Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

Well IPL is finally there. It has all the common ingredients required for a bollywood blockbuster. It has the best of bollywood stars Shahrukh Khan and the lovely Priety Zinta. There are a lot of financial muscle behind it too. You have best of the class cricketers who were auctioned off just like some antique. Some getting a price beyond expectations and some just getting selected. The current controversy in Australia has anything to go by then we can expect fireworks in IPL. Just like WWF you have two men engaged in a personal fight initially and then getting onto the ring. I dont expect anything else out of IPL. I think these guys should do some more preparation to make a Rocky kind of atmosphere. The underdog will go down in the first round and then spring back to end the game in a win. There would be mics everywhere to record what any of the player says on or off the ground. 24hr Reality TV format would be even better. All this would surely add to the entertainment value. Viewer w...

I have been a big fan of Google Reader even since it was launched. Its a cool application for news reading if you really love the gmail interface. Anyways some time back Google guys updated it. And from then I can see this awesome bug(Click on the image to see full sized one). Well actually what happened was that I had left google reader open for some time. Later when I came and finished what all was there and marking the uninteresting ones as read, I saw this popup. I had some 39 items only open(Look at the text bound by green lines at the bottom right of the image) but when I said Mark All as Read, I wanted to mark all 557 item(Not in the pane but updated ones) as read.Boy I got frustrated at this point. But I said Cancel, Refreshed the whole page and went through all those news which I did not find interesting enough to read. Finally I did Mark All as Read. Later I realised that even if I had done OK instead of Cancel, it would have worked and only those 39 items would have had b...

The First Innovation Camp or iCamp Bangalore for short happened in Bangalore on 23rd Feb 2008 at Mindtree Consultings office at Banashankari. Here is how it unfurled to me. 09:30hrs := Registered and I am in 10:00hrs := I am in the room for intro of Barcamp Concept, given by Murali. Some rules etc. A lot less ppl compared to my expectations and NO WI-FI to connect to :-( 10:13hrs := Henry Jacob start with design driven development. Surely its true for IT Industry, Innovate or Die. (SCO, Sybase etc are examples of that) Some interesting concept for Design Foundation,  Games and Cube. Key points Innovate to hasten, eliminate jobs,  A god system should eliminate existing tasks, speed up tasks, save money, time and make ppl fall in love. Hot discussion on whats innovation and what design is on. I believe he was going on a good track and like many other presentations at Barcamp this too got lost somewhere. 10:40hrs := now we come to some conclusion. Basically it is clear ...

Well it all started with a small revolution called Mobile Monday, Bangalore . It was an initiative of some minds behind the mobile technology in Bangalore(Keshav, S R Raja, Rajan & Rajiv). It was actually a success. The reason behind the success of the Mobile Monday has been its unique concept. The community meets every 3rd Monday of the month. They have a set agenda and people with passion. So much so that many communities in Bangalore are planning to adopt a similar approach. Like all good things he success of this has lead into a next step, which make use of Saturday. Now what rhymes best with Saturday, well one of thing is Startup. So here we have Startup Saturday . An interesting concept building momentum. What I expect next is the following, Testers Tuesday, Web Wednesday, UX Thursdays, FOSS Friday, Startup Saturday and finally Sleepy Sunday. Guys at least Sunday deserves a break :-) Anyways I dont see this thing not materializing. For a very simple reason, the community ...

There is surely something about Barcamp Bangalore. It keeps on changing. The people driving it are always changing. Newer ideas keep pouring in. Discussion on those keep on happening. There are people who are always whining about things that are not right in Barcamp. Well the only thing I can say after meeting the guys working behind Barcamp Bangalore is that they are very open to ideas. But then some people are always there to complain. Probably thats a property(I am getting geeky nowadays) we inherit as Indians? That question mark is there because I am not sure. But the fact remains we have people coming in who are there because they like this kind of an event. They have an idea on how it should be done. So whats new in this barcamp? well as I read from the mail Akash to BCB Mailing list, the Barcamp Bangalore wiki is open for all. There are no registrations. Only way you can register is by either being a speaker, volunteer or letting other know in specific, what u want to know abo...

Well this was one thing that I had thought a lot about. In college when I was totally unaware of the alpha blending technology. So I wondered how the ppl would have had got hold of it. I had this weird idea of having a pixel taken from background and using that to make us believe that its semi-transparent. When I learned about Alpha Blending I thought my idea was really childish. I should have thought beyond. Then came the question of how to make the splash screen transparent. Well as many of u might be knowing, splash screens are bmp images by default. You cannot have any special effect using them. But then I had an idea, how about taking a snapshot of the current screen and then generating a splash bmp giving a nice semi-transparency. This was one among the many ideas that bumped by head at some point of time.  Coming back to today. We all must have used the Windows Live Writer or other applications. If u havnt then give them a try. This application has a nice splash screen wh...

