Views of a Patzer!

Blog moved.

2007-02-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

I have moved this blog to my own space - http://kannan.jumbledthoughts.com (RSS)

My Tamil Blogs new address - http://chathurangam.jumbledthoughts.com (RSS)

I won't be updating these blogs anymore here in Blogspot. Thanks.

HP Rw6828

2006-06-07T22:52:00.000-07:00

I have always wanted to own one of those cute O2 XDA Atoms. I was holding back, because of the Atom's notorious stability and the numerous bugs in the software bundle + motherboard. But, when I went to Malaysia recently, I decided to buy one anyhow, because the latest ROM update seemed to make Atom more stable and also I could not stand my wife reminding me daily to get more organized!

I was staying in Penang. I checked out Bukit Jambul complex, did not find a decent enough deal or store. So, I went to Prangin mall in George town. The fourth floor, in the interior wing, is full of computers / electronics stores. Boy, did I have a great time there! I saw the Rw6828 there for the first time, though I have read online a lot about it. It was just released in APAC one week back, not anywhere else!

Basically, HP rw6828 is Quanta's offering to O2 + HW/SW fixes + some cosmetic changes + more SW bundled + HP's great aftersales service and customer support. The shop owner also offered me a 1GB miniSD + 1 leather pouch + 1 screen protector free. I went for it immediately :)

I got this photo off Pocket PC addict. I will update this with my phone soon.

I also picked up a Jabra BT-800 in Changi airport, on my way back home. Had no problem pairing this with rw6828. Works like a charm. The DSP for noise cancelling really works! There seems to be a firmware upgrade for this. I need to do it this weekend.

Some links:

- Rw6828 features
- HP official page for RW6828

Why no threads?

2006-02-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

I have a Dual processor Xeon machine (HT enabled in both the processors) with 2GB of RAM. Windows XP effectively sees 4 execution pipelines. Yesterday I had to move some 10GB of data from this machine to my laptop. I decided to zip it up first and fired open Winzip 9.0. It was painfully slow! I checked out the Winzip process using Sysinternals ProcExplorer and was surprised to see Winzip doing things (compressing/reading/other operations) in ONE thread! As you can see from the perfmon output, one of my processor was sitting idle, doing nothing! Why isn't Winzip using any threads to speed up things?? I became curious and decided to check out WinRAR 3.40. It is not multithreaded either! Is there some reason why compression programs don't make use of the available CPU power to speed up things??

Meeting the customers!

2006-01-31T20:25:00.000-08:00

This reminded me of my conversation with one of my customers (internal) last week. I was trying to sell him my teams tool. I setup a meeting requesting him to give us what his generic requirements are (basically what he is looking for!), so that we could make a detailed presentation of our tool geared towards his req. He declined that meeting request asking how he could give me the requirements with out knowing what my tool can do. It took a long time to convince him to tell us what he was trying to do and why he approached our group in the first place!

Workplace redefined!

2006-01-29T23:52:00.000-08:00

I have rearranged my monitors, this time to make it easier for me to read lengthy contents :)

I got this idea from Adam Nathan' s Channel 9 interview. He was demonstrating his WinFX based Hearts game and was actually going through the code using this setup.

Though I find this setup good for reviewing/coding/reading long documents, it actually a pain with Windows. There is a noticeable time lag in repainting windows, by my ATi driver. I am actually planning to go back to my old setup!

Am back!

2006-01-19T02:21:00.000-08:00

Its been a long time! Too many things have happened since my last post. My to-blog list is threatening to become a monstrous file in my HDD, my married life has permanently caused a dent in my day-to-day routines, my responsiblities in my workplace increased (read that as "I am being tortured more!"), I have got a new neighbour, a new year has started (BTW, Happy new year to you all!), Visual Studio 2005 is officially out (Yeah!!), I learnt about some really cool technologies, I bought a 802.11g router....Whew! Onething that hasn't changed is my bank balance, deciding to stay at the nadir comfortably for ever! :(

Yesterday I came across this Yahoo offer. Yahoo is finally allowing dots in email addresses. Good thing is you dont have to create a new account, instead Yahoo allows you to assosicate another e-mail Id with your existing one. You can get an extra email address here.

Carry on....

2005-09-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of "Carry on" series of movies, esp I love watching Ken and Sid. I am collecting all the movies in this series. Yesterday, I got "Carry on Emmanuelle". This is by far the worst film I have seen, in this series. Centered around "affairs", this film lacks that traditional "Carry on" charm. Keep off this film, if you are new to this series. I suggest you watch "Carry on Up the Jungle" or "Carry on Cowboy" for some real carry-on fun!

