The Circle of Life

Not so susegado

2011-06-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

Fox History channel is running this TV series on 'What's with Indian Men?' and they are covering Delhi, Mumbai, Goa and Jaipur. Considering the quality of content Fox provides in the history section, I was expecting something more than normal touristy stuff from this series but it kind of disappoints.

While Goans are supposed to be 'Susegado', they obviously don't have the highest per capita income in the country by being all laid back as has rightly been said by Reggie, the owner of 'Kalamari' resto as shown in the video. Its surprising that David from Tito's doesn't back that considering it is one of the most popular conventional night destination in Goa.

Remo speaks about Goa, the same way he always does :) Its good to have someone like Remo talk about not selling Goa out the way its been happening for most of the last decade.

They don't really get much about men in that. Also when did Boxing become a popular sport in Goa :O. Anyways an interesting watch!

The movie Dum Maro Dum also from Fox gives a much clear meaning of Susegado in Goa.

Whatever's LEFT

2011-05-14T02:10:00.000-07:00

With the election results coming in, democratic resentment to corruption and lack of development seem to have reached a new high. The results of the two states, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, where the opposition romped home by massive margins can be summed up in Oscar Wilde's words: "Moderation is a fatal thing, nothing succeeds like excess."

A change in the government doesn't necessarily mean better governance. Corruption is systematic and almost shares a symbiotic relationship with anything to do with administration and governance in India. Its difficult not to be corrupt. What can be hoped for is a best-effort development model without wasting too much time on changing the system of corruption. It is a culture and we share a love-hate relationship with it.

If you have fudged your tax returns or bribed 5 bucks to get your certificates done faster, you too are part of it. Quoting from one of Vivek Wadhwa's posts - "Once you start compromising your values for short-term gains, there is no turning back." So lets be complacent, tweet about problems facing us, hold some candles and wait for someone to clean up our mess.

As if Rebecca Black wasn't enough of funfunfunfun, some people decided to leave their mark on Bangalore, literally. I just happened to pass by Church Street in Bangalore and got the below captures yesterday but now its back to an ideal street, thanks probably to some Ugly Indians.

Don't know what's Left of them now

The longest standing democratically elected communist government does sound hysterical but now it is history. Never really lived under socialism, but reading from history it seems like an excess dose of it is not too good. China is a good example of practicing capitalists, ideological socialists. Ideology is only good for speeches and as long as you don't practice what you preach.

The Joker is back

What a grin! I bet its the Joker who along with Batman made a lot of Box office money.

A Naxalite or is she just being human?

I don't really know how it feels living in a Naxal area. Some say they are oppressed and just fighting for their freedom. Their violence is wrong but probably they just can't be complacent with the government we elect. Lets hope the left get it right and everyone is happy. Whoever did the street art stencil, good job! But alas, democracy still triumphs even if it makes a lot of people unhappy. Some advice -Drop your weapon, attend an anger management course and find a the root of your problem (or a better job).

A victim and a hero

Binayak Sen, a doctor by profession operating a non-profit to provide healthcare in rural areas, some of which also happen to be naxal infected (Infection is not a very nice word here, but even Love is infectious, so !) was arrested on charges of sedition by the government some time back. Country wide protests, support from international bodies like Amnesty and the UN made the Supreme court release him on bail. A mark of protest remains dormant now.

Loo Grafitti

Every wall is not a Berlin wall, yet has its own story. Wonder what this one would have to say if one were to write its autobiography.

Its amazing how a city has a life in places you wouldn't really care to look. So if you are bored to death, just try discovering life in nooks and corners of your house. You can expect to get Bangalored.

BBC News - Germany top for foreign students

2011-03-09T14:42:00.000-08:00

Germany top for foreign students
By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education correspondent

Germany has been named as the most supportive country for overseas students, in an international league table.

Among the attractions for international students is the increasing availability in Germany of courses taught entirely in English, so much so that students can complete degrees without ever having to speak German.

In the international zones of these classes, students from Germany, the United States and China participate in seminars conducted by German professors speaking in English.

View from abroad
David Ravensbergen, a Canadian at the Freie Universitat Berlin, says these multiple layers of internationalism can puzzle other students.

"They say: 'Let's get this straight. You're an English speaker from Canada, and you've come to Germany to study in English. And to study about North America. What's gotten into your head?'"

But Herbert Grieshop, director of the university's Centre for International Co-operation, says that languages should not be a barrier to such globalisation and that international English might be more useful than some regional varieties.

David Ravensbergen says the open access to German universities is a "well-kept secret"
"I wonder whether a Chinese student can understand us better than someone with a Yorkshire accent or some strange American accent," he says in flawless English.

The survey from the British Council which has placed Germany in first place is called the Global Gauge.

It comes ahead of a major British Council conference in Hong Kong examining university globalisation, called Going Global, which begins on Thursday.

The league table ranks university systems on measures such as openness, degree quality, how widely degrees are recognised, support for overseas students and how much students were encouraged to spend time abroad.

International policy
The UK was ranked in third place, with China coming fourth, ahead of the United States in sixth place, in a table showing 11 of the biggest players in the overseas student market.

The strongest overall performance was from Germany, which has promoted a deliberate policy of internationalisation.

There are more students from Germany studying abroad than any other European country and it wants half of its students to spend at least a term abroad, giving Germany one of the world's most mobile student populations.

The global market in overseas students has become a highly-lucrative business. The British Council estimates that it is worth £8bn a year to the UK economy.

But one of the attractions of Germany is that overseas students do not pay any more in tuition fees than home students.

Universities in many parts of Germany do not charge any tuition fees, which means in those places overseas students do not pay any fees at all.

No tuition fees
Freie Universitat Berlin, a top-ranking research university, has been part of this internationalisation project. It anticipates that a third of its students could be from overseas in the future.

"It's a well kept secret, that students are able to come here and there are very few barriers," says David Ravensbergen.

He is taking part in a seminar at the university's John F Kennedy Institute. It's conducted entirely in English - with language skills at a level where it is hard to distinguish between those who have English as a first and second language.

German students are encouraged to go abroad: Julia Sunaric has studied in Spain, the UK and China
He is also impressed by the way overseas students in Germany do not pay higher fees. In other countries, he says it can be a case of "internationalism for those who can afford it".

"One of the strongest motivators is finance. To go to university in Canada means taking on debt. It's essentially free to do it in Germany. It's incredibly appealing not to have to mortgage your future."

Sophie Perl, a student from the United States, also echoes the appeal of being able to study abroad, while paying less than at home.

"I think the biggest factor is financial. In the US a graduate programme would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, in Germany it doesn't cost anything. And it doesn't cost more for foreign students than it does for German students."

Dr Christian Lammert, who is leading the seminar, delivers what he says is now a "completely international" type of course. Even the noticeboards in the corridor have information in English.

OVERSEAS FRIENDLY

1. Germany
2. Australia
3. UK
4. China
5. Malaysia
6. US
7. Japan
8. Russia
9. Nigeria
10. Brazil
11. India
Source: British Council

Outside the window it's a cold afternoon in a leafy suburb of Berlin. The nearby tube station has a folksy thatched roof and there's a wurst seller nearby.

But inside the classroom it could be anywhere in the academic world, with English as the lingua franca and a multicultural group appropriately enough discussing multiculturalism.

The idea of learning in another language, in your own country, does not seem to be a problem for German students. "It's very common to learn in a language other than your mother tongue, so it's not anything special or weird," says Lena Verbeek.

There is a generational divide though. "For my parents it was something very new. Learning in an additional language was something they never dreamt of doing, as they studied only in Germany. It's becoming more and more international."

Studying abroad
There is also an assumption that German students will spend time at universities in other countries. Julia Sunaric, studying managing and marketing, has studied at universities in the UK, China and Spain.

The lack of tuition fees, even for overseas students, is a big factor, says Sophie Perl
"I don't think of it as that special, because other people have similar CVs. In Germany it's really common to study abroad."

She also says that German students are drawn to universities which teach in English, seeing it as useful for jobs in globalised businesses.

"When a university has a lot of courses taught in English, it's a kind of a prestige thing. If students have the ability and motivation to speak English, it's a good thing. People come here for the international image."

But what's in it for the university? There is no financial incentive - and overseas students need extra support.

"It's been deliberate policy. We wanted to internationalise. We thought that it helps our students, our research," says Herbert Grieshop, managing director of the university's Centre for International Co-operation.

Outward looking
The idea of internationalism permeates the university. It was set up in 1948 as a university for the western zone of the divided city and has always promoted the idea of links with the rest of the world. The university's showcase library was designed by Sir Norman Foster.

Herbert Grieshop says international English might be easier to understand than a Yorkshire accent
Mr Grieshop is speaking in a classic 1950s building, full of light and post-war optimism, and the open-arms policy towards overseas students owes much to a cultural faith in internationalism.

"It's good will, being a good neighbour. It's basic to our culture and our economy. We are an outward looking country."

"We think that global problems need global co-operation for research. And for our students it brings the sensibilities and the competencies they need in a globalised world market."

The university has not opened overseas campuses, but instead it develops partnerships through a network of overseas offices in countries including China, the US, Russia and India.

Pat Killingley, the British Council's director of higher education, says that an increase in international partnerships between universities has become a global trend. These partnerships can then become pathways, establishing a route for exchanges between students and staff.

For the UK's universities, she says overseas students are becoming particularly important for postgraduate courses.

"It's a hugely important trend, bringing students to the UK and supporting the research base. It's internationalising the whole system, she says.

It's a picture in which globalisation will "intensify" she says, expecting both more competition and collaboration between university systems.

Cross Post from -

BBC News - Germany top for foreign students

The One With The Bicycle Guy

2011-02-18T10:19:00.000-08:00

Today when I stopped by a small corner shop to fix my bicycle stand, I noticed an interesting piece of reality. The guy who does the fixes went to get the spare and I was exploring his small (2 by 5 meters) shop. There were a couple of cans of 'Pan Masala' i.e Tobacco gums which I'm not sure he chewed or used to store stuff, a damaged bicycle (not surprising since he repairs such stuff) and a couple of trophies with the same thing applied to them as is applied to the forehead of religious deities and priests in some parts of Southern India as a Hindu tradition. He obviously worshiped the trophies the same way he did the gods. Besides that, there were a bunch of posters of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Saurav Ganguly and the Indian cricket team players. No doubt he was a cricket fan. It was then that I saw a photo frame tucked behind the trophies whose color had faded and the edges worn out. It was the photo of a post-match victory team with a manager, the coach, the players and a trophy, a trophy similar to the one kept there.

When he returned with the spare, I asked him what all the trophies and the photo stood for and he told me his story of being a cricket player and fracturing his arm 4 years ago. He had won several tournaments but the accident changed everything. He had left studies for cricket and cricket had left him dead, almost. So he now fixed bicycles for a living earning a meager amount on a daily basis. He had a wife and a mother to take care of and they lived just behind the shop. The state of affairs wasn't that bad but definitely not as good as it would have been had he been able to continue cricket and reap some dividends out of the cash-rich Indian Premier league or one of the several other money driven cricket leagues.

This reminds me of the dialogue between George Cloooney in 'Up in the air' and Bob, the employee he fires.

Ryan Bingham: You know why kids love athletes?
Bob: Because they screw lingerie models.

Ryan Bingham: No, that's why we love athletes. Kids love them because they follow their dreams.

This cycle repair guy tried his dreams but failed. Maybe I'm wrong in making that assumption here. He seemed content and did not exactly regret what happened. That's why India is such a box of contradictions and its people even more unpredictably brilliant at living lives. Most people around here who have steady jobs no longer have real dreams, the one that they cherished since childhood. Maybe they are just being practical and have substituted their bigger dreams with many smaller ones like buying a house, watching a movie with someone, getting a better job offer, travelling to places and so on. Nevertheless it takes strong guts to pursue strong dreams and hopefully despite eating all that junk food, many of the generation will still be able to build those guts.

Now for some random stuff.

An ode to the valentine's day that was :) The Android bots signify that roses are no longer acceptable gifts for valentine, funky Android tablets are!

Google Summer of code 2011 is here

2011-02-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

For students interested in contributing to open source projects and getting a really good summer experience, the Google summer of code program (GSoC) has been announced for 2011. The timeline is also open for organizations working on open source software development to participate with projects and mentors.

An excerpt from their announcement below:

This will be the 7th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past 6 years Google Summer of Code has had 4,500 students from over 85 countries complete the program. We are excited to announce that we will extend the scope of the program this year by targeting a 25% increase in accepted student applications as well as accepting a larger number of mentoring organizations. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Full link here

The presentation detailing the entire structure of the program and statistics for previous years is given at the below link:

http://google-summer-of-code.googlecode.com/files/GSoC2011-Base.ppt

Feel free to go through it and check out the SoC site for list of organizations, IRC rooms to discuss with possible mentors and peers and previous years projects. Feel free to email me on pratikmandrekar@gmail.com if you have any related questions.

--Pratik Mandrekar

Barcamp session - Information & Communication Technology for Development

2011-02-04T02:52:00.000-08:00

We recently had a barcamp session at work and I held a session on information and communication technology for global development.

We discusses a few cases where technology has been applied to real life issues and involves people who normally did not actively participate in technology. The examples are from:
1) Mobile Money Service (M-PESA in Kenya)
2) Ushahidi - Crowdsourcing information for monitoring elections in India, Swine flue data, Egyptian political crisis
3) Digital Green - Participatory videos for improving farmers way of doing agriculture in India
4) Sana - A mobile health platform for remote diagnostics.

The presentation slides are attached below. Most of the things were actually discussed and hence the presentation may not be comprehensive but nevertheless touches on all points of the session.

You can contact me on pratikmandrekar@gmail.com

DISCLAIMER - All opinions are personal and have no relation whatsoever to the company where the session was conducted. The research is all aggregated from different sources and referenced appropriately in the slides.

-- Pratik Mandrekar

Pointer swizzling and Serialization

2011-01-31T03:09:00.001-08:00

While reading up a bit on serialization I came across this nice little way of persisting a typical linked list node in C using pointer swizzling.

A node like this:

struct node {
        int data;
        struct node *next;
};

cannot be persisted or written to a file system or database with the value of the pointer as the memory address pointed to be 'next' will never be predictable when the object is retrieved later. So create an enumeration of the nodes in the list and dynamically generate the 'next' pointer for traversing every time you re-create the list structure.

The persisted node will look like this:

struct node_saved {
        int data;
        int id_number;
        int id_number_of_next_node;
};

Also one needs to take care of Endianess when serializing across different machines as some data types like floating point even when implemented with the same IEEE standard on both the machines may not be readable or interpreted differently when run on the two machines.

The official java api documentation for serialization gives a very good explanation of doing serialization with java. One mainly needs to the following to ensure proper serialization and de-serialization (in their words maintaining consistency in reading/writing flattened objects)
Implement the Serializable interface
Not everything is serializable. It makes no sense to serialize threads or some streams (Probably all). If you need to use them in your serializable class, ensure you mark them as transient.
Override read/write methods of the object to ensure more control over how the state is maintained and later retrieved.
Keep a constant SerialVersionUid field in your classes to ensure that persisted objects whose classes get changed still remain valid when deserialized across different versions of the same class.
Reset or close streams to avoid caching problems. Two successive writes on the same object will not be cache safe.
There are performance issues.
Wikipedia also gives a comparison of different Serialization formats for data (note the difference between data and programming logic i.e code).
Also a note on using threads in general: Avoid threads when not required because they are difficult to manage. Preferable use event drive programming for UI and distributed computing. Here is a popular presentation which tells in detail why. A simple set of examples giving the benefits of using threads in sorting, searching and matrix multiplication is given here. A more involved concurrent programming model in Java is explained here for a webservice example.
I came across this new project under development by a couple of Google folks called Camlistore. Its entirely based on storing blobs (Binary data chunks) and indexing a pointer to the blob and signing it properly to ensure privacy control. It also has a protocol for mirroring the content. It has a fairly simple archtecture but could be a useful standard for managing all of one's media (Dropbox + Greplin + Google Docs + All blog services) . It does seem similar to an application built above a NoSQL implementation like REDIS but has a nice standard SQL database feel to it.
 
Trivia
Seems like people are using open source in Unmanned aerial vehicles too. Check the Open pilot project and the below video for some interesting stuff.
 
-- Pratik Mandrekar

Where does this bus go?

2010-10-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

Got this while trying to book a bus ticket online from Bangalore to Goa. Seems like some overworked web programmers really don't like you to go to Goa!

