DrAgOn-fLy's Page

'Adrenaline' Journey

2012-01-22T15:41:00.002+05:30

I like to be on the safe side of things, especially when I travel. So, when there is a connection journey involved, I book my tickets in such a way that I have enough time between flights,. But when you have to travel on a particular date, you tend to pack things a bit too tight. That’s what happened to me last week when I had to book a connection flight with only 2 hours in between. I knew it was risky, but in my defence, I knew the transit airport very well and also I've never been delayed before by the airlines I was travelling with. And the first reason helped me from missing the connection flight in a matter of minutes.

All of this happened during my weekend trip with friends to Langkawi island in Malaysia. Since all of us had long year end holidays, none wanted to give our boss a reason to scream at us by asking for more leave. So we planned a weekend trip. In order to take full advantage of the weekend, we planned to reach the destination by Friday night itself. As with all Fridays, around one hour after reaching office - after reading newspapers - our clocks started ticking - to get out of the office. We used different methods like using the back door, setting our on-line status to be ‘In a meeting’ etc to slip out of the office early and discreetly. Somehow we all managed to reach the airport just in time before the counters closed..

When we reached the gate, I noticed a strange thing. The flight we were supposed to be on, was not there, yet. (Usually by the time we are at the gate, most people would have boarded). We checked at the counter and they said the flight is delayed for 20 minutes.

Little did we know that when they told us about the 20 minutes delay, they meant that the flight would have to come from somewhere else in the world. That reduced our transit time to around one & a half hours.

Since our only option to make it in time for the connection flight was for the connection flight to be delayed, one of my friends was suggesting a fake bomb call to the transit airport. But before we attempted any such drastic measures, the flight crew ‘assured’ us that there is a slight chance that we can reach the transit airport in time.

We boarded in a hurry, got settled in our seats, captain announced that he was waiting for the clearance to take off and started taxi. We were anxiously waiting for the take off for a long time and later realised that we are not going to take off. Instead the flight was taxied to a remote taxiway and made to wait till there is a slot available for take off.

Finally, by the time we took off, we kissed our weekend plans good bye.If we had any hope of making it, the flight attendants assured us that its not going to happen. It was also the last flight to Langkawi which means we had to resort to our back up plan, which we never had. But one flight attended did some ‘calculations’ based on her experience with the air routes and said there is a chance that the next flight also will be delayed.

Since we had nothing to loose, we decided to give it a go. We switched on our mobiles and as soon as we got a signal (after touchdown), we called our friends and we heard the words we all were hoping for, “the next flight is late and will take off in 20 minutes”.

We could easily make it, provided we are able to get to the immigrations from the tarmac (around 1 km away), pass the immigrations (as it our next flight is a domestic one), collect our bags, get out and get back in to the domestic terminal, go through the whole security process, get to the counters/kiosks, and finally go through the gate security again, in less than 10 minutes.

At that moment, I became a believer of the concept “adrenaline rush”, as I felt my senses super tuned and my muscles stronger. By that time, most passengers knew that we had to catch another flight and cooperated with us when we pushed them aside while exiting (and the rest of them, cursed us with their ‘ colourful’ vocabulary). After exiting the flight, we ran like we’ve never ran before in our whole lives, reached & passed through the immigration in seconds, split up to collect bags and to find the information counter, screamed at the top of our voice to explain the whole situation and then finally ran through the security again. I was sure that the security personnel were going to shoot down at least one of us after all the chaos we caused there. On later thought, they may have realised that a terrorist probably would like to be much more discreet than us. When we reached the gate, it was half closed and we found our friends anxiously waiting for us at the end of the queue. And so, 10 minutes later, we were on our flight to Langkawi.

Unmistakably this is one of the never-to-be forgotten experiences in my life which I will probably publish as a book titled “How I realised the existence of the adrenal gland in my body”. If it were not for a combination of sheer luck, quick reflexes & wit and a bunch of terrific friends, we would never have been in that second flight. Even though we went through a lot of adventures later - during the course of our trip - this was the one adventure we never planned, one that none of us will never forget and one that I really don’t want to repeat.

nVidia CUDA, nVidia Optimus, Linux & their complex relationship

2011-11-18T14:48:00.001+05:30

After months of brainstorming on whether to get a Macbook or a Win7 laptop, how and where to buy it, what configuration to choose etc, I finally got my new Alienware M14x (Win 7) last week. Unfortunately I got my hands on it last Monday, which in my opinion left me no choice but to reduce my sleeping hours to 3-4hrs a day. With all those extra ‘sleepless’ hours I managed to find, I could accomplish quite a lot of things I had in my rather long TODO list by the end of the week, or so I thought. But I still haven’t completely set up my system, the way I wanted – lots of games, a Linux development environment etc.

The culprit is none other than the most important component in the laptop (for me) - the GPU. Since gaming, photo editing and GPU programming (nVidia CUDA) are the three things I am looking forward to focus on for most of my time, I wanted to make sure I made the right choice in selecting the GPU. The M14x comes with an nVidia GeForce GT 555M and it boasts the nVidia Optimus technology which uses switchable graphics (with Sandy Bridge integrated GPU) for power saving. All the reviews explained a lot about how this laptop takes full advantage of Optimus. But what none of the posts (I read) mentioned was, just like any other new technology, there is no support for Optimus in Linux till date, not by nVidia, not by Linux or not even by the manufacturer (in my case, Dell/Alienware).

What this means is, even though I will be able to use the nVidia GPU in Linux for CUDA programming, I won’t be able to use the nVidia GPU for any graphics applications in Linux. For example, I will be able to do computations on the GPU as a coprocessor, but it cannot be used for display in Linux environment. It doesn’t affect me a lot as I am not looking forward for any graphics programming in Linux in the short term, I already have my hands full with the TODO list I mentioned earlier. But it sure is a bummer considering I wanted to try out some graphics/game programming in the long term in the Linux environment. Hopefully there will be support for the Optimus technology in Linux soon.

I learned this fact the hard way, after spending long hours trying to setup my system to use the nVidia GPU. This post may/may not offer any solutions to any particular problem, but just a few observations and links to some of the sites/forums that helped me in the process.

To begin with, my requirement was to be able to do CUDA programming on a Linux environment in my M14x (GT 555M). On a side note, I have done CUDA setup & programming in the past and was familiar with it. My first step was to choose one of the Linux distributions supported by CUDA. I chose Ubuntu 10.10 and installed it. During my first boot, it asked me to upgrade to 11.04, which I did not accept because I knew that gcc 4.5 or above is not supported by CUDA at the moment. Ubuntu also asked me to activate the nVidia driver which I did it. Then I downloaded the CUDA dev driver, toolkit 4.0 and the code samples. I rebooted the machine and the Xserver failed to start. So, from the command prompt, I removed the ubuntu supplied driver.

sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia*

Then I installed the dev driver downloaded from nVidia site.

Chmod +x "filename"

./"filename"

I also installed the toolkit (also set the path), samples and the required libraries for building them as specified in the CUDA Getting Started Guide (Linux). I rebooted the machine and again the Xserver failed to start. I poured through support forums & blog entries, tried the black listing method, reinstalled various drivers etc. None of them worked. Ubuntu was unable to load Xserver. So I decided to reinstall Ubuntu and start from step 1.

This time I was more cautious, I did one step at a time. But the moment I installed the dev driver and reboot, Xserver stopped working. What perplexed me more was, I was still able to run the CUDA binaries, which means the driver is installed properly. For a moment, I considered giving Fedora 13 a try.

That’s when I realized that I am using Optimus technology and the thought crossed my mind that what if Linux is trying to use the integrated GPU and nvidia driver is conflicting. My heart sank when I found out that there is no support for Optimus in Linux. There is third party software called bumblebee, which didn’t work for me. Some of the posts talks about a BIOS setting which can force either of the GPUs rather than switching them dynamically. But M14x BIOS doesn’t have that option, yet. So, I was out of options and that when this post helped me. It helped me deactivate the nVidia driver and use the integrated GPU for Xserver. Also the GPU is detected as a coprocessor so that I can do my CUDA programming as long as I am not playing with graphics. Remember to update the Intel graphics driver.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

In a nutshell, if your laptop is equipped with Optimus, better use the integrated graphics as of now for Linux. It’s a shame that so much GPU power is simply wasted.

Singapore 101: Riding in Singapore

2011-10-27T14:54:00.006+05:30

Update: This post is the first among my Singapore 101 series where I hope to provide some basic information about various aspects of an expat lifestyle in Singapore.

It’s been around one and a half years since I started riding my Honda Phantom 200cc (motorbike) which is my first two wheeler in Singapore (overall 3rd one). Over the years, I get a lot of general questions about owning and riding a motorbike/two wheeler in Singapore. I would like to share some information which I learned after started riding here, which (I hope) will help a foreigner start riding in Singapore.

Pros & Cons

Before going to the details, here are some of the pros and cons of owning a two wheeler in Singapore.

The Good: Convenience & Cost Effectiveness - Even though Singapore boasts one of the best public transportation systems in the whole world, it can get really crowded during peak hours. During after hours, there is no public transportation at all when one has to depend on taxis which can get super expensive. Depending on the distance travelled, public transportation can sometimes get costly also. Having a two wheeler eliminates all of the above obstacles like long waiting periods for a bus or avoiding a traffic jam (which doesn’t affect a two wheeler as much as it affects a four wheeler).

The Bad: Climate - Since Singapore is a tropical country, it can rain anytime and it’s almost impossible and extremely dangerous to ride in rain. Fortunately, the rains here don’t last long.

The Ugly: Fatality - One small mistake can lead to far more serious consequences.

Getting a license

There are three classes of licenses to ride a two wheeler in Singapore.

1. Class 2B – To ride a two wheeler up to 200cc

2. Class 2A – To ride a two wheeler up to 400cc

3. Class 2 – To ride a two wheeler more than 400cc

To start with, one has to get a Class 2B license. To get a 2A license, one has to be a class 2B license holder and should not have more than 12 (traffic) demerit points for one year from the day he/she gets the 2B. (I am not sure about the details of demerit points. Also, it’s the same procedure for getting a class 2 license after getting a class 2A). To get a 2B license, one has to pass a theory exam, a test circuit (which comprises of obstacles like a narrow plank, crank course, pylon slalom, emergency braking etc) and a road test. For class 2A & 2, there is only a circuit test as you are supposed to know the basics of riding (both theory & practical road riding) already.

Before attending the test, one has to enroll in one of the three driving schools in Singapore and attend various sessions. For example, for the 2A course, one has to attend 3 practical & 1 theory sessions. At the end of each class, the instructor has to certify the candidate is ready to attend the next class. Only after successfully completing the 3 classes that the candidate can appear for the exam.

There is an option to convert an existing license from a person’s country of origin to an equivalent class (which I did) which will require one to write only a theory exam. For an Indian two wheeler license, up on conversion, you will receive a class 2B license. To receive class 2A & 2, one will have to go through the process described above.

p.s. Just getting a license is not enough for a person to ride a two wheeler, say a friend’s motorbike. He/she needs to have insurance for that particular vehicle.

Getting a two wheeler

One can either choose to get a brand new two wheeler or a used one depending on their specific needs. Different types of two wheelers include scramblers, sports bikes, cruisers, roasters, cubs etc. To register a two wheeler (in the case of a used one), all a person have to do is to go to the LTA office in Sing Ming Avenue with the owner (or his/her ID). It takes only around 5 minutes to complete a form and pay the fee.

