Archive for the 'Miscel' Category

Ted Talks : Alain de Botton – Atheism 2.0

Published on 6 days, 17 hours ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

The biggest issue have with religion is their fanatism. When you come to Science to understand your problem, Science tells you various theories and gives you the option of choice. With religion it’s not the same. An authoritative body drafts few rules it believes is in the best interest of people and then enforces it upon it’s followers. That’s what dictators do – take away the freedom of choice and enforce your will. I hate that.

Another is the existence of God. I think people make up the concept of God just for psychological reasons. But thats a weekness then.

Otherwise, even though I am an Atheist, I am not averse to picking up anything good from religion. Every system has some good elements – otherwise it wouldn’t have survived so long. One can always try to crete a better system by learning from the existing ones.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google Sunsets Urchin

Published on 1 week, 5 days ago in Miscel. 1 Comment

Of late Google has been busy trimming the list of products and services it owns. Most of the acquired ones have been integrated into some core Google product and thus makes sense to drop them. For example, Pikniks features have been integrated into Picasa and is thus being shut down in April.

Another such product is Urchin. Having acquired the web analytics company, Google went into overdrive to create the Google Analytic service. Needless to say Google Analytics is way better than Urchin. The modified urchin.js (now called ga.js) does much more – it can track events and client side activities better than urchin.js. Thus the announcement to sunset Urchin. However, this might not be very well received by every one out there.

Google Analytics requires one to feed their logs to Google servers. Yeah you could un-check the tiny box to stress that the data should not be shared with Google, but still a lot of people will be uncomfortable with storing their data on servers not owned by them. With Urchin one had the benefit of locally installing the service. The UTM logs would be collected on boxes owned by the companies and also the log processor would run inside their firewall. Every company needs this sense of security. The moment log collection and parsing are pulled out of a company’s firewall eyebrows are raised. This is the reason why I believe that there will not be many takers for their Google Analytics Premium service. A person who is willing to pay 150000 USD per year have privacy and data security concerns no matter what the contract says.

For quite a while the Urchin software had not been updated. Google could have let the situation be as is. But by announcing that no new licenses will be sold from March onwards, they have challenged everybody – give us the logs or get lost. This kind of goes against their Google Is Not Evil policy. Not a good move in my opinion.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mac : Impressed With The Battery Life

Published on 2 weeks, 5 days ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

It was only a week ago that I switched to Mac from Windows and my 10.7 Lion has already impressed me with its battery life. With battery level down to some 60%, I was able to play audio songs on my iTunes through out the night.

I started iTunes at 11 in the night and queued 132 songs for playing. No more activity. I left the lid as is, switched off the lights and went to bed. I woke up at 5 in the morning and the songs were still playing. Happily I dozed off again. The music had stopped when I next got up at 7:30.

But being able to play music for 6 hours with only 60% battery is an amazing battery performance. Really impressed!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Beginning To Like Rockstar Retrospectively

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago in Miscel. 0 Comments
Rockstar

Rockstar

We watched the movie a couple of weeks ago. Immediately after the movie I wasn’t at all impressed by it. I am not sure why. Perhaps it being the first show in the morning of a weekend, or just that I had very high expectation from the story line. The script was supposed to be a musical play, but my impression was that of a love story that dragged on and on for ever without any sense or purpose. Yes, occasionally the music was good and the rhythm kept you engaged. But overall we weren’t all that satisfied having spent 2 hours in the morning of a weekend.

But now, the more I think of it the more I appreciate the presentation. Ranbirs acting was definitely good. He portrayed the change of character of Jordan amazingly well. The metamorphosis of an innocent Janardhan into the arrogant Jordan was well scripted. The underlying theme of the movie was love – how it gives and takes away. Falling in love with a girl knowing that she’ll get married to another guy shapes up the character of our rebel Rockstar. He’s the real human – the madness, love, anger and yet a soul lost in music yearning for the company of just that one person.

The end of the movie immediately brings to mind the following verses from the American Idiot album by Green Day – Give Me Novacaine.

Take away the sensation inside
Bitter sweet migraine in my head
Its like a throbbing toothache of the mind
I can’t take this feeling anymore

Drain the pressure from the swelling,
This sensation’s overwhelming,
Give me a long kiss goodnight
and everything will be alright
Tell me that I won’t feel a thing
So give me Novacaine

The music is addictive. The melodious rhythms to go with Mohit Chauhans lyrics lend a magical touch to the whole experience. No complains on that front. I think the reason I did not really fall in love with the movie was because I do not connect easily with love stories. They seem too silly to me at times.

Would I want to live a life like Jordan? I don’t know. Impulsively I’ll just deny, but frankly, I do not really know the answer to that question. I just don’t know.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Stanford University Online Education Courses

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

This morning Madhu sent out a mail regarding few courses that Stanford University are offering. The courses are free of cost and start late in January. The duration is around 8 weeks. They’re perfect for self motivated people who are just interested in learning something new. The medium of discourse is obviously video lectures. One is supposed to go through them in their leisure time. Of course, one is expected to put in incremental effort every week instead of just revising the whole thing in the last week. There might be additional quizzes and assignments to be done. Also a mini-project is also a possibility. The emphasis is on learning.

