Intel 945G - Not The Worst?

I have owned a computer for as long as I can remember. And none of the computers I owned ever had one of em "dedicated"( ah, how I hate that word) graphic cards. Guess the main reason for that is my father knows good deal about computers and hence knows "graphic cards" means "hardcore-gaming". And let's face it. No father is gonna let their son ruin(are so they are led to believe) their lives playing games 24x7. Hence I have always been left to contend with the Intel 945G chipset(now that's another word I have grown to dread).

I can never forgot the times I had to sit through half an hour of solid installation only to be shown a message like this (accompanied of course by the all-too-famous Bump! sound). After a few more double clicks I would be forced to accept the painful truth.

Couldn't they just do a small test before the actual installation in lieu of wasting my time and tell me that their high-end game makes my PC a goner? Ah, fate does enjoy such petty moments I guess.

Of course few games did run on my PC. And I am very thankful for that. The better games that have been kind enough to run on my PC were Warrior Within, T2T, NFS MW and FIFA(after a lot of prayers, 09 worked) etc. It goes without saying that these didn't look at their best but hey, anything is better than that error message na. This was all before that fateful day when I was googling for fun.

For people who share my lugubriousness in gaming, I have two words. SwiftShader and 3d-Analyzer. I stumbled upon these softwares and they provided, inter alia, an option for "emulating HW TnL capabilities". My eyes immediately lit up because the absence of this "HW TnL"(no idea what it actually is) was sited as one of the reasons why games failed to run on my PC. Hence I tried to gives these a try.

The error message shown in the pic came when I tried to run Return Of The King. And being a huge fan of LoTR I was much disappointed.I tried the game with 3d-analyze and it worked! I was kinda taken aback by this uncanny behaviour showed by my PC. RoTK turned out to be a pretty decent game in the end :)

And the good news didn't stop there. A whole other bunch of games which had previously belittled my PC suddenly worked fine. The list included Splinter Cell, Portal, Deus Ex2 etc. But as with all things, they too had their shortcomings. A few other games failed too. Inspite of that, I finally decided that the Intel chipset(that word now seems ok) was after all, not the worst in the buisness.

P.S : To people who have "high-end" PCs I have this to say - "A day will come when you too shall hear the Bump! error"

Time Travel - Myth or Fact

Time traveling is one of the most fascinating branches of physics. The very idea of taking a peek into our future - in the literal sense - and watching our past actions kindles the heart. Scientifically time travel has never been proved. On the other hand, there is no actual proof or theory to deny such a possibility. Let's take a look at some of the interesting theories proposed for this.

The idea closest to time traveling that has strong scientific foundations is time dilation. Time dilation is the idea wherein the clock of a moving person appears to be 'running' slowly when compared to the clock of a stationary person. There is too way of explaining this - special relativity and general relativity. Time dilation and time traveling can be combined in this way. Say me and my friend are at rest with our watches showing 9 am each. If he remains stationary and I start running really fast, then technically my watch would run faster than his. For eg my watch would perhaps show 9 10 am and his would show 9 8 am. Thus I would be in the future when compared to him.

There is also another theory that suggests that objects moving faster than the speed of light would time travel. Let us analyze this logically. If I run faster than the speed of light ( theoretically ofcourse ;) ) and say I turn back. The light particles behind me would fail to reach me and hence I would see only black - the absence of light. I cannot fathom what we would see if he straight ahead. I leave it to your imagination.

Another interesting possiblity arises when time - as every measurable constant possibly - is seen as a relative variable. Consider a man living one light year from us. Now we can see what he does only after one year. Hence he knows stuff happening there before we do - that is he is, technically in the future when compared to our time frame. The reverse is also true i.e. we are living in the past when compared to him.