General Tips & Information

Renewal of road tax & insurance, getting the vehicle inspected from an approved inspection center, routine maintenance etc are some of the other procedures which comes as a package with owning a two wheeler.

More information about owning a two wheeler can be found in the following links

http://www.singaporebikes.com/forums/

http://www.lta.gov.sg/

http://www.onemotoring.com.sg/publish/onemotoring/en.html

http://www.bbdc.sg/

http://www.singaporebikes.com/forums/showthread.php/164254-RE-quot-Help-me-choose-bike-pls!-quot

If you find a mistake in the post or if there is any critical information missing, please leave a comment.

Compassion

2011-10-11T15:05:00.004+05:30

I watched this commercial for the first time, around a month back, when my friend shared it in Facebook. It was after my dinner on one of those hectic days, when all I wanted was to get my mind off everything else. So I was lazily browsing FB and I clicked on this video. At first, the music caught my attention. It was slow and relaxing. Slowly, the commercial got my full attention. By the time I finished watching it, I realized my eyes were filled with tears and I felt heavy at heart.

At first I told myself, “It’s just a silly commercial, you will grow over it”. But every time I watch this, it feels heavier.

Here, I am talking no more, decide for yourself!

“There are no perfect fathers, but a father will always love perfectly”

“When life is full of misery, what do we do most?”

Expedition to a Volcano

2011-10-04T17:35:00.001+05:30

“…Isn’t like that?” my colleague asked me.

“Uh! Umm, I think so”, I replied, even though I had no clue about what he was talking.

He understood it. “Hey man, you are not listening, where are you, actually?” were his next words.

He was right, I was not there. Even though its almost a week since my last trip, I was finding it difficult to get back to the ‘real world’.

It all started when we (me and my better half) figured out that our ‘party stocks’ are nearing its completion. In order to stock up in ‘large volumes’, we needed access to the duty free shops in the airport. That’s when our friends Jaiwin & Aneesh told us about a trip, some of their friends were planning. “A weekend in a ‘not-so-heard-about’ place in Indonesia with a bunch of ‘not-much-known-before’ people” – that pretty much summarizes our impression about the trip. ‘Never-say-no-to-travel’ being our motto, we immediately signed up for it. It turned out to be one of the most memorable trips in our lives, both because of the place we visited and the new ‘company’ we discovered.

As the trip dates neared, I wanted to get some information about the previously unheard location - Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park, East Java, Indonesia. Wikitravel writes, “If a landscape was ever needed to demonstrate the meaning of the phrase desolate beauty, then this is surely it. Rugged, barren volcanic peaks, gravel plains and that sea of sand, truly unworldly” and it’s true to every single word. The main attraction is to watch the sunrise from Mount Pananjakan with the active volcanoes Mount Bromo & Mount Semeru and the Mount Batok in the back drop.

We started from Singapore around 8pm on a Friday and reached Surabaya airport around 11pm local time. Special thanks to our trip organizer - Balaji - and the location specialist – Ajay – for arranging everything. We started our journey to Mount Pananjakan right away as we wanted to be there for the sunrise. We had to change to 4x4 jeeps in between, which took us to the view point just in time for the sunrise. Even though a small crowd was already there, we managed to find a good spot at the tip of the view point.

Both the pre-dawn sky and the sunrise were breathtaking experiences

That’s us, with the mighty volcanoes in the backdrop

After the sunrise, we began our journey towards Mt. Bromo

We traveled through the Sea of Sand (literally)…

…towards the Poten Hindu temple which is the gateway towards Mt Bromo’s crater

From there, we climbed for around an hour towards the Bromo crater. This is not a place for anyone who has problems with dust. As the atmospheric temperature rises, heavy sandy winds mixed with volcanic ash makes you somehow want to get out of there.

But the raw beauty of nature makes you want to stay even more. If you are lucky enough, you can witness the mountain puffing out volcanic smoke from it’s under belly.

By the time we reached back the bottom and back to the ‘base camp’, we were extremely tired and hungry from to the lack of sleep and the trek/travel. After some ‘light refreshments’ from a nearby shop – after which, the shop was closed for the day - we started our journey back to Surabaya where our stay was arranged.

After checking in and some initial rest, we all got together at the infamous ‘room 231’ where later we all took the ‘oath of secrecy’ that whatever happened there, will be buried with us in our graves.

The next day we explored Surabaya town. We visited the Semporna museum where the major focus is given to the influence of tobacco in Indonesian culture.

We also visited an old church (I am not very sure of its significance)

After that, we pretty much walked around the town on our own, taking photos and enjoying the company of the locals. We headed back to our rooms before very late as we had an early morning flight to catch the next day. (What happened to all of us that last night also comes under our ‘oath of secrecy’ and is still a ‘highly controversial’ topic)

Next day, we boarded our flight back to Singapore, with our newly made friends, the still fresh smell of the volcanic ash and with the satisfaction of having known one of the most polite people in the whole world. No wonder, even after one week, I am unable to find my ‘balance’ with the so called ‘real world’ life!

Movie in 2 mins: “Mere brother ki Dulhan” (My brother’s fiance)

2011-09-20T19:38:00.004+05:30

I am not a big fan of romantic comedies/musicals and I try my best to avoid one, especially the Bollywood ones. Within the first few minutes, any sane person can guess the whole story, down to the very fine details - predictability. At times, I make exceptions and watch them, usually when I am with my friends.

Last Sunday was one such occasion. I was visiting some friends and they suddenly planned for this movie - Mere brother ki Dulhan (My brother’s fiance). The moment I heard the name of the movie, I guessed the storyline. But when I found that the protagonist is played by Imran Khan, I was a bit hopeful. After all, his movies made me laugh (most of the times).

As expected, the story line was very clear within the first 10 minutes. Like the name ‘suggests’, the hero will fall in love with his brother’s fiancé. Since it’s a romantic Hindi movie, there MUST (keyword here is MUST) be a happy ending. There I was, watching a movie which I always try to avoid, because it’s just a waste of time. Even then I thought there will be something different, something which is not so obvious about the movie.

What I didn’t realize was the movie was so full of clichés and songs, even beyond my ‘wildest imaginations’. Read the following ‘quick replay’ in a ‘problem-solution’ format and decide for yourself whether any of these events sounds familiar.

Starting problem: Hero’s brother wants hero’s help to get married and settle down.

Solution: Hero goes on ‘bride-hunting’ for his brother, ends up at his old acquaintance (heroine – who rocks in looks and character). Their families also agree on the alliance.

New problem: Heroine wants to enjoy the last few hours, how can she?

Solution: Hero saves the hour and they have a great time together.

New problem: They fall in love (Aha!). Now, how will they make hero’s brother call off the wedding without embarrassing themselves?

Solution: Get hero’s brother’s old girl friend to flirt with hero. Seeing this, hero’s brother gets jealous and decides to run away with his old girl friend.

New problem: How will the family avoid the embarrassment?

Solution: Family asks our hero to marry the heroine.

And this whole thing goes with a north Indian wedding setting in its backdrop, with a song every 5 minutes (literally).

And so the Bollywood proved me wrong, again. I thought no one will watch the same old ‘winning Indian romantic movie formula’ after some time. After this movie I said to myself, that time has yet to come.

p.s. I didn’t give a spoiler warning as there is nothing ‘unpredictable’ to spoil.

Sabah: An experiment from God

2011-07-19T12:56:00.005+05:30

According to the popular travel guide Lonely Planet, Sabah is the result of an experiment from God. It goes on like this, “After the first six days of work (creation), instead of resting, He wanted to see what happens if He takes an island, covered it with impenetrable jungle, add lot of new life forms and turned the temperature up to 40 deg C. The result is the ‘tropical Eden’ of Sabah”. In my opinion, to His test tube He also added some kind of “over-sizing” portion so that everything is either the biggest or the largest in the area.

Mt. Kinabalu – one of the tallest mountains in Southeast Asia is located in Sabah. On the other side of the state are the seductive blue coral reefs of Sipadan, also called ‘The Diver’s Mecca’. One of the world’s incredible cave systems and karst formations can be found in Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, the other state of Borneo (UNESCO world heritage site). Borneo is also home to the largest flower in the world – Rafflesia, the largest living arboreal animals – Orangutan and the list goes on and on.

Even though, I wanted to visit Sabah for the above stated reasons, none of the above was the actual reason I made my first visit to Kota Kinabalu last week. Two of my ‘self-proclaimed mountaineer’ friends were visiting the place for the sole purpose of ‘conquering Mt Kinabalu’ and exploring the Mulu caves (around 10days). Being a travel enthusiast, I immediately agreed on meeting them. Since everything was last minute, I couldn’t cater time for conquering the mountain or exploring the caves or diving with the sharks (yeah, sharks are the major attraction of Sipadan). So I decided to use this trip as a survey trip for planning the future expeditions. Also, this trip was different from my usual trips as I concentrated on ‘less traveled paths’ and of course, spending time with my friends and concentrating more on my photography skills.

Our stay - Hotel Jesselton, KK. Jesselton was the name of KK during the colonial period. Located at Gaya St. – still cobbled, another remnant of colonial rule

Night markets of KK - Great place to spend time after dinner if you are a shopaholic, especially because there is a lot of room for bargaining.

Handicrafts market in KK - It was too late by the time we reached there and most of the shops were closed. These shops will give you a peak in to the rich culture Borneo has to offer.

‘Street dining’ in KK – One can discover the local cuisines in its authentic form here

We started our jungle/river boat ride from here. Located near a tropical reserve, this place is home to some of the unique species of flora and fauna.

The boat ride through the calm river during sunset was so relaxing

A lot of tourists – especially those from non-tropical countries seemed very curious about wild monkeys and got very agitated whenever one was sighted.

A ‘family reunion’

King of the trees -
During our jungle trek near the Mt. Kinabalu national park, the local guide pointed out this particular tree to be known as the king of trees

Hanging Bridge Canopy walk – The view down below is overwhelming, but I wouldn’t recommend this for those who are afraid of heights and also afraid of walking on a ‘rope’.

Nature at its best - After the trek we visited the poring hot springs. I have no idea why they call it hot springs when the water is cold and chilly. All my tiredness from the trek just vanished after a bath in the ‘natural’ pool.

Mount Kinabalu hiding behind the clouds. A view from Pine Resorts near the national park

By the time we returned, the clouds were up on us and the air was chilly. Our guide had a hard time driving through the S-shaped roads.

Sunday market in Gaya St. I found all sorts of interesting things in these shops. Both visitors and locals were shopping with equal enthusiasm

For Sale - A kitty in a pet stall in the market

Even though I spent around 3 days there, I parted with the feeling that I hadn’t even 'scratched the surface' of all the things I could do there – all the surprises Borneo holds. As my return flight was taking off, I was busy making a mental note of all the things I should do during my next visit.

Windows vs. Mac – My 10 cents to the age-old debate

2011-06-20T17:22:00.009+05:30

Well, how should I start this one? I am not surprised if your thoughts after reading this post’s title go something similar to this, “uh! Not one more of these never ending, 15 year old debate”. Also, there is a high chance you already have your own strong ‘opinions’ about both platforms. I am merely trying to add my own 10 cents to it.

My work – because of its ‘complexity’ – makes it a necessity for me to be well versed with Windows & Linux. Since MAC provides a Linux-similar development setup and Windows similar user environment in one box, my office issued me a Macbook Pro. Being a self-proclaimed gadget geek, I wanted to review it then itself. Later I decided against it thinking its better to wait a bit more and get to know the new toy.

