Seema’s unborn sister. - A short-story

Seema’s unborn sister. - A short-story

Beautiful Family: Mohan, Neha & Baby Seema

Two lovers, Mohan and Neha got married only after their parents allowed them to marry. It was a long struggle, to get their parents permission to get married. Neha gave birth to a healthy baby, Seema. The family also inherited lots of wealth. The family was well respected.

Mohan's Evil Sister: Thamarai

Mohan had an younger sister, Thamarai. Thamarai was young, cunning and scared of her parents. She never supported Mohan in his struggle to marry, Neha, just to be on the good books of her wealthy parents.

Thamarai was childless. Thamarai was jealous of her brother's wealth and happiness. Whenever the baby girl, Seema fell ill or failed/struggled in school, Thamarai would celebrate and blame that Mohan and Neha don't know, how to raise a child. Time flew. Seema did slightly above average in school. And managed to join JNU university for Bachelor's degree.

Accident: Young Seema lives with Aunt Thamarai

One day Mohan and Neha went to Goa, leaving Seema at home with Aunt Thamarai, for an urgent business trip. The flight Mohan and Neha took disappeared. All the passengers were presumed dead.

Seema became an orphan. Thamarai became guardian of Seema. Thamarai made Seema’s life hell. But Seema loved her aunt, as she had nobody else. Thamarai started taking money from Seema's wealth as expenses for taking care of her. Thamarai also took money from Seema’s wealth for her fertility treatment. Thamarai wanted to have a child of her own, and planned to use all the wealth for that child. She was undergoing artificial insemination, and got impregnated. And her mood swings due to pregnancy resulted in abuses and more household work for Seema.

Twist: Thamarai panics

Despite all that Seema completed her degree. There were rumors that the flight that disappeared had been hijacked 4 years ago, and the passengers are still alive.

Seema’s parents might actually be alive. Thamarai started panicking and prayed that her brother and sister-in-law, better be dead. She wanted the wealth for her own baby. Thamarai started claiming credit that she raised Seema very well and made her get a degree, while her parents were only able to get her finish schooling. And she cannot live without Seema. So even if Seema's parents were alive, she should manage the wealth and Seema herself, and not give back to Neha and Mohan.

Next chapter: Mystery

The next sequence of events is in our hands. Yes our hands. We have a role in this story. Mohan - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Neha - Nehru. Parents - British. Seema - Schemes. Thamarai - Lotus in Tamil. Unborn Sister - Hindutva.

Ban helmets

It is mandatory to wear helmets, seat-belts etc... which saves the irresponsible driver in case of an accident. Wont this protection make the driver try higher speeds, which (s)he may not, if (s)he will not have those protection?

If I were in charge, I will not mandate and might even ban helmets, seat-belts, airbags, other similar safety features that is there to protect the driver, instead of preventing the accident and make sure the driver gets hurt in case of accidents. so that drivers will drive more carefully. ;-)

I can has bokeh

I have a 4.5 years old point and shoot camera

But always dream about those beautiful photos with shallow DoF, bokeh...

I can do that for macro..But portraits?? :(

No DSLR, so what?

Took out of focus images that will be my background


Get them on the TV, and pose in front of it


ta da.. I got what I wanted...!!!!!!!!!!


Similarly

But enough of these..

I've bought this today!!
And can do this with a click of button!

baSIX of Photography

Given a task to photograph a subject in a particular location, different photographers can come up with different results. Different results can be obtained by varying 6 key parameters.

1. Shooting the same subject from a different angle.
2. Keeping the subject in different size and different part of the image.
3. Shooting from different distance from the subject.
4. Choosing how bright or dark the image should be.
5. Shooting with different intentional out of focus of background or foreground in the frame.
6. Shooting with different motion blur, when there are moving objects in the scene.

not 7. Changing the lighting that illuminates the scene. But it changes the scene/subject. And a photographer may not always have liberty to do it.

A photograph can look great or so so, by varying the above 6 parameters. But what looks good or bad is a matter of taste.