On Google Health and Application Development

2010-08-10T01:17:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post:

Google health is a service which allows users to load their medical data (as well as people they would like to care of) into google records. You can create a new account or sign in with your gmail user account. It allows you to upload your medical data, get health related suggestions, connect to different health service providers and several other medical services most of which are provided by third party vendors and come at a price. There is a video you could take a look at over here. It also contains API documentation for developers who would like to build over the Google data model for based on google health data and services.

The below is a nice presentation shared by Bess Ho and team deveoping a mobile application called Chief Medical Officer based on google health data services for the Android/Iphone using titanium for development (Atleast the design documents mention it that way in the presentation).

Google Health Architecture & API

View more presentations from bess.ho.

The best Firefox environment!

2010-07-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

The internet has been my main source of information and everything else that stems from it, fundamentally everything! In simpler terms its almost been the most important aspect of my life and for several readers of this post, I believe its true for you too. With computing being ubiquitous a lot more devices are coming into the market and the way we access the internet is changing. Yet there has been one constant force that has enabled me to access the internet: Firefox! Well I have used IE, Chrome and Opera for mobile but nothing yet beats Firefox atleast as a desktop/laptop based user-agent. On top of being the most used browser and the best one, its also free and open sourced and that makes Mozilla really awesome. I also think the following plugins make for a really incredible browsing experience:

Ubiquity - This one lets you gets a command line interface to show up anywhere, anytime in your browser and lets you do several things like perform mathematical operations on the selected data, finding the place on the map, sending emails or tweeting updates by automatically using tiny url's among several other powerful things focused around user mashups and a simple way to lookup things on the web or visualize data the way you want to. You can even create your custom commands. Is the most awesome natural language processing tool I have seen and used for over a year and half on the web.

Ubiquity for Firefox

Del.icio.us - An awesome bookmarking service acquired by Yahoo! that lets you aggregate all your bookmarks and lets you sync them across different computers or mobile phones. So you can get to access all the sites you would like to at any point of time and never lose any information by just a single click.

Yahoo toolbar - It was there some years ago. Then moved out of use and now, is back with a bang! The ability to add custom apps and preview your emails on gmail or check your facebook pages by just a hover click while you are surfing any page on the web really helps avoid the frantic attempts to open new tabs and going to the websites.

Firebug - When it comes to checking the source of the page you are visiting or designing web pages, nothing beats Firebig. An easy way to analyze complex components on the web, custom css, javascript and just examine any interesting components on the page you are viewing.

YSlow - From a developers point of view really helps understand why a page loads slow and what could be done to improve your site performance in terms of front-end engineering.

Foxtab - Need that 3D experience in your browser? Install foxtab and get a glimpse of 3D tabbed browsing. Also to dress up your browser in a style you like use Personas for firefox.

Flashgot - Don't like the way you can't really get that video you watch on facebook or youtube or some file that's taking too long to load in the browser? Well, Flashgot lets you download any media to your system with just a click; Be it flash videos or anything else and that too without leaving the current page or stopping what you are currently doing. One of the best download managers for media ever!

Of course there are a whole lot of plugins that I haven't explored and another set which have been phased out of my browser. Yet the above plugins are what make my browsing sessions truly awesome!!

...and to end with a preview of what firefox is coming up with soon:

An Introduction to Firefox's Tab Candy

Comments and reviews of more firefox related addons are welcome!

Pratik Mandrekar

pratikmandrekar@gmail.com

Physiological Data Visualization

2010-07-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

Visualization of time series data is necessary to understand several physiological activities of patients. This data is obtained from patients by mostly non-intrusive procedures. The pulse oximeter ( A device that indirectly measures oxygen saturation in patients blood), the electrocardiogram (Used to record ECG or EKG signals which is a representation of the electrical activity of the heart obtained by placing leads on the skin on different parts of the body) and the EEG (Electroencephalography - for measuring electrical activity of the scalp produced by neurons firing in the brain) are some examples of the same. The Sana team is working in collaboration with Rich Fletcher from the MIT media lab to use wearable sensors to monitor such activity especially with relevance to developing countries.

In order to get the data from such devices into the Media viewer I needed to get the data to a standard format. Now most doctors and clinicians all over the world use different standards and devices which makes it a difficult task to standardize the visualization part. The physionet is one such resource which supports different standards allowing interconversions, and provides a framework for creating standardized data for physiological signals. To start with one, I used the ECG signals from physiobank (The MIT-BIH Arrythmia database) as the basic data source. I added an interfacing mechanism which would extract the data from physionet compatible file/data formats into Comma seperated Values (CSV). The wfdb library provides functions which can be used in C/C++ to perform almost any task with the data. The ECG signals in the MIT-db comprise of a data (.dat), annotations (.at) and header (.hea) files for every recording. The data file is in binary and cannot be read directly. The processing is carried out using the wfdb package through C/C++ or using wfdb-swig and swig wrappers (Check it out if you are interested in building wrappers around your C/C++ code to enable almost complete portability to other programming languages) for Java, perl and several other languages. I mainly used the rdsamp library with parameters as shown to get the MLII lead data for the record 100.

E.g: rdsamp -r 100 -c -H -f 0 -t 10 -v -pd -s MLII

Owing to the uncertainty in formats for the different signals, we decided on using csv file format as standard input to the time series module in the media viewer. The csv file is stored alongwith the other media files that are uploaded during an encounter with the patient. Normally for an Encounter with the patient the record is stored as Observations into OpenMRS. The ComplexOb support in OpenMRS is to enable things like an X-ray image (The images handled by the media viewer) and other media to be stored for any encounter. I have presumed that the physiological data(mapped with time series visualization) would be one such complexObs uploaded during the encounter. This complexObs needs to be a CSV file for the media viewer to understand and plot the time series graph. Converting the different formats to a csv file is something that needs to be handled (Though I have tested it with physionet compatible formats, other standards need to be studied across the world). However once the csv file is present as complexObs associated with the encounter, the media viewer on load fetches that data similar to the images/audio/video and displays it.

The time series visualization module is built of charting components in flex. the data providers are associative arrays populated with data from the csv files. Hovering over the plot gives the x,y coordinates as a tooltip. A grid is displayed by adding annotation elements to the background. The file is selected from the list of thumbnails shown at the top.

In this a form has been added at the bottom of the plot to enable adding label (as title of the plot) and other information to the graph. This data will have to be stored and associated with the csv file.

Comparing two signals side by side vertically is a use case with applications that enable a doctor to compare the patients data from different leads. the media viewer lets one compare two signals horizontally as well as vertically. The signal to be displayed on either segments of the screen can be selected by focussing on either of the two sides and selecting the csv thumbnails. A slider seperating the two lets you change screen spans for either pf the two plots accordingly.

The vertical side by side viewer with form elements for adding label and comments.

This module is a prototype and depending on usability requirements can be modified further. If you have any suggestions concerning the same, feel free to contact me.

Pratik Mandrekar
pratikmandrekar@gmail.com

The side by side viewer

2010-07-06T06:42:00.000-07:00

The Media Viewer is developed to enable to view and perform basic editing tasks on the media associated with a patient. The media could be images, audio or video for now and other things like time series data associated with an ECG scan among other things.

An important requirement for the Media Viewer has been to add the side by side image comparison facility. This would enable practitioners to compare two different images or two sections of the same image side by side. This component has been developed in flex, mainly using the DivBox container. The main reason for choosing this was that i could add sliders to separate sections in this divbox and a user could drag the slider to adjust either side of the view. More ever I could extend it to vertical as well as horizontal modes to enable side by side viewing and editing. The Divbox is added through actionscript to the main canvas area depending on the state of the viewer. Below I will illustrate some of the states which are the possible use-cases for the components.

This is the Single View for the Media Viewer. One can select a thumbnail and if its an image it would be displayed along with the basic editing functions (Zoom, Brightness, Sharpness, Contrast) at the bottom. There is a drop down list at the top which enables you to choose the state of the Media Viewer to either single view, horizontal side by side comparison or vertical side by side comparison. You can also make the image fullscreen and download it to your local machine respectively by using the two controls in the top right corner of the viewer. The thumbnail viewer gives a preview of the image for an image and fixed thumbnails for any other format (audio, video, time series data).

In here, the oral cancer patient images are viewed side by side. The slider in middle separating the two images can be moved so that either of them occupy as much space as they want to. You can select either of the two sides by clicking on either side to set the focus on the right or the left image. More over, you can pan the images and use the mousewheel scroll to zoom in and out by just hovering over the image on either side. The other image editing functions will operate on the selected side of the viewer.

In this use case you can select an image and then use the other side to focus on the same image to get a near and far perspective of the problem. As has been shown, the lesion from near can be seen on the right side while the bigger picture appears on the left. This can be done by simply selecting the images for either side and zooming/panning as may be necessary.

For some images a vertical comparison may be necessary and the media viewer supports this view by simply selecting the vertical side by side view from the drop down menu. The slider separating the two images can again be used to adjust the span of either of the images in the viewer. You can change either of the images by first focussing on the image by clicking it and then selecting the one you want from the thumbnails.

Any feedback or suggestions for more features to this are welcome.

Pratik Mandrekar
pratikmandrekar@gmail.com

Enabling Mobile Broadband Service on Linux

2010-06-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

In case you have bought or are planning to buy a plug n play mobile Internet/broadband connection like Tata Photon/Photon Plus/ Reliance Netconnect/ Virgin Mobile or any other data card services offered by Airtel/Vodafone/Idea and need to make it work on a linux installation, you may need to do a couple of workarounds. In my case I got a Tata Photon plus and the person who came to set it up had no idea of Linux. Luckily I had VMware running and he did the initial configuration on the Windows XP I was running the virtual machine. The steps needed to make the connection work are generic to installing a modem on Linux with minor differences depending on the modem. Below I have listed the things needed to make the Photon plus connection work on Ubuntu 9.10.

1) Check if you have wvdial installed on your system by opening the terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal or in System) and typing wvdial at the prompt. If it says that you need to install it then you need to install it, else directly go to step 3.

2) You will need to download wvdial from here and run the installation. In my case I had to also download and install libxplc0.3.13,
libwvstreams4.4-extras,
libwvstreams4.4-base,
libuniconf4.4 in that order as dependency packages. The links point to i386 architecture systems, you can find equivalent ones for AMD and other architectures.

3) Install the usb modem and see that it is detected properly. It should be visible in the system similar to a pen drive or any other usb device does. Right click on it and say eject.

4)Now you are ready to configure the modem. Type 'sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf' at the terminal and it will detect the modem as a /dev/ttyX... device. The device name is now /dev/ttyX... where X... will depend on your system.

5) Type 'sudo gedit/etc/wvdial.conf' and remove the semi colon from the last three lines in the file that opens.

6)Enter Phone no ‘#777’, Username ‘internet’ and password ‘internet’ without the colons.In the end, add 2 extra lines in the configuration file.

Init3 = AT+CRM=1
Stupid Mode = 1

Save the file.

7)Open Terminal and type wvdial. It should detect the modem and connect automatically. Open the browser and surf @ 3.1 Mbps :)

In case there is a problem do : 'sudo cp /etc/ppp/resolv.conf /etc/' at the terminal

To end the Internet connection, you would have to a ctrl+c at the terminal or just exit it. Every time you want the Internet connection on, you need to repeat this step 7.

Hope that helps!

Pratik Mandrekar

A Google Summer

2010-05-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

I often wondered how software or more specifically the skills I learn as a Computer Science student could be used in a way that would benefit a lot more people than harvesting virtual crops on a social networking site. Then thanks to a friend, I just came across an entire domain that had never really crossed my mind before; it was the field of health care IT or medical informatics or whatever else you may call it, basically using software to provide better treatment to patients, providing diagnostics and making health care accessible to regions which just didn't have the human or economic resources to do so.

I initially explored certain open source tools in the field of medical visualization. For anyone intending to work in that field, I think Slicer is an amazing tool to explore. After exploring the the field interfacing medical devices with computers and the associated media generation from them I learned a couple of things like DICOM which is the medical imaging communication standard, medical ontologies and well Doctors & Clinicians especially Radiologists :)

I had been planning on applying for Google Summer of Code this year and I decided to apply for OpenMRS since they worked in this field of interest to me and had done amazing work in supporting data in holistic medical solutions across the world. One of the open projects for the Summer included working on a Media viewer module for openMRS which would enable health care workers to upload media like X-rays, videos of lesions, photos of scars, audio of heartbeats captured through a stethoscope and a whole lot of other things along with the patient diagnostics which would help doctors visually analyze the case of the patient better.

This particular project was developed by Sana, which is a student organization based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NextLab, Center for Transpotation and Logistics, Engineering Systems Division) that offers an end-to-end system that seamlessly connects health workers to medical professionals. My mentor Katherine Kuan along with RJ Ryan had originally developed the media viewer documented on the blog and I have to add enhancements to the viewer to functionally improve some of the existing features while adding new components to it. Sana basically works by installing a mobile application (Currently on Android phones) which is given to health care workers in rural areas who record encounters with patients as observations through a structured diagnosis process, uploading the data through a dispatch server to OpenMRS backed data management service in most cases. The doctors can then login from any part of the world, analyze the case and treat the patient accordingly thereby enabling access to quality health care to the remotest of places with basic mobile connectivity (Sana's packetization algorithms work really well, even transmitting images and audio as a standard SMS in areas with poor data packet connectivity).

I have just started my work understanding the code base, learning new technology, analyzing use cases and meeting some amazing people all along. Hopefully will get some interesting update for you soon!

Pratik Mandrekar

On Scrum and Agile development

2010-03-15T03:06:00.000-07:00

A quick interesting overview of agile with Scrum for Software development!

Project Management With Scrum

View more presentations from Tommy Norman.

Trip to Wonderla

2010-03-02T01:32:00.000-08:00

About Wonderla - India's largest amusement park

Located here:

View Larger Map

Register for this event:

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Learn basic Spanish for beginners - I

2010-02-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

This is a small walk through learning basic Spanish for those looking to impress friends by speaking Spanish, knowing what Enrique's Bailamos song means, to have dumb Spanish messenger status and tweets and just in case you end up in Spain or some isolated island which used to be Spanish and the chicos and chicas there only speak Spanish, you can make a feeble attempt to be their amigo.

Basic pronunciation rules:

1)H is silent
2)V is pronounced as 'ba' except when between two vowels it is pronounced 've'.
3)Z is 'sss'
3)A is pronounced AA
U is pronounced U
I as 'E'
E as 'A'
O as 'O'

so AZAFATA is 'AAsssaafaataa'

6)T is 'tte'
D is 'dde'
7)J as 'H'

Chico means a boy and Chica is a girl.

Personal Pronouns

I- Yo (Yoyo!)
You- Usted (formal) ,Tu ('u' with the accent ` for informal)
He-El ('E' with the accent `l, without that it means the)
She-Ella
You all- Ustedes (formal), Vosotrose(Informal, male), Vostras (Informal, female)
We- Nosotros (male), Nosotras(female)
They-Ellos (male), ellas (female)

Normally words ending with 'O' are masculine and 'A' feminine.
Add 'S' for obtaining plural from singular if word ends in a vowel, else use 'ES'.

Next part : Learn verbs in Spanish

Pratik Mandrekar

Why New Coal?

2010-02-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Wonderful documentary on India, coal and climate change. If you ever though climate change didn't concern you, just check out Project Survival Media for reports on how Climate change may just be your neighbour.

Algorithm for a Terrorist?

2010-02-20T03:25:00.000-08:00

Terrorism has become a part of our lives. Not necessarily because we have been or would be affected by it but because of our fear of the uncertain and our love for the media that ain't spare a khan. Our chances of dying in a car accident, walking on the road, getting choked up by food and being a victim of a defective mobile/laptop explosion are like 10x times more real than being holed up in a 26/11 Mumbai, 7/7 London or 9/11 New York like situation. Yet terrorism persists in our imagination and for most of us is in the form of a guy who could carry out a suicide bomb blast just about anywhere.

So who is a terrorist?

Algorithmically speaking, there are people who have attempted to discover terrorists simply by taking a look at their lives. I'm lifting this one from SuperFreakonomics.

The banking history of nineteen terrorists from the September 11 attacks reveals the following:

They opened an account of roughly about $4000 in a branch of a well know bank.
Typically used a P.O. Box number as an address that changed frequently instead of a fixed address.
Regularly had wire transfers from multiple countries below limits that would actually trigger alerts in Banking reports.
Normally had one large cash deposit and several small withdrawals.
Banking did not reflect normal expenses like rent, insurance, food, etc.
No consistency in money withdrawals.
Ratio of cash withdrawals to checks written was unusually high.
Didn't use savings a/c or safe deposit boxes.

Add to this some data from the 7/7 London attacks investigation, namely:

Since most of the suspects arrested were Islamic fundamentalists, one of the strongest demographic markers in the algorithm would be to have an Islamic name.

