Waves

Yesterday was yet another sunday spent usefully :D. We met at Kiruba‘s wife’s office to get our hands dirty on video blogging. And hey, it’s an amazing platform once you learn the basic nuts and bolts.

Team A’s Video.

What did we do?
Well, we split ourselves into teams of 3 and 6 teams in all. There were about 6 digital cameras that could record video. One team went out into the open to shoot their video. Another team started from the bottom of the staircase and headed up, doing the “Walk the Stair” show. This something-exciting-so-I-have-to-try-it feeling is not new to me. We decided our team will do the video at the terrace. We went up, shot the video, did “Walk the Terrace” and finally recorded for about 2 minutes.

Then we all came back and imported all the videos to PowerDirector. One team found out that their digicam didn’t have the capability to record voice. All of us sneered at them and ultimately, their video was the best, because it had a youtube director in it 😉 They dubbed the audio. Excited to the core, we imported our’s soon and set about editing it. Found that instead of focussing on ourselves, we had shot all the banians and jettis hung for drying up under the sun. Nevertheless, it was fun because this was our first hand experience. We reduced the size of the video from 60 mb to 16 mb to finally 6 mb.

Two teams came up with proper videos. One is uploaded to YouTube. It came out very well and had that professional touch. Another video was an interview type one. I do not know whether it’s been uploaded. Will let you know on that.

After this, we had a small session on podcasting. The technology is same. All we need to know is, how to combine two or more items to produce a third useful one. Look at the Blogcamp.in blog.

Softwares/Hardwares Used:
We used PowerDirector, vlog it, snag it, audacity, windows movie maker and hardwares such as a digital camera capable of recording videos or handy-cam and microphone. Install required drivers from the cd/dvd given by the manufacturer.

Happy video blogging, podcasting 🙂

Hi!! friends, today is Sunday and I’m in a very good mood. As told in the last post, I will give you the recipe for the banana mash. It’s a very simple and a very tasty dish that can be prepared without any special kitchenware.

Ok… let us proceed and get our hands wet 🙂

Minimum requirements: Half dozen ripe bananas, jaggery.

1. For every banana, take 2 tea spoons of jaggery. Therefore, for half dozen banana, you would have around 150 to 200 grams of jaggery.
2. Now, after peeling off the bananas, break (not cut them) them into 2 halves.
3. Put the bananas in a bowl and mix them with the jaggery. Mix them with your hand (like you mix rice with sambar) and mash them together.
4. Add half cup of cold milk and 5 tea spoons of honey.
5. Sprinkle some raisins, finely cut cashews and don’t forget the diamond kalkandu for that kadak-modak effect.

Extensions:
1. Take 2 ripe mangoes and peel off the skin using the regular vegetable skin remover.
2. Cut the fruit and mix them with banana. Add some more jaggery too.
3. Add raisins, cashews, diamond kalakandu, milk and honey etc.
4. Add any other fruit you want. Seedless dates is a good option.

The banana-cum-mango mash is now ready. Tastes good with roti, chapathi and poori. Make sure that you have banana or mango for this preparation.

Slurp!!! the taste is too goooood 😀 I can’t to wait to finish it off.

It’s happening again 🙂 BarCamp Chennai was an out-standing success. The same crew is now organising BlogCamp – India’s biggest blogging ‘un‘conference, set to happen in Chennai 🙂

The meeting at woodland’s drive inn was truly fun.

Check out more details at the Blog Camp wiki. There are some more exciting details that’s not to be revealed right now 😉

Monday morning, I was supposed to drop one of my friend’s mom at the Chennai Central station. The train was scheduled to depart at 6.25 AM. We reached the station by 6 AM. As we went there on my bike, I told her to wait at a place so that I can park my bike and come back to pick her up. I parked the bike and came back at 6.05 AM. Lo and behold!! she was missing. I was even having her bag with me.

Frantically, I searched all the places in and around where I told her to stand. There were still no signs of her. I came back and ran through all the freaking 10 platforms. Time was 6.17:29 AM. She is still nowhere to be found. Time is 6.22 AM now. Absolutely no info about her whereabouts. Imagine my tension in the morning when a lady is missing at just about 15 minutes before the departure of the train. I thought of complaining to the police, so that they will make an announcement through all the platforms, announcing her name.

Two minutes later, I heard an announcement that the train was departing from platform 11. I ran to platform 11 from 7 and found her near the 2nd coach after the engine. Heaved a heavy sigh of relief and shouted at her! he he he… When I asked her the reason for her sudden disapperance, she told that someone came to her and told the train was about to leave in 5 minutes. “F” I thought and let her board the train. The train had started moving by then. When I came back home and told my mom what had happened, she was ROTFL 🙂

Hi!! I have found a UI bug in Gmail. If you take a look at your gmail inbox, note the placement of the “Delete” button. Its the 3rd button.

Now, take a look at the “Delete” button at the Spam tab. Its the 1st button. Lots of times, I have clicked on “Not Spam” button and (doh!!) went on a hunting spree at inbox to perform the S&D operation 😉 S&D = Search and Destroy heheh!…

It would be better if the “Delete Forever” button is placed after the “Not Spam” button.

My father passed away on 5th June 2006 at 3.35 PM. I lost a person who was more of a friend to me than a dad. He was the only one with whom I shared everything. Everything = everything from studies to friends to girls to etc. etc. and yes he too was the same with me. He also openly discussed many issues that dads will find it difficult/impossible to discuss with their children. Natural disasters happen only for a few seconds and leave very little time for reaction. Nature
was (and is) a bit cruel on that part :((

Anyway, what has happened has happened and life has to continue. Therefore, in his memory and with his blessings, I will fulfill all his wishes and dreams. He made our life very comfortable. His planning was meticulous and we are always learning from him.

