Intel Xeon – the worse branding ever?

This is really frustrating if you didn’t knew. Intel likes to call many of their processors for “business class” systems “Xeon”. When they say Xeon it can mean anything from those dinosaurs based on Pentium II and the latest and greatest ones based on on Core i7. So when you see a system built with Xeon processor you really need to look up its exact subtle number and carefully study its specs to figure out what it really is.

For example, Xeon W3520 is same as latest Core i7-920, including the price. The only difference between two is Xeon supports ECC memory. So what’s the point in branding this processor as Xeon instead of Core 2 i7?

BTW, new Intel Core i7 series is definitely a winner and finally makes 2 year old Intel Core 2 series actually obsolete. This processor can execute 8 threads simultaneously and supports 3 channels for DDR3 access tripling the RAM bandwidth! Best of all, it costs more or less same as older Core 2 processors.

Snoqualmie Falls Hike Analysis

Today was perhaps my 32nd hike at Snoqualmie Falls. I've adopted this trail as my daily hike routine. Today I brought my new Garmin Oregon 400t GPS with me and recorded the track. Fortunately there is a website (although not that good) called MotionBased which can slice and dice and analyze this track data and tell you lot of cool things.

Here's the MotionBased's analysis of Snoqualmie Falls hike.

Few interesting things:

• This is a 1.4 miles hike with 475 ft elevation gain.
• The hike takes about 35 minutes.
• Ascent and descent speeds as well as times are roughly same (note that I do not made any stops except at ends of the trail).
• My speed while ascending is 2.4 mph and vertical speed is 14 ft/min or 840 ft/hr. Not too bad.
• This hike has average grade of 16%. This is just 1% more than max allowed by typical gym treadmills. At steepest point the trail is 30% grade while about the "safe" max limit on typical maintained trails.

Using my watch which can measure elevation I thought that was 300ft elevation hike. Obviously my watch can easily be 100ft off. Here's the elevation profile of this hike:

Treadmill Grade to Angle Conversion

Gym machines like treadmills and even some roads express the slop as "grade" in percentage. For example, most gym treadmills allow up to 15% grade. I've left going to gym since last few months and instead I'm doing this Snoqualmie Falls hike almost every other day (which is 0.5 miles one way and 300ft elevation). But occasionally I have to go to gym because of early sunsets. I usually put max grade (15%) and speed walk for one mile burning 350 cal. So naturally the question is how many feet I climbed?

For this I need to convert grade in % to angle. But what is "grade%"? Turns out it's ration of rise/run or in other words,

 

So your vertical climb in feet is given by,

So by that calculation, at maximum grade on gym treadmill I climb 783.2 feet for each mile I walk. Not too bad.

Via conversation here.

What is the best time to hike Zion Narrows?

I LOVE slot canyons and Zion Narrows hike is something on my To-do for very long time since I saw it in a documentary and IMAX. So when I saw this deal from Southwest about 50% off on all travels my first thought was to book tickets to Las Vegas (nearest to Zion) or SLC. Due to restriction on this deal the travel needs to be completed by May 31st.

So the question: Is last week of May the best time to do Zion Narrows? I've fanatically looked for answer all over and here's the summary. Disclaimer: that I haven't been there so all these research comes from web, not my experience.

My criteria for "best time" is fairly simple:

• Avoid wearing dry/wet suit to do this hike
• Avoid wading in 1ft of water for miles
• Pleasant 70s temperature that allows good other hikes like Angel's Landing

Several websites have various opinions on "best time". A top Google hit puts up a table indicating May, June and Septembers are the best. This is way too fuzzy answer because early May is actually as worse as April and it doesn't tell you different late May really is compared to late June. Yes, there is a big difference!

Next, other websites gets more specific and tells you late June and late September is the best time. We are getting closer to a specific answer but still no data points.

After lot of searching I finally hit the pot of gold:USGA Water Data! This website has exact numbers for CFS (cubic foot per second) and gage height data for each day all the way back to 1988. The rules are quite simple: anything below 50 CFS is easy and 250 FS is too much. The USGA has done fantastic job in presenting this data on website. For example, here you can see CFS levels for 2008:

Now you can see late May is not all that good but it is rapidly getting better over entire June although it takes all of the June before we get 40 CFS. This means late June is pretty good time to go but difference between early June and late June is almost two fold! Then notice all those spikes in early July. My guess is those are flash floods or thunderstorms. On other hand look how stable mid-end September is! We get 30 CFS almost all month.

Here's the corresponding chart for Gage Height:

So we are looking at about foot of water at May end and about quarter of that in mid-end September.

Likewise you can go through charts for may years back. It obviously varies from year to year. For example, year 2007 had very low stable CFS at end of May unlike rapidly decreasing high levels of 2008.

For the past few years worth of charts that I checked one theme emerges: mid to end September has most stable and low CFS!

But how about temperatures? Here's where Weather Underground's seasonal average feature helps! Here is the seasonal averages weather graph for Zion National Park:

As you can see, the temperature in mid-September is pleasant 70s just like in June.

So there you have it! Mid September to September end (2nd and 3rd weeks of September) is the best time to go to Zion National Park and Narrows. That's when you are most likely to get stable low water levels.

Mount Si - Take #2

Today I tried Mount Si hike again and returned back before I saw "Snag Flats", second time. Snag Flats are supposed to somewhere between 1300' to 1500'. It's relatively small hike that you can do in 2-3 hours (full hike to summit of Mount Si is a long 8 hour 3200' climb). Today because of heavily packed wet snow it was extremely slippery. Many people even had crampons on. People who did not had any traction devices (like me) had very hard time to go up on slippery trail and even harder time to come down.

I would not do this trail without wearing Kahtoola Microspikes.

Last time I'd to turn back at1250' because I'd started too late and it was getting dark. Today I got up to 1440' but still saw no sign of so called snag flats or a view point where Mailbox peak and Mt Rainier can be seen. But then I suddenly realized that I'd forgotten my camera on the trail during last water break! So I went down to look for it but didn't found it. I finally got down in parking lot and walked there for quite sometime looking for any lost & found places (Mount Si trailhead has HUGE parking lot and somehow there are always dozen cars there). Several people were coming down or going up but no one had seen it.

Then an amazing thing happened. Just when I was driving out the parking lot and I was almost out, I decided to stop for a minute and put up a sticky note. And I suddenly saw 3 guys coming down and they had my camera! It was just a matter of few seconds and I would have left. Thank you strangers!

PS: Those 3 guys mentioned that they were going to return it to ranger station. So next time if you loose something always check with ranger station or forest service.

So, which digital photo frame is the best?

If you are in the market to look for Digital photo frames this note will hopefully save you some time. It's really frustrating to buy one of this when selection is so large. This is very nice Christmas gift to your loved ones. I take lots of photographs but rarely have time to actually see them. So they are excellent gadget even if you want to buy for yourself!

One of the coolest feature in new frames is wireless connectivity to Internet. You can throw RSS feed from flickr or other photo sharing websites and the frame will download the new photos automatically. Some frames would even allow you to specify tags in Flickr for the photos you want to see in frame. So imagine your parents or grandpa suddenly see your trip photos in their photo frame as it is occurring! This the way photo sharing is supposed to be.

There are two major services that most of these digital frames supports: Windows Live FrameIt and FrameChannel. These services helps deliver even more stuff like weather and news in your frame.

There are quite a few vendors offering these types of frame. Some of the current models (11/2008) are:

• Digital Spectrum MemoryVue
• Memory Frame by Earth Tech
• Momento Live
• Digital Frame by Edge Tech
• D-Link Internet Photo Frame
• PixStar Photo Frames
• eStarling WiFi Photo Frame
• iGala Photo Frame
• PhotoVu Widescreen Wireless Frames
• Samsung Wireless Internet Frames
• Kodak EasyShare Frames

Lots of choices! To make filtering easier I would suggest to eliminate anything below 15" size. Those sizes (8" and 10") are typically only useful if you want to put frame on the desk just couple of fit away from you. Also frames below 15" will have resolution of 800X600 at best which is not all that good. Even the low end laptops have 15" screen and run at 1028X768 so you can put your laptop where you want to place frame and see how it looks.

In above bunch so far only two frames are 15" or bigger. One from Digital Spectrum and another from PhotoVu. The PhotoVu ones are actually even larger and really expensive ($700+) so for most people only descent choice may be Digital Spectrum MemoryVue MF-8115. There you go, that's the best value frame as of Thanksgiving 2008!

What about the future? Actually if you look at of lot of deals around you will see that LCD displays as big as 22" can now be bought for under $170. So I would predict that bigger frames especially in 15" to 19" range would be under $200 by Thanksgiving 2009. Most of above manufacturers who still don't have 15" models would probably have them pretty soon. Another important note is that life space of LCD frames is not very huge. Most manufacturers aren't releasing this data but depending on brightness levels it can be as low as 20,000 hours. Now that comes out to just above 2 years. So don't consider these frames as your long term investments.

Do you really need 1080i or 1080p or 1440p?

This study basically says that if you have 50" TV and you are watching it at about 9' of distance then 720p has all the resolution human eye with 20/20 vision can ever see!

Currently we use 80X40 screen through our Panasonic projector PT-AX100U. Now that's equal to almost 4 of your tiny 50" screens so certainly 720p won't be enough at our current viewing distance of 10' (our current screen size is limited because of wall size and I think the projector is perfectly capable of going up to 100" diagonal). Actually at that size looks like even 1080p won't be enough. The 1080 runs out its steam at just 76" screen.

For now we will probably stick with our 720p projector though. The 1080p projectors are still super expensive right now($2500+)! Whoever said current HD technology is "enough"...

How Much Is There To See?

We often say there is just too much out there. You can't even possibly see everything that this universe has to offer in a million year or even a billion year.

Consider an image with resolution of 640X420 (i.e. better than standard TVs and pretty close to DVD) and RGB color depth of 0-255. Although not the best, this is perhaps a good approximation for the human eye. With this setup there are actually only 4457 billion images possible. Let's say you were watching one image per second then in about 141,332 years you would have seen everything that is possible to see! If you were making video at 25 fps with each frame being unique then within 5653 years you would no longer have anything else to shoot.

Oil Prices - Summary of 4 hours of news bits in past month

I did not knew oil prices had crossed $4 mark and got a huge surprise to see that last Thursday. I don't watch news generally because much of it is irrelevant but after we have set up PC to our TV it's much easier to see exactly what matters. So I was just watching series of MSNBC videos going all the way up to May on oil prices going up, people leaving their RVs behind, people trying to sell out their SUVs, GM planning to dump Hummer, people choosing to do home barbeque instead of traveling for memorial day... There is a new term called Staycation for people staying home for vacation (we heard another term "Junctober" to refer to colder windier October like weather in June at our visit to Vason island)! a big dose for me of all of that. However the most worrisome part was airlines cutting down 25% of the seats and tickets sky rocketing 2X to 4X. So I looked up SEA to SLC and fortunately Utah ticket is only gone up by $75 ($225 to $295). Yes, big increase but its not like $600 - yet. It would be painful to think of Utah drifting away from the reach. On the other note, gas prices in Europe and elsewhere is about $8 so it's not very unrealistic that US prices will match up to that in not very long term. However all indications are that if oil prices goes above $5 there will be a crash in economy because lot of businesses are currently trying to swallow this increase in one way or another and with continuous rise all of them will finally dump it on customers.

Kiwi Berries

Oh... these Kiwi Berries from Te Puke, NZ... some of the best fruits in the world!

The ACM Turing Programming Contest Problem Set Archive

Here's the list of problems used in ACM Turing programming contest. Surprisingly, like many other such contests, lots of problems are s simply a variant of shortest-path problem.
The ACM ICPC Problem Set Archive

Another Pick At Randomness

There is lots of intersections on my thoughts on randomness with Chaitin's. I think his papers would be extremely interesting. I think it could be significant advancement to my Minimal Instruction Set and Program Complexity theory I'd been toying with many years:

G J Chaitin

Critticall

This is very interesting concept. I wonder if a language can be specifically designed so that genetic algorithms can natuarally be applied. Notes as my next project!