Movies I have in this series:

Carry On Sergeant
Carry On Teacher
Carry On Spying
Carry On Cowboy
Carry On Cleo
Carry On Screaming!
Carry On Don't Lose your Head
Carry On Doctor
Carry On up the Khyber
Carry On Camping
Carry On Again Doctor
Carry On up the Jungle
Carry On Girls
Carry On Dick
Carry On Behind
Carry On Emmannuelle

J2EE newbie!!

2005-09-26T01:52:00.000-07:00

Lately, I am doing a lot of Java / J2EE stuff, since Sudha is in to those technologies. Though I am one of those persons who would prefer to sweat it out with C / Assemly rather than making use of all the making-life-easier goodies offered by Java and related frameworks, I have to admit that my respect for J2EE framework is growing as I learn more about it. It is actually a breeze churning out a quality web application using Struts -- I was able to do that in 45mins, from scratch to deployment! Thats a pretty impressive figure for me...I don't know if web applications of enterprise quality can be done using Microsoft technologies the same way Java technologies allow you to do, I am not an expert in it. But, if any of you have personal experience in these, I'd love to hear your views.

Yesterday, we decided to create our own custom tag library. Sudha wrote a prime number generator tag, a simple TLD and the corresponding taglib entries in web.xml. When deployed, it threw an exception "tag-class not found". What the heck? Then we noticed our DTD was specifying a wrong version. After a quick fix, we deployed it again. Now, it threw an exception that said "PrimeTags definition not found". It seemed that the server (weblogic) couldn't find PrimeTags.class, our Tag handler class. We had it under /WEB-INF/classes. What could be wrong? We wrapped that tag handler in a package and redeployed the same. Now we got another error - "Bad class file. Current version is 49.0, expected is 48.0", a quick search in Google told us that we are trying to mix java1.5 & java1.4 compiled binaries. Resetting the java_home / path variables to point to jdk1.4 solved the problem!!

Now the question is, why couldn't the server pick up our class file when not packaged??

Dumb Error Messages

2005-09-20T01:54:00.000-07:00

I use Intel VTune performance analyzer with VS.NET 2003. Today, when I opened my solution, I got these really dumb error msgboxes from VTune...

First this one... EmbeddedHtmlHelp.cpp??? Very helpful!

Next it told me there was something wrong with VT projects, as if I didnt know that!! (Sorry, if this doesnt make sense, this is an in-house joke! ;))

Next it showed how bad a product could become....

Gem of all! No info messages at all, but with an INFO icon...icing is that Yes/No button..what am I supposed to press now? Yes or no? I certainly would love to meet the person who wrote this code!

Got engaged!!

2005-06-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

[Kannan, Sudha]

My engagement took place last week. Her name is Sudha. She works for Tavant Technologies. I have uploaded some more photos here. I do look huge next to her, aint I?

Most money-minded person I have met lately!!

2005-05-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

Dumb Code - 2

2005-05-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

I noticed the following code last week in one of our tools. The user selects some data in the GUI, selects a list of rules that are to be applied on that range, presses "Run rules". The GUI should pass certain parameters to the module below. This is one of the APIs exposed to the GUI by that module.

Why get a string, representing the rule category from GUI, instead of just an integer??

---[ Code snippet ]----------------------------------------------------------------------

// Rule category obtained from GUI
#define RULECATEGORY_1 "Type 1 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_2 "Type 2 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_3 "Type 3 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_4 "Type 4 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_5 "Type 5 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_6 "Type 6 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_7 "Type 7 Rules"
#define RULECATEGORY_8 "Type 8 Rules"

// Constants indicating the rule category
#define CR_1 0
#define CR_2 1
#define CR_3 2
#define CR_4 3
#define CR_5 4
#define CR_6 5
#define CR_7 6
#define CR_8 7
#define CR_9 8

int InitiateRuleChecking (
ORD4 start_index,
ORD4 stop_index,
ORD2 num,
char *category,
ChkStruct &bool_struct,
ORD4 array_size
)
{

int tempCategory = -1;
if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_1) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_1;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_2) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_2;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_2) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_3;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_3) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_4;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_4) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_4;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_5) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_5;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_6) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_6;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_7) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_7;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_8) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_8;
}
else
{
// Category not defined
AssertErr("Category requested by user not found ");
return -1;
}

// Remaining code...

}

---[ End snippet ]----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sin-"bad" Adventures!

2005-04-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

This happened last month (March). March 25th was a holiday (Good Friday), so I bought a KSRTC ticket to Chennai, for Thursday night (March 24th), or at least that was what I thought I did! I actually had bought a ticket for Friday night (March 25) and I did not even notice that mistake until I went there to the bus stand!

