Debasisa's

Dassault bags MMRCA deal defeating Eurofighter Typhoon

2012-01-31T09:38:00.001-05:00

Finally after years and years of delays,negotiations and rumors the Indian government sources today announced that French firm Dassault has won a multi-billion dollar contract to provide 126 fighter jets to the Indian military.

"You can take it as confirmed that Dassault has got the deal. Since there were only two companies and it has come out as the lowest bidder," a government source told AFP.

Six companies including American F-16 and F-18, Russian MiG 35, Swedish Saab Gripen alongwith Eurofighter and Dassault Rafale were in the race in the beginning.

But in April last year, the defence ministry shortlisted Dassault and EADS, evicting the American, Russian and Swedish bids.
The process was started with the issuing of a global tender in 2007 after which all the six contenders were subjected to extensive field evaluation trails by the Indian Air Force at several locations across the globe.

Page Rating on Wikipedia

2011-08-31T14:43:00.000-04:00

Social media craze has finally caught up with Wikipedia, the ubiquitous Like button is now showing up in many articles albeit in a different avatar as Page Ratings.This interesting new way of crowd ranking of articles aligns perfectly with Wikipedia's philosophy of creating an crowd sourced encyclopedia.

Page Rating
This nifty little widget at the bottom of the article lets you rate the page by giving 1 to 5 stars on the following properties:

Trustworthy : Do you feel that this page has sufficient citations and that the citations come from a trustworthy source?
Objective : Do you feel that this page shows a fair representation of all the perspectives on the subject?
Complete : Do you feel that the page covers the essential topic areas that it should?
Well-Written : Do you feel that this page is well-organized and well-written?

You Can also see the current rankings of the page by clicking on the "View page ratings" link which brings up the page ratings like shown below:

Whats the use?
As we have all come to know that too many of the articles on Wikipedia can not be trusted and are poorly written which was kind of defeating the whole purpose of its existence. But hopefully this page ranking system would help the good articles[which is most of the wiki pages] to float above the poor ones.

Its is crowd sourced so the next time you are on wikipedia looking at some article do not forget to check its rating and provide your own rating too.

Osama Bin Laden is DEAD!

2011-05-01T23:13:00.001-04:00

Yes its TRUE the most wanted terrorist in the whole world is finally dead.

Osama Bin Laden was killed in a manson outside Islamabad by an US Military asset based on actionable US intelligence.Giving final credibility to the claims of all of the India that Pakistan is harboring him since 9/11 and he was hiding in plain sight.

It finally brings some closure to the family of the 3000 people that were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the world trace center in New York.

Watch President Barak Obama make the important anoucement below.

JOIN THE LIVE CHAT

VISIT WHITEHOUSE.GOV

Trivia : The Google Way

2011-04-11T15:41:00.000-04:00

What's that?

Google announced today on its blog that its launching a daily trivia game called "A Google a day". According to Google "A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google." Unlike traditional trivia games where you cant cheat by looking up the answer on Google , here the questions are so tricky/complex that you are encouraged to use Google to find the answer.

Can't I just Google someone Else's Answer?

Nope, you can't. For this Google has created what it calls "Deja Google", "A wormhole inspired time machine that searches the Internet as it existed before the game began.". Also to make sure no one else can spoil the fun of you use your super sleuth googleing skills by posting the answer in a tweet / or blog post google suggests you use agoogleaday.com instead of google.com which excludes real-time updates and other things that are likely to include spoilers as people post the answers to the puzzle online.

Your answers can be posted on agoogleaday.com. The correct answers are displayed the next day under the Question on agoogleaday.com. Also it lets you share the question on all the social media sites , you can even follow agoogleaday on facebook or twitter to get notified when a new questions is posted.

Why Should I bother?

This is an attempt by google to encourage people to use google in innovative and meaningful ways and to demonstrate the power of search. It will not be an understatement to say that google search's computational powers have hardly been put to use, through this google expects user to realize its full power.

So go ahead jump in have fun.

2011 ICC World Cup Final Ind Vs Sl Live From Mumbai

2011-04-01T23:02:00.001-04:00

ICC Cricket World Cup Final Live

All the best to our boys in blue...GO India GO...