• But looks like most great award winning or liked, shared, +1ed photographs, won the audience for what was photographed, more than how it was photographed. It is the subject not the photograph itself. Just like it is the story not the writing that matters most.
• And the professionals seem to use auto-focus a lot. The costlier cameras are made costlier by having more auto-focus points etc... They fall back to manual focus only when AF fails. IOW actually professional camera's are easier to use than a consumer/prosumer cameras with lots of limitations.

Might be continued... this is an excerpt from my very long notes. It continues on to explain how to vary the above 6+ parameters, and which kind of equipment would help achieve them.

பிரம்மாண்டர் ஷங்கர்

டைரக்டர் ஷங்கரின் பிரமாண்டத்திற்கு அளவே இல்லை. ரெண்டு சீன்ல வரும் எஸ்.ஜே. சூர்யாவுக்கு இளைய தளபதி விஜய டூப்பா போட்டிருக்கார்.

Casual Consumer Photography Musings

I am neither a professional nor an amateur photographer, but a common man who uses his phone cameras and point-and-shoots. Here are some of my musings related to photography, which are possibly meaningless or wrong.


Digital Zoom

Many point-and-shoot and phone cameras discourage digital zoom. For example, Android cameras set at max resolution don't allow digital zoom beyond that. The reason is that, the image can be cropped any time later during post-processing.
This is true for camera's that store images in lossless/RAW formats. Otherwise quite some detail is lost, when the image is compressed in camera, and then later when cropped and blown-up("digital zoomed") in a PC. If we digital zoom on the camera itself, before compressing the image, more details could be retained! I could see that digitally zoomed image on my point-and-shoot is better than zooming in later during post-processing.


Panorama

Creating panoramic images was too hard long back, but not any more. My phone camera which has an accelerometer, but doesn't have a gyroscope is able to stitch and generate low-res panoramas in no time. Latest phones and cameras all have gyroscopes and do a better job with this.

I tried clicking panning few panoramas in my friends marriage hall with my phone.

And I feel that this format of very ultra-wide-angle is the best/must format for covering marriages! Hope wedding photographers/videographers would start adding panoramas to the mix. If you are planning to spend a lot on wedding photography, ask for panoramas/super-duper-ultra-wide-angle high-resolution shots.


180°/360° Panorama Videos

Awed by the panoramas from my phone. I wanted to shoot panorama videos i.e., videos with 180° or more FOV. Imagine placing/hanging a 360° Video camera in the center of the wedding hall.
One way to do it would be to create an circular array of cameras and stitch the videos together later. Another way could be to have a shining Christmas tree ball/convex hemispherical mirror and shoot a video of the image on it with a camera, and later post process it to do distortion correction. The same could be achieved by shooting on a camera with a fish-eye lens. Even better would be to use a circular fisheye lens and get a 360° (on one axis) video. Or 2 or more such cameras to create the complete 360x360 video. I found few 360x360 stills, but no videos. Also found few uncorrected 360°(single axis) videos.

I am trying to shoot pics/video using all shiny balls, door handles now :) I also tried to shoot videos simultaneously with 3 cameras phones with limited FOV, and tried stitching them together. Even when they are stitched badly, it has a good effect.


Lens and focal length

All the photographic equipment manufacturers use focal length for lenses, even on those that are targeted at consumers. With variety of sensor sizes, it doesn't seem to make sense at all. How does it matter to me, what is the focal length? Why cant they just mention the FOV instead? Focal length is an implementation detail, I am not interested in.


Might be continued

Will be continued, if more thoughts on fast-frame rate cameras that help creating super slow motion videos(which can be another nicety in marriage coverage), Light field cameras, 3D cameras and dreams of combining these together like 360°x360° Super slow motion 3D light field video will continue to occupy my mind...

Real hackweek, protected hackweek and long hackweek

I have been using KVM a lot, but never took time to understand how kvm works. I used some time from this hackweek to get rid of that regret.

Virtual Machine eXtensions instructions allow trap-and-emulate virtualization. And KVM exposes VMX in a convenient way to userspace in Linux. Virtual Machine Monitors(VMM) like qemu-kvm use the KVM API exposed by linux to emulate virtualize software.

x86_64 processors boot in real-mode. In this mode it can use only 16-bit addresses, ie., upto 1MByte RAM. The execution would begin at physical address 0xFFFFFFF0. Then the software has to switch to protected mode where protection and paging is possible. Paging is optional, but almost all OSes use demand paging extensively. Now 4 GBytes of linear address space is used. And then CPU can be switched to long mode i.e., 64-bit mode. Paging should be disabled in 32-bit mode, before switching to long mode. There are also other modes of operation like virtual-8086 mode to allow executing legacy real-mode software from protected mode, SMM for OS transparent execution of OEM specific code.

I had limited time and very very limited skill at hand. So aiming for the sky was not an option. Hence wrote a very simple VMM that directly starts the guest at address 0H, in 32-bit protected mode with paging disabled. And supports only insb and outsb as the only form of interaction possible for the guest. The guest is a simple static linked 32-bit program that doesn't use any library, and linked to start from 0x0. The guest simply reads a byte using insb and sends byte+1 back via outsb. The guest would halt, when it gets the, "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything". The VMM reads the byte value to pass to the guest from stdin and prints its response in stdout.

The KVM API is really very easy to understand and use. But some knowledge of the processor was required to make use of it. Intel manuals helped there. I don't have good understanding of things yet, but something is better than nothing.

I was occupied by quite a lot of things in life and work in the recent past. So I wasn't really planning to participate and make this a real hackweek. Also a National holiday for Republic day of India, bang in the middle of the week prevents this hackweek from being a long hackweek! But seeing videos of my colleagues from various parts of world having fun, I couldn't resist and decided to go for the virtual hackweek. I thank my employer for giving me this protected hackweek, and let me learn/do things protected from everyday work.

Panorama

Played with Hugin. It was fun.




Made using Canon A570 IS + Hugin on openSUSE.

Should try on some great places and outdoors.

I have a scrolling animation of the above image as a Google Gadget in my blog now.

தமிழில் க(ka/ga), ப(pa/ba), ட(ta/da), த(tha/dha) -Tamil contextual pronunciation?

தமிழில் க(ka/ga/ha), ப(pa/ba), ட(ta/da), த(tha/dha)

Some of my friends believe that there is no "gha" in tamil and there is only "kha", only "pa" and no "bha", only "ta" and no "da", only "tha" and no "dha"

But I pronounce differently depending on the word/context

அகற முதல எழுத்தெல்லாம் ஆதி
பகவன் முதற்றே உலகு

aghara muthala yeluthellaam aadhi
bhaghavan muthatrey ulaghu


ஆம்பல் - aambhaல்
விருந்தோம்பல் - virunthombal
பலா - palaa
நிபுணர் - Nibhunar
கடலூர் - cuddalore
கட்டுமரம் - kattumaram

எது சரி ?

Wrong from illite"race"y

"Right to education" act mandates all schools, including those elite ones, should admit 25% of students from its locality without any test or filtering. I think this is a very good move by Government of India.

But the schools and highly literate rich parents are not welcoming this. No one is denying them the rich the right to education. But they want to remain elite and are afraid of the poor.

http://expressbuzz.com/cities/bangalore/controversial-circular-decried/195084.html
http://www.mybangalore.com/article/0810/parents-in-bangalore-not-okay-with-rte-act.html
http://expressbuzz.com/cities/bangalore/parents-say-no-to-inclusive-classrooms/195349.html

Their concerns are
1. Quality of education will suffer.
2. Rich students will learn foul language from poor students.

They should think for a moment, how they felt when their kid was denied admission by a school, which is considered to be slightly better than the one, where their child is currently studying! Not getting admission there will not affect their kid by much. But imagine the difference, it could mean to the poor kid.

