Indian cricket team might be on the right track

By Sharad

Even though being an Indian one cannot stay away from cricket and being a cricket fan, of late I have tried to reason things rather than be blind about my passion. The past few years performance had only one sorry sight - Indian cricket team only going DOWN.

Of late, things have been changing and I feel for the first time, Indian CT might actually do something wonderful in the World Cup. What has changed ? Hmm first of all, the FEAR factor. For decades, it has been that case that if you perform well once (say hit a century), you can stay in the team for years without performing again. Now with so many players coming up, no one is sure about his seat. For opening slot, there is a fierce battle between Sehwag, Robin Uthappa, Gambhir, Ganguly and maybe even Sachin. In the bowling department, their is a similar battle between Zaheer, Agarkar, Pathan, Sreesanth, Kumble, Harbhajan. For the middle order we have Yuvraj, Kaif, Raina battling it out. Even the charismatic Dhoni is not safe with Karthik giving him a run for his money :-)

Secondly, the approach Chappel adopted by kicking Ganguly, Zaheer, Pathan and Sehwag might just work in India's favor. Now their careers depend on their strong comeback and Ganguly has just been doing that. I hope that same happens for Sehwag and Pathan. This will make them realize the fact that they are dispensable and just to reiterate the FEAR factor :-)

More importantly the Indian team is getting into the act now. In the recent West Indies one-dayers, they started taking singles, fielding well and started to play as a team again. How long this will last and will it be strong enough to see India through the World Cup is a question that only time can tell, but it sure has got my hopes high again :-)

Go India Go !

Creating playable DVD discs

Adam Pash has a very detailed and useful post about the software DVD Flick. It lets you write any video file to DVD discs so that you can play them on your TV. In simple words, it lets you burn those DVDRip / Divx / Xvid files that you have downloaded to a DVD disc to be enjoyed on your TV :-)

Key Features
- Free (Open source)
- Transcodes AVI, MPG, MOV and WMV files to MPEG-2 and burns your DVD in one shot.
- Lets you easily configure chapters and add sound tracks and subtitles.
- Lets you write the final project to ISO files.

Simple step guide -
1. Download and install DVD Flick
2. Configure settings - (size of media, NTSC/Pal, ISO or Burn to DVD)
3. Add the video files and configure chapter duration
4. Burn / Create.

Pandora Downloader

Few weeks back I posted about ways of saving songs from Pandora as MP3 for free. Just today, I read about another such tool- Pandora Downloader.

It is very similar to Pandora jar that we had discussed the last time, but is a little simpler to setup and and keeps a list of all the songs that you have played, so you can select any/all the songs heard in a session and save them.

The UI still needs a lot of work but the program as such is straight forward to use. Saves files to C:\Pandora and currently works only when you are hearing songs in IE.

As expected, pandora got on top and fixed the loophole even before I wrote about it :-(

Dont get disheartened, the new version is slated for a Feb first week release and use some other hack :-)

More links -

Lifehacker

Posts for this week

Author - Sharad

News roundup for this week. My list of must-read articles.

• Encrypting you instant messages with GAIM
  To keep instant messages - between you and your wife/girlfriend from office or potential investor about your stealth startup - secure and away from prying eyes.
  
  
• Hiding data in image files - easy steganography tools
  The digital equivalent of invisible ink is steganography software, apps that embed files and data inside other files, hidden from everyone who doesn't know any better.
  
  
• International calls for local charges
  All free calls was a recent service that opened out of Iowa. You can make calls to over 30 countries just by dialing to their number. In short -
  
1. Dial 712-858-8094.
2. Listen to instructions in Mandarin, Spanish and English.
3. Dial 011 followed by country code and number. No sign up, no fees, no hidden charges, unlimited call time. Guranteed privacy
   

LOVE!

What is love?
These ten letters often come to me.
Is it a feeling or emotion?
Or is it just a tendency!

Love mostly deals with the matters of the heart,
sometimes mind too plays its part,
Love has no limit, nor any bound.
It comes with the greatest joy manking has found.

