The Ultimate Phone!

One of my friend showed me this link about a new phone called Pomegranate Phone.
This phone has amazing functionality and its really unbelievable! Unbeatable and Unimaginable!!

Check out here!!



































































































Do I look like a ?? But still a cool ad!

My First XNA creation!

Thanks to Microsoft for creating such a nice framework for hobby game developers. XNA really rocks, so is .NET Express edition 2008 (though not as good as eclipse!)

My first xna game is out! After very long time I got sometime to do it, without scarifying my time on other important stuffs like movies, gaming and sleeping :)

Take a look!

Microsoft Photosynth - wow!

Recently I stumpled upon, Microsoft's photosynth. I am amazed to see what a software can do. What Photosynth does is mind blowing. From the bunch of photos of a same place, it tries to find a pattern among them and constructs a 3D image of it!! I can't even imagine, how they are doing this? Even human brain will have difficulty doing that. Amazing!

Take a look @ Photosynth.net

you will have to install silverlight plugin (something similar to flash plugin)..

Parleys.com - Good site for java fans!!

I hit upon Parleys.com which has many tech talk show videos.. it is better than videos in youtube.. We can even download the videos, but we need AIR (Adobe flex runtime) for playing the video.. but certainly looks promising.. Mostly it has J2EE related tech shows.. But video is not playing as smooth as youtube, hope it will be fixed (i guess my office broadband is fast enough to stream!)

see you!

Relaunch of my tech blog

There were various reasons why i started to blog, to improve my writing skills, to keep a note for myself, share my views with friends and finally every body does it :) I have been mixing different topics in this blog and I don't want that going forward. So i will segregate my blog post into general topics and tech टोपिक्सtopics. General view on some interesting sites or new game or gadgets does not go to tech blog, rather it goes into personal blog. In tech blog I am planning to write mostly about what I do every day for work or for fun.
Most of you might not have seen my tech blog, but i have created one long ago and now I am going to try updating that blog as frequently as possible.

My tech blog is http://witty-gritty-coder.blogspot.com/

I wish to see some of you guys doing the same to share you wisdom with us..

Frustrating day with solaris

I hardly use console based operating system.. not that i dont like them.. but i never got a chance to explore their full potential.. so i always have a dislike towards those terminals(after seeing matrix i started liking them though..) today i had to perform a build in solaris server.. i typed something wrong in the console so i have to erase it, so my instinct said i have to press the backspace key and it didn't work and suprisingly i got some funny looking characters on screen.. so i tried the obvious second choice of delete key, that didn't work either :( then i tried Vi short cut and again in vain and then emacs del shortcut, still no help.. cursing the creator of solaris and asked my colleague sitting next to me.. fortunately he knew how to get backspace working... type the following the console prompt

stty erase

make sure you press the backspace after you type "stty erase " and there you goooo...

How easy it is.. we need to remember a command to remove a character from console.. crazy!!

Back to work...

After long vocation of 10 days, I am back to work today. Though i had 10 days of holiday, I couldn't sit in home for even 1 day completely and most of the i was out to visit my relatives.. yeah many of them.. Lot of things i want to write about, I couldn't find time all these vocation days.. now that i am back to work, i hope i will have some time.. irony isn't it.. :)

first thing i would like to share an experience in a bus journey. After repeated request from my Grand Ma, i finally decided to visit her. The place i used to enjoy when i was a kid, is no more fun.. All my friend there are now grown up, most of them moved to cities for work and others busy with their business. I will not be able to meet any of them and all my cousins where out of town to their nana's place. I have to spend a whole day alone, but atleast i have tv with all channels there. I took the bus around 7 in the morning, suprisingly bus wasn't crowded and i had many choices for my seat and all of them equally bad :( so i selected the one which is easy for me to get down.. once i reached tambaram two old gentleman in their mid 50's boarded the bus.  They sat behind my seat.. they started their conversation and their conversation reached my ears.. they were speaking in hindi possibly urdu. From the language and their attire i can easily identify them as moslems. 

And then we reached Mel Maruvathur and there is a amman temple there.. crazy amount of buses, most of them parked on the highway, causing traffic jam. One guy explained to other guy that this temple is making crazy money and that's true.. after sometime they started talking about the recent Mumbai terror attacks.. so far i was not very much keen on their conversation, but after this i was keen on what they talk about, so i pushed myself back against the seat to hear them.. I was very happy to hear what they feel and they bashed pak like anything.. He was telling all the mosleum countries were good except pak. He also said pakistan is going down economically and their are trying to pull us down.. he said "I don't know which allah asked these terrorist to kill people..."

