Happy 57^th Republic Day!

First of all, I must say that I'm quite impressed with the people at the Bookstore. Unlike the morons at the Apple Store (who just want you to buy their stuff without being fully able to see how the said stuff works), when I told the folks at the Bookstore that I was switching to an Intel Mac and wanted to test out some applications on their iMac, they were most supportive. So, basically, I tested Dreamweaver 8, which ran just fine, the Universal Binary of QuarkXpress 7 Beta, which I really didn't care about but just did it for kicks and, finally and most importantly, Warcraft III. The most surprising thing was indeed how smoothly Warcraft III ran under emulation, considering that it takes the living daylights out of this iBook G4 I'm currently working on. I ran the game at the screen's maximum resolution of 1680x1050, and not only did it load a lot faster than it does on this computer, it was extremely smooth and playable. Of course, I would love for it to run natively on that machine, and so, I hope that Windows Vista will eventually be able to run on these machines thanks to some enterprising hacker's ingenuity (because I very much doubt Blizzard will invest in converting a 3-5 year old game (is Warcraft III really that old?!) to Universal Binary). And since I don't think I've mentioned this earlier, I am quite impressed by Windows Vista's graphics. I had a chance to try out the second Beta, although not on a computer with the Aero Glass support, and I found some things to have been changed for the better and some things for the worse, at least in short term. When you switched from Windows 95 to 98 to XP (or, if you were a sucker like me, then also Windows Me in the middle), you could use almost all your old keyboard and mouse shortcuts from the previous version. This will change in Vista. For example, when you right-click on an empty region of the Desktop, the last item in the menu is not "Properties", it's "Personalize Desktop" or something of that sort. This means that to access the Display properties, you have to go to Control Panel and then double-click on Display. Generally, Windows Vista has uncoupled a lot of features, and so you will see gazillions of Control Panels instead of just the few tens that you saw in XP. But, I think I'll do most of my Vista bitching once it actually ships. I'm not a Windows-hater as such, just a very critical reviewer.

Meanwhile, I changed my mind about buying the MacBook Pro. I decided that, for a >$2000 machine being purchased in 2006, an optical drive that burns at only 4x and won't even lay its proverbial hands on Dual-layer discs is a bit too much of compromise. Of course, I have other qualms too. One is the lack of a modem (which Apple seems to think is too stone age for its computers, not to mention cost-cutting) and the other is the general lack of information about what kind of battery life this thing will have, which is extremely sketchy. Plus, I think that a 1440x900 screen for a 15.4" display is positively primitive. Apple ought to get denser displays. So, anyway, I decided that it was going to be the 20" 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac for me, with the graphics bumped to 256MB. According to FedEx, it shipped on the 25th, but it's almost the 28th now and it is still doing something in Shanghai. They say it'll be here by Tuesday. Ai! Anìron...

A Short Note on Rosetta
As I mentioned some time ago, Rosetta, the PowerPC to Intel translation technology, has been coming under both heavy praise and heavy fire from reviewers. They praise it for the way it works - completely transparent, the user probably won't even know that he's using something under Rosetta unless he went and did a Get Info on the application. This is probably the best example of a "transition done right", GUI wise. Meanwhile, the same reviewers also attack Rosetta for working only at 50% of the native speed, while Apple had promised 80%. Although the reviewers' claims are nowhere near baseless, since Rosetta ran for me both Google Earth and Warcraft III without a hitch, both being extremely processor intensive applications, I am sufficiently impressed by it. I must also here mention why Rosetta is called a "Translator" and not an "Emulator" by Apple. Here's the way some standard emulators work: They get a block of instructions, they translate it to the other language ('language' here used for 'processor architecture'), send it to the processor, translate the processed data back to the original language, and thus a block of instructions executes. What Rosetta does is that it takes a block of Intel code, converts it to PowerPC code, executes it and caches it for later use. The key differences is that a) it seems to convert parts of binary instead of the instructions and b) it caches the translated code for later use. The latter part is confirmed by Transitive, the company that originally made this software, and they say that an app. that normally takes 128MB of RAM to run will take an additional 64MB for Rosetta. The assumption here is that once a specific block of code has been translated and cached, running it again and again will run it at native speed and it won't suffer a significant speed hit. If this is true, then a program that does something repeatedly will benefit from Rosetta a lot. This might also explain why Rosetta benchmarks have no standard trend (apart from generally being slower than the native compiles). It also means that increasing the amount of RAM on Intel Macs might help better the performance, in which case, it makes more sense to test the Intel Macs after upping their RAM a bit. Of course, I know about emulation and translation as much as Bill Gates knows about speaking in public. So this information is not to be taken as absolute truth. I shall post more on this once I get my hands on the iMac.