When considering the possibility of time traveling, we must also consider what will happen if we do manage to travel in time. The only possible idea seems to be the thoery of multiple universes. Like Michael Crichton said in 'Timeline' perhaps the universe is constantly dividing into different universities where the different possiblities of an event happens. For eg an universe where I win the Kriya blog contest, one where my blog gets deleted, one where I am heavily criticed for my works here etc. Now arises one interesting question. If we do time travel, which of these possible universities will we land up in? Can we choose any one? Your guess is as good as mine.

As Stephen Hawking suggested, the absence of people visiting us from the future suggests the absence of time travelin. But then this is not enough evidence to decide the idea as an impossibilty.

While considering all these fascinating theories, one question reamins unconsidered. Where is the Hand Of God come into play when we talk of time traveling? Or is it God that stops us from jumping from one time frame to another?

From Licensed To Open Source

For years I had been a user of the Windows OS. I came to know about the concept of Open Source only during my late schooling days. That was thanks to a chapter dedicated to Linux in my 11th which explained in great detail about the commands used in Linux. For someone used to doing stuff by click-and-point actions I was not very impressed by this new idea. Hence my first impression of Linux was that it was not user-friendly.

As I started my college, the words "Open Source" and "Linux" seemed to pop up everywhere. Hence I decided to check out this non-user-friendly difficult-to-use (or so I thought) Linux . Enter Ubuntu. I was asked too many questions during installation. At one point I was so confused I gave up installing it half-way.After few days and some advise from friends, I successfully installed Ubuntu in my PC. A feeling of satisfaction filled me :D

In the next few days, I struggled through the ways of Ubuntu. The GNU available was the only familiar thing compared to Windows. I found myself using the Terminal more and more ( I haven't used DOS for more than ten minutes totally in all my life). Yet in those few days I learned more than what I had learned from all the time I used in Windows. Soon the only reason I logged into Windows was to play FIFA which being an EXE file would not normally run in a Linux Distro.

After all this I began to wonder why the Open Source softwares where not widely used. The migration seemed too slow considering the lucrative offer Open Source was. I discussed this with my brothers - all working in big multi national companies - and found out few reasons for this lack of migration.

• Most of the companies have such large storage of data that the migration would take months - valuable time which cannot be wasted in this competitve world.
• The lack of technical skills available when it comes to handling Open Source applications. Most people feel comfortable with Windows rather than Linux.
• The muscle power of the big multi-national companies. These companies can simply buy off - thanks to their huge revenue - the smaller Open Source softwares.
• While Open Source is a collection of ideas from all over the world, the Licensed products comes from a single source.This means the latter has much greater unity compared to the former.
  

But then all this does not mean Windows is inferior to Linux. Far from it. Windows does offer much more features compared to Linux. The only problem is that it curtails the freedom of the end user. The whole point of Linux is 'free' - free as in the user is allowed to do whatever he wishes to do with the product.
The basic difference between the Windows and Linux can be best explained by this example. Windows is like an automated car - you don't need to do much but lose the control over the system and Linux is like a geared car - you have much to do with which comes full control. It is upto the people to choose between the two.

Thungo Mogo Juku Juku Opai ;)

I recently read an article in The Hindu saying that India tops the list of countries with maximum number of endangered dialects. This caught my eye for the simple reason that my mother tongue is Saurashtra and I wondered if it was included in that list. Thankfully, after googling I was happy to find out that my language had not been pushed to that state yet.

In the six years I spent in Chennai I had people constantly asking me what language I spoke. It came as no surprise when they gave me a blank reaction when I replied saying it was Saurashtra. Not many people are aware of the existence of such a language given the fact that the only place where there is significant population of Saurashtrians is Madurai.

Like the word 'Sangrail' can be split in two ways to give two different meanings (the meanings can be found in the Da Vinci Code), so can the word be Saurashtra be split in two ways. Split as "Sou"(meaning 100) and "rashtra"(meaning region) it can be understood as the "province of 100 regions". But split as "Saura" ( meaning Sun) and "shtra"(prefix word) it may mean "Worshippers of Sun".