Thursday evening, I left office by 7pm, went home, packed lotsa clothes (to wash in Chennai), stuffed my camera + other valuables along with my laptop in to a shoulder bag, started merrily to Majestic bus stand! As the next day was Good Friday, KSRTC expected lotsa passengers and had arranged for many special trips to Chennai. So, my 10.15pm bus actually came in only by 11.45pm!! Feeling relieved that I had not missed the bus, I boarded it and was shocked to see another person sitting in my seat, #14.

I told him, "Hey, I have this seat booked".

"Really?! I also have this. See...here is my ticket"

I compared all the fields, could not find any difference! I was really irritated by then. Who wouldn't be! I took both the tickets to the driver and told him the problem. He had one look at both the things and said I had got a ticket for the next day!! Only then I noticed it. I sheepishly apologized to that #14 middle-aged man, got off the bus as quickly as possible! I could hear the driver telling me it was possible to transfer the tickets. I didn't even turn to thank him. Since, it was already nearing 12am, the ticket controller said it was impossible to transfer the tickets. So, I was standing there, with a ticket for the next day's night, wondering whether to go back to my house in Airport road, or to buy a ticket in some bus and reach Chennai somehow! Unfortunately, I decided on the latter.

I went outside and got a ticket in National Travels for Rs.450! The bus seemed spacious, a 2+1 seating arrangement. I was happy that at least I would have some personal seat space. The bus left Majestic by 12.15am. By that time, I was feeling very sleepy, very uncharacteristic of me as I usually go to sleep only by 1.30am or 2am after all those Miike Takashis and other East-Asian "classics"! When they reached Madiwala, the bus stopped near a petrol bunk. I learnt from my next seat person that some one, sitting next to the driver, puked and they have stopped to clean it. I went down and saw the driver instructing a cleaner what to do. I told the driver that I was going for some water and would be back in a minute.

The petrol bunk had a shop; it had lotsa items on display. I was going through all those and finally, bought a water bottle and some snacks. When I came back to the main road, I could not find the bus! The bus had apparently left with out me!

“Did you see when the bus left?” I ran back and asked the person at the cash counter.

“Illa pa, Enakku theriyathu (No, I don’t know)”

I ran back to the road, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the bus’s wake at a distance. I could not see anything past 200 meters. I realized, only then, how silent and dark the night was. My entire luggage had gone with the bus. LAPTOP! Oh, God, my beautiful T41p was also there. With all its accessories, it costs around Rs. 1.4L. If I ever lose it or break it, I need to pay back that amount to my company. More than that, all my emails, personal and project related documents + all confidential documents were there, very much unprotected. Apart from these, my personal valuable things were there also.

For a second, it was a big void, I could not think of anything other than how to catch that bus. Looking around, I saw a call taxi waiting for someone. I ran to it, I quickly told him my problem, asked him if he would help me catch the bus. He was going home, after dropping his last customer. He agreed to come with me, of course, with the Taximeter on. Thus began the chase.

For 20 or so minutes, we did not see a single bus. The driver had already started talking about turning back if we could not find anything in 10 minutes. I was thinking more along the lines of catching the bus at any cost, but I could understand his concerns.

“What to do now? May be, I should get down, try to get in to a bus to Chennai, start searching for National travels there.” I was thinking.

“Look, a bus over there. Is this the one you were talking about?” Driver shouted.

I snapped off my trance-like state and looked up. YES, it was the same bus. Hoorah! We over took and signaled the bus driver to stop the bus. I jumped down, ran to the driver, and started shouting. I felt very mad, but inside I also felt kinda warm and relieved, a mixture of emotions. I did not even mind paying Rs.190 for the taxi, as I knew if I had not caught the bus I would have lost close to Rs. 1.7L. I got it in to the bus, patted my laptop bag, and slumped in to my seat.

I did not sleep that night !

Dumb Code - 1

2005-04-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was helping a friend debug an application debugger. In one of the report/UI modules, he had to log the date execution started + more process meta info. For date conversion, instead of using one of the inbuilt CRT functions, with the true spirit of a good (!?) programmer, he decided to implement it himself. When I saw the code, I couldn't help asking him "How many years have you been programming?"!! Check out this so called production-quality (??) code...

---- [ Code segment ] -------------------------------------------------------

#define MONTHS_SIZE 12

typedef struct __monthNoPair
{
char *strNoMonth;
char *strMonthName;
} monthNoPair;

static monthNoPair months[] = {
("1", "January"),
("2", "February"),
("3", "March"),
("4", "April"),
("5", "May"),
("6", "June"),
("7", "July"),
("8", "August"),
("9", "September"),
("10", "October"),
("11", "November"),
("12", "December")

};

char *getMonthFromData(int noMonth)
{
int i;

for (i=0; i < MONTHS_SIZE; i++)
{
if (atoi(months[i].strNoMonth) == noMonth)
return strdup(months[i].strMonthName);
}
return NULL;
}
---- [ /Code segment ] -------------------------------------------------------

Real hot Bangkok!!

