As I write this, I’m receiving reports of the numerous killed in the blasts. I express sympathy for them from the bottom of my heart, as I could have been one of them.

Today morning, I had plans to go to office early as UAT was still going on. This entire week I was reaching ahead of time, because I was taking the bottom-line for the UAT. Except for yesterday, I have been successful in coming early, despite my fondness to stay up late. Fortunately, I overslept. Missing my train, I reached at 9:30 in Liverpool Street. It was sealed off. Since this has happened a couple of times before, for incidents like fire outbreaks, I was not very perturbed. But people were talking about a certain “explosion”. However, in the haste of trying to reach office, I choose to ignore such “minor distractions”.

Now, what normally people would do to reach my office in Barbican would be walk for 15 minutes or catch a bus. Whenever I choose to walk I would fumble with my directions and barely manage to reach. This time, I tempted fate and tried to “figure out” the right direction. I literally strayed my way towards Tower Hill (those who know the way will be rolling on the floor laughing) and retraced my way back. I crossed several affected “areas” like Aldgate station and kept wondering what all the cops and choppers were doing. At several places the yellow vested police told me to return as the road was closed. It seemed so strange. I was in a sea of men and women in formals, rushing towards their office. Perhaps, that’s why there were not many onlookers, as it would have been in India. The weather, as if on cue, was dark, gloomy and damp since morning. Reaching Liverpool, I tried afresh and managed to reach Barbican.

First thing I did was let everyone who were still travelling to return home. Then I called home and all near and dear to tell them that I’m safe. Now we are practically glued to news websites and the news is now slowly trickling in. The death toll at last count was 40. It seems there will be no office tomorrow. We know it is a terrorist attack, but the cause is not known. London won Olympics bid yesterday and there are lot of protests regarding G8. Al-Queda has claimed the responsibility. But even if that’s so, they haven’t given any reason. I hope things will come back to normalcy soon.

[Images courtesy: BBC and Sky News websites]

The image of a typical Indian around the world is increasingly changing to that of a singing, dancing, romancing and festival loving person. Thanks to Bollywood movies, India is perceived through its celluloid dreams, just like once we conceived the West through Hollywood. Perhaps as a testament to that, the following cheeky poster campaign by Kingfisher is being increasingly spotted in Central London. There are others in similar lines, which reminds you of the bright traditional Indian ads.

Last week, I came to know that the smart phone I was planning for all along – Sendo X2 might never get released at all. Due to administration problems, the company has been taken over by Motorola. Sendo X2 which was expected this month seems to have been shelved indefinitely. Not that I’m dying for a smart phone (which I feel is quite inadequate given today’s technology). But I definitely miss a jazzy looking music player ;-)

A test to see if the mini-site on game development is working…. A promise of more exciting things to come :)

This weekend, I was humbled in more ways than one. First while visiting the London Science Museum, when one gets to see a spell binding display of the relentless scientific pursuits of Man. Despite spending a good 2 hours inside, we barely managed to cover the ground floor of this five storied treasure house of knowledge. And second, when I realised that, whenever one feels financially complacent; pay a visit to Harrods and you’ll swear never to use the expression “over-priced” in your life.

Harrods is the world’s most recognised department store spread over five acres right in the heart of London. Here you can see heaps of well earned money frittered over the most trivial or sometimes futile purchases. Like for e.g. in a “Sale” a pen for £250 (twice the price of a mid-range digital cameras) or a coffee table with a chess board print (not even carved) for £10,000. However, what would probably surprise you is - simply, the crowd. Yes, hundreds of rooms filled with buyers busy filling up their umpteenth green ‘Harrods’ shopping bag. If you hadn’t noticed the price tags, this would have passed for an ordinary departmental store.

Few minutes later, you look around. Your fears get confirmed. You are indeed the only person who is not shopping. So, I decide; while I’m here, I better observe the ways and manners of the elite. Most disappointingly, they look exactly like the ordinary London milieu. Most of them in casuals like sneakers (horror!) and jeans. Yes my friends you have to look out for subtle giveaways like designer labels or rolex watches to spot the real cash puppies. Hints that never escape the sharp eyes of the shop assistants. So, if you are the right crowd, you’ll perhaps be treated like a prince (most probably you are already one;) ). But I’m far from one, so…

The next planned destination - Hyde park, was sealed due to the Live8 concert. Though a major event here, the whole idea seemed shallow and pointless to me. In fact, it was not even a fund raising event like ‘Live Aid’. People seemed to have watched the whole 12 hour show and stayed up most of the night. In fact, I did stay up too, but for my game project :D Was fighting some Ogre-Blender related issues, but I got my issues solved thanks to the excellent Ogre3d support. Yet another day is saved, thanks to the excellent support of open-source projects :).