No wonder all that's said and done about My Name is Khan could be unscrupulously true or even worse.

They were also likely to own a mobile phone, be a student and rent rather than own a house.
Not withdraw money from an ATM on Friday afternoon. (This corresponds to the Friday mandatory prayer service for Muslims and is again worked around the assumption of terrorists being Muslims).
Not buy life insurance because insurance companies do not pay out if you die in suicide, lest pay for being a suicide bomber.

Supposedly based on this pattern and applying it to the general population, a small but significant section of the population was filtered out and marked as likely to be terrorist.What happened next is but anyone's guess. There are more scientific techniques too like this one for terrorism in Turkey and this one to figure out what a terror network looks like.

What if in all this statistical science we end up blaming a set of people who have nothing to do with terrorism (Obviously, Terrorists don't follow any religion, they just religiously follow terrorism and that could be just about anyone) ? What if our very fundamental visualization of 'guy with suicide bomb' as a terrorist is wrong (I definitely believe it is)? Maybe the reasons and forces behind terrorism are powerful and remain seemingly hidden because in all likelihood terrorism is just another political gimmick? I would rather leave those trivialities to open-minded self-opinionated intelligent readers like you :)

Pratik Mandrekar

P.S - My name is Pratik, and I'm not a terrorist. Marry Me?

New Year Resolutions

2009-12-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

New Year is the time when people make resolutions, become nostalgic, sun burn themselves over dawn parties and make merry. I don't really think that the day is special or very different from the every other awesome day I live. Yet since our days are numbered (Remember 2012?) its worth giving my $0.02 to this phenomenon.

After completing 3.5 years of computer science, and watching 3 idiots, I have my new found passion for Cyrillic. I always wanted to learn it to facilitate communication between our fellow visitors from the far off lands. For example, after learning Cyrillic it would take minimal efforts to understand what's below.

An announcement for the Tourists at Mandrem Beach

For those who do not understand the above,its a pity since I would prefer using my skill sparingly. Also considering that the world would soon have non-english URL's, it pays to know Cyrillic.

Secondly I will explore each and every cave of Goa (No URL for something as pristine as that). I recently discovered an underground tunnel leading to a cave. The tunnel starts just below this desolate house named 'Matreja' around the fatorda stadium circle, behind Ravindra Bhavan and the unmaintained lake. The cave, largely inhabited by bats goes right into the city centre and has two openings which I have been to and one of them opens right at the spot from where I could see the below scene.

The century old Margao municipality building

As of now the cave has been hardly explored and much needs to be studied about it. Only a handful of people know about the exact location and this is the best description I can give of it since I am bound by the non-disclosure of the new caves discovery act, 1885 provedaria de Goa. As I complete my trail and make new discoveries I will release more information for public disposal. It is likely that soon we humans would go back to living in caves to show our solidarity towards our great ancestors without whose procreation we wouldn't have existed.

I would make a film, a tale of 2 hostels, of love and horror, passion and compassion, war and peace. The story will be an epic starring anti-Virus as the main protagonist with the tagline: Hostel life will never be lively again.

The last dusk of BITS hostel life

Several other resolutions are in the pipeline and would come out just in time the clock strikes midnight.

On a more serious note, I would like to thank everyone who made this year a wonderful experience. I will never have enough of you. Thanks to vodafone, gtalk BITS and Margao for the amazing moments and the many more...

Happy New Year -1!

InPiKs

2009-12-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

At the Gateway of India

Being in Mumbai is always an interesting experience. Especially when its the eve of 26/11 terrorist attacks anniversary and you are standing right at the spot where everything happened. For Mumbai life goes on. Nothing can stop the spirit and vibrancy of this city. And for several reasons I love this place!

Leopold Cafe

The shoothout happened right here. A popular hangout for foreigners and locals alike and a menu that meets all your needs at a price, I got my first visit to leopold right on this day. We got a hotel room at bargain rates just above this cafe to spend the night. We were made to go through several security measures including our names being noted down on a suspects list 'coz we were idling at CST Railway terminus hunting some good book deals and had backpacks on; probably that reminded the on-duty officers of the night someone similar walked in doing much damage. Another unique experience :)

Crossing the Sea at Alibaug

Thanks to the DAAD and the Seminar they organized for us in Mumbai, we had a great outing to Alibaug. That's an island, an hours boat ride from the Gateway of India, followed by 30 minutes of bus journey to the beach. These ponies do real hard work ( Animal activists anyone?) and cross the seas during low tide, whih almost makes are feet wet as we cross the sea in the Tonga to reach the Kolaba fort some 500 metres from the shoreline into the sea.

The waters rising...
The horses/ponies waited for us as the tide was rising and we were out exploring the fort!

The bus ride and Village Folk on the island..surprising for Mumbai!

SeaGulls
Awesome company during the boat trip; this human induced daily migration of the sea gulls to and fro the harbour to Alibaug and back as food keeps flying off the deck is an amazing and entertaining phenomenon that gives you company in the Arabian Sea.

Far and away...Mumbai

Yeah..the Taj, now completely back in order though the heritage wing probably will take a lil more time to repair..historical place!

Vibgyor
Lens focussing and sunlight :P

Still waiting for our very own, Tortoise at Spicy Bella, Panaji, Goa to be followed by a dose of 2012 and Carassid and the tale of two sweet brownies :).

Now that's walking down memory lane..in 20 more days, I would no longer see this..sigh! But to cheer me up, some else has eyes too :)

BITS Pilani Goa Campus, the \m/ est place where everything is so so legendaryyyyyyy! No doubt I'm gonna miss it as I move out to new frontiers. Hopefully others too would have an awesome experience at this place! BPGC is not just a college, it is the college where Maggi can revolt and ideas evolve even in the loo, perhaps that being the reason why some room is so close to the place where SHIT happens!

Miss you! All the best!

Pratik Mandrekar
.mmmmmmmm.

Monkeying around

2009-11-08T07:08:00.001-08:00

3 days

2009-11-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

Its been an amazing experience the past two days, here's why:

BITS Pilani Goa Campus, as part of QUARK 2010 has organized a live webinar called TEDx BITS Goa. For those who are not aware of TED, its the coolest platform where ideas from all aspects of life are discussed and spread by awesome people. I could attend only a single session of the many sessions which you check out here.

Pranav Mistry with his 'Sixth sense' device, which can make your daily newspaper into the 'daily prophet' from harry potter where you can actually see the pictures in motion and that too just on your normal newspaper. You could even just make an action of clicking pictures with your fingers and the image would be automatically clicked and stored somewhere on your home PC. Integrates computing into our daily life.

Pawan Sinha, Visual Neuroscientist, has done great work in identifying relationship between blindness, visual learning and autism and his project has done wonders to several people in India. Romulus Whitaker with his conservation efforts for the king cobra and gharial, two of India's most magnificent creatures in the wild, showed how our daily lives could affect our very own survival.

The other big thing was WAVES Winter 2009 organized in a span of 7 months after the shift to semester 1 of the academic calender, has proved that 'We BITSians can make waves wherever we go' (Quoted from Anu Hassan's innaugral waves speech, more content from DoJMA).

The Sand sculpture made by the Internationally acclaimed Sand Artist, Mr. Sudarshan Patnaik based on the theme of global warming was an amazing display that enthralled one and all.

Numerous events, worshops, amzing participation from all over the country with sponsors lik Chings, Ibibo, NetCOre and the like with prizes like offers to acts in Pritish Nandy Communications productions for two, 150 hours of recording in Xion labs, delhi, acting school admit to Kishore Namit Kapoor acting school which has alumnus like Hrithik Roshan and Priyanka Chopra and judges like Vidya Balan for the Fash P, this is truly India's hottest cultural festival.

A piece of work from Arts and Deco among the numerous that dot the landscape during WAVES, a tribute to Michael Jackson.

The Legacy- BITS Pilani Goa Campus, WAVES Winter 2009 and Marco \m/. Make sure you don't miss any edition of this event!

Grooving to DJ Suketu today, KK tomorrow and Parikrama and Sea Rock on Sunday night. Not to forget the dance worshops, the prom night, mocktail, 3D photography, ambigram and other cool workshops..this is an amazing week of our live :)

Good night!

Climate Change

2009-10-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

350.org PowerPoint Slideshow

View more presentations or Upload your own.

October 24th, 2009

2009-10-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

Scientists say that 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere is the safe limit for humanity. Learn more about 350 – what it means, where it came from, and how to get there. Click here

24th October, 2009 - Benaulim

Goa's quite aware that to fight climate change and keep below 350 ppm of CO2 we need to turn green.

We want to highlight the 350 Cause via a signature campaign. But we also want to tell fellow Goans that Plastic bags are all over the place, and though alternatives exist, very few use them.

Our canvas is 350 meters of cloth spread across 3-5 cities, colleges and beaches of Goa. Encouraging creativity, a signature campaign on this cloth banner will then help create about 350 or more custom designed cloth bags that we will sell for a nominal Rs. 3.50. (Keeping the '350' number in focus all through! :)

A part of this banner will make it to Copenhagen later this year! Click here

Be a Part of the change!

Nagpur

Mumbai!

Danke Schön

2009-07-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Heute ist mein letzter Tag hier in Augsburg, ich möchte all jenen danken, die dazu beigetragen, dass dieses eines der besten Erfahrung, die ich je hatte.
(You guessed it right, two months here and all German I know is .......... this much!)

Kinder

Kidos

I met all kinds of them here; the big, the small, the naughty, the budhas, the mowglis, cindrellas, all disney characters.... The best part was having a kindergarten right next to where I live and be defeated while playing football with them. :P

Universitat Augsburg

University lake

I spent most of my time here in amazing company of people at the software engineering department working on my organic computing project and learning plenty new stuff which I can broadly classify into layman keywords like robots, simulations, traffic, manufacturing systems, touch screen computing (Microsoft Surfaces), safety and everything else that you can connect with them. I would thank Prof Reif (Even though he had been all over the world and I met him like 2-3 times only , that was adequate) and the DAAD for the opportunity and of course Mr. Khaldy and his team for the Berlin 'towel' trip.

University lakeside 2

The university did provide a lot of glimpses into European culture as the above picture does not illustrate. I added Mexico and Turkey to the places i would go to and met people from Central Asia (China,Japan, Kazakhastan, Afghanistan,Pakistan, Iran,Palestine, Iraq, Turkey,...), Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania, Russia,...), Africa, North America (Canada and U.S ob), North pole (Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Eskimoes,.. ) , Australia, Honululu and of course my favorite being South America (Mexico :P and maybe venezuela, Brazil, ...). Apart from the numerous Barbeque parties, the picnics, hikes and trips I learned a lot of history from all the discussions and deliberations with Mathhias, Frank, Jan-Philip, Nina, Hella, Flo, Simon, Kurt, Alwin, Andrea & Andreas, Michael,... and yeah thank you all for the amazing company!

And my interest in all kinds of Flora and Fauna, animals and birds helped me gather knowledge like which animal is responsible for the maximum number of deaths in Germany.

Rhinos!

Nein, it wasn't that mean looking creature, but rather the cute looking Hippo!

The very efficient and exorbitant transport system constituting the trams, S-bahns( Surface trains) and U-bahns (Underground metros), buses that are long enough to be mistaken for trains and the Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo (which the entire world knows about and they come from here!), Toyotas and Suzuki's and people being impressed by the Nano and yet guzzling gears on their sedans on the AutoBahn @240km/hr with ease. The bicycle friendly roads with streets and signals especially meant for riding bicycles and the routes along the rapids which are used for the Kayaking World Championships constructed during the Munich Olympics 1972.

Trams in Augsburg

The Food which I still am not able to name but was amazingly delicious, the desserts and chocolates and icecreams and the Turkish food I discovered just recently and not to forget the Italian Pizza's which were cheaper than bananas and water made sure I got my daily bread and butter: milch brot and chocolate cream to be precise. I also had my fair share of cooking and burning my taste buds with the chilli powder and garam masala added to camouflage the taste of the food.(Mayonnaise and Sauce too helped :P)

There are too many things here to thank, the friends on gtalk, facebook and orkut who stood by me in all those times of 'imboredandineedyoutoentertainmesomehow!'.India is famous and for plenty of reasons as you can see from the city gallery shop above.However what came as a bigger surprise is below:

Well i had met people who had been to Goa and loved it and rest who were curious about its beaches and spirituality (!?). Well I love Goa for my own reasons but nevertheless I had people who shared common objectives here too. That's some globalization!

..and yeah not to forget the costliest smses I had to send for both silly and sweet reasons.Thanks :)

So Danke Schön, Auf Wiedersehen.

Chao

See you in Goa :)

Pratik Mandrekar

DAAD WISE 2009 Internship Feedback

2009-07-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

Some tp..

2009-07-24T17:14:00.000-07:00

This should help you while away some time while you yawn..

Hello, reader! I am a young boy from the United States, and like most other American children such as me, it seems there is nothing I enjoy more than lazing about from morning until night, eating sweets, and wantonly disrespecting the wishes of my elders.

But I am beginning to realize that my behavior—and the behavior of all typical American young people like me—is in every way unacceptable. What is more, my lack of obedience goes completely unchecked, since my parents, teachers, and government authorities will do nothing to stop it.

Sleep, eating, and Mickey Mouse. That's what I like best. Most days, when I am not gorging myself on cheese hamburgers or wasting my time collecting baseballs, I tend to speak to adults as if they were my schoolmates or mere common insects, instead of figures to be feared and respected. Did you know the amount of effort I put forth in my daily life is not even one-tenth that of children my age in other countries?

Continue reading here

Politics

Nation Descends Into Chaos As Throat Infection Throws Off Obama's Cadence

July 14, 2009

This cough led directly to 1,400 overturned cars and three major prison riots.

WASHINGTON—Looting, fires, and mass rioting swept across the nation today when a mild throat infection threw off President Barack Obama's normally reassuring and confident speech cadence, sources in every major city reported.

"My fellow [cough] Americans, please [cough] remain calm," Obama said during a nationally televised emergency address to the nation that caused the Dow Jones to plunge 50 points with every cough, sniffle, or wheeze. "Now is not the time for [cough]…everything's [cough]. Stop it."

Without the president's fluid, almost poetic tone to reassure them, the American people have abandoned all semblance of law and order and descended into a nationwide panic, burning buildings to the ground, disobeying police, and relinquishing all hope for the future.

Grandfather Disrespected In Own Home

AKRON, OH—Though he is wise, benevolent, and the eldest male member of his family, grandfather Jerry Morgenthau, 74, was shown a degree of filial piety more fitting a dog or pig Tuesday when younger relatives disrespected him in his own home.

Reports indicate the retired steelworker and patriarch—who, unlike his insolent offspring, has cultivated great virtue in his time upon this earth—was ignored and patronized by his son's family throughout their brief visit.

Morgenthau's own firstborn child displayed unforgivable disobedience by smiling and nodding while dismissing his father's expert counsel on matters ranging from home maintenance to the best methods for attaining low-cost airfare to Florida.

"Okay, Dad," said Derek Morgenthau, who should be harshly chided for failing to glorify his ancestors.

P.S. - That's all that I could do today 'coz i had to put this up for someone even though I have been busy doing stuff..

chao

The Letter

2009-07-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Veronica

I know you would be surprised to find this letter here. Firstly we never wrote letters. Remember how our relationship started? Online chat rooms and Social networking sites wouldn't replace the numerous matrimony sites but surely we were an exception or so we thought. Time has changed sweetheart and I still love you but there's something you need to know

You may be wondering why I did not meet you the entire day yesterday and haven't been receiving your calls. I knew you would come in search for me. That's why this, my first letter to you and don't feel bad..maybe the last. Well we had the routine medical test at the company on Friday. They had interns posted to do the job this time. I had my sample taken and everything seemed fine except for a little dizziness which normally never happened. I just thought that maybe it was the workload I had this week and the nights spent with you (Gosh I'll miss you so much :( ). But then all blacked out. I don't know when I opened my eyes. It was dark. I couldn't see anything. I tried standing but my knees hurt. I groped in the dark for something to support. I hit something, it felt wet. I remembered my cellphone had a torchlight. I took it out and switched it on.

I was standing in a pool of blood. Two bodies lay besides me. Still and cold. I tried turning and looking at the face of one. I instantly recognized it. It was the same guy who had done my tests that evening. Worse, he was stripped bare and had two letters inscribed on him. The flesh could be seen ruptured and a few flies attempting to feast in them. Those two letters were my initials.

