Till Now ….

Long long time since I have written anything on this blog ….. A lot has happened since then . A semester is over , college over ( finally a BTech ) , a few more advance courses , summer magic , another job , new friends , tennis , swimming , lonavala , cochin and loads of events to cherish forever . Will write a post on what I have learned , liked and felt going through all of this .

What I miss though is college life . I am writing this post at a time when most of us would in train/flight/bus to college welcoming another semester .Miss all of my friends , the hostels , the MESS , CLC , Octa , Nescafe , Bru , Azzez ( now selvam ) , the job treats , McLawrens n all of that …..

Love you all ,

Jai Gurudev .

Back Home …

Back home after a pleasant semester . Got placed and all the usual good stuff . Pune is as usual energetic and lovely …. Relief is the good food ( finally ), internet speed  and loads of oppurtunities this city has to offer as compared to Trichy . Will be goin for a 10 day tour of Rajasthan and Delhi …. and loads of other stuff in hols …..

Ciao .

Jai Gurudev .

Knowledge

I came across this story on the internet .

In ancient Greece there once lived a wise philosopher, he was greatly admired by his peers and extremely smart for his time, indeed he was considered a genius. There was a young man who looked up to this philosopher with great admiration, he wanted to know everything he knew, and become great like he was.

The young man approached the philosopher one day seeking to become an understudy. The philosopher informed the young man that he would not teach him – he was not a teacher but a philosopher. The young man persisted, he asked the philosopher every morning for a lesson, anything would do. This went on for several months. Finally, one day the philosopher agreed and informed the young man that his first lesson would be taught at the beach the following morning, he was to meet him there at dawn sharp.

The young man didn’t sleep much that night, he was anticipating the great lesson he would learn about the ocean, or maybe the sand, or maybe some deep insight to the mating ritual of crabs; it didn’t matter, he was finally going to learn something. He showed up at the beach at dawn sharp as agreed, but the philosopher was no where to be seen. He scanned the beach up and down several times, he gazed as far as he could down the road to town hoping his teacher was simply late, nothing.

A little discouraged he sat down and gazed out into the ocean, and then he saw him, or his head rather, about seven paces out into the water, submerged all the way up to his chin. The young man was surprised but excited, he leaped up and ran out to his new teacher as fast as he could. When he got within arms length of the philosopher, the philosopher grabbed him by the arm and twisted him under the water, the young man struggled, but the philosopher was fast and agile, he had a firm grip. The young man was unprepared to be forced under water so quickly, he only had half a lung full of air. 10 seconds passed, then 20 then 30, but he could not free himself from the old man.

Panic started to set in, he realized that he was about to die, his vision started to tunnel, he desperately needed some air. Just before he was about to give up and take in a lung full of sea water the philosopher let him free. The young man, quite frightened, swam as fast as he could to shore. He yelled out to the philosopher and asked, “What was that for, are you crazy?” to which the old man replied “That was your lesson. When you want knowledge as much as you just wanted air, you’ll find it .

Jai Gurudev .

My Math Clock

Absolutely arbit post ….. I am doing an intern in Zeus Numerix in Pune again this summer and am working on some really interesting stuff . All throughout the day I am generally in front of the PC studying ebooks and writing in C/C++. A change would have been kinda nice …  I decided to make a clock except that all the numbers would be represented by their mathematical significance …..(Just to get some experience on woodwork ,etc. ….. 😛 ) I got the mechanism for the clock from a local watch maker . For the base I decided to use  wood from an old unwanted cupboard . A hacksaw , hammer were good enough to cut a piece approximately 18cm x 14cm x 1cm . To drill a hole so that the mechanism could be put in place I visited our electrician . To smoothen the surfaces I used a sand paper lying around my house .For the layout of the clock i.e. the numbers etc. I used Scribus along with .

Finally the layout or background looked like this ….. I did also add a denoting for the time variable …. 😉

I referred to Wikipedia for the significance of the numbers …..

