in the recent weeks I recieved a rejection from every place I had applied to for a summer internship - Google, Opera, CMU, IIT-Delhi - the lot. Having reached the 3rd round of interviews with google (someone described it as the Angelina Jolie of tech companies), I guess it was too-close-but-still-too-far. Fortunately, it doesn't matter too much, as I have an intern offer from Deloitte, which will be a great opportunity. Plus, the interviews at Google were a great experience. A post about those will be coming soon.

Google ADvani

"Advani for PM" is the graphical banner I see now on many Indian sites & forums. I suppose, if I had enabled graphics ads here rather than the square text box, it would have been on this blog as well.

While it is clear that he is trying to copy one of Obama's campaign strategies in the US (That is -- to use the Internet. Although, I don't think I saw google ads for Obama back then), I don't think it is clear whether it can succeed nearly as well, or even at all.

For one thing, Obama was a progressive candidate who could connect with the technology-savvy people of US, with his liberal and generally pro-science policies. Though I can't speak for everyone, it is rather easy to see Advani playing the dual game here -- ready to present different faces to the urban masses and to the orthodox "behind the scenes" agents of his party. Whatever it takes to get ahead, right?

And for another, how much does the internet really determine politics in India?

There is one thing though, although a larger fraction of the internet denizens in countries like US are liberal & progressive, almost the opposite is true in India. Either that, or the BJP/RSS supporters have a lot of free time. Browse through the comments on news sites or through forums to see that. Confusing.

Far Cry 2 grouches

Within Far Cry 2 I have found some of the best FPS gaming moments in a long time, however I do wish this game had ironed out its defects and balanced the gameplay a bit more. This is what I wish had been different -

1. Make safehouse/bus stop one and the same thing, and disable other forms of saving the game. This would give a lot more meaning to capturing a safehouse, and avoid the frustrating travel between missions. The difficulty would be much better balanced as well. Reducing the number of checkpoints would help, too.
2. The quests should be about more than just killing people to get to an objective. This game deserves it! Give us more spy missions/missions based in the town involving NPC's. After a while, all the game missions started to get similiar.
3. Use the game vehicles and buddies. Allow us to have buddies who can drive/ride on the mounted weapon.
4. The map was frustrating. Can't there be a detailed map of the whole world rather than the area you are in?

This comes late, but I just installed FC2 again and was playing the earlier missions. This is one frustrating game that could have been great!

Ebay.in Voucher Madness

I got a voucher in a mail from ebay.in .. which gives you a flat Rs 250 discount on any purchase you make. So you can order anything under Rs 250 for free. And the best part is, you can use the voucher once with every different account on ebay.

To use the voucher

1. Go to ebay.in
2. Find something which has a total cost (inc. shipping) or <= Rs 250
3. Go to "Pay using paisapay"
4. Enter the voucher ZEKK8DDZEJ

And you are done.

The validity is till 28th Jan.

Some other vouchers:

Rs.300 Off
Minimum purchase of Rs. 500
Voucher Code: 2KI9KBI3AY
Expiry 31st Jan 09

20% Off
Maximum Discount Rs.500
Voucher Code: A06LB0RN3M
valid till 31st Jan

If you read this post and bought something from ebay.in, please leave its link in the comments below.

Bournville Fine Dark Chocolate

It is that time of the year again, when I can indulge my sweet tooth and blame it on the festive season.

Here is a short review of the Cadbury Bournville Dark Chocolate series, relaunched recently in India. Each 90g bar (80g for Rich Cocoa) is priced at Rs 75.

Bournville Rich Cocoa - OK this is the first one I tried. I found it a little too sweet for a plain bar of dark chocolate, but not bad altogether. Much better (if more expensive) than the previous bournville incarnation - 7.5/10

Bournville Almond - The almonds break the monotony, and hey, its still dark chocolate - 8/10

Bournville Resin & Nut - This was the suprise of the bunch. I don't like Resins, but this dark brown slab impressed me. There is something much stronger about this one than the other variants - 9/10

Oh, and a happy new year to all!

Airtel Prepaid - Mobile Office GPRS plan

After switching to a new handset, I called the airtel customer care as the Airtel Live settings (which had been picked up automatically) didn't work with applications like Opera or GMail. I was told that Airtel Live didn't support third party applications. Funny that they worked fine with my previous phone.

Anyway, I was told that Airtel has a "Mobile Office" scheme for usage with third party apps, and surprisingly it didn't have a monthly rental (AFAIK, Mobile Office had been a Rs 199/month GRPS plan). The only charges seem to be Rs 0.3 / 50KB, which works out less than Airtel Live.

The activation steps are:

1. Dial *567*1# for activation.
2. Respond with "1" for Mobile Office.
3. Wait for the new settings to be received.

All is fine for now, with GMail and Opera running just fine. But what surprises me is - why does Airtel have two independent schemes for GPRS access, with one being clearly superior AND more economical. I'll update this post if any "hidden" charges come into play. If nothing like that shows up, I guess all Airtel Live users need to switch to Mobile Office.