After the recent terrorist attack there was a sense of hatredness towards moslems which was very unfortunate and by doing this we are yielding to terrorist.. the ill effects of terrorism is not thousands of people dying, it is not about the weakness of the security in our country, it is not about how easily they managed to sail into our country, but it is all about how they try to destroy the integrity of the country. As long as we are integral, we are united, we can survive any many terrorist attacks and we will be able to do well as a country.. 

Afer this experience I was happy about what india is and how it is going to be....

Jai Hind!!

The day we started to cook...

After lots of discussion and thoughts we finally decided to start cooking at home (bangalore). What is supposed to be the cleanest place in the house is where we dump everything. Dirty clothes' bag, dust bin, everyday news papers, water bottles, shuttle rackets, bunch of tooth brushes, tooth pastes and what not.. Since we have decided to cook and I am the one who wanted to do it the most, it was my responsibility to clean the kitchen. Ah.. friday evening, But I had to clean, since we have booked for a new gas connection, which can arrive any time.  

While I was doing the kitchen, I heard the calling bell. I was so immersed in cleaning that I didn't bother about it. After a few seconds another ring came through. I dropped the brumstick and then cleaned my hands with the near by newspaper and then eagerly opened the door. A guy was standing with the gas cylinder. I asked him to keep the cylinder in the kitched where we kept our dirty clothes bag before. He, then assembled the new Pigeon gas stove which was kept unused in the closet for more than a year. We were pretty excited about our first cooking experiment. 

He fired the gas stove and the stove flamed with bright blue light. My nose smelled odor of gas and I turned around to find the exhaust fan switch (yeah.. I had to find it, since we never have to turn it before!)  and turned it on, after few minutes it was better. I paid him 2550 rupees for the new gas connection and sighed him good bye. 

We have already decided what to cook today. I shut down the gas burner and them marched to a new by shop for buying cooking stuffs. We got a new packet of atta for chapathi and once we reached home we realized, we did not have chapathi roller for preparing chapathi's :) We felt stupid, but we immediately changed our plan to Dosa. So I  ran and got a packet of batter for Dosa. 

The first one was a big flop, it didn't come out properly.  I tried the second and to our suprise it was pretty good. We were encouraged by this good dosa and started the next one.. Finally we used all the batter and had a happy meal.  We then discussed about tomorrow's lunch plan. Its a week end, so we have some time to kill and hence we planned for a big menu :)

And today's lunch was also good! Not good really, but better than what we thought!! After the good meal comes the tough part of cleaning it, but we have to sacrifice something to get something..

Do you know Benny Lava???

I stumpledupon a blog about Benny Lava.. Benny Lava is the name given to an Indian actor by a bunch of western fans(really fans??!).. So just read the blog little more and came to know that Benny Lava aka Prabhu deva..

Buffalax, a youtube user, added english subtitles to a Tamil song.. subtitles based on what he heard and it's not a translation.. And it became a hit in youtube with more than 9,835,326 views.. sounds funny ah..! Take a break from your days work.. watch it here..

Nobody escapes from this economy crisis!!

Its all well few months back.. everybody is happy in Cisco with good pay hikes.. but that happiness didn't last long.. (Nooo they didn't rollback the hike by the way!!) Cisco is always projected as company which can handle economy down turn with ease.. Even in 2001 Cisco managed very well and Cisco sees these economy down turn as an opportunity to come out well, where as our competitors with many in-house problems are having tough time battling them and not to say about economy slow-down..

But this time even Cisco is not spared.. Spree of cost cutting measure were taken out across all cisco location and one of them is to force the employee to take leave this christmas and new year.. Company will be shut down for around 10 days and Cisco saves considerable amount of money..

In one way it is good to take leave, but people are worried where this will lead us to...
Everybody is hoping that Cisco will come back well.. With the foresight of our senior leadership, (standard slogan in every cisco meeting!!) we will fight back well.. Hopefully!!

silly string problem!

Today is no different in office. We are nearing the release and test team is chucking out bugs tirelessly. Every day we have more bugs to fix :( As usual i started to work on with a high severity bug. I found the cause without any problem.

But then came a surprise to me. We have a function which takes an array and returns the index of any object you are looking for. So we have an array with few entries and search for an string which is there in the array. But the returned -1 (not found).

I am surprised and puzzled. One things i did was to replace the == with equals method and it worked well. But what I am not clear is why == didn't work. Since string is immutable any string object which has same data will be interned to the same reference in the string pool.

Then I searched on google and found that if any one of the string is read from file, then it is not interned.

consider the following code:
public class Test {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("c:\\test.txt"));

String str = reader.readLine();
str = str.trim();
String str2 = "A";
System.out.println(str==str2);

reader.close();
}

public final static int indexOf(T[] array, T t) {
for(int i = 0;i
if(array[i]==(t)) {
return i;
}
}
return -1;
}

}

content of the file is just "A", what do you expect the program to print? true? you are wrong.. answer is false. This is where we have to use the intern function in the string class.

