Category: Trivia

There are hazaar brilliant ads but occasionally you hit into something which you really like. While I dont hate the ones which try to play around your emotions (by showing a impoverished child for example) but they dont sort of click.

I just found this in my mail box and I tremendously liked it. It gives such a big + spin to Adoption without adding any angle of charity to it. Brilliant. I dont know who conceived this but if you know then let me know. Great work.

Title: Encourage Adoption
Headline: Adopt. You never know who you’ll bring home

It all started with Google Image Search. It was so easy for me to tell my 3 year old about any animal, any bird, any plant, in fact almost any thing by doing a image search at Google Image Search. As with many things, fad ended after a while. From Google Image Search, we moved to youtube.com since we can pull any music video on demand. My home wireless is good enough to let us watch a song video with not too many buffering-buffering distractions. This carried on for some time and like many things, it also stopped happening. Though we still use youtube, to show her, her own videos and to show her videos to other people.

While all this was happening, we also happened to browse through some of the other sites which plays kids’ jingles and poems and have lots of lessons around primary English, Alphabets, Counting etc. Most of these were forgotten as quickly as we have learned about them.

So amid all this, my wife hit on to a site which we have been using till now. I realized this today morning that I have probably been here for last 1 year, I think more. And my 3 year old, loves it. So I thought that it makes sense to share the link with fellow internet-enabled young parents.

This site is called ‘Starfall’ and is at www.starfall.com. The home page is not really new-age design but very clear and not cluttered with million things. When you choose any lesson, you are taken to a small Adobe Flash based program which is interactive and is much more richer (music, sound, videos, animation etc). I am mostly on Mozilla but I would think that this would work on IE and Safari, on the assumption that Flash programs are pretty much browser agnostic.

I really like the ‘Alphabet’ section since all the 26 letters are shows in big sizes and when one chooses one of them, you see pictures and sounds of animals/object with that letter. There are also some interesting exercises like ‘Make the Match’.

I guess, I would close here. If you do go there and like it then let me know, write a small comment.

Most of us have grown up writing programs in C, it was usually Turbo-C or Ansi-C . There used to be black background editors which looked very primitive and most of them wont distinguish a keyword from a variable, we were supposed to compile them to find errors. Its not entirely true that all were using these editors, some of us also used the iconic and cult vi editor, an editor which is more like a rocket-controlled control panel with every conceivable operation possible through a weird combination of keys. Some of us would master the most common and flaunt our prowess but none of those prowess would ever make you a good programmer. Of course, we didn’t know that.

Later you started to have better editors and then IDE viz. ‘Integrated Development Environment’. An IDE is a software which makes it easy for you to create a complex project, having many source (say .c or .cpp) files, headers, libraries and so on. These IDE also usually have a very advanced editor which helps you in writing a program. So if you are writing a .cpp program and you are looking for arguments for a standard function like strcpy() which is defined in strings.h then you wont have to do much, just write the function and you would get options to choose from. Right while you are typing. They also help you in distinguishing language keywords like while/for/if for C from user defined variables, like int i.
Continue reading “How to pick a good IDE when you begin programming in C”

Finally, Airtel and Vodafone announced the availability of iPhone in India. Just like lots of wannabes I was also waiting for this. I work for a IT company and its not uncommon to find colleagues who are traveling to US for work.

About 3 months back, two persons (Ram and Krishna – yeah, the gods)in my own project bought an iPhone for them. It cost USD 440 to them and it was fairly easy to have them work with our local GSM cards. All was well. I had almost made my mind to buy them and asked one of my friends (Manish) to bring it with him. He was visiting Desh. The friend, a great money minder, thought that buying a iPhone at USD 440 is a bad idea and prices would come down. Also in terms of technology, features its not a great buy.

So, I deferred the decision. After a while iPhone supplies went low and everyone knew that Apple would release a new one , a better technology and a lower price. All this happened. iPhone 3G was launched and you can get it at USD 200 and then you have to pay more for getting the service. As of now it costs around USD 500 in America (I might not be updated here, it might be for less).

Our local boys announced that they would launch it soon and on being asked on the price, they played silent.