I didn't even dare looking at the other body. I swear i didn't kill them. I don't even know what I am doing here. I was supposed to be out there with you and here I am , prime candidate for a double murder with all the circumstantial evidence pointing towards me. I needed you. I took out my phone to call you. There was a message from a private number. I opened it. It read : " Wire 300,000 bucks to 4567889290018902, Stadsparkasse within before 12 pm tonight and you'll be free" I didn't know what to do. Then i did something for which i cannot forgive myself. Remember you had told me once about your mothers insurance policy bond worth 250,000 bucks? I'm sorry but I used your account (Remember never to share your account details with anyone in the future, not even the person you trust the most) and transferred the entire amount. I know that was the only thing you had. Your sister's education depended on that but at that moment I didn't know what I was doing. I just wanted to get out and I just did whatver was spontaneous.

Then i tried escaping from the scene. I could see in the dark now. It was my office conference room. The main door was locked but the fire exit was open. I went out and just ran. I don't know how far I went into the woods because my legs gave way and it was only 12 hours later when my eyes opened that i saw another message on my phone. It was the report from the medical bureau . I know this is going to hurt you a lot. It said that my report said I was positive for HIV and I should report to the lab immediately for more tests. I was scared to go back but I thought I should let you know. Please get yourself checked. There's another thing I need to tell you. The fortnight ago when I had been to Budapest for the meeting I had met this girl and we were drunk...I know you'll never forgive me. I have no option left but to kill myself. I know I have hurt you but you are a beautiful person and I know you will fight back. Will miss you.

Love you,

Yours eternally

(Ashamed of my initials)

Miss you and Take care.

P.S. - My dear sweetheart, a lot can go wrong in this world as you have just seen. So I hope you wouldn't really mind my doggy ripping off your pink Teddy which you can find under the Bed. After you have calmed down please meet me at our usual cafe. I swear everything above the P.S is a lie except of course the I love you part :). See you soon. Tc

Pratik

Yawn!

2009-07-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

Its like early morning out here and somehow I still am busy with things that have nothing to do with what I had planned for the night. A lot of nice things keep happening and its fun expecting the unexpected.I wanted to write something about my work but its to heavy for a lightheaded moment like now. Anyway for a brief I came across one of these today:

"There are 64 single men and 64 single women, all heterosexual its is presumed, who want to get married. Each one ranks all possible mates. The problem is how to find the set of marriages so that no two people (one man one woman) that are not married to each other do, in fact, prefer each other over their assigned partners"

Well this is a decent multi-agent problem and BDI systems I work with are adequate to solve it..but damn to Sec 377 , now I'll have to change the problem statement itself to suit the 'real' needs of the population.

Zzzzz...again a few glimpses of past few days (More here)

An Old water wheel used by the flour and saw mills and also to hammer Metal

Baby trying to destroy Public property? Err...not exactly...

Fussen's Lords in the Sky and Me with ice cream (invisible)

One of Fussen's ild houses next to the Ski-Jump and the Mini-golf park

Guess Who? At the farm.. :)

Ostriches et more...traditional Bavarian lunch at the farm in the Alps between Germany and Austria

Thanks for the hike up the gorge and the drive up to Neuchwenstein(People not in Pic, but Swans are)

Busy scaling the castle walls..DND!

Even Cindrella and Disney need to face Real Life problems of Material degradation

Its not just you who are scared up here dear :)

Marienbrucke or wateva- The highest bridge up the Alps

Hiking the Gorge

That's what Traditional Lunch costs and that too tip not included, but well worth it... :)

That's all 4 now...

Chao

Pratik Mandrekar

Another Legendary Weekend :)

2009-07-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

The party was planned, the grills were ready, the meat was about to be bought; it was all planned out when all of a sudden there was a storm predicted for the evening.If it were in India, I would have of course switched the channel when the weather report would have started but out here that wouldn't be the case.Even the clouds seemed to obey the weather report and started darkening. It was 3:30 PM and the party had to be called off.It was 5:00 PM and the weather cleared all of sudden.The forecasts go wrong here too :P. So the party was hurriedly fixed up albeit without those who wouldn't be reading their mails again would miss it.

BArbequing at the lakeside

I went with Alwin and Andrea to the mart to get the necessary stuff and an authentic Bavarian Shopping experience.Even the coal comes packaged for barbeque here!So all setup we headed to the lake, setup the grill, got everyone ready, discussed things about the guy who came from the same Romanian village that dracula did and all kinds of blah..with a dose of grilled meat and drinks to drink.Two students who hadn't read their earlier mails (fortunately!) turned up and well..! An advisory to all who go swimming or diving in frozen lakes, take a roap with you 'coz once upon a time a couple of swimmers did go and were lost inside, normally you would just blow the bubbles and see where they head, but with the ceiling packed with ice you have no option but to....so be careful...That was the middle of the week.

The next night I left for Werfen and Salzburg where the Biggest system of Ice Caves in the World and the life of Mozart awaited us respectively.The German trail at Munich for Salzburg was canceled and we had to board the Austrian Express with a DB pass and surprisingly no-one noticed.The Nordic woman sitting with me again had an Indian connection;she had seen 'Little India' in Singapore.Its surprising how everything somehow connects to India here and even Goa.

From the top of the Cable Car at the largest network of Ice Caves in the world

So we finally reached Salzburg, shopped a bit and reached Werfen which is an amazingly beautiful town with the Austrian Snowy Alps,' Gaei ' and deers, flowers with houses or atleast it looks like that, castles on the horizon and our journey to the top of the Alps where the Ice caves with all the stalactites and stalagmites, Elephant like structures with the ashes of the guy who discovered them , chilly high pressure winds blowing us away, magnesium ribbons to illuminate the interiors and Govinda burning his pant at the -10 degree Celsius or so temperature inside the caves will remain legendary! That sure was an experience..

We returned from Werfen only to realize that the optimal solution would mean we skip Salzburg night to spend time at the Munich station so that we could be early next morning to the Disney castle.So our second sleepless night at the Munich station with the blabber king from Pakistan and some more cute people, along with a walk on the street which would put Amsterdam to shame helped us stay awake till we took the train to our next destination

Bridge et Fall

The less I say about this place where Michael Jackson spent most of his time the better.However a few points to note:

The Japanese love this place and are have inbuilt GPS systems which aids them reach this place without looking at any map or sign.They have mastered the art of digital photography in positions we would refer to Yoga.
No one knows why king Ludwig and his doctor were found dead just 172 days after this Disney castle.It wasn't even completed and the Servants quarters here are too awesome for modern day Kings.
One of the many enlightening international conversations we overhead :P

Joy(An American lady)-My name is Joy.
Prachi (An Indian girl)-Did you know that Joy means happiness in Hindi?
Joy(spitting chewing gum)-Oh..that's nice !
Prachi- Gum means sadness.....

Next we headed back to Munich where the Deutsche Museum-The worlds largest Science and Technology Museum made us feel tiny and amazed at everything from Nanotech devices that could play football, to the Inside of Space Shuttles to the Sundials and Pianos which almost led to another WW.Dachau was next and we made a bus tour of the concentration camp with a guy holding a knife about to....err I guess he was trying to open the ventilator coz his doggy was feeling stuffy :)

Dum Dum

Allianz Arena, Food, food and time to board for our next destination:Lindau.The plan was to catch sleep at the Lindau station.We reached at midnight and for the first time this station had to close down at midnight.What followed was a nightful of experience roaming on the streets, the seafront bordering Swiss,Austria and Germany on Lake constance providing the perfect backgroud for drunk guys and girls trying to think we were the Loch Ness monster and monsteresses and ofcourse for the set of decent guys et gals who almost ran over us, shocked, awed, made us sleep in the Deutsche Post Office, PDA's that were passe by now and in general A Night to remember.That made three sleeplesss nights for me.Amazing Euro Trip :)

Lindau :)

Lindau is an amzingly beautiful Island and we experienced the Sea and Europe at its best with its set of Ducks, Swans and Lions. Alligators and fishes or poodles and dragons-They all looked same to me in the end, I had seen sooooo...much.

As Pure White as a ....(I did offer my donut, but she wanted a pizza..ofcourse its more than just a birdie :) )

On my way back I was almost fined for having my shoes resting on the seats, simple strategy of not understanding worked and I didn't have to attempt more advanced acting skills like getting hysterical and making monkey grunts and scratches.

....Sing

Finally I was home :) .The sign above is almost home. I love you :)

Another weekend, another week-Time just flies by with or without you...

Chao

Pratik Mandrekar

Check more pics here

My Experiments with Dark

2009-06-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

Well..well, Our father(Dude Gandhi) might have done all kinds of experiments with truth and dare but I prefer 'My Experiments with the Dark'.

To begin with I started with something sweet.I got one bar of every kind of Dark Chocolate available in the market so that I could select the better ones for the one who desires them most.I had never had so much chocolate in my life and maybe that's the reason they ended on a bitter note.Anyway, by the time I was done with the Darkest of the Chocolates I had enough cocoa up my snort to make it look like 'coke' and I was out in the dark.Middle of the night I went to this festival place where besides the couple of bands playing blues and rock, I had my dose of the Rodeo bull, the 'I lock you in that box, and survive the storm' game, people, drunk people and very drunk people who were actually speaking Greek or was it Latin..the pic would say better..Servos!

The Dark Night (The Rodeo bull was the best part if you can figure it out in the dark

The Dark was so dark that I couldn't capture anything worthwhile on my cam except for a few good videos which are to big to be uploaded on flickr and Now that Google plans to close down youtube I'm in no mood to put them there either, so they stay with me.But I decided that I'm going to master the dark and this is what I got In the art of Digital photography

The best modes:
[Children]-Use this to take a pic of fast moving objects. for example children
[Self Shot]-Use when Photographer would also like to be in the image

Well if that wasn't enough, my video editing software wouldn't let me filter the images so brrr..I had to do with whatever was left...

The next night when I made strawberry rice and lost Peace! 'coz of the war in Iraq, I had nothing to do but meet the dark lord aka Satan.No I did not join a black magic cult, that was just a dark Joke.

The Marathon for PEACE!

The next night(It was just 8pm though) I decided to go on a cycle marathon to the farthest place I could and I went upto some point which sounded like east Brimhingam but wasn't in UK but Germany itself. 40 kms(Well that's not really a marathon, but yeah good for a start), riverside, dogs, and the romantic strolls did have the desired effect and the dark just became darker when I ate some more dark chocolate and blogged.You see how good the effect can be?

Batman may live in the dark, but do you like Batman or Joker?

Servos,

Pratik Mandrekar

Tonite you can R.I.P

We saved the world!

2009-06-22T14:14:00.000-07:00

Truth is stranger than fiction and below is an excerpt from how we just saved the world a few moments ago and then of course to celebrate, 'washed the utensils' !

qwerty:
i can see smthng over der

!@#$%^:
see
if tht s it
dont turn bak
dotn luk bak

qwerty:
it looks like tiny creatures walkin on a mountain

!@#$%^:
haa
it mght b te illusionry one
do u see a blue light onthe top
?

qwerty:
a faint one in d distance

!@#$%^:
thn this one s fake
we need to go ahead
one with red light
run

qwerty: aah
(running)

!@#$%^:
wdont waste tim
run

qwerty:
run run run

!@#$%^:
if u gt tired
remeber i m thr

qwerty:
no tired master
run for life
run for the goog
good

!@#$%^:
we ned to save the wrld
run fr the ppl

qwerty:
save d world yipee!

!@#$%^:
run fr thr happiness
hey i see it
i see it

qwerty:
where is it o lord?

!@#$%^t:
hm lose ur eyes u l se
u wearin skeletons cloak
rght

qwerty:
ya (closing eyes)

!@#$%^:
nw keep thm closed n u lsee wht i m seoin
i dunno hw to pass this mound of ants

qwerty:
oh yes master..i can see it..isn't it huge

!@#$%^:
mayb u l knw coz u r skeleton rght nw

qwerty:
i thnk der will be a secret code to enter
ya i thnk here it i can se the ants clearing on my path
heres d code, i can understand wat dey r speaking!
mus b d coats effect

!@#$%^:
yeh tht s wht
do wht ut think is rght
i l tc of the rest
hey we need ot b fast

qwerty:
d entrance is out der to ur right master
we need to say dis together :hoodibababa hodibaba hoo hoo

!@#$%^:
ok
hoodibababa hodibaba hoo hoo
hoodibababa hodibaba hoo hoo
hoodibababa hodibaba hoo hoo
heya
it opeend
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
..a brave fight later we won! We saved the world!

You may not understand the above but it was one of those moments that come once in a lifetime i.e the chance to save the world! lite :)

I'm very sleepy now and can only tell you one more story.Its the story of how nice things can happen even when they may not appear to be so, This 10-year-old girl desperately wanted to see the new Disney-Pixar movie, "Up." But the cancer-stricken girl was too sick to go to a theater.

Thanks to a family friend who got in touch with the movie studio Pixar, an employee of the Emeryville-based company arrived at Colby's home with a DVD copy of the movie. The girl died later that night.Read more..

This Sunday we went to the Strawberry fields to do some strawberry farming, plucked over 4 kgs of strawberries and had another of those wonderful new weekend experiences.I wouldn't say much 'coz it would only make you more jealous..

At the Strawberry farm,Augsburg

Well I also got into history books.The Trojan Horse for those who remember...Augsburg is named after Emperor Augustus after whom the month of August is named and is the oldest inhabited place in Europe so there must have been some connection :)
(That's all I know of History so you can deduce from there onwards)
The Trojan Horse

Chao again!

Gute Nacht!

Pratik Mandrekar

Week 3

2009-06-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

Returning after 3 nights without sleep last Weekend, I woke up late as expected on Monday and soon became a trend for the week.I had excuses ready 'The tram changed its route', 'went to an ATM and was figuring out the German keys for an hour' or 'I found a lost kid, took him to the polizei and then his mom came and it turned out she was the mayor's daughter and ...'; however its so cool out here that I didn't even have to mutter half an excuse.Despite enjoying every moment, work happens in an awesome manner with deadlines being met on time and interactions swinging between politics to soccer to project to .... I love this work environment!

Highlights of the week range from my cooking experiments which have subdued now that I have reached standards beyond the expectations of the finest chefs and cuisines, being caught by the police for cycling on the pedestrian track, withdrawing Money from German ATM's using the 'love me, love me not' protocol to last night's Mexican party.I realized that Mexico is another of the Wonderful places to go to despite being the epicenter of the Swine Flu.Also my first acquaintance here being from Mexico I had a soft corner for that :) and it was well worth it, especially the shredded chicken in (... that was the only identifiable thing in the otherwise delicious dinner).I met this guy called Kevin from France with an India connection living in Brittany and we had a great time discussing business Informatics and life in France,India,Spain and Germany.He told me about a better VoIP service with which you can almost call worldwide for free than SKYPE and I think its way better than anything else available so all students planning to travel over the world should buy some credit,it helps keep CONTACTS :).I also met this German Girl who just came from her exam and every weekend travelled to her home in Munich(Same-Same to BITS and Margao :|)Later into the night this friend of his from Palestine went for a night drive and dropped me home.I'm globe trotting every week!

..yeah and not to forget today just had its share of Ice Cream and Microsoft Surfaces(Must watch for someone who doesn't know about it), the best part of working in such a high-tech environment is you get to experience everything that would normally would have been restricted to people's gtalk status and news.

Clockwise from top left -Me :), Intentionally embosed pic of the party, BITS Pilani Goa Campus,Collage of Prachi and Me at Bastei in Saxony-Switzerland

Lastly I would like to thank all the 4 (+1 whoz sleeping currently, its late night!) in the pic above for everything this week(And of course plenty in the past and future too) :).The weekends still left, sometime someone nice asks me Y should i have all the fun?

Keep smiling and you'll find out...else add me on gtalk- Pratik Mandrekar, I like reading your smart status messages :)

P.S-All the text in a funny color or underlined as per your browser above can be clicked to access the corresponding entertaining content!

The second Weekend

2009-06-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Did you know that its perfectly fine to be caught by a Policeman, have oil flowing like a Fountain sprinkler all over your kitchen with Eggs jumping around morphing into chicks and missing some one so much that you can't stop laughing all in a span of 6 hours?

Well it is and its pretty normal stuff for me but the DAAD Trip was something Awesome'r than normal! Well I woke up at 3:30 am to take my ICE travelling at 300 km/hr from Augsburg Hbf to Berlin Hbf.Luckily Prachi and her Object Oriented related company boarded in Leipzig and thankfully donated me her 10 cent flea market cherry yoghurt(Thnx, I owe you a lot :P).The Berlin Station was huge and we didn't have any problem in getting all the way to the hotel,meeting people, attending the lectures which were amazing(I'm just cutting things short, for those who would like to know why Germany loves Indians and spent over a few million euros to make us happy, its just 'coz Indians Love Germany or better mail me for exact details of how you could be a part of it too :))...