Labels: English

Things that my Computer Science professor calls 'puppies': functions, sets, blackboards, relations, operators, variables, theorems (and counting...)

January has been extremely, extremely busy. I can't honestly say that I didn't see this coming when I opted to take like six classes this quarter, but I guess I wanted to try it out just for the heck of it. Here's how an average day in the past week went. 8am to 10am was spent at work. 10am to 12pm was spent in classes, 12-1pm - more work. 1-5pm - more classes. 5-9pm - work. 9-11pm - studies. 11-12am - brief relief. 12-3am - more studies. And I'm actually finding this 19-hour schedule fun! Yes, I've become a masochist.

OK, so one of my CS professors calls almost every mathematical term a puppy, the other CS professor still uses Mac OS 9 on a PowerBook G3, my Math professor has the strongest Polish accent ever and writes 'Tripple Integration' on the board, my writing professor is almost completely insane and my German studies professor happens to like peanut-butter. Good times.

Meanwhile, the weather here is brilliant. Yesterday, although it was totally sunny and more or less heavenly during the day, it got awfully chilly at night; 7 degrees celsius by the thermometer, although it felt like sub-zero. Rosetta (the PPC translation technology in Mac OS X) is coming under fire for being about 40% slower than it was claimed to be, and Apple says it will have a shortage of MacBook Pros. Basically means that I will be forced to wait a very long time for my MacBook. Ah...

Labels: English

So I'm sitting in a hotel in Taiwan, right... in Taipei. It's 7pm and they tell me that a bus will come at 7.30pm to take this bunch of us 50 Indians to Chiang Kai Shek Intl. Airport. That will actually be very nice because there's free and extremely high-speed Wirleess Internet at CKSIA, unlike this hotel where I was told I'd have to pay $4/hour to get access. Of course, I'm in the computer room and luckily for me, somebody left this computer logged on as root, so I'm surfing for free as usual. Taiwan is one of those places where you find those Butterfly Freeways and so you can call it relatively well-developed. Everything's in Chinese though (I think it's Mandarin but I'm not sure) and... I dunno... I'm sorta not having fun here. I want to be back at college.

Unfortunately, the Macworld Keynote will take place while I'm on an airplane and so I'll have to watch the replay once I get back to The Dorm.

Uptil here was the part of the entry I wrote while I was in Taipei on the 10th of January. The rest is what I added on the 14th.

Now I wouldn't really want to set an exact line that you cross when you change from Mac aficionado to Mac fanatic, but if I did have to set one under some kind of duress, it would probably be "when you start having dreams involving Macworld keynotes". While I was in Taipei, I had one of those. This guy comes on stage, name of S. Jobs, wearing a blue jeans and black shirt, pulling up his pants all the time because, for the nth time, he's forgotten to wear a belt. Now, if dreams were mundane, they would be quite annoying because it would be like 'not' sleeping. Anyhow, that didn't seem to be much of a trouble at the moment because my dreams are known to be anything but normal and this one was no exception. In this fictitious keynote, Mr. Jobs announces a PowerBook G5. The dream then promptly fades out. Now, as far as the entry's title is concerned, this is all there is to it. Of course, this was just an indication of how much my subconscious really wanted a new Pro notebook from Apple, and as Apple's MacBook Pro website claims...

Also, on a side note, I did finally try out an In-flight Internet Service. First of all, it seems that it's run by the airplane manufacturer and not the airline, because it seemed to be coming from Boeing's Connexion service. I did a bandwidth test (something I do very often these days) and got 128Kbps with the Beeline Bandwidth Test. As for practical usage, I was able to watch streaming video from news.com. As for cost, it cost me $10 for the first hour (after that, it depends on what kind of 'plan' you choose). Definitely quite expensive; however, I just wanted to try this out purely for its sake. I was assigned an IP in the 216.x.x.x range and the originating city was Seattle, WA (in other words, Boeing Headquarters).

