Closed

During past few months, I was thinking of closing this blog. Rather, I want to end the stupidity part and randomness and give it a direction and thought.

Change is essential ingredient of life. I want to bring that in all aspects. To start with, I am closing this blog and starting a new blog on wordpress.

I am very much thankful to everyone who has dropped by this blog and commented. I am happy to say that I got at least two friends just because of this blog. I hope I will find many more friends at my new blog too.

Though I am closing this blog, I am not deleting the contents of it. The older posts and comments section will be still open.

You are welcome to visit my new blog here and change your RSS subscriptions accordingly.

What alphabet do you hate?

Do you have any special alphabet that you hate and you want to disable that in your keyboard? It's easy to do. Of course, you must be using Fedora. All you need to do is the following.

1. Log in as super user.
2. Open the file /etc/inputrc. You will see the following two lines.

#do not bell on tab-completion
#set bell-style none

3. Uncomment the first line and put the specific alphabet at the starting of that line.
4. Save the file and restart your machine.
5. Now, try typing that letter.

We, at our office, have found this accidentally. All this happened because one of my colleague wants to disable those annoying system beeps. To do that, one has to uncomment the second line in the above file. Accidentally, she has uncommented the first line too, and the letter 'd' stopped working on her keyboard. Our system administrator had a tough time to figure it out, but yours truly has cracked it using his instincts ;-)

breakfast conversation

A: How are things?

B: hmm... it's all blank and dark for me right now... I am struggling to get some clarity of what i want to do, and what i can do...

A: sometimes... it is better to do what we can do... *I mean safe...

B: of course, yes. But, what if it's not exciting?

A: *U don't have an option... but you can give it a try with the other option in parallel... if it doesn't clash...

B: That's true, there is no other option. I think i need to do more brainstorming.

A: yeah... so... we have to do something to feed ourselves...

B: WHAT'S THE POINT is my frequent self-question...

A: I know... that is mine also... but I always avoid it... 'cos there is no answer...

B: hope we didn't become too senile for this age! :-(

A: hmm... i guess... if we convince ourselves... that this is what we wanted to do... at least for limited period of time... and keep the remaining period... open... and start giving real ourselves... it should work fine..

B: agreed :-)

B: i can see that, we have to organise our thoughts and dreams as beautifully as a cleanly organized house, otherwise it's just a mess!

A: It is... I agree with you... 100%

A: hmm.. only thing is.. we should be ready to take failure..

B: that's true. just a random question... is there a failure or success concept for LIFE, in general?

A: I'm giving myself... "more than 10% success..." as the base line... :) I'm happy to fail 89.999% for the 10% success...

B: I like it :-) Good day ahead!

A: You too :-)

PS: this is a conversation between two friends... almost in same phase of life and thinking about what's going on!

life... huh, not again!

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans”

- John Lennon

PS: I read this quote somewhere and found quite touching!
PPS: I am not getting anything else to put in here ;-)
PPPS: By the way, have a nice time!

Man woman make love ;-)

Wait a minute... this post is nowhere related to man, or woman, or for that matter, love making! A while ago, when we met for a short discussion, one of my colleague told about these funny commands in linux!

1. man woman
result: No manual entry for woman

2. make love
result: *** No rule to make target `love'. Stop.

yes, that made our day ;-)

flash back...

28th July, 2005... exactly, four years back we have entered IISc main building, the place where many dignitaries, and renowned scientists have done their pioneering research! I happened to meet one of the best pals of my life there. I am more than happy that it hasn't changed a bit in these years.

Today, it reminds me of that funny attire of mine, when I entered the registration office. Neatly tucked full sleeves shirt, polished shoes, neatly shaved face, and those innocent looks... huh, it was funny. After two years of stay, there were no signs of in-shirt, clean shave or polished shoes! and no more innocent looks too ;-)

It kinda of joy to recollect those memories!

what else?

On phone...

A: hi B!
B: how are you man?
A: I am fine, how about you?
B: cool, going good!
A: what else?
B: nothing much!
A: OK.
B: what else?
A: nothing new!
B: hmmm...
A: and?
B: you have to tell...
A: hmmm... nothing new!
B: OK. what else?
A: as usual, nothing... Just life is going on!
B: OK then!
A: Yup, bye
B: bye!

This is how my conversations are going on these days! Does that mean, nothing is happening in life? Or does that mean, I/people forgot to converse? Or is life simply that monotonous?

PS: I am about to start one more boring day at office ;-)

life... work...

There's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

PS: excerpt from Atlas Shrugged #2

naked!

She looked at him in the exact moment when he turned to look at her. They stood very close to each other. She saw, in his eyes, that he felt as she did. If joy is the aim and the core of existence, she thought, and if that which has the power to give one joy is always guarded as one's deepest secret, then they had seen each other naked in that moment.

PS: I was reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand... Sometimes, her writings and expressions take the readers to the ecstasy!

it troubles...

