Friday, October 19, 2007

Ubuntu tips and tricks

Watch out for some kewl Ubuntu tips n tricks here!

Thursday, October 18, 2007

An Idea! - Does it really change ur life?

This is the latest Idea Cellular Ad featuring Abhishek Bachan...




Abhishek Bachan shown as a Village's "Mukhia", solves a feud between two families( with different surnames)..the solution is to change the name of each member of the village to an individual Idea Cellular mobile number...
Now, that means every one will be referred to with their mobile numbers than names...
but isn't the most basic fundas of this world that human beings are prone to remember names better than numbers?
If numbers were to replace names, what is the point of this complex DNS system holding the complex web of internet together?
If that ever happened (which in all probability will not be allowed by intelligent ppl ...like me :) ) for me, that would be going back to the Digital Stone Age!

P.S. The numbers in the ad as pointed by YouTube user community are actually 8 digits! ;)

Saturday, July 21, 2007

The PotterMania!!

Finally!!..after a long waiting..the seventh and supposedly the final Harry Potter book is out!!
I don't remember me ever watching a movie's morning show on the day of release.
But, today I did it! I was the fourth person to the get book from the book shop!! ( not the fourth in the world, but definitely earlier than the people in Europe or the Americas)...
Yes, I bought the HP and the deathly hallows!!
I'm reading through it...One piece of advice, the supposedly 7the HP book that had been available on the internet for some time is now confirmedly a fake one! I'm really happy, I didnot go through reading the fake one

I woke up at 4:45 a.m(!!), freshened up, took out my Yamaha Gladiator and drove away to Koti at 5:30 a.m; I was at the book shop ( I booked the book about 2 months back) on the dot of 6, By 6:20 a.m, the owner drove in by a Ford Fiesta, which contained the books..
I was actually half expecting a frustrated book seller who had to probably sit through the night guarding the books...but, though the man appeared not very well slept...there was a genuine smile on his face, when he was giving the HP7 books............
So far, the reading has been very exciting, interesting and throwing in some insights and some very good twists!

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Did I predict the future?

See my previous post for the prediction I made almost an year ago!!



;)

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Did you read these books?

I got this link from the TIME magazine's website which lists the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 (this article is from 2005!; Some body can point out if there is a latest list :) )
I got off to starts with "Gone with the wind", "Lord of the Rings" & "Catch-22", but never got to finish them off! :(

Now, I know, what I'll probably read over the next couple of.................................
.......years!

What did YOU read from the list and what are YOU going to read?

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Some good photography!

A couple of weeks back, me 'n' my gulti frnz have been rajahmundry to attend dear Rajesh's marriage; after attending the ceremony we went to vizag..that was my first visit to a beach...and it was real fun..we had two digi cams along with us. Here are some gud pics from the journey frm Hyderabad-Rajahmundry-Vizag-Hyderabad.



















Saturday, May 19, 2007

History - A very different perspective

Lately, I've been reading a lot FF ( Fredrick Forsyth). Now, I'm thankful to Sandeepan, Pranabesh and Amit Sharma who lent me the novels when we I was in college...
I've always had a special place for HISTORY in my areas of interest....but my knowledge had been limited to my text books that I read until my class X.
Now, when I read FF, I'm seeing history being unveiled to me with a very different perspective..Nobody told me (not even the text books) mentioned some of the very important things that happened in the history of mankind.To say in a few words,
"No body had put history to me in that way"..
Though the plot of the stories is mostly good..the incidents of history that are described take me to a different level...
Now that I know something, I feel it is important for me to read more and know more history...may be pass it on to others too.....

Monday, March 12, 2007

Tryst with photography

Last week our team went on an outing to Pragathi Resorts..a resort in the outskirts of Hyderabad...
I had taken my new Sony Cybershot along with me and captured the below master piece.


The people in the photo are Anil (left with the Orange T shirt) & Chaitan (the black shirt)
oh oh...wait wait..do you see me also??where am I?
If you think, if I'm taking the photo, why would I be in the pic; you are mistaken!
Can you guess the secret behind this photograph? Don't say Adobe Photoshop etc., etc,.
I'm a great photographer in the making :), ain't I?

Saturday, March 10, 2007

123456789 and magic!

Did you learn how to count in elementary? Then this should be a piece of cake to you....
try the below puzzle:

Don't understand what u r sppsd 2 do?
Well, this is a SUDOKU (no expansion..only highlighted) puzzle.
For some time, I've been working on this kinda puzzles....
How did this happen? In the last week of Jan, I paid a visit 2 my college in Allahabad and to Lucknow along with my friend Suresh.
When we were returning, I had already finished a short stories book by Ruskin Bond...I was lookin for smthin to pass my time...as I was going over the newspaper ..I found this Sudoku puzzle printed in the news paper...that was the first time, I had ever attempted one...I had read about the puzzle before and knew the rules and the expected result....
I shall describe one popular variant of this puzzle.....
a 9*9 blocked square...sparsely filled with numbers between 1 & 9..
one needs to fill in the rest of the blocks with numbers between 1& 9 such that..
NONE of the numbers between 1&9 should appear more than once in each row/column...
Wait...Wait..not only that...
the 9*9 blocked square is divided into nine, 3*3 blocks...and again NONE of the numbers between 1&9 should appear more than once in a 3*3 block....

Did you expect a diagonal rule? Well, there is none!!!

the most important thing...there is ONE and ONLY ONE solution to each Sudoku puzzle.
yes, now back 2 my story; now I started off..looking for possible entries to the boxes of the puzzle..it took me almost more than an hour to fill in the first entry;which probably is a record level long time taken to fill an entry to an easy level puzzle ;)
Yes, the puzzles can be segregated into Easy, Medium and Expert level puzzles too..