Labels: English

There was nothing more to be done about it - some classes just had to be missed if I were to attend Macworld this year. One of the professors was totally agreeable but the other didn't reply to my email, so yaks! I had my analog camera with me, but unfortunately, since I didn't have any film on it (and since I had only two hours at the Expo, I didn't go looking), I got no pictures. However, I'm sure I can find some really good pictures of Macworld from all over the web and post them here, although self-shot photos have their own 'air of authenticity' that will unfortunately be lost. The Caltrain from Palo Alto to San Francisco takes just over an hour, is a very shaky ride, which you usually don't notice unless you're typing a blog entry or playing DotA... Nonetheless, San Francisco today had the best weather I've ever seen [there] and wasn't freezing at all. I was disappointed by Apple's efforts though. I was intending to make my way to Moscone Center by following the increasing density of Apple ads per block. Unfortunately, the Apple ads don't follow a simple inverse square law, but an inverse to some astronomically high power, because I didn't find a single advertisement until I was one block away from Moscone. Oh, and it's pronounced Mosconee, by the way (just like Adobee)! Since I came in on the 11th and not on the 'Big Hype' day, registration was the most peaceful process ever with no queues at all. Macworld doesn't take place in the newly built and sleek-looking Moscone West, but in Moscone South. Although the Expo Hall was pretty big, I was surprised that everything that Macworld 'is' was contained in just one big hall. You can talk to Ye Old Mac fanatics who've seen the glory days of 1996 and see the look of sadness on their faces. However, I just gave you a totally objective (aftermath) opinion, and this was not at all what I was thinking of when I walked in. When I walked in, it was like "This is so awesome!" because there are huge, and I mean HUGE, canvases (40ft high?) with the new iMac and MacBook Pro plastered on them and they look absolutely stunning. Of course, the first thing I did was to go over and try out the MacBooks as I might be buying one of them in February or March (whenever they show up at The Bookstore, because they have great discounts and free iPods). I think I can officially announce that The Snappy™ is back. Yes, everything happens instantaneously and almost all the basic stuff - Safari, System Preferences, iChat, etc. - launches in one bounce (or less - Safari and System Preferences showed up before the bounce finished). And obviously, it's positively fantastic to have dual-processors in a notebook computer. The graphics prowess on these machines is also amazing. I mean, seriously, with 256MB of ATI Radeon X1600-ness, what couldn't you do on that notebook. I asked the Apple guy (there is always this one obnoxious Apple person standing next to every single one of the tens of Apple computers on show) standing next to the MacBook (supervising my actions) about Windows compatibility and as obnoxious as these guys are (almost like little Steve Jobses) they told me that they would not comment on that. And when I asked them when it would be available, I got the answer "February or whenever Steve says". I went away disgusted and found my friend Eoban who got me the free pass for Macworld. We strolled over to the gaming section where loads of lucky dogs were playing some really awesome games on wicked cool G5s with 30-inch cinema displays. I also chatted with the Panic Software guys (who make Transmit); they told me about Transmit 3.5 and I talked with them about some features I'd like to see in Transmit. We also spent a long time talking about Cocoa and me bitching about the lack of online documentation and examples on a lot of things like the NSOutlineView and Bindings, and thankfully, they fully concurred. It's simply another experience to bitch about something so esoteric. I mean seriously, we're bitching about Cocoa Bindings here. Kind reader, do you even have a clue what they are? No, they've got nothing whatsoever to do with a certain stimulating drink. Then I went over across the show floor to the Microsoft booth where they signed me up for a G5 sweepstakes (the only way I'm not buying the MacBook Pro is if I win that G5). Then I generally wandered around and came eventually to the Roxio place where I got to know that a lot of work needs to be done in Toast 7 before it becomes Universal, because right now it's Carbon and it has to become Cocoa. Yat's yat.

The next day I went to the bookstore to find a book called "The Nibelungenlied" (say that ten times fast!) and although I didn't find it, I did go up to the computer section and ask for a price list of Apple computers (yes, these are the things I do for fun). First, I was surprised to see that within two days of its announcement, the MacBook Pro had already found its way to this price list, and secondly, it was being offered for $2070, which, kind reader, is a knock-off from $2500. Translation: amazing deal. I pre-ordered one for myself. Can't wait.

Labels: English

First of all, it kind-of (well, OK, not all that much) killed me to write the word 'Goodness' with a capital 'g', but small letters simply don't gel well with numbers. Have you noticed that all numbers are invariably above "the line" and are of full height? That sort-of makes them go well only with capital letters, since they're all capital size. That's why "512 goodness" would've looked really bad, although there would still be a strong argument for the 'g' to be small - grammatically speaking. In the end, I thought, according to all the grammar I'm aware of, the 'g' has no right to be capital. But then, one always finds a loophole, which is the fact that it's the title of the post and, in a title, you can capitalize almost everything, save the prepositions and conjunctions. Plus, I reminded myself, it's my title.