Finally it was announced yesterday and boy, at RS 31000 its a steal. I mean it only makes sense to use a iPhone if you can managed to steal it. I dont know whether its Apple who is making money or its Mr. Bharti or Mr. Vodafone but its definitely a high high price for a gadget like iPhone.

I do not plan to buy it any more. A price like INR 15000 is a better price. If you want to lock your customer then have him upfront pay somthing like Rs 10000 and then adjust that against his monthly bill but at Rs 31 K, its a straight case of fleece.

I am sure there are people out there who would have this kind of money to blow it here but I dont see iPhone getting the success it got in US. By the way, today morning my friend Sudhir sent me a mail citing some of the reasons for not buying iPhone. Incase it matter here is the list

1. You can only sync music and video through iTunes. Want to drag-and-drop content from your hard-drive? Would like to sync music from another store — from Amazon, for example? You are out of luck.

2. You can only install apps through iTunes. Never before has a cellphone maker slammed the door to an open development enviornment and received nothing but praise for doing so. Imagine Microsoft creating a gated software ecosystem and installing themselves as the gatekeeper. They would be eaten alive by the press. Apple gets a free pass.

3. Apple deletes useful applications. Nullriver’s modem app went to the grave with no reason stated. Apple’s digital business is dependent on the music and movie industry’s whims. How long before the industry dictates which applications we can run?

4. Apple might not accept apps which might be detrimental to its own business. We won’t hold our breath for competitive products to appear on the iPhone anytime soon.

5. You can only run one third-party application at a time. An instant messenger that runs in the background and collects messages while you are away? Not happening.

6. Apple might not allow app vendors to open up their apps. The terms of the NDA that potential application developers for the iPhone need to sign, effectively restrict redistribution of the source. Apple has created OSX on the back of FreeBSD; Safari on KHTML, SproutCore library used in MobileMe, and now they have built a layer on top that excludes others. Nik at TechCrunchIT laments that “the same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope… Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?”

7. Limited Bluetooth use. The iPhone 3G has Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR but can you transfer files over Bluetooth? Does it support A2DP? Stereo Bluetooth? No on all counts. As of now, all you get from Bluetooth are headset voice calls, and that’s it.

8. No copy-paste. This might be more of an interface issue that Apple is seeking to solve, than anything else. But it only underlines the drawbacks of a walled garden. If development was as open as say, it is on the Palm platform — you would have a hundred different solutions by now, and at least one you could actually use. This also underlines how much the innovative spirit is killed by a controlled development environment. The iPhone ecosystem doesn’t encourage software tinkering and probably won’t spur garage breakthroughs that drive the industry forward.

9. No MMS. While you can e-mail photos, multimedia messaging is absent from the device. And speaking of videos…

10. No video recording. In the world of YouTube, the iPhone 3G does not offer video recording.

11. No voice command. For a touch-screen-only phone, voice controls would have been a huge plus for hands-free or one-handed control. Can we expect this functionality to be added by a third-party app?

12. Hardware locked to carriers. You cannot use any SIM card with this GSM device. How stupid is that? Hello monopolies, goodbye competition. Thanks to carrier lock-in when the phone launches in India, the iPhone 3G might not even enjoy 3G until months afterwards. How do you like them apples?

Sorry Airtel, Sorry Vodafone, you guys disappoint modern India. Either you are trying to make some money by selling handset which you didn’t create or you are letting Apple make money through us which you can easily handle, after all building these millions of telecom users should actually mean that we should be getting things for lesser price then otherwise.

I think my wife is right when she says that Pihu is a attention seeker like me. For last many many years, I try to change my look by sporting a new hair cut or a new beard cut. It may be difficult to believe but in 2000, for 3-4 days I used to shave just on one side of my face and that left a little stub on the other side, not strong enough to notice from a distance but if you are in a conversations with me then the beard on on of the sides were pretty conspicuous by its absence.

This is nothing big to feel about, I think people like me just try to flaunt too much. Probably we live with some complex which makes us do this minor crazy things.

My current look is a very clean and tidy military man look, though I am sure I fail in terms of muscle and brawn but here it is.

This is a self shot pic so haven’t come out well but you get the idea. Not long back, I had long hairs, long enough to tie. My saloon guys tells me that I am losing hair and I need to get careful, put more oil, do a steam etc. Very soon I would be on the wrong side of thirties and time to get into action.