Class system by birth still remains. Just that it has become modernized. The rich wants to makes sure that the poor cannot get quality education or get richer. The ancient class system was not as bad as, this mindset of these literates! Gandhiji would be proud of you, intelligent Indians. Untouchability is a sin.

All poor and illiterates are not bad in character or lack mental ability. Not all rich and educated have the best of character with highest mental ability. One's character or intelligence has nothing to do with his economical status.

I firmly believe that if this gets implemented correctly, many of the toppers will be from the 25%. I wonder what is the opinion of "Youth for equality" on this issue. IMO this 25% reservation is not a reservation. But the 100% only rich and educated is the 100% reservation. I love RTE.

Hey Buddy

Another draft from 3/1/08

In a chat room
x: Hey buddy
y: Dei, Now I have done laser da

x & y are Tamil people

buddy != புட்டி

i-pod

உன்னை
பாடும், உன் ipod-ம்
உன் eye பாடும்
என பாடும்

LOL. It is funny to read this, which I had saved as draft on 24/7/09. Publishing Today. :)

Hackweek V

I had been toying with the idea that, to split a file on my hard-disk, I have to read and write to a new file and then truncate the old file. But isn't it lots of unnecessary I/O. I already have all the data on disk. I should be able to change the meta-data alone and mark the file contents after some length as a different file.

So during this hackweek, I implemented 2 system calls on Linux, sys_split and sys_join. And added support for these calls to the FAT file-system. http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/6/9/200 With this patch one can split a file into 2 or join 2 files without doing much I/O!

Why FAT?
Normally creating a new file and then truncating a file approach, needs temporary free space as well. I once had a need to split files when there was no free space available. On advanced filesystems, sparse-file support(i.e., files with holes) helped. But FAT does not support sparse files. Also I wanted these to work on thumb drives which are mostly formatted as FAT32.

SLE11 SP1 release
This Hackweek was scheduled to follow the release of SLE11 SP1. And all the Bangalore employees, who worked for SLE11 SP1 were given a portable 160 hard-drive as a gift in the middle of hackweek. The transcend disk has a one-touch back up button, which works to sync selected folders, using a proprietary software available only on Windows. No support in Linux or Mac.

gnireenignE one-touch button

I thought, if the button press could be detected, I could use it to unmount the disk! So I set out to reverse engineer it. Usbmon + KVM + windows XP. Got the usbmon traces. I was expecting to see a simple Interrupt endpoint. But it was a bulk end-point only interface. And the software was continuously polling to get the button status. It was quite interesting to decipher the USBS and USBC's, but the SCSI/ATAPI payload had an unknown command DFh. And I assumed that by sending the command, if a button had been pressed in between, I would get a different value. And was trying hard for hours. But failed. Then took few more traces using Windows. Tried hard. When I almost gave up, I found couple of return bytes slightly different! Voila. The return value is different, only if the button is held down during the command. Now, I have a script to sync/unmount with a one-touch button! If you have this device, you can modify the script to do what ever you want it to do. Let your creativity flow freely.

English == UK || English==USA ?

I know sometimes UK is called as English. For the first time, I saw US as being called as English. So Googlificially, by default, English is US English, not UK English. No wonder there are more people in USA, India, and Nigeria than in UK, who can speak English!

Who is Linux?

Yesterday, I was bored in the afternoon and had a digital camera with me. I thought of making my own steadicam, but then when I saw the tux over my TV, this contest came to my mind. And the result is an entry to the competition.

I spent only few minutes. I think it is quiet OK, given its very low production value. I am not trying to win, but just like I send crappy patches to Linux and waste kernel developers time, I uploaded it to waste 43 seconds of your time.

Do you know Mahatma?

The Indian 5 rupee coin comes in so many size/shape/design now-a-days.



And it is going to be a tough task to have automatic vending machines accept them. The picture has only few types of 5 Rupee coins, I had at a time. There are many more in circulation.



Till I saw one of the 5 rupee coin which had "MAHATMA BASAVESHWARA" inscribed on it, I assumed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is the only Mahatma!