Critticall

Earth: The Largest Neural Model

It appears that the individuals in population and their interaction with each other very closely models neural activities in brain. The entire neural network can be looked upon as smaller fractal version of human population, with lot fo details vanished. In other words, an alien might prefer to look upon Earth as the planet hosting one huge "brain" instead of individuls independently living their life!

Why BN.com Has To Suck?

I've written quite some code whoes sole users are probably just few dozen people. Even than I'd went to extra-ordinary lengths to make sure that code was having highest number of features and ease of use than anything else that existed and was comparable. There are lots of businesses everywhere ranging from car rental companies to book stores who have, unlike me, thousands and thousands of users every single day, staff of hundreds and millions to dollars spend. To add all the cool features in their services that would delight their users every now and than, it would take probably cost a sub-percent of their revenues. Why it doesn't happen? Why it is so hard for Barnes and Nobel to create a website that can proudly stand besides Amazon in slickness, modern looks and innovation? Cost is certainly not the factor. What is it? Why certain part of eco-sphere is doomed to be second class regardless of available resources to them?

Things Behind The eBay Deal

I couldn't have read more braindead deal than Skype for $2.1 billion. Obviously Skype isn't worth that much (so far it has got invetsments of under $21M). One could have built much more feature rich, customized software for 1000 times less money than that. What about future? Wouldn't Skype have revenues of zillion dollars in 2010? No, it won't. Biggies like Microsoft and Yahoo are already coming up with similar software with far deeper reach than Skype could ever imagine to have. Plus cable companies are throwing away entire need for computer and microphones and have very soon plans to dial from regular phone and route it through Intenet.

So why executives at eBay would decide to through away half of their cash in deal that needs everyone to take microscope to find what's so good about it? There are many deals like that have happened in past where people just can't find justification and had just has to go with the aura of the buyer. My guess is that big heads in eBay is going to get, somehow someway, huge cuts in this deal. The thing is that when company has $4B floating in thier bank account, its not easy for executives to get it simply transfered in their bank accounts. So you go out, cut the deal to buy $2000 car for $200,000, have seller spend $188,000 on things you liked but which you couldn't have directly spent by yourself. And meanwhile, cross your fingers to have journalists think you are a smart guy and have them keep discussing that there must be something super cool in that car that a visionary like you can see but dumbass journalists like us can't. I meant those journalists which your PR department haven't bought out, yet.

Exception Code Template For CodeRush

How CodeRush could miss this template? Anyway you can copy and paste this in CodeRush Options (Expert mode) to have your own!

[System.Serializable]
public class InvalidDataException
{
public InvalidDataException()
{
} 

public InvalidDataException(string message) : base( message )
{
} 

public InvalidDataException (string message, System.Exception inner): base( message, inner )
{
} 

public InvalidDataException (System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info, System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context) : base(info, context)
{
}
}

Hurricane Formations

Since yesterday night the question how Hurricane takes birth was eating me away. I resisted googling it and try to find the answer just using what I know. My best bet was 2nd law of thermodynamics (which I've become a huge fan due to this website). The 2nd law essentially says that nature intrisinkly tries to equal out everything. That means if there is high pressure somewhere, the inherent consequence would be nullify the excess and have an equal average pressure everywhere. So I'd been trying to figure out what kind of pressure patterns would be required so a rotation would occur. I planned out a little computer simulation of this with the guess that a ring of low pressure would probably produce hurricane-like whirlpool.

Aha, I was dead wrong. The 2nd law would prevent cyclone from happening instead of be a reason to produce it. My wife intuitively pointed out that hurricane would occur due to warm air that goes up where the cold air is but while it does so, the Coriolis effect kicks in which would produce whirlpool (similar to the whirlpool produced when flushing the toilet). Her intuition is awesomely right. All hurricanes in northern hemisphere go in anti-clockwise and southern hemisphere in clockwise. The huge power that a hurricane demonstrate is supplied by rotation of the Earth which itself is so massive.

I was also intrigued by how hurricanes are named. It turns out some international committee has preset list of names starting with letter A,B, C.. for each year. The list repeats every 6 years (i.e. names for 2005 hurricanes would be same as 2011). While now many names used are male’s names, previously only female names were used to name hurricanes :).

Endless Columns

There are only few tracks that can be so immensly philosophical and still be modern and classy. Ofcourse, there are no vocals.

The Business Experiment

This Business Experiment got initially attracted me but I immediately realized why it would bring only an average or below average results. This experiment basically wants to try running a startup by votes from the people. The idea is to harness "wisdom of the crowds". I think, the smartness factor would be averaged out in this system instead of "more than sum of its parts". It's blind one-shot voting after all; not a structured logical argument going in the crowed which could otherwise have made difference. Other way to look at it is that such business is already in existence which is virtually run by voting and belief system of crowd: government! It may be fairly robust and may be sufficiently stable over centuries of existence but its the most inefficient business that we know of.

Google Indexing Leg

This is different for different websites but it took Google 24 days to index my last blog entry!

Finally Runs Even If Method Returns!


using (DisTest o = new DisTest())
{
        return;
}


OR


Dim o As DisTest = New DisTest
Try            
        Return        
Finally
         o.Dispose()
End Try


Interesting Headers

The response headers returns with Google's logo looks like this:

Content-Type: image/gif
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 21:06:18 GMT
Expires: Sun, 17 Jan 2038 19:14:07 GMT
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 8558
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:52:05 GMT


And for some gif served by IIS on Win 2003 Server looks like this:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 02:08:59 GMT
Content-Type: image/gif
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 09:12:29 GMT
Etag: "20bb944a9a20c51:acc"
Content-Length: 3779


You can get this by using Web Developer Toolbar's Information > Reponse Header button in Firefox.

Interesting things are:

1. Google is not using Cache-Control: max-age=xxxx header which tells browser to cach the image for a while and not re-request from the server again. This is surprising because you would think Google would use every possible way out there to reduce the load on their server.


2. Google has named their custom web server as Google Web Server, not surprisingly.

Types Of Database Columns

From an excellent article on Decimal mentions survey of 1,091,916 columns in databases owned by 41 organizations to find that 41.8% of them contained numeric data and 53.7% contained char data.

Chinese As a Second Languge

Dumping popular French and Spanish and taking Chinese [2 minute video - IE only] in schools is such a cool idea.

[via A VC]

Pavlov's Dog

BNL certainly has some scientific lyrics. The "Pavlov's dog" mentioned in Brian Wilson is about the classic experiment conducted by Pavlov in 1900s to show that dogs can learn to associate ringing of bell to the arrival of food and keep salivate even if you stop giving food.

On another note, "Nine-point-eight straight down" in When I Fall is the Earth's gravitational constant g when an object freely falls.

There aren't possibly better ways writing about science experiments in more artistic ways in mainstream songs ;)

Really Slick Screensavers

These are some of the best screensavers I've seen anywhere. Check out especially skyrocket which is extremely cool simulation of fireworks with randomly moving camera in 3D space and also Helios. Too bad I can't use them because I've donated my free computer time to World Community Grid to compute protein folding :(.

We are Finite State Machines

From the coolest UML tutorial:

Systems that have a fixed number
of states, and that respond to a fixed set of events are called finite state machines (FSM).

The book "Birth of the Mind" says DNA is nothing like conventional computers. It is FSM.

Venus Transit Tomorrow

This one is not a spectacular but its interesting because it's rare and because of history. Specifically, in old times (pre 1900s), people used this rare event to measure distance between Earth and Sun. Infect astronomers didn't knew this distance from a long time, so they invented so-called "1 Astronomical Unit (AU)" when they want to refer to this distance. In old times, everything was measured relative to AU, for example Venus is 0.7AU away from Sun. Venus Transit helped to resole this. Plus it also helped to figure out Sun's diameter. Now just out of curiosity, I thought, how would Venus transit could help in determining Sun-Earth distance and Sun's diameter? Answer is simple enough: Have two people watched it from different latitudes on Earth, make a triangle, use simple trigonometry and you get the distance! Nasa has put up a detailed explanation of little math in involved in this clever technique. Then This is, of course, still less accurate then modern ways of radars and satellites. Venus orbits around Sun in just 0.6 years. Then one would think why transits are so rare? Well, answer is, Venus's orbit isn't in the same plane as Earth, so it's pretty rare for Sun-Venus-Earth to get in one straight line, usually every little over hundres years or so. Apart from that, this transit won't visually appeal to most but if you had those special safe glasses to view sun eclipse, you might have a look between 11:05AM to 11:25AM on US East Coast on June 8, 2004. More info at Exploratorium and astonomy.no.

NotepadX Preview Is Out!

This is the thing I needed since like 3 years now and I started writing it by myself early 2003. But I knew something like this should have been already out there and I was probably wasting mytime in doing it all over again. So I decided to write several reusable application components rather then app itself and then build the app as a "demo" of components. I used NotepadX for about an year as a solo user while evolving and writing more code to make it better. And just now I felt it's pretty sophisticated and stable enough for other people to preview it. For non-geeky users, NotepadX is a powerful utility to maintain their data. For programmers it's lots of reusable interesting source code.

View more details about NotepadX

IE Most Wanted Tools

I just came across these Internet Explorer "power tools" which I'd wanted since soooo long. These little things called booklets are actually just shortcuts pointing to JavaScript which you can install by just drag and drop on your Links bar in IE (check View > Toolbars menu if you don't see Links bar). If you want to save time from having browse through each of these things, you can also download my selection and extract them in to your Documents and Settings\[Your_Login_name]\Favorites\Links folder and use them right away. You can do pretty neat things on a web page you are viewing once you have these little things. Some samples: View passwords, remove length limitations in a form, remove JavaScript, re-enable context menu, remove images and flashy stuff, show hidden fields in form, enable fields in form which are disabled, show borders of invisible tables, grayscale whole page (nice to have if page had weird colors), show HTTP headers, show HTML class when you roll over a block, force page wrap, lowercase everything, restore redirected links, view cookies, go to referer, sort table, number rows in table and more!

The Triple Mix

I thought I'd nothing new to listen to but then just brewed up this triplet which nicely works out on these winter days.

1. A Winter's Solstice VI: A Windham Hill Sampler - A nice classical album. Just by look at the track names like Northern Lights, January Stars, Snow Dance, This Clearness Of Light - you know it's gonna be good :).
   


2. The Very Best Of Yanni: Yet another good (if not as great) keyboard fiesta. Nice tracks: Flight Of Fantasy, In The Morning Light, The Mermaid.
   


3. Maroon: Surprisingly good for those "missing" times when there is too much to do and absolutely nothing do. This my Barenaked Ladies Firsts which probably one can never get tired of hearing one more time.
   

Listen As: Random
The entire play list is available on Rhapsody.

Chinese New Year Festivities

While my wife would be celebrating Chinese New Year on more native land of Hong Kong, there would be quite a few events happening in NEw York city. The big parade is on Sunday 25th in Chinatown with dragons and lions, all red and gold, along with other events. Chinatown-Online gives nice little info on traditions of Chinese New Year and other festivities dates.

The major deal of New Year is, of course, lavish food festivities. There is a suprisingly large number of restaurants in NYC which will be offering special New Year meals, but here are some select few places to get the Year of the Monkey off to a good start (Chanoodle is the most recommended):

• Chanoodle - (212) 349-1495 - 79 Mulberry Street (Canal Street), Chinatown


• Congee - (212) 965-5028 - 98 Bowery (Near Hester Street)


• Dim Sum Go Go - (212) 732-0797 - 5 East Broadway (Chatham Square)


• Funky Broome - (212) 941-8628 - 176 Mott Street (Broome Street)


• Joe's Ginger - 212) 966-6613 - 113 Mott Street (Near Hester Street)


• Ping's Seafood - (212) 602-9988 - 22 Mott Street (Near Mosco Street)


• Sunrise 27 - 212) 219-8498 - 27 Division Street (Near Market Street)

(Courtesy: NYTimes)
However my personal choice would be the Rainbow platter at Penang, the Malaysian restaurant on Rt. 10.

Have a good new year! Sing Dan Fai Lok!