Love brings in fun and a little pain,
It has few losses as well as few gains
Love has no causes nor any reasons
also it never changes like the seasons.

Love needs understanding of emotion.
it's nothing to do with the laws of motion.
I dont have a true-love-definition,
words are never enough to give any explanation.

to know what is love, it needs to fall in love.
well. falling and rising is all the same in love.

_A_A_

Which is the best IIT ?

Author: Sharad

A question that amazes almost everyone who either aspires to join IIT or has some contacts there. A question that runs high in debates among students. A question that might never have a definite answer. A question that is perennially debatable.

Even though this topic might not be in the best interest of me, I would surely like to give a shot at this one and see how judgemental I can be.

A quick start - Top JEE ranker's joining IIT in 2006. Source PanIIT.

IIT Bombay	46
IIT Delhi	28
IIT Guwahati	0
IIT Kanpur	20
IIT Kharagpur	0
IIT Madras	6
IIT Roorkee	0

Even though this might not be the best criteria to judge - it still reflects something very concrete - the choice of top 100 ranker's. Definitely there must have been something that influenced the decision of 46 students to join IIT Bombay. Was it totally a regional effect i.e. more students made it through JEE from the region in and around Bombay? My instincts tell me that cannot be the case. It still wouldn't have resulted in 0 admissions to IIT-G, Kgp and R. Geographically speaking, central position of Bombay along with the fact that is the financial capital of India indeed helps in attracting better students. This does explain why fewer students might prefer to go to Kanpur, but then should the numbers have been so different for Delhi?

So what other criterion's can one use to differentiate between the IIT's? I don't wanna digress into discussing (bashing) the rankings that sites like Rediff, Times of India or India Today publish. Some one suggested that rank them on research output. (Wikipedia's article on IIT says - IITs fall short in many parameters that are considered for educational rankings. The criteria for ranking(ranking methodology) prominently include internationally recognised research output, in which the IITs do not achieve notable success.)

I took a little inspiration from true-it-is journal and realized it would be useful to use Google scholar to measure this. The steps I used were like this. I typed in the following queries "Indian Institute of Technology" "Madras" -Chennai and then "Indian Institute of Technology" "Chennai" -Madras and eventually "Indian Institute of Technology" "Madras" "Chennai". The same technique for "IIT" "Madras" -Chennai and so on. I added up the number of hits - so that measures just plain quantity. I scanned the first page (only) and noted down the largest number of cites that I saw on any paper. For Roorkee I included University of Roorkee in my search. Here's what I found out -

Campus	Number of hits	Max. citations
Delhi	23,420	343
Bombay	19,870	835
Madras	17,320	312
Kanpur	14,660	2227
Kharagpur	13,300	376
Roorkee	6023	59
Guwahati	1460	17

The top 4 IITs look quite similar with IIT D topping the list with 23k hits. IIT-K even though has very few hits compared to IIT-D, it still ranks first in the maximum number of citations - a whooping 2,000+ citations. More importantly, it brings forward the truth that IIT-R and IIT-G have to work real hard !

Nevertheless, there are many many other factors that need to be considered for developing a more comprehensive listing. Based on what I evaluated - Bombay is marginally ahead of Delhi, closely followed by Madras.

Disclaimer: This ranking has nothing to do with the fact that I also studied at IIT Bombay. The views are my own and should be taken with a pinch of salt, if you may so desire!

More links
True-it-is
Rediff 2005 list
Economic Times
CBS 60 minutes (Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of IIT in India. )

Internet TV

C'mon guys: its not a day when u're missing those lovely indian soaps all the time.

