11 Dec 08 A month has gone by!
I never expected a month to go by so soon! I updated this blog by November 11th. So I decided to do justice to my old blog. When I logged in, I was surprised to see Wordpress 2.7 available! Yahoo! I immediately did an auto upgrade, thanks to automatic upgrade plugin. The interface looks sleek and cool and I guess the guys have worked so hard on this.
Everything is totally different with respect to UI. You have quickpress available at your dashboard, to make a quickie. I’m still searching for the options. Dunno where it went. Well, have to get used to this version. Incidentally, this is my 120th post. 
Tags: auto upgrade, blog, new wordpress, updated, wordpress
31 Oct 08 Enna Koduma sir ithu??
Yesterday, I updated my new blog and asked joel to see it. Joel did more than seeing it and commented too.. I was happy and everything went fine, until today. I am unable to see my own blog! Page Load error is what I get, but others are able to see my blog!
Dunno what to say… At a loss for words!… Enna Kodumai sir ithu?!
Tags: blog, harihb.com
24 Oct 08 Moving to harihb.com, thanks to godaddy promo code
Sathish (jujubee) mailed me that godaddy was offering .com domains for a price that info domains are bought. Yes, I bought harihb.com for $1.99 (+20% ICANN fee, totalling to $2.19). So, when the domain becomes active, its bye bye to harihb.info! You too can buy it by applying promo code 199TEST. Hurry though. The offer may get over soon
Looking forward to meet ye all there.
Tags: godaddy, harihb.com, harihb.info
16 Oct 08 A Bizzare spectacle - Debt Clock runs out of digits!
It is very well known that US debt to the World bank has crossed $10 trillion, thanks to the brilliant administration of George Walker Bush and his congress. The primary reason being the money spent by taxpayers to the troops in Iraq. Apart from that, the stock market crash has costed heavily too. But the total debt that the US govt has will be displayed in a Debt clock here
As you can see in the image, there are no digits to display the debt as $10,000,000,000,000. However, the clock’s inventor Seymour durst plans on replacing the clock with a lengthier version.
Tags: Debt clock, New york, runs out of digits, Wall street
05 Oct 08 My 100th Post - A Change in theme
Hurray! 100th post in this blog, accompanied by a change in the theme. ts been a long time since I changed my theme from iPhone. This theme is named ‘Olive Twist’. I happen to like it as it displayed the text in bright black bold letters and I felt that the readers of my blog (a few) would feel the theme to be easy on the eyes. Again I’ve started looking for themes that would suit my blog better. Lets see if I get one.
I have to thank ej.am, to have hosted my blog for over 4 months, providing excellent service all the way.
Tags: 100th post, host, theme change
04 Oct 08 A Memorable day at IIT Madras
I consider myself very lucky as I was able to visit IIT Madras today. IITM conducted ‘Open House’, an activity/exhibition of sorts, where students from College or high school can visit and learn something useful. Started off to IIT by college bus by 9.30 AM and reached the place by 10 AM. Initially, we were confused as we didn’t know where to go to. Then it was decided that student may visit a particular department of his/her choice. A battery operated van took us (CSE students) to CSE block.
Computer Centre:
My first reaction upon visiting the Computer centre was astonishment. I was bowled out when I saw how the surveillance systems in IIT were and I was even more surprised to see a 128 Cluster Super computer in front of me which was used for academic and research purposes. The university is equipped with 45 Mbps Internet connection with Wi-fi setup all over the place. 45 Mbps?!.. That amounts to 4.5 MB/s download speed!
CSE Department - RISE Lab ( I forgot the expansion of RISE ):
Next place we paid visit was the RISE lab in second floor of the CSE department. All kinds of chipset and machines were neatly scattered (an oxymoron, perhaps?) here and there. A guy came and explained his project on Artificial Intelligence, which was about making an agent learn and transfer the knowledge base contents into another robot of a different type, using as minimum sensors and actuators possible. I was very nosey there and asked a lot of questions which irked many standing nearby (the hell I care :D)
CSE Department - Some Lab
Next up, we went in search of the Microsoft lab, but instead landed upon a lab where quiz and a game ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ was conducted. Quiz involved concepts from Principles of Compiler and Artificial Intelligence. Myself and my team mate Ram kumar managed to get 19/35 correct and since we scored the highest among the participants, we were rewarded with a ‘Anju Ruba’ Munch choclate. We also tried out the game ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ whose working is as follows:
Given search query $amitabh bachchan$ actor. What I should do is, I should use the search box (of a search engine) and should type something related to the words with $ but I should not use the enclosed words. For eg., if I have to search for Amitabh Bachchan, I can type BIGB as search query and not Amitabh bachchan itself. Also, the query word can be used only once in a maximum of 10 tries. I scored a total of 22.5 in 10 attempts and they calculated the relative score as 4.5. Incidentally, this was also the highest (previously 4.3) and we were rewarded with yet another ‘Anju ruba’ Munch choclate.
CSE Department - Visual programming Lab
I was impressed with the projects displayed in this lab. Face tracking, Graph generation by studying the soil (Red Soil, Alluvial soil etc) and the like. The lady in th e lab gave me a pamphlet which later got transformed into a paper rocket.
CSE Department - Microsoft Lab
Most boring lab. Nothing interesting. Period.
CSE Department - Wireless Lab
I should say that this lab contained project equally impressive as in the RISE lab. Sensors used for tracking the car’s movement, measurement of lighting in the room were some of the many.
CSE Department - Distributed Objects lab
Boring. Period.
