My Blog

This Feb 2010, I have successfully managed to make blog postings at regular intervals. Being the last day of the month I decided to write a post about the posts itself. Thats why the name "Meta Post" (in line with data => meta-data :) . To start with, interface of the blog is changed. Incorporated monitoring the blog activities. Thanks to StatCounter. (was been associated with a similar project, indeed an advanced one, when I was @ merc). Dual visit points of the blog i.e. both directly and through Google Buzz made it more interactive. The avearge post length has got increased.. One more thing that made me happy is that there is *NO* traffic from Internet Explorer. Majority of them are from Chrome and FF. Few from Safari too.. Believe me there were considerable amount of hits this month. Hope to continue the same pace in forth-coming months too.. Let us C.

Cricket is no exception to technology impacts. We have seen during the past decade how this sport has benefited (!) by introduction of technology. Continuing this trend, rather at a increased pace I wondered how cricket would be around 2015. These are simply the glimpses of my thoughts at this point in time: Smart Pitch Reader : Instead of manual pitch reports there would be specialized devices which would scan the pitch with various sensors for factors like moisture, hardness, soil type, grass length, grass orientation, wind direction & speed etc. The collected data would then be analysed with the help of data-mining techniques with the global database and the behaviour of pitch would be predicted with maximum possible accuracy levels. Smart Fielding Guide : Think of a situation when the captain is running out of ideas. He would be given a specialized device which would guide him to set the fielding. He might get spots in the ground illuminated (indicating fielder positions).

Being a person in a wheel chair, accessibility has been the most important item on my wish-list. Today it is a guideline that all the public and semi-public buildings need to have the accessibility features like Ramps, Accessible Toilets, Elevators etc. In educational institutions this is a must. Because access denied is equivalent to rights-denied. As for as the environment I live is concerned it is far far better than the outside world. All the buildings (almost) have ramps. Thanks to the Government of India Guidelines. Nevertheless, creating a facility just requires money. But using the same in the right sprite requires some sort of culture. Constructing a ramp and putting the security man's chair right on it is what sort of culture I don't understand. Never ask about the slope of the ramp.. Few of them would provide you a trucking sort of experience. But something is always better than nothing.. It is good that steps are starting to happen in this regard. Not able to imagi

In continuation with the previous post, today was the last day of the one week workshop that we organized from PUDOCS. two sessions today .. one from a senior manager from BSNL on new things to be lanuched ... "Fixed Mobile Convergence" was the topic ... to be frank it was a bit too heavy for a computer science man to understand.. it was in view of ECE. After-noon session was on "load balancing" from Perumal Kalathi from Citrix; my senior colleague told me that he is an alumni of our own department .. nice to see such resource persons... he gave a nice intro to the load balancing issues. apart from the technical issues one nice thing that i noticed about this session is the simplicity with which he explained the things... Overall this week is like too much inputs to the brain :) no need to remember everything... atleast got a fair enough intro to Wireless Sensor Networks... this seems to be very interesting... I guess this may well turn up the new face of ubiquito

This week we are running a workshop titled "One week workshop on advances in computing and networks - industry academia practices" .. so right from monday whenever time permits I am attending that workshop... informative seminars by people from both industry and academia.. thought of mentioning few in this post: + A session from a Sr. Consultant from TCS on hardware related advancements.. hightlighted the control of cisco over the network world. + A session from Novell + A session on Optical Internet from Sr. Professor ... highlighted the optical-electrical- electrical- optical coversion... WDM etc... indeed a nice one.. + Couple of session of "Wireless Sensor Networks" ... it seems lots of research is going in this field.. a first speaker concentrated on transport layer protocols and the second one on MAC layer... (this many number of protocols ?????!!!!! oh my God !!!!) + A session from a Sr. Manager from EMC2 on "Cloud Computing"... the way he projecte

A dream for a long long years.. has come true today... Sachin Sir hitting a double ton... What a feel it is.. i was constantly following it on cricinfo since he was on 140* odd runs... my inner feel said he will make it today... so i made a buzz entry of scores in regular intervals... ... me had to leave it to a lecture (which also turned out a very exciting one).. wow.. he has proved it once again... Sachin scored 200* of 147 balls with 25 fours and 3 huge sixes. What is more important here is that he is doing it consistently for the past 21 years... He is playing in his 411th ODI.. my goodness... what for he is playing.. money ? fame ? more than anybody else he has all these... look at the passion that Mr. Sachin Tendulkar has... One thing that we need to learn from his the "consistency"... being topper is not hard.. but maintaining that position for 21 years is some thing phenomenal... U made us proud Mr. Sachin Tendulkar.. The little(!) master..

Recently i got BSNL broad band connection on combo plan 500C. They assured upto 2 Mb/s speed. I have checked it with speedtest few times... It shows more than 1.95 Mb/s regularly... Happy with this reasonably good net speed... The only glitch that i found is the initial connection delay when the modem is switched on... Not sure its a global phenomena or it happens only to me.. Overall very happy with this speedy connection...