Steve Jobs and his company sure know how to make users feel great. ‘Feel great’ is actually an understatement. The feeling of using a Mac is different. It’s not like using a PC, which is just another tool to check mails or get jobs done. With Mac, the whole ‘computer experience’ is different. Its simply different – in an awesome way. That’s the first and the most important thing I felt after using a Mac. By user experience, I mean whatever the user is directly in contact with - the touchpad or the display or the sound or the cool looks & feel.

I am a person who shuts down my windows pc/laptop after I use it, or else the whole system simply slows down over time. With Macbooks, I just close the lid. It’s just like switching on/off a TV set. I have used many windows laptops and none of them ‘gets ready’ as fast as a Mac – as soon as you open the lid. With Windows, it simply won’t work.

For embedded developers (like me), a Mac is a good choice as it runs a Linux-like kernel. Also, for graphics designers a Mac is the best choice as the display is stunning. There is no comparison.

Being said all that, I still can’t imagine a Mac replacing Windows. Mac allows good Windows integration with Bootcamp (Yes, I use dual boot). I also have a windows VM running in background all the time.

Most of the general-purpose software is available in both platforms. Exceptions are Picasa Photo Viewer or irfan view or gTalk, which I use extensively in Windows. It’s very hard and sometimes impossible to find support for some software especially specialized (industrial) software/hardware in Mac. Another reason I can’t let go of Windows, is gaming. Mac is not an option for a true gamer.

If anyone has a misconception that Macs wont get stuck or there is no Ctrl-Alt-Del in Mac, now is a good time to leave them behind. Macs do get stuck in the middle of nothing, some times even for trivial things like muting. Also they are not significantly faster than Windows, as some may suggest. Its just that Macs always come with expensive and high performance hardware associated with them.

Even though Safari is their flagship browser with a cool look and feel, it's one of the worst browser I have used, till date. It simply won’t work with Gmail or even blogger. It also has compatibility problems. Firefox is not as evolved as in Windows and so most of the times I end up using Chrome in Mac.

The biggest problem of all is that Macs are super pricey. Not only a Mac, but any software or accessory that is associated with a Mac comes with a hefty price tag. A normal Mac is almost as costly as a top class Windows laptop (which makes Mac a rich man's toy, in my opinion).

I can’t conclude in a single statement whether Windows or Mac is better. I would like to put my conclusion in this way. If you are planning to purchase a computer/laptop,
1.    If you are in a budget, don’t even think about going for a Mac, you’ll probably end up bankrupt.
2.    If you have just enough money to buy a Mac, use it to buy a top class Windows machine.
3.    If you have surplus amount of money at your disposal (or your office is providing you the machine), buy a Mac and install Windows in it so that you can exploit the good of both worlds (which is what I am doing currently).

That’s it, I would never choose a 'Mac only world', but having a Mac with Windows is a powerful combination – something I would like having always.

Something’s, I will never get over with!

2011-06-08T10:22:00.004+05:30

I felt it again, the same feelings which I felt around 7 years back, when I had to leave everything I knew in my life behind and had to step out in to the open world on my own – yes, I am talking about the time when I graduated. I saw the same sequence of events happening all over again, even though the environment and the people were totally different. It was as though history was repeating itself all over again.

Since I work in a university, I got the privilege of being part of a student club. Last weekend, it was their big annual event and as a club member, I also decided to do my part by helping them out. At first, I was a bit irritated due to the fact that I will loose a hard earned weekend and also I had to get up early (believe me, I cant remember the last time I did that). But it turned out to be way better than what I expected.

I got the opportunity of being in the middle of a bunch of highly motivated undergrad students who are organizing an event. Any one who had organized an event in their school/college days knows how it feels like. It’s too damn hectic and tiring at the time of the event. You have to run around fixing stuff, manage others, and no matter how good the planning is, things go haywire all the time. But after the event, when you look back, you get the satisfaction of a great achievement. And you feel more bonded with your teammates.

All these totally reminded me of the events I had been part of organizing, during my undergrad days. Even though I didn’t do much this time, I got a feel of it. It was a kind of Déjà vu for me. The people who did marketing/publicity reminded me of those times when we went around looking for sponsors or travelled far and wide with the posters of the events. I could correlate almost anything I saw there to my college days, like the registration team or the participation in the events or rushing with a last minute change or people sleeping in the organizing area who were tired to death. I even witnessed people having crushes on others.

But the moment that inspired me to write this blog happened after the event. When it was only the club members, the juniors decided to give going away presents to the graduating students from the club. There was this very friendly girl among them who got totally surprised by this and as I expected, got emotionally overwhelmed. Tears started flowing from her eyes. The gift only made things worse. It was a collage with all those great moments with her friends. Gosh, that’s when I went back to the time when we all sang ‘Kabhi Alvida na Kehana (never say goodbye)’. I wanted to pass on to her something a very good friend of mine told me precisely at the time when I was feeling really depressed about leaving college. “Don’t be sad that it’s over, be happy that it has happened.” But then I thought it’s better to let her figure it out on her own. Besides, I am never good with words at moments like these.

I do wonder sometimes, why do we need “goodbyes” and “thank you”s? I feel it too formal. For me, the best thing to do is to just walk away. No “goodbyes”, no “see you”s; just like you are coming back the next day. We don’t say goodbye at the end of a typical day. People say “One must move on when its time to move on”. There are times when I think I have moved on from a lot of things. But moments like these prove me wrong, that no matter what, I won’t be able to get over with some things, that even now, I look back in time and long to relive those crazy & nostalgic moments of my life.

Popular Misconceptions about Japan

2011-05-27T09:00:00.000+05:30

Recently I got the opportunity to travel to Japan. I had fancied a japan visit for a long time and so I had some background knowledge about Japan, by the time of my travel. Besides, I have some very good friends in japan through whom I had learned most of what I know now about japan.

Before I went to Japan, I had lots of ideas about what I might find in Japan. Most of them were correct and some were not that correct. Overall, I would say, I was better off than many other people I had discussed about Japan. Sometimes, the level of misinformation people had about japan, amazed me. So I decided it’d be a good time to clarify some of them. I won’t be sharing much about my experiences in Japan, as it’s a subject for another blog(s).

The only language in Japan in Japanese and its very difficult to travel in Japan because of the language barrier

I was a bit worried before my travel about the language barrier, but it turned out to be just as easy as navigating through any other tourist location. Its true that the Japanese are not that well versed in English, but most of the sign boards have English instructions and most railway stations have tourist information centers nearby. In the worst case, I simply used sign languages as the Japanese go to great lengths to help you.

Geishas are prostitutes

Another blunder! Geisha is a female entertainer, not a prostitute. If anything, they were strictly forbidden to have paid sex. “In the late eighteenth century, dancing women called "odoriko" and newly popular female geisha began entertaining men at banquets in unlicensed districts. Some were apprehended for illegal prostitution and sent to the licensed quarters, where there was a strict distinction between geisha and prostitutes, and the former were forbidden to sell sex.” – from Wikipedia

There are pornographic videos, which claim to be featuring Hollywood actress. But that doesn’t make Hollywood actresses, prostitutes. Geisha’s case is also similar.

Original geishas exist even today, in the Gion area in Kyoto. And Japanese are very proud about geishas.

Japanese eat snakes, scorpions and stuff or the main Japanese dish is raw fish and they don’t eat other cuisines

Totally wrong! I don’t know who eats snakes, may be the Chinese or the Koreans, but not Japanese. They like seafood a lot and perhaps the most curious thing I found is a sea urchin sushi.

They do eat a lot of raw fish (sushi, sashimi etc.) and its very tasty if prepared by a licensed chef. But they do have other dishes like the ramen, udon, domburi etc. Another thing I noticed during my travel is, they love Italian food. I could find as many Italian restaurants as Japanese restaurants. Also I found Middle Eastern food, Indian food and even Kerala food in Japan.

They are extremely conventional or they are extremely advanced and so no traditional

They are a bit of both. They live in the edge of technology and at the same time they keep their traditional values. It’s amazing how they find the right balance between both. Very close to Akihabara – the electric town, Tokyo – you can find Asakusa with the famous Sensoji Temple where they still pray. They wear Kimono’s (traditional dress) with the same pride as they wear their extremely formal official dress. They never leave their traditions behind for modern lifestyle.

A couple of other misconceptions are, they are very cold-hearted people, anime & manga are cartoons, Yakuza is a myth etc.

As for me, two quotes from the movie The Last Samurai sums up my perception about Japan and its people,

“Everyone is polite. Everyone smiles and bows. But beneath their courtesy, I detect a deep reservoir of feeling.”

“They are an intriguing people. From the moment they wake they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue. I have never seen such discipline.”

The Dragonfly Page

2010-12-08T09:57:00.004+05:30

I did it. I completed the long delayed ‘personal’ project I was working on. As I said, its a personal project and has nothing to do with my work. Its something I started around 6-8years back. I spend so much time over it that I thought I was never going to finish it, ever. I had refined and redesigned it more than 10-20 times, and explored new technologies each time I restarted it. But this time it was different, I promised myself that I am going to finish it before the end of 2010. And I did it. You can check it out here – The Dragonfly Page. (Access the site at http://www.thedragonflypage.com)

I think you got what I am talking about, its my personal website. The first time I built a site for myself was back in 2000. Internet was more like Disneyland to me, it amazed me and I wanted to be a part of it. HTML was way too simple back then. Just some tags, some images and some captions and I had my site. I hosted it in yahoo geocities. But geocities used to put a big banner (ad) on top of the site and all formatting I worked on for hours, simply went haywire.

Later when I was doing my undergrad, I started rebuilding it from scratch. I moved my domain to tripod.com which was referred to me by my friend Jayanth. In tripod, there used to be an option of choosing the ads to be displayed in popup windows, so that the page formatting remains intact. But I never got to finish the site due to various other reasons. I think the “site under construction” page is still there.

Even though I continued experimenting with various site designs and stuff during the years that followed, the next real effort was around 2006-2007 time period. I wanted to buy myself a domain and build a better site equipped with technologies like flash, java script etc. I completed almost all the graphics and page designs. Again, due to various reasons – laziness being the prime reason - I never got to publish it. But I kept all those graphics and most of the designs which I am using currently.

The logo I designed last time

This time it was different, I had access to many resources like a server to host the pages, all the tools to build a site etc and I didn’t want to waste them. But the main motivation came when I browsed through some of the recently updated sites of my colleagues and friends.

This time, I wanted to start and finish the work in one go. I didn’t explore any new technologies and I used my previous design as a starting point, used almost all the previous graphics and reduced the number of pages planned for the site. There are still a couple of more ideas I want to integrate to thedragonflypage. They will be incorporated when I roll out version 2.0, which I hope will be in the near future.

Hope you like the site and if you do, please leave your comments/suggestion here or through the feedback form.

Special thanks to THESITEWIZARD.COM from where I got the tutorials required for building my site.

My new blog - The Dragonfly's Wall

2010-12-06T13:57:00.000+05:30

There was a time when I used to browse hours and hours for high definition wallpapers to decorate my desktop. I found it very frustrating sometimes to find good wallpapers that matches my style. But after I started photography as a serious hobby, I combined it with my photoshop skills to create wallpapers for my desktop. Recently I began thinking why couldn't I make them available to all those who are in search for better wallpapers. That thought resulted in my new blog - The Dragonfly's Wall.