—- I choose 1728 coz its 1 less than 1729 . The smallest number to represented as a sum of 2 cubes .

—- Coz 0! = 1 ….

—- 0010 in base 10 is 2 .

—- 3 is the first Fermat Prime . All numbers satisfying

—- thats the way 4 represented in Knuth’s Up Arrow Notation .

—- where is the golden ratio

—- 6 is the cardinality of the smallest non-abelian group .

  —- 7 is the 3 Mersenne Prime .

—- 8 is the 6th Fibonacci Number .

—- 9 is an exponential factorial .

—- 1010 in binary is 10 in decimal (base 10)

—- 11 is the second unique prime….

Finally, after the assembly it looked like this ……

a better pic sometime sooner …..

Why should the youth vote ??

The youth vote is sadly underestimated by party analysts.
Yes, it is true, the trend analysts who tell party spindoctors where to target their advertising dollars and public relations efforts traditionally over-look the youth market. Why? Because the sad reality is that election year after election year the percentage of eligible youth who actually register and vote is small when compared with other demographics. This doesn’t mean the youth market isn’t a force, just that it isn’t a main motivator in the drafting of campaign platforms and pre-election advertising. So, like any self-respecting rebellious young person the natural thing to do is go against the grain and do the unexpected. Keep them on their toes, shock them into the 21st century and get out and vote!

The biggest election issues often directly effect the youth of the nation.
The war in Iraq (young soldiers are the ones dying), education funding both public school and post-secondary, employment and job training programs, and reproductive rights issues are just a few of the current hot topics that directly effect the quality of your life RIGHT NOW. Think about the future and the world you will one day “inherit” from the power generation and you can add environmental concerns, fossil fuel consumption, farming and livestock funding (think the food supply is shrinking with every farm that can’t sustain itself) and the list just gets longer. Add any issues that are near and dear to your heart on a personal level and the list becomes a little overwhelming. Don’t vote and you effectively kiss away your ability to have any influence as to how these issues play out in your world, and dude, that’s just lame.

The only way democracy works is if citizens, young and old, are active participants.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this one is an oldy, but hey let’s face it, it’s also a goody. A government by the people, for the people just can’t work without the people. This is a simple fact. Like a car without an engine, or a computer without a hard drive, a democracy without voters is just a shell and has no power. While it is easy to say “one vote doesn’t make a difference” the reality is that every vote counts… have you heard of Florida? Also you have to remember that as an individual your vote may seem to be little more than a whisper but when your vote is combined with the votes of others who share your views it becomes a voice and the more like-voters there are the louder that voice grows. So get out there and make the youth vote be heard.

If you don’t vote you really have no right to complain about government decisions you don’t like (no matter how much they actually suck).
OK, if there is one thing that is really annoying to us actual voters it is the endless ramblings on the bad political policy of a current government spewing from the mouths of eligible voters who never bothered to cast a ballot. If you don’t vote it is like saying you don’t care how your country is run, so if you don’t care where do you get the idea that you can complain when something happens that you don’t like? If you don’t vote you really have no right complaining about anything the government does and if your like most young people you like complaining and have it down to a fine art. Want the right to complain when TPTB (the powers that be) make a truly heinous decision? Then you must exercise your right to vote.

Bottom line: you should vote because you can.
Voting is a tremendous gift. Believe it or not, young people just like you in other countries actually fight and even die for this right; a right that so many youth in democratic nations take for granted. You should vote because you can, if you don’t you may one day wake up in a country where you can’t. It can (and has) happened. Enough said!

braille browser

Long time since I wrote anything on my blog. Its been a hectic schedule here , although things have eased out after subscribing to an internet connection in the room. Elections are coming , so please vote. Its really very crucial that the youth have a say in the immediate future of our country.

Parithi n me were thinking of something for the ECell Ideas Challenge. Its a competition wherein you present a techy and sellable idea.