Venus And The Moon

If you live on East Coast and if you looked in to West in last few hours you might have seen a real bright blob of light. It's so bright and has "burning aura" (literally looks like flames) around it that I thought it will soon fall down as huge shooting star. So I just fired up my copy of TheSky software to see what's going on and came out with some neat surprise. Well, this is Venus and for next month or so it's gonna be visible long after sunsets and would stay pretty well above horizon (which is not very usual for Venus). With it's current magnitude of -4.0 that's way way too bright for normal night sky standards and it's gonna be even more brighter. If you trace path of Venus, it seems Venus and Moon both comes really really close (almost touching) on 23nd Feb, 2004 at around 17:34 which also happens to be Sunset time! And the beauty of the whole scene during this Sunset is that it would be really nice crescent moon. So watch out and put this date and time on your calendar!

Leonid Meteor Shower This Tuesday

This event is slowing down every year and so for some people it would be a reason not to care and for others it would be a reason to care even more, because next year it will be more slower :). But it's still nice to see shooting stars with some predictability. This year, the peak time on East coast would be on 19th November between 12:00 to 2:30AM which is little earlier then past years. But again my wishes have already came true this year so don't have lots of wishes to make :).
Nasa has really cool graphical estimator for pick intensity for most cities in the world. For times on West coast and more details, check out this press release. Just don't expect something like that image of meteor shower on this site!

Two Becomes One

Once upon a time, far far away from any real world you know, there lived a sparkle of light. Always trying to hide away in the kingdom of dark, it looked to the stars in the night. On one such magical night, it finally tried to look for itself in all the worlds that existed. And with the lightning of awe, it indeed found the one as unreal as itself in its own lone world. The two were far apart, unable to touch and see but still able to long and feel. They moved towards each other for they saw the face of love without seeing each other. Even when they fell, the face made them to stand up and walk again. And on one of the star covered dawns when the Sun was about to light up the sky, they met where the ocean meets the sky. Then they got bound to each other forever to make the wings and they flew away.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shital and Anah got married on 1st Of November, 2003 sunrise at Lanikai Beach, Island Of Oahu, Hawaii.

The New Synthesizer

I finally bought my new keyboard synthesizer - something I wanted since last few months. It's Yamaha EZ250i from InstrumentPro (they seems to be the only one bundling the survival kit along with). This one is suitable for beginners as well as advanced users who needs a perfect piano experience. Infect it's the ultimate machine available for learner in the market. This one is an upgrade over EZ30 and has just arrived in last July. It can be connected to computer right away, has 400+ voices, accurate Grand Piano sounds, built-in Education Suit among several other things. Sweeeet!

Fall Foliage Long Drives

It's cool to be in mountains when fall is just still arriving and you are among the first to feel it. This year my First Of Autumn hikes happened in Adirondacks. This area in upper state New York is probably among the most scenic part on East Coast. You got choice of 46 high peaks to climb (a High Peak is a mountain taller then 4000 ft) apart from countless small mountains and hills, several small and huge lakes to canoe and kayak or just relax on cruise, quite a few waterfalls and quint towns. The best part is you can even take small plane like Cessna 152 and fly over those mountains covered with fresh yellow, red, violet colors. It's probably someof the most scenic experience you can ever have in this part of the country. But behold! Fall is just beginning. The next best thing to do is probably long drives on colorful lonely snaky roads passing through mountains, valleys and lakes. But.. where would you go? Here's some of the best picks for autumn fall foliage road trips!

• Citysearch has their picks of top 10 fall foliage spots


• Visit GORP's Autumn kickoff. They have the great sets of scenic driving routes.


• This is commercial fall tours site but they have good adventure section and you can "steal" some of their iteneries :)


• America's Best also have small list


• If you are in New Jersey, pick your road trip from this great routes through out NJ.


• Last thing: How would you know when and where it's peak of fall colors? There are 3 sites which can tell you when it's time to go: Foliage Network, USDA Forest Services and this other site.
  

Barenaked Ladies Live!

Barenaked Ladies will be performing live at New York on 22nd Oct. These guys concerts (there's no female members in the band - for the unawares) are among the most fun live events, so don't delay in getting tickets! Even more, these are the few of rare artists who prefer to perform live and then put the song in a album rather then other way around. I didn't thought they would be doing any tours. Pinch me if I'm still asleep :)

Will AIers Ever Stop Being Dumb?

Every time I read and hear something in AI research, it freaks me out. These "research" people just keeps formulating laws out of thin air without having any strong logical grounds. Every researcher seems to have their own minuscule world of hard and fast rules that they think is capable to explain everything. What's even worse is that they keep day dreaming that if they keep going like this they are not too far from the finally glory. These people have essentially transformed the "science" of Artificial Intelligence in to a never ending empirical guess game. And this disease is spreading fast everywhere. Now most research studies simply means collecting data, do some statistics and throw some sketchy laws with lots of "might be" to hungry scientific generals. All you need is some post at Stanford or MIT and you can at least expect that your garbage will occupy shelves of library all over the world. A good example is this lecture by Doug Lenat of Stanford. You will see how lots of "principles" are drawn right away out of the thin air without any justification for their validity and completeness. I think these guys should step back for a while and read Newton's Principia or Euclid's Elements just to get feeling of how important it is to approach problem with strong logical grounds rather then "just thoughts out of my mind". We don't have HAL. But seeing current state of AI, that doesn't surprises me.

Voyager Is Missing

Star Trek Voyager is off-air since past few months. So I went to Netflix, my DVD subscription, just to find that Paramount hasn't produced DVDs yet. So I went to Amazon to buy VHS version, just to find that the video cassets are one episod per casset (consider having 150+ episodes). So all these have almost ruined my hopes to get back to Voyager, just when I needed the most. As my last resort, I looked up in Kazza and found some of the cool episodes floating around but it gonna take days to get them.

Moral of the story: If it is still on-air in your area, watch it while you still can. Don't mess with your luck.

Evanescence @ Webster Hall, NYC

Evanescence will be performing live at Webster Hall on 16th Sep in New York City as part of their tour. This is little unusual because even the Webster Hall is kind of the top dance club in the City, I never heard any concerts happening there. But probably thats what makes this cool. Check for tickets and other tour locations. But beaware, tickets are being distributed by the worst ticketing site in the world.

Some Awesome Destinations

I recently went to Sierra Club's meeting/presentation on California's Route 1. This road trip certainly seems to be the queen of all. The presenter been touring this route every couple of years since last 3 decades and had some really awesome photographs - some taken in different seasons and time of the days and some even different decades! Here are some tips from the guru himself: The road trip to CA1 can be done any month, never let weather stop you. Still if you are too picky, in summer (through September) it's kind of hot. From December to March is good time except that El-Nino may strike the Pacific coast and parts of CA1 suddenly merges in to ocean, yet Feb-March is the best time. This is also the time when you can see lots of white whales in the ocean floating around while watching sunset in Pacific Ocean. The good place to stay overnight on this route is Ragged Point Inn. You might want to frequently take exists in between, specifically for San Simeon Castle. It's good idea to stay around this gorgeous huge architecture (they have even special tour for just bathrooms among others!). To stay around this building is San Simeon Pines is a good resort. The route is 90 miles long and totally worth an entire day trip.

While in presentation, I also stumbled upon list of really gorgeous places to visit in United States. They are special because they have specific times when you should be there. Also they are very diverse (from flower covered moutains to canyons in Utah!). If you get a chance, don't even think about missing out on them. I certainly won't :).
Here's my filtered list:

• Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah Canyon valleys partially gets covered in snow. Not for faint hearted.Best Time: Jan/Feb


• Cottonwood Lake, Alaska Clear waters and ice formations in lake like a huge starfish from end to endBest Time: Feb


• Glenn Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona Best Time: Feb


• Tehachapi Mountains, California Absolute gorgeous mountains completely covered with flowers. Yes, just like you had dreamed once :). Best Time: April


• Isla Espirita Santo, Sea of Cortes, Maxico urrr... this one is non-US.Best Time: May


• Painted Hills, Oregon yes, hills that actually looks like someone painted them outBest Time: May


• Elives Chasm, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Best Time: June


• Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta Best Time: Aug


• Cohutta Wilderness Area, Georgia Best Time: Sep


• Kennebec River, Main Best Time: Oct


• Snake River, Wyoming Best Time: Nov


• Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park, California Best Time: Nov


• Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska A special place where you can see Aurora Borealis! Best Time: Nov


• West Indian Manatees, Florida Best Time: Dec


• Owens Valley near Laws, California Best Time: Dec/Jan


• Weddell Sea, Antarctica urrrr... this is non-US, again


• Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Oregon Best Time: Dec/Jan

Things To Remember When Building Your PC

I recently upgraded my custom build 2.5 year old beast. When I started out that time, I wanted to make something really powerful, enviable and which kind of had everything. After burning $3500 in this endeavor I enjoyed owning something that exceeded what Microsoft and others just recently "innovated" as Media Center PC. But this time upgrade wasn't easy and I kept messing up things many times and calling up other gurus. So here's the list for the benefit of someone not-so-skilled:
1. Usually motherboards have 3 special screws that would touch the chassis and provide the grounding. Don't mix up (aha, screw up) those screws.
2. When you lay PC on its side (motherboard top facing you), remember all IDE cable's red-line side faces you but floppy's faces down. If you mess this up, drives won't be detected and you might keep thinking that you blew up power supply and run to buy another one.
3. Power cables to all IDE drives would have yellow side facing you and red side facing IDE cable's red-line. Usually you can't plug other way, unless, uhhh... you push really hard!
4. It's important to see which drive is master and which one is slave (ALWAYS look at the jumper settings before you put drives in bays wire everything up). I didn't bothered and just keep trying until they all were detected (real reason being I'd lost my flashlight). This won't blow up your drives but it's very unreliable.
5. Don't forget to connect CD digital and DVD SPDF connectors to sound card. Former allows digital ripping of audio CDs in MP3s and later allows Dolby Digital sound if you have the card that supports that and have hooked up to Home Theater system. Also if you want to listen modem noises on speakers (or home theater as in my case), don't forget to connect modem and sound card. Many cheap modems don't support this any longer however.
6. If power light blinks then probably you have power supply set on 230V (European style) rather then 115V (US style).

Sunset And Moonrise

On Tuesday, Sep 9, Sunset is at 7:16 PM and moonrise is also at 7:16 PM. Cool right? Good way to see this would be at High Point State Park or a special hike from Sierra Club. My preference is former, undoubtably the best place in NJ to see this!

A Visit To The Temple

I'd to just help my neighbour to find her run-away cat. Now a last blogbit... before I really really go to bed!

This Labor Day weekend I was thinking about spending 3 days in programming few stuff I'd planned but such things just can't happen. Suddenly a plan came around out of nowhere for 12+ hours of road trip to West Virginia and a visit to an ISKCON temple. Submitting to spontaneous weird idea seems to be my weakness. This one was weird because, well, who can think of visiting an ISKCON temple out of nowhere? While I'm not affiliated to ISKCON (or for that matter any religious organization whatsoever), I was curious about them anyway (watching Hare Krishna group dancing on Leicester Square in London is very cool) and so I joined my gang. This indeed turned out to be great road trip. We almost started at sun rise, passed through valleys and mountains covered with mist and made few stops. The temple located on the mountain top in hilly state of West Virginia has some good views. We also realized that day was little special being the last day of a festival called Paryushan from Jain religion and first day of another festival Ganesh Chaturthi and the last day when the temple remains open until 8 PM and a day when free feast is served and of course, it was the last day of summer. As if all these coincidences weren't enough, I ran in to one of my classmates in the temple who had left his job to be a full time ISKCON person serving as deputy director of a charity hospital (it's amazing how I keep meeting my classmates by coincidences. Last time I met one in a strip club, this time it was in a temple! And we always say this first to each other: "what the hack you doing here?"). We also took the tour of Palace Of Gold which is the memorial built for the founder of ISKCON. It's funny though to build a memorial buried under gold for a person who probably spent his entire life fighting against materialistic world and achieving nirvana.

You can view some photos of this trip, some are really cool including one with beatles procreating right inside the rose!

MTV VMAs

Before I go to bed, few more bits...
This is to announce that this year's VMA sucked. I used to see this show for it being totally different from other award functions (i.e. freaky, weird, explicit and eye-popping). It seems to be the general opinion that if it hadn't been for Britney-Madonna's kiss, this would have been the worse so far.