I hope you will like the wallpapers posted in my blog.

Archery – The art of perfection

2010-12-02T16:43:00.003+05:30

“One day, Guru (teacher) Dronacharya decided to test his students in their skill of archery. He hung a wooden bird from the branch of a tree and then summoned his students. He asked the first one to aim for the bird's eye, but not shoot just yet. He then asked the student what the student could see. The student replied that he could see the garden, the tree, flowers, etc. Drona asked him to step aside and not shoot. He repeated the same process with a few other students. When it was Arjuna's turn, Arjuna told his Guru that the only thing he could see was the bird's eye. This satisfied the Guru and he allowed Arjuna to shoot the bird and his shot pierced the bird's eye.” – Excerpt from epic Mahabharata about the great warrior Arjuna which shows the power of focus and concentration.

I started archery just out of curiosity, but found myself attracted to it quite fast. One reason is the amount of focus required from the moment you take your bow till you release your arrow. Your mind needs to be calm and all you need to see is the golden circle at the centre of the target. Once you release your arrow, you know whether your form was good and you'll score an 'X' or whether you are going to score a 'M'.

Archery is the art of perfection. If the archer has got a perfect form and if the equipments are in the perfect condition, his shots will always hit the gold.

10 things I would like to see in Gingerbread (next Version of Android)

2010-09-24T12:12:00.012+05:30

No, I haven’t stopped blogging and I don’t plan to close my blog.
Yes, I will try to blog regularly, but may be less frequently.
No, I didn’t blog for sometime ‘cos I was lazy or ‘cos of lack of subjects.
Yes, I couldn’t blog for long ‘cos of my hectic schedule (not work overload) even when there are lots of things in pipeline, I wanted to write about.
With that said, here is my next blog...

10 things I would like to see in Gingerbread

Since the iPhone 4 buzz is slowly settling down, I see a lot of talk about the next version of Android, code named Gingerbread in tech circles. After reading most of the articles and the rumors, the only thing I am sure about the next release of Android OS is that its code name is Gingerbread. You heard it right, that’s about it and everything else is just speculations and rumors. Out of these, the most prominent speculations are,
1. Minimum hardware requirements of the Gingerbread are a 1 GHz CPU & 512 MB of RAM. (2GHz is more like a rumored rumor, if you know what I mean)
2. A completely revamped mind blowing GUI.
3. Support for bigger displays with higher resolutions around 1280 x 760.
4. Release date is mid of Q4 2010, mostly Oct 15th or 16th.

And some of the “really-not-sure” rumors are,
1. Gingerbread is targeted for high end hardware and therefore the devices might be costly.
2. GUI will be similar to current Gallery App.

I couldn’t find any rumors about any OS level changes or support for any new hardware. You might have noticed that I haven’t specified a version number. Some argue that Gingerbread will be 3.0. Some others say its going to be 2.3 since it’ll be a continuation of Froyo (Android 2.2).

What I want to see in Gingerbread is listed below (both new and fixes to current features)
(Note: This is also a “review after 3 months' use of Google Nexus One” too)
1. A revamped Gallery App or at least a faster, smother, bug fixed version. Yeah, you haven’t read wrong. I know the current galley app is one of the best & most hyped (in terms of look & feel) in Android, but it has lots of problems namely,

It simply won’t show images downloaded through some third party apps.
Sluggish at times, especially when deleting images. It takes some time for the next image to load and when I navigate to next one, it get stuck in between.
When selecting and deleting multiple images, it behaves strangely - it shows random images and has to be closed and reopened.
Sometimes, it just won’t show any images and simply displays the message “Loading new albums”

2. A new UI as given in the speculations sections. A mobile device is mostly about its look and feel and a new UI will be a great boost to Android. I would like to see more glossy icons with lots of reflections without affecting its speed. But if they want to make it like gallery with all the above stated problems, I say no to that.
3. Wireless syncing and ability to join adhoc Wi-Fi networks. It would be nice if a PC can recognize the phone when its near and if we can use an explorer/browser to sync/transfer files.
4. A better Wi-Fi stack – the current stack is not perfect.

Occasionally it won’t connect automatically to pre-configured hot spots, saying its disabled.
Sometimes, it won’t scan even if the user issues an explicit scan command.
Now my work around to the above problems is to turn off & on the Wi-Fi, but I want this issue to be fixed.
More configurations can be exposed to user.

5. A new music player. Its not that the current one doesn’t serve its purpose, but there is a lot of space for improvement, like a good equalizer or wireless syncing option etc.
6. Support for more video formats and resolutions.
7. All Google Apps directly from Google and not from third parties. E.g. GTasks, Google Docs etc
8. Ability for more ‘screens/desktops’. Now Android supports a total of 5 screens. It would be nice if it gives the option to configure the number of screens.
9. Offline Google maps. I don’t want the whole Google maps stored locally in my phone. But an offline mode will be great which can buffer recently navigated areas.
10. And finally, a phone application/software straight from Google - like iTunes, may be a browser based one, which can do the following things,

Browse the android phone & SD card
Convert videos to any android phone specific formats
Wireless syncing for music, videos, files etc

I came up with this list after being the owner of Google Nexus One for around 3months. Hope to see these features and a lot more in Gingerbread.

Tilt-Shift Effect a.k.a. Miniature Faking Effect

2010-08-04T11:21:00.012+05:30

I always loved miniature models of cities or objects, both in real world as well as in a computer. The process of making them is an art of perfection, like the effort one has to put in to grow a bonsai tree.
I was really amazed to see this picture while I was browsing through flickr pages. I was thinking, “This guy must have put in a lot of effort to make this model” when I saw the footnotes. It said “post processed the tilt shift effect in photoshop” which meant, I can create this effect using photoshop. I didn’t believe it at first. But, after around 5-10 minutes of Google-ing and around 20 minutes of photoshop-ing, I had my first tilt-shift image ready. I used a random snap at first but later tried it on a real photo. Here is a small tutorial on how to do it in photoshop. You can find many tutorials in net and the main steps are same. I have added some tips from my personal experience.
According to Wikipedia, “Miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is made to look like a photograph of a miniature scale model. Blurring parts of the photo simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered in close-up photography, making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is; the blurring can be done either optically when the photograph is taken, or by digital post-processing. Many faked-miniature photographs are taken from a high angle to simulate the effect of looking down on a miniature.”

1. Initial photo. I had to go up to the 6th floor to get enough elevation required for this effect. This is the main requirement for tilt-shift effect. If the photo is taken from a sufficiently high altitude, it’ll give the impression of looking down at the model.

2. After pre-processing. I did some pre-processing to make the image look a bit artificial. The properties I manipulated are Levels, Exposure, Variations, Shadows/Highlights and more importantly Vibrance/Saturation.

3. Enter ‘Quick Mask’ mode either by pressing the quick mask button (highlighted in the image) or by using the shortcut ‘Q’

4. Select the ‘Gradient Tool’ and then select the ‘Reflected Gradient’ as shown.

5. Decide which part to highlight in the image. Then click & drag a straight line (press down the ‘shift’ key) from that point to top or bottom.

6. When click is released, the area will be selected in a gradient red color.

7. Exit ‘Quick Mask’ mode by pressing the quick mask button (or ‘Q’). This will give you a ‘marching ants’ selection in the image. We are going to blur the selected area to simulate shallow depth of field.

8. From the ‘Filter’ tab (as shown), select ‘lens blur’.

9. Now this is where you can get creative. The values I have used for this tutorial are shown here. You can try playing around with the values for different results. But, I’ve got to warn you, it might take some time (depending on your graphics card) for the preview to load, especially if its a big image.

10. When you are satisfied with the image in preview, press ok to exit. Deselect the selected parts using ‘Ctrl+D’ and you are done.

11. The finished ‘tilt-shift’ed image.

Result of experiment no. 1

Result of experiment no.2

These are just the main steps in creating the effect, but there is more to it and I am still learning. The image saturation and the shadows/highlights play an important role in making the image look like a miniature model. But the most important factor in my opinion is the contents of the image. If its a picture of nature, it might not look as ‘perfect’ a miniature model as compared to an image with lots of objects or people. See the difference for yourselves in the photos below.

California National Park: A lovely snap taken by a friend of mine. More of his photos here.

After applying tilt-shift effect

A random snap downloaded from internet as I couldn’t find any of my photos with lots of people in it.

After applying tilt-shift effect

More links
1. Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial
2. Tilt-shift photography – Wikipedia
3. Flickr Group: Tilt-shift Miniature Fakes

Travel Guide: Pulau Rawa

2010-07-26T12:48:00.014+05:30

Its been only around a week since I am back from Rawa Islands and already I am missing that place. It really is a paradise - see it for yourself from the snap below.

This is the perfect place if you are looking to take a break from a hectic schedule or if you are longing for a weekend getaway from the city. You wake up looking at the beach and the clear blue water, with the mild wind blowing at your face. Eating, drinking, and playing at the beach are all I did the whole time I was there, as I was looking for a very relaxed, ‘be-as-lazy-as-you-want’ kind of a break and I am not out of that mode yet.
When I was planning this trip, I had to do a bit of ‘asking-around’ as this is not a destination to which you can find a lot of travel agent tour packages. A couple of my friends and colleagues also asked me about the trip after they saw the photos. So this time I am attempting to write a ‘travel guide’ to Rawa. (Note: All the prices quoted are at the time of my travel and may vary with time)

Pulau Rawa
Pulau Rawa is a coral island off the east coast of Johor, Malaysia, 16 km by boat (30 minutes approx) from Mersing town (Wikipedia). The beach is made of pure white soft sand and the water is clear blue in color. You wouldn’t want to get out of the water, any time.

Accommodation
There are two resorts in the island, Rawa Safaris and Alang’s Rawa. Both the resorts offer tour packages, but I didn’t go for them as I like to decide on my own. Also I wanted to try the restaurants at both resorts.
At Alang’s Rawa (where I stayed) - previously known as club Rawa - the most sought out chalets are the two facing the beach (shown in the snap) and you might want to book these at least one month in advance if its peak time (April - September). The room charges are RM220 per day (twin sharing). More details can be found in their site.

Food
The main reason I didn’t go for a package is ‘cos I wanted to try the restaurant in the other resort. After having my first meal at Alang’s Rawa, I knew I would be having all my meals here only. The food was so tasty that I wished I had a bigger tummy. At Saturday nights, they provide an excellent barbeque dinner. Average meal cost is around RM35 (BBQ cost is RM60).

Drinks
Bottled water is costly in the island and its better to stock up at Mersing. The well water is salty. But they provide beverages (cocktails, liquors, beers) and juices at a very reasonable cost. Since its a party atmosphere at the bar at nights, there is a possibility that the beer get over on weekends and you may have to wait for the supply boat to get it from Mersing.

Activities
Even though its an ideal place to be lazy, there are some activities you can try there. The obvious ones are snorkeling, island hopping etc. Rawa Safaris resort rents Kayaks at RM35 per hours and you can go around the island, if the sea is calm. If you have an Advanced (or better) diving certification, you can rent the diving equipments from the Rawa Safaris for RM95 and venture in to the corals near the beach on your own. If you want the tank only, the cost is RM20. The max depth is around 9m. A couple of staff I talked to, told me about the existence of baby sharks around the island. But I was not lucky enough to find one. They also told me about a small jungle path behind the resort which can make a small trek.

