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.