We did some wandering a Checkpoint Charlie, had some Pizza, behaved like pucca Indians draining everybit of 'free' tea bags and milk at the Hotel Aletto and then followed an awesome night clubbing at Mandigo in which Light meant the radon illuminated teeth of faceless people in the dark and tequila shots made some go crazy and someone go crazier after them. Night life in Berlin was an experience worth it.Ofcourse the next day was followed by a city tour and I'll upload those photos later and then a boat trip which was cool.

The next day we had one day to travel anywhere and we chose saxony switzerland whose awesome pics you can find here.Prachi and Me took the ferry and hiked to the most beautiful place I've been too(Surprisingly Goa came second in this Hike route, maybe coz Goa doesn't have such a wonderful terrain and lakes) and climbed atop the Bastei Bridge from where you could see the world!The Amselfal came later and then I had to run to board my last train to Augsburg via Nuremberg(Oh how could I forget that, Nuremberg is now my rth love, you cannot assume lexicographic ordering though, its modulus would be 3 or 4 only :) . Half a Pizza and getting into the wrong class later I was back to Home sweet Home where my newly discovered facebook apps were waiting for me..Thank you everyone who :) for my camera and my ''art :)

:-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-*

I don't know what to say..Germany loves Pratik Mandrekar?

Well that's up 4 another reason..I got plenty of work tomorrow, chao :)

Cam Era

2009-06-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

I finally bought my new digital camera today at the City Gallery.My first trip there was a walk through Fuggerei(Click Here and don't miss the video but there's plenty more that I would show you later like the boat trip and water wheels) which is the most amazing place I've been too and is the oldest existing settlement in europe(Around 2000 years).This time I went knowing exactly what I wanted to buy and aware of the fact that I was walking through a 2000 year hold settlement.

This one here helped me in deciding what I wanted.I knew that anything above 6 Megapixels was Perfectly fine and anything above that is almost redundant.Optical Zoom and not digital Zoom is what I should go for coz the later just enlarges pictures reducing photo quality while the former actually involves a lens manipulation.The ergonomics of the camera meant that I should go for something that should be able to be fixed in India in case something went wrong.Battery life,memory, video quality were some of the other qualities I had to filter for among the huge variety.

I got a salesman this time who informed me that the ones priced a bit lower use AA batteries that wear out soon while the ones priced a bit higher used rechargeable batteries and way better.Of course there were other high ended varieties like underwater shooting et all but they weren't in my budget.Before I proceed if anyone is coming to Germany then remember that Germany does not accept Visa or any other credit cards(There are just a handful exceptions).So then I had a selection of the most likely set of digcams I would choose from..there was kodak,sony cybershot(1 with Carl Zeiss (cheaper) and one with Sony Lens), Pansonic,Samsung,Olympus,Nikkon,Fujifilm,Canon and a few others which I did not consider. I checked out all and bought this one, a Samsung I70 which gave me everything I desired and plenty of add-on features like MP3,Textfile reads, WideScreen, Sliding Interface,Lightweight et all.Along with a 2 GB memory card,USB charger with AC/DC adapter,headphones,drives and a 15 Euro Special pouch and a lil' bit of bargaining I settled for a whole deal of 141 Euros(Around Rs 9300) which is way cheaper than what comparable ones were available in India.I even managed to get a Duty free exemption with a bit more talk.

I came to know an Indian neighbour who works for WIPRO and is working for a client in Augsburg for the past 1 year.he invited and treated me to an awesome Indian food and I learnt another set of things about the Sub-continent.Tomorrow's a holiday and I guess I'll be using that cam to click click n click...

...and why doesn't chrome fix the bug for facebook apps or vice versa? I had interesting predictions coming up, one app said I would fall in Love with someone whose name starts with 'A' and aaah..i would have know who it was lest for Google! (:O)

Want to know something legendary about this place? Find out here!

chao

Gute nacht!

Bowling Night

2009-06-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Well for the first time I had Italian Food made by Italians at this restaurant around the corner near the university.Great food, awesome people. T'was to be followed by bowling at the ABC Arena.We talked about the EU and why Turkey is seemingly the sick man of Europe and how everything works out there in bulgaria and bosnia et all.Well I met someone very interesting but I would comment on that only after a week of development.Well the city is seemingly unpolluted despite the huge number of cars and trams and tains and that's coz Germany promote's people to have solar panels on their rooftops and has stringent eco-management laws...psst I also heard some nuclear stockpile will be soon blowing up somewhere in the north and that's y Germany is shutting down its dependence on Nuclear power, well that dawned BARC'ing memories and I had fun discussing them with People.

For more pics click here

The Bowling was fun, I finished last first round and pretty much near the top with double strikes the next one, spent what I did when I was at Essel world, and plenty of other amazing things which I'm a bit tired to discuss..I bet i'll get dat new cam 2mrw and let d pictures describe more..i went to buy 1 and looking at the deals found it difficult to make a choice between a handycam and digcam..came back and read blogs and hopefully I should go for the digcam coz that's what I guess I need..

Chao

Gute Nacht

Photostream

2009-06-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

I got lost, got random, went to the jungle, walked 2 hours, drank water from the river coz I got tired and reached some a zoo at the end where the lady let me in free coz I reached when it was about to close and camera ran out of steam(Atleast it started to work!)...I guess enough of verbose..now for the Pics..I love Augsburg n Bavaria n smthng else too that sits far away...Phew! Rest 4 later..and I lived the last 2 days without spending a single cent, well Intuition! Someone thought I was from Philiphines, Someone Impressed I was indian, someone by the fact that I was a student, the rest I managed...

View The Pics the day the camera started working@ Countryside and a few at the zoo

Tschus!

Bavaria

2009-06-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

FIsh and Turkey :)

Now for some pics too

Alles gut!

2009-06-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

I had to write this.As I said every day just gets better.

Today we managed to get an interesting breakthrough on the problem we were looking at and I have to give a presentation to the team tomorrow.I know that there would be flaws and there's one assumption that prevents it from complete generalization, but when the team of people brainstorm together, it simply gets Awesome!

I was shown the safety analysis project today and how the Deutsche bahn railway crossing system was used as a model for safety analysis.After that I played with the Kuka industrial robot , the main ones I'll see later next week, but the one used for experiment and demo.Some students had integrated the Nintendo Wii which is a joystick which makes the console or object it conrols move in the same way we move it in our hand, for eg if we are playing a tennis video game just smash the wii joystick like a tennis racket and voila!, so I manged to complete that game pretty quickly and then saw a few more things including an intersting set of mobile platforms..all this technology is so awesome...

I stayed overtime today 'coz I wanted to attend the presentation by the Russian students at the ESG.I was invited by the International office to this party hall, and it was amazing..I made my first set of contacts outside the group, Sarah(From Sout-West Germany) and Gabriel(From Mexico) whose brother had just flown him to join at the school.Both do law at the the university and as part of Mentorenprogramm of the Studentenwerks Augsburg.Well I later was to go with them through the city while they went for 'Terminator 4'.They were nice!

Then the Russian students started with a very pretty dance and an exciting presentation which I managed to understand in bits and pieces.The food was incomprehensible as usual, but I kind of liked that soup :P, on my way to the tram station, I heard someone call me from somewhere in the sky...it was omit and he spoke a lil bit in Hindi, seems he'z from Afghanistan(but again all german) and his grandparents are from Delhi,and then I met this girl who was waiting down for him from Turkey and there was a lil bit of discussion on 'Maine Pyaar Kiya' and some jokes that made me stand the summer chill.It was late night but I loved all the people and ofcourse the Skype group chat with raka and Prachi with Haha in the background has made me sleepy...an awesome day n night!

Chao..i better start learning more german..

Guten Tag.

Kissing

2009-06-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

Ideally Mumbai should have been the place I should have started from.There was an option of doing it starting in flight too as I watched 'The Reader'.Munich was so romantic that morning that well it had to happen but I had to wait...and wait...a few stations later, getting lost in the desperation to not miss it, I finally got it done...

Well its just been three nights here and don't strain your grey cells much for that 'coz the title refers to this beautiful town on my way to Augsburg.

For those who may stumble upon this while searching for summer internships or higher education, I'm on a DAAD funded WISE internship program in which I had to find a project of Interest and a host Institute.I chose this place called Augsburg which is in Bavaria and around 40 kms away from Munich.The universitat Augsburg's faculty of Informatik are involved in the Organic Computing project and I'm currently working on some specifications relating to deadlocks after reconfigurations and the details wouldn't make much sense to you.If you would like to know more about the Internship or the project mail me on pratikmandrekar@gmail.com.

Now continuing with myself, I arrived at the station at around some time close to noon, my watch had stopped working at this temperature and all other devices on me showed Indian time, so I just presumed it that way.However the sun shines all day here in Summer(like 6am-11pm) and so that was a bad presumption.

The streets were almost deserted but I was made comfortable here thanks to the guy with whom I would be working here ofcourse under the guidance of Prof. Dr.Wolfgang Reif and his team.My address to be:Hermanstr. 33a, H.no 30, Augsburg turned out be a room in proper european style house with a window facing an amazing garden and better than most hotel rooms I have lived in.I had my personal kitchen too and am still experimenting with cooking(Have managed my past 3 days of breakfast and dinner in there :) ).

Bavaria is an awesome place with the Bavarian Alps,Switzerland and Austria to the South and Paris et all to the west.The Romantic Road passes right through Augsburg and have a look at this for a rough idea of Augsburg(It's much more amazing though, the city was reconstructed after WW-II bombings and is one of the oldest settlements in Europe-An ideal place to experience europe and have the best of contemporary as well as rennaisance culture)The University is amazing too, have a preview here. I'm supposedly the only Indian studying here amid students from over 95 countries and it seems they have been receiving many applicants from Indians off late and well, lets c :p

I walked up to the university witha 4 euros(approx 250 bucks) map in hand exploring the streets.It took me 2 hours and then1.5 hours back another route.Phew!The next day I got myself a monthly pass on the tram.Either way the transport system is amazing and beautiful in all aspects and respects especially considering the fact that with little knowledge of german I could navigate evrything in German perfectly.The food's more of a choice I have to make based on the price on its appearance 'coz 95% of the times I have no idea what it stands for(I entered a store which was supposedly a Drugstore and picked up some baby food thinking its mayonnaise, fortunately the younger generation knows English and that helped me save a few euros!) but I love the cherry yoghurt pudding and ummm..I don't know what the rest of the stuff's called.

I'm sleepy now with all this cooking and hogging and hard-working and so am sleeping, dats enough for an intro I guess and yeah Augsburg's the place where Mozart spent most of his time and his father was born here, and so was Rudolf Diesel, the one whose engine runs your car...and remember this?

Its the castle you see in every walt disney movie, its not very far from here...prolly I'll be rock climbing, or kayaking at the olympic stadium or sun-bathing at the lake on campus or at the zoo or simply getting lost at one of the streets by now, but I need to catch by 400 winks before that..

chao

Guten Tag!

Bbye

2009-05-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

As the IPL draws to an end so does this stretch of the blog...Thank you for clicking on my gtalk hyperlinks to randomness across this page :P

Now time for change... :)

Here's an interesting piece of gossip:
"

"
to be contd...

Same URL, sometime later, bbye and thanks again :)

Tc

Is my mind half fool or half M T ?

2009-05-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
~~ Mahatma Gandhi

“There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.”
~~ John Adams

“I’ve come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that’s as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.”
~~ Oprah Winfrey

“You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

~~ A. A. Milne
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
~~ Mark Twain

Inspire!

Mind at work-How we crack exams!

2009-05-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

Funny Abbreviations as seen in answer sheets.(Actual answers in Computer Networks)
------------------------------------------------------------------
PING -
Print in Network Group
Past information and Get
Push in to Network Group
portable internetwork graphics
popular internt naming grades
packet is not good
paket in network georaphy
private inter network gateway
private inter network gate
interrupt network gropher
persistent internet group
provide IP network goal
PING in network group //This was mine, just thought of using a recursive acronym like GNU :P
post integreted network group
please identify network group
person in network group
primary information umber generator
public internet gateway
procedural internet governance
public internet group
public internet names group
positoin in network group
protocols of inter network group
private interconnected internet group

-----------------------------------------------------------------

ICANN -

ICANNT (a.k.a the Blabber queen-Pranshu)
internet control authority of networks
------------------------------------------------------------------
IDN -
Invalid Domain Name
------------------------------------------------------------------
W3C -
world wide web.com
wireless 3 connection
world wide web cache
world wide web community
world wide web control
world wide web connection
world wide web compliant
world wide web configuration
world wide web corporation
world wide web centre
world wide web collection
world wide web controller
------------------------------------------------------------------
URL -
user retrieval line
user request link
user requested links
user resource locator
user request language
unified relational language
unified rational language
user resource link
unique recognition length
user registered line
universal request language
user request language
------------------------------------------------------------------

Also when asked what is the domain server extension used for Antarctica, someone wrote -'No net in Antarctica'. Who would have known it .aq anyway?

Smart BITSians!

Will miss you all :)

^~~

2009-05-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

Control Systems

2009-05-11T13:27:00.001-07:00

The world is a weird place of notions and conceptions and illusions and delusions.The only thing that makes it human is the way we keep learning from our pasts and tune them so that we feel more pleased with ourselves when we repeat those stupid things time and again in our lives.

An ode from one of the greatest person who understood his life:

Nash: What truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me to the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. I have made the most important discovery of my career - the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found. I am only here tonight because of you
[looking at and speaking to Alicia]
Nash: You are the only reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you.
[applause from audience]

Alicia: How big is the universe?
Nash: Infinite.
Alicia: How do you know?
Nash: I know because all the data indicates it's infinite.
Alicia: But it hasn't been proven yet.
Nash: No.
Alicia: You haven't seen it.
Nash: No.
Alicia: How do you know for sure?
Nash: I don't, I just believe it.
Alicia: It's the same with love I guess.

Nash: I find you attractive. Your aggressive moves toward me... indicate that you feel the same way. But still, ritual requires that we continue with a number of platonic activities... before we have sex. I am proceeding with these activities, but in point of actual fact, all I really want to do is have intercourse with you as soon as possible.
[pause]
Nash: Are you gonna slap me now?

..that's a bit awkward to accept but honest it is.No one understands madness.That's why I love that MAD things that makes you special. ---<--(()

:)
:*

Heartistic Humor

2009-05-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Ahem...

The solution to the above is simple.

It's almost the first thing that comes to your mind when you see the *heart*. Guess what's it?

Damodar HSSS Class of 2006 Reunion

2009-05-04T09:24:00.001-07:00

Hey,

There was a lot of talk going on around about this thing and I guess we would like to know a few things before we go ahead with anything.Kindly take the survey below and post anything you have to say in by writing a comment clicking on the link below and don't forget to tell your colleagues.Please leave your name below in d comments section so that we know who you are.

Hope everything is awesome as usual in your respective lives :QoD

Ciao

Intentionally blank

2009-05-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

This Place has been intentionally left blank to represent the void created by the BIG BANG(For those who believe the universe was created from singularity, Pure Physics here, nothing else intended).

The Journey

2009-04-23T10:50:00.002-07:00

As his head collided with the wall of the train compartment, he managed to take a glance first at his watch and then outside the window. It was 5 am. He could hear the monotone of the "chaiwalla" which confirmed their halt at a station. He managed to look out with his heavy, tired eyes after clearing the hazy glass window. The dawn was on the verge of greeting him. It was bluish-white, windy and supposedly cold outside. He could see the red cloth getting swayed high up and vanishing in the air of Bina Jn. He was well versed with the way now. Every station and its timing was etched subtly in his memory. Discarding every suggestion his mind put forth, he slided down back and was about to close his eyes. When his eyes fell on something. Something so captivating that he could not sleep anymore! He positioned himself to the maximum view and got fixed.

Alight by the blueness of the pre-dawn light, the girl in front seemed to be having the best sleep of her life. The blanket was just below her chin, as if intentionally slided down by God to let her pearlish, smooth and fairly white face light up the surroundings. The air inside the compartment was slowly meddling with her blonde tresses making the streaks slip and fall on her smooth cheeks with their ends falling on her thin yet seducing lips. He could feel the bewilderment caused to him. He routinely checked if someone around him was awake and staring at him perplexed at the beautiful sight. He could have wished for nothing better. And those moments were interrupted by a lady. Oh! How he cursed her! How he wanted to pause that moment of eloquent beauty! But as he wished for more the train screechingly came to a halt. He was about to move. But, she moved first.

Opening her angelic eyes, he looked towards him. And got conscious. Sat up straight, and slided near the window. She yawned and stretched reluctantly, conscious about her impeccable beauty.
He got conscious too, of his not-so-finely carved actions as she had. But what men are known for, he too was busy in portraying "cool" and "I-dont-care" attitude. When she struck.