Hope somebody will find it useful!!

Wonders with Wii Remote

After iPhone's multi-touch screen and Microsoft's surface, touch-interaction with computer has taken a new avatar. Every other day new video about these technology popup on youtube.

Take a look at the second light multi-touch screen

And today i stumpled upon a TED video about using Wii to create interactive screen. I am particularly excited about the idea of using infra-red to find you visual line of sight. EA is planning to use it in its game.. excited ah!! Take a look!!

The "SHIT" effect

Last Saturday I wrote my TOEFL. To me English was a night-mare in school days (still to some extent). Some how i managed to improve my stance at English little bit, but far from being perfect still.. I crossed GRE successfully, where luck played an important role and people said TOEFL is just a piece of cake (in fact it is), but i am obsessed with the speaking exercise. But i was confident to do it (after 2 years of being YASE, I have taken few presentation in front of 5 to 10 people).

Finally the day came. Reading and listening was a breeze. And then came the toughest part (at least for me), speaking. Trying to calm myself and after adjusting my head phone couple of time, the screen read.

"Describe the city you live in"

So i explained about Bangalore and it did go pretty well.. Ok, I am going to cross this, I said to myself. Then came the actual test. I read the question and mentally prepared my answer. Figuring out the first few sentences I am going to speak (sometimes I still have to form the sentence in Tamil and translate it!). I have 15 seconds to prepare and 45 seconds to speak about the question. After 15 seconds, I started with my answer. I started with few trembling words and gained stability in few seconds. Ah.. I am speaking alright i said to myself.

And then came the most embarrassing moment to me.. Before I could conclud my speaking, I ran out of time,. Two seconds before the clock ceases, it will show you a pop-up saying "Stop Speaking". I too got this pop-up at the end. I don't know what I did, still I couldn't believe it. Out of reflex, unknowingly without my knowledge I said "SHIT" into the microphone and it got recorded!!! What it did I just say? Oh my god, I am screwed. I got tensed. Not knowing what to do. I looked around to see if somebody is there near by, so that I can explain what happened. Nobody is there. I felt too bad, at the same time I wanted to roll-down and laugh for what I did!! then came the next speaking exercise, which I some how managed.. And the remaining exercise didn't go that well !! Any how we can't change the past, atleast I hope they wont ban me from future test :) At least if i would have said "The Magic Four Letter Word", they would have thought I am an American!!! LOL!!!

I know this is not fun, but unfortunately people enjoyed it.. So I am putting it in my blog :) After all life is about FUN!!

Cheer and Keep laughing,
BY "THE ONE WHO SAID 'SHIT' IN TOEFL"

Chandrayaan off to space -- what it is to India??

Finally Chandrayaan took off to moon, the place humans landed some 50 years ago and we are sending a box (ofcourse with some equipments inside) with our national flag now.. But it's never too late.. and it is a great achievement. Only few countries in this world were able to do that. But this is just my feeling. It is not always about us and it is about how people around the world looks at India.

After reading ezhil's blog, I started to see what international audience think about india. When i say international i have two countries in my mind, USA and China. So i started to read few news channel sites in USA and CCTV english of china.

Comments in ABC news are interesting. People having mixed feeling towards india.
CCTV doesn't even mention about this event, instead there is a news about a bomb blast in India!!

We have sent a satellite to moon after 50 years humans landed there. So what is good about it? Does ISRO work the same way like any other government organization works? But sending a satellite to moon shows what a nation is capable of. So I personally feel happy about this. But sending this satellite, are we going to salvage millions of poor Indian citizens? the answer is straight no.. are we going to find something new about moon.. again the answer is straight no.. but it does serves a purpose. By sending satellite to space, we prove our capability in rocket science and space business is a lucrative business. Countries earn tons for carrying other countries' satellite, which cannot afford it's own launch vehicle.

Chandrayaan is good sign of India's progress and i am happy about it..

Google Chrome Vs Yoga

NO, its not a post about how good Google chrome is?? But how one can use the recent events to advertise.. What a crazy idea to related yoga with Google chrome..

The most geeky way to advertise, isn't it??

The rainbow day!!!

Today climate in bangalore is amazing.. After long days of sun and no rain (yes even in bangalore!) clouds have opened up today, unfortunately today some cricket match is going on in bangalore and who bothers! Friday, we usually get free fruits from cisco. So as usual we went to the cafeteria to get some fruits. Some cricket match was going on, so i have to sit there with my friends watching cricket :( for few minutes.. And it started to breeze outside and few minutes later it started to drizzle. So i have to pull my friends to go out to get some fresh air. so we all went out and we are standing on the 8th floor of our building. The same floor we go everyday looked more beautiful. The wind became so strong, that it dashed couple of chairs. A plate with noodles was blown away :)


And we saw a beautiful rainbow on the sky. It is looked so amazing. We spent some time there till it started to rain and now I am back on my seat writing this blog :) and planning for this week end.. (loads of movie to see and this is what i am doing for my toefl! LOL!!)