Getting there (from Singapore)
If you are a very lazy person, you can straight away book a bus to Mersing from Singapore (Five Star, Transnasional etc) and the cost is around S$30 per head, one way. But I prefer the ‘do-it-yourself’ way. I booked the bus to Mersing from Johor – S&S International (One way cost - RM10). Travelling time is around 2hrs. Another option is to book Causeway Link Express. The timings are displayed at the ticket counter. For both, one has to personally visit the Larkin bus terminal in Johor. From Singapore, you can take the MRT to Woodlands MRT station, get the SMRT bus no. 950 to Woodlands checkpoint. From there, take SBS 170 to Larkin terminal. From Woodlands checkpoint, it will take around 20 minutes to 40 minutes to reach Larkin depending on the queue at the checkpoint and the traffic. Even though I booked the 8:30 am trip, the bus started at 9:30 am only due to some repairs.

Back to Singapore
For travelling from Mersing to Johor (on Sunday), I booked the ticket at Mersing Bus terminal on my way to Rawa on Friday. The bus timings chart is given below. The 8:30pm bus I booked came at 10pm only. Always expect some delays if you are thinking of a bus journey and plan accordingly.
Another option is to take a taxi from Johor to Mersing and back. I did it during my last trip to Pulau Tioman. The taxi cost from Johor to Mersing (Friday morning) was RM150 and from Mersing to Johor (Sunday evening) was RM200. You need to bargain for the lowest fare.
I guess that’s all what you need to know for a trip to Rawa. Visit the resort’s website and shoot a mail asking for a reservation. Book the bus, pack your bags and simply go and have the time of your life in Rawa. For any missing details, just drop me a comment.

Some Snaps

Larkin Terminal, Johor with S&S bus

During the 10 minute walk from Mersing bus terminal to ferry

Ferry timings – I hear that if there are around 5-7 people and pay around RM50, they will drop you at RAWA on their way to Tioman.

Rawa Safaris Office at Mersing

Private Jetty from where we board the speed boat

Rawa Island

The main dock at Rawa. However the speed boat directly drops you at the beach.

Alang’g Rawa – The big hut is the bar and restaurant and the other A-frames are the chalets.

The speed boat ride

Where I stayed – The hut in the left

Twin sharing room

Get tanned – All the facilities are free here. You don’t have to rent any life jacket or snorkeling equipments. But I have to warn you about one thing, its been used by many people and the equipments may not be in an excellent condition.

Dreamy Rawa

The beach from the restaurant. You will never get bored sitting here, sipping a cocktail and watching the ocean.

A romantic remote part of the beach. You can literally call this a private beach, just for you.

Bus timings back to Johor from Mersing.

More snaps here

GUNDAM Modelling - My new obsession!

2010-07-15T12:49:00.008+05:30

Well, I cannot exactly say it’s a completely new obsession. It dates back to 2007 when one of my friends bought me a RX-78-2 Gundam (1/100 scale, if I remember correctly) model from Japan. He knew that I am interested in Lego and ‘Bionicle’ kinds of stuff. He wanted to give me something more and challenging and bought me my first Gundam. I opened the package and was really amazed to see all small parts. It took us around one day to completely assemble the RX-78.

That was the start. After that, I started reading about Gundams. I told my friends in Japan to get me the anime series. I choose Gundam Seed Destiny, the latest one at that time, to start with. I loved the anime and wanted a Justice Gundam, but settled for a Freedom (1/144). I couldn’t pursue this hobby further as there are not many options available in India.
By the end of my last semester, I started thinking about Gundam again. This time I started with Wing Series as I loved the Wing Zero Custom, a lot. Of course, I watched the Unicorn OVA too. This time I had all the options available to me and the day my exams were over, I picked up a Unicorn (HG) from Toys ‘R Us and started working on it. This time, I didn’t feel very good after completing the unicorn - it looked like a plastic toy. I wanted to do more and that’s when I started searching for Gundam modeling, stores etc and stumbled to this blo g. I visited Hobby Art Gallery the same day and was amazed to see the models displayed there. At first, I thought they are costly kits with perfect ‘out-of-the-box’ looks. After a couple of visits to other modeling shops and more browsing, I figured out there is much more to model building.
Equipped with all these information, I collected some modeling tools, paints and stuff and started redoing my unicorn. I was afraid to use Gundam markers at first as I didn't want to spoil the model. But I had to start somewhere and one day I did it. The end result was not very good, but much better than out-of-the-box stock plastic look. I wanted the gloss look and used a gloss topcoat. That did not give the looks I wanted (I suspect the white color body) and so I did a flat coat over it. Here are some photos.

My Unicorn dismantled & ready for painting

“Warzone” - after painting. I used Tamiya colors.

After assembly and ready for top coat

After top coat – It’s not much of a difference. Also you can see my Gundam marker missed some grooves and made a mess.

My first completed model.

With cover

My Next project - A Wing Zero custom MG, I picked up from HAG.

After seeing the models displayed at HAG, I know I am no way near where I want to be. I am lucky that HAG is offering modeling courses and I will be starting one soon. The two blogs which helped me a lot in my endeavor are http://www.dannychoo.com/ and http://toymakerinc.blogspot.com/.

Reflections

2010-07-08T14:39:00.006+05:30

One and a half year! It’s been around one year and 6 months since I reached Singapore. It has been a period filled with twists and turns – all of them, amazing. Now when I look back, I am proud to say that it has been one of the most rewarding periods in my life. Most importantly, the reason for what I came here for, I have completed with a (self) rating of exceeding expectations – Yeah! I graduated, with flying colors.
I came to Singapore for doing my masters. I was a bit afraid and didn’t have any idea about what to expect. My friends had warned that life will be very difficult without a job and friends. I truly hoped that I am prepared to start out from scratch, to get out from the comfort zone I was in, 1.5 years back. I vividly remember sitting at the stairs of my apartment (22nd floor) the night I reached here, alone, sipping a beer and thinking how I would feel or where I would be, two years down the line. And now, here I am, 1.5 years down the line, finishing my masters, with a group of amazing friends - just the way I always hoped for, with a job I always dreamed for and looking forward an exciting future.
When I made the choice to come here and purse higher studies, I could only hope that it would be a good decision. But now I can ‘state’ that it turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made. During the last 1.5 years, I have met some of my best friends ever, who are part of my life more than even I am part of my life, learned a whole lot of things (of course that was the main goal), more than that, the course sparked my interest in many fields I never thought I would find interesting (e.g. probability theory), found a job which is extremely satisfying, which allows me to do the things I love to do, met lots of people who opened up the whole new door of exciting opportunities that I can pursue. I learned to adapt to different environments, managed to balance work, study and personal life, learned to work under a hectic schedule, more than that, I learned how to keep my spirits up even when I had to work 24/7. I traveled a lot, experienced different things, met different people and discovered the world under the water & over the mountains and many others. The tenure at NUS exposed me to the amazing possibilities the world has to offer, or more accurately, the power of knowledge.

I can say from my heart that I have thoroughly enjoyed my learning experience in NUS, and I truly wanted to gain knowledge which is very different from my school days when I studied to somehow push through the exams. I know I have only managed to get a glimpse of the amount of knowledge out there, and that excites me. When I completed my undergraduate studies, I didn’t have a very good idea as on what is it that I want and I moved along the crowd. Now I know what is it that I want, or more like, what is it that gives me the feeling of “Wow! This is awesome; I want to do more of this”.
Above all, I would like to thank NUS and each & everyone who were (and still are) part of my journey - my parents, my sister & brother-in-law (who gave me the inspiration at times when I was down), my friends, my teachers, my colleagues, and to that occasional ‘stranger’ who gave me hope when I didn’t know what’s next, whom some people call, God.

Tribute to a friend who fought and died!

2010-06-25T14:53:00.012+05:30

He was born somewhere in Japan. I heard about him around four years back. He was stylish and the best in what he did at that time with some unique features no one else could match. After some self-debate, I decided to invite him to my life, as a friend who stays by my side no matter where I go or what I do. And he came. He did come with me no matter where I went or what I did, literally. We climbed mountains, did scuba diving, enjoyed the beauty of nature and did a lot more, together. He opened a whole new world of opportunities before me which I never knew existed. He inspired me and helped me inspire others. And he died, last month. It might be better to say I killed him, unknowingly. He didn’t give up till the last moment, he fought and died.

I am talking about nothing but my beloved camera, Canon IXY 800IS (a.k.a IXUS 800IS or SD 700IS).

Just after I bought it

Released in 2006 February, IXUS 800IS was the first point and shoot camera with the Image Stabilization (IS) feature. It was when I was looking for a new camera that I heard about the IXUS 800IS. I didn’t have to do a lot of research as I always wanted to get a Canon IXUS and also since all the reviews said IXUS 800IS was an excellent choice. And from my experience I’ve got to say, it was an excellent choice I made.
I still remember the day when I got it. It was during 2006 Onam celebrations. It has been almost 4 years and I have taken around 30,000 photos with it. Yeah, that’s a lot of photos and the CCD was showing signs of aging recently. Still, the photos I took with it are amazing. I bought the waterproof cover shortly after I bought the camera and I have taken my IXUS literally everywhere I have gone. I have photos from each and every month since I bought this it.
Last month, I and my friends went to a water theme park and that’s when it happened. As usual, I cleaned the cover and the O-ring, put silicon grease and fastened the camera inside the cover. We took some photos in water and after sometime I noticed the camera restarting periodically. Immediately I went back to the dry area and opened the cover to see it was half filled with water. I might not have closed the cover properly. I tried my best to save it, but I guess it was not my day. Even when it was half filled with water, the picture we took were of the same quality as before and I could retrieve them from the SD card later.
During the 4 years I had the camera, many things happened in my life and I have snaps of most of the memorable moments. Even after I bought my DSLR, I used IXUS just as before. Both served very different purposes for me. It really showed me what photography is about and I doubt there are any settings in the camera which I have not experimented with. I guess the time has come for me to move on. There may be a lot of high end cameras out there with awesome specs, but I really doubt whether I could find one which could truly match my beloved Canon IXY 800IS.
Here are some of the best shots (unedited) and memorable moments which originated from my IXY’s CCD,

One of the very first photos which showed me IXUS’s potential

One of my most viewed photos in flickr

A beautiful moment from my life back in 2006 - taken during our trip to Kalakayam, Trivandrum

X’mas celebrations at my old office

Underwater Self-Portrait - One of my first experiments with the underwater photography

Water-vision – This is how you will see sky if you look up under water

Fireworks – I never got enough of ‘firework’ photography

A nostalgic moment

Time standing still – Saying goodbye to one of my best friends, ever.

Family Reunion – My grandmother’s 80th birthday celebrations at my home

Vishu – A local festival

I always loved colors...

Panoramic View – I was breathless when I first saw what this camera was capable of

Another X’mas at home

Water - when time stands still

After a rainy morning

Playing hide ‘n seek

Singapore!

Making new friends – During our trip from NUS to Melaka, Malaysia

Friends forever – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Nemo and his father – it’s a totally different world down there

Me, after my first set of dives

One hell of a start – New year celebrations at Phuket, Thailand

Final moments – I think that’s when water started getting in the cover

Last shot – The last shot which my IXY 800IS took

More photos in flickr

Review: Google Nexus One

2010-06-14T16:46:00.008+05:30

It’s been around 2 weeks since I’ve got my hands on my new Nexus One. I’ve got pretty excited when I saw the DHL vehicle parking in front of my office to deliver it (yeah! I was waiting for them). I’ve got the same level of excitement even now, writing this blog and I am really happy to say, this gadget has exceeded my expectations. That’s my review in short. It’s awesome and it changed the way I’ve been experiencing the web. On the downside, there isn’t a single day my friends haven’t asked me, “is this phone more important to you than us?” both joking and seriously.

