New Year Resolutions :)

I will no longer spend long hours gaming,

Rather I will concentrate more on studying;

I will not waste my time in vetti websites,

And find a physical activity like flying kites;

I will no longer think lazyness is good for me,

And accept the fact that hardwork is the key;

I will take notes in all the classes I attend,

And not be playing hollywood with my friend;

I will no longer cut classes for no reason,

And consider bunking an act of treason;

Importantly, tomorrow when I see this thing,

I shall not burst out laughing.

Happy New Year Ppl :)

Love?

When my eyes to her was drawn,

I knew not what i was feeling,

All other thoughts were gone,

For she was my only first love.

I was with her for five long years,

But never once did she know this;

Away from her now, I am in tears,

For she was my only first love.

To me she will forever appear a star,

Ever beautiful and beyond my reach,

Her memories will now only be a scar,

For she was my only first love.

I know she will one day go her own way,

'Cos she is as pretty and free as a dove;

Someday someone is gonna take her away,

For she was my only lost love.

P.S : The poem is about my first crush exaggerated for poetic reasons :D

Pirates Of The Silicon Valley

Now I found this movie in my friend's pc. Another pirate movie.I wonder if its better than the Depp movie. This was my first reaction to the movie's name :) Then my friend said it was movie about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. That got my interest and I watched it that night.

The movie opens with 'Steve Jobs' saying

"I don't want you to think of this as just a film - some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds - no. Listen to me. We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We're creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. We're rewriting the history of human thought with what we're doing. That's how you have to think of this."

Next we are shown Steve Jobs (with beard, moustache and all) and Bill Gates (with a big geeky glass) during their college days. The movie goes on to show how their lives begin to cross each other and how they deal with it. The transition of both of them from geeks to buisnessman is also worth mentioning here. The movie also shows how Apple and Microsoft came into existence and their first big breaks.

Both 'Steve Jobs' and 'Bill Gates' give a good performance and are convincing in their roles. The scenes where both of them interact are quite entertaining. The other main catch in the movie is the real story behind Apple's main GUI design, DOS and later Windows. The icing on the cake is of course the dialogues which are at some places quite brilliant. Some of the real good ones are

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates : Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Businessman: Steve - it is Steve, right? You say this gadget of yours is for ordinary people. What on earth would ordinary people want with computers? :D :D :D

Bill Gates: Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking they can't lose.

and of course the best of all...

Steve Jobs: We're better than you are! We have better stuff.

Bill Gates: You don't get it, Steve. That doesn't matter!

I don't wanna say anything more lest I spoil everything. But I'll tell you this. If you are an aspiring businessman or a Computer freak, this is definitely worth watching.

Noetics?

9:58 pm. Sunday the 27th,2009.

He was busy reading The Lost Symbol. It had been long time since he had been so engrossed in a book. It told him a fascinating idea about the power of the mind. "Like matter, the thoughts in a brain also contain mass. This 'particle' if focussed correctly could be used to alter physical matter..."

His concentration was suddenly broken when out of no where two loud speakers started singing loudly and rather annoyingly. He tried his best to ignore it. "Thus if the mind is trained well and made to focus on a particular thought, it can be used to affect the outcome of an event. While this may seem like advanced magic it.." Darn loud speakers, he thought. What the f*** did they ever actually accomplish. "..has already been mentioned in the ancient literatures itself. One only needed to see the Vedas or the Bible or any other similar text. They say the same..".Arr how I wish they shut the loudspeakers.And just like that, the loudspeakers started malfunctioning and was forcibly switched off.

"Our fore fathers have always believed that the mind held supernatural po..".Wait a minute. Did I just shut the loudspeakers using my mind. Did that happen because a lot of minds in my area thought the same?.Maybe I do possess super powers,his heart said. You need to get some sleep, said his intellect.

Note : To know about noetic science, read The Lost Symbol or see theintentionexperiment.com

See C

Well having attended a few C debugging contests, I found C can get very interesting even at the very basic levels. Here is a few questions that are worth understanding if you got any interest in C :)

*)First is the simple printf statement. Consider

int i=5;

printf("%d,%d", i, ++i);

If you guessed output as 5,6 - sorry.

Thing is printf first evaluates all the expression from RIGHT TO LEFT before printing the actual values. So actual answer would 6,6.

