Telephone behind a glass partition

Fidel leaving, Nader joining

February 24th, 2008 Roshan

Hell yeah, Ralph Nader has announced his candidacy for the post of President Of The United States, and if I was an American there’s no doubt who I’d be voting for this November. You can see a list of things that Nader backs which the other contenders are either opposing or ignoring on his campaign web site. I disagree with his stand on Nuclear Power, but I can see where he’s going with it.

In other news, I dislike the way Cuba is run, it’s ridiculous to not allow the people to choose their leaders, but from BBC’s few talks with a bunch of people on the street in Cuba they seem rather happy with the way Fidel Castro has been leading them. To be frank, I don’t know how things are there, and I’d love to be able to visit so I could see for myself how life really is. Must put that on my To-Do list.

Posted in World | No Comments »

Phone Recaptured

February 24th, 2008 Roshan

It’s not often you get to say good things about the police, but they managed to retrieve my mom’s phone, stolen in November, and they caught a store owner selling these stolen phones. My mom managed to find the IMEI of her phone and after telling the police, those guys tracked it down to some guy who claimed he borrowed it from his friend, who claimed he bought it from a store. Well, that’s where the chain ends. Like, major props to those cops. Remember to memorise your IMEI or store it somewhere. You can get it by dialing *#06# on the phone.

Posted in Madras | 8 Comments »

Sigma and the MCC Math Reunion

February 23rd, 2008 Roshan

We had both today, on a Saturday. I was there on time. It went well. We, 3rd B.Sc. buggers, win the department thing and following that we understood just what “my cup runneth over” meant. It ranneth over all right. Went to the beach, high tide, moon was super, came back home, sleepy now.

Since I found an interesting thing: Marc will be happy to know that there are worse places than where he goes. Well, no, he won’t be, it’s no consolation whatsoever.

Posted in College | 4 Comments »

You see what you want

February 21st, 2008 Roshan

I saw this research paper on Slashdot that claimed that you see what you want to believe and the first thought that crossed my mind was Rashomon, a brilliant film by Akira Kurosawa that I really enjoyed back when I saw it. I didn’t know it was based on a short story, but it’s really interesting.

If you want to watch a couple of Kurosawa films and you don’t want to buy the DVD, you can rent them out from Cinema Paradiso or Ric Video. There are some real gems there.

Posted in Me | 5 Comments »

The Book Is Better

February 20th, 2008 Roshan

In any group of people discussing a film adapted from a book or theatre script, there will be at least one person who says that the book is better. If no one will else will step up to claim that, I will call it George’s Law and I’ve never seen it fail. Not once. There are other, similar, laws of human behaviour which are so common that one wonders whether its something hard-wired in the language centres of our brains. Take people who solve Rubik’s cubes, I’m pretty certain that each such Rubik’s Cube solver has been told the following at least once: How do you do it?! You know, when I was a kid I just took the stickers off each side of the cube and stuck all the same colours on the same side. Now, just in the interest of full disclosure, I did do that to a cube I had, and now half the stickers are missing because I didn’t stick them back on properly.

Why do people do stuff like that? You know, standard lines.

Posted in Me | 3 Comments »

Ticketless on the rails

February 19th, 2008 Roshan

Imagine you’re stopped at the Guindy station by ticket inspectors. It’s a mere formality, you’re an upstanding citizen and always travel legally. The last thing that you expect is to be told that you’ve been travelling outside the 1 hour period that the ticket is valid for, you have exceeded that period by a horrible 100%, the fine for which is fifty times the cost of the ticket itself. Makes me wonder, really. Why is that limit 1 hour? A reasonable limit would be 4 hours. Of course, that’s what I think. Ranjitha’ll remember to buy the ticket the next time, she says. That’s the right way to do it, while everybody waits for someone to modify the ticket printing machine to print 4 instead of 1 on that portion of the ticket. One can hope.

Otherwise, here’s a comic that reminds me of somebody else who doesn’t like my trebuchet ideas.

Posted in College | 4 Comments »

The Asus EEE PC

February 19th, 2008 Roshan

My dad was asking me about the, now famous, Asus Eee PC. Apparently he thinks that such a cheap lightweight laptop would really be just what he needs. We did the usual play around with me trying to convince him that what would be awesome and absolutely necessary would be me having both the Eee PC to carry to college with me and the Compaq NX 7300 to actually do my work on. The only that seems to be stopping him from getting on with it is the fact that he wants to connect the damn thing to projectors and have it just work, it seems to have a VGA output but I’m not too sure how good that is at actually doing stuff because I haven’t had a purely great experience with dual monitors and I can imagine this is similar.