As they say, this is definitely “Web meets phone”. Previously, there wasn’t a single day I don’t use my laptop. After I got Nexus One, I haven’t used it more than 4-5 times. I do most of my ‘web-things’ using Nexus One, such as mails, messengers, social networking, news etc. After I started using Nexus One, my ‘online presence’ has increased a lot.

Now to the review I’ve offered. I wanted to post this after the first couple of days, but I felt I won’t be doing the phone justice by an early review. That’s why I waited patiently and jotted down the points.

Disclaimer: This review is solely based on my experience as a consumer. This might not be true for any of the other Nexus One’s out there. I have tried my best not to be biased, but then again, I love this phone.

1. Device (General)
Fast, fast, really fast: The thing I was sceptical the most was about the speed of the device before I bought it. I’ve got to admit, it’s really fast. Gone are the days when we press an icon and wait for the phone to load the application. I don’t know whether it’s android or the hardware, which is also pretty impressive. I haven’t been much of a smart phone user before, mainly because I felt it was not the right time to get one. But I always tried to be updated and whenever possible tried different phones. None of the experiences matches with this one.

Multitasking: You can use anything with anything (use any app with any other app). This is really an awesome feature. I can talk over phone and at the same time share images or web pages or videos etc with them. And this is going to be a long post.

2. Web Experience
“Everything is in the cloud, babe”: Since Nexus One is directly from Google, all of their services are tightly integrated to the phone. To me, it’s a boon as I use almost all their services except for a very few. For e.g. I prefer Flickr (to Picasa), Facebook (to Orkut), twitter (to buzz) etc. For some users, it might be a curse as you may have to rely on third party apps for things like contacts or reminder (calendar) if you don’t like syncing with your Google account. Some of my experiences are given below.

Contacts: If there is anything I don’t like about Nexus One, it’s the contacts. I had to spend around two days to get everything right. I used to store all my contacts in my SIM card. After I inserted it and copied the contacts, I couldn’t see them in the contacts list even after I disabled syncing with Gmail. But they all get added to my Gmail contacts (multiple times as I copied it multiple times) and my address book was in a big mess. After spending around one day merging and deleting the duplicate copies of my contacts to Google contacts, I added my Facebook account. It synced everything to my contacts and messed up everything again and I was back to square one. The same thing happened with my Orkut, twitter and other accounts. Finally I decided not to sync any of my accounts except my Gmail & Facebook account. Some of the other problems I faced (and still facing) with contacts are,
1. There is no option to set a phone number or email id as the default option. Some of my contacts have multiple numbers – personal, mobile, work, home and multiple profiles – Google, Facebook, Orkut etc. I cannot find the option to set a particular number or profile as the default.
2. Joining contacts from different accounts is also a mess. The phone automatically chose the default name for the contact. I have friends with multiple profiles. They have same mail id, but different display names in different accounts. I want to choose the display name, but I am unable to do so. Even if I edit my Gmail contacts, it may display another profile’s info as the display name.

Syncing: I noticed most of the syncs, especially YouTube takes some time. This happened when I favourite-d a video using my laptop and tried to accessing favourites via Nexus One.

Browser: The browser is really fast with features like the pinch to zoom, multiple windows, bookmarks etc. I cannot find much of a difference between a normal (PC) browser and the Nexus One browser. A double tap automatically formats the page to display screen after zooming which is really easy for reading. I am eagerly waiting for Froyo (Android 2.2) for flash support. Some of the features I wish for in the future version of the browser are,
1. YouTube video in browser restarts when switched to other tasks. It would have been nice if there was a ‘resume’ feature.
2. I haven’t figured out which fonts are supported by Android and how to install them. I read regional language news and that is one thing I miss as Nexus One doesn’t support Malayalam fonts.
3. Even though there is pinch to zoom capability in browser, it won’t work if the browser is opened from other apps, say twitter for example. That’s really annoying.

Mail: Since my main account is Gmail and my work accounts are also sync-ed with Gmail, I don’t have to use another email client. But to send using my work mail servers, I have to configure the email client provided. I haven’t been able to do that till now. The Gmail app is cool, but I would like to see a few additional features implemented in future.
1. I have configured multiple accounts in my Gmail account and when I compose mail from a PC, I can choose which account to send from. I cannot find this option in the Gmail app.
2. When I press the attach button during ‘compose’, it opens the gallery. Instead I would have loved if it opened the file system. Now I use a third party file explorer to tackle this issue.
3. Unlike the PC version of Gmail, there is no ‘frequency based email id selection’. If I want to mail a friend with multiple mail ids, I have to type the exact mail id, and cannot simply select the one on the top. Also the email ids won’t fit in the screen in portrait mode.

3. Apps
Lots of ‘em: I have seen iPhone ads which boast over 250,000 apps and Android store having only around 50,000. Come on people, do you really think you are going to install all the apps? I haven’t had any problems finding the apps I needed. One might argue its because I was not a previous smart phone user. In the worst case, you always have the choice of writing your own app since Android is an open platform. And believe me, it’s not that tough if you know java. (Yes, I have some experience with that)

Gtalk: We cannot change the “Available”/ “Busy” status without changing the current status message. There is no option of simply using the same status message and changing the status as in the Gtalk PC application. Hope they add this feature in the next release.

Maps: I would love to see the map data stored locally in the phone, so that I don’t need a data connection while travelling (especially when I am at sea).

4. Display, Camera & Gallery
The display is gorgeous. The colours are so beautiful that you won’t feel like taking your eyes of the screen. The AMOLED screen can be used smoothly even in bright sunlight. It’s got a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash. Normal users (who need some/any camera) can use this as a replacement for their point and shoot cameras. Unfortunately, I - being a power user - don’t fall in that category. I feel phones are not yet ready to replace even point and shoot cameras.
Don’t get fooled by the appearance. To test the camera and the display, I took 2 similar snaps with Nexus One and Canon IXY910 IS during one of my recent trips. The shot with Nexus One looks awesome in the phone even better than the canon one. But when seen in a normal display, it doesn’t look that great. Check their properties (attached) for the details. (Notice the time difference between the two shots, as they were not taken exactly at the same time)

Taken with Nexus One

Properties of photo from Nexus One’s Camera

Taken with Canon Digital IXY 910IS

Properties of photo from Canon IXY 910S

Some of the other comments are,
1. The camera settings menu gives only very basic settings. Atleast a custom timer option can be easily implemented, I guess
2. As for the image editing part, after I crop an image to set as wallpaper, I noticed the images losing their clarity. I didn’t dig much in to this, so it may be a problem with what I did.
3. There is also the issue of photos not being loaded to the gallery immediately after they are taken. Sometimes, when the gallery is opened right after the photos are taken, they may not be there. So, it would have been nice to have a refresh button for the gallery.

5. Connectivity
Since I do not have a data plan, I depend heavily on Wi-Fi. In Singapore, you will find connectivity almost everywhere. At shopping malls, there is Wireless@SG program and one can easily find data access.

WiFi Stack: It’s fast and almost perfect. Yeah, almost perfect. There are many features I would like to see in the WiFi utility/stack in the future,
1. The main one being the ability to set priority for hot spots. There are two hotspots in my office and I want to set the priority between those two.
2. Most of the hotspots these days use web captive portal method for authenticating users. So it would have been easy if Nexus One could remember the user names. This is not the “remember username and password” feature in the browser I am talking about, but the “Adding to dictionary” feature. My login ID is a weird combination of my name and the department name. Every time I have to manually type it rather than selecting from a set of choices shown. It’s a pretty basic feature I have seen in other phones, but not in Nexus One.

6. Battery
Space for improvement: Hmm, this is one place all the smart phones need improvement. With Wi-Fi & GPS turned on all the time and on medium display brightness level setting, I have to charge the mobile once every 12-18 hrs on an average. While charging, it gets a bit hot, but not as much as my previous Nokia handset.

7. Music Player
Simple and Plain: The main functionality I wish for in music players are the ability to sync manually, which is already there. I love the Nexus One player for just that reason. I haven’t tested any third party music players. Some of the features I am looking forward in the future version are
1. MP3 tag editing option
2. Wireless Synching like Microsoft Zune

8. Miscellaneous Experience
Some of the features I am really looking forward which cannot be classified in to any of the above categories are

1. Undo: The most important feature which is applicable everywhere in Nexus One is the ‘undo’ feature. When I tap the textbox and if it selects an already typed text and if I accidentally touch the keyboard, it’s gone forever. I can’t find the undo option anywhere.

2. Search: When I click the search button, the search box comes with the previous searches. When I select any of the previous search terms, it directly start searching, I want it to wait till I press the search button, so that it will enable appending of additional search terms, before it start searching.

3. Wireless mounting: Accessing of Nexus Ones storage over WiFi. I don’t want to carry my data cable everywhere I go.

4. Landscape Dock: The dock available now is only for the portrait mode. If there was a landscape dock available, it would have helped for watching videos.

5. The fact that to enable simple speed dial we have to install a third party app is a bit irritating. I hope the android team will include speed dial in the future revision.

Conclusion
I have barely scratched the surface of the things I wanted to write here about Nexus One, especially why I love it so much. At the same time, I didn’t want this to be a long post which even I don’t want to read. Since I had time & space limitation, I mainly focussed on the features which are not currently there in Nexus One. The experience Nexus one offers far outweighs all the missing things I had mentioned above. Then again, there is not much point in writing about all the features which is already very well covered in the common technology blogs. Over all, I love my decision of going for a Nexus One.
I hope this post helps some of you who is confused about which phone to go for. I would definitely say, go for Nexus One.

My New Toy – Google Nexus One

2010-06-07T15:03:00.013+05:30

One thing I really hate about society is ‘others’ telling me what I should do. This applies for everything; I hate others forcing their ideas on me about what I should do with my life or ‘expecting’ me to do stuff in the way they think is the only option, or telling me to ‘follow the crowd’. This is precisely the reason why I hate Apple and its products and that’s why I chose to go with Google Nexus One over Apple iPhone.
I totally agree that iPhone is a trend-setter and it set the standards for the smart phone market. But that doesn’t give them the right to tell people what they should do with their phone. I used to follow iPhone and its evolution closely. Every time I look at one, I wish I had one, but I couldn’t cope up with the idea of enjoying a ‘walled garden’. More than that, I would prefer suicide to being tied up with one carrier for 2 years. I was ready to pay the premium to get an unlocked device, but that won’t free me from Apple telling me how I should use my phone. So I decided to wait for the right device to come by.
Then came Android mobile OS from Google and I was very happy to see something promising coming up. For one of my (masters) subjects last semester, I worked on an android based project. We used HTC Dream and Hero for our projects and needless to say, I was really amazed with HTC Hero. But I didn’t feel it was better than iPhone.

Manufactured by HTC and software & marketing by Google, Nexus one has its brand value, to start with. Even though I did know about Nexus One’s existence for quite some time, I never really focussed my attention towards it. One reason is that its Google’s first ‘physical’ device. They’ve only been to the software before and no matter how good they are at what they do, I believe in thinking twice before investing in technology.
It took me around 2-3 days to finish reading almost all the articles out there about nexus one. By the time I finished, I knew that this is the phone for me. Some of the features of Nexus One which did the trick are,

Business Model – Simple and elegant. Only one place to buy – Google store and one price around the world. I know people will disagree with me on this as Google themselves declared this is not a good model as customers like to see and feel the device before buying. But I love this model, I really do.