PS: From now on we can have beautiful category icons designed by Jimmac

Short Description

When you click on the RSS icon in the status bar of Firefox, it automatically “discovers” some feeds for you. Would you like to see every category of your blog appear as a seperate feed in Firefox? If so activate this plugin. And yes, this is my first Wordpress plugin.

You can see it in action at ArunRocks.com

How to Install it?

These are pretty standard.

1. Download livemarks-0.5.zip. There are no additional required libraries

2. Copy the livemarks.php file to your plugins folder at \wp-content\plugins

3. Go to the plugins admin page and activate it

4. There is no step 4! ;)

Full Description

Users of the Firefox and Opera browsers would familiar with live bookmarks or livemarks. This is a browser’s in built mechanism to keep track of any site’s RSS feeds. For eg: in firefox, an RSS icon appears in the status bar, clicking on which will display a menu of feeds automatically “discovered” by it. Wordpress blogs will automatically have two feeds (varies with the template) - an Atom feed and an RSS feed. This plugin tries to add the following to your list of of “discovered” feeds -

1. Every category of your blog appear as a seperate feed in Firefox if you are at your blog’s home page

2. The relevant category of a post will appear if you are visiting a particular post

3. The comments feed of your blog

I have a problem!

Sorry. Please post any bug reports as a comments here

Version History (Changelog)

v 0.5 (June 23, 2005)

• Initial version uploaded

Created by

Arun Ravindran

Q. What happened if suddenly all Marketing people became unemployed?

A. They would become Taxonomists

I made-up this PJ*, when I found out that I belong to a category of consumers called the Generation Y or Gen Yers. In short if you are born between 1979 and 1994 (exact dates are debatable), you are a Gen Yer. In America, Gen Yers are more than three times the size of Generation X or “Baby Boomers”. It is found that Gen Yers tend to be more conservative (old-fashioned?), multiculture tolerant and less rebellious that Gen Xers. It is said that they prefer humour, irony, and the (apparently) unvarnished truth. This explains why the Sprite tagline ‘Image is nothing. Obey your thirst’ has become such a hit.

It is true that we (I mean Gen Yers) have a different outlook on life and our career. We have been driven to achieve success in everything we do. Many of us might not desire overnight success but success nevertheless. This makes us extremely competitive and cautious. As a result, we demand such high starting paychecks and perks that Gen Xers find it so ridiculous to accept. I’m sure many of us know that our bosses find this hard to accept. How can a rookie Gen Yer be better than that experienced Gen Xer?

Of course, the Gen Xers would quitely accept that they have to work twice as hard these days because they try to catch up with the feverent pace of the Gen Yers. They will of course always attribute this to the faster pace of life, without even bothering to explain why is life too fast anyways. It is, they would irritatingly say, because of technology, of course. But duh isn’t technology supposed to make your life easier? Um… well.. no… this would be followed by some baseless anecdotes to prove you wrong.

The fact remains that mankind continues to evolve stride after stride with technology. We squeeze in more to our lives. An invisible force prompts the economy to shift gears. This force is the fresh blood or the emerging generation. They might be Gen Yers or even Gen Zers (post September 11?). But surely they have evolved. They work better in the current environment because they grew up in it.

I know this sounds like alarm bells for the Gen Xer reading this post. Didn’t mean to, but weren’t you extinct?!

• *PJ - A slang popular among the Hinglish speaking community that stands for ‘Poor Joke’. Often used when the joke sounds very contrived esp for the purpose of making a joke.

I have just discovered this exceptionally artistic indie film called Ninjai. It would be without doubt the best movie in Flash I have ever seen. In fact, its fan following has become so huge that it is more than a movie, it is a game, DVD etc. It is hard to belive that it is created by a group of stunt men called The Ninjai Gang in their spare time. They say they made it for themselves. A true artist makes a great creation only when he/she makes it self satisfying. I strongly believe in that.

It has an incredible soundtrack and excellent music. Here is the trailer:

So, why don’t see it for yourself?

Note: With every chapter it gets progressively voilent and the story is very addictive. So don’t tell that I didn’t warn ya…. :)

Like the search for the Elixir of youth or philosopher’s stone, I was looking for some kind of Intellisense feature for Python in Emacs which I have grown used to since my windows programming days. Yes I’m referring to the little drop down list that helps you auto complete class members. I’m also referring the tool-tip that appears which shows a functions signature when you are calling it. I know that PythonWin, my python editor of choice, already does this. But I intend to use Emacs as my IDE. It seems that you have two alternatives, both have issues as you will see:

py-complete - Not yet Windows ready?

Firstly py-complete seems to require Pymacs. Now, this was not very obvious. The idea of python helping in completion seems to be very cool and nearly worked without pymacs. Seems pymacs is not quite well supported in Windows. As soon as I read this I sort of gave up.