Sppsdly (and my xperience also tells me that) , the position of the prior entries of the puzzle determine the complexity of the puzzle, rather than the number of prior entries provided...
Then I got to know of this kewl website that provides you access to lakhs and lakhs of Sudoku puzzles ranging from Easy to Expert levels...
since then, I've been trying at least one puzzle a day...its really fun and you will definitely feel elated as and when each of the puzzles is solved.....
I decided to move to Medium level puzzles as my easy level puzzles timing came to down 8 mins; which FYI, is below average as per the website standards :(; but then, I do not care...now my timing is better with medium level puzzles..I've improved from more than 30 mins per puzzle to 15-20 mins per puzzle..I hope to be better than what I am now..
The only thing that frustrates me is that, if I make a mistake somewhere, some times, it takes forever to track back :( ..which is very tiresome and makes me feel like quitting the puzzle; but then, as I said, I'm improvisin

Wish me luck :)

Sunday, March 04, 2007

The Departed

One word ..awesome

no nonsense movie.. one shud definitely watch the movie.

..a well deserved Oscar...a bit late for Scorsese...but, its always better late than never..

Thursday, January 11, 2007

The "start" button

A couple of days back, I had the privilage to work with SuSE 10 ( a Linux distro, fully supported by Novell)
(Don't worry, this is not going be as big as the last one ;) )
For quite long now, I was hoping that some Linux distro. would be compatible with my keyboard...
You might say, what are you talking about?Any one can type and see the characters on the screen with any Microsoft Windows compatible keyboard..

Yes, but have you ever noticed the key with the "Windows" image on it, rather, famously known as the "start" button...
What happens when u press the key........... on Linux?



Nothing...........
and I've been a lot frustrated, when, to use a console, I always have to use the mouse :(



until now,

Not any more I'll be frustrated........
'Coz, SuSE 10 changes this!! :) Yes, the "startup menu" equivalent (already available in earlier versions of SuSE) can be accessed by the "start" button!!!
How good of SuSE to have thought about it :)
..................for me ;)

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

My new year bash - 2007 !

Why should anyone consider Jan 1st as a special day? Why is that not just another day in anybody's life?
Okay enough of philosophy...Jan 1st is the day where most of us take new resolutions..only to find that we make the same resolution for the next year too! ;)
most of my new year celebrations... for abt 15 years..were spent at my home....and probably a very few times that I was awake when the clock stuck 00:00 hrs...but then things changed, I moved away from my home and I started celebrating the new year in a different fashion (though I despised the stuff at that time !)...but things changed and so did I, and started njoying the stuff...
Its been almost 20 months that I moved back to Hyd..and celebrated the last new year wid my family @ my home.........

but, this time, its been a different xperience all2gether for me...
one of my frnds Shashank was on vacation and had come back from the U.S. and we decided to meet...and called up a couple of others Rajesh, Venky, Suresh and Ramu, so that we cud have a new year bash 2gether...
Though we had enough time 2 plan for the bash...but we never ever planned it...
all of suddend on Dec 30th nite, I get a call frm Rajesh ordering me 2 be @ Shashank's house by 9 a.m. the nxt day; I called up Suresh and we were @ Shashank's by 12:00 afternoon and we found our frnd Ramu has come frm B'lore 2 spend time wid us....we spent some time discussing this and that...and thought we wud go out for lunch..we were 6 ppl and we had 3 bikes...but Shashank said we would go by his car...and it turned be none other than the Skoda Laura!...
Skoda Laura was made to seat 5 ppl comfortably (unless one plans to sit in the dicky ;) , we were 6, so had to adjust a bit (which we were not new to, btw )...
we drove to the Prasad's Multiplex....and entered the "Mirror Maze" which was something fun! all mirrors around u and u'd have to find ur way out on the other side...really fun!!
then we walked around..chit chattin and decided to have lunch somewhere....
but then we thought we go to the outskirts some where...we drove to himayatsagar...gandipet.. and watched the notorious "outer ring road" in the making..and we reached gandipet...
when we were sitting for a while @ gandipet...a tarrot card reader with a parrot walked over to us...and wanted to tell "everything" abt us...we talked two of us into getting talked abt them..

a bit abt Skoda Laura..'m not an automobile xpert..but, automatic transmission, but customisable for manual trasmission and sports mode too!

then indicators, rather sensors, that tell u from time to time the amout of fuel and how long (in kms) the fuel will last..the temperature inside...and sensors that watch the car's rear so that it does not hit somebody/thing when in reverse...awesome music players whch can play 6 discs at a time(i did not understand the concept here )..plush leather seats..and awesome pickup..at times when the road was empty..we reached 120kmps!

then we went to a dhaba..had some spicy, gud dinner (donot remember the name of the dhaba)and then started coming back 2 the city...it was a huge traffic jam at Mehdipatnam..'coz the next day it was Eid too!! and about 2 to 3 Thousand goat and sheep were put up for sale all over the place!! It took us abt an hour to get out of the traffic and come back 2 the city...
next we decided to stay back @ Shashank's for the nite and watch "Bommarillu" and Rang de Basanti.....
now the important part is not the movies we watched...but wat tools did we use to watch it...Shashank had brought something like a projector from the U.S. which plays DVDs and also projects them onto a screen!!..So, we picked an empty room and let the show begin...and watched uptil 3 p.m; ofcourse, we greeted each other and friends @ 00:00 hrs...
one thing was surprising...the networks weren't as busy as they were "supposed" to be! every one of us was receiving calls, SMSes and we were also able to make calls and send SMSes...Hmm..the mobile network has definitely improved :)

and that is how my new year celebrations went.....................
how was urs?
btw, the pics are frm Venky's 12x Canon cam . (frm the U.S. ofcourse)