Not tied with any carrier - As I pointed out early, I hate going to a carrier’s shop (especially Singtel) and waiting in the long queue. Once you get to the sales person, they treat you like pathetic losers. Also you have to sign in for a 2 year contract and you are adding 2 miserable years to your life. I strongly believe that phones shouldn’t be tied to any carriers and it’s a strong violation of customer rights. Telecom industry in Singapore (and US?) has much to learn from their Indian counterparts.

Device is ‘Open’ - You can do whatever the hell you want with it, literally. You can manage the storage device in your own way. I do manual syncing of songs and my data and Nexus One actually allows that.

Integrated Apps - Since Nexus One comes straight from Google, all of its services like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Sky, Gtalk, Google Calendar etc are fully integrated and we can expect full and free lifelong support.

And some of the other ‘much-talked-about’ features (as compared to iPhone) are multi-tasking, bigger & higher resolution (800 x 480) AMOLED display (which is stunning), light-weight, faster processor (1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, 512MB RAM & flash), 5 megapixel camera, upcoming flash support etc
I got the phone around one week back and I have to admit, it’s changing the way I used to do certain things and I love the experience. It’s really powerful and extremely user friendly. Besides the contact syncing problem I faced (yeah, it’s all in the cloud), it took me zero time to get fully ‘Nexus-ed’.
Even though it is one awesome device, there are many things I would like to see in the future software upgrades. I will be posting a review blog soon about my comments and experience with Nexus One.
Now I believe iPhone has met its match. It happened around 6 months before and a lot of new android based devices are coming out, all of which are one step ahead of iPhone. In China, android devices already outnumber iPhones. All these remind me of the old Apple vs. Microsoft war in the PC market which Apple lost miserably. Let’s wait and see whether history repeats, which is something I am betting on.
More links on Google vs. Apple
http://gigaom.com/2010/02/12/google-vs-apple/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/the-dogs-of-war-apple-vs-google-vs-microsoft/

An evening at Marina Barrage

2010-05-31T13:38:00.002+05:30

I’ve always been longing to do a photo-shoot trip in Singapore from the day I got my SLR. I kind of done it once last year, but it was not an exclusive photo-shoot trip. After my exams, I shortlisted the places I would like to visit for a photo shoot. I planned it with my friend (who is interested in photography and is better at it than me). One of my top choices was (and still is) capturing sunrise from MacRitchie Reservoir. I decided to start my long weekend with this trip and planned it for Saturday morning. For that I had to get up early in the morning by around 4:30am. It had been a looooooooong time since I had wake up so early and I couldn’t get the right mood and messed up the whole thing.
That’s when I decided to do another one. Since I suffer from “I-want-to-do-it-now” syndrome, I decided to do it that day itself. The next choice in my photo-shoot list was ‘sunset/evening at Marina Barrage’. From there, one will get an excellent view of Singapore city skyline and the night view is simply awesome. I had been to Marina Barrage once last year.
This time I got the ‘pieces’ right (only after some effort) and it was one ‘hell-uva’ a photo-shoot trip. I got tired pretty fast due to the hot and humid climate, but only after clicking lots of great snaps. I wanted to do more, may be another time.

The moon was really lovely and BIG.

When we started, there was wind and the reflections were not perfect.

I tried some monochrome versions too.

After some trial and error, I settled at this settings and the atmosphere was getting windless.

This is one of the best photos I took and the reflections are near perfect since there was almost no wind at all.

I wanted to stay longer and try more combinations, but I was damn tired and wanted to return home and get some rest. I was not particularly fond of night photography. After this experience, I am in love with it. Singapore is an extremely photogenic place for city and night photography with lovely skylines. I want to do more and I hope I will be able to do justice to this hobby of mine.

Just can’t get enough of it!

2010-05-17T15:51:00.008+05:30

If I don’t (re)start it now, I may very well never do it again. Yeah, I am talking about my blogging. Its been around 5 months since my last blog. So much has happened and I never got enough time to sit down and write anything. Five terrific months have passed, and many exciting things happened. The more I wanted to write, the busier I became. I didn’t want to put so many technical things in my blog and scare off my readers. That’s when I decided, “ok that’s all, I will give myself a break from blogging till I get over with my hectic schedule” – which is the end of my current semester.
Almost one month has passed since my exams are over and my days are still hectic. The only difference is that I switched from a work/study mood to a party mood. Even though I thought about blogging at times, I got too lazy and never got to the point of writing one. To continue/restart something like blogging, I needed a lot of inspiration and motivation to overcome my laziness. After last weekend, I am feeling the urge to write, once again. Hope I haven’t lost the grip and I can continue writing from now own.
As the title says, it seems I just can’t get enough of it. The more I do it, the more I am falling in love with it. You might have guessed it - diving. I am in love with sea and the water and the corals and the creatures and anything and everything to do with diving. Every time I am in water, I feel like I belong here and when I see my air less than 100bars, I feel so sad. And the worst part is the surface interval; you can’t simply be in the water continuously. The maximum number of dives you can do a day is 5 (including the night dives, if you really start early).
After my open water (beginner) diving certification last year, I did diving in Phi Phi, Thailand and Manado, Indonesia. Those were the times I really missed blogging (about the trips). But I couldn’t help it as I landed back to loads and loads of work. Last week I did my advanced certification and that was one of the best trip I even had. I got more control of my buoyancy, equalisations problems are disappearing and the best part – made a complete new set of friends. To really enjoy a dive trip you need,
1. A good dive instructor – I did it with the same instructor as I did my open water – Monica, one of the best instructors out there in my opinion and an extremely skilled one. I wonder how she stays so still in water without a bit of fining or BCD adjustment. Duncan – our DM is also a really cool person.
2. A good place with lot of marine life – which exactly what Pulau Dayang (Malaysia) is. The corals are beautiful and as my friend Boon stated, “I lost my soul over there in the Reiner’s Rock (dive site)”
3. A good dive resort with tasty food and lot of drinks – which is exactly the resort provided.
4. And above all, lots of friends to enjoy it with. Most of us were alone when we started the trip but made friends real quick – Boon, Max, Neeraj, Haider etc and we all had a great time together.

oH! Man, I want more.

Yeah, that’s our resort, it has got a breathtaking view and the dive sites are very near. You can see lots of snorkelers in the beach. There are corals very near to the resort.

A breath-taking view from the jetty

That’s Neeraj with his “Diving totally rocks man”

Boon - There are very few things this guy has NOT done. His interests include archery, diving, motor bikes and a lot more. Oops, I missed one thing, this guy is a professional photographer.

That’s a large bat fish. I had to get under a coral to get this shot.

That’s Monica (on the left side) correcting Dave’s navigation. She is energetic and real fun to be with.

These are not some see plants, but are worms called the Christmas tree worms. They grow on corals in all colours.

That’s me, this photo is stolen from Boon’s collection. Thanks Boon for this.

I didn’t use a wet suit for this dive and wow, its too good, I am never going back to a wet suit.

Duncan found this big moray eel hiding under a coral.

Even though I’ve done more than 20 dives, this was the first time I get to see a ray. This one is a blue spotted sting ray.

Haider trying his tricks upside down and below is Neeraj. Neeraj and Haider are two real cool guys to hang out with.

Duncan – while doing our safety stops

We saw a lot more things than in these photos. I took my camera out only on the first day after which the battery died and I didn’t have a charger. We saw a barracuda hunting – it was so fast that all of it was finished even before I could switch on my camera to get a shot, a titan trigger fish circled around us at 30m depth and scared the s**t out of me, did a daring rescue – helped 2 fishes stuck in a fishing trap, did night dive, drift dive, deep dive, navigation and above all, it was a pure 100% fun weekend. Hah! How I wish I had more of it.

Oh! Singtel, what the hell?