2005-02-25T00:54:00.000-08:00

HOT! Bangkok is really hot, I mean it literally. At 4am in the morning, the temperature was like 2pm in Chennai! Thankfully, all cabs have air conditioners. Because of the recent Tsunami, Bangkok has lost some of its tourists, I heard. It doesn't look like that. You find foreigners everywhere.

Though, I had no plans for buying any electronics items, I ended up buying a MP3 player and couple of DVDs. Pantip Plaza, the mecca for electronics, will surely tempt anyone in to buying things they never wanted to buy. It is a five storey mall, with umpteen shops selling the same things, at different prices. If you are lucky & patient, you will find the cheapest price in one of these stores, but still the highest price quoted will be lower than the lowest price outside :) I picked up a 512MB MP3 player for 3100 Bahts. This is Rs.3500 or so. I was pretty satisfied with the deal. Unfortunately, it was shortlived, as I soon found the same model being sold for 2900 Baht in the next shop!!

Software/Movies. Whatever you can think of, you will get it here. Starting from the complete Office 2003 suite to 7 DVD pack of "Training for RHCE", you will find everything. All the latest movie DVDs, totally cloned, no loss of quality, are available. Of course, these are not legal copies, but what can you expect for a 100 baht? Adult DVDs are a separate business here. Be prepared to be stopped by a vendor displaying a bunch of adult DVD covers every 10 steps!

For those in Bangalore, Pantip plaza is 50x National Market!

How irritating can be a HTTP Proxy??

2005-02-01T05:45:00.000-08:00

It is pretty difficult to shake off certain habits, downloading from Internet is one such thing. I am sure many will agree with this. It doesn't matter what you download, be it movies, documents or whatever... many people download stuff just for the sake of having/owning it. The knowledge that you have so much data at your disposal can make you verrrry happy & feel "knowledgeable"! The amount of information (or simply, stuff!) out there is so vast that what you can get is only limited by your pipe's capacity! In my country, that is the bottleneck. The broadband boom is yet to happen, so you can't get an unlimited 3Mbps or 6Mbps line, unless you are related to Ambani or Dhariwal. Unfortunately, I am not! I decided to check out the HTTP tunneling solutions out there. There are only a few programs available for tunneling through HTTP Proxies, like Socks2HTTP, HTTPort, GNU http tunnel (Here is an implementation in Java), McGyver's HTTP Tunnel & HTTPTunnel NG. If you are wondering what this tunneling stuff is, click here.

I tried out 3 of these and the only reliable solution, for me, was HTTPTunnel NG. HTTPort is a free software, running a free gateway. So, naturally you won't get that much of a download speed with this service. Also, many of the common ports are blocked, like nearly all P2P ports!! I tested IRC on this, it kept on dropping the connection. It is understandable, being free, they won't be able to or not ready to spend money on a fat pipe. Bottom line: Not reliable, but good piece of free software. Socks2HTTP doesn't provide a free gateway, they demand that you register for a 15 day demo period. They charge $4.99. Even after registering, my connection was not stable. The software hangs every 2 hrs or so and even if it stays connected, the local SOCKS interface keeps disconnecting the programs. I guess it is because their gateway shares a low bandwidth among too many users. It is certainly not worth $4.99 (that too, for only 15 days!). They also have a monthly scheme, which costs $9.99. The solution that worked perfectly for me was HTTPTunnel NG. This costs only $4.99 for a month, unlike Socks2HTTP where you need to cough up $9.99. There is a free gateway, which has a restriction of 5KB (this is what it showed in my machine, though they claim 15KB in their webpage), while the registration allows you to go atleast 5-10 times this basic speed. Initially, this program was crashing in my test machine, but registering seemed to solve the problem. After I gave the registration key to the program, it seemed to have switched to a rock-stable mode...I am happy with the download rate too. I dont know if I'd be getting the same service for ever, but I am pretty satisfied with what I am getting now.

[Movie] MoviezzzZZ!

2005-01-04T20:38:00.000-08:00

I came back from my movie-less vacation last week only to be greeted by my "movies-to-watch" queue, overflowing with 23 films. What a way to start my work week!! I started off with Ocean's 12, which was a major disappointment. Ocean's 11 was so impressive, I was eagerly waiting for the sequel to come out, to see Mr.Ocean pull off one more of that "oh-not-possible-at-all" jobs, but the movie is a huge let down. The plot is so weak. No "wow! cool" ideas this time. No action scenes. Ahhhh!! The only consolation is Brad Pitt. He is his usual charming self. This movie is actually Ocean's 2 or something like that, certainly not Ocean's 12!!

