The Book of Blue

After trying out loads of searches on the much-hyped Wolfram|Alpha search engine, I came across this query, which will never fail Wolfram|Alpha…

Try it out here

My PC is sure working overtime. Check out the core temperatures:

No wonder it’s rebooting itself every few minutes. Time for cleaning the beast and changing the paste.

I was always scolded for killing too much time by doing nothing. Now it seems ‘killing time’ is the only way out for people like me who repeatedly fail to get up early despite the numerous alarm clocks going off together!

BANDAI has come up with this amazing alarm clock that can only be silenced with a special gun – yes, a gun! The sleepy user has to take the gun and shoot at the target that pops up when the alarm goes off. There’s also a Time Attack mode in which users must shoot the mark in a given time frame and get praised by the clock in case they manage to hit the bull’s eye.

Gunning down morning blues sure seems like a great way to start a day!

While the MHRD was busy toying with the idea of coming up with a $10 laptop, they surely missed ‘the bus’.

Google has come up with their own way of spreading the power of the Internet throughout remote locations in India. They call it The Internet Bus.

The Internet Bus Project is an attempt to educate people about what the Internet is, and how it may be beneficial to their lives, by taking the Internet experience to them through a customised Internet-enabled bus, which will travel to several towns and cities across India.

With such innovative methods, it seems “The Road Ahead” towards spreading the power of the Internet will surely be less bumpy!

I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I came across this news.

The $10 laptop project has come as an answer to the $100 laptop of MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte that he was trying to hardsell to India. The $10 laptop has come out of the drawing board stage due to work put in by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras and involvement of PSUs like Semiconductor Complex.

A prototype, with 2 GB of RAM, would be on display in Tirupati day after tomorrow, when the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Techology is launched.

I just can’t wait to get my hands on this!

Yes, I know I am late. Very late. Klueless 4 was open to public as early as October 2008, but I was too busy with unimportant stuff in life that I gave it a miss.

A friend reminded me of it today, and I am starting off my Klueless journey today. Let’s see how fast I can crack the mystery.

UPDATE: Progressing with speed… level 12 (28 Jan)

I got this image from a friend and thought of putting it up on the site.

All credit goes out to the original artist. Nice piece of work.

Quick Question: How did Aamir build such a great body?
Quicker Answer: Since he kept on forgetting what he did in the past 15 mins, he kept on exercising after every 15 mins!

While playing around with some codes recently, I came across something strange.

I was trying to get a list of files – with an extension of .ROD – in a certain folder. I tried out the following line:

FileInfo[] fi = Directory.GetFiles("C:\\MyFolder\\", "*.rod");

I was expecting 20 files, but I got 24 files! Debugging through the code, I figured out that along with all the files that had their names as xxxx.rod, the GetFiles() method also returned files that had their names like xxxx.rods, xxxx.roddy, xxxx.rod123!

For some time I wondered whether I’ve actually discovered a bug in the “invincible and ever-powerful” .NET framework. Some amount of Googling and MSDN-ing, led me to the following note:

Because this method checks against file names with both the 8.3 file name format and the long file name format, a search pattern similar to “*1*.txt” may return unexpected file names. For example, using a search pattern of “*1*.txt” will return “longfilename.txt” because the equivalent 8.3 file name format would be “longf~1.txt”.

Alright, so that’s the real answer. Microsoft has been clever enough to search both file name formats so that none of them gets missed. So “*.abc” returns files having an extension of.abc, .abcd, .abcde, .abcdef, and so on, whereas *.abcd will return files having extension of .abcd only.

Happy coding!

It is the last day of the year. Looking back, I see a year which has witnessed important landmarks in the history of mankind. From the Olympic gold medal to the first African American President of the United States, from the global economic meltdown to the painful terrorist attacks in Mumbai, this year has been through a lot.

I am pretty sure that sometime in future, 2008 would find its own place in the history books.

But now we should look forward to welcoming 2009 and hope that the new year brings in joy, happiness and peace all over the world.

Here’s wishing a Happy New Year to all the readers

Friday morning. Day after Christmas. I got a call from Nokia helpline informing me about their newly launched navigation system for Kolkata. They invited me to a demo and being a true gizmo lover, I couldn’t miss the chance.

To start off the demo, I was taken to a waiting car and was explained all about Nokia’s latest “ultra-cool-uber-geek-over-the-top” (that was the expression of the guy who was giving the demo!) navigation software. It is basically NAVTEQ technology that is built into the phone.

We selected a nearby movie theater as our place of destination, and then it was left to the phone to guide us through. The phone automatically searched for the appropriate roads and decided on our course of journey. We turned on the loudspeaker so that the phone could give instructions aloud in Hindi.

The driver pushed the pedal and we started off. After some amount of driving, the phone said “aagey 200m ke baad dayein mure” (turn right after another 200m). The driver got puzzled on hearing this, and instead of turning right he went past it. The phone was quick to once again work out a new route and started instructing the driver on how to take the next turn. This time, with a little help from us, he took the right turn!

The phone constantly measured the current speed of the vehicle, and it matched well with the vehicle’s own speedometer.

After some twists and turns, we finally reached the movie theater in 30 mins (it would normally take 10 mins if we had used shortcuts!).

The features are pretty good, but GPRS connection was a problem during the demo. I think it uses pretty high amount of bandwidth, and the current GPRS scenario in Kolkata isn’t great.

Although the navigator works good if you are not familiar to the place (it is bad in working out short-cuts), I would like to see public-transport system incorporated into it. With rising fuel prices, public transport is something that people will be relying on a lot.

Cutting out the waiting part (i.e. the time they made me wait while they set up the demo), it wasn’t a bad experience. I would still wait for sometime until they actually make things more perfect.