One of the ideas we submitted was a braille browser. Essentially a browser for the blind.

The Government is putting in a lot of effort in converting texts to braille. It is time consuming and costly too. We thought of designing a interface over which the blind could access the information on the internet.It provides them with endless opportunities in exploring the World Wide Web.

The display would be in braille.

Is it really practical ????

What we need is  a touch screen interface that would dynamically change the indentations on the surface.The next part is about decoding the information on any website. Consider Wikipedia. Removing the unnecessary images like its logo and background the necessary information can be easily decoded by using a suitable standard and further sending the appropriate signals to the microcontrollers on the tablet . It would just be like live feed or feeds that we get in say Google Reader.

The touch screen interface is the tough part. What we need is a material that changes its characteristics dynamically thus enabling us to feel the indentations on its surface. Also , its characteristics should be  modifiable by applying suitable electric or magnetic fields .

We have thought of using ferro-magnetic materials for the same. But the idea isnt tried or tested . Neither do we have any clue on how ferromagnetic materials would feel like .

If you have any material in sight which would do such a thing  or if you have any other way of approaching this problem leave a comment on this blog or write to me at  balkrishnanitt [at] gmail.com .

Bye,

Jai Gurudev.

Today

Change is only constant . 

Today was a day of changes. I mean drastic changes. I had the image files of ANSYS and FLUENT which would refuse to work in Vista. Later today , I messed up with a network connection in Fedora, which probably had no way out and had to reinstall everything. 

The solution to the first problem was to install our good old OS Windows XP . This took a lot of effort had to upgrade the BIOS ,change the BIOS   settings and then install Windows XP. It took a lot of time and overcoming some anxious moments. Alls well that ends well and XP worked out of the box.

The next part was a toughie and I decided to install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex over Fedora. I hope it works for me …. 😉 .

Lastly I am really glad to be back with wordpress, after a long long time.

hello , wordpress .  … 🙂

The interface wordpress offers is really amazing as compared to the one used by blogspot.

Read the previous article about the conversation between Guruji and SIMI activists. Its really good example of how to tackle the stressful situations and why meditation and daily kriya is really necessary . 

Jai Gurudev.

Assembler

No, this is not the program and has nothing to do with the language in any way. It is a very interesting game.Check it out.

Assembler is a new physics based wonder where you move some depository equipment to get your precious green crate in position. For what? No matter! Physics work perfect and the feel of grabbing and moving around things is just perfect. Don’t play too much or you’ll dream of dirty green crates flying around.

Assembler

Sem V

Finally after 4.5 months of NITT I was in a dire need for a refreshing change from the college atmosphere ….. Sometimes u did love to escape from the place but not from the people there … thats precisely the feeling i went through . We(Neil , Save , Himanshu , Zaveri , Mayur, Khanjan, Amit , Shaunak ,Kshitiz and me) came home by rail .When Save’s around rarely is there a dull moment …. A lot happened during the journey to Chennai …. probably a bit more on that l8r ….

This sem was one of the most happening sems for me ….  MGL started of with a bang and the entire team did a very good job ….  this was follwed by 2 YES+ courses which rocked to the core.Its amazing to see Gurudev at work during these courses …. Things which seem impossible are taken care of with elegance and ease …. and the most amazing thing u witness as a volunteer and a participant is the transformation of the mind that takes place during the course….. words cant describe it …… This was followed by Navratri celebrations in the Ashram . A post on that l8r … definitely the most amazing time of the year ….. Then the sem exams …. and so on ……

Back home and well since no one s around during this time probably wont be as entertaining as summer hols…. Anyways

Bye c u l8r .

Jai gurudev

Blackle !!

Vinay sent me a really interesting email which pointed to this site.

Blackle is the black version of Google. And since the amount to usage of Google is bound to increase it makes sense using blackle.Another fact is that it doesnt save much energy from LCD displays which are very popular today but does save a chunk from CRT displays

Facts:

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.