Being associated with web search - research i always wanted to keep track of whats happening in the IR field.. This feature titled "Google Squared" seems to be a step forward in the way results are displayed.. Google squared would provide the tabular results with relevant columns (it might sound easy... bt i assure you that in an unstructured web it is not...) for example i queried "indian cities" in Google Squared.. the result you can see in the image.. http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=indian+cities Generally Google would simply list the results that relates to the query... But with introduction of a feature like "Google Squared" we can easily understand that its not merely displaying the result... It does some sort data analysis on it... Btw, this is not a feature which is released just now... it has been released last year itself.. don't know how it missed my attention :)

It might be a surprising news (for many, in this part of the world) that Baidu - Web Search Engine is used by millions of people in China which gives a tough competition to Google.. Baidu Provides not only the basic search services but it also gives facilities like Map, News, Space, Encyclopedia etc.. For More info on Baidu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu One question that pops is why such a tight competition is not there in India? .. We call ourselves the IT super power.. The answer to this question is very much there in one of my previous post [Research :: Computer Science].. Our research pattern has reached a stage where most of the things happen for a count.. Not at all a good sign... Need to develop that kind of research culture where your work is converted to direct benefits to the community... Once that happens, we would certainly have many indian counterparts similar to baidu of China... Hope that would happen in our life time....

I will not hesitate to call myself a fan of pop corn... always had a liking for it.. one constraint on it was on the salt content of it... i dont like salty food items.. Some of the easy-to-make pop corn products were also salty... so i decided to cook(!!)/prepare pop corn myself... but dont know how to do it... so as usual googled it... found many recipes.. and ended up knowing that pop corn making is both tricky and easier... Finally decided what to do... my pop corn algorithm is as follows: procedure MakePopCorn(dry_corn_kernels) begin 1. get dry corn kernels (really they are called kernels.. nothing to do with OS) 2. apply some oil on it 3. coat oil on the vessel in which you gonna prepare 4. for (i = now; i < now + 2 min; i++) // heat the vessel for 2 min :)))) 4.1 heat the vessel (with out corn kernels on it) 5. repeat 5.1 add the corn kernels 5.2 close it with a lid 5.3 shake the vessel // corn kernels starts popping until (

If someone asks me what are you doing these days? More often than not I struggle to find a sharp answer to this. Most of the time busy with something.. seriously not wasting even minutes of time... Right from morning to late night.. A typical day would be chunks of a) Lectures b) Interaction with students c) Web surfing (in terms of gathering recent trends which are the core of my lectures) d) Some unnecessary mundane tasks (anbu thollaigal .. ) e) meetings f) of course, research (thought of listing it at (a) but still not convinced with...) Recent days I am able to realize that these tasks need to be channelized... Trying to be a smart worker... but the very basic belief of mines is to do things to the maximum possible perfection level.. need to find the balance between where the perfection is required and where not??? btw, somebody said perfection is not possible anywhere... need to attempt for excellence.. I guess this is an important stage of evolution that me is going through...

How bigger is the boundary of the term Research? Is there any thing called pure research ? People used to combine the terms Research and Development together (R&D)... and some persons have coined new terms like academic research.. I seriously don't know what do they mean by academic research. I cant imagine a research work in computer science with out solid implementations.. I don't feel that count of publications alone is an index to quality of the research that you do.. (I didn't mean to say publications are unnecessary but they alone are not sufficient).. And more than any other thing, the impact your research is going to make on the society that you live-in is the primary key.. But there is a serious divide between the research community and the society that they live in... If this divide is bridged I guess we (India) are in a nice shape today to be the world leaders... Hope my research would bring atleast a "nano-impact" on the society that I am in ... Ma

Recursion is an annual all India Computer Science Students meet technical conducted by our department PUDOCS during second sat and sun of February.. Every year it used to be a vivacious one... No wonder this year too... This year was 16th.. (We have 2 more years to become guru..!!!) Of course being a faculty I have very little to do with this event.. All the credits should go to the students who do everything right from collecting money to conducting all events.. Kudos to all of those students associated with it... This year we might have one more event, Recursion++ because this year being the silver jubilee year for the university.... Hope our guys would make that a great success..

One question that pops up many a times is "Why the blog postings are not happening @ regular intervals?". Seriously i don't have an answer to this question. Thought of writing a blog-post many a times but due to some urgent necessary (some time unnecessary) commitments it got delayed.. Many things have happened after the last post... thought of listing the important ones in this post: Met(!!) L - The most important thing that has happened.. Might write a separate post regarding L. Registered my Ph.D officially. Started taking medicines for HBP.. (Is this important ? Don't Know .. :) ) One again i am deciding to update the blog at regular intervals... This time i have BB connection at home... So might get more time to update ... Lets see..