Channel 1
2

All D best.

ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 Live

2011-02-18T23:09:00.028-05:00

Channel 1
2

Watch Australian Open 2011 Live

2011-01-13T20:09:00.001-05:00

India's Chase of the 1st ODI IND Vs SA 2011

2011-01-12T11:31:00.002-05:00

My First Time Lapse

2010-12-29T11:42:00.002-05:00

After making us (DESI) New Englanders (lol!) wait quite some time for snow this winter the weather gods finally decided to make it up to us on the Christmas weekend and threw in a freaking blizzard.

To capture it all on camera I decided to do a time lapse video capturing the view of the blizzard from the window of my home. So I charged the batteries for my Canon A 590 IS , copied the CHDK stuff to the memory card along with the intervalometer I wrote and rigged everything on the handle of on the handle of my window door.
The resultant video below is the result of my first attempt at this so go easy on me. :)

Yeah , I know you can't really see a bunch of car head lights after the first few seconds and you can see the light inside my house reflecting off of the window glass too. But ,hey this was only my first time !

These are the tools I used for making it if you'd like to try it yourself some time.

I used my Canon A590 IS camera with CHDK, any high end camera[DSLRs] can be used or you can use most Canon point and shoot cameras with CHDK to run the Intervalometer script.
I used a intervalometer script I wrote myself but I found out there are free and better intervalometer scripts out there. Here is one which should work for most cases. Ultra Intervalometer by
```
Keoeeit.
```
I used PhotoLapse 3 to combine the stills to make the video but I guess you can also use windows movie maker but PhotoLapse 3 gives better quality and more options.
Also used Youtube's video editor to add some music and that's pretty much all you need.

Best of luck if decide give a it a try , hope your video turns out better than mine.

Problems While Syncing IPod Shuffle

2010-11-02T14:11:00.000-04:00

I got a brand new Ipod Shuffle for my older brother as a gift . I downloaded and installed ITunes 10[Yes its required!!] and added songs but when I tried to sync the songs to the shuffle it kept giving strange errors.Like :

"Cannot be synced. The Required disk cannot be found."
"Cannot be synced. The Required file cannot be found."
etc..etc..

I really felt bad for my brother , he was so exited to try it out. After doing some Googling around this is what people had suggested to do to solve the issue.

Remove any other USB devices connected to your PC and try syncing again.
Going to control panel and refreshing the hardware.[control panel>System>Hardware Tab> Device Manager Button>Highlight your computer name>then click Scan for hardware changes button on the toolbar at the top.]

We tried all this but nothing seemed to work. Then out of curiosity I connected the IPod to a different USB port than Wala!, like a charm it synced all the songs. :)

If you have same or similar problem do try this.

Common Threading Error [SimpleDateFormat/DecimalFormat]

2010-11-01T14:48:00.002-04:00

I have come across a common threading mistake related to Threading in JAVA[I did the same mistake too and spent quite a few sleepless nights thinking what is causing this weird behavior ]. This is related to the The java.text.*Format classes, in java these classes for the most part are NOT thread safe. This is stated in the java doc. Under high volume when the shared/static class is run in two different threads at the same time in the same JVM the data from one thread will be transferred to another thread. These issues most likely will not be reproducible due to timing and are extremely hard to debug .

The Issue
While creating formatters to be used in the java application many people declare the formatters as static elements. e.g.:

private static final SimpleDateFormat LOG_DATE_TIME_FORMAT = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");

private static final DecimalFormat LOG_AMOUNT_FORMAT = new DecimalFormat("###########0.00");

Solution/Fix

The same code that is thread safe can be written like so:

private static final String LOG_AMOUNT_FORMAT = "###########0.00";

then in your method create a new instance locally.

SimpleDateFormat dateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat(LOG_AMOUNT_FORMAT);
String formattedDate = dateFormatter.format(myDate);

Hope this helps people avoid the horrible nightmares I had with this issue.

Live ICC Word T20 2010 FINAL AUS Vs ENG

2010-05-01T10:58:00.051-04:00

IND Vs SA 3rd ODI Live

2010-02-27T09:34:00.006-05:00

India vs South Africa 3rd ODI Live

Click on the play button to start the stream.