Sticky Chapter

I'm stuck on Chaper 8 of Brief History Of Time again. This is happening for the 3rd time. Everytime I read this book I get until this chapter and then eventually give up. This time I tried to track down the fault and realized this chapter is so much unorganized and has apparently unrelated thoughts, though interesting - which keeps me coming back to it. Okay... let's start again. Shall we?

Should Virus Creators Be Punished?

I and Don Rittenburg of Groove Networks went in to intense arguments over lunch whether person who creates viruses be punished. I took the side that they shouldn't be. My point of view was that cyberspace isn't exactly the real world. It's man-made, designed to be anonymous and most importantly by it's inherent nature it's not supposed to be limited by laws. It gives you immense freedom and if you can be stopped by creating bunch of laws by old fat ignorant politicians then it isn't the same. Of course, freedom isn't a free lunch and you have to accept the associated risk and resposibility. I put the virus creation activities as the inherent part of cyber culture and implicit right of cyber-citizens just like free-speech. Don happens to be really good logician and put some really good arguments. His central idea was that just because it's possible, it can't be just allowed. If your car tires are not secured by lock and key, would you let a person to blow air out of them just to demonstrate that it is not secured or just for fun? Is it worth to live under constant fear that your stuff is not really secured and someone somewhere is gonna come and get you and may destroy your life time of work and get away with it without getting punished or even detected? And multiply the hassle by millions who gets affected, loss of hours, possibly life or career threatening consequences to many and lots of not-so-geeky people who just won't be able to get their computers back to normal. Would that be acceptable? From Don's argument, I think I see the aftermath that typical virus author would fail to see or doesn't won't to. I realized that cyberworld isn't just the world of universities and nerds anymore but is now married to the real world and is inseperable part of it. And that marriage would mean loss of inherent freedom and bring the laws in. I'm now in agreement that they might be allowed to be punished but still believe that punishment shouldn't be stiff: just few months of community services would suffice. That did settle our 40 mins long logical wrestling (or I lost, to put it correctly). My apologies to cyber-citizens for my failure to defend this supposed-to-be law free culture, however :(.

Mars Viewing

Just saw the red planet through my 4.5" telescope and 10mm eye piece. Unlike it was advertised on several web sites, no, it doesn't get as big as moon when looking through modest telescope. Infect there's barely any difference when I'd looked at it through same scope in last couple of years. So I just went in to some number crunching using fact sheet at Nasa's web site, and it seems that Mars should look (at best) 30% more brighter and around 40% bigger then I'd seen couple of years ago. Now the catch is that when looking through telescope with above spec (which is pretty beyond modest 70mm stuff), Mars would normally look like a bright tiny disk. So 40% increase would make that tiny disk little bigger - but still a tiny. To make it look as big as Moon you would need increment of 1000% or more and that's not going to achievable just by Mars coming closer - it's possible only though much much bigger scopes. So my conclusion is that news sites and emails that kept circulating were pretty misleading to public. Though the good part is that lots of people suddenly got interested in astronomy. Infect one of my friend was so hopeful that he has put a $100 bet with me on whether Mars would look as big as moon on 27th August with bare naked eyes! So I'm not entirely dissopointed with this hoax, at least someone would get some money :).

Cool Albums Of The Season

Here's some from shopping list of past few months:

[Artist - Album]

Linkin Park - Meteora
Evanescence - Fallen
Audioslave - Audioslave
Macy Gray - On How Life Is
Barenaked Ladies - Rock Spectacle
4 Strings - Take me away (into the night)

Evanescence's Fallen is probably the best thing came out this year. Audioslave is raw, hard and grungy. How Macy Gray came in to my list? I don't know... I'd written bad things about Meteora previously but when you are in real need for extreme screaming, lots of hatred and hard hard hard stuff these guys seems to fit the bill.

Anders Hejlsberg

Just watched MSDN TV's new episode on Managed Code. The topic is pretty trivial for me but what's exciting is to see one person talking and seating there. I remember my years as a rebellious programmer when followers were few and swimming opposite the popular currents wasn't easy. In all-Unix all-C++ organization I'd heavily pushed for tools and style I believed in - even if it meant taking over entire responsibility and work load on me. All those tools that I chose, used and appreciated for the vision it embedded, looked separate pieces of great ideas which just seem to happen to came on my way... until there was one day when I read a magazine article and came to know there was really only one person behind all of those and all these years: Anders Hejlsberg. Those separate pieces of vision now seems to make a complete picture and so you can imagine how I would have stand in awe of him. As far as world of programming is concerned, Anders is my hero.

When I Fall

In this world of the Greater Being, I feel like I'm at play... like a little kid. With all my sense of wonder and curiosity... walking on my knees to get close, see and feel everything that has been put around me... and smile for all those good things that I find. And when I'm just moving around, there are moments when things are not the way I would have wanted... sometime when I would have really wanted. Some of the worst moments of my life constitutes of those when the people I'd admired I see falling apart and I can't do anything about it... when someone you cared is dieing and you can do nothing about it... Those moments... when I just want to look up in the sky and pretend that I don't exist... trying to convince myself that it's ok... I feel like I'm betrayed with anger bursting out every inch of my body... But then when I'm all low and down, there's always something that happens... like someone struck the new string on the guitar that I'd never heard before... wiping out all my doubts with just that one stroke of note. So I look around to find the one but I can't see. But I know she was there smiling at me... like I'm a little kid... someone is sure playing with me.

Your Yahoo Group Membership

Due to recent changes, your membership might have been messed up in Yahoo groups that I maintain. If you got unsubscribed and not getting any emails, please use following links to correct it:

Group: shital
Group: MyTechList

Language Of Flowers

I found a little booklet today titled "The Secret Language Of Flowers" by Rachel Ibarra explaining nicely what each flower means when you give it to someone. I've to confess, I'm not good at it and so have to depend on the lady at the check-out counter to make sure I don't buy flowers for my boss which would mean "secret love" on her birthday :). I can't find this book on Amazon or B&N so you have to go to your nearest grocery store such as Pathmark to get it. Alternatively there's this nice web page for this but without pictures chances of screw up is high!

Astronomy Events This Month

Mars is going to be the closest to Earth in recorded human history so far. You can go out at midnight and look in the South and the big blob of orangish yellow light (which you might mistake as air plane) is Mars. Even on the rainy nights you can see it lurking behind the cloud - it's that bright. Infect it's brighter then anything after Sun and Moon! Even in a modest telescope you can see it's big bright surface magnified as large as Moon. More info is in this newsletter.

Next Perseid meteor shower peaks on Aug 13, 2003. I'd spotted couple of shooting stars last week in just about two hours of time span and thought I was lucky! Well, this was the scientific reason behind it, actually.

T3 On DLP and Matrix II On IMAX

When I saw Terminator for the first time few years back, it had struck me like a lightening. Though most people considered it just another action flick, it was one of very few movies which I guess could change lives and sets the directions. And so to the date, it's still my #1 favorite movie. I thought there won't be Terminator 3. When I heard about it, seen previews and learned that director is not James Cameron, my prediction for it was to be a soulless sure flop. Well, I was wrong and right. It is flop and it's sure not as influential as the original. But it's still totally worth watching. It's probably the best action film I've seen so far. The car chase sequences are anything that you would have seen on the big screen (The car chase in Matrix II now looks like kids play). So it has become one of few movies that I've went out to see it twice. If it's available in your area, choose the theater with Digital Projection (DLP) for fine DVD-like details on big screen. If you live in NJ, Loews Jersey Gardens Theaters is the place to go.

Next, Matrix Reloaded is released on monster screens of IMAX. This is remastered edition rather then real IMAX movie but it's fun to watch those special effects on 8 story screen :).

New Books

I'm running out of books to read so I was on shopping spree at Amazon. Just picked up few books from my Wish List and then few books from my favorite authors.

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer


• Gamma: Exploring Euler's Constant


• How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers


• Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology


• Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary


• The Best American Science Writing 2002

Cool Pocket PC Stuff

If you got this thingy and don't know what to do with it besides storing phone numbers and birthdays, well, here's some "secrets" I came across after my first night with it :)

• Sexual Positions 1.0 - Of course, this has to be the first to grab :). No freaky stuff in this one and it's legally free.


• Pocket Bartender - It's so convenient to handover your Pocket PC to bartender and ask her to make that drink that no one else has ever heard of!


• TheSky Pocket Edition - This is probably the best and most popular in it's category. Think about coming out of your car, tap on your Pocket PC to see real-time sky map and know the name of that star you been wondering about in the middle of nowhere. If you had good telescope, you can even plug-in your pocket pc in to it and control it with pen taps! Other such programs include Pocket Stars and Pocket Universe. The bad thing about TheSky is that there is no trial edition available but I've heard that you can make a copy in someway if someone else has it. Don't ask how!


• Ephemeris - This is cool little app to show moon phase, sun/moon rise times etc. Helpful if you were like me who won't mind not sleeping additional one hour to see sun rise!


• TV Remote Controller - I've yet to make this work but the basic idea is that you are sitting in the bar and suddenly TV channel gets changed to Star Trek from some stupid sports game and no one knows how did that happened.


• Taiyoukei - This is nice set created by a Japanese guy for astronomy. Taiyoukei meaning "solar system", for example, can tell you which planets are up in the sky right now among many other stuff.


• EBooks - There are several free (the one on Kazza may not count) ebooks available which you can read on Pocket PC during your bus trips to New York. Special fun are kids books: Alice in the wonderland, Encarta Pocket Dictionary, Adventure of Tom Sawyer and Julius Verne.

Apart from these cool stuff, Pocket PC as an operating system totally sucks. How one can even think of making it and selling it? There's lots of scope here to make additions to this crappy operating system.

Jun-July Photo Album

This quick and small album could be viewed at dotPhoto. I'll post it on my site when I stop being lazzzy.

Things With The Rain Drops...

Listening to When I Fall with sound of rain drops from my window... These days are going good. Haven't missed chance to get myself wet in rain most of the time... and walking on wet grass with bare feet... and watching rain drops making curves in cones of street lights... and taking a long drive in rain with my windows open... and taking snaps of Sun hiding behind dark clouds... and taking a deep breath in drizzly air... and wondering at water dance on my windshield... and following a droplet cloud around wheels of other vehicles... and making a splash on my way... These days are going good.

Lost and unfound

It's frustrating how much difference a little stupidity can make to your life. Yours and others. These days and nights are dedicated to some meanest of them.


[Listening: Matchbox Twenty - If you're gone]

A Marriage Conjecture

I and Sundar usually get in to blazingly fast high information density conversations. The recent one which lasted for 15 min spanned through topics such as best porn available on Net, XSL, marriages, divorce laws in Texas, blogging and ants. I just happened to make a statement with him which I thought worth blogging.

So here's what I call "The Marriage Conjecture".

"I was thinking marriage is a big thing. You need to have 100% confidence. Your match should be made in heaven. Both of you should love each other deeply. ALL of these thoughts are CRAP."

It's a conjecture because nothing seems to disprove this but to the deep of my heart I know it can't be true. So just like usual mathematician, I guess there's something missing here.

Feel like throwing a comment? send me at sytelus@yahoo.com.

New Google Toolbar

New version of Google Toolbar is released and it's even more cooler. It now has Popup blocker plus blogging support. I just blogged this straight from the toolbar!

Yahoo! Launch Getting Better

My favorite online music service Rhapsody is not working for me these days. They removed entire Linkin Park collection, few albums from Kid Rock and God knows what more. So I'm back to my old favorite Yahoo! Launch. They have gotten better with more selection, many more videos and more features. The best thing is, ofcourse, you can tell it what you liked and it will select more your kinda music rather then purely random songs. And it's totally free! You can listen to my own customized radio station which I'm listening to right now.

Jersey Starquest and other star parties

Star parties are event with all night deep sky observations and chance to meet other fellow amateur astronomers. The first one of the year at East Coast is happening this weekend at Hope, NJ. There's usually crowd of 20-30 people with all level of skills. You can try all sorts of telescopes (some as large as 17") and instruments for deep sky CCD observations and so on. There are going to be day time events, talks and presentations and sun spot watching! If you missed this, there is 3 more popular star parties coming up this year. Check the event calander at S&T site. You can see some photographs I took of last year's star parties.

