A little background first. My brother and I are crazy about the Harry Potter series. We would line up outside Walden to buy the book on the first day itself and then tussle over who gets to read the book first. The fight would always end with both of us reading the book together.
Since we were so passionate about the story, any deviation from it in the movies would disappoint us. For instance, in the third movie, the director simply cut out the part where Sirius and Remus recount their days with James. I liked that part. It explains how good a friend they were. The Goblet of Fire was made unnecessarily menacing by adding special effects the storyline could do without.
But this time around, with the decision taken to split up the story into two parts, the director had enough time to stick to Rowlings’ story line. There are little deviations and the pace of the movie matches the pace of the book. The script touches all the important points as I remember – getting Harry to the Burrow, their leaving after the wedding, Ron deserting his friends, visit to Godrics Hollow, the return of Ron, visit to Luna Lovegood’s dad, Harry wrestling away the wand from Draco and finally Dobby’s death.
The only missing part was Dumbledores’ story. Perhaps that will be covered in the second movie. I am already looking to watching the last of the series. It should be awesome!
When I started listening to English music I stumbled across last.fm, a radio cum music recommendation engine. A world of music with lots of artists and genres was opened up for me. I could search artists that played symphonic metal, and also look up artists similar to Dream Theatre. Last.fm is the only reason I have known and listened to so many artists.
I want to rekindle my love for books and reading. When I was a kid I used to read Enid Blyton, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and a few more. Later I started reading fiction stories and drama. Now I want to read up books on psychology and human behavior by authors who use story instead of scientific experiments to make their point. The problem is that I do not know which authors should I read! You see, I have not found any good site like last.fm for books which could recommend me artists like Paulo Coelho.
The sites like Shelfari allows one to create their reading history but fail to recommend books based on the same. Others have a recommendation engine but are similar to jinni.com – recommendation based on parameters such as mood, tempo, theme etc., instead of reading history. I need a combination of the two.
The idea is pretty simple actually. Infact, last.fm could almost use the same code and put one up. The main functionality of the site would be to allow people to create their reading history and suggest books based on that. To account for the changing interests, there could be an option to assign higher weights to later history than the earlier ones. Of course, the books and authors need to be tagged first. But then sites life Shelfari and others already have a lot of tag data. And then once people start using the site, they’ll start tagging themselves.
For now I am having to rely on my googling skills to find books with similar subject. I would love to discover a book recommendation engine similar to last.fm.
I do not have one yet, but I am sure I want one – strictly as a personal laptop though. I admire their attention towards achieving aesthetic excellence.
The other day I was watching the Apple Keynote video dated 20th October, 2010 (I have not watched the video completely at the time of writing). The Mac sales statistics are incredible! Apparently a customer sale study has put the ratio of Macs to the rest at 20%, which means that 1 in every 5 computer is a Mac! And if this does not impress you enough, then consider the iLife product that has been demoed next. I saw the iPhoto and iVideo applications and will write about them.
iPhotos does way more than any other photo software I have used till date. It has a nice full-screen feature which lets you focus completely on the task at hand – arranging your photos or making a collage or choosing the next facebook profile photo or making a photo album of the last adventure trip you had. The photos, if tagged properly, can be shown on a map at their locations. Apple has put in themes that allow you to quickly make a picture slideshow. One of the theme goes thus -
A globe is shown to start with. Then the app zooms into the city and photo pins start appearing on the neat map. Then using the time data from the photo, the app transitions from one photo to another. And while all this is happening, a soothing tune will be played in the background.
Say you now want to print these photos into an album and show them to your parents. iPhoto picks up your photos and chooses an appropriate cover. Inside, few pages contain single photos and the rest are collage. The single photos are those that have been rated higher, while the lower rated ones will be used as thumbnails in the collage. But this does not mean you are restricted by this default choice. You can just drag and drop photos to swap them or reorder the collection. The whole thing is so intuitive, you do not need a tutorial to make the first album. Just drag and drop.
iVideo was even more mesmerizing. One can now also apply effects on sounds, let alone the video. And the best feature was making trailers. iVideo comes with a few inbuilt trailer themes and it is very easy to get the hang of it. In fact, through the demo of making a trailer, was shown another feature which I loved the most – applying face recognition to videos. Say you want all the clips in which only one person appears. Just set a filter and voila! Watch the keynote video and you’ll appreciate the brilliance too.
There must be more to it than just this, but as I haven’t watched the complete video yet I’ll rather not comment. Now, your manager probably might not get impressed with the amazing slide transitions in your presentation, but your girl friend will definitely enjoy those lovely themes using which you can make a picture album in just a few minutes. Even without having used one, I do recommend a Mac for home use.
