lucis

Over the past few weeks the homepage of Times of India has been posting picutures of hollywood and (sometimes) Indian celebrities. The pictures go with some absolutely ridiculous piece of news under them (such as, some one famous brushed her teeth today). What really bugs me with these photos is that about 9 out of 10 times the whitebalance on them is WAY off. The skin tones are horribly wrong, and there is either a greenish, or a bluish, or a yellow cast to the whole picture. I am amazed as to how a newspaper the size of ToI can let such a thing get by for so long. Tells you the state quality control with Indian websites…

Just saw story on /. about how the Simputer is turning out to be a failure. About 3 years back I was really interested in linux on the hendhelds, and came into contact with several people working on the Simputer project at IISc, Bangalore. While it is a really fascinating idea to have an open source hardware/software solution, I was never convinced it would succeed. In fact, I would say it was a really bad idea!

Unlike software, having an open source project for hardware does not work very well in general because electronic hardware is a numbers game. The more you manufacture, the cheaper it gets. For a big manufacturer such as Compaq or Dell or Palm, the actual manufacturing cost of the handheld turns out to be very close to negligible. For a company like Picopeta, however, it the cost turns out to be orders of magnitude higher! A hardware product for a niche market was never going to work.

What is interesting is thinking about what should have been done. The need for an electronic computing device for the rural environment is understandable, but developing a new piece of dedicated hardware is wrong in my opinion. A better alternative would have been to take a compaq ipaq (which retailed for about $150-$200 even back in 2001), and develop custom software for it. Linux ran great on the little ipaq 3100 even back then. Developing a nice and easily usable UI would have been the smart thing to do. Since hardware only gets cheaper, and older handhelds can be had for peanuts, this would make the “simputer” far more affordable and would have had a much greater chance of success.

In the end, the simputer still costs $250+, while you can get a modern Pentium 4 with decent graphics and a 19″ monitor for under $200. I hate to say this, but I guess this is what happens when a company is run solely by academicians!

A moment of silence for the thousands who lost their lives, and millions who are now homeless and starving as a result of the deadly killer wave that caused perhaps the worst natural disaster in history!

This would be absolutely hilarious if it wasnt so serious. Apparently hard drives and CDs containing security codes and other “confidential” stuff were stolen from an unguarded building about eight months back, leaving all defence, IB and RAW vulnerable.

This goes a long way to show that developing better, stronger encryption algorithms is not always the answer to improving security. Dumpster diving and traditional break-ins are probably a bigger threat.

On a slightly different note, I am surprised to see big places like Panera still print the complete credit card information on their recipt. This is a clear invitation for identity theft. Then there is the popular spam that tricks people into handing over their ebay passwords. The best fingerprint/retinal recognition security system is a failure if someone uses a doorstop to leave the door open.

I think the security problem is at a much lower level than Computer Science. It is about educating people about how serious a wrong click of a button can be.

Got to watch a couple of hindi movies after a long time recently. One was Munna Bhai MBBS - it was a torture to watch this one. I wonder why so many people recommended this trash to me! Horrible, horrible acting. Stupid, inconsequential and unoriginal story. Awful music. Nothing original. Perfect example of how to get everything wrong in a movie! What is surprising is that so many people liked it so much! Well, it was better than most hindi movies, I guess; but nowhere close to being enjoyable.

The other was Ek Hasina Thi. I kind of liked this movie. The end was disappointing, but the movie was great overall. The story was again not original, but was rather well presented. Nice music too! Also, I thought the acting was above par (yea, Saif Ali Khan can do some good stuff!). Definitely good for a hindi movie.

And best of all, a major part of the movie was shot in New Delhi. Got to see a glimpse of delhi after a long time! And the icing on the cake were shots totalling about 5 minutes around PVR Anupam (a movie theater) in Saket [see picture above]. I lived about two blocks away from Anupam for more than 10 years, and used to hang out there qutie often! I have also used one of the ATMs shown in the movie a few times! Delhi is not shown in movies that often, and this was just great!

This really made my day! Formula 1 in Hyderabad, India! After watching just one race live in Indianapollis this year, I can say that watching it in person is far, far better than watching it on TV. There is just no way to capture the sound, intensity and excitement that twenty 900 horsepower F1 car engines at full throttle generate at the start of the race.

But I am not really in favour of the three day exemption to tobacco ads that is being proposed. It is not right to change major policies for any event, no matter how big. But with both France and Canada facing difficulties in hosting the GP for the same reason, I dont see a way around it.

This is really big! It is really great for the economy and overall impression that people have about India. It would probably be the biggest sporting event in India! I really hope this goes through. (Though I doubt I’l ever get to see it live in Hyderabad…)