Sharath M Srinivasan

ACM Bangalore Tech Quiz 2010

2010-01-24T16:22:00.021+05:30

I had the incredible opportunity and privilege to conduct the 2010 ACM Bangalore Tech Quiz yesterday (thanks Amit!). We had atleast 40 teams taking part in the prelims and 5 were chosen for the finals. I was also pleasantly surprised to see some of the top quizzers in the country take part in this quiz, including a few familiar faces from the good ol' RV Quiz Corp. So, here are the questions from the quiz. Do take a stab at these and try not to kill the fun by googling for the answers. Please do not post answers as comments as well. Instead, mail your answers to sharathms [at] gmail.com

ACM Tech Quiz 2010 - Prelims

ACM Tech Quiz 2010 - Finals [Click Full Screen below]

Results:
1st - Mitesh Agarwal & R.Jayakanthan
2nd - Shreyas S & Vikas Gorur Prasad

At the end of the day, the winners walked away with a cool cash prize of 25k and 15k.

Phew, I finally got to grab some much needed sleep after hashing up questions over a few sleepless nights :O Also a special mention to my old quizzing buddy Aneesh P Tarun for a few questions.

P.S: I just noticed that its been over a year since my last post and I'm hoping to average much more than that :D Thanks for staying subscribed!

Disclaimer: This post is for entertainment purposes only and represents only my views and not that of my employer or anyone else.

AskBob | Hacks from the past | Building your own search engine

2009-01-21T02:22:00.008+05:30

Back in 2006, Sunil and i were just 2 days away from our code submission deadline at college. We had no code to submit. so, what do you do? hack of course! We decided to quick-hack a web search engine; you know, something that "looks like G", something that works (just), but definitely not industrial :) we had already zeroed in on lucene for an inverted index. so, the larger chunk of code was the crawler itself, which fed stuff to lucene from all over the web. If you like building crawlers that would like to stretch its legs, mercator is a good place to start reading. Anyhoo, this is how AskBob ended up looking after 2 nights of messing around in C#. i dusted off my old source tree today and let AskBob loose for about 20 minutes.

So, what went into AskBob?

For a start, there is a seed list of links using which pages are fetched; a parser gets meaningful text and links within those pages and you know the drill: lather|rinse|repeat. view the web as one infinitely large graph and traverse it (forever?). you'd have to be careful from where you start, as you can heavily bias your search results. GDirectory is a good place to start though. Once you start building the crawler, you'll run into all sorts of problems. We had to take care of broken HTML (we did, sort of), filter out broken and invalid links, make sure not to run into an already visited page. We actually had multiple lucene indexes to do some of this stuff. And then there is the whole "do no evil" policy where you have to respect the robots exclusion protocol, not hit the same server hard and many more little things like these.

Some numbers:

When we talk about search engines, we usually talk really big numbers like billions of pages, millions of hits and a kazillion other things. But for two clueless guys with commodity hardware and a 256kbps "broadband" connection, we'll see much smaller numbers here. And, this is not the right way of doing any kind of benchmarking for sure :D. By limiting our threadpool to around 6 threads on a (now) 6 year old laptop, we were able to roughly index 70~100 pages per minute. As this is largely an IO bound operation, getting the threads to crawl at an optimum rate was quite a pain; and hence the limit of 6 threads. What was amazing was the number of URLs that were being parsed and queued for further crawling. In around 20 minutes of crawling, you see almost 100000 URLs extracted from the pages visited earlier. And, all of this text cannot be stored in memory. This is where your on-disk and in-memory data structures matter and can significantly affect how your crawler can perform. The sheer volume of data generated is a joy to watch though.

What else should have gone into AskBob, but didn't?

Here are a few things that immediately come to my mind. But there are many more things you'll need if you want to host your own search engine out for public consumption.

Ranking - lucene does not implement a "page ranking" mechanism. i think it implements ranking largely based on the word frequency within the document rather than measuring things like the number of incoming links to a page, etc. looking back, implementing a basic backlink count based mechanism is fairly easy to implement. but we never got about doing it.