When I started watching National Treasure, I expected it to be one of those boring, "shoot-at-everyone" kind of movie. I was happy that I was wrong. Storyline is simple: Treasure hunting. Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) is searching for the treasure-of-treasures hidden by FreeMasons. He follows a trail of clues, ends up stealing the original "Declaration of Independence", fights goonies & finally, finds the treasure (What else!?)...Cage was good, adding a witty comment here & there, but I liked Justin Bartha ("Riley") more!! This is a good movie, providing solid entertainment. Do see this (if you like these kinda movies, that is!).

The Grudge is certainly not the best horror flick out there. Infact, it leaves you wondering why all Japanese horrors nowadays resemble "The Ring" so much!! Mere plagiarism or am I missing something?! I don't know. The film's plot: Bad things happen in a house & it causes a "stain". Whoever enters the house is cursed and is eventually killed by the ghost. A caretaker (Sara Michelle Gellar) tries to find what actually happened. I was disappointed with the total lack of fright-factor seeing the films's ghosts. C'mon, ghosts are supposed to be frightening, right?! May be I am getting used to Japanese ghosts (woman with her hair covering the face)!! If you are new to horror movies (esp. Japanese) or if you like horror movies a lot, go ahead and watch this film. For others, I suggest, go see SAW or Old boy again.

Are you a virus writer? Don't despair!!

2004-12-12T23:54:00.000-08:00

Benny, one of my favorites (!?) from 29A has got a day job. He was hired by Zoner Antivirus team (Czhech). This has become such an issue, which I don't understand at all. The argument against hiring virii coders is that the employers will lose credibility as their software is developed by an ex-malicious code developer. WTH? We have a saying in my country, which, to paraphrase, says "Only a thief can *find* another thief"...True, isn't it? An ex-virii coder knows the tricks of the trade, he understands how his former-peers think, how they try to find vulnerabilities and how their polymorphic engines tick! This is crucial information, IMO.

If a security firm is not hiring a seasoned hacker, it is akin to a country's intelligence agency refusing information from an opponent's intelligence agent! Antivirus companies say that the skills needed for writing security software is completely different from that needed for writing malicious code. This may be true in some cases, but I cannot accept the statement as such. C'mon, if I know how to exploit a vulnerability, surely you can make use of that knowledge to fix that vulnerability, in the first place, right?? You write your software, give it to the fellow, whose job is to crack it somehow....He will be pretty effective at it than a 10 man testing team & a Quality assurance expert!! It all boils down to how you make use of the talent, IMHO. Anyhow, congrats & all the best, Benny!

P2P software

2004-12-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

If you are still using Kazaa, Morpheus or one of those old, obsolete software, I have news for you....wake up, things have changed!! eDonkey n/w was the coolest one, till sometime back, not anymore. It still is the best source for complete CDs, though. eMule, an open source client for edonkey network, is still one of the most downloaded programs off sourceforge. The main advantage of eDonkey network is, it provides quality CD dumps, while Kazaa & Gnutella (most of the time) provide you only the rips. Rips include only the bare minimum that is needed for running the software, while a CD image, obviously, allows you to make an exact copy of the original CD :) Mind that, many of the things available in these networks are illegal. But, because of its P2P nature, it is pretty difficult to shut down these networks, unlike Napster which was inherently non-p2p and so was easy to shut down. The original Gnutella network doesn't have good content, but gnutella2 seems to be good.

The latest *hot* thing is BitTorrent. Torrent network doesn't have that much data, when compared to some of the other networks. That doesn't mean a thing, as it is still pretty much a newbie to the p2p arena. At the current rate, Torrent is going to be a biiiig one soon. If you are in to category III films (CAT III is the certificate for those Chinese films that contain gore, high volume of sex blah blah blah. I think you get the point, click here if you don't!), the best Torrent source for these kinda movies is CrazyMazey. This has a forums + its own tracker. So, the download speeds are amazing and you get all those "Cannot-see-without-puking-atleast-once" films from here :) [WARNING: This is not for the squeamish. If you are new to these and are curious to know more about these, read this review of one of the Cat III classics, "The Untold story"]. Some other Torrent sources are LokiTorrent & Youceff

[Update (22/12/04) - Due to the legal actions being taken, many torrent trackers are shutting down. I have removed all the links to these sites, but you know how to get there, dont ya?! ;)]

Macro-mode shots in Canon Powershot A80

2004-12-03T03:06:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the macro-mode shots I took with my Canon Powershot A80. Since I am totally new new to these, I chose not to fiddle with the manual controls. All these pictures were taken in Portrait setting, with Macro-Mode on.

Click on the picture to see it in 1024 x 768.

Some more details:

Horizontal/Vertical Resoultion: 180/180 (dpi)
Bit Depth : 24
sRGB color representation
Shutter speed: 1/40sec
Lens Aperture: F/2.8
Focal: 8mm
Metering mode: Pattern (If I change this to Center weighted average, will I get more clear pics?)
Exposure compensation: 0 step.

