Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Car vs Motorcycle vs Walking/Running

Dhaiya has quoted from Zen and the art of .. you know what

Ritesh Dahiya: Vacationing on a Motorcycle


When I had first read these lines in 1997, I was a third year student at IIT-Delhi and did not have a motorcycle. My access to any kinds of powered vechicles were limited to -

Priya scooter - Owner: Manas Garg
LML Vespa scooter - Owner: Rohit Agarwal
DTC bus - Owner: Government
Red Line bus - Owner: delhi dons

Given this limitation I had to reconstruct the quoted phrase: replace car with motorcycle and motorcycle with running /walking The central argument still holds - You are closer to nature while walking/running as compared to riding a motorcycle.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Google Talk

Google Talk: "They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free."

Clean interface ..No ads ..light-weight.. What else do u want ? Great show Google

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Just completed

Tyranny of numbers (continued)

I have finally manged to read through all of Dan Brown's novels.

Ratings on a scale of 10 -

Angels & Demons (9)
The Da Vinci Code (7)
Deception Point (5)
Digital Fortress (3)

Anyone who enjoys thriller and has not read Angels & Demons is missing something. Last two books are not recommended at all as they suffer from a very shallow plot and predictable ending.

Though I enjoyed Da Vinci Code, I could not understand why it had become such a big hit. To find out if I had missed out something, I read this book twice. The book is definetly a page turner, though suffers from a very weak ending. Its surprising that it has turned out to be such a big hit and most people just limit themselves to this book rather than reading Angels & Demons... Tyranny of numbers

There are a lot of similarities in all of Dan Browns book -

a) Very short chapters to retain the attention of the reader
b) Fast paced
c) Bare minimum character development
d) Involving big names - NASA, CERN, Pope ( CERN has a disclaimer on this)
e) Weak endings - Not all things fall into place. After taking the plot to a climax the fall is quite dramatic and the explanations are not adequate. I felt quite cheated that some of the names that added gravity to the plot were not realy required.
Manas is raising the same question here
"Why did Teabing involve Opus Dei for his work? He just needed one guy who could drive and shoot. He could have hired anyone for that. The Church and Opus Dei were involved just to make the plot of the novel much grander. So that people feel that there is a REALLY REALLY BIG conspiracy going on here. Well, Brown couldn't justify it in the end."
f) The respected and trusted characters are the villians




NOT RECOMMENDED

Now Listening ..RHCP

I am not a RHCP fan because I had listened to some of the hits that the band has produced and did not like the songs. Two months back I came across this album - By the Way. The songs in this album are quite different than the ones I had listened to earlier. Since then I have listened to this album more than 40 times and am still listening to it.

Sometimes the greatest hits of a author/band may not be representative of their work. This thought has always been with me ever since I realized that the greatest hit of Pink Floyd (We don't need no education) was definitely not their greatest number nor was it a representative of their typical style. What is this phenomenon called - Tyranny of numbers

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

email in junk folder

Some things never change -

Recover StumbleUpon Password
"Recover Your Password

Your password has been mailed to v---@y---.com
(email address has been obscured for your protection)
If you are using hotmail, you may find the email in your 'junk' folder

Enter your Email Address, Stumbler ID, or Stumbler Nickname: "

This reminded me of the time when gmail invites sent to hotmail used to end up in junk folders

Monday, August 01, 2005

Feature Rich browser application

Manas, some cool stuff - GMail sure has been an inspiration to many

AJAX breathes new life into Web apps: "AJAX is the newly minted acronym encompassing a fresh vision of empowered browsers: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Before AJAX, Web pages displayed links, forms, and buttons. When a user clicked on a link or a button, the browser sent a message to a distant server asking what to display next. JavaScript would typically be used for nothing more than to check form inputs. Web pages were as static as pages in a book."

Open Source Film Making

Using Creative Commons Licenses For Film