Before leaving the block to have lunch, rain started to pour heavily. But I didn’t care less and made my way to the canteen. Had ‘Oru karandi Thakkali saatham’ for Rs.6 and chappathi for Rs.9. Later, I went outside and drank ‘Darjeeling Divine’ tea for Rs.20. The tea was worth it, I should say. Then we caught the Air conditioned bus that was going towards the Velachery gate and made our way out of the humongous 400 or more acre university campus.
I have to say that this post, my 97th in this blog is by far the longest with the Word count being 650.
End.
Tags: CSE Department, Fun, IITM, Labs
01 Oct 08 TechVista - Microsoft Research Symposium - Part 1
October 1, 2008
A very special day, and why not. I registered for the Microsoft Research symposium - “Techvista”, a few days back and I got the email confirming my registration on September 29th. I was excited and looked forward to attend the event. Next day, it was another pleasant surprise for me. I got an email ‘Important Information’ from Techvista guys, saying about few points to be noted. But the points that caught my eye were
1. Chartered buses will start from Tambaram and will drop you off at the same point in the evening - Oh yea!
2. Lunch session at 1 pm - OH YEAH!!
Last but not the least
3. 100 copies of Office 2007 to the winners of the lucky draw event - THATS GREAT!
Now then, I have 3 reasons that favor my decision to go to Tech vista. So, I started from my home, caught the bus waiting at Vasantha Bavan by 7 am. Reached Nandambakkam Trade centre by say 7.45, had tea and biscuits and went in at 9 am. I had the privilege of meeting Dr. John Hopcroft (rings a bell? - He is the author of our Theory of Computation book). Things started well, with Prof. Anandan of IIT Madras talking about the Digital India Heritage project. We were treated to a FANTASTIC visual demo of their project and I was introduced to a new technology ‘Photosynth’ of Microsoft. MAN! It was off the hook!
Next up, John hopcroft started his talk on optimizing the search engine. He started off well, but went too technical in the middle. I couldn’t understand a single bit of what his diagrams - mostly consisted of Graphs, edges, vertices - meant. Next came a professor, PhD laurete from Microsoft research team, who talked about all the aspects of playing with the camera. How much did I understand? - 0. Next up, a lady by the name Shafi Goldswayer, obsessed with Comic sans font came and gave a shoddy presentation. It was by far the worst presentation I’ve ever seen.
Lunch at 1 pm. Sine the morning breakfast at 10 pm turned out to be a scene from the Koyambedu market, I made it to the lunch room tad 10 minutes early and waited for the plates to arrive. But, the lunch session went pretty decently and the food was good, infact great!
Post lunch session - in Part 2
Tags: microsoft, research, techvista, trade center
03 Sep 08 Chrome - Google’s latest toy
Chrome - A web browser developed by google. Very simple UI, no bull and bloat. Still in beta phase, I expect a better final version of this browser. Lets start with the UI. The user interface is so-oo simple! Nothing fancy! Whatever that is required for a good browsing experience is in place. Next, the speed. The browser loads in a flash, unlike firefox. Firefox takes 4-6 seconds initially to load. Chrome, on the other hand starts in a flash!
Though it lacks features IE8 or Firefox has, I think this browser is definitely going to be good once all the enhancements are made. I still have to explore the features of this browser. Until now, I can say that my browsing experience using chrome was good.
Tags: Browser, chrome, firefox, google
28 Aug 08 Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 - Software Review
When I saw this email, I was thinking, when is Microsoft going to learn that Firefox is 10,000 times better than IE. But when I saw the video, I was getting interested in the software. Though they have come up with 5-6 innovations that are not present in your opera or firefox browser, they are thinking that Search suggestions feature is something new. Too bad that they haven’t used firefox before.
However, let me come to the point. Lets look at the innovations.
1. Accelerators - Nope, its not what you think. This is not browser accelerator. This is a feature where in you can make use of pre-defined services that lets you save 90% of your time. Let me give you the example which was given by microsoft. You want to go to a hotel, you don’t know its complete name. But you do know that it ends with ‘DOOR’. So you type in ‘Door’ in the address bar and you get some results. Say for eg. Triple Door restaurant, 3rd Lane, Seattle.
Now then, you aren’t satisfied yet. You need to know the location. So you copy paste the address and put it in googlemaps or wikimapia etc., and locate the place. But in IE8 Beta 2, when you place your mouse pointer over the address you selected, you can see a small icon. When you place your pointer on it, you can see ‘Find it in local maps’. Select it and viola, without loading it in a new page, you are displayed with the exact location in a small box. Thats something cool!
Other features include ‘Web slices’, ‘Browse “inPrivate” feature’. If you want to know more, do take a look at this 100 MB video. Total running time is 20 min and I really liked every second of it.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/launch-videos.aspx
Tags: Browser, firefox, IE8, microsoft
27 Aug 08 A Simple Question in C which took me by surprise
This was a simple question in C which required the user to give the output
i=1, j=0;
if(i=1) j=3;
if(i=2) j=5;
What is the output?
At first, I didn’t notice the question and answered j=3. An oversight, you can say. It then dawned upon me that the = sign is assignment and not the conditional operator! This question took me by surprise! It taught me a very important lesson too. Never take things lightly. Be careful and read question twice or thrice.
Various answers I got from friends:
1. Gopal - Error: LValue Required
2. Manoj - No effect
3. Vishnu - Ok da bye now
The explanation is simple. At the last if condition, i=2 assignments results in a value>0, which validates the if condition and hence j is assigned with the value 5.