Sitemaps - Sitemaps.org offers a fabulous solution for dealing with issues like the frequency of visiting a page for updates and the importance of certain pages over the others within a site.

Document similarity - This is a tricky problem. There is no easy way of telling if two different URLs point to the same page, or if they have similar content. Sunil tells me that Shingling is a good way to measure some of this stuff.

Why call it "AskBob"

Back then, in our circle of friends, tHacker started using the word "Bob" instead of "Dude". It caught on pretty well i must say. So, "AskBob" seemed cool enough a name for a search engine :)

This was a post that i wanted to write for quite sometime now, but never got around doing it, until i stumbled upon this.

Disclaimer: This post is for entertainment purposes only and represents only my views and not that of my employer or anyone else.

Weekend trek blues

2008-01-23T01:33:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/2000 sec
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 50

Shot during a weekend trek to Bilikal Rangaswamy Betta, which is about 40kms from Bangalore on the way to Kanakapura. More info about this place here. It's a good idea to leave early in the morning to catch some stunning scenes on the way. Experienced trekkers can climb this mountain in about an hour, but pizza eating souls like me take double the time :) There isn't much to do up there other than stare at the horizon :)

EXIF
Camera: Minolta XG-M (35mm Film SLR)
Lens: Minolta 28mm (Wide Angle)
Exposure: 1/200 sec
Aperture: f/22
Film ISO: 200

If you did notice, this was shot with a (really old) Minolta film SLR. This camera is almost of my age! Yet somehow, it is so much better than my digital S2-IS, just like the way 20 year old Maruti 800s are better than the new ones. The shutter release sound is very sweet and solid. Your thoughts?

(P.S: The picture here, is a mere scanned copy of the photo itself and thus isn't of great quality. The person in the picture is my dear friend Chetan, who is a superman trekker. Thanks UG!)

Bee Eater In flight

2008-01-17T23:17:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/1000 sec
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 50

Happy New Year! And, thanks for staying subscribed :) Lots more shots are on their way. Let me know what you think of this shot. Meanwhile, i've started shooting with a (pretty old) Minolta SLR for kicks. Its raw and awesome. Once in a while, it hits back at me, which can be quite painful :D Makes me think a bit more before i hit the button.

Update: My cousins Vijay (Nikon D200) and Vikram (Olympus SP510UZ) have started posting their shots on flickr. Do take a look at their awesome shots. I'm now in a bizarre situation where i've begun to identify people with the cameras/lenses they have. The ones who don't have generate a segfault ;)

Update: Amit Mishra tells me that this is not a Kingfisher, but a Bee Eater.

Cattitude!

2007-08-05T02:00:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/60 sec
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO: 50
Flash: Fired

I don't use the flash often, but this is one of those instances where it actually helped. Btw, do you like cats?

P.S: http://www.sharathms.com now redirects to this blog. You can also contact me on mail[at]sharathms.com.

Tricks of the trade

2007-05-03T23:59:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/10 sec
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO: 50

A black smith [hidden, behind the fire] shows his son the tricks of the trade. The kid was just scared to sit there and handle all that fire.

You know, this kid should be doing what every other (lucky + rich) kid does i.e. go to school and learn. Let's hope that the OLPC project or the "Hole in the wall" project would help this kid someday. I suggest you watch these two very interesting videos: OLPC Video, HITW Video. I love Prof. Negroponte's attitude when it comes to critics who say that the OLPC project wouldn't work.

Close encounters of the scary kind

2007-04-21T01:15:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 15 sec
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 100
Post-Processing: Superimpose

Loads of rain + creepy cold wind + a shaky umbrella + a camera lens that is constantly mucked up by rain +
(worst of all) the fear of being struck by lightning + the urge to get atleast one decent capture (phew!), is what took me to shoot this picture. After all the clicking was done, it was time for the previews. They looked great in the camera (They always do. Never trust your camera LCD). "The tripod + long exposure trick did work very well," or so i thought.

