Information flow in future

While hearing about molecular computing and nano memory cards, one would wonder how the future would be. Definitely different. Here is a preview.

You return home and settle at home. Want to know how organic is the tomato you bought. Pick one of them and use your TV remote as a scanner. Immediately picks of the universal identification number of the tomato and starts pumping data after data about the tomato. The shop it is been purchased, the date it is been stocked, the vehicle it came in .. You could use the remote to drill down the pouring info. The farm of the tomato is show live. The fertilizers used in the past, the chemical composition, the Dept of Agriculture's stance with respect to that fertilizer, What not ..

It is amazing to know the interconnected and data relatedness we can end up in.

Thou this kind of info access is technically feasible, I guess the legality over personal space, business confidentiality etc will hide these info.

The beast

Never came across this one before .. the cell surrounded by 8 mines!!! (circled in the image)

Got it correct and finished off the game too. Felt slight nervousness after unveiling the big shot. There was a pressure to complete the game successfully.

That was quite an experience after playing for years.

The land shark

The revenge of the nomad
Chapter 2. The land shark

Cacophony Rao is the villain of the story. He got his title for his loud and shrill voice. People are fearful to face his screaming shout more than his violent behavior. His family owns enormous wealth. In fact, most of Vijapura city belongs to them. Among multiple business they do, they are famous for real estate. Mr Rao make profit out of layouting land and selling for a margin. He also pockets out of forgery and threatening people to transfer their land. Our hero, Ramaraj, had bought a site from Mr Rao. After five years, this particular layout had appreciated a lot. Mr Rao couldn't digest the fact that his layout is no more with him and it is valued high. He started with usual way of bringing muscle power and trying to retrieve the land back from the purchasers. He was willing to pay them back the money they had given 5 years back.

Obviously site owners were unhappy. They protested, without much use. Many gave off the site fearing the consequences. Few people like Ramdas were trying to save their valuable. They can never acquire a site as the land price had raised up beyond reach. Their only chance is to hold on to what they have.

In order to clear off the problem, Mr Rao applied the ultimate weapon. He choose one of the protesters and made a hit. Alas, it happened to be Ramraj. Ten or fifteen gundaas came to Ramraj house in the mid night. They smashed opened the house and hit the couples with heavy iron and sticks. The attack went on for 30 minutes and both suffered a major injury. Neighbours dare not to intervene, they called for the police after the tough guys left the place.
Seethalakshmi couldnt bear the beatings and she breath her last on the way to hospital. Ramraj had to be administered in the hospital for months and slowly his body parts recovered.

Did police took action? Nope, Mr Rao took care of the matter through money. Beyond that his brother, Karan Rao, is an influential politician. None of the government bodies function beyond Karan's power, atleast in the Vijayapura vicinity.

continued.

First sale

(Pepper climber as shown in the above image. Pepper grows as a bunch of tiny tots. Seen in the right hand side of the image)

After we moved into the farm, we were doing lots of work .. one thing after another. Farm related, house maintenance, government paper work etc. Amidst all those things, we were able to pluck out some pepper and dry it up. My job was to sell it to some merchant.

I hopped from shop to shop, trying to learn the buying price. I had to put an act, as thou I am a seasoned farmer and trying to sell off a load. Had a fear, what if he asks some technicalities about the goods? I know that pepper is used in pongal, beyond that my knowledge is nill. Luckily a shop near the city center bought the stuff with less questioning.

I will have to research more to know about the best price. Less planning to pack it and sell them off.

Joyful life

The revenge of the nomad
Chapter 1. Joyful life

Ramaraj, our hero, has an ideal life. He is employed as a manager in a paper mill. His wife, Seethalakshmi, works as a clerk in a central government department. They lead a happy life; in fact they are expecting a baby in few months. Financially they are sound. Out of their small income, they purchased a piece of land away from the city. After five years of purchase, now that the city had grown and the area is developing good. Ram and Seetha are slowly thinking about constructing a dream house there.

All seem to be going good. Peace before the storm? Let us see.

continued.

The spider web

Usually when we clean the cob web, the spiders used to reconstruct within few days. This time it is a long due and still the house is clean. Upon reflecting, the truth unearthed. My wife had gone to her mom's home on a long vacation. So, no cooking, no food spillage, nothing in the waste bin. The house flies and other small insects should have migrated to better food source. And hence the spider had also wound its silk carpet to elsewhere.

Quiet interesting to note how these small creature observe the environment, adapt to the changes and base themselves to the food source.

Sales pitch

Selling goods seem to depend on two factors. The need of human and fear of something. The basic needs like food and shelter always keeps certain market thrive and healthy. Beyond this is the market where greedy people purchase. Samples: Invest in land purchase and it will double in three years. Drink saffron powdered milk while one is pregnant, and the new born will be fair skinned (if this is true, we shouldn't have any dark skin by now). I checked the price of the saffron and decided to have a baby with my skin tone. Another classic sample is the precious gem that is decided by one's zodiac sign. These specially designed gems can solve almost anything in the world, right from finding a spouse, promoting you in the place of your boss, healing chronic cancer, and a free pass to space travel.

Most of the above ingredients can be used with a threatening mode. If you dont alter your house as per vaastu, 1000 bad things will happen in the coming year and so on. All parents bought this vitamin tablets to boost memory of their kids, if you dont buy, your kid will fail miserably. Another classic sample of fear factor is the insurance policy.

Guess we will save lots of money when we shop without greed and fear.

Time convertor

How easy to convert a pacific std time to your local time? What if you need to deal with the london time too. Adding the 'day light saving' factor will increase the fun in the conversion.

I wish we have a simple plugin (mainly attached to the email client), that would scan through the document and highlight timestamp in different time zones.

Color synchronizer

Opposite to our house is quite an interesting house. It is occupied by five mallu girls. Quite a time pass to watch them together on their terrace or strolling in the front yard with their mobile and occasionally meeting in the streets.

Apart from the mundane task of watching these college girls, I made another observation. Their dress. Not only when they are wearing, but also when they are dried up in the cloth line. The dress colors are similar on most of the days. Indicating that the girls have been wearing same color on the previous day or so. It is as thou they decide earlier on what to wear. Or it could be subconsciously the roommates synced up in some ways and picked the dress with same color shade. I would equate this concept to "menstrual cycle synchronization" when girls stay together.

Whatever it is, definitely worth doing a research on this topic. If anyone is on it, I can volunteer to provide vital data for the project.

yErTram

yErTram is a method/tool for retrieving water from well. While writing the post "Chain of thoughts", I googled for this word and failed to find a description. Even a picture was not available. So, I asked my art master to help with providing a sketch.

A huge stone path is placed upon the center of the well. It would form a narrow path for a person to walk over the well. At one side of the path is a fulcrum setup which holds a hefty wooden beam. The extreme end of the beam is tied with rocks for balancing purpose. The other end is connected to a stick with a bucket. The stick and the bucket go into the well for collecting water. The person has to hold the empty bucket, keep pulling down the stick so that the wooden beam comes down towards the well. Once the bucket reaches the water level, the bucket is filled with water and the stick is drawn upwards. During this process, the person would have to walk from the outer edge of the well towards the center (walk on the stone path) and walk back after collecting the water.