Many of us, since childhood, have some dreams/aspirations. We take different paths to reach those goals or fulfil those aspirations. As expected, the usual hurdles, partial successes, failures, and other jugglery will be there in the path. As time progresses, we reach to such state that we are too engrossed in solving the temporary issues and forget the theme of our basic goals.

If one of our good old friends call up and ask about what's the status of so -and-so goal, it blows us like anything! Because, we are already drifted too much from the roots and getting carried away by the winds and storms! It troubles... very badly!

PS: is the good old friend, your inner-self?

light scribbles - Photographic weekends #28

Coins - Photographic weekends #27

it hurts...

At every point in life, we make certain choices. Some of those may have really bad consequences. If one looks back, he/she can see that those consequences are natural for those choices/decisions. Of course, natural! But, it hurts...

PS: some random words from a conversation with one of my buddies!

spilled - Photographic weekends #26

Colorful tomatos - Photographic weekends #25

Colors - Photographic weekends #24

random words from my blog

I tried wordle.net to create this one. Just for fun!

daddy or grandfather? - Photographic weekends#23

Shot this one at Krushnai water park, Pune. Body language and the way of expression of this little boy, were really amusing! For more photos of kids, visit my flickr page.

golden shower - Photographic weekends #22

Golden shower trees are in full bloom these days... I can see these everywhere... struggled with my SONY DSC-H50 to focus these yellow flowers...

PS: I have recently started a photo-blog with my friend, Sravan, who became a proud owner of a Nikon D40 recently. Visit here!

Up... up... and above - Photographic weekends #21

Captured this one at Colva beach, Goa. Though its momentary, how good it feels when we are flying in the air!

Mission 'amla fruits'

Today, while we were having post-lunch walk. We saw one amla tree and we want to pluck some, but there was no route to climb up the tree. I asked for permission from the house (tree) owners. Mario has planned for this pyramid. Sivaram and myself have formed the base. Suvarna has taken the photos. All of us have relished them while continuing our post-lunch walk. Had fun!

...with love - Photographic weekends #20

I shot this one at Janjira Fort, around 150km from Pune.

hOLi है!

This was made with collective effort of our team members on the day of HOLI. Thanks to all of them for getting their hands colorfully dirty to materialize my crazy thought!

Ghostly me - Photographic weekends #19

I was experimenting with the shutter speed settings... so is this ghostly photo with 3 seconds of exposure.

PS: I haven't clicked anything interesting lately. So is this funny thing ;-)

You fall, I lift - Photographic weekends #18

Shot this one in Kashid beach, near Alibaug, Maharashtra.

PS: Can anyone tell me why a falling/setting Sun always comes out as an ellipse, instead of a circle?

Free time? - Random thoughts #2

For the last few weeks, I have been hearing news about the layoffs and other awful effects of global recession. Some of my friends, including my wife, have expressed their fears of getting laid off. If I am not sounding harsh, I feel all this fear is just because we are not prepared, really! We are habituated to this lifestyle with comforts and fat salaries, and started taking them for granted. I feel that most of the times, most of our time is spent, most inefficiently, by most of us.

I know few exemplary friends whose learning curve is always in growing direction. I often wonder what makes them so consistent in doing that. To my horror and disbelief, one of these exemplaries has expressed a fear of getting extinguished with the current learning speed. With his consistency and religious regularity, if he says like that, where am I? A difficult question to ask myself. Instead of passing time with social networking sites like orkut, twitter and gossiping on gtalk, the same time can be used for more constructive things. If we are prepared for the worst and ready with necessary weapons in our arsenal, I think, even the ugliest possible situation in life becomes manageable. All this is an outcome of reading Seth Godin's post.

If we have free time, we should feel blissed and make best out of it!

Programming blues - Random thoughts #1

Being a computational researcher, most of our time is spent in writing programs. When we do a thing repeatedly or for a long time, our thought process and henceforth the ideas get moulded in that language. Here are some such random things!

1. When I see people, there are different kinds of smiles. If smile is considered as base class, cunning_smile, deceiving_smile, healthy_smile, encouraging_smile, lifeless_smile etc. are the derived classes. When I think like this, I am involuntarily giving a gentle_smile.

2. When I want to get up early in the morning, I put my alarm into an infinite for loop, with 10 minutes as snoozing time. Of course, the loop will be ultimately broken by my wife. How it's broken depends on many factors, though ;-)

3. Whenever (most of the times) I don't feel like going for jogging, I comment that activity for the day.

4. When I am preoccupied with too many things, I tend to forget certain things. I blame this on insufficient memory, and give a segmentation fault. There can be unexpected response due to uncleared cache etc.

5. Most often, I take too long to boot up in the morning.

6. Few things like washing clothes, arranging house etc. are simply declared in the program, but never defined or executed!

7. Improper allocation of resources (like time, money etc.) will lead to the decreased efficiency of the program (life)!

Now, this is being terminated due to insufficient time!

A bit of paradise - Photographic weekends #17

Location: Munnar, Kerala.

Valentines forever - Photographic weekends #16

I captured this memorable shot near Mulshi dam today. The way this mother and daughter have dressed in red was impressive and it suited to the occasion.