To empty people, brighter nights and shorter days

[Now Listening: Tom Petty - You don't know how it feels]

Can't beat this clock... can't stop staring this screen... can't sleep these nights... can't leave this place... can't think... can't do better things... can't stop thinking... can't stop blood in these veins... can't see world less beautiful... can't find that piece of heart... can't contain in to self... can't hold her hand... can't breath out... can't fall in to comma... can't get closer to my sky... can't steal colors... can't get bigger space... can't stop meaningless talk... can't get bored with blahs... can't keep aweful silense... can't stop reaching out... can't stay alone... can't stop cursing... can't survive people... can't be bad... can't become one...

Bolly Flicks On TCM

Turner's classic movie channel will be showing three Bollywood movies in a row on every Thursday starting 8 PM. This is on experimental bases for the month of June. The bollywood movies have an average opinion of being stupid, mostly same, colorful, frequent with dance sequences with no reason and something that makes most females burst out of tears all the time. But the movies that TCM was showing since past few weeks were some of the very best, including my rare personal favorites, that's far away from this average opinion. So I guess it would be worth to check out their schedule.

Virtual Worlds With POV-Ray

POV-Ray is the 3D graphic software which allows you to create 3D world with lightings, reflections, shadows, color gradients, materials, textures and so on. I'd read about it about 5 years ago and almost ignored it - until just few days back I decided to gave it a whirl one more time (I think it was a sudden urge to create some 3D graphics). Just after a quick simple installation and spending 15 minutes on beginner's tutorial, I was totally in to it. Just a couple of hours more and I'd my very first 3D image which is cool enough to show off. By the time night fall, I already had an AVI movie with a virtual walkthrough in my 3D world (by making camera move along a specified trajectory). This thing is addictive and it rocks. I can now calculate 3D coordinates and linear transformations in my head! The scripting language it uses is C like and very intuitive. Sure there were many other ray tracing programs including 3D Studio but this open source free program is much more "programmer oriented" rather then "artist oriented". Don't forget to check out Internet Ray Tracing Competition for some truly mind blowing virtual images.

PhysLink store

It's nice store. Here are the things I just bought...

 
• Thermodynamic Drinking Bird


• Hyperactive Yoyo


• 75W Black Colored Light Bulb


• Mini Compass


• Whistling Saucer


• Boomerang


• Ceramic Horseshoe Magnet

New Version Of This Site Comming Soon

The new look[s] and content is soon comming to replace my current web site. This new version will feature something called themed site - i.e. I can make my site look like anything I want in minutes! This concept is not new but as I wanted to take care of all small details, it took me 30 hours of heavy duty ASP.Net programming and couple of missed meals last weekend to accomplish this - in most ideal way I could think of. Thanks to all rain and cool air coming from my window - which kept me working long long hours. There will be change in content too. I'm planning to delete some of them. So just in case, you'd liked it, save it in your own machine before it dissapears! Apart from that, I'll be moving my blogs to my own blogging tool. These blogs are currently hosted on blogger.com and that thing SUCKS! They charge for their crappy blogging software and still 50% of the features I want are missing. I'm just tired of looking around for another blogging service and so I got to write my own - my next mission.

High Point State Park

This place is becoming my luxury hike place on lazy drizzly spring days. It's the highest point in state of New Jersey. You can see all neighboring states Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York on clear day and you don't even have to hike to get on the top - just take 5 min easy drive and you are there! It has even little beach on the lake. You can view Mohonk, Catskills, Camelback, Pocono's, Bear mountains - all from same place! It's even better on drizzly days because there's no one there and clouds are kissing the land :). Also, by far it's the only perfect sunset view spot I've found in NJ. To get there, all you have to do is to be on Rt 23N. Just after few miles Rt 23 suddenly becomes all green and gorgeous. The country roads after the town of Franklin are cool enough to get lost for a while. I have a took some pics - check it out! I'll be adding few more soon.

Central Park Summerstage and 311

Central Park summer stage schedule is out. Mark your dates from their official home page.

On 311, this is a new number you can dial in New York and ask any question or make any complaints - literally! This is due to effort of new mayor Bloomberg to combine several agency to one spot through one number! Want to know how to dispose refrigerator? or complain about that loud car alarm? Dial 311.

Jewel Moments

On one fine spring morning, a beautiful lady with the sweetest voice decided to walk in a gorgeous park and sing for whoever cared. It was Saturday morning, one of the least busy time of the week when rest of the world prefers to sleep after long Friday night. It was one of the most invisibly promoted concert - even a professional certified guide at Central Park just 200 feet away from the stage didn't knew about it! But still many of us did knew and hassled through early Saturday morning to be there. There were even fans who literally set up their front line spaces before sun came up. Then there was a "Jewel stalker" who tried a stunt to reach her with roses. Jewel being inherently very shy and sensitive, you don't expect lots of fun fair on the stage. It goes smoothly with occasional emotional bursts until she feels comfortable with the whole thing. And then she can tell jokes and attempt to be funny. She doesn't try to create exact replica of her album versions, instead almost always she would change tempo, tones and add twists. One often discussed disappointment was new hair style (change from the one with long beautiful hair). She is sure my #1 favorite female artists and I been envy of people who heard her live when she still a coffee house singer. Her open air concert in the world's greatest city and gorgeous park on that fine spring morning just looked like falling from the heaven. Catch her few glimpse in my photo albums section. Her new album 0304 is already in the stores and I guess she might have more upcoming events in case you are interested.

New Albums From My Favorite Artists

[Many of these albums are also available at Rhapsody.]

Suddenly all of my top 3 favorite artists have relased their new music albums during last few months. Unfortunetely all of these albums sucks. But anyway, because they are my favorite they will get metion here :).

First, Matchbox Twenty has came up with new album More Than You Think You Are. Yes, they continue in tradition of weired names for their albums (oh well... who can make sense of name Matchbox Twenty itself?). I guess they have grown big in last few years but haven't completely lost their touch. Some tracks are cool. It takes time, experiences, situation to get taste of music from these guys. So far I personally know only one person who likes Matchbox Twenty!!

Next, Linkin Park is out with much-awaited Meteora. I'd though this will be something new and fresh but it totally smells like leftover of their previous hit Hybrid Theory. These guys have so much energy and imagination I'd thought it's not gonna wear them down any sooner. Hopefully they have something cooler in pipeline.

Finally, Jewel has got her new single Intuition out. She does hip-hop kind of thing for the first time and pretty much screws it up. She has her new full album 0304 set to be released on June 3, 2003. Hopefully that isn't all that bad.

So if these sucks, what's cool? Listen to 200 Km/H in the Wrong Lane. If while listening some of the lyrics doesn't seem to make sense, just remember that this album is from duo of teenaged Russian lesbians (and yes, they are hot!).

Another is Barenaked Ladies. These canadian guys had most of their releases in last decade, have huge followings and their concerts are considered to be one of the best to go for. Very cool guitar tabs seemlessly going with equally cool vocals and effortlessly flowing lyrics and hummable tunes. If you think they took cheap marketing uproach, wait until you listen to tracks like Pinch me, If I should fall or Light up my room. Yes, there is NO female member in the band, but I'm sure you won't care.

Total Lunar Eclipse (May 15, 2003)

Total lunar eclipse coming on 5/15/2003. Most of US can see it. 10:03 PM ET. Awesome sight!

Check out press release from NASA for more info on why this happens and local times in other countries.

Courtesy: hubble_this text alert list on Verizon mobile

Mercury On West

Elusive, offen hiddden planet Mercury is visible this week. In USA, look low and west after sunset.

Courtesy: hubble_this text alert list on Verizon mobile

New York Shows

There are two shows currently on in New York city and it's last week for both (i.e. until 27th April 2003). One of them is International Auto show at 38th street and 11th avenue at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (see http://www.autoshowny.com). You can open the doors of most commercial cars on display and sit in (including Hummer H2) to see how it feels like it. While this might be exciting for some people, I found it more or less boring. It's like walking around a big parking lot. Except few Porshes, Ferraris, Bentley and few concept cars everything else you can see on everyday roads in US anyway. The best car I saw was Bufori, a $110,000 machine which has 1930 classic looks from outside and ultra hi-tech from inside.

The next event happening in NYC is Macy's Flower Show at Herald Square. I haven't been there but the flyer says over a million flowers, 30,000 species from 6 continents are on display. Spring rulez. Try not to miss it :).

Next on the list is Central Park Summerstage. This is a popular summer destination where professional artists performs live and free of charge. This year Jewel is going to be there on 10the May. Jewel is one of my top favorites - probably the best female vocal on the planet. I've been looking for her concerts but there weren't any so far and now it's right here in central Park and that too free!!

I got this alert from pollstar.com - these guys keeps keeps a watch on concerts and music events - but I can't get additional information or varification for this event.

Best Of New York

I just keep finding excuses to run away to New York and yet have never ran out of places to go. On the contraray, many have. Here's the coolest link to help you out. These guys have came up with a list of best of everything - from Best Haircut to Best Romantic Hotel. So if you are tired of stumbling on to same old places, here's the gene for you :).

http://newyork.citysearch.com/best/categories/2002

Picks: Movies, Concerts And Art

Three movies that you shouldn't miss this season:

1. Chicago - A total classic. Very different. Nice screen play. Cool lightings and photography. These guys got nominated for 13 acadami awards and I wasn't surprised.
2. About Schmidt - A movie that gonna move you. Shatter you. Only for hard core reality fans.
3. The Guru - A cool hilarious flick on an Indina emigrant. Neat.

Concerts:

1. Matchbox Twenty is on roll. Click here their schedules for NY/NJ area.
2. The unity of light - A concert by my favorite Indian artist A.R. Raheman. This will feature several other BIG artists from Bollywood music scene. Looks very cool to me.

Art:
The 50th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix is now being celebrated visually, with six different exhibitions in Manhattan.

My New Photo Albums

I'd become little lazy in putting up my photos since last many many months but now I just looked back and thought these ought to be out there or atleast some of them! So here goes my Saturday night updating my photo albums! But in this blog I want to talk little about taking photographs. First, you do not need bulky pricey cameras. The good photos you capture entirely depends on the angle, moment and your judgment rather then technology embedded in camera (gee, and you still call me a geek!). Almost all photos in all of my albums so far were taken from mere 1 Mega pixel digital cameras which had all necessary functionalities but weren't the high end ones (HP C20 and Sony DCR-100). The key to get good photographs is just to get out more. And every time. Make your will exceed the difficulties posed by weather or other circumstances. For example photos in my new album on Verrazano bridge were taken on one of the cold day in winter with chilling winds. I still remember my hands were frozen at the point of getting numb even after wearing gloves and I couldn't hold my camera still! Yet in other album on Sun rising from behind the New York City it was even more brutal - I'd forgot my gloves! You won't feel the chilling winds in those beautiful photos but it were there. If you ask why others don't have these photos, it's for simple reason: they weren't out there. One more thing, you might want to avoid any retouching of your digital photographs unless you really want to do some modern artsy thing. The only thing I would allow on my photos is resize and 90 degree rotate. However tempting it might be, absolutely no enhancements of any type - the world deserves the truth the way you saw it! Finally I must thank the pool of positive feedback last year for these photographs but I guess I do not consider myself an artsy or even dedicated photographer. Infect much of the time I intentionally do not carry my camera or don't take a snap even if I had one. You do loose capturing some magnificent views but you don't loose moments :).

My new photo albums can be viewed from my site.

Exploring The Undergrounds

Well, it's amazing how some of the most beautiful passions are shared by so few. Thanks to a re-routed email that dropped in to my Inbox telling me there was a presentation on "All about caves and caving" and I got a chance to meet people who are exploring these underground marvels since more then a decade. I'm pretty much beginner and just had some idea how these caves would have looked like when I read Adventures of Tom Sawyer a decade ago (and this still remains the best book I've ever read!) and when I went out on one of the caving trips last summer with AMC. It is simply breathtaking what this planet's underground holds for you with miles and miles long caves nerves system frequently including super huge tall domes formations and sometime hundreds of spiky icy straws, deep pits and even lakes. These caves can be explored almost all year round because temperatures there stays stable between 50-60 F. However it's complete darkness there and you got to have helmet with light and some other essential gear. It's recommended that if you are beginner you go with someone experienced and never go in group of less then four. If you are a good hiker and have some rock climbing experience, it helps but all you really need is a will to crawl, scramble and be there! The National Speleological Society is your starting point to get in touch with gurus and go out in their group outings across United States and Maxico. If you are in New Jersey, visit Northern New Jersey Grotto to meet some of the cool experts in this field and start out in their trips designed for beginners!