Geographically Saurashtra refers to that part of Gujarat which is a peninsula. The highlighted portion in the picture gives the more accurate description of the region.

It is believed that the Saurashtra speaking people originated from this part of India. This explains the close resemblance the language has with Marathi and Konkani, both Indo-Aryan languages of Western India.

As the region lies on the Arabian Sea, most of the Saurashtrians followed waeving as their occupation. This remains true even now for most Sourashtrians still depend on weaving for their livelyhood.

There is no actual historical evidence as to how or when these people - my ancestors - migrated to the Southern part of India. But it is generally accepted that the Saurashtrian people were forced to leave their homeland due to continuous invasion of their land which led to much suffering and loss. Hence they migrated in large groups to Southern India bringing with them their maginificent skill in weaving. Since then many Saurashtrians have entered other fields and excelled in that(T.M. Soundararajan is a good example).

For a long time I had believed that Saurashtra was only a dialect for I had never seen any writing in that language. But I was proved wrong during a recent visit to a temple in Madurai where I found slokas written in the actual Saurashtra script. Yet sadly the language is not taught in any schools and the script would have been lost but for the magnanimous effort of few Saurashtrians.

Here are a few helpful quotes in Saurashtra that are worth learning...

*Avo - 'Come'

*Thungo mogo juku juku opai - 'I like you very very much' :D

*Thora nav kayo? - 'What is your name?'

*Thora number kayo? - 'What is your number'

*Bharad jayengan ya? - 'Wanna go out?'

*Jaara pisa - Podaa loose

*Tho atho kai paje? - 'What do you want'?

*Thoro kaam seeli jaa - 'Mind your own buisness'

For more translations pls comment and I ll translate em ;)

How Long Can I Go

Well having seen my share of novels and movies in my life, I have, for a very long time wondered just how long a sentence I can write in English without commiting any possible grammatical and semantic mistakes as known to me and hence I have decided to give this a try now here in this blog by stringing together as many clauses as I possibly can (for this sentence is a Complex sentence and not a simple or compound sentence) along with few other adjectives that immediately jump into my mind, which I must say is actually in a relaxed and happy state for I just noticed India win the ODI against Sri Lanka quite comfortably, and I hope that you read this, keeping in mind the fact that if I had used certain swear words like f... this sentence could have been much longer and appreciate this attempt of a fellow human who has tried this only because he is very bored thanks to the fact that he does not have much else to do. :)

P.S : Suggestions on elongating this sentence are most welcome. ;)

The Empty Test Note

I wake up on a Friday with full confusion,
Thanks to all the late night preparations;
My mind is buzzing with stuff from Maths,
I know luck is my only hope to get a pass.

With two test notes I enter the examination hall,
One look at the questions make my heart fall;
The only bright side was I needed only one note,
Later I decide to leave the hall with my mind afloat.

I wake up on the Monday feeling little satisfied,
With decent preparation I was no longer terrified;
Again I entered the hall but now with no tension,
But when I saw the test note I was in confusion.

'Maths' was on 'Subject' column in the test note,
When i realized things my heart so nearly broke;
The events of Friday in my mind soon begin to run,
And if I still had the answer note, then the empty one...

The Road Not Taken

I wrote this during my counseling for getting into college after my 12th. Here it goes.

Two roads diverged in the yellow woods,
One of them led to SSN IT in Chennai,
The other lesser known one to TCE C Sc,
And it was a difficult decision to make.

The road to SSN was today s trend,
Also it meant i can be with my friends;
But high fee no dream job it had,
And it was a difficult decision to make.

Lesser known of the two to me shown,
A path where i had to start alone;
It would be a new adventure for me,
And it was a difficult decision to make.

Finally like tat poet i chose the lesser one,
Since i knew i wud never be alone anywhere;
I don't regret this decision or so i hope,
For it was a difficult decision made.

Note : I wrote this knowing nothing about the two colleges except from what I heard from others. So any attempts in judging them at that time were meaningless.