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The Scorched Walls of Nalanda

The Scorched Walls of Nalanda
Originally uploaded by Shubh M Singh

World's first residential international University

Sayonara Orkut Profile [2004-2009]

After a long enough life on orkut I have deleted my account after realising that I was pressing a lot of [F5]'s on the home page to receive updates.

unknown friend

unknown friend
Originally uploaded by vivek sakpal

A common experience of having a SLR with you when travelling. :)

LOTD: Respect your elders

Appearing for a job interview has been a job in itself for me these days , off course its not a job you get paid for but the one for which you pay and expect nothing. Its a great social service . :)

Anyways coming back to latest addition to my "Lesson Of The Day [LOTD]" series....


Happened to appear for a nice interview session with a panel of 6 people, all of whom must be 50+ of age.
The chairperson being the oldest, frequently referred to his victims as "बेटा " and threw some basic questions on basics of basics ....of basics of core subjects.
For example "Define internet". :-)
Now a definition had to be in a well formed sentence which was close to the one interviewer had in his mind... how do you (as a victim ) beat that?



The unconvinced stance of the interviewer recursed to every next question he asked. The fury was carried over by others too and they turned down my chances of survival to an extent that , the last person to ask question argued about me not writing my name on certificate page of my mtech thesis. ( of course it was "printed" and not written 4COL)


In the end it was the wrath of fury I took from question no.1 till the end for not quenching the chairperson's thirst for exact definitions. Yet I respect the interviewer अंकल  , much enough not to write the name of his firm :)

BING Is Not Google

Microsoft vs. google is really going to be a battle for a long run. With Mr. Gates entering into the search engine business, microsoft has shown its desperation ...again. Even its windows 7 does not seem to enjoy any credibility. Like they say , "You never test the depth of a river with both feet". And with BING , Microsoft has just done that. People in the open source world have renamed it to my-crow-shaft :D .

I am sure if they were to expand BING , FOSS geeks would call it "BING Is Not Google".

Be it the flashy Ajax working over a randomly selected background, or its low priority to google related search results, BING has begun its journey towards setting another bad example first it was with an operating system , and now a search engine.

A friend of mine mimics the famous dialog from the movie Matrix .... for Mr. Gates instead of Mr. Anderson....

" Why, mr. Gates, why? why, why do you do it? why, why get up? why keep fighting? do you believe you're fighting for something, for more than your survival(of IE)? can you tell me what it is, do you even know? is it freedom(open source) or truth(that MS sucks) , perhaps peace - could it be for love? illusions, mr. Gates.......vagaries of perception. temporary constructs of pathetic coders trying desperately to justify an existence (of a software) that is without meaning or purpose. and all of them as artificial as the perception that u will survive. "

Bid Adieu KGP

Some days ago I read a twitt saying "Funny how something we lived without for the longest time is suddenly something we can't live without" - Simonnet.

The twitt was regarding a sudden crash of google and panic it caused. Suddenly this twitt seemed to touch me in other context, "Life in KGP". Really two years of campus life have been lively and enjoyable. Who doesn't miss his college life ? (except a book worm or a I dont care ;) )

Interesting gtalk status messages :)

People have this tendency to put quotes as their status message on Internet messaging clients. They change and provide insights into their minds from time to time.

Here is an effort to value those few keystrokes:
[please help me add more to it with a reply to this post]

"I want to change the world but God won't give me the Source Code ... :("

Wind(ows) of Linux

I have Ubuntu and Vista installed on my laptop, But I never thought if I hate windows.

This pretty screen of 15 inch in front of me is my window to the world. How would I hate it if the OS that lures me is also called Windows ?

Windows showed me what I could do, what others can help me do. I cant simply curse the windows for its changing look as a sign of its desperation in keeping up with beryl. I should thank it for making me think a lot before I do something, for example I double click on Firefox only to realize that I have to install PRE-loader for reducing the delay that click will cause.

I should thank the windows for differentiating between Good, bad and the ugly. Even before installing an app I would have to watch out for a "incompatible with vista" warning. Can you believe , even Nero had to release its own product for vista.

When you love someone , its unconditional ... even if the world sees at windows as a moron, I respect it because even in worst case it has set an example for the world of how a window should never be.

आमची Multimedia

When you see mirror you see yourself. You see yourself and associate with that image an 'I'.
Go one step ahead ... you attach so many 'mine's to it. Its a bubble of 'mine's that we all live in.And media is the stick that bursts this bubble so gently that you run into tears out of joy or otherwise.


Multimedia shows how human beings around you are cooperating with you to make it possible for you to have a stand in the society you live in.


It offers a chance to pay tribute to all those who make/ have made it possible for you to be here and will always. Even unnoticed elements of the society can be acknowledged that they Live not only exist , that every dream they see has wings of wisdom and compassion.

At 25 you are facing a sort of crisis. All the time you are thinking about where you will land up after 'this' phase gets over. Either the concept of 'timestamps' or that of the 'landing zone' always adds to an uncertainty and a spiral of dreams built around them gets more deeper.

There is a constant looking back on everything that you cannot control now just to have a gaze on them when you had it. The present tense seems as an invite for the past. Some things are lost but memories remain... damn this hardened glue of memories never melts.

The thought that If-things- could -have- been- different- so -would- be -me ruins the present and succinctly the future.

Quotes of the day

Today I was lucky enough to attend talks by two eminent personalities.

One Dr. Shamik Sural from SIT , IIT Kharagpur.
And another from Dr.Romit Roy Choudhury.

3.00 PM :Dr Sural et.al. have done a springer publication on Spatiotemporal role based access control. The talk was a kick for those seeking solace in space and time in the geospatial world. He talked about the spatiotemporal primitives they have introduced. The approach goes like

modeling[timed automata]- Specifications - decidable properties for model verification

The three steps in spatiotemporal or any modeling can be simulated in tools such as UPPAL.

4.00 PM : It was this ever enthusiastic figure standing in Room no. 108, CSE dept. This guy is brilliant and possessed a very strong convincing power. Truly an entrepreneur.

His talk was on the topic "Designing a virtual information telescope using mobile phones and social participation." About the technical details you can find it at his research group link.The things he said made perfect sense and had a backing of a lot of practical results. Here is some excerpt I liked within his talk...

".....People ask me whats the killer app for Wireless networks? ... its "killing time" :D..."

"... CNN iReport.... Nokia Morph .... Nokia N95 Compass "

"Economy forces the local businesses to have a different outlook which we have used as a metric to create a fingerprint database from the ambiance information. This info is collected in terms of freq bands which is categorized into different features in the fingerprint DB using SVM or other data mining techniques."

Today was fantastic ... feeling a lot pumped up after a long time. :)

Source-Gate-Sink

Ya you are right in a sense... these 'are' what a MOSFET should have to maintain the system in balance when many of them are combined to form a meaningful circuit.



But here I am using these metaphors (deliberately) with respect humans. Every human being has these terminals but they are not visible....they are mental.

Lets say source = source of (whatever) ideas.
gate = the mediator that provides a MOSFET to operate in source or sink mode.
sink = sink of ideas (only those generated at the source)

Sometimes the mind acts as a source, sometimes as a sink ... The application is just temporal.

People who only use their source and gate are conductive all the time they have ideas to share with others but do not allow the sink to share something. These are the species whom we being social animals, call extroverts.

Yet its never the case that people who only use their sink and gate never have their own ideas. They have their ideas, they have dreams but the extrovert is always so busy not to be able to conduct in the reverse direction i.e. from sink to the source. Obviously it would violate the properties of a MOSFET. But we are social animals and we have the god-gifted understanding of these source-sink dynamics. We should know when the other person is in Source mode we should be in sink mode and vice versa.

Its high time to revise our lessons in source-sink dynamics today to build a better future which is equanimous for one and all.

Dark side of the moon ....

With the smiley moon being seen in the skies we thought somehow there was something the nature was teaching us , "to smile"

LOTD : Send a responce to the pings but expect one when you ping back.

As we grow old, our universe of work expands. You think that you are the SUN of this galaxy and everything else around you is merely the effect of centripetal force.

That's the moment a feeling of I-don't-care...I-don't-give-a-damn-to-it.. comes in.

This post comes as an average day's experience online and offline. As a part of it , I tried to communicate with my friends online and offline.

The figures will be meaningless so the gist of the matter is , people whom i pinged offline were happy to see me, ready for a general discussion on whats up - what has to be - what could be etc and any sorts of discussion. What I thought on the issues being discussed really mattered.

The experience with people I pinged online was not as much convincing. 90% of the ones who pinged me had something new about them to convey to me. Those whom i pinged had something They did not care what I was doing, what I wanted to do or anything. The remaining 10% were offline today :)


I guess we all have universes of our own ... but we are not suns we are merely planets revolving with a centrifugal force called friendship.. the Metta.

A bug's life

Its a month of October and tons of dead bugs are found in the morning exactly below the tube lights that burnt throughout the night. Interesting fact is , there is no sign of them in the morning. A friend of mine once joked that probably they fly towards the sun in the morning and come back to earth as the sun sets. (P.S. a typical IITian's brain you see :) )

Well, its campus placement season and everybody is busy becoming what the market want. The global turmoil in foreign banking is causing some hustle this time. So a bit of finger crossed situation around. Attending PPTs and taking particular note of that salary - slide. No goodies this time for attending PPTs but yet its quite interesting to see how companies lure us all like a bug is attracted by a light bulb.

What's more to say then , Let us see all of us either land up on a light bulb or the Sun.

सम interesting quotes

“खेड्यातली मुले ही ‘रानफुला’ सारखी असतात . अणि रानफुला जर ……या रानफुला ना जर चांगली कसदार कलि जमीन ,चांगला सूर्यप्रकाश , योग्य ख़त -पानी मिळाले तर ………ती अशी रूज्तात ,अशी उमलतात , अशी फूल्तात ,की ………त्यांच्या समोर मुंबई , ठाणे ,पुणे शहरातील गुलाब ,कमल ,मोगरे सगले फीके पडून जातात ."

Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.

I hate Mr. M.K. Gandhi.

I am not being an extremist but , I simply don't understand what he as a person has tought the people of India. Or his followers blindly copy what he did without understanding the context of his actions. Today we are a free country and there are other ways to eliminate problems. The mentality of holding X responsible and using the so called 'non-voilence' to bring him/her/it down is ruining the states and as a result, whole country today. It is the time of high tide and we are not suppopsed to act so stupid.

ऐसे "अपने ही पैरो पर कुल्हाडी मार लेना " हमे अब छोड़ना चाहिए .

source:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kolkata_/Roadblock_to_protest_hotel_sex_racket/articleshow/3434299.cms

Doctor of philosophy handling Admin jobs

[LOTD* ]: The plus in having a professor to do an administrative job is that you are questioned less... He is always too busy to do that. :P

Today I was at the training and placement section of the insti. I found out today at the (at least (12-1)th) hour that my name is incorrectly printed and I cannot change it , unless academic section had made the updates. The staff handling registration for tnp was so thrilled at me (or us in general , the 11th hour-specialists ) for being so late. They at least Pointed me towards the information cell where the tnp incharge was sitting . This guy was as cool (and as silent :P) as ice.

I told him my situation .... that was 15 seconds.
He was listening while doing some work and kept mum for a while .... that was around 10 seconds.
At last he asked "Roll Number kya hai ?" ... yes right 2 seconds hardly
I answered ....
Next question, "Naam?" .... 1.5 second would be an exagggeration :P
Last.... "OK"

I thanked him on my way out. But I dont think he would remember me next time cause he never looked at my face. Throughout the scene, I was just a record in the database to which he only was authorised. :D


P.S. LOTD* means Lesson Of The Day.

When earth played with the moon ...

August 16th - 17th I witnessed a Lunar eclipse for the first time [Thanks Nilesh]:

11.30pm: Started with the full moon and no stars in the sky...
12.30am: But the Earth took over its pride ...
2.30am: Stars felt so bright as it was in the happening...
2.40am: Stars realised their delight was momentary as the earth started turning away...
3.00 am: Don't know what every one in the sky felt now as I slept with while thinking in my bed. :P

The scenic beauty uploaded at :
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/wfmaN2MMroQ1QnGcapsi6A