Internet Television can surely help you out for that matter. Just take a look on this website:

http://www.idesitv.com/db

Register and watch channels from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - n - lemme know wat you think of it :)

Good Going,
_A_

Humor - More maths genius

Online Image Editors

Smiley cat has a very comprehensive listing of the sites which offer online image editing. The online image editors that were compared were -

• Snipshot
• Cellsea
• PXN8
• Phixr
• VicImager
• Picture2Life
• NetImager
• ImageAuthor
• nexImage
• LookWow

These tools were compared on the ease of use, range of features, functionality etc. The interesting fact was, all these tools gave a solid basic image editing functionality - crop, resize, adjust color, contrast, brightness etc.

The end verdict was Cellsea was the most preferred tool because of the wide and impressive range of features, easy, clean and simple UI and handled a range of file formats.

More discussion on the products.
The full comparison chart.
Amit A. at digital inspiration covered a smaller subset here.

Humor - Maths Genius

Humor - Effect of market boom in India

Crappy Websites

I must be surfing over few hundred web sites daily. A lot of them are very popular. Even though the numbers say that these websites are doing very well, their interface makes me feel YUKS! Can't these sites afford a decent designer? Here's a quick list.

• Rediff.com - The famous indian portal which was considered as India's best website. Alexa rating currently ranks it at 78! The user interface for the website is crappy to say the least. On the front page, the total news worth a normal user's attention is less than 10% of the area. Remaining 90% is ads! Can you believe it? Next in line are the glossy ads. The site is so colorful that you are blinded by the sudden light from the gazillion ads (ok kidding!), but its still a very bad UI. Even though they have upgraded the email space to 1GB, but the moment you start typing in your username, a popup appears. Well what the heck is that for. Noticed right now that a pop-up appears even when you load the site (this was instantly blocked by my firefox, so didnt notice it earlier). I am not sure why people actually end up going to such annoying sites. More links - linuxreviews

• Timesofindia.com - It suffers from the same problems. Slow interface, too many shiny ads and the bitter truth - absolutely crappy news. Well technically, they have all the "masala" news (bollywood star's liaison's, the latest innovation that happened 6 months back (yaah as if no one knows about it), political scandals etc.) but speaking of anything worthwhile is probably not on their agenda.

• Sulekha - I am not sure if I should be writing about it. Just for the heck of it, I complained online about the site and their user-interface. Surprisingly they replied back and wanted my suggestions on how to improve the look and feel of site. Well let's see how they go about it. Their website does not work across different browsers. The ads are more shinier and glossier than those on rediff. Lot of spam ads/ messages posted on their site (I know its a tough problem) to clear out those, but for a site which has over 10k hits everyday, this should be a no-brainer.

If people know of any other famous sites that are equally crappy, please let me know :)

Google needs to stop automating everything !

Google needs to stop automating everything. For one it needs to put some serious thought into the kind of contextual ads it displays. The sample ad in the pictures shows the problem. Dont even ask me what it means.

Given the kind of revenue they generate from text ads, I thought they would have classified and filtered all such content. Now I feel, Google should be using language specialists to figure out the good from bad and filter out such content immediately.

Install ubuntu from windows !

The announcement of new Ubuntu installer.exe is a big step in easing the life of so many newbies. Now you can install ubuntu and its flavors without getting into the hassle of Live CDs and worrying about how to repartition your hard drive or figuring out the complexities of a dual-boot setup. 

The new Ubuntu Windows installer lets you run the Linux distro without effecting your windows setup.

From lifehacker - In other words, it's like a live CD without the CD. Just run the installer, which in turn downloads a disk image of Ubuntu (actually, your choice of four Ubuntu distros), and then reboot your PC. Choose the desired boot option from the menu that appears, and presto: You're running Linux. This is a working prototype, not a finished product, so user beware. It didn't work on my Vista box (I discovered after the fact that Vista isn't supported yet), but it ran like a gem on an XP system.

Great way to run Ubuntu without the hassles of partitioning or burning a live CD!

Ubuntu windows prototype.

