Category Archives: Thought Work

Dealing with surprises!

My dear one always complained that I am not so fond of surprises. Deep inside, I do appreciate an element of surprise in my life. But sometimes life brings along difficult surprises to you, and they are so surprising that you start doubting the law of gravity. Anyway, $#i+ happens! But one needs to learn to deal with such hostile situations in life. This talk is not authoritative enough due to the uniqueness of each situation, but discusses the human nature that decides how we deal with them.

Like most artificial intelligence engines do, the human mind also runs on a learning model. This model is prepared and maintained by the brain by storing information about situations in the past along with environmental factors around them,  the decisions taken then, and the outcome of the situation. And it is this model that the mind tries to exploit when dealing with new situations. Don’t we always try to relate to the past? We somehow try to force-fit the current situation to something in the past and then apply the known outcome to the situation. But this model needs to be used with caution. Worse enough, we also involve statistics based on other people’s experience of similar situations and impose it on ours. The urban dictionary calls it ‘superstistics’, the use of prior evidence of one event to predict the outcome of another unrelated event – from the words superstitious and statistics. Continue reading Dealing with surprises!

Automated Report Template for BITS DLPD Dissertation

This is not a blog post, but just sharing the report template used for the final semester dissertation/project at BITS, Pilani. I guess this is common to MS SS & MM courses offered by DLPD (WILPD). This is the result of the numerous email that keep floating during the semester, only adding to the confusion. So I created a Word template that one can use right away, for lazy bums like me who start late. Just define custom properties, and the report template will automatically fill itself up.

Usage:

  1. Download the file from either of the 2 links:
    DocStoc (latest)
    Box.Net
  2. On Windows, right-click, go to ‘Properties’, then the ‘Custom’ tab
  3. You will see all the fields used in the document like Report Title, Mentor Name, Student ID, etc.
  4. If not, in MS WORD 2007, go to ‘Prepare’ > ‘Properties’ from the OFFICE menu. Then ‘Document Properties’ > ‘Advanced Properties’ on the yellow band and ‘Custom’ tab on the pop-up.
  5. To modify a value,
    – Click on the field name in the field list
    – Change the ‘Value’ above
    – Click ‘Modify’
    – Repeat this procedure for all fields
  6. Do not delete any of the fields.
  7. Open the document now, select all the text (CTRL + A) and press F9.

I have taken care of the fonts, page numbers, table of contents, etc. You can copy-paste one of the existing chapters to create a new one. However, if something is missing as per the checklist, please bring it to everyone’s attention. We can discuss this via comments below.

Wishing you all good luck without your report & viva!

This intelligent template is dedicated to Sonal Purandare who motivated me to get started on the report and offered immense support in difficult times.

The Square Root of Three by David Feinberg

After Sunday, I finally had some time to check out movies I missed. Up in the Air is good, but not a must watch. Or perhaps, I’m not good at reviewing movies. Harold and Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay was funny, but I enjoyed the White Castle installment more. The clever poem that Kal (Kalpen Modi, a.k.a. Kal Penn) sings to win his love at the end was very impressive. Probably its the geek in me that loved it, but you should read it as well.

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the 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! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

World Water Day 2010 – Let’s pledge to conserve

Water: Precious & Scarce as it is
Water: Precious & Scarce as it is

Do you know what date it is? 22nd March. I know its not your birthday (unless you are Prof. Aneesh Gangal), neither is mine. Today is World Water Day, observed world-wide since 1992, popularized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development at Rio De Janerio that year. And what are we doing? Forget about standing in the world’s longest queue to highlight the global sanitation crisis or using low flow toilets, we’re not even closing taps when we brush. And please note, its not about the money; water is still very cheap at 25 paise (INR 0.25) a gallon. Just that its not enough. Water like other resources is extremely precious & sadly depleting. Let us atleast pledge to conserve & use it judiciously. Read further if you wish to Go Green!

Anyway, we’re talking water. If you are planning to save water, you should first be roughly aware of how much you are using. Similar to the carbon foot print, water consumption by individuals & companies is measured by a water foot print. This includes the total amount of freshwater used directly and indirectly. Direct consumption is on account of drinking, washing, leaving the tap open 🙁 Indirect usage is the water spent on growing vegetables we consume, manufacturing coffee beans, preparing a meat steak, etc. Unfortunately, it takes 20 gallons of water to create a pint of beer. Here is a Facebook app to check out your water foot-print.