Ever since I upgraded to the 4b6 of Firefox, my screen occasionally goes blank for a few seconds and then I get a message telling me that my display driver had stopped working. It ultimately led me to revert back to Firefox 3. An updated beta, the 4b7, was released yesterday and I was optimistic that the problem might have been solved. However to my dismay, the issue remains.
A quick search threw up results of forums where people have complained about the nVidia driver crashing because of Firefox 4. Some suspect it may be because of the Direct2D feature newly implemented in the upcoming Firefox. There were suggestions to update the nVidia graphics driver to solve the problem. But unfortunately, even that does not help.
I think I’ll keep using the beta so long as the crashes are infrequent and Firefox is able to recover from them. Otherwise I will be forced to use the Firefox 3 until a more stable beta has been released.
Awesome ! I did not know it. I mean, very recently the client updated itself, but I had no idea about this new feature. It was accidental that I came to know this. I was playing a few video songs in Windows Media Player when I opened my last.fm page, and to my surprise the songs had been listed! Then I checked my client and it was indeed scrobbling the songs. I haven’t tested if this is a wmp only feature or if it works the same with winamp or itunes.
Whatever, but the feature of scrobbling video songs is cool. I like it.
On the sad part however, last.fm has declared that they’ll be discontinuing the loved tracks and my playlist radios from the 17th of November. I’ll miss the loved tracks radio a lot.
Visualization of any concept does help understand it better. But when playing with large data sets, I think it is necessary to also understand the relationships between the various parameters of the data before plotting them out on a graph. Also comparing or taking relative measure only makes sense if there is a strong logical reason behind doing so. For instance, David showed a comparison of Military Strength vs. Population chart. I am not really convinced that such a comparison makes sense. The military strength depends more on the border perimeter and area that needs to be defended than just the population.
However, playing around with data can definitely be great fun. Like the graph he showed:
What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday and then flattens out over the summer?
I Hope you get this on time,sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip in Cyprus for a program,I’m presently in Nicosia and am having some difficulties here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept.I want you to assist me with a loan of 2500Euro to sort-out my hotel bills and to get myself back home.I have spoken to the embassy here but they are not responding to the matter effectively,I will appreciate whatever you can afford to assist me with,I’ll Refund the money back to you as soon as i return, let me know if you can be of any help. I don’t have a phone where i can be reached. Please let me know immediately.
It was complete with my dad’s signature as well. A search in google for the line i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept and I knew that it was a spam. And unbelievably, gmail did not send it to spam directly!
Actually, I would also support such a bill. I believe in the freedom of choice and the right to live my life the way I want to given that it does not harm anyone else. I respect the willingness of two people to get married if they feel it is right. So why should the society lay down rules as to what choices can we make and what we are barred from doing.
Recently my grandfather had to be admitted to the ICU. His vitals weren’t stable and kidney was not functioning properly. Thankfully, he recovered and got discharged in 4 days. But those were 4 long days. Not only for him, but also for us. Trust me, you don’t want to be sitting in the corridor outside ICU chambers.
The hospital I am talking about is in BHU, Varanasi. You will find people from all sections of society there – from the rich to the poor. And it is the poor with whom I sympathize the most. There was this patient, a girl from a nearby village, who was pregnant. A few days ago her child died inside her womb. The family members did not care to get the dead body of the child out of the girl. Result – septic. When she couldn’t bear the pain, the family members got her to BHU and she was immediately admitted to the ICU. But even after spending 40K on her treatment, the doctors could not for certain assure the family members that she could be saved. They refused to pay for further treatment, and asked the doctor to let the girl die.
Occasionally we were allowed to go visit our grandfather (I know such things should not happen in ICU, but well). The ICU had 14 beds, each equipped with monitors to track the vitals. Green color coding tells you that everything is fine, yellow indicates borderline case and red is the call for immediate attention. Of the 14 patients, some 5 were in the yellow zone, and 2 in the red zone. In fact, once when my mother was feeding my grandfather, the doctor had to ask her to leave because the patient on the adjacent bed had his heart stop beating and needed the emergency procedures. The place is that scary.
On the fourth day, a patient was admitted in the morning, and by afternoon his dead body wheeled out. Every now and then a group of anxious family members would start weeping concerned for the life of their patient. Another neighbor of my grandfather had himself moved to a different section because his body had become too toxic and could have become a danger to the other patients. He died the same night. A man had been operated in the brain and collapsed into coma. For 3 weeks his wife and daughter had been coming to ICU.
All this definitely affects the patient too. The news of moving him out of ICU was a big relief for everybody. But I still think of all those people still waiting outside in the corridor, hoping their patient recovers as well, while fearing that death is too close to be ignored. I saw 3 dead bodies being removed in one day – ICU is the most depressing place I have yet been to.