In any case, he’s decided to wait and see, and probably eventually purchase either that or some other laptop in that price range and with similar specifications — I don’t need more than 8 GB, that’s enough for me.. Of course if it’s going to cost more than Rs.19,000 for the top end model it ceases to be worthwhile because you can get a full fledged laptop with an AMD processor for around 10,000 rupees more than that fully legit. I’m eager that he get the Eee PC and have a good experience because it’s a Linux device, but you know, if he can’t use it then there’s no point.

Elsewhere, a friend posted about HCL’s new laptops, news that showed up in The Hindu a week or so ago. There, he claims that he’d buy the Eee PC if it cost around Rs. 8,000. See, I know they make money off the stuff, but Rs. 8,000 seems like way too little in production costs. I claimed that you can’t find a desktop PC with the Eee PC specs for that much. Let’s see if I’m right:

1 GB DDR2 RAM - Rs. 1,200
8 GB SSD - Rs. 3,500
Wireless 802.11b - Rs. 1,000
Intel Celeron-M processor - Rs. 3,000

So there, that’s taking lower estimates, and without a motherboard even, or any of the rest of the features, and some essentials. Perhaps the friend would be better off with a Sony PRS 505 or one of those new Panasonic Ebook readers.

Prices are from newegg when I couldn’t find Indian prices (newegg is usually cheaper)

Posted in Gadgets | 2 Comments »

Techofes » Washed Clothes + Seven Days

February 16th, 2008 Roshan

What a name! Jesus.

I went for the rock show at the end of the technical festival, and there’s nothing I can say. As soon as Washed Clothes started everyone started leaving, and when Seven Days was playing the whole place was nearly empty. It was quite sad. The music, of course, was just fine. Seven Days was amazing, their covers were pretty damn good reproductions of the original versions. It was okay, could’ve been nicer if the stage was lower, if there were more people, if all the expensive lights were used, but these guys were really good, I wouldn’t mind paying to listen to their next show.

Posted in Madras | No Comments »

Airtel much faster than usual?

February 15th, 2008 Roshan

I once complained about Airtel, and what a bad experience getting a connection was, but once you’ve got the connection it’s perfectly alright and pretty reliable. I’d signed up for a 256kbps unlimited plan, and today when I was downloading java and tomcat off the ubuntu servers, I got the following readout:
Fetched 51.6MB in 12m5s (71.1kB/s)
Watching the stuff download and timing it, it was correct. I was getting 11 MB every 4 minutes. That’s more than twice the rated speed. I hope this isn’t some glitch in the system, maybe they’re just giving us a look at how faster connections are so that we’ll be tempted to upgrade. I must say that I am. The worst, of course, would be if they’ve accidentally switched us onto another plan with a bandwidth limit. I hate those, you have to keep track of how much bandwidth you use, the Internet shouldn’t be like that. Always on, ready to do what you want at a reasonable pace.

Marc claims that they must be stress-testing their connections, or perhaps letting people have extra bandwidth. That’s an interesting idea and he came up with an even better one — They’re showing off, ‘putting scene’ :D If so I hope they keep having excess space in their tubes :)

It’s still going on, I downloaded the Java SDK at 200 kB/s and now my upgrades are going at anything between 70-100kB/s.

UPDATE: As of now (8:40 IST), the connection is back to rated speed. It was fun to play with some high capacity though. My router mysteriously restarted just before I noticed that speed was back to normal. I hope the two things aren’t related.

Posted in internet | No Comments »

Apathy

February 13th, 2008 Roshan

It seems to be common to people everywhere, they just don’t want to get involved. It was like that for Kitty Genovese and for that girl on the Mumbai Rail who was nearly raped by some idiot while people just watched. It’s the same old story again, and this time it’s in England. I feel sorry for the poor woman, and I hope that criminal is caught.

Funny, the same title works for the other topic on my mind, the Indian tigers - we’re losing them. They’re dying out at a geometric rate, there’s only half left than from the last time when they took a census. That’s pretty awful, don’t we care? The death of the tiger is a symbol of how much we’ve affected the ecosystem around us. There’s a bit of a light though, the tiger population in Tamil Nadu at least is growing at a very slow pace, there’s a tenth more of them around today than in 2002. That’s a small ray of light in an otherwise overcast sky.

The funny stuff I’ve seen lately:
You thought Kirlian photos were weird, now they’ve gone and recorded a ghost.

Heather Mills is getting a divorce from McCartney. Now normally I wouldn’t give a damn, but I do find it hilariously ironic that someone who makes disparaging comments about one person having too much money would go around trying to get £60 million. Ha ha, that’s hilarious, man. I mean, hey, I know raising a kid is expensive, but 60 million pounds? What does the kid eat, gold?

One hell of a product name: Looking Good For Jesus. Ha ha ha. Oh shit, that is plain hilarious. And I think I can work in a link to this funny screencap about how digg comments sometimes work.