अरे, पांचसौ बारह हो गया रे!
512 Goodness is, of course, all about the fact that MTNL finally bit the bullet and granted me 512Kbps access to the World Wide Web from within Delhi. There was this Uncle of mine in London whom I visited in 2003 and then he boasted to me about his 384Kbps connection, which, by the way, seemed wicked fast to me back then, considering the fact that I was on a 28.8Kbps connection. Since he recently visited Delhi, I asked him how fast his Internet ran now and let me know that it had progressed to 1024Kbps. I was quite elated to hear this answer (and not something outrageous like the connections we have at my college - "Oh, I just got a 200Mbps line. Wink! Wink!") because I showed him that while his connection had gone up by a mere 3 times, mine had done a ~20 timer. Shows progress of the country and all that jazz. All quite admirable indeed. Plus, the great thing is that MTNL's connections are ADSL and you actually get about 65KBps at peak or at least 55KBps normally. Downloads are all whooshy :-).

Apart from all the Internet goodness, we went for Rungta's pre-birthday celebration at "Not Just Paranthas" in GK-II Market, which really made for a delicious afternoon. I might write a review about it on Impulsive Highlighters. (Both Rungta's and ImHi's links are on the right). And this reminds me of the fact that ImHi has recently come alive again with three very recent entries. And so has MXMUG - sorta. Check it out (again, on the righ').

Meanwhile, my days here draw closer, and although I'll miss home (and all those paranthas), it'll be nice to be back at college too.

Labels: English

Whenever I want a few hearty laughs, I always turn to my Web Statistics tool (which anyone can access by clicking the "View Journal Stats" at the bottom end of the sidebar on the right). The funniest thing is something you will find under the 'Marketing' category known as 'Keywords', which is basically what people searched for on a search engine like Google to get to my website. Here's an excerpt from the list for today (in order of "relevance"):

• starting a farm business
• photography palika bazar
• write punjabi oat computer
• smita porn
• harry potter update firmware goblet
• single player warcraft 3 dota
• azgez bloodfist
• ...

You can check the rest out at your own leisure. In fact, I believe you can go back and check for many previous days if you're in the mood. Some examples from the last two days are: "dumbledore's death", "AIRTEL'S MUSIC IS A COPY OF" and "free girl webcams no credit card required".

Holidays coming to an end.

Labels: English

Woo Hoo Exclamation Mark Exclamation Mark Exclamation Mark Exclamation Mark One One One One
I'm going to Macworld San Francisco thanks to my oldest known-online-only (though not for long any more) friend Eoban. Well, I won't be there for the Stevenote, because that ticket costs a helluva lot of money, but वाट the heck, at least I'll get to try out all the new gadgets/[hopefully new Macs]/[more iPods?] that Steve's going to pluck out of his pocket. For those who saw the videocast of the WWDC in June (the big Intel announcement), did you notice that M. Jobs had departed from his Black n Blue dress-up to a totally black outfit? Fellow likes to dress for the occasion. Has managed to forget to wear a belt every year for, like, the past half-a-dozen years and pulls his blue jeans up at least seven times during the keynote. Nonetheless, although I do wish I gave a bike-handle for the बेचारा, what I really care about is whether he's going to be revealing any new PowerBooks, because, if he is, I'm going visit one on the Expo floor and order one of them for me [from it]. It's been almost 3 years since I've had a new computer in my hands (and I mean new in absolute terms, not just "new to me").

Meanwhile, for all you Mac users (and I know you're out there somewhere), as well as the Mactelites (cheap bastards), if you noticed, choosing Get Info for a file in Finder will show you two checkboxes, one is Locked and the other is Stationery Pad. With the former, I was well-acquainted, but I didn't have a clue about the latter. So I googled for it (note: Mac OS X does not underline "googled" with a red-dotted line, signifying that it has meaning!) and finally found the answer: when you set the Stationery Pad checkbox on a file, and that file is "opened using Finder", the Finder will open a copy of the file instead of the file itself. This does bring to Light the meaning as well. However, here comes the crunch: if you use an Open dialog box in an application, this bit is not honoured. Sad... I, personally, don't see any immediate use for it, except for using it with a Letterhead, which I don't [yet] have. As for the curious, Mac OS X does indeed define Google in its 130MB (ships on all Macs) Dictionary.app:

Meanwhile, here's something that my हिन्ग्लिश Harry Potter-readers readers should like: Some Harry Potter-ness translated into हिंदी in the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets movie that I was watching a day ago (and really enjoyed watching): (Yes, I could have put a बिंदी on it but I wanted to use the न्ग्ल consonant cluster (yep, that's the official term) just for the fun of it)