Story Reading At Symphony Space

This one is cool artsy low-profile New York event. Nothing much happens: a celebrity comes on stage and reads you a short story. It's an experience, given the right story teller, how much different a story becomes when someone reads it to you. Visit Symphony Space's website to get more info on shows. I think shows will run through June. My last year's favorite was one called Boys from the Best American Short Stories. This will probably be repeated this year too. But watch out for it, that had been a sold out show last year!

Music Finds: 7 Ethnic Tracks

One of my favorite "soul test" for a song had been to make someone listen to it who doesn't understand the language and see if they can still figure out the meaning from rhythm and vocal emotions. All of the following tracks are "remixed" versions of original tracks (if there were any), have sweet vocals and certainly has a different style.

[artist - album - song]

• Deep Forest - Pure Moods - Sweet Lullaby. Probably an African language. My guess for this song was that it's a song for pre-marriage rituals and I was wrong for both guesses. You can find english translation from Internet but give yourself a try!


• Deep Forest - Boheme - Marta's Song. This one is pretty old (released in 1995). Rest of the album is crap.


• Karunesh - Global Spirit - Punjab. Probably a version of folk song in an Indian language Punjabi. Extremely popular 2002 hit in India. Karunesh is a German born artist who later came to India after near-fatal motorbike accident which started off his spiritual journey.


• Khalid - Khalid - Didi. After you listen to Arabic languages you might wonder, if one can even sing in that. This old global hit might prove you wrong.


• DJ Aqeel - Ek Haseenna thi - Tu Tu Wahi. One of the Bombay style remix but with very cool vocals.


• Instant Karma - Dance Masti Again - Aaja Piya. Yet another Bollywood remix with cool vocals.


• Bally Sagoo - Best of Bally Sagoo - Gur Nalon Ishq Mitha. The bhangra-style music is well known to make your feet move. And when that gets remixed by Bally Sagoo, it a definite dance hit. Much of the album is also not too crapy.

Moving Around Mumbai

Well, I never liked the City's new name "Mumbai" (from old Bombay) but it looks like that's gonna stay. My favorite season to be in the City always had been Monsoon (June - Sep) when it rains a lot. However the weather in December is also pleasant 70s (F) and sky is still clear enough for me to spot some shooting stars. Here I'm going to outline few observations as a personal note. If you been to or away from this wonderful, dirty, soulful and one of the greatest cities in the world, here's the treat for you :).

The vegetarian and the non-vegetarian sects seem to have risen in equality in their strength and aggressiveness. Vegetarian burgers were already common place but now you can see vegetarian hot dogs on menus! I even saw the ad for vegetarian tooth paste! But on the other hand much of the college going crowed doesn't feel any guilt in eating animals. However, vegetarian burgers are just "vada paw" with burger's bun. The restaurent staff also informed me that hot dog has same material as burger but with different buns. Looks like the City is reinventing American food just as it did decade ago for Chinese food. Much of the "Chinese" food available on Bombay's street is something that's most Chinese people are not aware of!

Bombay girls, on average, are more free from traditions, modern and sophisticated. However this might be more true for upper middle class and riches. It's not unusual to find girls smoking in college campuses and no one even gives a second look. While I hate smoking, doing it just as free as a man could and without guilt is a good change. In the New Year's party that I been to, the clothing style of the crowd there was undistinguishable from a posh nightclub in US. But then again, that party was sponsored by F TV, a new channel in Bombay on fashion stuff. Now there are many more cable channels available then before. However most western TV channel's have "indianized" themselves to stay in the fierce competition. The MTV India is far far better in quality and presentation then its native US version. The cable internet is now easily available for nearly same cost as dialup, however numbers of hours are limited and you have to pay hefty sum for a modem. Mobile phones are extremely common place and that looks like a booming business. Most phones use European style SIM cards and have pay-and-go billing. The mobile text messaging (SMS) is very common and can be used across the glob (In US, the text messaging standards are different which makes it neither popular nor globally usable). One of the other visible improvements is the numbers of FM channels that has been mushroomed in the City. I found most of them had real good quality programming. That may not be surprising when you realize that most DJs on these radio stations are young and even possibly still college going crawd instead of government employees. So, you know it's gonna be cool and vibrant stuff. Radio Mirch is one of the nicer ones.

There are many more shopping malls then before but still they are quite small (not even 1/4th) compared to giant ones that you can find everywhere in US and UK. Much of the things sold in these malls are direct imports and targeted for relatively rich mass rather then usual middle class. You can get almost anything that's available in western countries: popular colognes, brand sun glasses, Boss home theater system, DVD + MP3 players, big screen TVs, Play Station 2 and so on. But one of the hard to find thing was Calvin Klein Eternity cologne which I'd forgot to pack with my luggage at last minute! These new malls are starting the change in retain business but most purchasing still happens in street-side small retail stores. However apart from more shopping malls, what city needs right now is more high rises. I saw old and small buildings being replaced by bigger and better looking ones (usually referred as "towers" in the City terminology). However these are usually still limited to 7 floors high. I guess much of the city's problems like slum areas, unhygienic places and unorganized shops would be instantly solved by putting up real sky scrappers (50+ floors giants) everywhere like in New York and thus creating sufficient room to accommodate everyone nicely. Unfortunately lately I'd heard that some old residents had filed law suits against new high rises and so government is actively thinking about putting a ban on them. The sky scrapers is the reality that have to be accepted at one point or another. Later is not better. There's no escape.

Most people in Bombay feels that the City was improved in last few years by several new flyovers and highways. But it seemed minor changes to me and may even go unnoticed if someone doesn't tell you. Local trains now all have 12 coaches. I felt that the pollution in the City had reached to suffocating level. But you hear and see different things. One information board near Thane station said last measured air quality was rated "excellent" and that board itself I could see standing in smoke. I was guessing UV radiation would be much higher because of this but no one I knew was wearing sun block lotion. All "ricks" (3-wheelers) and taxies are now required to run on LPG gas rather then gasoline ("patrol" in City's terminology rather than "gas" as in US). The drivers hate this law because of long queues to fill up with LPG gas. However from cost, pollution and maintainenece point of view everything is better with LPG. I was wondering why LPG driven vehicles are completely absent from UK or US. Anyways, there's fine of Rs. 200 for not wearing seat belts. Though few people cares and infect, taxies has no seatbelts at all even if you want to wear them! I'd later realized taxies even don't have side mirrors!! The "usual" driving style in Bombay might make you loose couple of heartbeats. If you wish, you can even switch to totally opposite side lane so you can pass vehicle in front of you! No traffic fines. Even if you are on extreme right lane at the traffic light, you can still attempt to make a left turn. It's ok. No one cares about divider lines between lanes. Infect for many, its fun to drive exactly on the center of a divider line! Most two lane roads would be used as 3 or 4 or even 5 lane roads. The only widely accepted "traffic law" seems to that more massive vehicle has a right of way. That means pedestrians, being the least massive things, has no right of way whatsoever. Peds just have to wait. If they happen to break this rule, you are allowed to honk at them. Honking is not an irritation but a normally accepted way of communicating between drivers (no pun). Even some trucks had signs "please honk" (to let me know you are behind me)! My friend told me that numbers of vehicles are now doubled in the City. But the surprise for me was that I didn't saw a single car accident in entire period of month - something that I'm so used to see on Garden State Parkway in New Jersey once a week. That's probably because of low speed limits of 40 KM/hr or less in the Bombay city. I do like to indulge in the conversation with cab and ricks drivers because they often have honest views and good info to share on lower middle class - though you have to take a risk of looking stupid at times if you haven't been around for a while.

Your visit is incomplete anywhere you go if you don't sample local food, music, nightclubs and jokes. As far as food is concerned, Bombay is a heaven. I had hard time keeping off myself within limits. The sophisticated restaurants with cool innovative menus and interior decoration have mushroomed everywhere you would care. However, real food in Bombay is the street food. You shouldn't miss that because I haven't found the taste equals even in acclaimed authentic restaurants outside India. The best street food heaven would certainly be the Chaupaty. However, it's advisable that you don't try everything in a single day (like me) because it might easily cause bad stomach problems or even typhoid. You do need some confidence and strong built-in anti-bacterial protection. However bonus is that while eating that stuff you can see a perfect sunset in the ocean, something that's not usual on the East coast in US. Other places to see sunsets in Bombay are Band Stand in Bandra, Marin drive, Jogger's Park and Worli sea face. All of these are cool places to walk around when it's not crowdy. With perfect temperatures of 70s, mild winds coming over your face and beautiful sunset in front of your eyes nothing gets better. The notable one is the Jogger's Park, a clean well maintained sea side place where I saw the last and probably the most beautiful sunset of the year. There was a funny sign in there "No Mis-behaving"! One of the City's other places to have fun is Waterpark which is a heaven because of hot temperatures all year. This waterpark has put forward a claim for world's biggest water coaster. Also one of the other visible changes in the City is so many brand new coffee houses. The one chain Italian coffee shop called Baristas is all over the City and they happens to have 10x better coffee then Starbucks and 100x better then Dunkin Doughnuts. Yeah, definitely.

One of the changes that has struck me the most, painfully, is much more sharper division between lower and upper middle classes. It seems that the former's family income has remained virtually unchanged over the last five years while the average prices of all none-essential goods seems to have been almost doubled. But it's still amazing that most people seemed quite satisfied with their way of living. They didn't seem to miss buying a portable CD player and or going out for playing 10-pin bawling. They think they have fun, they satiesfy their needs and they are rising. I think what constitutes this City is its people then it's geography. Even under rising financial pressures, crushing work hours and increasing inflation, people are still good at heart as they ever have been. You can meet complete strangers, get along with them and have fun without caring each other's last names or financial backgrounds. Only problem is that you might have to tell them that you gonna go away soon. Its might be as well less painful just to disappear...

Unethics Of Cloning

So what's wrong with cloning? Lot of things. To clone a person, from genetic point of view, is to like learning absolutely nothing from your experiences. It's an effective stop to evolution of a living being. But fortunately, the Vatican church and many other religious people don't have to exercise with reasoning. Their objection to cloning and almost everything else could be put in same old one liner: It's unethical. But why cloning scares lots of people? Imagine, what if you and me could be mass-produced like TV sets in your home? What if we are not really more then complex bio-chemical machines made out of organic mater that could be just as easily produced in factory? Will clone's soul too be mass-produced? Could clone be considered as rebirth of some other person 50 years ago? Would s/he have rebirth? And what about his or her sins? And can clone go to heaven or hell? Apparently religions all over the world are going have tough time again to re-align themselves with reality. But what if we, as Bible says the one who would rule over everything that moves on land, water and sky, are not really the center of the universe? For fans of historical scientific stories this is nothing new. In 1600s, The Catholic Church had put Galileo in the court for making announcement that the Earth is not really at the center of universe. It was shocking that nothing really revolves around us except poor old moon. Finally Galileo decided to concede rather the church burn him for making entire human race so insignificant. It was funny though when I saw a press release few years back when Vatican publicly apologized to Galileo for that 300 year old mistake. Apparently Bible was easier to bend then truth. And as far as I can see, time is coming back with more dosage of insignificancy. This century is going to be the century of genetics and artificial intelligence. These are the two fields that's still unexplored and where growth is raging at exponential rates. Both have possibilities to come up with better "beings" then we are, of course you can't afford to say that publicly. Just like Galileo's announcement, it's socking and "unethical". May be that's impossible or may be that's what evolution destined to or may be we would be end up being a father of smarter kids. But this time the things that should move out of the center seems to be us rather then Earth. And I just keep wishing if I could be just as blunt all mighty Q when he tells Pickard, "you are not that significant".