HTC Dream - And the Google Android G1

The "Googlephone", or the T-Mobile G1 phone, based on the Google Android operating system is out. The hardware is manufactured by HTC, and the phone was known as the HTC Dream until it morphed into the Googlephone.




You can check a detailed review here. The phone costs $179 in the US with a 2-year T-mobile contract. HTC plans to bring the phone to India somewhere around December with a carrier contract, but the price is almost certain to be higher than that in the US.

The reviews are generally positive, with praise for the operating system mixed criticism for the few odd glitches and rough edges.

But after all, this is a Linux based smartphone, with an OS developed by Google, and houses all the features I would ever need. It doesn't need much more than that to become my dream phone! If by a rare chance HTC prices this phone well in India, I would certainly go for it.

Check this page for an online simulation of the phone.

USB AVR Programmer

AVR Microcontrollers are a popular and powerful series of microcontrollers, and are cheap and easily available. I was looking for a USB based programmer for it, as my PC doesn't have serial or parallel ports. These are generally hard to find and expensive. Thankfully I got it from eXtreme Electronics, which had it for Rs. 350. It is also possible to make such a programmer yourself, but the extreme electronics one has the advantage of more reliable PCB & circuitry.

Link to product - http://shop.extremeelectronics.co.in/product_info.php?products_id=28

MIST : Online codebreaking

Mist is an online code-breaking/treasure hunt game which is going to be launched as a part of TROIKA 08, the annual technical fest of Delhi College of Engineering. The aim of the event is to get ahead, armed with your creativity and resourcefulness. You may need to learn new skills or research some information to get ahead, but the event is not a GK quiz and no trivia knowledge would be expected from the participants.

We worked hard to make the event a reality and now that seems to be paying off with over 400 participants in the events 4th day :)

Do check it out at http://mist.dcetech.com

No one lives forever 2 without TnL

Those of you lacking an ATI/nVidia graphics card probably lack support for Hardware Transform & Lighting. While these graphics cards are not meant for playing the latest and fanciest games, some old ones also throw a problem or two, and after eagerly getting my hands on No one lives forever 2, it refused to run out of the box. Thankfully utter disappointment can be avoided very simply - download this version 1.3 patch. The game will still be buggy though, and may crash at times, but something is better than nothing!

The game is good fun, though not as good as the original.

Ahead

Saving youtube video's from cache

Saving YouTube video's to your hard disc is not too difficult, you can use a firefox extension like VideoDownloader and a player like FLV Player or MPlayer to play the downloaded .flv files.

But on a low bandwidth connection, my interest was to save a video that you have just viewed in a browser window. I tried this on Firefox running under linux, but hopefully the method is similiar for other browsers and OS's.

Step 1: Identify the browser cache directory

Type about:cache in the address bar, and open the directory specified as "Cache Directory"

Step 2: Identify the video cache file

This can be tricky, but browse the above directory according the file modification date. The file you need should have some hexadecimal name (ex 55A2D2B9d01) and be of appropriate size (5-10 mb for most video's). Under linux, most file managers identify files based on metadata rather than extensions, so if FLV is a recognised type, your job is easy.

Step 3: Play the file

Rename it to .flv and use a media player like FLV Player or MPlayer

Unreal Tournament on Linux

I wanted to have some 3D gaming goodness available when I am under linux, and Unreal Tournament seemed a good choice, especially as I had the GOTY CD lying about. But as I had it installed under windows, I didn't want to waste precious disk space by duplicating content, so I wanted to share the data content with my UT installation on the windows parition. So this is a brief guide which should (hopefully) help someone else with the same quest, and serve as a reminder to me when I need to attempt it again. This was performed on Ubuntu Edgy running on my laptop with Intel GMA 900 graphics.

First you need to set up 3D hardware acceleration for your graphics card. Intel graphics users have it easy, you need not do anything. Although UT under windows supports software rendering, I could not find the option for that here.

There are several installers available under linux for UT, and I have no idea which one will work best for you. Try them all is my only advise. I used ut-install-436-goty.run available here.

Some other installers are available here and here.

Make the downloaded file executable, and launch it as root user (sudo ./filename with ubuntu).

The first two files I linked to allow installation of only the game engine, which is what I needed. Uncheck the "data files" option for that.

Now, we need to link the windows data files, I used this guide for that. Use these commands -

for i in Cache Logs Music Textures Help Maps Sounds Web;\
do ln -s /path/to/windows/ut"$i" /usr/local/games/ut/"$i";\
done

cd /path/to/windows/ut/System
for i in $(ls *.u *.int *.ini *.dll);\
do ln -s /path/to/windows/ut/System/"$i" /usr/local/games/ut/System/"$i";\
done

Then run "ut" to start the game. If you get a "dirname: missing operand" error, run this command

export UT_DATA_PATH=/usr/local/games/ut/System/

Replacing the path with the one appropriate for your system.