Semantic Flopped

Then, I installed CEDET 1.0 (beta 3) which gives you Semantic inspired by this post. It seemed to be a pain to install the whole thing until I discovered that you have to keep certain things in the load-path. Finally this is what I added to my .emacs file

;; Set up load path
(setq load-path (append (list (concat use-home "site/cedet/speedbar")
(concat use-home "site/cedet/common")) load-path))
(load-file "~/site/cedet/common/cedet.el") ;; Load CEDET
(semantic-load-enable-minimum-features)

Now as the post suggests, we have a fully working speedbar but auto-completion is pretty much weird. For eg: M-x semantic-analyze-possible-completions describes the scopes you are currently in.

Conclusion

Both approaches are really good though quite different. They haven’t made use of the emacs tool-tip library either. Since this is a crucially lacking feature in Emacs, I might as well do a bit of R&D on this before giving up the dream.

Whew! Finally the days of struggle are over. No longer I have to worry myself to fit the puny 30 MB of webspace. Yes friends the promised upgrade is finally here. The space has been bumped up to 100 MB coinciding with my birthday (and hence the title :D). And the other promised upgrade to Wordpress 1.5.1 has also been completed. The site has been totally revamped and yet the (perma-)links are still the same. Wordpress is truly magic!

Let me tell you some of the changes you might observe:

• The Blog is the site (and vice-versa)
• The gallery is now fully integrated to the Blog. Also means a post will now have more pictures inline.
• The site will be themeable
• Shortcut keys. Press Alt+A, Alt+R, Alt+H . If you use IE, press Enter in each case.
• You can now subscribe to my site. Thanks to Bloglet!

Well, no, I’m not in Bench(!) In fact there was tonnes of office work. At one point there was 6 empty coffee cups (which had tea) on my desk. Then, how the hell did I do it? Well, god alone knows that I work best under pressure. That’s why he so kindly keeps me less loaded most of the time. You gotta love him for that.

Well, let me thanks everyone who sent me birthday greetings through various ways. You really made me feel proud (and old, of course). Guys (and a girl) in my project managed to arrange cakes and get write-ups written about me. You won’t believe the kind of planning that went into all this. This was when, like I said, we were in a crunch period. Of course, the threat (rather gesture) of birthday bumps always lingered around, I was thankfully saved from a potentially embarrassing situation. That too, (horrors) in front of my clients :p

In the evening we went to the MahaLakshmi Temple in East Ham. Later, we had a very enjoyable time while having dinner at Chennai Dosa. Ankur, Anant, Bhute, Parag, Sachin and myself were in total PJ mood. Most of the jabs were interestingly directed at Bhute. Its a world renowned fact that the only opportunity to taunt Bhute is when he is hungry. Needless to say, all of us made maximum use of this opportunity.

Well, saw some more movies recently. It seems most of you guys are put off by my movie reviews, so I shall not continue them anymore. Some great mallu songs have been released. Some of them from movies like ‘Udayanaanu Thaaram’ and ‘Albhutadweep’ are so good that I’m dying to see them. I installed emacs today and spent a few hours customising it. I hope this is a sign of many good things to come. Keep guessing ;)

Dear Gentle Reader, here is an unabashedly delayed third and final installation of my movie reviews. As a bonus, I have added three new reviews of some really good recent movies.

Before I go any further, here is a shameless plug on me. In the early part of this month, I was busy attending a week long advanced course on BizTalk, by Deepdive who conducts various training programs for Microsoft on topics which (sic) are not very popular. Besides being very informative, the break from office work helped to clear up my mind quite a bit. Meanwhile, I had the chance to use a Creative Zen player for a couple of days. With the first hand experience of the i-Pod lifestyle, I can now relate to the reasons for its popularity. Enveloped in the bubble of music wherever you go, the Zen brings a newfound zest to your mundane daily activities like commuting.

However, unlike others, music has the effect of immobilizing my thoughts and mesmerising my senses. I say unlike others because, many find listening to music going well with performing any activity especially ones that require a lot of concentration like reading. It is just the opposite for me and if I ever blog, it is often necessary to turn off my headphones for me to proceed. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the utility of the Zen or the iPod. Comparing both, I find Zen a much better buy, because of its additional features like the FM radio or Voice recorder. However, the rocker of Zen is quite dodgy and less accurate to use than the iPod’s wheel, at least for me.

Further on the topic of gadgets, I aborted my plans to buy a Nokia 3230 in the eleventh hour:cry:. The main reason being its slow speed of operation and poor industrial design causing dust accumulation. This combined with its known shortcomings of poor/non-stereo audio output, led me to call it off. So it will be a Sendo X2 for me. Thankfully, this comes at a very affordable price tag of £150. However, it is still not having a full qwerty keyboard. My requirement is, as you might have guessed, is a Series 60 smartphone. If only I could get my hands on Lenovo P930 !