*)Now the comma operator. They always asked questions involving this. I didn't even know what it meant till I saw this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_operator

*)The playing with increment/decrement operator. Consider

i=5;

j=i+++++i;

If you split the second line as j= (i++) + (++i) and calculated the appropriate value, then congrats, you made the same mistake as me :)

Seems it actually gets divided into (i++) ++ (+i) so it becomes an invalid expression.

*)Problem is to print "Hello World" without a single semi colon in the program :D

Now I thought of macros,recursion,function calls blah blah blah but as always the answer was one hell of a simple solution.

Just put the printf statement in the if condition or for/while condition thing and job done :)

*)The mother of all C questions :D

int a,i=5;

int *b=&i; //Creating pointer to i

a = i/*b;

What is value of a?

If the answer 1 popped up in your mind (after all we divided a value by same value), ha ha ha! Compile,run and see :D

Naming Convention

It always makes me wonder how people can mess a name as simple as mine. Let me tell you what I mean.

My EDC mam thought my name was Sai Shankar.

HOD thought it was Shankar.

EDC Lab mam thought it was Sai Saravanan.

So did the other sec boys for sometime. :D

Apple lab mam thought it was Sarvesh Gautham/Sai Vignesh.

uP sir thought it was Sowmya Narayan.

OS mam thinks(still :D) it is Sai Krishna.

I even had a boy from the other sec come to me and ask earnestly "Dei unnoda unmayana per ennada?" Lol!

Note : My real name is Sai Santhosh :)

Shift+Delete

I have a drive full of movies. And soon I ran out of space. So I decided to remove few movies. Cars got shift+deleted. Next was Angels and Demons. But this popped out an error. "The file does not exist in the system" or something very similar to that. I tried deleting the folder again. Same error. I restarted my system. The error didn't change. I couldn't understand what was going on. How could the file not exist??? I mean, it was right in front of my eyes.

I googled and found many strange solutions for this strange error. I tried many of them but in vain. I tried to create a rar file out of it and encountered same error. Yet the movie inside the folder ran perfectly fine. This kept me wondering for a few days. Then I did what I always do under these circumstances.

Restart. Go to Ubuntu. Mount the media. Now I tried Shift+Deleting the file. Angels and Demons was deleted successfully. What Windows failed to do, Ubuntu accomplished without a fuss. Ofcourse I still don't have a clue why that error came. But from experiences like these I have learnt something.

If something doesn't work in Windows, try in Ubuntu.

If you want to do something, try Ubuntu.

If it doesn't work in Ubuntum it's not worth doing.

Ode On Friendship

When I was born, I inhertied my family

And all my childhood it was all I had;

I can't forget how times passed happily,

For I always had my mom and my dad.

Then as time passed new problems awoke,

I knew not how to speak on this to them;

Then something called friendship arose,

I felt like I was on the world's helm;

I know now that friends are not inherited

And that you gotta be lucky to find real ones;

To lose them would make our hearts devasted,

For they show us the reality of life's essence.

With friends around, one can rule the world,

Atleast that is what they can make us believe;

All my life around me they have swirled,

I only wish to repay them before I am to leave.

IV To Ooty :)

Just a small poem about my dept IV. I haven't gone into any specific details of the trip, just an overview :)





The IV started on the 9th of July,
Into the sky did the crackers fly;
Our industrial visit was to Ooty,
For it was finally time to party!

An hour before midnight we started,
Into two big buses were we seated;
The drive at night didn't scare us,
Cos all the dancing made it no fuss.

It was drizzling when we saw our hotel,
Ah, the chilling climate had a lot to tell;
All day we were shivering under the sky,
Yet somehow all our moods were on a high.

All the places we saw had their own view,
I cannot fathom how fast the time flew;
We all danced to tunes, even the shy ones,
The questions session involved many a puns.

With many sighing hearts did the buses return,
The trip to ooty cannot easily be forgotten;
The co ordinators had done one hell of a job,
Remembering reguar classes all I can do is sob.

Square Root Of 3

This is a direct rip from the movie Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. It is a poem recited by Harold in the climax. I know it sounds geeky but hell, I like it :)

I fear that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
A three is all that's good and right
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath a vicious square-root sign?
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick
With just some quick arithmetic
I know I'll never see the sun
As 1.7321
Such is my reality
A sad irrationality
When, hark, just what is this I see?
Another square root of a three
Has quietly come waltzing by
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
And with a wave of magic wands
Our square-root signs become unglued
And love for me has been renewed.

