March 27 03
We Programmers are Important too… For Want of a Nail, A Kingdom was Lost! goes a famous rhyme. Quite often, major events depend on such small and seemingly inconsequential things that they are often overlooked, leading to terrible disasters. When Apple first released its popular iTunes program, thousands of Mac users installed the program, only [...]
March 24 03
On the Wisdom of War A little sanity in these difficult times. Let me reproduce here, some quotes by people who were truly great statesmen and intellectuals. Their collective wisdom is much more than anything I can ever write, so over to them: “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys [...]
March 22 03
War, the Oscars and Cricket While the rest of the world is worried about the war, Indians all over the world have only one thing on their mind – saturday’s World Cup final against Australia. It’s my theory that as a nation, India is driven by two things – Cricket and Movies. Which of course [...]
March 18 03
Spring break 2013: how ’bout outer space? Travelling to space might not be as far as you think it is. Brad Edwards of Highlift Systems, Seattle proposes to build an elevator to outer space using carbon nanotubes in a decade or so. The nanotubes are cylinders of carbon molecules that are extremely small and unbelievably [...]
March 14 03
A brief history of Lena All students of image processing (and I’m sure, many non-techies from the early 70s) are familar with the image of Lena which is one of the standard images used to test and demonstrate the algorithms used to encode and compress pictures. I’ve often wondered how the image of such an [...]
March 12 03
Going Digital! Movie theatres across India are going digital!One of the major film processing laboratories, Adlabs (which also has the world’s largest IMAX theatre in Mumbai) is retrofitting nearly 400 theatres across India with digital movie projectors and film servers by April 2004 so that in the future, movies will be either stored on high [...]
March 9 03
Check out the Club Rio on Rural. I can’t remember the exact location, but it’s somewhere between Curry and Palo Verde. It’s huge, and if you go between 5 and 7 in the evening, it’s happy hour, so you can get in with a cover charge of just $2 and (this is the best part) [...]
March 3 03
Revisiting Deep Junior Reading David Fogel’s Blondie24:Playing at the edge of AI has prompted me to think again about Kasparov’s draw with the supercomputer Deep Junior earlier in February. While it has been bemoaned by many as the end of the superiority of humankind over machines, I see it as just the opposite. As far [...]