Google @ 2001

For google's 10th anniversary, engineers at google have given us a time machine, which let us search the web as it was in 2001.. They have just put back the oldest web index they have. Whatever you try to search, google will search the web as it was in 2001 :)

So searching iPod, iPhone will give you strange results :)

Try it out here

Have Fun!!

PS: All the site may not open, since those pages listed by google may not exist now..

Google Chrome - Next Generation browser

Now the browser war is getting tougher with the introduction of Google Chrome, a brand new browser released by google without much hype. But why did google created another browser? Google is clearly heading in a way where it wants every god damn thing to be online and with it's own browser Google can surely redefine web application.

Following are the interesting or innovative ideas by google:

1. Tabbed user interface. Ok.. Firefox had it for eons and IE7 has that now, so is opera.. What's new in google chrome tabs. But google tabs are different. In all other browsers all tabs share same process space, that means they run inside the same process, where as in google chrome each tab is a separate process.. When I first read that, i was thinking "That doesn't really sound like a good idea", after all separate process for each tab is resource crunching. But google gave a really nice explanation and advantages of having separate tabs as separate process. With separate tabs as separate process you can regain any memory lost (due to memory leaks or what ever) by just closing the tab, OS will kill the entire process, reclaiming the memory. Ok.. sounds good! But what about sharing resource etc., god knows how google does that.. 

Now-a-days we are running more critical application in browser like online shopping, booking tickets etc., Should n't browser be stable? With separate tabs as separate process, whatever happens only that tab will be affected, remaining tab will remain!! Sounds Interesting!!

Now some experiment: Run chrome and launch few tabs. If you see task manager, you can see separate chrome processes. End Taks any one of them and navigate through the tabs. In any one of the tab you will see a "Sad Smiley" and the process you killed is associated with that tab.

2. VM for Javascript. Chrome runs a VM for javascript called V8.  Faster, efficient and safe.

3. Empty Tab : Google chrome maintains the list of sites that the user visit frequently. So when you open a new tab instead of just opening the home page or some stupid page, chrome will show you the list of frequently visited pages. Cool! Nice idea!!

4. Need not say about UI, Google is an expert in HCI. But I was shocked since I was not able to find any menu bar???! 

5. Similar to fire bug, chrome has an inbuilt javascript debugger. Nice!

6. Incognito Window - What ever you do in this window will not be saved anywhere(yes, even cookies)! So use incognito window if you are going into a porn site!! lol!! Guess IE8 has a feature similar to this.

Certainly looks good! Google has invested lot of time and brain into developing chrome. So certainly it is going to be good product from google.

Look here for more information.

Few statistics - comparison between chrome and IE6

-----------------------------------------------------

Tabs : 2

Process Mem Threads

IE         38512 24

chrome's         63344 32

Tabs : 10

Process Mem Threads

IE         52844 57

chrome's         161068 39

But google chrome for sure eats up more memory and resource! with the above statistics it is very clear!!

These are some obvious things one can see using chrome for few minute. More interesting stuffs later. 

Has anybody used IE8? I totally lost interest on IE - I use it only for some application i use at work! 

Other browsers watch out for Chrome!!!

More on chrome to follow!!

K7 Computing - A company with a difference

I some how happened read about this not so heard company "K7 Computing" right here in Chennai. I was very much impressed with the way they offered their openings! Definitely different and cool!

See : http://www.k7computing.com/careers.asp

Thread Local

Thread local is the concept of storing data which is specific to the thread. For example member variables are specific to instance, thread local variables are specific to Thread.

The IBM's page outlines exactly how it works..

This is definitely good way to do thread related transactions where in each thread denotes on transaction or session. Caling the get method on the thread local will return value based on the thread from which the method is called.

An example:

public class ThreadLocalTest {

static class CountdownThread extends Thread {
public static final ThreadLocal local = new ThreadLocal();
private int start;

public CountdownThread(int s) {
start= s;
}

public void run() {
init();
while(true) {
System.out.println(local.get());
int i = local.get();
local.set(--i);
if(i==0) {
break;
}
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

public void init() {
local.set(start);
}
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
CountdownThread t1 = new CountdownThread(10);
CountdownThread t2 = new CountdownThread(5);
t1.start();
t2.start();

}
}


Output:

10
5
4
9
3
8
2
7
1
6
5
4
3
2
1

I wonder how come I didn't hear about this for long time!!!

Happy coding!!