Her: "Where have we reached?"

Him: (Looking towards her with extreme "coolness" and fumbles) Itawa...oh sorry...Itarsi Jn.

Her: Ohk! Thank You.

She took out her phone and called someone. After disconnecting the call, she comforted herself on the seat and looked out. He gathered all courage and blurted:

Him: Going to Bangalore?

Her: (Smiling) Yes.

Him: So you belong to Delhi or just paid a visit here?

Her: Arre nahi, main to dilli me hi rehti hun. Near east of kailash. Bangalore to bas relatives se milne jaa rahi hun. Tum kahaan se ho?

He never expected such comfort from her! Not at all! She sounded like she knows him since her birth! And he replied:

Him: Delhi se hi hun. Just completed my first semester of college. Chuttiyan thi to doston se milne jaa raha hun.

Her: Ohk! So you seem to be more of a "all-for-my-friends" person! Masti karne ka plan hai poora!?

And something inside him took a sigh of relief! And they hit off! Lunch time approached and both of them knew almost every detail about wach other. He told he stared at her in the morning, she hit him with her hands. She told him that she was scared of him in the starting, and he gave her a hi-five for theor friendship now! They went to the train door, stood there. Whole afternoon. They laughed upon the fact that why did they pay for the A/C ticket if they had to stand out only! They gossiped endlessly. Around 6, they reached Dharmavaram. And they stepped off the train on the platform.

The evening sky greeted them. They took a plate of daal-pakoda and shared it. The train moved, and they ran towards it! Climbed it and laughed their hearts out! Nothing awkward had happened yet. And there wasn't any scope if it either. Acoording to him only. They teased each other, exchanged phone numbers, exchanged hugs, and became best of friends. The journey was perfect. They had dinner together, played a game of checkers, discussed about their professional goals, about their families, about their interests, likes and dislikes...anything and everything under the sky! He felt like as if this was better than reaching Bangalore. They conversed till 3am. Talking on every random topic they could. Talking endlessly. When finally she said that she was hell tired and wanted to sleep. He agreed. But before dozing off, she struck again:

She: Oye! Idhar aa...
He: (Leaning Forward)
She: (Planted the smoothest and the most caressing kiss on his cheek)
He: Ye kya tha?
She: Kuch nahi...aish kar! Aur so ja!

Next morning something awkward did happen. He woke up at 11.30 and was amazed at a note in his pocket which read:

"Hi idiot,
Remember I didnt tell you something yesterday at Dharmavaram? I am suffering from breast cancer. I was not going to Bangalore. I will get off at 5am. You are snoring like a bear! I am going to get myself checked. Infact to get myself confirmed, that am I really gonna survive only 3 months or can I expect myself on this Earth for a bit longer time.

You commented that I came across to you as a girl who doesnt fear anything. Yes I dont! Coz' I dont fear death now! Its been 6 months now since i was diagnosed. And it doesnt matter anymore. Theres just one thing that matters to me now. YOU. Yes I Love You! I know thats bad but I can't help it! And I am as usual chirpy and telling you this with all my cuteness. So smile.

And by the way, we won't meet ever. And won't be able to talk also. (The no. I gave you is wrong. I didnt want you to go mad trying to contact me!) And nothing is SERIOUS. I JUST LIKE YOU. So dont be caring and sad as usual and dont think about me. Just take care of yourself and live life happily! I hope you find a girl who loves you lot! And takes care of you and your bhullakadness! I am happy. I will be happy always, even after leaving this world. (Maybe because I met you in the last moments!) Dont you worry.

Ok ab mera station aa raha hai. Mujhe jaana hoga. (Picchli baar bhi teri wajah se hi chhootne wala tha!) Please khush rahiyo and be with your family. Children are treasures of their parents. Make them proud.

Mmmwaah! Bbye!

Yours,
Wonder Girl. :)"

He didnt know what to do. He couldnt absorb it. He just couldnt. He went to the washroom and cried his heart out. Feeling light he returned to his seat. In just 3o some hours, he met a beautiful human being, me awarded her the place of one of the most treaured relations he had in his now lost heart. And now he had to delete the place. He had to erase everything. It was damn tough.

Sitting at the seat, the sun shone upon him. He couldnt feel it. How he wished he could see his wonder girl once again and scold her. And then hug her. How he wished he would have guessed her feelings. He just considered her a very good friend. How could he not see it in her! And then he knew. Her eloquent beauty enshrouded her feelings. Her pearlish fairly white faced decieved him. Her blonde hair hid every single of her desires under it. How he wished he could have told her that he is already commited. That he is going to meet his someone special to Bangalore.

Lost in his agonizing wishes, he saw the yellow board of Bangalore Jn. nearing him. The train halted. He stepped off the train and tried to forget the incident as a nightmare. But it failed. It was tagged. Embedded in him. He did not tell anyone about this ever in future. He just wondered, "Can anything be more spontaneously hurting? Can anything be more devastating?"

And securely placing the journey and "Her" on the sacred pedestal named "My Wonder Girl" in himself, he stepped ahead and greeted his friend with a smiling face, and a crying heart...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Got this from soulworld's blog, quite similar to an experience....howz it?

Musings of a Sleepy mind

2009-04-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

Would you buy the Tata nano?

or prefer to stay in this wing of the Taj that's still under repairs post the Mumbai terror attacks?

Why did both the above things relate to Ratan Tata and yet be in news for the entire year?

The kid sure doesn't seem to know where Pilbhit is or for that matter what his name meant. Whatever political strategy Varun Gandhi(He has a degree in Public policy from London) followed sure did catapult him to an awesome position, atleast for the news channels it's all about Gandhi v/s Gandhi . Earlier it was Maneka v/s Indira, is it time for Rahul v/s Varun?

Check http://photoholics.wordpress.com/ for Macro photography

..and y am i typing random stuff again?

Gn :)

Magic!

2009-04-12T01:56:00.000-07:00

The Great Camouflaging Act

Wait for it....
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Guess Who? :P

QoD

2009-04-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

Quotes of the Day :P

All through my life I had the choice of love and hate...I chose love and I am here.
-A.R. Rahman, at the Oscars

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.
-From, If Love is a Game,These are the rules

Things do not change;we change
-HDT

I think if life could be quoted it would say something like:
"LOL, look at all that blah blah...
I haven't even reached halfway through you and you think you know what the climax is ?
Dream, dream, dream more...I just wonder what randomness about me u'll come up with next,

Peace!

"'

Has any quote ever been true for you?

Thank You!

2009-04-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

Thank You all for the loving shower of Coke, Cake, Kicks you bestowed upon me.It was an awesome party especially with the rains :)

Some special people were absent though and I have been responsible for a few things but i still do miss them.Tc

MAD-Make a Difference

2009-03-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

MAD ~ MAKE A DIFFERENCE - Will be starting a chapter in Goa.Right now they are on the lookout for people who are interested, willing and dedicated to work in establishing MAD in Goa from scratch.You can check the details on their website- http://www.makeadiff.in/ and get in touch with me at pratikmandrekar@gmail.com in case you would like to contribute.Just about anyone

What’s MAD all about?

We are an Organization of young people working amongst orphans and
other underprivileged kids to provide them with quality education so
that one day it shall empower them to stand on their own feet and when
the times comes fly away. We try not to grill into their heads the
tedious school syllabus but instead prepare them face life better by
improving their communication skills, computer skills and their overall
personality.

Just Two hours a week

You can do sooooo much with us in just two hours. Be a teacher to these
underprivileged kids, spend some time with them and just see what
wonderful joy you bring into their lives. And all it takes is two hours
a week. Would that be too much to ask??

Be a Journalist

Our journalists represent the free voice of the youth. We have no political
affiliations, no religious influences or any other biases. All that
motivates and guides us is the goal of social justice. Here our
journalists write about the various problems faced by the youth or by
the world as a whole, from the youth’s point of view.

Start a cell in your college

Be the leader and start a MAD cell in your college…You will have the
autonomy to plan and coordinate your own activities and also receive
our help. Your chance to do lead your college

Be a trainer

Do you have a passion for teaching? Are you employed or constrained by
time but still feel you have so much experience you could share with
us. We’ve something just for you. You could help us train our
volunteers.

More at http://www.makeadiff.in/

.........wherever it takes!

2009-03-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

PS-The above pics are a consequence of the weirdest travel weeks I have had to have in the past few weeks.Hiking, Trekking, getting lost, climbing, and meeting people sure do help when things get weird.Gnite :)

sLuMdOg MiLlIoNaIrE

2009-02-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

Every Human being worth their name strives for two things their entire lives: Love and attention. Primal instincts made us strive for food, water, air and shelter; with humans no longer in that stage of evolution, their needs have changed and so have their desires.

Slumdog Millionaire is just one example that exemplifies the above. We just love every Indian connection.The movie wasn’t even shot in Dharavi(It was shot in the slums of Juhu and Versova) and yet for us the slums will always be the same:the name itself is an oxymoron that reflects our true selves. We love to watch the slums, run a project there but never live there ‘coz we all want to be millionaires in cash or kind :P

The movie did make the author of the book a millionaire. No one knew that guy(I still can’t remember his name, but he was some Indian ambassador).The book was called Q & A, now its called Slumdog Millionaire with Dev Patel and Freida Pinto on its cover. I bet JK Rowling and Dan Brown would be jealous of this guy. The movie had a decent storyline, excellent background music and performances by those kids and of course our technical expertise just needed its time to be reflected at the Oscars.Would they offer sound engineering as an elective next year? We anyways have creative multimedia and half of BITSians have very good acoustics and the also have very good acoustics on their Ipods,laptops and Woofers( Doesn’t that rhyme with Dog?).

All in all a good evening at the Oscars, great for Bollywood and of course Dan Boyle, unlikely it would be great for the slum dwellers but of course something to cherish is better than nothing at all. For BITSians? Well we can self-congratulate ourselves for promoting 2100 pirated viewings.

Random musings across T1

2009-02-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

Apart from using blogger for scribling out randomized info about myself, I just thought I would give some space and time for some interesting things that I came across during Test1.

For those of you who use firefox(or chrome) there's this firefox extension called Mashlogic available at Mashlogic Download that really adds a lot of functionality to the web page you are viewing.Btw a mashup in web terminology is a tool that integrates existing services pertaining to a specific domain into one tool.I have been using lots of extensions and add-ons including the one on which I'm blogging right now(Scribefire & coolIRIS)but this is the best I have come across till date. Also for a reason that could be any or all of the below:
1)Network restrictions in BITS Pilani Goa Campus
2)Installing Google Gears (I'm not sure if this comparison is valid but I would rate the caching ability of Gears way above the Squid proxy used in our campus)
3)Exam time blues
..I started getting download speeds almost 10X times the normal downloads on this network without using any non-browser based software.

Fist of Rice(FOR) is a non-profit organization started by a group of students most of which are BITSians from our campus with the purpose of solving the grassroot level food deficiency problem, based on the concept that a fist of rice donated by an individual summed into hundreds of donors in thousands of locations would generate millions of rice bags helping to solve the food problem to a considerable extent.Check out FOR. Another site to check out would be Bhook and Poverty.

Valentine's and the color codes also came and went.Unfortunately for St.Valentine, there wasn't much to do with his original idea of Valentine.However Love is not something that is to be celebrated on one day.It's much much more than that 'coz it involves friendship,childrens', teachers',independence,and every other day of the year 'coz unless you work for it, you ain't understand it and till you understand it you won't get it.That's something that gphone.exe has been teaching our computers of late in BITS.The virus has inflicted almost all the CC comps and half the student PC's and lappies.The best way I found to remove it was to use Glary's utilities.Available in our software repository or free download, it's very much like a task manager which would have been otherwise disabled by the virus.

that's all folks :)

C ya

Gnite

:)

2009-02-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

Philosophy: We don't realize the importance of something or someone in our lives till we have lost it.

Science: Impulse=Force*time

I never imagined that the above two were fundamentally correlated until the happenings of today.A force of a few Newtons applied on a button for a minuscule instant of time made me relate the rest of my time to the above philosophy so much so that nothing in my past had prepared me for it.I can't speak much about it but I'm thankful and grateful to the stars and planets and humans and animals and plants who made this happen 'coz I just would never have understood the importance in my life of that element if it hadn't happened.thanx :)

WAVES'08(Every festival has given me a lot,including this one) had marked the culmination of a habit and hobby that inspired,transpired and conspired the last of QUARK 2009.It was an awesome feeling being there once again.For this I would like to thank the whole of BITS and my team for working under these conditions and bearing the brunt of many a people!

French still connects everything I do.
-My first crush was there,my first night out was there, the place I love is also there and today also it played the sweet role in my life...thnx :)
I just love this french connection.

----<---(()

+ - * / :)

Nice take on the recession

2009-02-04T02:05:00.000-08:00

Chk out

http://www.bigbrassblog.com/index.php?itemid=2486

:)

Thank You!

2009-01-26T10:28:00.000-08:00

Itz been a year since my first blog and on the occasion of the Chinese New Year I would like to thank the dragon for the number of items that have now become an integral part of my life; from the NOKIA made in China phones(that have enabled me to microwave myself more than my mom uses the microwave oven) to the Manchow soup that has somehow replaced the Coffee.

Slumdog Millionnaire has made it to the Oscars and having watched the movie before release in India I'm not so proud of the fact that by encouraging piracy I'm just adding fuel to the very coffers that supported the 26/11 happenings in Mumbai.The world has changed a bit more, derz Obama,derz not much of LTTE,derz more of Taliban,derz nothing right on the left and nothing left on the right of the satyam balance sheet(quoting Deepak parekh's statement on liabilities against assets),economy in turmoil or not;rich people are still rich and the poor are still poor especially our poor little doodle.I would like to thank the following happenings for happening in the past year.

1)QUARK'08-Already enough said. Time for QUARK 2009

2)WAVES 08.Again enough said.This year we'll have two of them, check out the Summer special WAVES SUMMERS

3)The Awesome story that was the reason for my attempt to lower my cgpa and it did succeed :)

4)PS-1, BARC,DRHR,Mumbai and the people.........one of the best 5 things in my life till date

5)The koi who conspired,transpired and metamorphized into what stands of now.I had never witnessed anything like that.The Peevee who came from PoK and fought a battle that's been so sweet, so del.icio.us that Google came second best when it came to learning and evolving..and I'm so happy that it happened, whatever the future is, I love my destiny 'coz itz just inside my pumpkin.

6)My journey to the Center of the earth.Well I did go there,finding a treasure that's the present.

7)The Time Machine- For telling me what's there on the menu in the mess tomorrow.

...and I'm sure you wouldn't have understood anything lest you are the person the line is meant for.You haven't been here for long time dear no 3,Hi 5!,6 can't read and 7 has already read.

For the rest, stop wasting your time reading useless posts 'coz they aren't meant for anyone other than Me.

C ya.
Gnite

Two is One | enO si owT

2008-12-23T08:27:00.000-08:00

I keep seeing you.I just felt you standing next to me.I don't know what you are, where you are but I know you are real and somewhere up close...

Funny feelings keep running down my brain(Most of us do) and we dismiss it as daydreams or fatigue or plain tp.Little do we realise that slices of our time are dedicated to meet the requirements of ourselves living in a parallel world the same way load balancing is carried out on power distribution systems and in servers.

The only reason we see is that our vision allows us to 'see' or 'live' in the so called visible spectra of VIBGYOR colors.The reason we feel things is because of density.We don't feel air 'coz it is 'light' for us. Now imagine a world where the beings over there can 'see' in the spectrum we cannot (suppose microwaves) and they can 'feel' things that we cannot just because their defination of density is different.These things arise from the failure of exactness of zero and infinity.For us what is zero and infinity is relative.Our lives are relative.But we may be having relatives relative to ourselves.

Now this is based on a true incident which took place recently.The transition was seemingly smooth.Nothing was different there.Neither was I.I have 2 mouths,one nose,one ear,50 fingers.I breathe water,I live in the air.I smoke food and I drink vegetables.I swim with my ear and dance with my hair when I have to go somewhere.I occassionaly walk but high urine prices means I cannot use my 9 wheeler.Btw I sleep at BITS.Its a 4 century course and I'm in the third century.Pretty boring, I prefer studying instead.Atleast I can hear my eyes and get some rest.My book is my lifeline.By licking the page I get to nose my friends.Nosetalk is a wonderful social software which allows me to nose virtually and stay connected.My deodrant is another: I can nose hours and hours on it with some special ppl and not pay donuts for it,thanks to the CUG.

I'm so bored of sleeping, I wan't to study. Ciao....
..Day dream over.Or has it just begun.