I packed up my stuff, went back into my room and plugged in my camera to my machine, and i said to myself "Crap! i should've used ISO50 instead of 100". I gave the s2-IS one chance by shooting at higher sensitivity, and it let me down by adding all that noise. Have you experienced noise at ISO-100 (or below) with the S2/S3-IS? Let me know. Don't get me wrong though. I do think that the S2-IS is one of the best Non-DSLRs out there.

Also, let me know if this shot is good enough to be your wallpaper ;)

Can you feel the pain?

2007-04-13T00:21:00.001+05:30

A mahout's remote control in action. One day, this elephant will loose its patience ... and the rest as they say, *will* be history.

(~R)GB

2007-03-01T20:48:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/200 sec
Aperture: f/8

For lack of a better title ... *cough*

Abby again

2007-02-16T20:06:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/6 sec
Aperture: f/8

Another shot of the Abby waterfall in Coorg from my earlier trip. Capturing flowing water with a slight over-exposure makes the water appear "silky". There might be a better crop for this shot, but i decided against it :)

Aero India Revisited

2007-02-12T17:13:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/320 sec
Aperture: f/5

This is the fourth time i've been to Aero India here in Bangalore. Frankly, i won't be visiting Aero India again. It's the same old show again and again with only a couple more aircrafts being thrown in [F16 and F/A18 this time around]. The organizers need to create a bigger show. If somebody is listening, next time, can we have some flares please? I'm not asking for a missile show, but atleast flares must be possible. Actually, *any* fireworks will do. Just flying around will not do. Or, am i asking for too much? But, it was a delight to see our IAF pilots push the Sukhoi-30. All these years though, it has been the Russians showing us who's boss.

Namdroling Golden Temple

2007-01-15T02:33:00.001+05:30

On our way to Madikeri, we noticed a *lot* of Buddhist monks. We saw a few of them at Abby too. When we spoke to a hotelier about interesting places surrounding Madikeri, he mentioned this Tibetan monastery/temple called Namdroling, which is a few kilometers off Byalakuppe. That's when the "aah" factor set in and we decided to visit the temple on our way back to Bangalore. When we got there, we saw that the Tibetans outnumbered everyone else. They were everywhere, even employed in the local petrol bunk! And then after driving further, we found the reason.

The golden temple is stunningly beautiful. It made me stand and stare at it for a few minutes, instead of clicking away with my S2IS. The inside is equally stunning.

So, the next time you visit Madikeri, make sure you spend enough time here. I bet you'll want to come back often to this place :) And, if you are a photographer who loves to shoot birds, visit the temple during sunset and carry those big tele-lenses and multipliers with you :) Now, i want one of those!

Abby Falls

2007-01-10T02:16:00.001+05:30

The route to Abby is short [8kms from Madikeri], but very narrow and even congested at times, given that it is a pretty popular place. Now, Abby is a great place to shoot photographs. There is even a suspension bridge across the river, so that folks can enjoy the view. But, make sure you carry a tripod along with you for those long exposure shots. I am glad i took mine :)

I also met a gentleman from Bangalore who had a great DSLR [EOS 350D], but didn't carry a tripod. After some photography related chit-chat with the gentleman and going nuts trying to get the "perfect shot", i left the place. For me though, the urge to upgrade to a DSLR is growing by the day. Maybe someday ...

A dash to Coorg

2007-01-08T02:25:00.001+05:30

On New Year's eve, i received a call from my uncle who said: "Hey, how about a one-day-trip to Coorg? We can be back in Bangalore on the same day if we leave early." I still had two more exams to go. But then, it didn't matter much and i jumped and said "only if you let me drive!". So, we left Bangalore at 3.30AM and reached Mysore by 5! There wasn't a soul to be seen on the Bangalore-Mysore road and it was a great pleasure to drive. We took the Bangalore-Mysore-Hunsur-Byalakuppe-Madikeri route and it took us about 4.5 hours to get there. The scene en route to Coorg is very beautiful early in the morning and also a lot more different than later in the day. It made me stop and click several times during the drive, which also happened to bore my uncle beyond belief. But, we were glad about leaving Bangalore early in the morning. Here are a few of the snaps that i shot on the way to Coorg. Watch out for more photos in the next post.