Well as I have been observing Camps happening all the time. Its like they are happening dime a dozen. We had Barcamp Bangalore. DCamp Bangalore was introduced later. Kamp was one more even to add to the list. Then suddenly some techies join forces for Devcamp . Now I see iCamp (Innovation Camp) in sight. Cool stuff happening. But then isn't it a little too much. Actually to come to think of it. Most of those are in their first inning. I wish they go into their centennial editions. Infact India need more of these camps. The camp phenomenon has hit the Kashmir Valley too. So the fever is finally catching on. I really loved the discussion at Devcamp which talked about a lot things. Most make no sense to me but some did. I am sure there were other who took home more than what I did. I heard there is this OSSCamp which also happens regularly in Delhi atleast. So its clear that Barcamp fever has gripped India big time. So what next. Well next step is converting this mo...

In the list of those seriously stupid researchers we have one more. These guys are saying that smart people are more likely to have alcohol related problem. So how is that. Well they offer a rather simple explanation. Well the smarter the guy, more money he will have. All humans get stressed equally. So the rich guys have more money to spend on alcohol and hence more the problem. What a stupid research once more. Let me make one of my own . Ok here it is. All smart people die of unnatural causes of death. Well they are all rich. They all love fast cars. So when they drive is real fast, they sometimes end up in a fatal crash. So they dies a lot earlier than any person who is stupid and does not own a car. Serious Crap....

Well its been almost one and half year and I have been able to blog for this long. Its nothing short of a miracle. But I am not sure how many people read this blog. But one thing is sure, I dont care. Why the hell should I care. I write not for money, not for fame. But for myself. I write because this is the only way to let my thoughts out. I remember, I used to keep one book when I was in school. My friends still remember that and keep comparing my blog to that. It does sound good that I am able to continue the hobby that I had in my childhood, may be in a different way. As a mark towards my 100th post I switched to a new theme Semipro-II . Some of my favorites, in no particular order, from the last 99 ones are here. http://the100rabh.blogspot.com/2006/09/wah-re-bande-vande-matram.html http://the100rabh.blogspot.com/2007/01/jai-ho-reservation.html http://the100rabh.blogspot.com/2007/02/art-and-culture-of-salesmanship.html http://the100rabh.blogspot.com/2007/07/wanna-learn-from...

Devamp Bangalore happened yesterday and I was there to witness the event. It was a real cool place to be in first place. A real gathering of geeks. You could hear people talking passionately about the semantic web, AIR, mobile technologies, JSON and many others. You could see ppl blogging or working with their laptop. It turned out to be a wonderful event. I had shortlisted 5 sessions to watch out for, and I am happy that out of those 2 were really cool, Microformats and Semantic Web and Clutter. Microformats and Semantic Web talked about poshzone, which is an acronym for Plain Old Simple HTML zone. More details here . Clutter is a new Library which is a wrapper around OpenGL and OpenGL ES. It allows you to do the same cool stuff with a lot smaller code that you could achieve by coding endlessly in OpenGL. Its a new thing which is coming up and we should collaborate and work on developing it further. The best part is that it can run on the mobile platforms as well. Another cool t...

Devcamp Bangalore is another attempt to have a good unconference style developers conference. But I feel its been plagued by several issues. I am writing it today because I did not want to generate negative publicity around an event which could have been one of the bridges for moving of Indians from coding coolies to tech giants. Still there were certain things which made me doubtful of the motive of the event. I am post now about it because there are only a few hours left for the event to start and I am going to attend it. But these are something which the organizers on their part must make sure does not happen. First thing is, probably this event was there because Martin Fowler was coming to Bangalore. He is being treated as the chief guest. His topic too is yet to be decided. In true Barcamp spirit, this does not happen. I dont know if Martin Fowler is driving this camp or the campers themselves. The event homepage at one point of time had link to a post by a gentleman who had ...

One my friend Saiyed pointed out to me something amazing at click.in. It was a used toothbrush which has been put up in classified. Rest you can see and laugh. Here is the link http://bangalore.click.in/classified/for-sale/household-appliances/238985/used-toothbrush-execellent-working-condition.html . Enjoy and have fun. If possible do reply to this guy

I just read this amazing research which says Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn't save money Here is the story on Wired . Le me quote the article "It was a small surprise," said Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who led the study. "But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more." Some more interesting lines "Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don't survive very long," van Baal said. "But if they are old enough to get Alzheimer's one day, they may survive longer and cost more." The ultimate suggestion "We are not recommending that governments stop trying to prevent obesity," van Baal said. "But they should do it for the right reasons." Stupid fellow. He was surprised. What the hell. Well if you are a smoker or an obese you defini...

It seems like the Indian judges have got a new sense of humor. As long it had only been speculated by humorists that Court will send notices to the Gods. But a court in Dhanbad has done it . Seems like really no one is above the law. Lets see if 'Kaanoon ke haath, kitne lambe hai'(how long is hand of law). Can it bring the Gods to court? Great going India. Now look who is making a mockery of law.