The Lonesome Road

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Painted Sky, originally uploaded by shadowfall.

Went out for a walk with my parents today and took a few sky photos. Have put up four of them today. Will upload some more tomorrow.

Somehow like this photo as it looks more like a painting (well, at least it does to me).

As always praise/criticism is always welcome.

Hope you like the photos!

PS: Gallery link is to the left, or for those of you who don’t want to move the mouse all that much, click here.

Well, it seems that the rain has managed to do what most political parties cannot - shut down Mumbai. Totally.

Heavy rains over the last couple of days have brought in their wake heavy flooding of roads and rails. Once the rails are flooded and the trains stop moving, the city is more or less paralyzed. Add to that the fact that the roads are flooded as well - it simply brings the city to a standstill.

According to the news yesterday, gridlock traffic was the norm yesterday. People have actually left their cars on the road and looked for alternate ways to get back home.

The heavy rainfall also knocked off the electricity in most parts of Mumbai and power was restored only late last night in most places.

Note: Calling Mumbai requires patience. The cell phone lines are jammed and quite a few areas in Mumbai are almost unreachable by phone.

Travel advisory: The Pune-Mumbai roads are all blocked. This includes the old highway as well as the Expressway. Secondly, all trains on the Pune-Mumbai route have either been delayed or cancelled. Finally, Mumbai airport will remain closed today. Normal operations will start when the rain lets up.

Over the last one year, Yahoo! and Google have been on a big buying spree - each seeking to pick up products and technologies that fit in with the image they are trying to create.

For instance, Google latched on the the blogging fad (well, fad is the wrong term to describe it, but that’s a topic for another post) and bought Blogger. Then in order to make photo uploading simpler, they also bought Picasa and made it free. Results are looking good.

A month or so back, Yahoo! responded by buying one of my favourite photo sites - Flickr. This was in line with their new photomail philosophy - and a good buy considering the large number of subscribers Flickr had. And then came the announcement from Konfabulator that they too had been bought out by Yahoo!. Once again, what used to cost USD 19.99/- is now free. Oh - and for all of you who bought Konfabulator 2.0 - don’t worry, they’re even giving a refund.

So, where is this going to end? Both these search engines are now in the race for video. All I can say is that good times are rolling for the end users.

Rock on!

The new Firefox version (1.0.6) is out for download. Windows XP users click here for a direct download. Those with different systems can use this page to find an appropriate installer.

Enjoy!

Everyone who enjoyed The Darth Side (and if you haven’t read it - I recommend you do) can rejoice! The author of that brilliant blog - CheeseBurgerBrown is back with a new journal. It’s called Simon of Space. I’ve just ran across it yesterday and am going through the previous articles in chronological order.

Enjoy!

The helmet rule has finally been implemented in Pune. The “valiant crusaders” tried their best to extend the date that the Supreme Court had proposed, but to no avail. The agitation has not stopped though - there are lawyers who say they will fight cases for people caught by the cops - free of charge and politicians who encourage people not to pay fines and take a court order. In between all this you have the local Pune dude/dudette who isn’t really bothered about the rule and chooses to wear/not wear a helmet based on his/her mood. A look reveals that only 30-40% of the drivers are following the helmet rule. Also, though the rule states that both - the driver and the pillion rider must be wearing helmets, the cops (wisely) have only been stopping those vehicles where the driver is breaking the rule.

However, in the early parts of the month, Pune was lashed by heavy rains. This for the most part dissolves the material used in road construction and creates a slew of potholes on the roads. They can range in depth from a few centimeteres to a few feet.

Secondly, due to the rains, a lot of flooding took place on the city roads. This coupled with the fact that the lights usually go off when the rain pours caused the city roads to become highly unsafe. A gentleman died when he was thrown clear off his scooter after the front wheel locked when it struck a pothole.

I wear a helmet when I drive - it’s personal choice. The thing is, when you drive over the potholed roads, it jerks your head around. When this jerk is coupled with the additional weight of the helmet can lead to a lot of neck strain.

Also, the method of filling roads in this city defies explanation. A group of road workers will come and pour the tar/stone mixture into the pothole and then a roller will flatten it out - but not fully. So on the road, there are varying levels of strata. The roads are not smooth and the transitions are not good for you or the vehicle that you drive.

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. Later all!

I was trawling the web yesterday when I came across this site [baen.com]. Now these guys have a policy that any author whose work is published by Baen, has an option to put up any of his/her books on the site for as long as (s)he wants to.