P.S: What do you think about my new blog template? I changed it so that i would get some real-estate for posting larger sized photos. Template organization and editing is much better in the new Blogger, mostly because of Blogger's section and widget tags and some good old CSS. I started off with the 'Simple' template and after fiddling around for quite some time, i got this design up and running.

Happy new year!

2006-12-31T19:11:00.001+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/320 sec
Aperture: f/2.7

Here's wishing a very happy new year to all the readers of my blog. I hope to bring you better photographs during 2007. Do keep coming back for more :-)

P.S: I recently migrated to the new Blogger (the one that was in beta for some time). If you are using Windows Live Writer for posting, then you need to tweak it to get it running with the new Blogger. You can find those tweaks here.

P.P.S: Also, I added Snap Preview Anywhere to this blog. Now, couple the idea of live thumbnails with search engine results and it would rock! That's what the people at Snap have done :-)

P.P.P.P.P.P.S!: BSNL has already started to offer high bandwidth connectivity (free upgrade on dataone) and its freaking awesome! I am downloading stuff at almost 2mbps right now! That's a great new year's gift! Thank you BSNL.

Inquisitive

2006-12-17T19:32:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/125 sec
Aperture: f/5
ISO: Auto

Isn't it? Yes, this is the same bird as the one in my earlier post.

What's cookin' doc?

2006-12-07T22:53:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 5 sec
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO: 50

Bugs: "eee .... what's cookin' doc?"
Elmer: "wabbit stew"

Out of focus

2006-11-24T00:28:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/50 sec
Aperture: f/2.7
ISO: Auto

I love the variety of colours in this picture. The objects that are out of focus in this shot are a set of light bulbs in an auditorium. The light bulbs in this huge audi are almost 100 feet above the ground! To get such an effect, we need to focus right in front of the lens and have a very shallow depth-of-field. Note to self: Always clean the lens before shooting a super-macro.

More shots taken this week:

Lesson learnt on Day-1

2006-11-09T17:51:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/50 sec
Aperture: f/2.7
ISO: Auto

This was one of the very first photos that i shot with my (then) "shiny-new" S2-IS. I had read *lots* of reviews on handling the S2-IS and other lessons online before i got my camera. But, when i finally got it and loaded it up with the cells, everything that i had read before went straight into the garbage. So, all my pre-purchase thoughts which went like "i'll only use the manual mode to shoot" wasn't working and i had to revert back to one of the preset modes. After i shot this sunflower and saw the preview on the small-screen, i thought i finally got a good one. It turned out that the depth-of-field was very shallow and hence the focus wasn't quite right. Crap! Lesson learnt on day1 - Always take several shots of the same object.

Happy Diwali!

2006-10-20T23:57:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 3.2 sec
Aperture: f/8.0
ISO: Auto

Wish you all a very happy Diwali! Click here for more of my Diwali snaps.

At first, i thought it is going to be easy to shoot fireworks. But boy, i was very wrong on this one. When i started shooting, i realised that using long exposure was the best way to go. So, the rule book says that if you use long exposure, good results can be achieved by mounting the camera on a tripod which prevents camera shake. I do have a tripod and "tried" shooting a few snaps. But then, fireworks keep going off all around you and it becomes extremely difficult to focus on the light with the right amount of zoom within very little time. Finally, i had no choice but to hold the camera in my hand and give it a go. I guess a few of the shots turned out to be decent enough. I've put up the same on my flickr account.

Also, the S2-IS has a preset mode for shooting fireworks. But i generally dislike shooting in preset modes and always like to go manual.

Buffalo Run

2006-10-15T23:45:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1 sec
Aperture: f/8.0
ISO: Auto

The rains affect everyone; from the farmers in rural India, to the commuters in the cities who run around wearing plastic carry bags on their heads. In the city, dogs and other small animals seek shelter beneath cars and other places during the rains, but big ones like the buffalo in this picture, just run around with nowhere to go.

P.S: Also check out "The Eye".