अदृष्य चोगा (invisibility cloak)
मायूस मीना (Moaning Myrtle)
जादू मंत्री (minister for magic)
मग्लू (Muggle)
काढ़े के अध्यापक (potions master)
काल दृष्टी (Basilisk)
रहस्य का तेहखाना (Chamber of Secrets)
सर्प भाषा (Parseltongue)
छड़ी (wand)
नागेश नागशक्ती (Salazar Slytherin)
ज्वाला (Fawkes)
उल्लू (owl)
चौकीदार (gamekeeper)
बोलती टोपी (Sorting Hat)
गौरव गरुड़द्वार (Godric Gryffindor)
श्राप (curse)
पिशाच (goblin)
छूमंतर गली (Diagon Alley)

Personally, I was laughing my ass off. If you weren't, I personally do not know what's wrong with you. But, seriously, I would love to see the other three movies in Hindi... just for kicks.

Cheerio.

Labels: English

नववर्ष की शुभकामनाएँ! आशा है कि आपको नए साल में सुख व समऋद्धी मिले।
Another trip to Gurgaon today and the realization that, if malls keep popping up in that place at the present rate, Gurgaon will very soon have fewer people than malls. When something like this (i.e., deemed to be a fairly positive thing) happens though, it's almost certain that it will have one or two extremely sad and/or ironic features. Recall the skyscrapers of Gurgaon, one of which caught fire and the lack of a fire truck that could reach high enough? The analogous shortcoming for the malls there is the lack of parking space. You're there, the mall's there, but you can't get in because there's no effing place to put your váhan at rest. Meanwhile, lots of cars go by you whose drivers keep their hands continuously depressed upon the horn making it seem like they're either dead and their heads have hit the respective steering wheels of their cars or this is some really twisted form of testing the Doppler Effect. Cars are slow, inefficient, polluting... they need to go. While a nuclear bomb is only a potential threat to the existence of all humanity, we're choking ourselves slowly to death with these gas-guzzling monsters. What we need is that Delhi Metro of ours to expand... and fast. The Metro should aim for something similar to Manhattan's Subway, in that it should be so accessible and ubiquitous that even the idea of owning a car becomes perfectly ludicrous (which, by the way, is exactly how it is in Manhattan).

The whole of the last week of December I've spent fighting a machine which adamantly refused to get a better operating system installed on it. Most of you should know Souvik Da (link on right) who writes incredibly hilarious (but wholly true) stories about life at Punjab U. on his blog. Well, he's got this really spiffy new computer with a Pentium D processor and all the works. Let me put the matter-in-hand this way: Mac OS X (for Intel processors) runs best on a computer which has these three technologies: SSE3, PAE and XD. One of the few processors which comes with all these technologies is the Pentium D. Souvik has a Pentium D processor. Why won't Mac OS X then run on this computer that is practically factory-approved by Apple itself? 1 week and 9 blank DVDs were spent pondering this very question. The computer didn't budge though, and after a week of pounding away with Anti-TPM patches and Bootloader patches and what not, the computer resolutely remained stuck with Windows. Destiny, some call it. One of the better things that came out of this though was a renewed passion for Warcraft, and this lovely gameplay style called "DotA" or Defence of the Alliance. It solves one of the longest-standing problems that I've faced in Warcraft, and that is that, although your heroes have these brilliant spells that you would love to micromanage and use all the time, since you've got this huge hoard of 89 other units to handle, you lose track of your hero and he or she just winds up using regular melêe or ranged attacks. With DotA, you only handle your one hero, upgrade him/her with goodies of marvelous sorts and go out to battle. The best thing about DotA is all the goodies and how quickly the hero levels come. The unfortunate thing about DotA is that, unlike ordinary Warcraft, there isn't much of a Single Player life for this sort of game. Some of the neat things in DotA are the explicit references to the Lord of the Rings, with its Mithril Hammers (+24 damage) and heroes saying things like "Ash nazg gimbatul" and "I come back to you now at the turn of the tide". A must-check-out for Warcraft players. (All the Warcraft references in this paragraph referred to Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne version 1.20b). DotA can be found at www.dota-allstars.com.

Meanwhile, 2006 has begun. Yay! and all that. My prediction is that 2006 will be dull, 2007 will be better, 2008 will be so-so and 2009 should be the best of this lot. Personally, I find the ceaseless "Happy New Years! Aapko nayey saal mein sukh aur samridhi miley" (and other such arrangements of words) quite obnoxious and tiring. That's just me - your antisocial blogger.

Cheerio.

Labels: English