[Movie] Memento

2004-11-25T01:45:00.000-08:00

I know this film is quite old now, but still, when I saw this again in DVD, I felt the same awe/confusion I felt when I watched it 2 years back!! This film can easily win a top-10 position in the most complex films ever made.

WARNING: If you haven't seen the film yet, go see it now and then read this. This post is just a big spoiler.

All the mystery/suspense movies you have seen so far, most probably, had the story unfolding in a linear fashion, right? Like, he found his wife dead, got some clues, solves one clue and finds a fellow/object. From there he goes to the next clue blah blah blah, right? This film shatters that normal (!?) way of story-telling. Actually, this film's beginning is its end. Confused? Don't be, because there is still more to come :-) Leonard Shelby is an Insurance agent. One fine day, his wife gets molested & killed by two men. He shoots one of them, a masked one, but the other one hits him with something hard. Leonard (Lenny) looses the ability to persist short-term memories because of this. Cops think that there was only one fellow; their version is something like, Lenny found a masked person molesting his wife and when that fellow hit Lenny on the head, he shot him. They don't believe Lenny's version of 2 men. Lenny remembers everything that happened right up to that incident, but nothing persists in his memory bank after that blow to his head. He knows his wife's molester is still out there somewhere. He wants revenge, he decides to go after some John G, who he believes killed his wife. But how do you find someone, let alone kill him, when you keep forgetting things that happened 10 minutes back?! He comes up with an ingenious solution - keeping notes & taking pictures. He has seen one of his clients, Sammy, suffering from a similar disorder. Lenny believes that by repeating things/facts, he can condition his mind to recognize them. He uses a Polaroid to take pictures of persons/places he wants to remember. He writes notes to himself on back of those photographs. He also keeps a detailed map, putting all these photographs in to a macro perspective, to know where everything fits. However, notes and pictures can be lost! So, he tatoos all important facts about his wife's killer in his body!! Since there is no memory of what he did 10 minutes back, he is vulnerable to exploitation by people who take advantage of his condition. Can he trust anyone? Can he find the killer on his own? These are the questions you get reading the story of a normal suspense thriller, but not here! This film totally produces a completely different set of questions.

As I said earlier, the film starts from the end. Firsy, you get to see Lenny kill John G! From there, the movie is in a rewind mode. There are actually two threads in this film: First thread takes you through this gradual rewinding, showing what happened before Lenny killed John G, in bursts of 10 minutes, while the next thread is in a chronologically correct manner. The second thread is shown in B & W. Slowly these two threads converge! This way of story telling, AFAIK, is (or atleast was, back in 2001!) very new. This could have easily left the viewers totally confused. So, every scene in thread one, has overlapping shots with the next 10 minutes burst. By some clever editing and a strong screenplay, director Nolan puts the viewers under a spell. Thinking about this, I remember one of my friends' comments: "Your humor is dry. It makes you laugh immediately, but later makes you wonder why you laughed!" You can say the same thing here. You are gripped by the way story unfolds, or rather folds, but when the credits roll, you are left with so many questions unanswered. You will see that many innocuous looking scenes that you previous overlooked have a hidden meaning! These unanswered questions, I am sure, forces you to watch the film again :-) I saw this twice and the second time, with the right perspective, I found many small things highlighted in the beginning that makes sense only when you have the total picture. The strong point of this film is, it doesn't say that something happened this way or that way, it leaves that to the viewer to conclude. So, everyone gets to form their own interpretations! This is a clever way of involving the audience. Unlike other suspense movies, this one doesn't straightaway give you the puzzle and its solution, instead it concentrates on giving you only the puzzle and many clues (or facts) from which the viewer can form any number of conclusions!! I loved this concept. Because of this, you think about this movie and its umpteen unanswered questions even after the movie ends! Isn't this what every director craves for?! Audience remembering the film for a long time to come!!

Did Lenny kill the right John G? Has he killed people before? Who took the missing pages from the police file? Is Lenny saying the truth when he is talking about Sammy? Does Sammy really exist? Are Sammy and Lenny the same persons? How did Lenny's wife actually die? Is she a diabetic? Did Lenny himself kill her? Did he strangulate her or just overdosed her with Insulin? Is searching for John G just a ruse for Lenny to be a psychopath? Woah! I need to see the film again!

Bottom line: This film has CLASSIC written all over it! Go see it. Do tell me what you think.

PS: Check out this page, which talks about the story telling technique used by Christopher Nolan. Excellent stuff.

Tidbits

2004-11-23T03:23:00.001-08:00

Here are some things that caught my attention lately. Since I don't think these things deserve separate posts, here we go.