"Mile Sur Mera Tumhara" Original Video

2006-10-08T22:40:00.000+05:30

... is now available at youtube :) How could i miss the obvious? So, the search finally ends :)

New Blog Header

2006-10-04T23:52:00.000+05:30

This blog needed a refresh. I was too lazy to change the template and i guess changing the header image gives it the much needed change in looks :-) I made it up with one of my photographs. So, what do you think? And yes, i still support Ferrari in the F1 championships and Enzo Ferrari is still my favourite car :-) Also, we had been to Hyderabad and Sunil has written lots about the visit.

The fire within

2006-09-19T12:43:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 3.2 sec
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 50

This cage like thing holds a candle inside. I was trying out different Depth-of-field settings on my camera and ended up shooting this object. Here is another shot of the candle holder. So, what do you think?

Why 1.25 seconds?

2006-09-14T18:28:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 15 secs
Aperture: f/8.0

This is a shot of a commercial jet flying over head in the night with all those "flickry" lights. The plane itself isn't visible because there is very little light that reflects off it for the camera to capture. I had very little time to frame this shot as the plane was flying a bit close to the ground and appeared to travel at high speed. Although i had mounted my camera on a tripod, the camera shook for a moment when i released the shoot button and it then stabilized. Thats the reason behind the shaky start of the light trail. Actually, the S2-IS has a 2 second "wait" mode (before the shutter opens) for situations such as these which prevent camera shake. But then, there was very little time for me to switch to this mode :)

Now for a bit of math. Do you observe the two red dots in the middle of the two trails? Thats the red light which "flickrs" periodically when the plane is airborne. In this shot, you can see 12 pairs of these. The exposure time of the shot is about 15 seconds which makes it one "flickr" for every 1.25 seconds. So, why is it 1.25 seconds?

The Valley of Green

2006-09-08T18:38:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/200 sec
Aperture: f/2.7
ISO: 50

P.S: What's your take on Michael Schumacher? Do you want him to retire after the 2006 championship? I dont!

But, i want Kimi in Ferrari :) Schumi Vs Kimi would be awesome!

Milkyway

2006-08-28T20:22:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 8 sec
Aperture: f/8.0
ISO: 50

Now, please don't ask me about black holes and supernovas :D

Technically, this shot is the opposite of the "Matchstick Fireworks" shot. Notice the exposure time. The shutter stays open for that long (8 secs). This is the light source, which i started moving around in circles to get this effect.

Predator and Prey

2006-08-21T21:34:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/30 sec
Aperture: f/2.7
ISO: 100

This spider had just caught a fly and it wrapped the fly completely with the slimy-webby-thing that it secretes. While it waited for the fly to become more juicy, i caught this snap. This spider reminds me of the movie Arachnophobia which i had seen when i was a kid. Imagine millions of creepy-crawlies invading your house and your town. Yup, that's exactly what the movie is about and it managed to freak me out back then. Sick!

P.S: I am posting this from Windows Live Writer (Beta). It is super convenient and works very well with Blogger. Yes, you can edit posts too :)

Matchstick Fireworks

2006-08-10T12:01:00.000+05:30

EXIF
Camera: Canon PowerShot S2-IS
Lens: 36 - 432 mm equivalent
Exposure: 1/1600 sec
Aperture: f/2.7
ISO: 50

After several matchsticks and many more adjustments to the focus, i took this shot. I held the matchstick upright (well, almost) and burnt it from the center so that the flame moves up and to the head of the stick, where boof! it goes up in flames. The shot was taken in the high-speed continuous mode (@ 2.4 shots/sec). Check here for similar shots.

Update: I've uploaded a couple more shots with different exposure and aperture settings. Do take a look at it.

Living Life in the Super Macro Mode

2006-07-17T00:47:00.000+05:30

Life was rather boring with my old Kodak CX7430 camera, which is basically a point and shoot cam. I've had this camera for about 2 years now and i seriously needed an upgrade. So, i decided to get a Canon Powershot S2 IS. I finally did get it after a couple of months and now i absolutely love it to death! Shooting with this camera is like power-sliding all day long with a Porsche 911. It is elegant and extremely well thought out in terms of design and usability. The lens is marvellous too with 12x optical zoom and image stabilization. Here are a few shots that i took a couple of days ago: [Mouse over for EXIF]

Update: I've now included my flickr feed into feedburner. You would get both my blog + flickr items on my feedburner feed. Do subscribe :)

Like these pictures? Leave a comment here :)

Keralaaah!