IND Vs SA 2nd ODI Live From Gwalier

2010-02-24T07:48:00.002-05:00

India Vs South Africa 2^nd ODI Live from Gwalier

Click the play button to start the stream.

India Vs South Africa 1st One Day Live

2010-02-21T08:49:00.005-05:00

India Vs South Africa 1st One Day Live from Jaipur

Click the Play button to start the stream.

IND Vs SA 2nd Test Live From Kolkata

2010-02-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

India Vs South Africa 2nd Test

Read Chandamama [Janha Mamu] Online

2010-01-30T09:24:00.013-05:00

I am sure like me most Indians have read Chandamama [Janha Mamu] at some point of time in our childhood. I used to wait eagerly to get the monthly story magazine in our post, I remember I used to scan it right to the last page as soon as we got it in the mail. Specially I used to like the "Bikram Betal" stories a regular feature of Chandamama. While going through the pointless forwarded e-mails yesterday I saw an e-mail from my friend Pintu with a link to the Chandamama archive. Once there I was back in my childhood days. They have digitized all the issues in all the languages [including odia] from 1955 to 2000 issues. Its a wonderful way to preserve such a rich story telling heritage and making it available to the web savvy next generation.

The site itself is quite cool, you can find issues based on language, year and month of publication, though the quality of the pages of the older issues isn't that great but still every thing is in pretty readable resolution.They even have all the vintage ads published in the magazine , completely search-able the same way as the issues.It also has cool online games for children. Check it out it might refresh some of your childhood memories.

President Obama's First State of The Union Address 2010 Live

2010-01-27T19:36:00.003-05:00

Happy Republic Day

2010-01-25T20:37:00.003-05:00

Today is the 61^st Republic Day of the Republic of India. That didn't come out right, did it? anyways I remember this day when I was in school. Lots of parade practice everyday after school leading to this day. I was in N.C.C. in my school. So they will select the best cadets to represent the school at the city level parade held at the stadium in my city. So on the Republic day parade we used to go to our school with our extra clean uniforms, shining shoes for the flag hoisting at school. After that we used to mount the NCC truck and move to the stadium take the designated place for our school. Then we had to wait for the chef guest to arrive but it was some how all worth it because we got extra refreshment then usual and we got to march in front of a huge cheering crowd was such a big thing and it really felt very patriotic.

I would rush from the stadium to my home after the parade to catch the live telecast of the parade from Delhi on doordarshan, I used love watching all the colorful tabloes and all the military gear: fighter jets, tanks, ballistic missiles was really awesome.

That also remind me how I wanted to be in the armed forces and serve my country . But its all a fond memory now.But make no mistake I am still as patriotic as I was then and I am still as exited to see all the military gear. May be more so now that i have been away from my beloved India for more than a year now.

below is a live stream of the parade from New Delhi courtesy nic India.

You do not have Real Player Installed- Please download and install to view Webcast

Enough said. Jai Hind!!.

Wish You a Happy New Year 2010 !!

2009-12-31T11:14:00.005-05:00

I wish all my readers a Happy, healthy and safe New Year 2010.

I guess some apologies are in order from my side so I'll go right ahead and bluntly accept it.

- I have been very lazy the last couple of months, I have hardly posed any real content . I hope to be more productive in the new year and post more interesting stuff more frequently. And as generous as my readers are I sincerely hope my apologies will be accepted and you will keep following Debasisa's.

Now that we have that out of the way here is what we can look forward to in the days to come :

I promised my self to start some of the open source projects I had always wanted to do . I will be sharing my experiences, progress, code[obviously as its open source , silly me!!] and of course the final products.
I have seen from the statistics that as me most of you want to watch live, free, adfree cricket on Debasisa's. So soon there will be a permanent home page exclusively for cricket streams on Debasisa's.
Apart from my personal experiences I'll also be posting interesting and useful technical bytes that i come across at work or find online. That will give an outlet for the geek in me.

With all your support Debasisa's has completed one year now. Here are some of the interesting statics that might amuse you a bit, they surprised me !!!

We had 862 unique visitors and 2,371 page views.
We had visitors from all the populated continents from the world.
The most visited page after the Home page was the page with the cricket stream.