The slow child

When an animal gives birth to smaller ones, immediatly the junior would move, spot the mom and starts sucking milk. In few days, the puppies or other offspring would run around, understand the world around, pick a fight with its sibling, try to chew anything that is available. What a fast track life.

Compared to that human child is very slow. After three months of looking after it, we are very happy to hear some noise out of it. With few more months, it starts pushing itself around - making us immense proud. Another six month to stand, try to walk, play with words. Would have to wait for four to five years to reliably be on its own and cross the mid-teen to be productive and able to lead a life.
This difference between animal growth and human always puzzled me. Reading Bill Bryson's book clarified the doubt. Giving a passage from his book:

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and a greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head through such a tight space it must be born while its brain is still small - and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding.

May be the smaller brain allow us to learn the stuff after birth. Wheareas animals comes with almost pre-moulded brain and the scope for them to learn is limited. So, our hardwork in terms of taking risk and going thru immense trouble paid off well.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

As the title says, almost all corners of Science is touched upon. Right from the formation of universe, rocks, volcanoes of the earth, ancient creatures, DNA structures, and more are discussed in a laymanistic simplicity. The flow of these topics are also wonderful. Had thrown lots of light upon life of the Scientists who worked in different eras. Amazing to peek into their personal life too, like who the 19th century chemist foolishly inhaled poisones gases, the enemity between different researchers etc.
A very good read for anyone curious to know our origin, stuff we are made up of, where we are and other Scientific inquiries. The book is by Bill Bryson.

Ellu juice

While being in a village, thought of having a cool drink. While checking the availability, I was puzzled by the menu item 'ellu juice'. There was a language barrier too, and the server couldn't explain more than that ('ellu juice' is something made out of 'ellu'). Out of curiosity, I asked for the same. What I got is sesame milk juice! Never had or heard about this before. It was quite tasty.

In the wild

Got the possession of the farm. On the first day evening, I moved in with my wife. The sun was setting slowly and so we were settling down. The electrical work ought to be worked out. Hence we had to pour kerosene in the newly bought kerosene lamp and lit it before the sunset. With the lights up, we found a clean spot (as clean as possible) for making our bed. It was inside a small room. We closed the window so that creatures from outside dont join us. As we didnt have anything to do around 6.30pm, we had our dinner. It was a nice candle light dinner, tasted like bread with jam. We promised to have lots of singing, playing jokes and talking everything under the sun (beyond as well). After talking about everything, at 7.30pm we felt sleepy. After putting off the lights, the room was pitch dark. It was so dark that closing the eyes or opening them didnt matter. Once in a while my wife switched on the torch and scanned the walls, roof to check any unwanted visitors.

Insurance policy and the functionings

ok, after chasing for the real Insurance policy benefitors , I found a clue. When we have some work to be done and we reach out a government employee or a distant relative or anyone, they help us out of the request. After that, they start with, "sir, my wife is a policy agent, why dont you buy an insurance policy". It is quite difficult to out right refuse the offer as we just got a free service through them. We will have to find an escape route like saying that we got policy previous month or so.

Anyway, I think these kind of social pressures are making the policy industry to thrive. And obviously the immediate benefitors are the agents.

The old bachelor

A friend of mine is in his late thirties. Had been going through all channels to find a life partner. Still no luck in settling with someone. The initial criteria were too many and beyond market supply. His family fancied getting a girl half his age and from a rich background. Slowly they kept relaxing their requirements. The recent one relaxed is the origin of the desired family. Earlier condition was to choose someone from the same community and also their family should have originated from the same town as theirs. The origination has been dropped for now.

I used to wonder why they are finding it difficult in the bride hunt, in spite of dropping many criteria. May be the rate at which they drop particular criteria is very slow compared to the brides moving out of the market for that age group. Wish he access the situation properly and moves fast.

Thunder, wind and rain

It was a quite afternoon, calm and bright. All of a sudden heavy wind was flowing in the area. Followed were thunder, lighting and rain. The rain was thrashing around with fury and wind fueled the beatings. It was a dramatic scene to watch from the balcony. It was as though waves of water was cleansing the landscape.

Chain of thoughts

When my wife was about to enter the house, I thought of playing a childish prank - to hold the door tightly from inside that she will be puzzled with the door not opening in spite of unlocking. When such thought came in, suddenly something flashed from my young age. Of someone holding my bicycle from behind and I was surprised that my pedaling was vain. Now I tried recollecting the face of that person. Oh, I remembered. I used to go to a public garden at early morning. In those days, gents went to different gardens on a daily basis. That were our bath points. We had well in the center of the garden. Drawing water from well require good muscle and stamina. Bigger men can do themselves and fill their tub with water they need. A boy like me would have to depend on a gardener. He would fill the tub, which would need 3 buckets of drawings from the well. For a day, I will have to give 10paise, on a monthly basis to was decided to be Rs 2.

Ok, that is the man who found be on the road, someday and held my bicycle.
Interesting to note the thoughts we keep jumping from somewhere to anywhere. To think about the money value, the good old social life style, the equipments we used, etc etc.

Oh, I didn't trick my wife by jamming the door; partially got lost in my own world and other partial was due to the insight into after effects when my wife successfully opens the doors and find me the culprit.

Green peas masala

Couple of days before, we finally made up of our mind to prepare green peas masala at home. Here are the steps we followed.

• Peel and chop onions, small one are tastier. I assume the onion amount should be as much as the vegetable we add.
• Fry onion in oil. Make it to golden yellow.
• Add ginger garlic paste, garam masala, pepper or chilli powder. Keep stirring.
• With the brownish paste in the pan, add green peas.
  Let the peas be fried in oil first.
• For richness, grind some cashews in water. Add this paste to the peas mixture. Add some more water.
• Instead of cashew paste, tomato or coconut milk will also be good. None of the above is also an alternate option.
• With added water, close the pan for few minutues. Make sure all ingridents mix up well.
• Serve hot with chappathi or parota or dosa or lemon rice etc.
  
  

Handling old laptop battery

If I disconnect the power from my laptop, the laptop shuts abruptly in 5 to 10 seconds. Looks like the battery is gone. However, I suspect some kind of firmware involvement also in this problem. When windows desktop is put under some prompt, then the laptop doesn't die even after removing the plug. So, if I wanted to move the laptop around while still working, I click on shutdown and leave the shutdown prompt as it is. After shifting, I cancel the prompt. So for this method helped in retaining for power for 15 minutes. Let to try beyond.

Ideal expense writer

We tried maintaining personal expense using different tools and techniques. Started with a fancy spreadsheet, then a website, moved on to traditional paper book, a pocket sized one etc. Nope, none helped us to stay on track. After couple of days, laziness pulled us away from these equipments.