2006-05-03T16:44:00.000+05:30

This was my first visit to Kerala and i have no doubts as to why its called as "God's own country". 6 of us [Sunil, Sabarish, Ghana, Raghavan, Ankit and me] traveled to Kerala and had a mega blast. We were on a tight schedule, thanks to just 4 days of holidays, which meant we had to plan our travel and stuff down to the teeth. We could only visit Munnar, Kumarakhom and Alleppey backwaters and surrounding areas due to lack of time. All said and done, let the pictures do more of the talking. [More here]

As i write this post, a quote that appears on the "Discovery Travel and Living" channel occurs to me - "A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving" - Lao Tzu

So, the next time, i would definitely go to Kerala as a traveler and not as a tourist ;)

Paritrana

2006-02-09T15:02:00.000+05:30

If you still haven't got your voter ID cards, i suggest you do so right away. Well, i have mine and i am voting for Paritrana, India's newest political party floated by 5 former IIT-ians. Wow!

[Via IBN, More here]

Serenity

2006-01-27T02:38:00.000+05:30

We [Sunil, Ranga and Me] had been to Coimbatore to deliver a few sessions at the Coimbatore Institute of Technology as part of the MSDN@Campus program. My talk was on ASP.NET 2.0 and it was a great experience speaking to a massive audience of around 1200. Once this was done, we decided to take a much needed break at Kodaikanal. We had a great time there and my camera was kept very busy. We also travelled to a nearby forest and caught lots of uncut nature. Here are a few snaps that i shot there. [More here.]

It was my birthday on the 22nd and its really weird trying to spend your birthday preparing for a talk and working on demos instead of freaking out. All said and done, Kodai was an absolutely overwhelming experience even though this was an "off-season" visit.

Quest World Vs The Matrix

2006-01-09T16:14:00.000+05:30

I've been a big fan of The Matrix ever since i saw it, not just because it is packed with lots of action and amazing camera work, but because it is the only movie that got me thinking. Never before had i spent so much time trying to predict whats gonna happen next and all of this had actually started to make sense because it seemed to be a philosophy in itself!

Back in my early school days, i used to watch a lot of cartoons and stuff alike. My favourite of them all was this futuristic sci-fi series called Jonny Quest, which was all about the adventures of this daring kid [Jonny Quest] with his dad [Dr. Benton Quest] in some sort of a virtual world [Quest world] which was programmed by Dr. Benton Quest. To login into Quest World, one had to wear some sort of glasses [which i cannot describe] and bam you would be into it after a small countdown! And if i remember correctly, it even had something similar to the Construct [yeah, the white place in The Matrix where you could load guns and what not!]. I was watching a re-run of The Matrix revolutions on HBO a week ago and it suddenly hit me that it was damn similar to the Quest World theory. So, let me just try and bring out some of the remarkable similarities exist between the Quest World and The Matrix.

The body cannot live without the mind

Neo: If you're killed in the matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind

Remember the pointed metal thing that goes straight into your brain when you jack-in to The Matrix? The Quest World system had these glasses kinda thing which were used to get people jacked-in [not very convincing to look at, but let us think of this as a more humane and a painless way of getting people jacked-in]. But the purpose though, is to override the signals sent to the brain by the nervous system. So, this does mean that What You Feel Is What You Get [WYFIWYG ;)] i.e. if you get busted in The Matrix and you get busted in the real world as well.

The obvious Indian connection

The Matrix talks a lot about Karma and a lot more things taken from the books of Hinduism. There were a lot of characters such as Ramakandra and Sati who spoke about these. Whats really interesting is that a character by name Hadji, the adopted son of Dr. Benton Quest, who had these amazing spiritual capabilities, hailed from Bangalore. The Quest World too was a perfect fusion of Science and spiritualism.