1) First, this Science-based story by Jeyamohan. I didn't know Jeyamohan writes these kinda stories too!! The basic story is about how different our Siddha Medicinal system is from Alopathy and how the system that we practise now is not the true Siddha. I got to know (learnt!?) a lot of things. Interesting read. But, after having read the story, I feel as if I went through a dense medical journal ("Siddha for dummies" !?)

2) When I was looking for some interesting blogs to read (as if I didn't have enuf already!) I stumbled on Sriram Krishnan's blog, He is a student (Wow!) in Chennai, a nerd & more importantly, has excellent coding skills! Good to see such motivated talents. He is really in to search technologies. Though, directly not related to my current work, I got kinda motivated reading all his articles. No denying that his "How to write a search engine in 16 hours" post brought back sweet memories of how I had only an evening to make our OS, which we did as our final year project, understand Tamil :) Good old days. I doubt I enjoy doing anything so strenuous lately. Professional life, for sure, takes out that enthusiasm and, sometimes, that curiosity to learn more & more things, out of you. This is my personal opinion, of course. Let's hope Sriram doesn't feel like me after 5 yrs of being in the field. Microsoft/Google, if you are looking for a talent, with enuf enthusiasm/motivation & technical know-how, you've got the right candidate here!

PS: Rama/Prem, this fellow is good, do have a look at his postings.

3) Latest *big* thing (& here's a going-to-be-a-big-thing! ;)) in Gollywood: Dhanush got married to Aishwarya, super-star's daughter.

Don't you think Rajini looks more like one of those ADMK ministers?? I can't believe this is the same person who attacked Jeyalalitha so ferocioulsy back in 1996!!

4) Mr. Duraipandi is strongly arguing that the number of characters alloted to Tamil in Unicode is not enough. I found this article quite interesting; Mr.Duraipandi gives a no-nonsense introduction to what makes Unicode tick, especially the Tamil part of it. He complains that if only Indian government had given a proper set of characters to be included in the Unicode, we'd have been typing much easier in Tamil. As a Tamil blogger now for close to 2 months, I have to agree! If not for the excellent software, e-kalappai, I'd have given up by now. One small grumble though: Mr.Duraipandi could've avoided the usual "Tamil is not given proper recognition, we are always the losers, blah blah blah" whining!

5) Saw some 10 - 12 movies since my last [movie] post here. Nowadays, I see so much *junk* that I keep forgetting the good films I see, along with those junk. Some films that I wanted to mention were "7/G Rainbow colony", "Bose" & "Bride & Prejudice". For those who haven't heard about these films, the first two are Tamil films and the last one is an Hinglish film. "Bride & Prejudice" (B&P) is directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend it like Beckham fame). This film portrays a Punjabi family, literally preparing their daughters to be given in marriage to desis & only Desis! I didn't like the movie. Aishwarya was charming & beautiful as usual, the songs were great (except for the last duet song), some of the dialogues were good & sharp, so why I didn't like this?! I don't know; It simply is not the best effort by Ms.Gurinder. I have a detailed review of this ready somewhere in my HDD, might come around to post that sometime later (BTW, here are some Desi jokes). I think "7/G Rainbow colony" (7/G) is an excellent film by Selvaraghavan, director of "Thulluvatho Illamai" & "Kadhal kondaen". If you haven't seen this film yet, thinking that all Selvaragavan films are are always cheap and vulgar, you are missing a good movie; you have to see this film. The film was so captivating that I could not stop thinking about it for 2 days. If you think the songs are so good to hear, just see them in the movie in proper context, you will love them! I think Ravikrishna (hero) is a talented actor, but it is too early to say that. Sonia Agarwal has acted excellently. Yuvan shankar raja is fast becoming my favorite music director. I heard Karthik Raja, his brother, did the BGM for the movie, but who cares?! BGM is the backbone of this movie. It brings the emotions in every scene to life. Excellent work, again. Do not miss this movie. I read some reviews saying that only if you are/were in love, you'll like this movie, *shrug*, probably true! "Bose", I think, is one of those good movies that go unnoticed. It sucked for the first 15 or so minutes, but after that the screenplay really picked up pace. Srikanth copies Surya's mannerisms to show himself as a tough commando [sic!]. Sneha is charming & beautiful, as usu...Oops, I said the same for Aishwarya, right?! quick, think of something! Ok, "As usual, Sneha is beautiful & charming" ;-) I have a biiig review written for this too. I will post it one of these days.

Some movies I have a review written and stashed (lost?!) somewhere in my HDD: "Mr. 3000", "Beg!", "Herold & Kumar go to White castle", "The Forgotten", "Office space" & some more I don't remember now!!