Recommended guide for Open Source Software's

People often come up to me and ask for advice on software's that could help them with their daily activities (browsing, antivirus, media players etc). In all likelihood, I advice an open source software for two simple reasons - they have infinite value for money (a very good software for NO money), they have been tested by millions of user and their development is always ongoing - in simple words, any bug or feature that you think/want/desire can and will be added to the software :) Here is my recommended list -

Web Browsing
1. Firefox - (Replaces Internet Explorer)
Firefox makes it to the top of the list, so no points for guessing that its the MOST recommended software. Compared to any other browser - it is much faster, lightweight (wont consume 100% of your CPU), simpler, stops annoying popups and has tons of amazing plug-ins that can make surfing the web a real pleasure. Switch to Firefox now !


Antivirus
1. ClamWin (Replaces Norton Anti-Virus or McAfee)
ClamWin is a smart anti-virus software that is fast, easy to manage and unobtrusive (wont eat up your CPU and make it slow) while keep your system free of viruses. So why pay for Norton or McAfee anymore?


Email Client
1. Thunderbird (Replaces Microsoft Outlook)
Thunderbird is an email client that has the main features desired in any email client or software for that matter - rich (full) feature set, lightweight, fast, a very good spam filter, and last but not the least protects you from those ridiculous phishing attacks by clearly indicating which emails send you to a bogus website. With a new plugin you can even get Gmail like UI for thunderbird.


Word Processing / Office Suites
1. OpenOffice (Replaces Microsoft Office)
Instead of paying for Microsoft Office, one should try OpenOffice. It includes very nice replacements for Excel and PowerPoint (and workable replacements for Access, Word and other Office elements).

2. Abiword (Replaces Microsoft Word)
A very effective replacement for Microsoft Word (who wants to pay for M$?). It is very fast compared to Word and includes pretty much every feature that I one desires in a word processor, plus saves and operates on lot of different file formats.


Photo Editing / Graphics
1. GIMP (Replaces Adobe Photoshop)
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is feature rich, solid and free ! So now why pay exorbitant amounts for Photoshop anymore !


Instant Messaging
1. Gaim (Replaces AIM, Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger etc.)
A very simple instant messaging program that allows you to be on AOL Instant Messenger, Windows (MSN) Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk simultaneously with one program. There are other programs that do the same work, but Gaim is simple, fast and more reliable.


Video Player
1. Mplayer (Replaces Windows Media Player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.)
One player to rule them all! Plays anything under the sun. Use its keyboard shortcuts and you will never use any other player ever ! The most interesting is use of arrow keys to move within the video. The plain MPlayer has no GUI (graphical user interface) and can be a little tricky because of the command line hassle. My recommendation is to go with MPUI.

2. VLC Media Player (Replaces Windows Media Player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.)
Similar to MPlayer, plays all media formats and has a clean, simple interface.

Update: The second list of MUST-try open source apps is here.

Disruptive Technolgies are here to stay

Author: Ankur

Nothing is permanent but change!
In his 1997 best-selling book, "The Innovator's Dilemma", Professor C. M. Christensen from Harvard Business School coined the term Disruptive Technology to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. Several technologies that have been percolating around the edges of mainstream software industry are expected to bubble up to the surface this year, and CEOs / CIOs and IT managers need to be prepared for the aspects and opportunities they represent-just to play safe!

The major fields to watch out for in the year 2007 are predicted to be:

• RFID: Motorbikes on roads to billboards on skyscrapers, this is "the" thing to watch out with key players like IBM and Honda putting up their toil!
  

• WEB SERVICES: After making a mark with words like blogs, social networking, RSS, web2.0, google, wiki into the lives of a common man in the past year, lets see what new software-services come up this year.
  

• FREE SERVER VIRTUALIZATION: The concept behind virtual machine software is simply stated but hard to implement. The idea is to run multiple operating systems and applications in the same box, making it easier to provision a new server and make more productive use of the hardware. Interesting, ain't it?
  

• ADVANCED GRAPHICS PROCESSING: This further breaks into - a) 3-D Image Arts and b) Usage of Graphic Processors. Microsoft has already aired off their new operating system, Vista: a classy example of what advanced graphics can be. I'm sure there's pretty much awaited!