There are a lot more things in common between The Matrix theory and The Quest World that i could think of such as the bad programs [yes programs] of the Quest World that troubled Jonny all the time and Jeremaya Surd [the villian] who hacked into the matrix and did bad stuff. Although the Quest World series focuses more towards the adventures of Jonny Quest, in and out of this virtual world, it is a must see for The Matrix lovers! It was more than enough to make me watch the re-runs as well. Whats more impressing is that all of this stuff was thought of by Doug Wildey even before the Wachowski brothers were born!

Filmsdivision.org

2005-12-24T02:48:00.000+05:30

Remember my old post about those awesome Prasar Bharati productions? Now, there is more. You can find all the videos ever produced by the Films Division of India here. Now, i can go to bed feeling absolutely nostalgic.

Dakshina Kannada Police Weblog

2005-12-17T23:56:00.000+05:30

"This weblog has been created by the Dakshina Kannada Police with the purpose of disseminating police news of the district to those interested. Authentic and official information of DK Police will be posted here regularly. This is just an attempt to create an interface with the press and the public at large. Your views and suggestions are welcome."

They even have a flickr account to upload photos for the press!
They have enabled ATOM as well!
Lots of posts have been written in the Kannada script which wasn't being rendered in my computer. The next thing i find on this blog is a link to the truetype fonts developed by the Govt. of Karnataka!

And all of this seems to have been done by the local Superintendent of Police. Hats off!

When will Police across the country get this smart?

F1 Engine Fire-Up

2005-12-15T17:50:00.000+05:30

This is the most freaking awesome video i've ever seen! If you think Formula-1 is a relegion, then this is THE video for you. [Download here, Size: 16.37MB] I almost fell off my seat when I saw this for the first time :D

Note: The server that hosts this video is a bit sluggish. So, you might have to wait for quite sometime. But believe me, its worth the wait. And, the video starts off on a low note. Make sure you watch the full video.

A sad year for World Rally Championships

2005-12-02T21:40:00.000+05:30

Richard Burns [in picture] and Michael Park - Two huge characters of the WRC are no more. I've always loved Richard for his driving style. Before the F1 style paddle gear shifts were introduced, [which was a couple of years ago] he always used to drive the car with just one hand on the steering wheel which was a pretty amazing thing. WRC 2005 will always be remembered for the loss of these two amazing sportsmen.

Richard died of Brain Tumour and Michael died due to fatal injuries caused by an accident during the 2005 WRC Wales Rally.

Update: Dont forget to watch Top Gear on BBC World tomorrow [Sat, 17th Dec at 3PM]. The Top Gear crew pays tribute to Richard Burns.

When Doordarshan ruled...

2005-08-15T13:35:00.000+05:30

Every sunday used to be like the cricket world cup final day. Series like the Mahabharata and Ramayan were just perfect. Artistes were assigned roles that suited them perfectly and it seemed as though the gods were really fighting. These days though, television doesnt have the spirit that it had in the older days. Kids grow up watching "item numbers" which is a disgrace. Watching tv was an experience in itself and i am glad that i grew up watching DD.

Back in those days, Prasar Bharati produced a few amazing clips and cartoons based on national integration. I was on the hunt for these clips and managed to find quite a few on the web. A million thanks to those who have put these up on their web spaces. Absolutely unreal stuff -

Mile Sur Mera Tumhara [Audio] - http://www.rtpdesis.com/mile_sur.mp3

Baje Sargam [Audio] - http://www.rtpdesis.com/baje_sargam.mp3

Ek Chidiya, Anek Chidiya [Cartoon, Video] - http://www.rtpdesis.com/ek_anek.asf

Mile Sur Mera Tumhara [Video - An awesome remake by students at MIT] - http://www.aisl.cyd.liu.se/downloads/Mile%20Sur%20Mera%20Tumhara/milesur50.mpg

Its high time; DD has to start off airing these gems again. Kids would never know a thing about national integration.

A happy independence day to all of you!

Update1: Check out filmsdivision.org for more DD videos. [including the ek-anek video]

Update2: Click here for the original mile sur video.

Animal awareness and The Matrix

2005-08-04T15:52:00.000+05:30

Ever heard of "Moopheus"? Check this out ... (ROTF)