Bhute recently purchased a Sony Erricson P910i which, despite its ugly body, is a revolutionary convergent device. It is a serious PDA-killer with amazing audio output (unlike Nokia phones) and a reasonable camera to boot. Its QWERTY keypad though a vast improvement over P800 wouldn’t be your preferred input device.

Other than all this is, of course, my incessant hobby of game development. I spent a good part of last 2 weeks trying out Irrlicht game engine. Now, I’m tring out the Ogre engine. The latter having the backing of a number of commercial and open source projects behind it. My learnings from integrating Blender and Irrlitch is to use the Cal3D format for import/export of skeletal animated meshes.

Okay, movie-time:grin:!

Kinsey

Kinsey tells the story of Alfred Kinsey(Neeson), a scientist who dared to bring the taboo subject of sexual habits not just to the intellectual sphere but also to the coffee table. If you are like me then you will like this Biopic (a new fangled term for biographies). It starts off with a slightly witty scene involving Kinsey (assisted by his wife) training his team on effective interviewing techniques. The rest of the movie is a flashback, starting from his early childhood under a puritanical father. Young Alfred finds it suffocating to advocate the hippocritical causes that his father often required him to. He takes up teaching zoology and gets fascinated by the subject of gall wasps. He gets intruiged by the observation that - No two wasps are alike. Meanwhile, he falls in love with one of his students and they marry. As years pass, his incessant hobby of collecting wasps consumes his life. A newly wed couple’s misinformed notions brings the topic of human sexuality to Kinsey’s attention.

With the same zeal, Kinsey conducts a landmark study on this subject. Unsurprisingly, his methods and intentions are questioned and ridiculed. While this is a film on a serious subject, it is entertaining at the same time. Many critics believe the movie has a lot of relevance in the present American context. Nevertheless, I found Kinsey a touching and meaningful film. Recommended for serious film goers. Verdict: 3.5 / 5.0

Finding Neverland

I found this costume drama to be interesting, because of Johnny Depp. His transformation to the playwright Sir James Barrie is astonishing. He carries his Scottish accent to such a finesse that you would actually tend to believe that he has one.

I would quickly wind up by saying that, this film failed to impress me, perhaps due to over expectation. It is a kind of tear jerker that I don’t appreciate. :roll:. Verdict: 2.0 / 5.0

Constantine

If you felt that the concept of heaven, hell, and angels have been beaten to death on Television, then watch ‘Constantine’. They you would say it again :mrgreen:! But seriously, it did build up quite well. I felt genuinely interested in the idea of a character who could cross to nether worlds. But somehow the movie failed to deliver with its unrelated subplots.

There are some who criticise the movie, for tilting it toward Keanu than the original comics. Since I have never read Hellblazer comics, I didn’t find it a problem. The effects are quite good for a theatrical experience. All in all, above average. Verdict: 3.5 / 5.0

Elektra

Elektra was disappointing to me, as I was expecting something on the lines of Daredevil. They virtually made a hash of eastern mysticm and self-discovery (hint: Spiderman), to make a big budget semi-chick flick. Other than the standard hack and slash sequences (hint: razzle and dazzle), we have some good acting from Jennifer Garner and Kirsten Prout. Verdict: 2.5 / 5.0

House of Flying Daggers

I was entralled by the trailers of this movie, as virtually ever scene looks picture perfect! Being an old Matrix fan, the action sequences also looked promising. Watching the movie, I got thrilled to bits as it turned out to be even better than I hoped for.

HoFD is a Chineese (you would watch it with subtitles) romantic story set in ancient China. All the elements (ie filmi masala) you would expect in a commercial film are here - action, romance and drama. Nevertheless, the sensitive portrayal of every character makes it stand out from the regular cartoony ones one sees in such movies. After seeing it, one cannot help remark - Hollywood, you better watch out. Highly Recommended. Verdict: 4.0 / 5.0

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Any serious sci-fi fan, would have read The Hitchhiker’s precisely because it never takes itself seriously. The film tries to bring justice to the wild and wacky imagination of Douglas Adams and more or less succeeds in doing so. Having read the book, I found the characters to be almost the way I had pictured them. Some of the sequences are also literally breathtaking. The animations showing the contents of the Hitchhiker’s guide are quite funny and well made.

All in all, a nice entertainer. Recommended. Verdict: 3.5 / 5.0

This post turned out to be a huge post. So huge that I could almost hear it squeeze itself into the MySQL database when I published it. Pays for being late. In fact, pays for being me:wink:.