While thinking about an ideal expense maintainer, here is what I wish to have. A box kept inside the house, close to the entrance. I can drop any receipt of different shape and texture. The box equipped with ocr will grab those pieces of papers, analyze them and find the expense to be entered. A calculator size panel in the side of the box would beep out the number it found. I can alter the number within 15 seconds, or else that number will be entered in a registered. The receipt will be filled neatly inside the box.

Blue toothed box will sync up with my computer on a daily basis. QED.

catalyst

The purchase did happen, along with some kind of drama which happens in these kind of deals. At one stage, the seller and the buyer slightly withdrew from the interest of making the transaction happen. When the two parties were about retire, the middlemen swung into action. They rescued the spirit. Brought in required parameters and convinced the parties to move ahead. Quite interesting experience. Till the last moment we didn't know if we will be buying!

To buy or not to buy

A purchaser's dilemma. Particularly when the stake is high and the buy is ornamental. Many comments, speculations to digest from different walks of people. Is the price high? Are clean hands involved in the deal? How much to rely on the seller? Will the ROI be satisfactory, whatever may be the expected returns be?

Guess we will have to keep moving with timely decision. Just enjoy the positive effects and correct any mistakes.

first last Vs last, first names

Most occasions we use the format, first name last name. There are few places, particularly while writing, that the structure last name, first name is adapted. In good old days, most often the last name reflected the occupation of the person. We see many family names with Baker, Clerk, Smith etc. So, while entering names in the record, last name sorted list would list out folks as per the jobs they work on. That would be easy for some one to keep track of the records and call the right set of folks for duty.
Not sure about the above theory. This occurred at me while using the address book in my mobile. I try to store the occupation of the person first before his/her name, eg Elec Sekar, Taxi Gopal, Law Ganesh, CA Manikam etc.

Back to yoga

After almost an year, I am restarted yoga practice. It is quite difficult and muscle flexibility ought to be regained. Quite good to do and body feels light.

Reflected on the reason for dropping out of a regular practice. Guess it is lack of concentration while doing alone. Mind gets drifted away into its own world of thoughts. Getting back to exercise, that too in the early hours of the day, is difficult. I used to convince myself that if I had some company for yoga or I joined any yoga institute, then I would be able to do better.

This time I had decided to keep doing on my own and focus on the task at hand.

Tactics of the leaves

While watering the plants, a cool insight of the plants came upon. The leaves starts from the stem and raises up in a slanting manner. They form v shaped pattern through out the stem. Having a flat structure, instead of v shape, might be more efficient to capture sun light. The advantage of v shape showed up while watering the plant. Water falling on the leaves rushed towards the stem and finally close to the root. Had it been a flat arrangement, water from the leaves might have splashed away from the root to the ground instead of towards the stem.

May be the plants have to form a strategic positioning for maximizing sunlight as well as rain water.

Freedom to mind

While going through the strange world, I got a light all of a sudden. What a freedom and relief we get once we are out of an issue. The issue may be minor, but we feel our mind relaxed and calm.

The problems and issues we face need not be a real challenge. They can be just a lack of knowledge about that particular system or situation. If we put some effort to understand the functionality of the system and behaviour, we may be through the difficult moments.

Strange world

When we reach an ideal point in life, we settle down happily. And then creeps bunch of issues here and there. That leads to the yearning of cleaning off such negative factors. We want those issues to vanish so that we can relish in our imaginative conditions we fantasized on the first place. Slowly the goodness of this experience drops off and only the bad thingy stick to our mind. If more and more such issues pile up, the particular point reached will itself be a burden. We start fantasizing for something else. Back to square one.

transparent editor

What if the text editors we use are transparent? Or transparentable? This occurred to be when I had to switch between different window, refer info at various source and come back to the editor to continue composing. Instead, if I have transparency, I will have focus on very few lines close to the current line I am editing. This patch of visible lines should be draggable/movable. Remaining area of the screen will be displaying the windows that are at the background. I can refer or even cut n paste from any of the available screen. With a snap of key or click, I should switch from transparent mode to opaque. Would be cool.

Follow British or American

While interacting with American colleagues, one of the confusing factor is the date format. Desis are used with dd/mm/yy and Americans insist on mm/dd/yy. Upon pondering on this conflict, interesting things surfaced. It is not only date format, there are many things Americans wanted to move off from British traditions. Here is a short list.

road side

Brits ride to the left side. Anyone following that convention will find it tough on American roads that drive on the right hand side. Car steering is also position in appropriate side of the car.

switch on/off

Simple light bulb switch. Do we pull the knob bottom to top or top to bottom for turning it on? Depends on the country.

Culture

Britons and I guess most of the European countries adhered strict hierarchical order in the society. The working place too followed such bureaucratic structure. Americans bent such rigid model and practice somewhat loose hierarchy.

Language

The formal British English had to give way to American slangish language.

Considering these factors, looks like such drastic change were taken upon themselves to symbolize their freedom from a former colony. They want to show their difference.
May be top to bottom writings of Chinese, right to left of Arabs could have originated out of similar identity establishment.

The power game

Recently Manipal University was derecognized as a quality medical college. The reason given by the government inspecting body is that the univ is lacking resources. Considering the recent past, where the institute is considered one among the best (to be precise, fourth best medical college in the country), such a lack of resource is a surprising findings. Are our institute adhere such a low standard?

Clearly the corrupt hands of the inspecting body wants to tamper into a resourceful setup.

A thought occurred to me. The state government is somewhat friendly towards MU. If a state government inspecting body could be floated, that would ease out the issue for now. Slowly the authenticity of such inspecting board can be popularized among other states.

This will bring down the power of the Central inspectors. However, the new setup will introduce few more flangs of its own.

Travel updater

Recently I happen to be on road and rails for four days. Just kept on moving from one city after another. Apart from the hackers, beggars, loud video player .. a new annoyer had joined .. it is the co passenger yelling at his/her mobile. Observed a pattern in this mobile usage. These people HAVE TO inform the other party about their exact longitude, latitude coordinates. Even if they don't know, they would wake the co passenger from sleep and question them with, "where r we now?" .. followed by ... "Aaang, I have crossed so-n-so place." As thou the listener is going to open up their GPS box and start monitoring the movement of this guy.

Wondering if we can have a personal mobile phone jammer.

rattled mind

In a volunteer mailing group, a small ripple will create a big wave of mails and an ultimate splash. One definite rocker is 'switch off lights' and 'save tissue papers'. What creative suggestions come out of these simple topics .. people get very unconventional and emotional about their ideas.

Recently such mail thread started with simple suggestions like:

Put some posters about power saving.

Encourage taking stairs as opposed to elevators.

Turn off lights in huddle rooms/conference rooms.

An engineer's response:

We are the engineers, we need to think of some innovative power saving
measures !

/What if there is sensing device at the entry of pantry as in one enters,
lights ON... and /

/as soon as one exists, lights OFF !! ( depending on the total number of
heads entered MINUS/

/total number of heads exited ) = 0 Implementation of this would cost intial
investment but would/

/save lots of power & power bills later.../

Someone started cribbing :

I do not see this poster idea is working, there are
posters just near the tissue paper in the toilets but people still use the
tissue paper. To my surprise even people stand and read this poster and use the
tissue paper as if the content is in French.

If we dont want people to use tissue, dont keep there! simple.

Followup ideas ...

On a related note, the quality of the tissue paper can be
improved.

Can someone tell this environmentalist that quality paper => cutting more trees

There were other suggestions like volunteers calling employees and advising them on tissue usage. People were going further to trace the origin of tissue, wondered if great grandfather and beyond used tissues etc.

What idle brain can do!

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Remember reading this book during college days. Couldn't recollect much of the story thou. Yesterday I had to travel alone in a taxi for 2 hours. While looking around for a book, got this one. Suitable to spend 2 hrs or so.

The first part of the book talks about how general trend in people and what kind of inertia hold them back from moving out of the flock. Also the kind of struggle and hardship of successful people. Particularly the kind of changes they have to make and willing to go through tough time due to different life style.

Second section is quite heavy with meta-physics and after life stuff. The highest thing that to be worked out is - love. Guess westerners have the notion of seeing love as the ultimate thing to go for.

Last part was too much .. purposefully painting a messiah image to the hero. It was able to cure a bird whose wings were immobile. Lots of followers and enemy camp and so and so.

A nice inspirational book.

fluid containers

Ever wondered about the shape of the fluid containers? Most of them are cylindrical. The petrol, milk tank containers, milk can, over-head water tank, water heater, most of the kitchen utensils, pen, water pipe, ...

Any idea about the reason?

Helping tendency

Someone sent a technical query to our office internal mailing list. The query was kind of simple. In no time there were so many replies and suggestions. Some of the answers were repetitive. Even two people replied after two days .. which is rare considering that most mails in that forum dies out in couple of hours.
The reason behind the mails is .. the questioner is a girl, that too with an attractive name. Guess the guys didnt know her age or other details, if so they might not have bother to provide such help.

perception

Morning I was looking at small spiders, ants and lizards. The first instinct is to drive them off. I was also trying to see their perception about human. They might have an image of 'annoying monsters'. Always the monsters chase them away. At time spray chemicals or set hazardous mechanical, electrical devices on them. Doesn't allow them to lead a peaceful life, the nest they construct is destroyed in fraction of seconds.

If only we could listen to their conversation, it would be really interesting.

Voyage haiku

Planning travel across our galaxy
may be far beyond Andromeda or Triangulum
Packing two condoms for safety

passing the bug

I was observing the neighbouring construction work through the window. A worker found a small snake. He hit it with a stick still it fell unconscious or dead. Now he had to throw it out. He used the same stick to pry the snake across but it fell inside the construction area itself. This time he aimed for our garden! The snake fell on our car path inside the compound wall.

He was about to get back to his work. That is when I had to come out of the house and shout at him. Probably he thought the house was unoccupied as no one was living for a long time. Then he realized the situation and immediately came into my house to clear up the mess.

How human behave! We are ready to take any short-cut to cut short our work.

Space allocation

While traveling, my wife and myself were enjoying the landscape and the scenic beauty. She asked about the dimension of an acre of land. It is 66 feet by 660 feet. Quite odd shape to divide the farm land. A lengthy rectangular partition. She asked if there is any reason behind such division. It seems like an ancient practice. May be from the time man started cultivation as a part time apart from his full time hunting job.

While reflecting, suddenly a similarity appeared between this land dimension and a totally different system. It is agraharam.

The Brahmins had an upper hand over the society. Their contribution is reflected in many areas of Indian life in the past. They were also biased towards their own kith & kins, (like any other human being). So, if they were doing town planning, we could expect them to occupy prime locality. The center of the town had the temple. Brahmins lived close to the temple. The central land ratio should had been minuscule compared to town's total land size. Low availability and high demand plus compulsory allocations to Brahmins would have a driven towards optimal, compressed allocation algorithm.

Probably with the above constraints, they got houses with odd dimension. In a typical agraharam house, a corridor will start from the front door and run towards the end. Rooms will be placed one after another along with the corridor. A small garden or open space will be available at the end of the house. It is a lengthy house with narrow width; the width of the house is always 1 room wide and the length could be 5 rooms or more.

The reason for the odd dimension is the resource crunch. Here the sacred street is the resource, which ought to be shared by as many as possible.

Going back to the farm land, similar resource crunch and optimal allocation might have lead to such rectangular division. The resource could be the water body like river, or the resource can be the approach or reachable to the road.

Would like to see if these rectangular partitions are adapted at international level.

Aladdin Factor

Book is interesting. Authored by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. There are many things to learn from the book. A sudden awakening, that most of us don't know, is what to ask in life. The barriers in asking are discuss in detail with lots of samples.

Systematically analyzed fear and tips are provided to overcome. That part is very useful. The narration in the book is definitely positive and will help anyone to bring themselves up. Handling change, the beginner's difficulty are discussed well.

Lots of cartoons, quotes, life incidents all over the book made the reading live, easy and comfortable. However, the Aladdin story didn't stick together with the topic. Also I felt the later part of the book kind of redundant (the chapter from 'Ask at Home'). There are many narration from salespersons' diary. Talks about how they cracked some of the difficult deal or situation. Many seemed to be 'yuck' and beyond normal people; may be that is the extra skill acquired by salesmanship and the author suggest others to learn.


Can be read once.

Demystified the other road

Yesterday I went through the 'other road'. It was thrilling experience to go through it as I had created such a curiosity and hype in me. The other road had a big electrical transformer!

New place

I felt working from home causing some side effects. Wanted to have a office setup and worked towards it. Got it done after running around for office space, net, electrical equipments were challengeful tasks of their own. In spite of things going smooth, running around was stressful.

Felt wonderful once things were set and to relax comfortably.

Medical file

Branded, hi-fi, multi-functional corporate hospitals use file system. It is the physical file cover which holds all the patient records, results, observations. If a patient request for a treatment, his/her file is retrieved from the record storage room and passed to concerned dept. Depending on many factors, this process of moving the file takes a happy 30mins to 60mins. Sometimes the staff have a happy hours of playing 'treasure hunt' in order to trace the file.

The patient need to wait in a lengthy queue in the dept for some doctor to analyze. Then n number of tests are expected. Each test will be greeted by a lengthy queue again .. no, ur relative cannot reserve a seat for you in the next test room. If the number of tests tend towards one, then there is a hope for getting treated on the same day.

The big, posh hospitals that charge $$$ follow a different process. They create a five star environment for their A-class patients and take care well.

However, the branded hospital handling middle and lower group of people adapt the same process of file system we saw earlier. I was puzzled to notice the same process in these hospitals. The real surprise was that, why is that a hospital never learn from the bottle necks observed in another hospital system? Atleast the later hospitals could have written smart software to handle the crowd and manage better. Why they didn't?

Suddenly it struck! .. the sales guys!!

This could have been the conversation between the hospital management and sales guys from a software company.

HM: we would like to have an efficient system that would smoothen the process. It should help us keep track of records and refer back easily in a secure manner.
SG: Sure, sir. We will be able to do that. It would take 8 months to develop (and hospital wil have test it), and cost approx 2 million rupees. On the other hand, we have an industry tested solution, which costs 0.3M and can be installed within 2 weeks.
HM: oh, I guess we will go for your solution.



Such primitive system not only punishes the patients who are in the last rung of the ladder; but also the staff, the doctors and the management. Instead of having a smooth process and channeling the crowd thru time management, the current system opens the gate for chaos.

Overcoming Monday blues

It is Sunday early morning. I feel energetic and fresh. Going through the task list for Sunday, which will have special assignments like riding to scenic places.

I feel if we don't laze on Sunday, we will have a fresh Monday morning. See Sunday as any other day, Monday will also be like any other day.

System crash

Ever heard about a person fainting immediately after passing urine? You would hear water flushing and a thud sound of the person falling down. This case has a funny medical name too .. Micturition syncope

Till now I thought only windows os does things like this.

optimal teeth

Is the material by which our teeth are made is the right choice? They seem to corrode easily. Doesn't seem to regrow as it ought to have. Are there any alternative that nature could have tried out?

Could the corrosiveness be aggravated due to modern eating habits?

A family in the train cabin

While traveling in the train, a family got into our cabin. The silence got down. The man came for a send off of his wife, wife's parents. He was getting in and out of the train. Once the train moved, the two kids took turn in getting the attention. Even deciding the dinner time took its own time and discussion. I just reflected if any one of them travelled alone, they would have had dinner without a word and slept by now.

The girl and her mom had lot of things to catch up, hence the light was turned on for a longer time in the night. We had to remind them to switch it off. The small child woke up once in a while and cried with a rhythmic voice. The lady tried to put it back to sleep by threatening in a irritating mood. Her mom tried to pacify the child with an lullabic attempt.

Overall it was a difficult journey.

Drag and Drop class hierarchy

While working with gwt-ext library, I found difficult to understand the available set of classes related to drag and drop functionality. In order to demystify, I took a notes for myself and drew a flow chart. Sharing with others.

Also, if you are looking for useful info on the drag n drop classes, yui seem to have good documents.

Which college to go? None.

Couple of my relatives were sharing their dilemma about the colleges their kids should choose. I suggest them not to send to any college, particularly if the student is talented. Many couldn't digest this suggestion and repel away.

Off late colleges are open at every corner. Businessmen fund these college and their view will be obviously business oriented -- reduce the expense, increase the income. After paying heavy amount as capitation, what we get is poor quality education from incompetent staff.

Is there any alternate? I suggest talented kids to learn skills over net. This is by assuming computer job is what one aims for, which 95% of students aspire towards. The 5% should go to a very good college of their dream fields. Surely those seats will be available without competition and prosperity rate ought to be better.

Will students without world experience, job experience gain technical skills over net? Can they settle comfortably in say, over a year? I feel some kind of collaboration, guidance is needed - which need not be a college. If a college can provide such guidance, it is good.

In such skill acquisition mode for 2 years, I believe the person should be able to solve problems to an extend of matching the expenses to income. With 3+ years, real money should be pumping in. Believe me, there are so much work that needs to be done outside.

Any evidence that this is feasible? Yes, think about the top companies in the country hiring non-computer science students for their software development projects. They see the talented pool to learn things and start working in real projects. They give a 6 month training for them.

If 6 months is all the training one needs, y not we start that when we are out of school?
Many have the secure feeling with having a degree. Correspondence course is the answer.

PS: I went through colleges. My comments above are relevant to the current scenario where colleges focus on minting money in contrast to industry looking for quality engineers.

The other road

While travelling in the bus, I used to see some small village roads bifurcating from the main way. Many times I was curious to know about those unknown roads. Where are they going? Are there interesting things in those roads that I am missing .. like a beautiful scenic spot, or a massive bridge or a village trade show etc. Is that road dry n dull or pleasant n cool? Will there be many passer-by or very few activities?

Is that an old road or introduced in modern days? May be this could be the village road missed by a village boy gone very far, may be attracted by the glamourous city lights (sure the boy wants to come back to this road).

What are the people doing in those villages? Are they missing the village boy or happy with the money he sends?

adding a background grid

Ever wondered how to get a grid background like in some designer tools? Here is a simple way.

Decide on the cell size you want. You may choose 20*30 pixel. Create a image of that size in paint. Draw a line in the last row and last column. You should get a image like this :

Include this image as a background in your canvas. Allow the image to be repeated horizontaly and vertically.

In case of html+css, you may specify as :

.grid
{
background-image:url(../images/bluegrid.JPG) !important;
background-repeat: repeat;
opacity:0.1;
filter:alpha(opacity=10);
}


This should give out the desired result :

mono color picture

Never thought a mono color could give striking effect. Color image always brings multi-color to our mind.

Here is the drawing I did recently.

Who needs newspaper?

With all the stuff net provides us, I started wondering if there is a future for newspaper. Manually someone dropping at 5am, then the paper has to withstand rain, wind, dogs etc and reach my table. I will have to read thru carefully to find articles of interest to me. If I am lucky, I will get one or two.

Wait a minute .. these interesting articles seem to be read earlier! Ya, these are 2 days old in the net. The newspaper guys have conveniently searched in the net and cut n pasted the article into their paper moulding machine. What a cheap trick!

I register to different feeds so that articles of my needs arrive at a particular place easy for me to read. They reach my place as soon as they are written at the creation point. Good classification, searchable options, sharing facilities, preserving them for future use are few points I prefer net way of reading news.

Some people may argue about 'local news'. I feel net is faster n better in that aspect also. There are thousands of social network groups, blogs which actively propagate local happenings. For professional touch of journalism, there are site like citizen matters come in. They cover the local news and keep the readers informed.

Do you think newspaper publication will roll out for long time? May be till rural folks plug in their laptops.

closing ceremony

While strolling in the neighbourhood, a small hardware shop caught my attention. The owner was closing the shop for the day. He had to pick the paint buckets kept in front of the store for display. The buckets ought to be packed inside the small shop. There were other assorted tools and equipments placed outside. His job is to bring them to safe and put down the shutter.

I was thinking about the way I wind up the work. All I have to do is press the shutdown button. At times I complain the machine is too slow while shutting down!

A gaze into future

Looking into the future is always a fun; we had been quite curious to know things will be as the time pass. If we watch early Science fiction movies, we could see what that era expected to happen around 2000+. It is funny to see that and compare with the surroundings now. We had out-pared most of the scientific expectations expressed by those futurists. Some of their imagination never occurred .. (in fact, many are still carried forward). When we think about future, we do have an image of people in bright colored cloth, wearing a electrical wired helmet, also that florescent drink.

Here are few of my thoughts on future:

• Unique identification number for people, at global level
• Tight security, surveillance and low crime rate
• High concentrated urban life style. Mega apartments and narrow path.
• People hardly need to go out as all facilities and work environment are available at their living room.
• Improved medical care but collapses once in a while with massive out burst of unknown illness which claims millions.
• Heavy amount spent on upgrading military, thou war never happens. (Everyone aware of the fatal blow to the planet)
• inferior leadership
  

Let us see if we reach there before hitting a total economic break down or a severe loss of population through political conflicts.

Our view of the surroundings

Other day a pizza delivery scooter entered my street. Being a blind street with just four houses, we rarely get outside vehicles. The pizza guy couldn't see the blindness as the street is too slope and the other side is an open field instead of a wall. He had to reach the end and take a U. Definitely he would have been cursing whoever designed the layout. It is haphazard, we can expect it in such hilly area.

I was wondering what kind of feelings, expression, frustration he would have had about this street. This is his first time in this street, may be in this area too. He might have registered this mistake and try out other paths. Or he might have been too time stressed with his pizza delivery and he may not have observed the street into his internal system.

While thinking about this, I recollected the first time I was in this street. It was different. I was very much relaxed. Being new to the town, I was curious to learn the surroundings, people, buildings etc. We saw the house from outside. I observed the neighborhood. It looked fresh, calm and nice.

After staying here for months, the views and the feelings about the house, street had changed. What a difference can acclimatization can bring in!

gwtExt panel to fill the page

While using gwtExt tools, I wanted the panel to occupy the entire screen. Found that Viewport is the component to use. However I didnt see the required effect in spite of using the Viewport as per the guide. I just got a small, shrinked panel as it used to be. After couple of trial and error, the culprit turned out to be an auto-height method called by the main panel. Commenting this statement cured the problem.

// panel.setAutoHeight(true);

Phone sex

Let us learn kamasutra positions throuh mobile.

Circles and squares

Most convenient structure for nature is to spin out a circle. The spherical planets, stars, galaxies, and tubular-cylindrical body cells, and the beautiful circular pot-holes .. the list is end less. What makes these forms prominent? Two things comes to mind: one is fluid dynamics which forms the pebble, pot-holes, to certain extend the moon and the planets. Second means is the central attraction force. This is the force that bring the atoms into spherical, a planet, star also as spherical.

My wife pointed out a natural square structure. When the body cells are tightly placed in a tissue or somewhere, they tend to form cubical and called cubic cells. There are rare incidents of such sharp shapes. Other area I could think of is, the cliffs and edges formed in mountain ranges when the mountains torn off due to violent quakes or other means.


When it comes to artificial shapes, man made structures are predominantly squares. The house we live, the computer screen, newspaper, this blog template .. goes on. The circular pattern is adapted either out of absolute necessity (wheel, motor coil) or for aesthetic reason (like a big arch in the hall, curvy furniture,)

Looks like it is easy for human to work with squares than circles. There are exception to this rule, like home made dosa :-)

Beauty and the reaction

What is beauty? Sure, we all have many definitions. Why do we react in certain manner towards something beautiful, as per our defn?

There is some kind of appreciation, excitement in our mind, upliftment of our mood. We also get an inclination to possess the object of beauty. Or leave out a sigh if we understand the object is beyond our current reach. What is this need for possessing? Is it owner's pride to show-off or some kind of attachment with the beauty?

As said in Selfish Gene, could beauty imply sound health? May be we opt or try to pick like wise. If that be true, our evolution path should take us to more and more beautiful surroundings, beautiful people, beautiful experience and events. Of course, that will happen only when we stop our self destructive operations.

Burn the IIT

Here is a view contradicting the Save the IIT post.

There will be a divide between the rich and the poor, one in power and commoners, the performers and non-performers. The performers join together to form a group and enhance their productivity. They start benefiting out of such a network. The more successful it is, more it attracts the outsiders. Pressure builds up on to the closed system and slowly they will have to join in more people. This starts diluting the system and this particular branded group will loose its charm and name.

Probably the core performers or similar set of people will start again from scratch and get into a new brand name. This will last till the next burst.

In a way, it is good for the performing good themselves. This mechanism provides a good cleansing means. A stagnant group will become stale and that itself will lead to destruction. Anything that can start fresh and build with new ideas will be more sophisticated and useful to the society as a whole.

Post your comments if you have different views.

Save the IIT

Today the court had agreed for quota in creamy colleges. There are pros and cons.

To me, it looks like this is not the way to bring social equality. For eg, let us say we want to bridge the gap between rich and poor, one yard stick could be to see that poor are able to enjoy the luxury of five star hotels. If a politician sees an opportunity in this whole deal, and he forces the hotel to open the door for the poor ... he may put hundreds of poor in the building but it is a short term benefit for all (except for the politician). It is a degradation to the hotel. In long run, the poor are going to end up in similar poor-ness state like they were before, just that now they are inside the building.

Here the point is not against getting the poor inside the hotel. It is about the process. Instead it has to be cultivated at the root level. See that there are abundance, prosperity, skill usage etc so that people can climb up on their own to excel. That would be a way to bring people up and match with the rich. A tedious, abstract, theoretical process, but that is the way to go.

Coming back to quota for education, it is nothing different from the above scenario. Weaker strata needs more infra structure to build their basic knowledge. Upon stepping onto the fundamental level, they will have to climb up and compete with all others. The purpose of creamy college is to provide environment to nurture supreme intelligence. That ought to be honored.

Check out Burn the IIT.

A day in the hotel

I got this from the comments section of http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/article3681312.ece

“WHILE WE were docked in Monaco, a guest left her hat in a taxi. She had no idea which taxi she had used. All she knew was that the driver had been listening to a football match on the radio. I contacted the radio station and asked them to make an appeal, in the hope that the driver was still listening. He was - and the hat was returned.” Gabor Szarvas, chief concierge, Crystal Cruises

Compare two properties files

I had two properties files and the parameter names were almost same in those two files. I had to go through them to find difference in the values. Searching for any utility didnt get a positive result. So, implemented the following logic.

Load both the file data into a hash map

(the param will be the key; we will end up having two hash maps)

for loop into sorted keys of first map

{

if (key exist in second map)
{

if
(firstMap.valueof(key) == secondMap.valueof(key))

{

key = firstMap.valueof(key) in both maps

}
else

{

key differs in the maps with firstMap.valueof(key)

and secondMap.valueof(key)

}

}

else

{

key exist only in first map

}

}

for loop into sorted keys of second map

{

if (key not exist in first map)

{

key exist only in second map

}

}

Food on-demand

This idea occurred while having lunch in a restaurant. What if I want a dish made out of a particular recipe? It would be nice if a restaurant promotes that idea. Food on-demand could work like this :

• I go to their website and place a recipe. I could give a url to a recipe or type in my own recipe.
• Restaurant reviews it and does a feasibility study. Return back to the requester with the cost estimate, date of availability etc
• Both the parties decide on a suitable date and time, may be an advance is paid to the restaurant for planning the work
• The person happily munches on the meal he wanted to have (probably the recipe out of his/her childhood memory). Optionally the person can leave a comment on the dish and level of satisfying his/her expectations.

Here is my list of items I would like to get it done in that way :

• There are so many tasty dishes made out of plantain flower. My wife avoids them due to the complexity involved in preparing them. Very rarely we get in restaurants. If we have 'On-demand food', I could pass a recipe like this.
• In Foster city area, I had tasted a potato pizza. (I think the restaurant name is Lake View). They did not use the potato wedges. Instead cut them into small cubes and slightly fried. It was very nice. From then on, whenever I have to order, I use to check for that pizza; unlucky me .. never ate that again. Few times, I tried convincing pizza restaurants to try that toppings and none dare to. They wanted to follow the direction they know.
• There are many dishes I had in my childhood. Today I don't have them, may be I don't get those materials around. Or I don't know where to get. Food on demand would address them.

Why did cave men draw?

Upon pondering about cave painting, questions arises on the purpose of such paintings.

Did they want to show case their bravery and valor?
Were they preparing a draft plan for their upcoming hunting season?
Or a dad teaching archery at the board room?
Just a bored guy scribbled something on the wall?
May be a lady showing off her man's capability ..
an encrypted message for the future gen???

Interesting thou.

LIC, wake up

Why are public service sucks? Is it for all or specially designed torture technics for me alone?
I had a loan from lic. After facing difficulty in managing the EMI and payment, I decided to close the loan. With lot of effort, I managed to pay lump sum in two batches. After that they mentioned that a request to close the loan ought to be raised and they would tell me the final settlement. I did the same and paid the last payment of 2k+. Relaxed a bit of closing a hefty loan. Next month came a surprise from lic; they were trying to use the cheques to collect further money. Upon failing to encash, they started adding up penalties.

Sick folks. Will definitely consider settling the issue thru consumer court.

Unidentifiable error

Came across an interesting error while starting with script.aculo.us A test code was working fine. I moved the same script to the real project code. Then the script started throwing error, 'undefined object'. Spent lot of time in comparing the test code and actual one. Couldn't find any issue.

Then placed few alert statements and narrowed down the issue by applying divide n conquer. What caught was this function :
function $(id){return document.getElementById(id)}

Seems like scriptaculous.js is using prototype.js and the later is defining a function with the same signature as above. After going thru the function defined in prototype.js, I found that to be sophisticated and served my requirement too. I commented my definition and the page flies through without error.

Moral : don't duplicate function names, it is going to be lot difficult to debug.

Languages and dialects

I was wondering why we have so many languages in the world. Some ancient, dead and few started recently, growing; some have written form and some dont ..

It is understandable if different languages spurn out at isolated geographical locations. However we see that many languages and dialects co-exist at a close region. One possibility could be that the people migrated and carried their language to an area where people had their own language.

There seems to be more to the story. Looks like socio-economic-political motives might have driven people to create languages. For eg, in a business environment, it is a great advantage for the salesperson to use some secret code words to discuss in front of the customer. Also, a language and a dialect could establish an identity of the customer and hence favor discounts.

Around the world, we are politically charged by emotions. We create artificial borders. These emotions are mainly based on faith or language.

In order to demark the dividing factors among human being, I would love to drop all languages and adapt a single universal language. When people start seeing language as a tool to communicate and not an emotional toy, then we may achieve this idealistic world.

Ladies finger fry

Here is my recipe for preparing deep fried ladies finger.



My wife had cut the vegetable, onions. She started with the initial ceremony of frying mustard and cummin seed in oil. Added onion and stirred them for some time. Once the onion turns light golden color, she put the pieces of ladies finger into the pan. She kept stirring and added little bit of salt, chili powder and garam masala. After mixing these, she stopped at this point.



I took over the control. Kept stirring further. Added some more garam masala for extra taste. While I was stirring this, my wife started shouting that I am spoiling the vegetable. You need to focus on the stove and the preparation. The vegetable and onion combination will become red (just like her face). Go little more so that it is light brownish green and tastes slightly crispy.



Ah, it is an wonderful dish. If you can get it right, your wife would envy about your culinary skills.

When matrimonial sites go down

We know that the successful matrimonial sites are minting money through all means. What happens to sites that are not so successful? Still they manage to pull enough traffic to their site. May be the same type of users may not login. The sites are creative to utilize their resources and spin off a totally new pages that amuses the new customers. What resources they have and how do they use? They got a bunch of photos from matrimonial profiles. Since the site doesn't need them anymore, they allow users to vote on those photos! Sample this

Seller's view

When the customers' needs are like this, salesperson perspective are very much aligned. While I was living in the city, I thought of preserving the cloth from insects and dampness. Had to buy some naphthalene for placing in the closet. The near by general store was handy and I approached the shopkeeper. He was in his twenties. He was not the owner, should be a relative of the owner.

I asked him for the naphthalene balls and he showed some local branded one. The white balls were neatly arranged in a plastic sheet and tightly wrapped. A piece of paper announced the local brand name. He was trying to push this piece to me. However, I wanted to compare the price of this packed one and loosely kept naphthalenes. They were placed inside a bottle and he had to weigh any amount I would like to get. That was 50% cheaper than the packed one. I am sure he will get a better deal by selling the packed one than the loose one.

He was trying his sales pitch for the packed one. He commented on the quality, intactness etc. However, I was not convinced that I should spend more money for providing better repellents for the insects. Finally I asked him to weigh the loose ones. He did that, put them into a small paper bag. He liked the smell of the naphthalene. While handling the bag to me, he asked, "what is the purpose of these?"!!!

Gadget for the railways

There is a nice neon board displayed inside the train compartments. The location of the train is constantly displayed. It is very useful to know the approaching station, the distance and the time etc.

It would be nice to extend this facility. How about having a personal alarm when desired station approaches? Like, we set our mobile phone with the city code. The display board keeps sending mobile recognizable signals for each approaching stations. If the station code is same as the one I had set in my mobile, my mobile will wake me with an alarm.

This system needs a download to install in the mobile and the announcement signal to reach the mobiles.

Just a thought occurred in between the sleeps.

Mil and dil

Had a chance to know a little bit about the mil and dil equilibrium. My wife prepared potato curry and while having it, she asked what is the better way of preparing the dish. As I know only my mom's way of making it, I suggested my wife to check with my mom.

Ah .. that was the trigger for 30 mins rainfall. All the incidents, events, discussions, dialogs that happened from prior marriage upto now .. that is about 2 yrs of packed drama replayed again at our living room. My wife gave her interpretation of the whole sequence and also as a complimentary, highlighted what could have been others' motive in the game.

That was quite an experience. Not that everything was bad in the 30 mins time. I gained something value. First is patience. And the other is a discovery of a hot button that shouldn't be pressed.

Bad dreams

It was a lazy, fine Sunday morning. One could feel the freshness, the slow change in color & hue, the chirping of the birds, silence of the morning. It was a nice morning, except for a bad dream I had minutes ago. Still didn't come out the dream+sleep state. I looked at my wife who was still at sleep and about to get up. Slowly I woke her up.

It is our habit of narrating each other's dream. I started telling about the dream where I was chased by a man. While running, I saw my wife shopping on the road side. I pulled her and started running with her.

While talking about this dream, suddenly my wife's face turned pale. She was frightened to the core. I asked her if she is fine; she still couldn't speak. I got a glass of water for her (rare moments). After sipping it she slowly gained herself and with a shaky voice asked, if that was a fruit stall where she was standing by. It was a shock for me! Yes, indeed it was. The dream was etched into my mind and quite clear to play back.

Now she continued the narration. We both ran couple of streets and found ourself surrounded by goons. Yeap, just like movie style. They were pulling out weapons and that is the time I woke up. My wife also got the same dream and woke up at the same point.

What a coincidence! Can there be a meaning to it? Is this a prophecy? To be on a safer side, we thought of not going out for few days, particularly towards the market area. Even then we couldn't come out of spooky incident. Googling gave few cases reported by people but none was authenticate.

Luckily we have a neighbor who is a psychoanalyst. She is our family friend and we move along well. We checked when she will be free and thought of talking out with her. Once we met, we both explained our experience and sounded our concern with such freaky dream. We could see a smile coming out of her. She apologized for what she was trying out. As part of her research, she was working on a alpha ray generator. The project aims at studying the ray's influence on dream. Seems like she can play a particular frequency through the player she has and expect people to react within the range. As the concept is still under study, she didn't reveal more. I asked about the side-effects and health hazards. So far no complains ...

While coming back, I requested her to play some romantic frequencies here after.

PS: this is my first attempt on a short story :-)

Refined RGB color grouping logic

As I mentioned earlier, I had to group colors. I wrote a simple logic where I put zeros in the last n number bits of each color pigment of each color pixel. This gave the required result, but gave distorted colors.
In the quest of minimizing the distorting, I arrived at a better calculation. The line of thought is:

• if we want to group colors together, we will have to mask the LSB bits of each color
• Masking can be either making those choosing last n bits as all zeros or all ones
• choosing either one of the above would lead to distortion
• Instead of fixing the bits towards 0s or 1s, I tried to find a uniform number that could be placed at the last n bit.
• This involves scanning all the red pigment of all the pixels. Add the last n bit values from these pixels and find average. Trim this average number to n bit size and paste this n bit at the end of all red pigment for all the pixel colors. Do this for green and blue as well.

After trying this approach, I got a better colors that were grouped together.

grouping the RGB colors

As I mentioned in the image handling utility, ChitraDeepam, I had to club colors together. The need arised due to the vast color range listed out of the given image; whereas the user was expecting to see few basic colors strikingly visible to human eye.

I was thinking about comparing the individual pigment of a particular color, (pigments => red, green, blue), and deciding which band of basic color it, (the given color), will fit into. However this was a complicated logic as we will end up into infinite comparison and may end up where we started.

A simpler logic occurred to me of masking the LSBs (least significant bits). User can have control over how many LSBs to mask. If I make those bits as zero, (for 3 of the pigment in each pixel color) then I am reducing the set of colors. This masking results in distortion of colors. As we are loosing few bits of data, we move from accurate image colors towards inaccurate colors.

Here is the code:

public Color trimColor(Color color, int accuracy)
{
// find the mask to be applied on color
int trimBar = (0xff << accuracy) & 0xff;

int red = color.getRed() & trimBar;
int green = color.getGreen() & trimBar;
int blue = color.getBlue() & trimBar;

return new Color(red, green, blue);
}

I am looking out for reducing the distortion and still achieving the color grouping. A friend had suggested to check with image processing utilities and libs. Seems like there are lots of possibilities for these minor features to have exists for ages. Let me go through.


Update: check the refined approach.

Programming in local language

A professor at medical college requested me to write a small image processing application. He wanted to analyze any image and identify various color concentration and different ratios. I pitched in a java code that would read the bmp file and go thru pixel colors, count the rgb values etc.

Since the apps is a home-made, free-lanced small utility, I had lots of flexibility in scribbling to my heart's content. While doing so, I wanted to have convenient names for the classes and variables. I started using Indian words in coining class names.

I had to handle each color element and count their occurrences, manipulate the colors etc. The holder for such activities was named Varna which is color in Samskritam. The opposite color fetching function is from this class.
All colors from the image was extracted into a big double dimensional array. The huge volume of such colors prompted me to label it as VarnaSagar, ocean of colors.
A portion of image was handled at a time. So, I had to have some container which fetched colors from the VarnaSagar and processed them. The name for such small container is VarnaKalasam, pot of colors.
Even the screens were not spared. Image displaying modules and panels were termed Chitram, means a picture. The controls that open up the image is called by Darshan .. something to show up or see.



Would you like to guess the utility name? It is ChitraDeepam. Deepam is shine or light or glow. In our context, ChitraDeepam is a tool that illuminates more info about any chitram or image.


It was a nice experience to go thru in writing this utility. Using familiar names or related words made a lot of difference. It improved the way we conceptualize the problem domain. It also shows how powerful over native languages play even at a computer language level.

I remember few concepts I couldn't understand mainly because of the name. For eg, facet is one such topic. I never took time to understand the meaning of this word. Due to that I couldn't fully understand the topic, thou I attempted reading it couple of times. If I had known the meaning of the word, probably I might have been able to understand faster.

Anyway, here is the screen shot of the tool I wrote.

Customer needs

It was sunny morning. I was gazing at the empty road and watching petti activity happening at the small shop across the road. A tempo with tender coconut was unloading the coconuts into the shop. A driver and a teen age boy were handling the stuff and the shopkeeper was over-looking the download.

As the coconut looked fresh and nice, I thought of having one. Went to the shop, checked the price, and picked up a good one. Asked the boy if this one was tender and juicy, he affirmed. Sure, it was nice to drink.

The guys were done with their work and about to leave. The boy asked the shopkeeper, "Do you have Pepsi?"

Opposite color in the RGB palette

Recently I was working with a simple java code handling some colors. I had to display all the colors available in an image. I displayed the colors in the background and mentioned the color number as foreground. So, I got a beautiful rainbow of colors. The issue I faced is, to find the right foreground color for each item. I cannot fix a single color as the visibility will be affected when the background and foreground colors are same or similar.

Here I came across an interesting idea from the net, where the individual r,g,b components are bit-wise operated. Each of these three component numbers (ranging from 0 to 255) are toggled bitwise. A new color is formed and that will be complimentary to the original color.

This is what I wrote :


public static Color findOppositeColor(Color color)
{
if (color == null) return null;
int red = color.getRed();
red = findOppositeNumber(red);
int green = color.getGreen();
green = findOppositeNumber(green);
int blue = color.getBlue();
blue = findOppositeNumber(blue);
return new Color(red, green, blue);
}

public static int findOppositeNumber(int num)
{
// toggle the msb
return (num ^ 0x80) & 0xff;
}

Note: earlier I thought xoring all the bits is required, however I found that color #808080 failed to find the true opposite color as the xoring 0xff would return #7f7f7f, which is next color. Hence I had changed the logic to toggle only the most-significant-bit.