Ericsson update

define:geek

A person who can find enjoyment in the minor version update of a software he/she rarely uses.

That's one definition, and not altogether bad, not bad at all.

So I set out to update the firmware in my mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson K320i. There was no particular reason to do this, actually.

The update service software was a 20-odd MB file, and somewhat surprisingly the download link in my phone's support page was defunct. Anyway, I grabbed the file from the K750i's download page. An error popped up immediately after starting the application, though. A message asking me to update to the latest macromedia version from www.macromedia.com

This left me a little clueless, macromedia makes a lot of software. Anyway, on updating my Adobe Flash Player for IE to 9.0, the bugger ran. After an impressive animated show, firmware started streaming in from the internet. (I still do not understand why all these instructions require removing and replacing the phone battery). Start the phone again to get an error (hurray). Surprisingly the phone wasn't wrecked, it worked and (guess) the phone information shows a new version number.

Man and Superman

Even Don Juan in Hell is the middle section of Bernard Shaw's play. This will annoyingly be the same.


Exams were over ... yesterday.

Before - Numerical oriented and no chemistry. I will do well.
After - While nothing went wrong, nothing was too great. With no major regrets, its time to move on, to more meaningful things. Yeah right.

But what annoys me is that I am becoming bitter about myself as well. I am not being myself. There was a time when a fictitious personal superman was what I strove to be, but its time to let go and be myself.

After all, its man who always wins. Ask GB Shaw.

Welcome greyworld2

It is a testimonial to the geek in me, that formatting a partition is like saying good-bye to an old friend. This particular partition was set up just a little more than an year back, when I switched from Slackware to Arch Linux 0.7.1 noodle. So it had the memories of an eventful year, from the projects/programs which were made in the last days of the 12th standard, to the collecting PDF sample papers of entrance exams, to regular geeky stuff like tutorials, crazy hacks suggested by forum users, custom built packages of unknown software etc...

(I have had it with ext3. Twice I have seen an ext3 partition corrupt itself without the slightest provocation. This time I am going with jfs, just as my instincts told me when I first tried linux.)

I normally change the hostname of my machine each time I install a new OS, but this time the old hostname will live through. Goodbye greyworld, welcome greyworld2.

Blur

I hate to be disorganised and forgetful, which is rather strange because I am always so. Being a little laid back, the consequences of my mistakes don't bother me so much, but it is terrible when it causes loss to a friend...

I need to be more focused and organised.

Day of the underdogs

That was day before yesterday.. when Bangladesh and Ireland defeated India and Pakistan (respectively) in the Cricket World Cup 07. I missed the Ireland match but I must say Bangladesh batted, bowled and fielded excellently. It would be interesting to see where these two teams go in this world cup.

Its nice to be an underdog, especially 'cos winning as one is just about the best feeling you can get.

DIY Brain Surgery

Life is strange and interesting. I guess that is the thought one can take comfort in if everything else gets screwed up.

Welcome to the windy city, where d'you wanno go and what you gonna do?

When I was so much younger (ok, maybe an year back), before getting admitted into a good college, before the tension of board and entrance exams were long past, things seemed more carefree and happy-go-lucky than today. For some reason I felt reasonably sure that I would do well in life.

What am I looking for now?

Short term success? As in decent examination marks, doing well in college festival competitions, sports etc. I suppose so, yes. I would certainly be happy to meet some of these aims.

Long term success? What do I really want to do? Artificial intelligence? Something useful in computers? Physics? Mathematics? Deep down I just want to live comfortably and be respected, and more importantly be able to respect myself.

Love? Someone said,

Love is ego

Maybe I just want an ego boost.

My interests, activities, hobbies are developing. For better or worse, I cannot say. No longer do they completely revolve around computers (did I make a conscious effort towards this, I wonder), and going from GTK 2.10.1 to 2.10.2 does not hold the same thrill. I am taking a little more pleasure these days in sports, music and spending time with friends. Would this ever mean that I sacrifice my career to a lack of monomania?

Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Y'know I have some faults (that reminds me to dedicate a post to lethargy) and one thing is that I do care about what other people think about me. Not just my good friends, but even anonymous internet users like you. Thats why I took a little trouble with the italics (hehe).

Portland, troika and NPL

The portland project is quite promising, I really hope it is developed and used widely. I hope there would be something related to that in Google's summer of code.

Next week is festival week in our (and probably many other) colleges. Atleast five or six different tech/cultural fests will take place simultaneously. Troika seems the most interesting, and I have hopes on the AI bot programming event.

Tomorrow we head towards the national physical laboratory to present our progress on the project. Our small project will seem odd among the bigger and more impressive sounding one's around us.