News? Do Not Kid Me!

We live in times were almost every news seen/heard is manipulated so much that the very reason for those news channel seems to be in no longer delivering news but getting more ads. Here are few such instances.

*)What They Reported :

"American President advices Americans to not travel to India". Mr.Chidambaram "talks tough" saying "We will ask their government to retract their statement as India is a secure country".

I saw this news and was amazed for such a statement from their President would do no good in improving the relationship between the two countries. Then they showed the actual videos of what the two people had said.

What Actually Happened:

American President tells Americans in India to be always alert and keep a low profile due to the recent terrorist activities in our country. (No mention of "Don't go" there). Our Home Minister when asked about this said "I am not aware of any such statement. If they given such a statement we will tell them to take it back".
After a few hours the "If" part was cut out and only the "Take it back" was shown. And they ran this piece for the full day!

*)What They Reported :

"Dhoni loses cool : The Sehwag Injury Fiasco"
"Sehwag hid his injury on his shoulder from the BCCI and the Captain and it was akward for Dhoni when details of the injury was asked. This happens after Dhoni reportedly clashed with his Vice-Captain Sehwag.Dhoni then lost his calm..."

Then a video where a reporter blamed Dhoni for leaking the news. Dhoni - coolly - asked him "Are you blaming? No, you just said I leaked the news in front all these people. So are you accusing me?..." Ofcourse after an hour all this was cut out. Only the "Are you accusing me" bit was shown with other videos of ppl diving in the recent IPL. Hmm

What Actually Happened:

Sehwag got injured in IPL. Everyone hoped he would recover in time. He didn't. So the injury was revealed. So all that happend was an injured player was sent back to India. This piece of news ran for quite a few days!

*) I got this as a forward in my cell :)

"Sun News has put this as a "breaking news" : 'Masilamani is great hit' in their channel. Is this really a news? What a pathetic situation."

Thank God there a few -very few actually- who still try and deliver the actual news. Cheers to them for honesty and others for imagination.

Iyyo Iyyo

This is a conversation my dad overheard in the bus when he came from Chennai to Madurai to visit me. It was during the err 'Alagar going around the city festival' when a group of people spray water on who ever they can.

...
Guy X : Ya, I am new to the city.
Guy Y : This is a big festival sir. You know me and my parents have lived many years in Chennai. But the crowd here is so much more than in Chennai ( The "crowded" place was looking like a half empty Ranganathan street!).
Guy X : Oh, I didn't know Madurai was such a big place.
Guy Y : It is sir. After the next turn is the Kamarajar Salai. It is the Madurai equivalent of Mount Road (Whaaaaaaaat???). Its as long as Mount Road. Maybe longer(Omg!). There is also new complex coming in that road like that Spencer Plaza...

(Unfortuntately my dad had to get down on the Kamarajar Salai stop where my house is. Pity we missed the rest of the conversation)
Pride on hometown is ok dude. But this kinda "reel vudrathu" is just too much!

No Single Soul

My life for long has been so bare,
For none came to show me some care,
Life for me had once been much better,
For I got no single soul to talk.

I feel my old friends are very far away,
For they have all gone their own way;
Now I have these new people 'round me,
Yet I got no single soul to talk.

Few people did make me open my mind,
And they all seemed to be very kind;
But in the end all I feel is regret,
So I got no single soul to talk.

They seemed to find my words so funny,
Yet every word I said was said in pain;
They made jokes of my memories and so,
Now I got no single soul to talk.

What's gone wrong???

- Empty seats in the IPL matches. No jam-packed crowd for a twenty 20 match?

- Yet to see a 200 plus score in this IPL.

- Still no joy for Ferrari :(

- A debut team is having - to quote from espnstar.com - "too much brute force for his rivals to seriously compete".

- Neither Raikkonen nor Hamilton have a won a race so far this season!

- The face of Roger Federer with the Champion's cup is in the papers no more.

- Manchester United lost a semi final!

- Berbatov is running - yes running! - during a game.

- My happy-go-lucky friend says "I ve studied couple of units in SS". (And we re only in the study holidays)

- My geeky friend says "seriously me full time ipl,epl and fpl only".

- And I am suddenly having thoughts about studying during study holidays. (Hopefully these feelings will go away for they are very disturbing).

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.