Why VB.Net Is Better Than C#

[Warning: This blog contains programming lingo which may not be suitable for all audience]

Seven years ago, a candidate appearing for his first job interview right after school was put up with cold stare and a question: "So, what you know in C?". The candidate kept his reply short with similar cold stare: "everything". While candidate got the job very next day, the reply was unusual for interviewers because C was notorious for being deceptively complex language and it was believed that only few knew it's real innards. So for decades, for most hard-core programmers, it had been a passion to meet every challenge and master it's every intricacy. And still many of them knew it was becoming increasingly impractical to use it and compete against new RAD stuff like Delphi and VB. Even if we'd adapt to (some call it give in to") RAD which had much weaker languages, we always kept our secret hidden love for C++ in our heart and hoped that our darling would be reincarnated one day to be back with us again. When I saw C# spec in .Net beta I was thrilled. The re-incarnation was finally happened. The C# is probably the best programming language yet that is modern, sophisticated, sexy and yes, has true RAD vision behind it. For more than a year, I'd aggressively fought to choose C# in anything I was doing until I started comparing it with VB.Net from good 'ol productivity point of view. And this is really bad... VB which I thought will be dead in coming years, seems to be winning again. I'm still reluctant to give final verdict and you are invited to pour in your opinions. While the entire book is already devoted on this subject, here's one of the most complete list of reasoning I've compiled from several sources and my observations on VB.net and C# pros and cons:

• Direct copy paste of large amount of existing VB6 code in to your .Net projects. I did this so many times until I realized what if I'd been writing code in C#?


• Option Strict can be turned on or off at will in VB.Net. With C# it's not in your control. This is really helpful to reduce unreadable ugly type casting when using COM interops


• You can use either traditional On..Error or Try-Catch. With C# you only have later choice


• With VB.Net you can have "modules" which is little cleaner then static classes.


• Easier way to resize arrays in VB.Net and other functions like IsDbNull and exponentiation


• More granular way to shadow methods in derived classes


• No automatic indentation and removal of extra spaces. This slows you down plus your code looks little ugly.


• No automatic statement completion (for example VB.Net IDE automatically completes constructs like If-Then-Else)


• No automatic casing. How many times your compilation failed because of stupid upper case/lower case mistakes?


• No redundant ";" after every statements. We originally loved this as C programmer but think about it: How many times you combined two statement in single line? Isn't new line enough to mark end of 99% of the statements you usually write?


• Auto completion of "()". As usual, I love all kind of auto completions. Code must flow with speed!


• Have to use escape sequences for "\" in XPath and file paths. This native C feature really becomes cumbersome and even worse can produce hard to find run time errors.


• Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace provides for missing .Net functionalities like case insensitive string replace. While you can use it in C# also, it's bit natural to use in VB.Net


• VB.Net wires events in forms transperently (you can delete the event handler without compilation error)


• VB.Net allows optional parameters

Said that, C# also has it's own share of advantages:

• Much powerful and flexible language constructs


• Can do Operator overloading


• You can use real memory pointers for performance code!


• Lots of original Microsoft and 3rd party code will be ported to C# rather than VB.Net. For example source code for DevXpress grid and many other is available only in C#


• Better looking type cast statements


• Much of Java, C++ Builder and VC++ code may be re-used - but with comparitively more care and may need more changes than using VB6 code in VB.Net


• The Shared Source CLI code is in C#


• New language features are announced for C# but not for VB.Net


• Multi line comments


• C# can use native unsigned data types in .Net framework


• Allows XML documentation of code


• The great Using keyword in C# allows to do "deterministic finalization" in easy readable way for objects implementing IDisposible.
  

Five Good Books On Microsoft .Net Framework

[Warning: This blog contains programming lingo which may not be suitable for general audience]

In a programming world, to do a criticism against anything and everything Microsoft does is like putting up a fashion statement by beautiful models with their useless cloths. But after spending years in intensive computer programming, Microsoft .Net seems to be the best computer programming environment human kind can possess at this point of time. It's simply just too perfect (if you forget the stupid ".Net" name tag i.e.) converging several good stuff from lots of things that existed ranging from non-proprietary C++, rival Java, Microsoft's own VB and my old favorite Borland Delphi. I was kind of surprised at this level of perfection when I first used it and amazed at the numbers of human years that might have been spent to achieve this level of skills to do something this sophisticated flawlessly. So how do you get started? After going through details of more then 200 books, purchasing 10s of them, returning back many out of dissopointment, here's the 4 winners that has finally emerged. These books are probably all you need to learn almost everything you might need to develop advanced applications. I assume good familiarity with VB6, little more then intermediate programming experience and a desire to know low level details.

[List arranged by order of importance]

1. Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET - Francesco Balena. This one is an absolute must and covers almost everything in single volume. Fun to read and goes deep in to details. This is your ideal starting point if you were a VB6 programmer.
   


2. ASP.NET Unleashed - Stephen Walther. The ASP.Net is the most changed part between transition from VS6 and it's the most exciting one. This book, I've found, is the best on the subject.
   


3. .NET Common Language Runtime Unleashed - Kevin R. Burton. Haven't read this one yet but it looked really cool with MSIL and other low level stuff.
   


4. Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime - John Gough. You don't know it until you get dirty with details and this book gonna take you in real details. I bought it to understand MSIL, virtual machine, common language issues and in future to make my own compiler for RPL.
   


5. Microsoft ADO.NET - David Sceppa. The ADO.Net is the center of almost any large scale app and you need to know every little thing about it. While I've included this book in the list, I must admit that this one was a disappointment when I tried to find details on some advanced level stuff I was doing for real world application. But still it clears up lots of basics on concurrency handling, typed datasets etc.
   

So, What's not included in above books? First, the C# language spec is not included because you better off reading it from MSDN. General tasks that you might perform every now and then are at Quickstart tutorials (the HowTo index). However, none of the books that I came across really contains good application architecture strategies that you can use in real world. For this subject, you should check out articles at DevX, Fawcette, asp411 and asp.net. This might be your best bet when it comes to putting principles in to practice.

Finally, here's the books I returned: Instant ASP.NET Applications, ASP.NET Tips & Techniques and Programming Windows with C#. Beware!

Book Find - Complications By Atul Gowande

This book I'd bought for my brother who is a doc by profession but unfortunately he has to now wait until I finish reading it. While the lingo of biological sciences usually tends to scare us, I'd always a fascination for doctor's life and this book is about it and more. The author takes you in the real stories that happened in his career as a trainee surgeon with a style that might put a fiction writer to a shame. The real beauty, however, is in the microscopic details. The philosophies involved in medical profession is embedded here with the wit and sharpness of a logician and that's another stronger side of this book. Click here to have a look.

The Better Giving

A year ago it took me around 6 months before I felt it was the perfect gift to give it to my cousins. But the trouble was that by the time they received it they got confused whether it was for last year's occasion or coming year's! It's an art to find a gift that's unique, hard to find, memorable and the one matching with person's personality and need. Here are some of those tips and places that I came across over time to help you out this holiday season.

1. The premier destination to get the unique gift idea is surprise.com. A must visit if you are still in the complete darkness.
2. Check out my collection of gift links. You will find things ranging from Kamasutra weekender kit to Astronomy's cool gift ideas.
3. To find out what's latest and coolest, check out Scientific American's Top SciTech Gifts of 2002. This one is a real good contemporary compilation.
4. If you still didn't found you were looking for, view my collection of shopping links. Specially check for Diversity Stores section.
5. Instead of giving gifts to someone who already has too much, you might want to ask them if it's ok to give some donations to non-profit organizations instead of giving them yet another gift that would be anyway useless to them. Click here for some charity organizations in my links collection.
6. Finally here are my personal favorites and non-favorites for this year: Quicktionary, Book light (both are perfect if a person is an avid reader), external hard drive (perfect for heavy laptop users because they always run out of space), handheld GPS (for outdoor person), Lego Mindstorm robot kit (absolute perfect gift for kids), DVD/MP3 players, HP49 calc (perfect for mathematicians), model air plane kit (prefer unassembled ones). And now the things that sucks as gifts: fragrances, cloths, pocket PCs and palms, organizers, CD players, pocket MP3 players, RC cars, PS2. These gifts totally suck.

Finally it's not necessary to go overboard. Infect being a follower of 'Grinch philosophy' I'm supposed to hate all give and take of gifts. May be it's just enough to send a web card with few clicks to let someone know that you still remember.

Surviving The Thanksgivings

For some, thanksgiving is a day when you wake up in the morning, make a list of people and spend rest of the day to hate them for not being with you. We have come up even with a term "Hate Giving Day". So everybody you knew runs away to their families, suddenly all shops and restaurants closes their doors, entire country like falls in to a comma and you poor soul have no where to go! Well, title of this blog is misleading: you not gonna survive this, but sure you can try...

• It's gonna snow: around 6" in New York and this city looks gorgeous in snow. Good opportunity to take cool photographs and email to everybody on your "hate list". Also this should provide more intensives to get up from the bed and go for Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.


• Watch the movie The Grinch (the Jim Carrey one). Watch one more time. Watch over again. In fact you might want to buy this DVD rather then renting it so that you can watch it over and over coming Christmas holidays also.


• Guess what. The cinemas, Boston Market and Malasian restaurents like Penang is not closed on thanksgiving and here's whole new pool of good movies out: 8 Miles, Harry Potter, Santa Clause 2, a Bond movie and some Indian-English flick called Hollywood Bolywood!


• It's also perfectly valid to go totally lazy. The TV people has got some cool flicks including Star Wars, Antitrust, Miracle On 34th, Vertical Limit and such stuff. To allow yourself not to get up from the bed in case of a "time window" in between stupid TV stuff, keep some thick book handy. And yes, don't forget to watch The Grinch in between.
  Suggested Listening: My December - Linkin Park
  

Happy ruining your hate giving.

Look, What's Time Has Done

This month there's something strange happening in my inbox. Lots of those emails are marriage invitations and some from the people who I knew as "geeks". And then I start remembering those days when we set in college labs until late, many times whole night and most of the time escaping from scheduled lectures. The girlfriends and dating was the least of the priority when there is a whole world with challenges in front of you to explore and win (partially that was also eased by the fact that only few female souls thought it worthy to pursue engineering as a field of study). We were tough, proud and ignorent.Some of us thought they don't want to live beyond 30s because it looked too boring. Most of us unanimously thought getting married, silently settling down and disappear in the mass of other 4 billions would be the worst possible way one can live a life. Today I still see likes of these people around. But for the eyes who knew them, there is a subtle difference. The faces doesn't have loud signs of a rebel - rather it looks more like tired fat exploiters. People expect our curiosity to age with us. You don't see people in their middle 30s and 40s roaming around science museums just by themselves - they are not supposed to be that curious! Aging is an interesting process and there was a debate: Is it imperfection or a necessity? While for most it's depressing to even discuss, the study of aging at cellular and genetic level is a fascinating biological paradox. One of the best work I've came across is a book called A Means To An End. While still written for a lay-person, it explores scientific theaories of aging without shying away from the technical language of molecular biology and genetics. However as a human beyond mass of bio-chemicals perhaps more interesting is the experience and emotions attached with aging. When I was cruising through that book Hackers, one of the things I anxiously wanted to know was what happened to those super hard-core computer geeks of 1960s. Where they are, what they are doing today and most importantly, are they the same? If not, where the compromises have made it's home? Author has put this information in the very last chapter and to read it is like reading the Revelation in the Bible. Watching a movie of a large building being demolished with carefully planned explosives has different sets of emotion. Is it fun? scary? Exciting? Disappointing? This experience is perhaps best written in a tiny book by G. H. Hardy written in 1950s called A Mathematician's Apology. When mathematicians - the people obsessed with reality, people with the eyes of pure logic rather then good or evil - writes about emotions it ought to shine like a dew on the rock. When I read this book couple of years ago I thought I'd like to carve it in stones so it's there even if humanity manages to loose it's every printed copy. The book cold heartedly deals with author's diminishing abilities for mathematics with his age and one of the most passionate arguments for doing mathematics. Pretty much every paragraph in this book you can put as a quote on your walls! However it couldn't have been more cold hearted then one of that interesting finale of Star Trek Voyager. Most fiction ends either in good thing or bad thing - but not the most probable reality. An average life of human population, with no magic and no coincidences, usually doesn't interest fiction writers. But that Voyager finale appeared to be little different - for first few minutes i.e. The characters who you came to adore are now shown old, have white hair, have wrinkles, some of them already died, some of them insane and most of them looks helpless. Watching your strong heroes ending up in their aged weak state, their lives passed by without any magic is watching reality working like a knife made out of ice. Not everybody can take it. And so after those few minutes, authors of Voyager finale soon puts in some magic and attempts to sweetens their pill. Funny. And there was this quote somewhere: time is the only critic - everyone else has just opinions and fantasies.