ETAD

2004-11-16T01:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't totally recovered from my last ETAD (Embarassing, Totally Annihilating Defeat). If you remember, I bought CM 10 + White Belt + Black Belt to try to drown myself, but alas, it looks like I need more. So, today I went ahead and took a 3 months subscription to Chess Today. Chess Today(CT) is a daily newsletter, delievered to your mailbox as a PDF, with interviews/annotated games/puzzles et al. It is published by GM Baburin. I am hoping to see some good annotations for the ongoing Russian Superfinals games in CT as well as BlackBelt. Mig or Baburin? Lets see whose annotations I understand more :)

Russian Super Finals Rd 1

2004-11-15T20:21:00.000-08:00

I was on a long vacation last week, enjoying not only playing with my brother's daughter, but also preparing to watch Russian Super finals :) How can anyone miss this one (even if that means missing a 2 yrs cutie's smile)!?

Russian heavy weights, Kasparov, Kramnik & Karpov usually do not play in their national championship, which, by the way, is one of the strongest events! In Russia, literally, you can find an IM-strength player in every house. It is a known thing that a Russian Candidate master is as strong as a FIDE IM. With its abundant Chess talent and more importantly, the excellent ambience which nurtures this Chess talent, it should not come as a surprise that Russia is the dominant Chess playing country. Russian Chess Federation head, Zhukov, announced last year that the winners of the 57th Russian championship @ St.Petersburg and Tomsk , along with top 7 Russian GMs (Kasparov, Kramnik, Svidler, Morozevich, Bareev, Karpov & Grischuk) would play in a super-final, finding a single Russian champion!

Kramnik & Karpov pulled out. The former producing a Doctor's letter saying he needs 2-3 months rest before any serious play and why the latter pulled out is still a mystery. To make a guess, I'd say Karpov would be at the bottom of the points table in this strong tournament if he played and he knew that :) If you think Kramnik's producing a doctor certificate reminds you of how we used to produce a proof for taking sick leave, back in the school, you are not alone! ;)

So, 11 players were confirmed for the Russian super-finals taking place from November 14th to November 27th.

First round pairings (Nov 15th)

Garry Kasparov (2813) - Evgeny Bareev (2715)
Alexander Motylev (2596) - Alexander Grischuk (2704)
Vladimir Epishin (2599) - Alexander Morozevich (2758)
Alexey Dreev(2698) - Artyom Timofeev (2611)
Vitaly Tseshkovsky (2577) - Peter Svidler (2735)
Korotylev bye.

Kasparov - Bareev

Kasparov started off well by beating Bareev in a rare variation of Caro-Kann. Motylev unfortunately under performed and Grischuk easily converted the advantage in to a full point. Morozevich in his game against Epishin, looked dominating in the early stage, but Epishin neatly unwound himself and secured a draw. Probably Moro missed many strong continuations, but I am sure we can learn a lot from Epishin's play. Dreev & Timofeev went for a draw. In his game against Svidler, Tsheshkovsky blundered in the 29th move and, needless to say, Svidler converted the advantage in to a full point.

The final standing after Rd 1

(Thx Chessbase)
So, who is playing who in the second round?

Round 2 pairings (Nov 16th)

Artyom Timofeev (2611) - Vitaly Tseshkovsky (2577)
Alexander Morozevich (2758) - Alexey Dreev (2698)
Alexander Grischuk (2704) - Vladimir Epishin(2599)
Evgeny Bareev (2715) - Alexander Motylev (2596)
Alexey Korotylev (2596) - Garry Kasparov (2813)
Svidler bye.

Garry has to beat Korotylev today to keep his ELO above 2800 and to shake off his rust! Lets see if the old lion can still roar as it used to :)

Open that sesame!!

2004-11-04T21:58:00.000-08:00

When I first bought my computer (back in my first year of college), I installed and tried out all the things I could get. My 56Kbps modem, though trusty, couldn't get me all the things I wanted (like the complete OS/2 3.0, which I got with the first PCQuest CD back in 1995 :)). Luckily, I had a subscription for PCQuest, which delivered a CD full of goodies every month. One of the hot things at that time was voice recognition. IBM Via Voice & Dragon naturally speaking were two of the voice recognition software I tried out. Both, unfortunately, didn't have the technology developed/implemented to that extend where typing can safely be forgotten! It took me a long time to learn to dictate; Ya, it might sound funny, but try speaking like "This is a text UNDO test UNDO test PERIOD. SELECT TEST. BOLD.", your mom will think you have finally gone nuts!

It seems the hardware/software has finally evolved to make this experience enjoyable (I "enjoyed" my encounters too, but thats more fun, this time it is serious business). Check out this post by John Udell.

Click here to see the SWF video of Udell trying his hand (voice!?) at dictating, with the latest Dragon Naturally speaking 8.0.