Of late – after leaving Kharagpur to be more precise – I’ve had this appetite to learn something new. So the moment I saw this opportunity, I enrolled myself in 5 courses. The first one being Machine Learning by Prof. Andrew Ng. Here’s the link to the course – http://jan2012.ml-class.org/.I’ve been through his video lectures posted in Youtube, the first of which can be found at http://youtu.be/UzxYlbK2c7E. I’m taking this course to refresh my machine learning concepts. I expect this to be one of the better courses.

Another one I got myself enrolled into is the Game Theory course. Here is the link to the page - http://www.game-theory-class.org/. Everyne who has watched the movie – A Beautiful Mind – will agree to have been fascinated by the game theory concept. Shenoy and I tried to learn more about this by doing a mini-project in our third year, but I wouldn’t count that as a successful experience. Hopefully, this time the experience will be better.

The third course to interest me was the Cryptgraphy - http://www.crypto-class.org/. Once again, we had this in our third year but I never took it seriously enough even though the topic had always interested me. Lucky for me, my brother is doing a course in Cryptography this semester. So I’ll have someone close to talk to clear any specific doubts. There’s always the course forum otherwise.

The fourth one is Probabilistic Graphical Models - http://www.pgm-class.org/. The desire to take up the course arouse from the fact that it’ll be mathematically involved. Also I think the knowledge of models can supplement my Machine Learning fundamentals.

Lastly, I also got myself enrolled for the Natural Language Processing course - http://www.nlp-class.org/. Now this’ll be something entirely new – something I have absolutely no idea of. That is the exact reason why I want to study this subject. During my four years of engineering, I never picked up this course, but finally I have the chance to learn about this topic.

My expectation from the course is pretty simple – good lectures, good quizzes and assignments and a mini-project in each. At present I’m quite excited about getting started and I’ve convinced myself that I’ll definitely find time to study the subjects the right way this time. I hope I can do that. My goal is to know these 5 topics more in depth by the end of April – yeah, I expect to continue even after the course is done.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google Inserting Ads In Maps Interface

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

I only noticed it today! Now when you click around at objects in the Google Maps, you might just see an advertisement inserted in the popover. Here’s a screenshot. The description for Kyra Power Dining & Theatre has an ad from justeat.in.

googleMapAd

Popularity: 1% [?]

TGIOF : Jumping To The Tunes Of Poets Of The Fall

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

Past weekend Poets Of The Fall rocked Bangalore. A band that I had so grown fond of finally made their second visit to India after 4 years. And since it was not much crowded, we were able to make our way to the fourth row pretty easily. And they played all the songs I knew and I knew very few. In my defense, it’s been long since I was last in the campus.

Desire was the one I really wanted to listen. And they played it in acoustic style – no drums, only guitar. It was wonderful. Then came Roses, Locking Up The Sun and Sorry Go ‘Round. We were jumping and dancing excitedly to the melodious tunes always aware that the best were yet to come. And those were the last three – Late Goodbye, Carnival Of Rust and Lift – in that particular order.

We were all tired and exhausted after those 90 minutes – neck pain and sore throat proof enough that we had a great night.

Here’s a video I shot using my Galaxy S2 camera. Sounds mostly noise though.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A Spam Mail That Gmail Failed To Filter

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago in Miscel. 4 Comments

And it should have! It’s such a common template!

Your email address has won 753,000 G.B.P in this year special HOT DIAMOND DIWALI EXHIBITION. To receive your award, send your name and mobile number to Mr. Mark the officer in charge via email:  info@hotdiamondpro.com
Your Sincerely,
Skiles Jerry
Public Relations Officer

Popularity: 8% [?]

TGIOF: Poets Of The Fall In Bangalore

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

Yay!! Going to watch the Poets Of The Fall tomorrow evening. They’ll definitely play Carnival Of Rust. I hope they also play Lift and Desire.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Facebook Media Server Failing

Published on 4 months ago in Miscel. 0 Comments

We’ve been seeing lots of Facebook static file requests failing.

And this issue is slowing down the other websites that have deep Facebook integration. Soccernets css is getting screwed up and even cricinfo is damn to slow.

Here’s a screenshot from my Chrome web-developer bar:

fbImageServerFailure

[UPDATE]

Well, within minutes of this post getting live the things were back to normal. But the fact that there was a failure remains. Discussing among ourselves we came to the conclusion that perhaps the Akamai cdn was having some issues. We suspect s because Twitter was failing as well and the links in question were those of Akamai. The ak prefix in the links above suggest that even Facebook uses Akamai.

Popularity: 1% [?]