2009-12-28T09:45:00.003+05:30

‘Sheer Incompetence’, ‘Utter Arrogance’ and ‘Complete disregard’ towards customer needs are the terms which I can think of right now to describe what Singtel is doing to me. As you might have probably guessed by now, this is yet another story of bad customer care and one more example which illustrates their arrogance and negligence towards the customers. I am thinking loud, “Is it just me or is it like this for everyone in Singapore?” I am not talking about some third world country where connectivity is a ‘not-so-heard’ term. I am talking about Singapore, one of the world’s most efficient countries.
It all started when I decided to relocate. I knew from my past experiences that transferring my internet connection will be one hell of a ride. So I decided to start a bit early. I called the Singtel customer care hotline (1688) three days before I was to move in.
Day 1 – 1 day. (Dec 16th, After waiting 5-10 minutes in the waiting queue which is there for all the calls)
Me: Hello, I am relocating house and I need you to relocate my internet and phone connection.
Reply: Sure sir, what is your address? And what is your postal code. We need the postal code, without that we cannot process a relocation request.
Me: I am sorry, I am not sure about the postal code as of now. I will give you a call after checking it out.
Day 2 – 3 days. (Dec 18th)
Me: Hello, I am relocating house and I need you to relocate my internet and phone connection. Here is my address and the postal code.
Reply: Thank you sir, we just need the address to check it.
Me: (Thinking: what the hell?)
Reply: Hi sir, as of now there is an existing connection in this address you gave us. We will have to do a rewiring for you and for that you need an appointment. As of now, you’ll have to wait atleast one month for a rewiring appointment.
Me: OMG! Please tell me whether there is any alternative.
Reply: First you have to terminate the connection and give us a call. I will put your name for an appointment now. After you terminate the connection let us know, we will activate the phone line and you have to do the self configuration.
Me: That’s ok, configuring the router is not a problem.
Reply: Also sir, you won’t be able to retain the present phone number. I will give you a call later with the probable numbers you can choose from.
Me: It’s ok, I don’t really care about the number, I only need the internet connection.
Later that day, she did give me a call and I choose a number. She said that she will log everything in the system so that after termination, I can call them again for activation.
Day 3 – 6 days. (Dec 21st, I communicated with the owner and he terminated the existing connection)
Me: Hello, I am relocating house and I need you to relocate my internet and phone connection. I hope all the details are already logged in the system. You can do the activation as soon as possible from there.
Reply: Hi, who am I talking to again? I am really sorry to tell you that nothing about you have been logged in the system. Could you please give me your info?
Me: Ok, here is my details…
Reply: What is your new address with postal code?
Me: (Thinking: Holy God! Is this really happening again?) Hey my dear fellow, I have already given all the details.
Reply: Is it so? Then do you have a telephone connection in your new place already?
Me: There is a socket there.
Reply: Do you know whether its active?
Me: How am I supposed to know that? You are the person to tell me right? I already talked to a customer care officer and the person I talked to, said that activation can be done from there.
Reply: Sorry sir, I don’t know what you are talking about, Click! (And the line went dead)
I dialed again.
Me: Hello, I am relocating house and I need you to relocate my internet and phone connection. Please someone tell me what is going on. I already have done everything and now someone is telling me nothing has been done. What is going on?
Reply: Hi sir, all your details are logged in the system. You have an appointment for rewiring one month from now.
Me: I don’t need rewiring, the existing connection is terminated. You can activate it from there, if possible today itself.
Reply: Sorry sir, we can activate it, but it will take 3 days. You can have the phone line up and running by Dec 24th 5 pm.
Me: If there is some problem, then I will be able to get after 26th right? (‘cos it is the holiday time)
Reply: I am afraid so sir.
Me: Ok, so I am expecting to get a dial tone in my phone by 24th 5pm and no one will be coming for my assistance right?
Reply: That’s right sir, you have to do it on your own. If there is any problem, you can call our technical help desk or take another appointment.
Me: Thank you very much.
Day 4 – 9 days: (24th noon, during lunch @ office, I got a call)
Caller: Hi sir, I have an appointment to rewire your apartment.
Me: Who? What? When?
Caller: I want to check when you will be available?
Me: Are you really calling from Singtel?
Caller: Yes, when do you want me to come?
Me: Ok, I’ll get out of office early today and you can come by 5pm.
I am waiting for the caller and I called the customer care to clarify.
Me: Hello, I have already given a relocation request and the deadline given to me was 5pm on 24th Dec. But there is still no dial tone in my phone.
Reply: Let me check sir. Hello sir, according to our system, your connection is already up and running. Have you tried configuring your router?
Me: There is not even a dial tone in my phone and how am I supposed to configure a router?
Reply: You can try that sir. But then again, this is the sales dept sir, and for configuration enquiries, you can call our technical help desk.
Me: ok thank you. (You guys sux)
After some time the rewiring guy came. He said that he is here is rewire my telephone line. He poked around with the telephone line and some boxes and he also made some calls to his office (at least that’s what he told me)
The guy: I am really sorry sir, they did the wrong wiring at the exchange. So we have to do the rewiring. It will be up tomorrow first thing in the morning
Me: I really need this before the holidays, and are you sure you’ll give me this tomorrow?
The guy: oh! Sorry sir, I forgot that tomorrow is a holiday. We will do it tomorrow first thing in the morning and give you a call in your mobile and landline.
‘Tomorrow-first-thing-in-the-morning’ is over, afternoon is over, evening is over and the next day is over and at noon, I got fed up. And I decided to call again.
Day 5 – 11 days: (26th morning, From this point onwards, I had to explain my whole story till now which takes around 20 minutes plus the waiting time which is around 5-10 mins)
Me: Hello, I am relocating house and I need you to relocate my internet and phone connection. The technician who came to my house told that he will fix the internal problem and didn’t call me back till now. I am still waiting and there is no dial tone in my phone.
Reply: I will put you for another appointment sir.
Me: Now way I am going for another appointment, get me someone who can help me right now.
Reply: I will transfer this call to the technical department sir.
Reply: (from technical department) Let me check this sir, (put on hold). Hello sir, I have checked with the telephone department and they say it will be working by today 5pm. You can start using you phone by then.
5pm is over, 6pm is over and I called again to the technical department.
Me: I am supposed to be using my phone by now, but I believe I can’t do that without a dial tone.
Reply: (After all the explanations and clarifications and holdings for around 30-40 mins) I am really sorry sir, right now, the sales is closed and all I can do is to escalate this issue to the sales department and tell them to contact you first thing on Monday morning.
Day 6 – 13 days: (28th morning, first thing in the morning, I am calling them)
Me: Are you planning to give me my phone connection any time this year?
Reply: Sir, this is the sales, as per our records, your connection is up and working fine from 24th evening, I will transfer this call to the technical department.
After 20 – 30 minutes of explaining my whole story
Reply: Let me put you on hold sir. (After 20 minutes on hold) I have updated this with the technical department sir.
Me: So am I not talking to the technical department?
Reply: You are talking to the technical department for the internet and TV, the telephone is another department sir.
Me: Ok, so what can you do about this now? May be if you can track down the technician who promised me the phone line ‘first-thing-tomorrow-morning’, you can know what happened actually.
Reply: The only thing I can do is to get you another appointment tomorrow between 11-1pm (for which I may have to take off tomorrow from work) and I have specifically told the operator not to leave your house with your giving you a working telephone line.
Me: Thank you very much. Hope this story will be ending once and for all tomorrow.
And the above sentence happened around 30 minutes before I write this. I am waiting for all this to end and to get a written statement from the technician or whoever it is, that my phone was not working for half a month after I raised my relocation request. Let me see whether they will reduce this month’s bill to half. If I delay the payment of my bill, they fine me. Then they should reduce my bill to half if there was no service for half the month because of their fault.
Is there anyone out there from Singtel - I don’t care – who it is, who can explain all these? This is only about my Singtel internet connection and my mobile phone carrier is also Singtel. Don’t get me started about it. So, now my readers may wonder why I am still sticking on with this connection. That is ‘cos I signed a two year contract with Singtel which ends only in 2011 and I have already given S$400 as advance. So I am stuck with this “fill-in-the-blank-as-you-wish” operator for one more year. Now I know, even in Singapore (which I thought is a flawless country) there can be flaws.
Once again, “Is it just me or is it like this for everyone in Singapore?”

EE5902 Multiprocessor Systems Qn. Paper

2009-12-01T16:40:00.004+05:30

Subject: EE5902 Multiprocessor Systems
Department: ECE Dept, NUS
Semester I, AY 2009-10 Question Paper

Here I go again. My second exam for this semester also didn’t have previous year question papers published. Remembering the questions this time was a bit tough as it contained 20 one word type questions. I have somehow managed to remember bits and pieces of up to 16 questions. The rest, I hope my friends will help me. If you have attended this exam and have any comments about this post or if you know any missing questions, please post a comment. Please don’t mail them to me. I don’t need them. I am doing this in the hope that I may help some students in the upcoming batches. If you find this helpful, please leave a comment so that I know I have helped someone. Thanks to my 2 friends who helped me in remembering these questions.
Q1. [These questions are not in the order in which they are asked. I am putting the questions I remember in the order I jot down them right after the exam]
1. State only the correct statements
a. [Don’t Remember]
b. Data parallelism is not scalable [Something similar]
c. [Don’t Remember]
d. Control Parallelism is not limited by pipeline length
The correct statements are __________
2. [Summation]j,k [Summation]j,k(aik + bik) Computations like these are best suited in __________
3. Write a typical RT for a CV 1011 in the space provided (page 278)
4. __________ level parallelism is prohibiting the increment of factor k for a k-issue superscalar architecture
5. Baseline network has only one path from input to output (T/F)
6. For a superscalar processor of degree m and n instructions, as n tends to infinity, the speed up factor becomes __________ (notes chap 6, page 55)
7. Pentium is RISC in the higher level and computes CISC operations in the inner core level (T/F) (Notes Chap 3, slide 30)
8. If hit ratio of level Mi of memory is pi, the expression for access frequency for Mi __________ (Notes Chap 3, slide 69)
9. If the number of processing elements are between 1024 and 16384, it is typically considered to be a __________ (page 32)
10. If the time complexity of a problem is of O(2^n . n^2), it is clearly of polynomial complexity (T/F) (page 34)
11. What is the time complexity of the expression () [Forgot the exact expression]
12. MAL is greater than or equal to maximum number of check parks in the RT and less than or equal to the average latency of any greedy cycle. Also the average latency of any greedy cycle will be one greater than the number of ones in the initial collision vector. So, MAL is greater than the number of ones in the ICV. Point out what is wrong with this statement in the space provided below.
13. Non-linear pipelines and the reservation tables have a many to many mapping (T/F)
14. Loop level parallelism is considered to be __________ grain with less than 2000 instructions (Page 61 and it was given 200 instructions, not 500)
15. Power is proportional to the square of the frequency in embedded processors. (T/F) [Not sure about this statement, but it was relation between power and frequency which is given in slide 40 in the first lecture]
16. [One problem with coming up with an expression with some T1, T2, T3 and T3 and E1, E2, E3 and E4 for something. Don’t remember, I didn’t get time to look at this as this was the last question in the set]

Q2. We have a system with cache and memory. The cache capacity is 8 blocks and each block is one word. We have a 4 x 10 array, X(i, j) which is stored in main memory from address 7A00 to 7A27 in a column major fashion. (7A00 contains X(0, 0), 7A01 contains X(1, 0) etc). MM is also word addressable. The following program is executed

TOT = 0
For j = 0 to 9, do
TOT = TOT + x(0, j)
End do
AVE = TOT / 10;
For i = 9 to 0, do
X(0, i) = X(0, i)/AVE; /* Normalizing all the elements in the first row */
End do

Run the LRU algorithm on the above code for both the following scenarios
(i). Direct Mapping
(ii). Associative Mapping
Draw the mapping diagram also.
Hint: The memory is in hex [and some more, which I don’t remember]

Q3. A computer architect wants to connect 8 processor nodes to 8 memory modules using an MIN. He/she decides to use a baseline network, but wanted to have more connections from input to output and decided to have 5 stages. The first 3 stages – stage 1 to stage 3 – is done as normal self-routing network. Then from stage 5 through stage 3 is also self-routing network. For e.g., if we partition the whole network into two parts around stage 3, we will get exact mirror image. For this network, answer the following questions,
a. Draw the above stated network
b. How many paths are there for a given input-output pair
c. Device a strategy to route a given input node to an output node
d. A processor connected to the first switch in the first stage, P(0) is connected with memory module in the last switch in the last stage – M(7). Now the processor P(3) wants to connect to M(3). Show how the connections are reconfigured for the above design (qn. Q3 - c)

Q4. (Same question as problem 6.13 in text) For the same 4 pipelined stage in Qn 6.13,
a. Specify the reservation table
b. Find the collision vector
c. Draw the state diagram and mark the transitions

Q5. Formulate the differential equations for the reliability model for memory with state diagrams and with full equations (Same question as the reliability model for memory in notes)

[---- Questions Paper Ends Here ----]

Some doubts I had during my preparation for this exam. There are more which I never wrote down and now I don’t remember them. I had all these doubts by the end of my preparation which was just before the exam, so I didn’t get time to clarify them.

Qn. 19 in self test. The answer given is False. But in the text page 55 says “Bernstien’s conditions simply imply that two processes can execute in parallel if they are flow independent, anti independent and output independent”. Does it directly contradict the answer or is it ‘cos it doesn’t say anti-independence?
Qn. 28 in self test. The answer given is CRCW, but in text page 37, 38, it is clear that the ‘uncommon’ type is ERCW.
Qn. 43 in self test. “All processors need not be executing an instruction concurrently in a MIMD machine”. The answer for this one says False as per the self test answers, but the qn no. 10 in the qn bank “In a MIMD computer, all processors must execute the same instruction at the same time simultaneously” which is given as False too, directly contradicts this.

Page 346 in text. The input to the switch from both p1 and p2 shows e1 as the increment factor. It should be e1 and e2 right?
Can we consider pipelines as a MISD stage or a systolic array. Cos they are multiple fn units acting on a single data stream with specific function. In linear pipelines, the stages cannot be programmed. But in non-linear, different stages can be programmed also right?
In the Pentium, why do we need 2 bits for the history in the BTB? We need only one bit right?
Qn. 29 in self test, given a CV, how can we uniquely say the number of pipeline stages in the RT? Even is no stage is left unutilized in any cycle, the m of the CV will be less than n-1 right?

Some points I wish to note here, (just like my previous post)
1. I am not sure about the answers of the multiple choice questions and that is why I have given pointers to the page where they are mentioned.
2. There is no guarantee for any of these questions to be exactly the same as seen in the question paper. I simply wrote down what I remember after the exams.
3. I am publishing this the next day of my exams and so I don’t know the results, yet.
4. Please don’t send me mails asking for answers, please post comments in the comments section so that someone else may answer.