So who is this Mahatma Basaveshwara ? Are there any other people, who are called Mahatma? I found Jyotirao Phule.

Guess, now coins are released in memory of people, incident etc.. instead of stamps. Can you think of anything equivalent that could be done digitally? Or something is already in use?

Back from National Free Software Conference - 2010

I, along with Chen, the Maintainer of Gnome Evolution project gave a talk in National Free Software Conference - 2010, Bangalore. Our talk was titled "Developing a Free software, Inside story"

I talked about who all are developing Linux Kernel, and how one can get started etc... Then Chen talked from his perspective. It was an inspiring speech, even I felt greatly motivated by him. He started with how he was excited, when he made changes to the software he used and showed it to his friends when he was new to open-source. Later he talked about Gnome and Evolution community. In the end he had lot of fans around him, and it took him nearly an hour to leave the hall after the talk!

Before our talk, we attended couple of talks. "Free Software Business Model – Software as a service" by someone from CGI. It was the usual corporate talk explaining CGI's business and then what is SaaS, PaaS, IaaS,... There was "Debate on Open Standards draft 2.4" by Venkatesh Hariharan, Policy Director, Red Hat and Prabir Purkayastha, Knowledge Commons. It was about Indian government's policies regarding mandating open standards and formats.

I came to know about this conference only 2 days ago for the first time. It was hosted by the Free Software Movement of Karnataka(FSMK), co-sponsored by Dept of IT Karnataka, Kerala IT Mission and Govt of West Bangal. The punch-line of the conference was "Free Software is the Future... The Future is ours..." I predict in future, Conferences won't provide network as everyone would have mobile Internet themselves. And this conference was ready for tomorrow already!

Weird binary!!

I read about weird binary at Varun Kumar's blog (http://varunkumar-n.blogspot.com/2010/03/weird-binary.html)

Number system with base as –2 (minus two) is commonly referred to as “Weird Binary”. Like binary number system, weird binary also uses the binary symbols 0, 1. The bit positions in weird binary represent the powers of (-2). For example: 11001 in weird binary represents 9 in decimal system.

This number system reminds me a saying in Tamil regarding tough situations, "For every foot of climbing, Slipping 2 feet". ஜான் ஏறுனா மொழம் சறுக்குது .

So How to convert from decimal to weird-binary(base minus 2)?

But I didn't want to check-out others solutions to the problem, before trying it myself. I wanted to find a pen and paper way to calculate it, similar to the one we use to convert from decimal to binary. And found it interesting!


Just at every alternate step, instead of going for the maximum multiple of 2 less than previous balance, find the minimum multiple of 2, greater than previous balance.
IOW, at alternate steps, if the remainder was 1, add 1 to next balance(quotient).

Weird-binary can be used to represent negative numbers without any special sign-bit. But I still couldn't think of any use for this negative two base system. Can you? Is it being used anywhere?

Unclear advertisements...

There are so many advertisements for TVs and DTH services on TV! In many of them, they show a blurry picture, and then as a TV frame crosses the screen, the picture inside the frame is shown with crystal clear clarity. It simply means that the TV + service, I currently have is already delivering such quality picture ?!

Or do they mean that, the picture via there products is more clear than, even watching it directly? Then all the TV production teams should buy there TV and first get the picture on it, then shoot that picture and tele-cast it. ;-)

I understand advertising for TVs via TVs do help. And today, we go for multiple-TVs + multiple service providers. This is just a joak.

Green fridge

An idea to save power.

Why not have a split-refrigerator similar to split a/c?
Wouldn't fridges releasing the heat inside an air-conditioned(cooling, not heating) room would make it hard for the a/c? Or does keeping the fridge inside the a/c room reduces the power used by fridge?

Any way I don't live in an air-conditioned apartment and I believe energy can neither be created nor destroyed. But my fridge heats my apartment, which I don't like during summer. I would like it to dissipate heat outside my apartment. But during winder it can continue to serve as a room-heater.