Shooting Stars Getting Ready To Fall

Leonid meteor shower is slowing down every year but it's still a magnificent event. I was fortunate to witness this heavenly fireworks last year at a mountain lake some 20 minutes away from my home and there was shooting stars falling down at the rate of one per second for the entire period of more then 15 minutes. Now that's more shooting stars a person would otherwise see in his or her entire life time! Well, I didn't had too many wishes to make so came back home with just memories of bright lines meteors made and their reflections in the lake. This year it's gonna be around 6 times less intense (that is only 10 meteors/min) but still that's a lot! For USA East coast residents the peak will be at 5:30 AM on 19th November (while predicted blue moon is just setting on the west). Check out more info at space.com.

Also, if you had like to be keep up with such time sensitive news, head down to my personal group.

Two IMAX Flicks

Just watched new episode of South Park and took my regular dosage of grossness, cursing and offensive language. Feels better... love it! Ok... now back to the bad stuff. I haven't been keeping track of new movies since past couple of months because all of them pretty much sucked but now here's two IMAX movies that you might not be aware of and that's gonna go away soon. Both are running at Loews IMAX theater (67th St and Broadway, New York City).

• Space Station 3D: This is the movie that you don't want to absolutely miss. Watching this movie on huge 8 story high screen, with 42 speakers and in 3D is probably the next best thing to be actually there in space. It has been shot by actual astronauts with cameras in their helmets. The philosophical thoughts of us being something special is sure to trigger in your mind when you show those awesomely beautiful Earth views filling your entire eye sight on that huge screen. Photography of zero gravity environment, astronauts' daily lives and their way of having fun is just amazing. Recommended sit: The very first row!
  


• Star Wars - Episode II: I'm not a Star Wars fan but this might be worth to check out if you have extra time and money. I'd watched Episode II when it came out earlier this year (it was than running at AMC's digital cinema which is probably one of very few of it's kind) but to say the least, it's the weird story even for geeks! The IMAX version is not really re-created for huge screen and you can clearly see the low resolution distortions in graphic effects when it's projected on that huge screen. However that chase scene with sky diving sequences in futuristic city are the real treat and totally worth on the extra large screen. The THX digital sound effect also works great. This movie has limited engagement.
  

How To Get To Sleep Faster

Not submitting ourselves to sleep is a problem for many of us. Here's few of the ideas that I found works getting little closer to your dreams :)

• The thing that almost always worked for me is to read real complex book filled with poorly proven math equations and undecipherable physics text (or some translated ones). It quickly drains out all extra energies and puts you in nice sleep (no pun intended)!


• Turn on your air conditioner. The heat won't let you die. The colder environment slows down body functions, helps to dry down the energy levels and drives you towards the kind of "stasis". Note that you should never sleep without warm comforter/duvets in this case (even if this looks contradictory)


• The new recent find that has also worked well: drink glass of warm milk before going to sleep! Well, actually it's from all-wise Guineen's character in Star Trek TNG. No wonder it works :)


• The last one is to put on the run of classical music on very low volume. It isn't very effective but it's cool!

Some Books About Programmers

Just read couple of reviews of my blogs at Weblog Review. Looks it aren't all that bad after all :).

This one is about the few cool books that I came across on programmer's life, passions, dreams and thoughts. To tell you the truth, all of them has kept me awake until early mornings since past few months. If you are hard core programmer from the roots, you are in for the real treat! Be hold!

The first on the list is Hackers. No, it isn't about breaking illegally in to some computer system. It's about the very first computer programmers who put their foot steps in to this new world - like a little curious girl entering in the wild magical world of fairy tales. But more than the technicality, the thing that will touch you, cut your skin and swirl through your soul is the stories of passion that these people had - stories that are now permanently carved in to every page of this little book. A wonderful work. After coming from work, I would usually tell myself that I'm gonna read couple pages and then I'll got to sleep and almost always I ended up staying awake until 5 in the morning with my face little tired of all those smirks that passed by. I can see myself and my career like a mirror in this book. It's like reading stories of your ancestors and identifying yourself - or more like explaining yourself why the way you are. I believe you don't have to be techie to read this book - it's more a testament than a technology on the heights of human passion that this profession somehow inherently needs you to posses.

Second on the list is Hard Drive. It's about Bill Gates and building of Microsoft during early years (1975-1990). Well, I never really cared about this (this is my first book on the subject) and my perception of Bill Gates was pretty much like "smart business man who got super lucky". Above book, Hackers, however changed all that. I was actually shocked to know that Bill Gates is really just another hacker - a hard core geek - just like many of others around. And I was just hooked up in to those stories - probably some of the coolest one in Software industry. Author has like picked up all tiny hilarious interesting details. I used to find myself spending hours in conversations about bits from this book and spreading laughs. You just can't put it down!

Last one and which I haven't finished yet (I'm kind of saving it from reading it entirely) is the Show-Stoppers. It's hilarious. detailed, passionate and revealing inside stories of one of the biggest software project ever under taken. After reading the Hard Drive I just can't get enough to know about the Microsoft. This book takes from where Hard Drive leaves - the after 1990 era. And this one is very detailed and that's why it's more fun to read. I almost felt like a team member who lived in the NT team - feeling same pressure, finding ways to curse, getting ashamed for blunders and rejoicing for the final target that would be achieved. If you happen to live in programming world, this book is an absolute must Don't Miss. For others, take it as an optional.

New Music Finds

I missed Central Park visit this Sunday. So now this is happening 3 years in row. Anyway, this blog is about the new cool music artists/albums I found in past few months. It's starts with Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory. To say the least, this is the one we call it "a land mark". Very artsy compositions, meaningful smart lyrics and the best part: hybrid of melody and metal. You can't possibly miss this one. I haven't heard so much "visual" music in such quantity and quality. No, you need not be "metal" guy to listen to this. However the word of caution: many of the lyrics and song styles in this album can drive you in to frustration, illusionary fears or induce suicidal thoughts. You do need to be strong to listen to this and very strong to enjoy it.
Next on the list is Jewel. When I heard her voice for the first time I was almost stunned by the sweetness and soul embedded in her voice. And to this date, I consider her as the best female vocals on the planet. She writes her own songs though many of them I consider sucks (her poetry book is available on Amazon). Few totally outstanding numbers: "Absence Of Fear", "Time After Timely", "Break Me" and "My Hands Are Small". The first one, the "Absence Of Fear", I consider the best love song ever written and sung. Many compare (and occasionally mistakes) her to Cranberries but I guess the "souls" these two artists put in their songs have different identities. To hear Jewel is treat to ears and thanks to modern day technology, it's available to entire world!
I'll include few of my old finds later but before I log out, here's the very latest: DJ Sammy! I randomly picked up his new CD "Heaven" in the sale at Wiz hoping to hear some cool trans and I glad I did. This is almost perfect (11 out of 13 tracks are vibrantly cool) and easily the second best techno-trans album after Moby's Play. Tracks are full of life and energy and there's no repetition... The creativity poured in this album is amazing. Most of the tracks are seamlessly combined with very cool female vocals from Yanou (though she hasn't got much credit on front CD cover) - a voice with unparalleled sweetness, imagination and passion. Another peculiar quality of this album is that as you hear it too much, instead of getting dull, it keeps getting better - it's been kind of longest lived CD in my car's player (i.e. 5 days). You need not be trans-junkie to like this album. It will catch your ears whoever you are. Only thing, being an import CD (euro dance) it costs lot: $18 to $25.

Alone Alone All The Way

I like to observe the universe as a cold hearted logic machine... emotionless like a drone... trying to find reasoning... and exploits to build more deterministic world. Perhaps that's why I was swept by the concept of Borgs when I saw them in Star Trek. And so I'd thought I'm designed to stay alone... Me, my books, my thoughts - can go long way before there's a need for human contact, touch, feeling or emotions. Loneliness seemed to be blessing which gave you freedom to work your way. That is, till now. I guess I saw it... saw it in it's entirely... probably saw it the way God might have create it.. or seen it. And when you do, it passes though each of your hair on skin, racing to make every bit of life meaningless and breaking every bit of your strength you had. It can't be defeated. You either accept it or you seize to exist. It's cold dark endless universe and it's probably the scariest experience or may be just too vast to accommodate in human senses. I watched my cold hearted logic machine breaking down... May be I'll rebuild but the fact that it can be broken down is annoying.... unacceptable... But I guess it did lot of work... slowly and steadily to bring down all the walls until all that was left were us - from eye to eye - a stare to know each other. A crave to reach out - like wanting to someone pull my hand from quicksand. I felt eternity in the moments that passed before someone would touch my hand. I thought I wanted to give up everything for one touch, one contact. I felt angered and weak... weak like a sand castle... trying to put myself together against a blow. But then I think may be I wanted to get defeated. But as in any experiment, I guess I now understand lots of things... I understand how it feels... like a point traveling in cold, dark and infinite space, with no hope of destination.... no destination.... no purpose. It's scary... And perhaps that's why God created the universe.

Outdoor Clubs On East Coast

If you are single or have hard time to make you friends get of bed to climb some mountains or paddle some rivers - well, here's something that might interest you. I've found few huge and really cool organizations that engage themselves in doing some interesting adventure outings in groups. The biggest and the best of these is the Sierra Club. It's purpose of existence is nature conservancy and awareness. Every week they have multiple outings - hikes, kayaks, group dinners, meetings and even outdoor movie shows! The places I'd visited with some of the hike leaders this summer were mind blowing, kind of secret gems... They also have special singles outings which I guess is better place to find that special someone then anywhere else because people who you meet in these clubs are the ones who you can identify with yourself, the spirit of adventure and sense of exploration. The Sierra club is non-profit, has chapter in almost every state in US (I usually go out with NY and NJ chapters) and they excert high influence on US nature policies.

Another huge organization is AMC or Appalachian Mountain Club. They stand out by the diversity and huge quantity of outings they offer - including everything from hiking, sailing, kayaking, tour of Brooklyn bridge, night time Central Park, ice caves, all summer softball at Central Park, camping at their own facilities, windjammer cruises, tree identification walks, a day at Coney Island and so on. In spite of these, I like them less compared to Sierra due to couple of reasons. They don't publish their schedules fully on web and force you to get their printed book. That tiny book takes time to arrive and can easily get misplaced. Many of the hike leaders doesn't have or disclose their email addresses and at many instances, you will find it hard to contact them by any means even if they disclose anything at all. While most the people you will meet are very respectable and pleasant in person, the Sierra's flavor of openness and friendly feel is not as strong.

The last organization on the list is ADK or Adirondack Mountain Club. Actually this is the first one I came to know about before any other. While it's small and locally focused on NY/North NJ, I believe it's the most intimate and friendliest club around. But the coolest things they do which sets them apart from everybody else is their international and national adventure travel. The list includes week-long outings like staying with real Inuit people at Greenland in the way they live, hikes at Swiss Alps, England Coast-to-Coast, trekking with donkeys in France, Grand Canyon backpacking, Alaska rafting and so on.

A last point: I've often observed that that age proportion at many of these vibrant exciting clubs is not well balanced: numbers of young people (in 20s) is strikingly and surprisingly less. I guess it's responsibility of people like us to spread the word and keep these clubs and spirit alive in the coming time. So get out of the bed and go somewhere!

Hallowin Signout

Okay... guess this will be the end of the day - it's hallowing! And Aishwarya Rai's birthday... 10 mins to midnight... Since last two years this is the day and time (1st nov between 1 AM to 3 AM) when I always got in to a car accident - a nearly fatal ones. oh... need to eat something... should be going to Nanuet for that cool diner I'd found... will keep blogging if am alive tomorrow :-)