Three weeks before this shocking incident, I had this gut feeling that something bad was going to happen. On 24th June, the day of the last university exam, I was feeling sick. I wasn’t able to revise the subject properly and this guy was the only one to whom I let the feeling creep out. Without turning back, I made a dash to the bus after the exam got over. Only on seeing my dad at home, I felt relieved. Sometimes, at nights, I have even touched his chest to feel the heart beat. PHEW!!

Right now, I’m alright. I have let out all the feelings and ready to take on the responsibilities and the challenges. One main reason for that is, I felt the heart beat of my dad stop right under my palm. Thank God I didn’t cry at those very sensitive moments. My brother had good awareness to call 1066 (ambulance for emergency) immediately and telephone his friend and our cousin who were here within a few minutes. It is those few hours after death that matters when people are more important than anything else. The more people are near and the more the place of death is crowded, the more comfortable it is.

I want to describe those last few moments with dad, but it is difficult even to try and speak about it, leave alone write about it. I went to the bank today to deposit some money. My hands were shivering uncontrollably because where I saw my dad working a few days ago, that seat is empty now. That empty chair caused me to sweat. My cousin was with me and things eased out a little.

Tomorrow is the 5th day. The rituals are starting from tomorrow. Huge thanks to all the friends, relatives and unknown people who are supporting us.

Praying for the soul of my dad to rest in peace.

Shit!! the power cut yesterday night threw me off-track so much that I was sulking for a while ;-). Ok… the point is, I was doing the following things.

1. Trying out AT commands on my k300i mobile phone.
2. Installing Open Solaris 10 on vmware.
3. Reading Joel on Software.
4. etc. etc.

All those things hung up when the UPS started blaring the warning signal. This is one of the moments I strongly felt the need for a laptop.

I installed Windows Vista build 5308 and after 14 days, it expired. I couldn’t activate it also. So what is the use of having it and wasting 10gb of precious space? I formatted the drive and restarted my system only to find that the boot loader is a pain in the neck. It just won’t go and refused to give me the default Windows XP boot loader.

Considering the fact that I have 4 OSes 😉 Redhat Fedora Core 3, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista 5308, I have to jump through 3 boot screens to boot into xp, or wait a painfull 70 seconds if it has to be done automatically :((

I popped in the windows xp cd and booted my computer from the CD. I pressed ‘R’ to go to the “Recovery Console”, selected 1 (represents XP on my computer), entered the password for Administrator account and then typed the 2 commands.
1. fixboot
2. fixmbr
After that I typed “exit” to restart.

Voila!! the Windows Vista boot screen is gone :D. Grub is also washed out. But recovering it is not a problem. Now my HDD is happily chugging away releasing 10gb of wasted space. 😀

The holidays have begun. Apart from having fun, I have started reading the archives of Joel on Software, one of the most popular blogs on software, usability, software engineering etc.

Wait, I know you are going to stop reading this post because I mentioned software engineering. Now, be a little patient and go through the rest of the post 😉

The “Painless” series of articles on Joel’s blog is just too good. Software engineering texts by Roger S. Pressman are very good to read. But, they are intimidating to the beginner :). Therefore, this series of “Painless” articles should help us to get started and be efficient too.

Mostly, we start our projects by opening the popular text editor and start spewing code. And, there are actually 12 better ways to write code. Once, we complete coding, we figure out that we have missed something and later fix it, which brings its own separate set of problems. At this point, the project goes haywire and becomes like the figure on the left :).

So, all we need is a good spec to which we can refer and understand where things change and what all parts are getting affected. Start here to go about writing effective specs.

Normally, we work without schedules and don’t understand the importance of them. Working on a schedule is very important because we know where we are and where we take wrong turns. Here is a way to painlessly schedule your project 🙂

After you begin to code, you introduce a new set of bugs right? Is there a way to painlessly track bugs? Yes there is :D. Read this article. Most probably, you work in a team and if the team members are a bunch of nuts whom you are finding difficult to manage, read this and this. They provide significant insight on how things happen at the bigger level. Lastly, if you are developing web applications, this article on “Less is More” is excellent.

Oh! and here are 2 nice case studies from Joel’s company itself.
1. FogBugz
2. CityDesk
I have linked part 1 of the articles, check the archive for other parts.

Now, that you have read all the links and the basics are firmly established, I recommend going back to the tables and designing your software that way.

Happy Software Engineering !!

Yippeee!! a huge relief atlast, as I completed the last exam 5 minutes before and even checked the answers ;). That was something that happened only for a handful of exams like programming, compilers etc. There is a lot of mixed feelings as I have to prepare myself to face the big bad world out there. Don’t no what is in store for the future…

So, what did I do after the exams? Went for the “Pink Panther” movie. Not bad I must say, because it was full of this vadivelu-vivek type of comedy. And later that night, got a nice small treat from this guy. He is leaving to Bangalore to join the company where we got placed. All the best to him. Hoping to join him soon 🙂

I don’t know where I will be posted. I may or may not leave my darling city where I have been for the past 21 years and watched all its development. And I don’t want to leave this city because IT is happening. Rapid developments are the order of the day as the IT/ITES companies grab every square inch of available space.

Ok… got to go now.. See you soon!