Well we assume so many things that we never really understand their meaning.Humans are intelligent no doubt about that but so are others.Context Matters and so does relativity.What you are is not what you see, what you see is not what you think you are?

Too complicated. Sleep or study..Gnite

----<-(()

Roses are Red,
Violets are blue,
You're so Pink
That I may think
That there is no sugarplum
In the cuppycake of candyfloss
--To Bhoot, wid love :)

Distortions

2008-11-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

Distortions,Misconceptions,Notions,Suspicion,Doubt,Perceptions..all have one thing in common-The Human Brain.The more knowledge we gain the more we think we perceive the universe,the more we doubt honest intentions and end up on the distorted side of our misconceived notions and then say that Life is a matter of Perception.The above pic is similar,having distorted the 5 images that changed my life so that no1 is suspicious of my intentions and does not have any misconceived notion which would change their perception about me i sit safe in this social strata where the difference between right and wrong is a perception and what's best is a notion best understood by an illogical commotion.

After having 5 days of misconception that the Guppies weren't actually guppies but Kayas' troubling our little angels I transpired a new conspiracy theory which will sound more like Murphy's law-What we see is not what we know happens to be true 'coz truth always happens as the opposite of our perception.

Since my last post two weeks back to now a few notions were made and a few more perceived and added to my knowledge base and what helped them were as follows(Despite the fact that neither first order logic or probabilistic models could help me to logically reason out what is the Axiom to solve the Artificial Intelligence paper!):

I had 4 International Interactions:One with some people from France wherein the Consulate ppl were present to give some lecture,one with an Italian who has designed his own techniques to Integrate GSM and GPS Capabilities with Asterix(Internet telephony basically),one with an American whoz settled in Pune and a telephonic conversation with a guy from Germany who really made me a lot more Interested in my areas of interest while trying for my summer Internship.I still remember my first work related international call to South Africa from BITS.I had a hard time convincing the lady out there that a three letter word called GOA existed in India yet I ended up with the final document having DOA on it!

I had my test series filled with all the drama and emotions that had been missing for a loong time..thanx to the misinterpreted 'Guppies'.It ended with Pranshu's B'day bash at Martin's Corner where I sang(I did?) Karaoke after a really loooong time.Finally the week ended by my fruitless efforts of copying code for DECO labs resulting in a perfect code that produced the desired output.Life would be so monotonous if it were a code.Same input domain,Same predictable output.Thankfully it isn't and Love Story 2050 would not come true!

I painted after a looooong time even though I regret that I couldn't make that day very special still I really wanted to let the Smiley to smile.Such a sweet moment to see it actually happening,I hope it is eternal.I revived a sms relationship with a friend which came as a surprise again after a very loong time.

Summing it up, my days are always special and especially after all these things and more that cannot be explicit but are meant to be understood by the implicit implied.

Pssst....I also heard that a friend of mine has adopted a stray CAT since the days for CAT are closing on..what weird people..actually everyone's weird and that's what makes them special especially someone whoz so special that even half a million qubits couldn't replicate the beautiful mind.My post is Randomness Again and that's what I meant by misconception.U ain't understand what u read,till you ain't the person you perceive.

Have a Happy Weekend!

---<--((()

Thorns may come,but beat them across 'coz until you get the exposure u haven't seen what the sweet smell is!

Rock on!

2008-10-27T10:47:00.001-07:00

Another diwali, another post...time just flies, especially when there's Test 2 around the corner and I'm having a weekend getaway at the above place.Awesome place must say,pretty much untouched by the kind of tourists that flock Goa.

Inspired by RD, here I present an anecdote that happened this month @ BITS Pilani Goa Campus:

LIfe's Like that...

A girl goes to the ARC(That's the Academic Regulation Council) nad says the following,"Mere Chacha ne parcel bheja tha,woh aa gaya?"..the In-charge over there:"You have proved you are a true BITSian"..Girl(Confused$@!)"..er...mere chacha ne bheja hua parcel aa gaya?"...again.."You have proved you are a true BITSian!"..Finally she is informed by a good samaritan that this is the place where you get your grades and electives from and not your courier...so much 4 a true BITSian!--As retold by Abhishek

Well frankly speaking there's nothing wrong in this entire process knowing how good seniors are at giving 'advice' to young BITSians and had it not been for things like this that keep lighting up our lighter sides,college would have been boriiing.If I think about it being the top 1% of the nation and I guess the world too, we have a lot of reasons to be happy.Especially being in a college where within 4 years of its existence we have won accolades at the best fests( Three Cheers to the BPGC Oasis team for capturing the title) and winning quite a few honours at National and International events we ought to realize that we worth much more that what we think we are and can contribute to the society in a much larger and broader sense rather than waste our lives doing things like crying 4 someone near and dear who no longer lusts/loves you(Isn't it a high time people in BITS realize the difference?).

QUARK,WAVES,SPREE 2009 are all in the making, finding their way amid the economic crisis that has hit the world.Economy affects the flow of money and money affects our dreams and aspirations but the fact is that whatever happens,BITSians will remain BITSians.Our talent never dies,our skills never perspire.After working with such a diversity I ain't fear any longer about where we are headed too...'coz irrespective of the Bulls and the Bears...we do rock, and will continue to do so!

All the best :)

HIStory

2008-09-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

The difference between being dumb and being numb is something that never occurred to me until I did both simultaneously.

It was a moonless starlight sky with those occasional dwarf clouds sometimes resembling a dinosaur with a nosering and at other times a cross between Mickey mouse and harry potter making their presence felt as I aimlessly walked on this circuitous route spanning 6 kms in my favorite place in Goa which I would call here the Boulevard of a 1000 dreams.A PCO on the route was all it took for my evil twin to start thinking about E.V.I.L things.A phone call soon followed to one of my favorite numbers and the call was something like this:

My Evil twin:"Hello I'm calling from the bureau of XYZ.Can I speak to Miss E?"

The Woman Hitler:"Why d hell do you want to meet her?"

My Evil twin:"No No...I'm not like that.We would like to Inform you that Miss E has been selected for this secret thing and we would like her to meet us asap."

The Woman Hitler:"And why is your office open till late night? I don't trust people like you.."

My Evil twin:"Er..Maam with the elections coming up and the US Nuclear deal under process and Money laundering taking place we are having transfers and ....thud.."

The line went dead.

Now this wouldn't have been a dumb act if it was some random act with a random person.But I was right opposite the house of this Woman Hitler and this Miss E was supposed to meet me sometime 1 hour back and my evil twin had derailed my track.

Now the numb part..as useless as uselessness can be, my dumb evil twin started walking in the exact direction of the target except for the fact that he was the target and house was about to launch an Inter continental ballistic missile.Comfortably numb and staring into the eyes of of this cold blooded woman hitler didn't affect my evil twin 'coz when you are numb and dumb, there's nothing that'll affect you and nothing to get affected respectively.

A few fireworks lighted the neighborhood, a meteor shower followed enthralling the amateur astronomers who were just learning bird watching in the night sky sitting in their bed coz they were too susegad to tilt their eyes above the level which they were lying in their bed.

I finally managed to rescue my evil twin from this dumb numb thing;bravo! The route to my final destination had just begun and anticipating more of this I changed my course.Where I finally ended up I never understood 'coz the story had just stated and the class had just ended :P

---<---((()

.........jab we met,things happen and this one's for the one that never happended :)

2008-09-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

IT & T1

2008-09-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

The place where IT all started. Mumbai.Wallstreet crash or Terrorist attack,IT's still beautiful.

The first time IT came after I returned late on a beautiful evening from BARC.
The second time IT happened in the auto from Chembur to Sion.
Thanks to Vodafone, the IT never stopped happening after that and never will.

What IT is?
-Time will tell :P

An ode to the tests till now

I came,I saw,I wrote
what I wrote is not what I saw
what I saw is not what I came for
Average wudn't matter any longer
'coz I have reached a position much stronger
or so'th I think till I came,I saw,I wrote

Switch(myday)
Day 1: Operating Systems--->My operating system had the kernel missing,
Day 2: Theory of computation--->my finite state automaton did not understand the language of my heart,
Day 3:the irony of three makes thee wonder why,what,how...
DECO-No decoder could decode the complexity of multiplexity of my dreams,
Numerical analysis-I couldn't find any roots so waht use areth any analysis?
Artificial Intelligence-Humans areth the most intelligent beings-then why'd we be so artificial?
Default: I'm yet to optimize my data structure;
Still happyness never evades myth life
'coz what matters is matter and IT does matter :)

Happy Blogiversary!!

2008-08-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

A decade has passed since Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. Thus was discovered Blogosphere, an entire universe of humans turned aliens back to humans and other like minded creatures.So what do we do to celebrate a decade of blogging?

We Blog more!

Coming to celebrations, do we need to really celebrate days? Aren't such days just an excuse for our avenged souls to find more reasons to make us warm and eventually melt our beds and the aspirations of the one lazing on them?Well whatever be the reason here we have another reason to celebrate..the Beijing Olympics.

It all started with the 8.08 PM, 08/08/08 inauguration in which the Indian contingent led by R Rathode(That's another way of how we flaunt the only thing we have) staged a flag bearer's march appearing impressive from a distance but when it came near the media stands there you could see..Sania Mirza dressed in her training jacket,another lady with a similar dress besides her and another one in a green saree...what a delightful combo(!) for a 2.4 billion TV audience,80 world leaders and the biggest billionaire Olympic inauguration ever.And if that wasn't enough here are the results even before the first day draws to an end..

"Mansher falls back after good start :India's Manavjit Singh Sandhu is placed 12th while Mansher Singh was at 21 after the first round qualification in the men's Trap shooting event.." excuses..excuses!! and here more excuses: " Earlier, Indian shooters began on a false note, with Anjali Bhagwat, Avneet Kaur and Samresh Jung failing to qualify for the finals of their respective events."

A few more results to celebrate:"Samresh Jung fails :Samresh Jung failed to qualify for the final in the 10m air pistol event, Tombi Devi crashes out : Indian judo champ Tombi Khumujam Devi's Beijing Olympics campaign lasted only two-and-a-half minutes as she was knocked out in the preliminary round of the women's 48kg event on Saturday."

Well I guess Olympics will be a far happier occasion for the Indian audience if they consider the fact that the Chinese and the Indians have evolved from essentially the same species of primates or apes or whatever..so we can celebrate almost every hour when a chinese wins a medal and we don't even reach close to qualifying for the finals....so obsessed are we with finding an Indian connection to anyone rich,famous or talented (aka Vikram Pandit,Arcelor Mittal,...) that we forget to build our own Identity.Or is it that we like being lazy enough to win one silver medal,clap about and then celebrate for the next four years?

Whatever the reason be,wherever the blame game may lead to...we'll still be the same(as far as I can perceive the Indian contingent at the Olympics)..That's why monginis was intelligent enough to come up with its Tagline.."go ahead...lets celebrate!"

Ciao till we win some medal :P

Internet Journalism Part-I

2008-08-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Internet is a powerful tool for the media.News portals like Rediff,Yahoo and Google News offer a vast repository of diverse happenings from America to Zhangjiakou.Apart from these portals there are search engines,RSS Feeds,Wiki and there's Google.Well googling has become an integral part of our daily lives but its neither the beginning nor the end to what you want to find.Here I cover some search engines that offer specialized sevices and in most cases these will help you end up with a better result than google...and in the end I'll just copy-paste a few tips on how to use Google in a better way!

The keywords I used to compare were "quark goa" without the quotes and the following are the results and what I think about the corresponding Search engines:

www.Google.com- Gave the www.bits-quark.org site on I'm feeling lucky! which basically means its the first site that appears on its search result page.199,000 results in all but the worst part:the rest of the immediate results were nowhere close to the official site which shows that google's *crawler isn't exactly the most intelligent bot out there.Neither is Google the most exhaustive search engine.

www.yahoo.com-First hit: www.bits-quark.org, next www.bits-goa.ac.in and the rest all relevant to either the BITS Goa Home page,wiki or blogs with the quark Tag.More results than Google in this case.

Windows live search- Excellent new engine.No need to hit next button 'coz all search results on one page.results close to yahoo's,Fast and offers excellent Image search options.Apart from that google still offers more tools than this.

Ask.com-Very good at searching across blogs and social networks.Use it when you are searchin for people or the birth place of your grandfather's aunt in Ullan Battor.

AltaVista.com-Good relevance of results but I see no point using this when there are other options already available.

Then there are slower engines like lycos.com and sites which integrate all engines in one.

Use www.555-1212.com to search area and country codes and email addresses,forumone.com to search across forums,www.infospaceinc.com to search across yellow pages and different directories and findforms.com for finding all kinds of legal material but all mostly related to US.

Then there are other specialized sites pertaining to medicine,news only,regional engines,computers,market watch and industrial products.

Now coming to the part of optimizing your Google search:

1)Use "Laloo Prasad yadav" in quotes when you want the results to contain the entire phrase as you have typed it else you'll end up with things like railway LALOO,rabri prasad yadav.

2)A capital OR to find either of the two parameters on each side of OR.

3)The + or - operator. Eg. search elizabeth -queen and you will get all instances of things in which elizabeth is not a queen.

There are plenty more tools and sites but these are fairly adequate at the moment.Of course Google is still the ONE but my favourite search engine is

http://www.cuil.com : Recently established by a bunch of former google researchers, this site provides 3-4 times more results then google and boasts of a very fast and efficient engine.The Intelligence component in the crawler is surely more than google which just ranks on basis of its pagerank feature.

So for a general search my ranks are:

Google OR Cuil
windows Live search
Yahoo
ask.com & www.555-1212.com
Any of the rest

That's all 4 the day folks!

*crawler-Well this is a program or something we may call a bot that roams all over the world wide web and indexes pages so that they are marked in an appropriate manner for the key words.This indexed data is then used when you press the search button.Read more on the crawlers at http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Power Politics

2008-07-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

After spending two months at BARC ,amid all the hooplah over the nuclear deal and watching uncommon ground where Dr. Pachauri and Mukesh Ambani expressed themselves I think I am in a better position to comment on India's Energy future more than 60% of the MP's during that vote of confidence motion(I still liked the way Omar Abdullah,Pranab Mukherjee and even Laloo Prasad Yadav and L K Advani spoke :P).

First the Nuclear Deal:I read the IAEA draft and the following were my observations-

1)The draft at any point does not speak about our military establishments but only those reactors that would be used for civilian purposes.

2)USA has a right to invoke the Hyde Act which would lead to the deal being withdrawn but,

i)When a nuclear reactor is built,the entire supply of nuclear fuel is stored with the reactor which means that even if the deal is off, our reactors for civilian purposes are safe and productive and the NSG can still supply us fuel for future reactors if they want to(..but maybe they won't fearing the US)

ii)The Hyde Act is a domestic act made to ensure the sovereignity and internal US security and any action that will be taken against India has to follow International procedures and India can have its own version of the Hyde Act which clearly proves that India will at no point be dependent on the USA or the NSG or that there would not be a Pokhran III.

3)China has already made a similar deal with the USA..the text is almost similar..except for the line where it says that both US and China would mutually agree to cut off the deal if the need arises to say so.India is lobbying for a similar clause even though we have a less explicit line in the IAEA draft for the 123.

4)Even though the nuclear energy produced would contribute only 5-6% of our requirements in 2050..that amount is huge enough to offset the current type of load shedding happening in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh and considering Inflation and depleting crude it seems an Intelligent choice.

5)Politics is a game in which politicians never lose.

So in the end, What do you think about it?

Secondly India's and the world's Energy future:

Being at the undergraduate level I couldn't exactly do anything much about my ideas to build a graphene based solar device or graphene transistors(Graphene is the one dimensional allotrope of Carbon) or even work on microalgae that I can get from my neighbourhood beach and build a photobioreactor(Well it basically uses algae to produce biodiesel) but I could surely write on it.When Dr. Pachauri and Mukesh Ambani spoke, it was clear that alternative energy is soon (10-20 years!) going to become mainstream energy.How?

Consider the market side of it: Reliance Investing in Solar RnD and starting production in Maharashtra,Tulsi Tanti's Suzlon making billions out of air(wind!),Bio Diesel(Both the good one and the bad one) playing a significant role in Inflation due to food shortage and wasteland development respectively and the Carbon credits.Doesn't it look like an energy Rennaissance in the making?

Now the politics part of it:Rich countries already have polluted and developed...now when its time for the not so developed ones, they need to pay us not to pollute(Proof: The Kyoto Protocol,the recent Bali meet and even the deadlocked WTO talks),the Tata nano boon-bane story is all about connecting the policy making people directly with the 'Aam aadmi'.