Keep Watching. Good Luck!

Data protection - Full Disk Encryption

Author: Sharad

To address the issue of data leaks from stolen / missing laptops, the concept of full hard disk encryption is coming as a savior. Encryption is performed at hardware level using ASIC chips. With full hard disk encryption, every sector of the hard disk is encrypted using the most advanced encryption algorithms. Using full hard disk encryption for data security is the best and only true protection for highly confidential information that is stored on a computer hard disk. Seagate is working to create the first Full Disk Encryption enabled Hard Drive. More info about Seagate's FDE solution. Other product from Guardianedge.

Moving To America? The Questions to Be!

Author: Ankur

With the basic desire to plunge into the land of Uncle Sam, approximately one half million students come here annually.[REFER: Here] It sure is a wise decision to gain some focus and preparedness for a better standing in the days you spend in the US of A.

To begin with, make sure you have drawn lines on the following considerations:
1) What specific aims do you have post the master's degree?
2) What field do you want to major in?
3) What funding limits do you have?

As for the Indian Engineer's, the major job option (or rather the only one) is the Software field. On an average the mass-recruiters back home (per se Infosys / HCL / TCS) hire approx. 7000-10000 engineers each year, individually. Such is not the situation in the US. Here ample decent jobs in areas like Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Core Sciences, Medical Sciences, Fine Arts, Dramatics etc are available. Moreover, hybrid areas like Mechatronics, Nanotechnology and Computational Biology are also some great options you get to work on. The diversity of options, sometimes, is all the more confusing. So, to begin with, be clear with what kind of a profile would you like to fit yourself in - or - in an interrogative manner - "How do you see yourself five years down the line?"

The available options may include:
PhD leading to some post-doctoral research.
University Teaching.
Corporate Job in the US.
Corporate Job in India.
Entrepreneurship.

To help yourself formulate the answers for Q(1), read! Read about the various social, economic, ethnic and medical aspects of the lifestyle, for the ultimate aim is a comfortable lifestlyle.

After making your pick with Q(1), the job is little simpler. The major can be well decided looking upon your inherent interest in the field of study. It might be some subject you liked a lot (don't mess this with scoring high in a subject). It can also be some talk / conference / seminar / presentation that lured you to work upon it. All in all, it is an intelligent choice to pick a field yourself after giving in due thought process (it is a flexible choice - anyways you can change it later, ie if you feel like).

The tuition for grad school may range from $8000 - $40,000, depending on the choice of university/program/credits. The details can be easily figured out under the "Tuition and Fee" sections of a grad school website. Therefore, the answer to Q(3) is entirely a subject to personal conditions. It is better to consult your parents/guardians/family members/sponsors regarding the available funds. Also, it is advisable to explore the various loan schemes available - both in India as well as US. Making a wise choice in this regard is vital.

After finalizing the above the answers (or just a range), work upon the basic required examinations for admission to a grad school: GRE & TOEFL.

PS: GRE-TOEFL prep fundaes in the posts to follow.

First Post

Hope this arbitrary activity I cherished for long turns out to be some good - though for some reason procrastination had overtaken me to write a post over a long period of time.

But here I am finally to pronounce stuff the way I do.

Way to Go!

A.


PS: The efforts by SM & NG are highly appreciable! Good Going Guys.

News Update

Author - Sharad

Hmm so lets see whats going around the world.

Apple's Iphone is the big news in the market. Apples stocks are soaring high ! (More links - How apple kept it a secret, Guardian - Scramble starts , NY Times- Apple waves its wand, again)

Cisco sues Apple over Iphone name.

India successfully launched the 10th PSLV (Polar Sattelite Launching Vehicle) and fired off 4 satellites from a single rocket. Woo hoo :) Indian scientists still need to work on GSLV's (Geo-synchronous Space Launching Vehicle) to be considered at par with the Russians, Americans and EU. (Links Hindustan Times, Statesman)

Michael reports - Ebay buying StubHub.