Happy valentines day to all of you!

Random thoughts on randomness...

Being a random boy, I was searching for some random things on this vast space of internet. This is where I found some random posts about randomness written by my random friend Krishna. Well... as you can see from his posts, everything is deterministic with some governing rules. But, we perceive them as random just because of our inability to find out those governing rules. I am totally amused at these thoughts, and I totally agree with this perception. Though it looks random, I guess there has a lot of sense and meaning to it. As I try to apply this rule to life, in general, it looks completely random and out of scope. If we try to observe it from a higher level, we may actually find some sense of these governing rules, which may guide/help us in leading it in a desired direction. I guess, I am generating random thoughts here ;-)

PS: I just got a random thought that I would start a series of "random thoughts". Followed by it, I've just randomly decided to write something about beauty in my next post.

Sunset or sunrise? - Photographic weekends #15

Shot this one during trip to Matheran, last weekend. I had to exploit both optical and digital zoom facility of my camera, for capturing this view.

Rubiks cube family... expanding!

I have been friends with this wonderful puzzle game since mid 1999. During those days this simple fact, that it can be rotated in all 3 directions without breaking, has made me so fascinated towards this game. I remember how desperately I've played with this on the very first day. It took almost a month for me to completely solve this. Huh, what a joy that I've felt when I've completely solved this. Mathematically, the total permutations of a solvable (3×3×3) original cube is given by: or 43 quintillion, in short. Highly unimaginable to list all those configurations by hand. The facts and figures of this game are always interesting. When I read that there are people who can solve this game just in 7.08 seconds I couldn't believe it. There is an extensive mathematical research that has taken place on how to solve Rubik's cube. It was found that any random configuration of the cube can be solved in just 26 steps. You can read the article here, quite mathlicated though! Well... that's just the tip an iceberg.

One fine day, when I was browsing for information on Rubik's cube, I came to know that there are 4X4X4 and 5X5X5 versions are available with fully functional models. Recently I have seen videos of 7X7X7 and 9X9X9 version of the game in fully functional form. What an amazing design. Just try to imagine its internal design. You'll surely come out with an expression of wow.

No... that's not all of it. There are softwares available to play the game online. If you are too bored and have already solved the smaller versions like say 9X9X9 manually, you can play the higher versions virtually. I was dumbstruck to see the videos of how people have solved up to 100X100X100. Checkout here to see how 20X20X20 is solved.

No... that's not all of it yet! There is a whole family of twisty games which come in various shapes (see the video of dodecahedron here, and read about Pyraminx here), sizes and complexities. I feel like buying all of those and try solving one by one! Huh, too high an ambition for an amateur like me!

Bottom line is... we humans, though very lazy, though very arrogant, though very egoistic and blah blah blah, are blessed with this powerful brute force. I guess, that's what is making us understand this mother nature step by step. If nature is not this beautiful and complicated, all our research efforts, and life in general, will lack motivation.

Cars and colors - Photographic weekends #14

Life can be funny!

I did some crazy thing a week ago. We are around 100+ heads in our office and there are only 4 urinals available. Because of the air-condition or just the natural urge, people do visit these so frequently. Lately, I got so frustrated with the way they spill it there. I don't know how many companies do the job of pasting instructions of how to use western toilets, but somehow I felt that there is a need to instruct about how to use urinals properly. I got this idea of putting up a funny-poster somewhere, and pasted the following poster.

Everybody was coming and asking the admin-person about who has pasted that. Huh, I think people are not ready to stop spilling. Instead they are insecure about their manhood. Read more about this insecurity here. Yesterday, one of my colleagues has drawn a cartoon depicting the situation. I am posting it here, just for fun!
Have a fun-filled Friday!

Back from hibernation!

I think, it's more than six months after I have written anything that is substantial here. Reasons could be many. Post-marriage blues, laziness, busyness, retrospection, tiredness, blah blah blah... Many a times, I felt that my posts are looking too personal and mundane! Also, I observed that people write more when they are out of comfort zone. As far as non-professional blogs are concerned, blogs have become venting points. Personally, I could see that many of my previous posts are just out of frustration, depression and some such nonsense!

I am happy to see regular visitors to my blog, despite of my continuous trash! I started photographic weekends series just to make sure that this blog remains (attr)active. Now, I am back from hibernation and joining the regular bloggers!

Wish me all the best and keep visiting!

By the way, those who can read Telugu can visit my Telugu blog here.

Innocence doubled - Photographic weekends #13

Shot this one during Mahabaleshwar trip last weekend! I could visualize these two little girls as those described in the story "Little girls are wiser than men" by Leo Tolstoy. These twins have doubled the childhood innocence!

Solitude or loneliness? - Photographic weekends #12

Shot this during Sinhagad trek a week ago... Amidst many colorful flowers and plants, I found this one amusing! Sometimes, we are not sure if our mood belongs to solitude or loneliness!

PS: I have become more and more lazy these days. May be because of my resolution to reduce my laziness and extra pounds. Hope I will update regularly! By the way, I wish all of you a very happy new year!