All the above Information overload will surely consume a significant portion of your energy needs but just to sum it all up for an enginner, its a new interesting emerging vocation and for the person right now reading this blog with the AC on (despite the monsoons outside ur window) and the monitor at full brightness, just close your comp and sleep for a better sleep 20 years later :P

"What if there were no hypothetical situations?"

2008-05-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

"What if there were no hypothetical situations?"

The irony of the 'If's' and 'but's' in in our lives are nicely reflected by the above title,but then if one observes carefully, our entire lives revolves around the uncertainity surrounding these two words.Now that the Sem is over I still hear people saying "IF I had read that chapter....","I scored av+40 BUT the cutoff was ...". What an Irony! :P

Anyway, having attained Nirvana from all these semesterly(!) mundane affairs i am here blogging for perhaps the last time before I get back next Sem.It is at such moments that I comprehend the ingenuity of the Embryo project and thank the BITS Alumni Assoc for giving us the 24*7 LAN and the Net(..albeit a bit too slow :) ).This semester sure did prove Interesting especially since the time I last posted 'coz a LOT of sweet things happened which already occupy a zillionth of google's server space and I hope it continues to do so :) .

Coming back to the title, I would like to get a few perspectives from your(i.e the lone reader reading this post) on these following hypothetical Situations.Don't forget to use your iMAGINATION.

1)What if a plane crashed on BPGC on 1 June 2008?

2)What if PS1 got cancelled?

3)What if the Girl/Boy you have a crush on came in engaged next sem?

4)What if the Number of hours you can spend on DC are made proportional to cgpa^3 ?

5)At this point in my life I would love to be .......... but (optional-the challenges involved)........ and yet...................

Well...I wonder how many people would write on that BUT(!) I hope atleast you do.Jus click on the link below and spare a minute to type in.I'm not writing anything more buggy but would just end this with this quote I came across:

"Gay People invented sports.Think about it.Boxing:two topless men...in silk shorts..fighting over a belt."

Now that's Imagination :)

Ciao. Enjoy your PS and IF not, the Monsoons BUT please don't complain about your PS 'coz WHAT IF you had got something worse!

The Sem that was...

2008-04-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Long time since my last post and yet it seems just a few moments ago.Time just flies past especially when your one hand is at the mongi counter and the other on Gtalk:P. With the semester coming to an end(--compres, ++ps1) I felt it was time for retrospection.I tried shortlisting and summarizing the ten best things I experienced this sem..Here'z it....

1)One can never take or make a Right decision.The choice is always between people you care for and the people you think care for you.At a given Instant the best we can do is take the 'best' decision and the do our best to retain the 'best' tag.

2) The logical conclusion to how the human brain works is illogical; A consequence of my biophysics neural network project.

3)Abstract Words like 'Trust' and 'Faith' are too abstract to be understood by an abstract being called 'Friend'.This is just a Q.O.D of 2.

4)Crushes will remain Crushes...unless you have the 'guts n glory' to speak..(which I don't :P). This is the only open ended challenge left with me,but it feels good :)

5)You are the person you choose to be. Everything else is just an excuse including politics. The smarter you play, the dumber you appear.So successful politicians play dumb(Ref: Do I need to mention?).

6)Marks seriously don't matter but that's just half the story, the other half is that itz just a matter of my perception.

7)Ecology is not a subject,Inflation is not about price rise, career decisions aren't made in 5 seconds, Electricity isn't the greatest invention( we love living without it, don't we?);Negation isn't a hobby,Its a habit.

8)The sound of Music is a beautiful piece but there is better stuff on DC :) and Google is the best place to live for androids but an overdose of google is lethal; especially to a haunted soul.

9)Intelligent People are the best assets to have but somehow they tend to be NPA's weighed down by trivial emotions. In simpler words most people give more Importance to stuff that doesn't matter simply because the don't think Dreams are Important!!

1o)Life is beautiful (as usual :) )

Well...the points are just an abstract way to say thank you to some people who were nice, some who were nicer and the 4th one for the nicest!

.....and also a sorry to those who I couldn't give what they wanted but then this end is just the beginning so stay put and we'll get the parallelism right.

Looking forward to compres :), ps , those nice sweet things in the to do list and of course my visits to the jungle to discover Ants( That's my Lop next sem!!).

Ciao and enjoy your Summer :)

T.I.M.E M.I.T.E I.T.E.M M.E.T.I......nyone knowz how to waste more time? Read on....

2008-03-02T09:19:00.001-08:00

Well... Waves just 2.85 days away(d curtain raiser is on 5th) and our Cruise trip1.69 days away(Is it? :) ) a lot seems to be happening this week. Well d extra significant figures added to numbers are just to remind myself how Important time is, having spent d past 4 days doing half of the things I planned to accomplish and having to spend the next 4 doing twice the number planned..law of conservation of work( who'd dare say itz non-conservative?).

Watching Filmfare awards is not something we get to see everyday..d oscars are an obnoxious weed( yeah bhajii got hayden 2 and we won the U-19 world cup with Sachin hitting his first Kangaroo century!!!) especially Shah Rukh and Saif with their gay habits and the 'na real'(coco) awards to vidya balan and akshay kumar...itz been a nice night. I also had to shoo away a saleswoman twice waking me up to sell home made jam.. I used d same lame excuse "mammi ghar pe nahi hay!" but realized that time has changed since the last time I used this excuse. So I gave a more BITSian excuse "we already have JAM for waves" (chk out d sponsors if u don't believe).....dat was enough 4 her. Poor thing, have to roam around with things to sell to earn credit points for living and here I'm marketing in a sponsored car!

Apart from all that I have one serious question. Do time management plans work?
My experience tells me they do. When you don't want things to happen ( say 4 example exam) they happen exactly as per the schedule..and when u want things to happen they don't (I wanted to send an email and somehow d gmail clock jumped over to japanese time putting me on a jet lag or gain of 4 hrs..) I was reading about these calenders and how they evolved and it seems before leap years were invented kings used to arbitrarily add or subtract days from a month especially corrupt officials who wanted an extension used to add days wenever they wanted...no doubt that modern day officials do the same ...after all Time is money..

News from Gujrat : 17 dogs married in a ceremony. Puppy love.. no doubt but 17???? I'm weak at permutations(or is it combinations?) but how come 17 a prime number and that too in Gujrat-Land of ___________( Fill in the blank with personality of your choice!)

Well...enough of time pass for now.If u sit calculating how much time u have spent reading those time in bold above u'll never find yourself on the cover of TIME magazine( Times square wala..not apna wala..)

Good Night and Jai Maharashtra(Jus heard they having a real time show where u get 5 lacs for telling why u need those 5 lacs.. only for Maharastrians!!)

But Yeast or Waste,
Not or Sloth
Goa Rockzzz....
.....and u 2!!

Panchi Zameen Par

2008-02-26T11:03:00.000-08:00

Birdie...that's my new pastime to the already long list of pastimes I do in my prime time.

Well..itz not like I have decided to go out and play golf right in the middle of our greens but just do some bird watching in our beautiful campus(Seriously no pun intended...itz more of the Dr. Salim Ali kind with a tolerance of 4-5%).

To start with I decided to do a bit of research(...dat reminds me I have a PPL tomorrow!) on the white feathered flock that you would have probably noticed in the central lawns. Well according to the bird watching techniques I googled out...d first thing is jus the same thing u do in your exam paper i.e Guess. So I guessed that they were birds(lol)... Well they were and still are Herons...

Now Herons are of a of a large variety and even google gave up on them ,I tried to derive my own conclusions and ended up with egret but that turned out to be the other names of heron...so here is another Open Ended problem....maybe someone could do a BPL on it.

While on my way to the Zhopdi to meet monty python(well..jus to have a half fry) I found a bird which I guessed was 'Unicorn Bird' 'coz it had a conic projection on its head but well it wasn't to be so 'coz it seems unicorn birds are the rare and endangered blue-horned curassow, also known as the unicorn bird. ... found in Bolivia so I changed its name to horn bird(well it could be cross between hornbill and a bored bird).Again another open ended problem...

The third bird I saw was Bingo.....Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher sitting atop one of our intelligent lamp posts(Intelligent 'coz they understand the sentiments of desolation).That one keeps coming behind my house so it was easy....after a few more 'Significant Successes' which Include the Crow, The sparrow, the eagle, an ostrich from intra-campus, a migratory pair from loveberia and some ornithologists in the library.

After such an entertaining experience that contributed significantly to my knowledge of diversity in unity ..(dats right) I turned my attention on to my bed which appeared like a Nice nest ready to set up a new home albeit that was not possible due the legacy of the Don & Diva so I still remain Single....

I even found a birdie connection to Quark ..quack,quack jus like the Tom and Jerry days...nyways sice itz been over I have hardly anything that would involve me as much as Quark'08 did... looking forward to Quark'09 have a tweety night,

Yours truly,

Days are Nice, Nights are Nicer...I live somewhere inbetween

2008-02-25T11:49:00.000-08:00

2day was another nice :) day....
Reason 1:Test-1 was completed in an exceptionally shocking (es) manner...the post below did do some small wonders though..

Reason 2: For all those who complained that they weren't getting interesting Quark Query Calls...I got mine first one for Waves today and that too from a homo sapien 8.0 (The fairer Sex) from PCCE......

...apart from that there were a lot of other nice things.I'm thankful to whoever it might be for giving me the my daily dose of BPS-Bijli, Pani, Sadak sans the Snake....Well I got 2 reports to write and lotsa other work to do but thanks to my intelligent,hardworking,dedicated neighbours I will hopefully be rewarded for my decision to bestow my faith on them for trusting them with my Mup & MT reports...the rest of the work is helped by this single word:Procrastination......

Well dats enough I guess, ought to catch some sleep 'coz smeone jus pinged me calling me a SDB (sleep deprived being)

Sweet Dreams :)

CGPA - 10 ways to get a 10 in 10 hours with 10 chapters remaining

2008-02-24T08:17:00.000-08:00

Well I think the title seems appropriate for someone who has an ES 2 paper tomorrow and needs to know how much one has to prepare for this Electric Shock 2.A search on Google for CGPA was(ob!) all about CGPA but only one among the zillionth result stood out from the rest of the flock(not that it was very heartening to see it but yeah it was what I wanted) Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical association(Short,Sweet CGPA..).A little scroll down revealed another interesting fact posted in Intel's recruitment profile in Malaysia-" You must possess a Master's degree or a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering or a related field with a minimum CGPA of 3.0/4.0." Well dats something nice to here.A similar search on orkut just threw up communities in thousands having CGPA ***** in them(The 5 stars are a mark of solidarity towards Chetan Bhagat's 'Inspiring' novel).

Well(4 d umpteenth time..) I may not be the best person to comment on CGPA 'coz I have always managed to as my peers call it 'jump over d line..'-courtesy ARC, but I would still like to pen down a few things that I think I should do now dat I'm actually in the situation of that title(jus 5 chapters though...!!)

1)Flush your brain clean 'coz else every time u try to read ur peripheral vision will suddenly tend to get better than Rajv... Singh Rathode and u'll start spotting things that u wudn't know existed in ur room...
The best way to do this is counting sheep albeit in BITSian way...thats just going out and finding out how many rooms in ur hostels have the sum of squares of their room no equal to multiples of 7(In case u hav Maths) or going to ur server room and pulling a line or two and checking wat happens..(In case u hav ES-2) or better still cutting down your lan cable to check whether the fibres used have the CE(That's Energy compliant..not China Electricals as smeone in my school used to say) embedded on them(Communication student..and if u r CS jus google the alphabets of Swahili and find out the meaning of Lol..

2)Understand the difference between listening and Hearing Music. Sean Paul and Linkin Park are to be heard while AR Rehman is to be listened too...else u'll just be left comfortably numb about what you were planning to do..

3)The Syllabus is not your master, U r ur own..don't let the book drink you, drink the book till u 're semi-intoxicated and have reached the peak of your gaussian performance.Come back only if u start missing the book more than ur Home.

4)Change ur startegy with every chapter..better every second page..start reading upside down..right-left or back to front..or just go to Wiki(The only time u use this BITSAA sponsored LAN for what it is not meant for) and key in the chapter Name...Alternate Text with Lecture slides or better still ur friends concise notes made especially to appreciate ur abscence from the LT's(In such circumstances your friends tend to seriously narrow down to 1 or 2 esp. if u r in a boys hostel).

5)Think about why you are doing what you are..sink in the feeling of what ur dream in life is and remember that ES2 makes not much of a difference to it either way....(Unless of course u plan start the lucrative venture of repairing the BITSian Transformer!!)

6)1 hour of performance is all that matters for the marks you want..so cool..and believe me thaat's the only thing that works in the hall no matter whetehr u hav studied 5 hours or 5 months for it..

7)Optimize ur score by planning out your answer sheet.. full marks are ur assets=what you don't know is ur liability* what you know are your stock holdings.. buy stocks sell liabilities..hw u do that depends on ur experience and once again cool...

8)Be comfortably Numb before and Numb afterwards 'coz watever you do, watever u say dosn't matter the moment ur paper gets over..

9)U always should appreciate the BITsian system which gives u so may opportunities..for the rest remember that there are always 50% people below the average..so itz nothing to bother abt..I hav been in that situation arnd 12 out of the 19 subjects I have had..and still I've scraped an A..(More reason not to study for tomorrow)

10)Rank ur priorities: Remember there are only two ways-Either U get there or U don't and In either case u r not loosing anythng so jus giv it ur best Shot...Bindaas..

Well that's a lot of advice i believe..time to practice before I preach...itz still in the Beta stage..Update will be available only after electric shock 2 tomorrow..

Ciao...
Enjoi d Nite in d same way ppl frm all ovr come to Goa do..

Tata..

.....Nano
:) MAD

A blog to blog....

2008-02-23T13:14:00.000-08:00

Well this is my 2nd blog...'coz due to some NTR reason the other had to be closed down.For those who haven't experienced the circle of life well here's an example that is the simplest revealation of this and you all must be experiencing daily...the 'fwd:...' that you forward comes back to you with more 'fwd:fwd:fwd:...' a pointless waste of server resources and your valuable time.Well you may not mind just clicking the delete option on it but for those who understand the terms 'environment' and 'earth' would probably understand the Implication those unnecessary,inactive communities on orkut and these 'fwd:fwd:fwd:..' have on us.They consume such a byte^terabyte^99999999 Gjoule of energy that google's contemplating a 6 football court sized server area in Portugal jus for this purpose..d same amount of energy that could power our campus for a million years..so folks jus giv it a thought the next time you press the Forward button.

Right now I'm mid-way through the tests and Waves'08(http://www.bits-waves.org) is also approaching but I still can't get off my QUARK'08 hangover. Itz been beutiful and I believe we'll make it bigger, better and ob..(no pun here) more beutiful :)

Time to sleep I guess 'coz my quota of 10GB songs is almost getting exhausted...Good Night..

NTR-Not to be revealed!!
Facts can be excused to be approximated 'coz my numbers are dyslexic... :)

The Circle of Life

Not so susegado

Whatever's LEFT

BBC News - Germany top for foreign students

The One With The Bicycle Guy

Google Summer of code 2011 is here

Barcamp session - Information & Communication Technology for Development

Pointer swizzling and Serialization

Where does this bus go?

On Google Health and Application Development

The best Firefox environment!

Physiological Data Visualization

The side by side viewer

Enabling Mobile Broadband Service on Linux

A Google Summer

On Scrum and Agile development

Trip to Wonderla

Learn basic Spanish for beginners - I

Why New Coal?

Algorithm for a Terrorist?

New Year Resolutions

InPiKs

Monkeying around

3 days

Climate Change

October 24th, 2009

Danke Schön

DAAD WISE 2009 Internship Feedback

Some tp..

Politics

Nation Descends Into Chaos As Throat Infection Throws Off Obama's Cadence

Grandfather Disrespected In Own Home

The Letter

Yawn!

Another Legendary Weekend :)

My Experiments with Dark

We saved the world!

Week 3

The second Weekend

Cam Era

Bowling Night

Photostream

Bavaria

Alles gut!

Kissing

Bbye

Is my mind half fool or half M T ?

Mind at work-How we crack exams!

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Control Systems

Heartistic Humor

Damodar HSSS Class of 2006 Reunion

Intentionally blank

The Journey

Musings of a Sleepy mind

Magic!

QoD

Thank You!

MAD-Make a Difference

What’s MAD all about?

Just Two hours a week

Be a Journalist

Start a cell in your college

Be a trainer

.........wherever it takes!

sLuMdOg MiLlIoNaIrE

Random musings across T1

:)

Nice take on the recession

Thank You!

Two is One | enO si owT

Distortions

Rock on!

HIStory

IT & T1

Happy Blogiversary!!

Internet Journalism Part-I

Power Politics

"What if there were no hypothetical situations?"

The Sem that was...

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