So why is water so important?

Get updates from any web page via a Feed43 RSS feed

As is evident from several posts on my blog, I am a total food freak! I am also a regular burrper. I have written several valuable reviews at Burrp and also received written appreciation from Burrp. A couple of months back I was thinking of copying food review from Burrp to my blog. Since that was going to be tedious, I went looking for a RSS feed from Burrp. It was sad they don’t offer it, but I wrote them my feedback. Now I was left with no option but to think out of the box!

The Need
The Need

And then the Web 2.0 enthusiast in me came to life! I had been using a service called Feed43 to process several feeds and remembered that it allows creating a feed out of any page on the internet. I checked the HTML source code of my Burrp profile page to find that reviews were quite structured in terms of markup. So why not let Feed43 read out the page and create a feed for my reviews? This way I won’t have to copy anything manually. Moreover, whenever I post a review to Burrp, it will be available on my blog in less than 6 hours (that’s the refresh rate for free feeds at Feed43) Continue reading Get updates from any web page via a Feed43 RSS feed

A Tribute to Sachin Tendulkar

When Sachin Tendulkar travelled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam. When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company,…

When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company, Roger Federer was a name unheard of; Lionel Messi was in his nappies, Usain Bolt was an unknown kid in the Jamaican backwaters. The Berlin Wall was still intact, USSR was one big, big country, Continue reading A Tribute to Sachin Tendulkar

Tarpipe workflows for publishing updates to multiple social media sites

Off-late, I have had too much social presence on the internet. How do I manage it? Ping.fm! This service lets you pre-configure & then simultaneously update multiple social media sites by pinging Ping.fm which can be done via email, SMS (to a UK number – noooooh!) or a Jabber/Gtalk bot. Now that’s enough for the aam zindagi, but when you live the mentos (or should I say prasadgupte) zindagi, you might just want some processing to be done before you post to multiple services. That’s where TarPipe kicks-in! Here is a short tutorial.

Tarpipe lets you build custom workflows through an intuitive UI (like Yahoo pipes) to control how, where, and what part of your data is to be published. In my example, I’m creating a workflow to upload a photo to Facebook via email and then post its URL to Twitter & FriendFeed. I avoided using a URL shortening service to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

My First TarPipe Workflow
My First TarPipe Workflow

I first drag a Email Decoder connector onto the canvas, and then Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. Note that bubble on the left side of a connector indicates ‘input’ & the one on the right side indicates ‘output’.

So when I connect the Mail Attachment bubble to the Photo in Facebook, it means that the attachment (a photo) will act as input to Facebook. On similar lines, the message body acts as the caption for the photo. The URL for the photo, generated by Facebook, will be available as output which I will use as a link in Twitter. The photo-thumbnail goes to Friendfeed along with the title & link. The title in either case comes directly from the email. Continue reading Tarpipe workflows for publishing updates to multiple social media sites

Google Transliteration: Type Indic languages in any text-box

Type in English, Save as Marathi
Type in English, Save as Marathi

Last week I stumbled upon this amazing service called Google Transliteration that can be accessed through a bookmarklet (jargon explained at the bottom). You can use this to type in one of the Indic languages in any text input box on the internet! (whether it really gets saved depends on the website 🙂 ) Language currently supported: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu & Urdu.

Update (21-Feb-10):
After reading this post, one my valued readers questioned the utility of this service! And this is what I wrote back:
Few years back acquiring Indic fonts, and learning to use Indic keyboard layout was a challenge. Google eased that with a web service which takes away reluctance to reply in local languages.
With such a service, an application developer need not provide for transliteration as a feature (its a feature in Gmail). Creating a database with double-byte storage is enough to record input in any language.

Also, Transliteration can help people understand how words are pronounced when they are familiar with a different script. However, this may not work when the same word is spelled in multiple ways. eg. Mohammed [Read more]
With CJV languages, transliteration will often yield only an approximate result.

Continue reading Google Transliteration: Type Indic languages in any text-box

What a ‘gluttonous’ weekend I’ve had

This weekend has been quite different. With Valentine’s day falling on a Sunday, it should have been something for my heart, but instead it was great for my stomach. I had been eating out all the time. The food forced me too take long walks to make place for another meal, and I used it to compile 5 new foodie reviews at Burrp. Do check them out! By the way, did you know that I have a dedicated RSS feed for my food reviews? If not, please do subscribe through your favorite reader!