The librarian of the site - Eric Flint (who also has a set of his books available for free) makes very logical reasons why this won’t hurt anyone. These two are my favorites :

a) Word of mouth is an extremely effective form of marketing. Very true. There are plenty of books I have bought simply because of this. Case in point - The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King. I was lent book 1 by a friend - and now I own Books 1-5.

b) Computers cannot write fiction. No matter what, fiction is the production of a human brain. Distribustion of e-books does not threaten an author simple because he’s the one creating the fiction - only the medium of distribution is evolving.

This makes a lot of sense. Bibliophiles collect books - I know it’s a obvious statement, but one that seems to have escaped notice. If I do read a book online and like it, the chances are very high that I *will* buy it. And to be very honest - though I read e-books, nothing beats haveing the book in your hand, relaxing in a chair and being lost to the world around.

More power to the guys at baen!

Well, I know this is an old article, but it’s still a fun read. In a survey, around 75% of office workers were willing to give their password to a total stranger - all for a chocolate bar. The complete article can be found here. [securitypipeline.com]

I reached this article while I was reading an article on slashdot on how cell phone records are obtained and sold to the highest bidder. This problem seems to be mushrooming daily. Even in India, we get a lot of unsolicited calls. It peaked during the last elections when loads of sms used to come on the phone encouraging people to vote for a particular candidate. One of my friends was woken up in the morning with the (then) Prime Minister of India saying “Mein Pradhaan Mantri bol raha hoon” (This is the Prime Minister speaking). My friend - half asleep that he was - was wondering how to reply when he realized that it was a recorded message. Unfortunately, there is no legislation to curb these activities.

In other news, it seems that the blogger post tracker is back online. After being stuck on 50 posts for the better part of a year, my counter now shows 126 posts. Passed a 100 and didn’t even know it

Anyway, that’s all from me. Later folks!

It’s been a fun week - trip to Bombay, meeting with old friends, a cousin coming over - basically, the works.

The thing is, my cousin (Rishi) got the phone he uses in the States over here. The only network that it managed to recognize with the original sim card in it was AirTel. Touble is international roaming costs a ton. Pretty obviously, Rishi wanted out. Usually, when friends come over from international territories, they simply buy a local sim and use it till they go back. Unfortunately, any sim other than the original one gave an invalid sim error. A quick search on the net revealed that it’s a sim locking system implemented by the provider. Of course, there were also a lot of links on how the lock could be broken - for a price, but we weren’t interested. A call to the service centre revealed that they could also break the lock for INR 1000/- (appx USD 25), but Rishi wasn’t very keen on tampering with the phone. Then we had a brainwave. If the original card showed an AirTel signal when inserted, would a local AirTel card work on the phone? It did. We could make and receive calls without any trouble. So all you guys out there with phones purchased from the providers - come to India and get an AirTel card.

When I went to Bombay, I was hanging out at a friend’s house. He was trying to back up some of his data on a DVD - and we were supposed to leave for dinner in some time. I was wondering why he was in such a rush to burn the data. On a 8X writer, a complete disk burn takes approximately 8-8.5 minutes. When I asked him I was informed that his burner took 54 minutes to write a DVD. I was pretty shocked. Initially I thought that there was a problem with his SATA drive and the DVD writing, but somehow that theory did not gel. The next thing I thought of checking was the IDE cable settings for the Primary and Secondary channels. The primary channel was fine. However, the secondary channel - which incidentally his DVD-ROM was connected on was using PIO mode. For those born after this mode, PIO is one of the slowest modes of data transfer, and has been replaced by Direct Memory Access (DMA) and Ultra DMA (UDMA). There was an option to use DMA - if available. A change to this setting and a restart left the system setting unchanged. A quick search gave us the dirt. It seems that if in the data transfer the OS encounters more than 6 CRC errors, it switches the system from DMA/UDMA to PIO mode in order to “protect” the user.

The workaround :
1) Go to System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> IDE/ATAPI Controllers
2) Delete the channel (primary and/or secondary) driver
2) Restart
3) Set the mode to DMA (if available) and restart the system.
This should fix the problem in most cases. Once we did this, the system started burning DVDs in 8 mins and 49 seconds.

The last few days have brought terrorist bombings back into the front pages. In India, we managed to stave off a militant attack on the disputed land at Ayodhya and the London transport system was systematically bombed by terrorists. The only thing that comes to my mind is a saying by Mahatma Gandi - “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Give peace a chance..