Not significant or great by any means but I am very proud of this non the less.

I sincerely thanks all of you for the kind patronage and support you have shown for Debasisa's and with all of you a wonderful year 2010. As a small gesture of thanking you I wanted to give away 3 Google Voice and 10 Google Wave invites. Please leave you name and gmail address in the comments and mention which invites you wish I'll send the invites to you asap. Please note that Google Voice is only available in the US.

You can watch Live video from Time Square NY as the count-down happens for the ball drop for 2010 below from 5:30 PM to 12:20 AM EST December 31^st 2009.

Free Live Cricket Stream

2009-12-23T19:14:00.010-05:00

India Vs Srilanka 4th ODI Live from Eden Gardens Kolkata

One
Two
Three

Srilanka's Tour of India 2009 - 3rd One Day at Cuttack Live

2009-10-24T20:29:00.078-04:00

India Vs Srilanka 3rd One Day

Free Streaming Live ICC champions Trophy 2009

2009-09-26T09:29:00.024-04:00

Free Video Streaming of ICC Champions Trophy 2009

live from South Africa.

Watch Free Live Video Streaming Of the Final : Australia V New Zealand

Too Much Excitement for One Week-End

2009-07-13T07:57:00.006-04:00

After a 7 month stint at 47[D] Crystal Brook Way I moved out to a new apartment in Marlborough; 12 Royal Crest Dr.
I had to move out as the owner at Crystal Brook Way was expecting his parents from India for the next couple of months. Hence on 25th April 2009 I packed my bags after returning from office on that Friday and called Rajat to come pick me up as he was already living in Royal Crest. On reaching my new home I just dumped everything in my room and had some food and went to bed a little early at about 10PM as I was too tiered after all the packing and moving. My other roomie had some plans for the week-end so he left with his friend.

Wake Up call!!
The morning I woke up to a loud knocking sound on our door.At first I was very angry/irritated as to who the f***k is this guy knocking so loud so early on a Saturday morning.As I was walking towards the door I was slowly getting my senses back and realized there was some kind of alarm that was going on. I was surprised to see a Big Fat Fireman when peeped through the doors peep hole. He said " Sir, You have get out of the apartment right now, there has been a fire in the building". With out fully realizing what he was saying I instinctively grabbed my cell phone and keys and rushed out. On my way out I could see black smoke coming out of the basement but no flames though.

Thank God for the Smoke Alarm
Upon reaching to the front of my building I saw two fire trucks , 3/4 police cars and all the residents of my apt standing on the road[The pics posted above are real life pics, taken with my cell phone camera]. I went to a person and asked How did the fire start? he said " I don't know there was some smoke in the basement which triggered the smoke alarm and notified the fire dept." I used get annoyed with the smoke alarms complaining [read going off] for every little speck of smoke coming out of the kitchen like when I made a "chapati" bit too crispy in the morning while making lunch or giving a "KADAK tadka" to the Daal etc. OK, I agree is was more than a speck of smoke but I still thought it to be a nuisance rather than a life saver as it turned out to be for the residents of 12 Royal Crest Dr on that fateful day. All the desis staying in my building were all praise for the smoke alarm, me included.

The Culprit.
After 2 cold hours outside the fire officers allowed us into the building after they cleared up all the smoke and put out the fire source. When I re-entered i went directly to the basement to see what had caused the fire. It was the dryer in the basement. Seems like some one was trying to save one buck on dry cleaning and had put in woolens inside the dryer in spite of the printed caution[in bold RED fonts] not to do so.Due to the hot air the woolen cloths melted and jammed the dryer and that caused the machine to spark /fume and hence the smoke and fire. And from the half burnt cloths lying there ; it was anybody's guess that fool was a DESI.

Lesson learned : "Don't dry your woolens against the caution in the basement dryer unless you want to burn the house down."

Watch Rath Jatra Live online- The Festival of Chariots of Lord Jagannatha

2009-06-23T11:37:00.008-04:00

Rath Jatra - The Festival of Chariots
of Lord Jagannatha Celebrating on
24th June 2009 at Puri, Orissa From 8:30 AM IST Onwords.

May lord Jagannath Bless you.

Live Web Cast is brought to you courtesy National Informatics center.