Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Promoting your video

Yesterday I got a mail from my friend about some IIT Alumni meet where some IIT girl sang an (unexpectedly) good song.

Here is the song which was forwarded to me : http://nostaljigs.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=86.

The song seemed good to me and it is good (keeping a typical IIT prototype in mind).

I went to youtube to look for the same song so that I can download the same song and 'what the hell is it?'. She a well known pakistani singer. Went back to the original site and started reading the comments. The 1st page was all innocence and then from 2nd page onwards truth was out and people were baying for the blood of the poster.

Still its a good song worth listening quite a number of times.

And yes the video got promoted well, got a lot of hits to the site as well as youtube.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Mid Size car analysis

Vineet bhaiya bought a new Verna and a lot of analysis went into it.
Would like to share some of it with all..

LOGAN SX4 - Zxi
GLS 1.6 Petrol
Boot Space 510 (ltrs)
Overall Length 4247 (mm) 4490
Overall Width
1740 (mm)
1735
Height
1534 (mm)
1570
Wheel Base
2630 (mm)
2500
Ground clearance(unladen)
172 (mm)
190
Fuel tank capacity
50 (Ltr)
50
Turning Radius
5.25 (meter)
5.3
Kerb Weight 1200
Type 4 cylinder ,8 valve 16v DOHC
4 cylinder, 16 Valve
Displacement 1598 1586
Max. Power (hp/rpm) 84.5 / 5500 102 / 5500
Max. Torque (nm/rpm) 128/3000 145 / 4200
Price 568789 700000
735000


Verna XXi (Petrol) City EXi / GXi

Boot Space 500
Overall Length 4310 4390
Overall Width 1695 1695
Height 1490 1495
Wheel Base 2500 2450
Ground clearance(unladen) 170 160
Fuel tank capacity 45 42
Turning Radius 4.92 4.9
Kerb Weight 1060
Type 16V - DOHC 4-Cylinder, In-line
8- V Petrol
Displacement 1599 1497
Max. Power (hp/rpm) 103.2 / 5500 77 / 5000
Max. Torque (nm/rpm) 14.9 / 3000 12.8 / 2700
Price 7,02,854 City ZX EXi : Rs.688000
City ZX GXi : Rs.738000

Friday, May 11, 2007

Alternative Rock

Dashboard Confessional - Stolen





After a long time heard some music so close to the genre of U2. May be after some more years, they come close to U2 themselves.

Here goes the 2 compositions of U2 which I believe brings the best out of them:

U2 - With Or Without You





U2 - Beautiful day



Cool Iris

Just got a new plugin recommended by Vinay and its really cool. It basically opens a new div when you hover over a hyperlink and shows the preview of the target (href) of the hyperlink in it thereby saving you a lot of time and hassle to check out the link in a new tab/window

Try your self with this new addon to Firefox (can be installed from mozilla addons).

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Legal Videos @ MTV

After all the debate and discussion about illegal videos at youtube and other similar site and countries and corporations going for lawsuits against it - MTV has openly hosted all the latest and hot videos up at the site for voting.

One can go up here and watch those videos legally.

NJOI :)

The tenth dimension

I read a lot about string theory and its discourses on higher dimensions like the 10th or 11th or the 12th dimension. It was hard to perceive for my small mind. Then I came across this small video which explained the concept with relative ease and here it is.

http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Before Time Stopped

NatGeo carries out a series named 'Before Time Stopped'. It speaks about what happened before something started like one which told about how earth was formed.

Similarly in .NET, before execution starts a lot of things happen:

1) You develop something in C#
2) You compile it using the C# compiler
3) The C# compiler spits out IL code and a manifest into a read-only part of the exe that has a standard PE header.
4) The compiler also imports a function named _CorExeMain from the .NET EE
5) When you attempt to run the PE, the OS loads the PE (which loads the DLL that exports the _CorExeMain function: MSCorEE.DLL).
7) The OS loader then jumps to the entry-point inside the PE (put there by the C# compiler)
8) That code is just a small stub that jumps to the _CorExeMain function
9) _CorExeMain then starts the execution of the managed code that was placed in the PE
10) Since IL can not be executed directly, the EE compiles the IL using a JITter into native CPU instructions as it processes the IL. This part only occurs as functions are called the first time.

and hence time starts ..

Applying Design Patterns

Design patterns is something which has intrigued me since I joined the industry and my seniors informed me about the mystical thing. Earlier I dreaded it but gradually I learnt it through lot of readings, examples and real code in projects.

Today I saw another nice and simpler explanation of 4 of the basic and most used design patterns (besides some creational patterns like factory and singleton).

The observer pattern is explained here.
The other three patterns namely strategy, decorator and builder are explained here.

Monday, May 7, 2007

Druvaa

So now jassi' startup is official.

Named Druvaa.

And hence we have our first entrepreneur.

Friday, May 4, 2007

Comics

Well Dilbert is my favorite but found this new site today and it looked exciting:

http://www.xkcd.com

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Digg and the hex code

It was just another day and I was not at digg in the morning as was busy with some code. In the evening I went through the news and got to this page (cached) . I got suspicious coz being a google lover, I believe google never supports such things. To enquire more, I looked into the net which pointed me straight to digg.

It looked like I had missed a big war over there. It was all like, some one (stud) had cracked the HD_DVD processing key and had posted it at doom9 some 6 months back. Someone had posted the same on digg. A few days back, a DMCA takedown notice was served to it (along with google) by AACS who algorithm used the 16 digit Hex code that was cracked.

The Digg cracked and forgot its sense of fair use and free speech and started deleting posts and banning users. This was responded which overwhelming force by users who reposted more articles on the same as well as requests to bring back the banned users and talks about digg's fair use started. People started talking about leaving digg for reddit/netscape. This whole thing is well captured in this post. Finally digg backed down with its founder Kevin Rose accepting the will of the masses.

This embarrassment of digg was well captured and used by reddit and netscape supporting the revolt of digg user. I also in support with other digg users opened a reddit account as it was very simple to register. I tried netscape but it was tough so left it.

The war seems to ebb now but lets watch out what AACS does is respond.
Will it be something like Novell cracking lawsuits against linux or will it just cow down and accept defeat that the algorithm it design was not good enough that it got hacked within months?

Update: Now you even have it in youtube :)
Update 2: Digg story is top ranked for the second consecutive day in the Sci/Tech section of google news. Here goes the snapshot: