July 10, 2009 • 12:25 pm 0
Sankat City – simply because of Anurag Kashyap’s push and overall PFC push (it better be good).
The other movie has to be kaminey ! – I have watched and loved all movies from Vishal Bharadwaj – he gets every genre done right. From makdee to maqbool – one of the finest works. Waiting for this one !
Filed under: Uncategorized , Movies
• 12:07 pm 0
Sometimes it does cease to surprise me how oil firms (nationalized – Indian, Chinese, Russian ) or the MNCs engaged/associated with Oil( Chevrons, Shells) behave when they need to cover up. The lobbyists everywhere feel they can wriggle out of the mess they create with penalties and stand up and commit them again. This arrogance comes since the feeling is folks are dependent on them. Can you imagine these kind of statements in this day from regular technology or other kind of firm? Can middle men be removed? Our own bofors scandal is still fresh.
The statement of Lobbyist for chevron - ‘We Can’t Let Little Countries Screw Around With Big Companies’. I am sure the local firm is equally responsible as this could not have gone on without graft at local level. But the lawyers and lobbyists reek of arrogance.
Filed under: Uncategorized , Amazon Chernobyl, Oil firms
July 4, 2009 • 5:22 pm 0
Kannada actor Shankar Nag’s dream child Sanket has contributed another play called ‘Naa Tukaram Alla’, which is written and directed by S Surendranath.
S Surendranath’s ‘Naa Tukaram Alla’ is an adaptation of Herb Gardener’s ‘I am not Rappoport’. It is a comedy play and it deals with the life of two old aged persons. The play throws light on the life of common man in the modern world.
Play had standing applause and evoked laughter on every second sentence. The subject was pretty serious and at times I thought some of the audience was obnoxious with their laughter riot. But it was wonderful to see theater almost full for a kannada play. Looking forward to the next production at rangashankara.
Filed under: Drama
June 26, 2009 • 12:41 pm 0
ज़िन्दगी क्या है , जानने के लिए
जिंदा रहना बहुत ज़रूरी है
आज तक कोई भी रहा तो नहीं
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOQlFia1IU&feature=PlayList&p=3C581C3C75419B47&index=1
• 12:29 pm 0
1. Waltz with Bashir
2. Tell no one
3. Frozen river
4. Paranoid park
5. The bank job(Escapist – ocean’s 15?)
6. In Bruge
7. There will be blood
8. No country for old men( little bit voilent compared to older movies from brothers, but still a notch above anything else)
9. To End all Wars (No movie conveys the utter disdain for war as tool of change – the suffering is this time for POWs )
10. Gone baby gone (Ben Afleck – the director — curiosity killed the …)
11. Michael Clayton ( finally clooney does himself a favor – wonderfully edited movie )
Filed under: Uncategorized , Movies List - 2009
June 25, 2009 • 7:45 am 0
I had tried earlier YSlow/Firebug combined with other tools (jslint,jsmin-packer) successfully. I was keen to find out what Page Speed has to offer. I was surprised at level of details and new features – page speed activity, a request overview and it also tells you the improvements of implementing the suggested changes.
I then tried Page speed.
Page Speed results on page speed page
Improvement needed on their own website.
Update (08 July 2009) – Myspace has released performance tracker tool for IE.
Filed under: Uncategorized , Firebug, Google Page Speed, jslint, jsmin, yslow
June 14, 2009 • 1:47 pm 0
This post is result of review of lookup engines done for at max 20 mins and should be taken with load of salt.
Both wolframAlpha and GoogleSquare are great attempts at compiling “data” and doing something useful with them. Wolfram leaves better impression because of focused answer approach – you do not see links and links of information through which you need to sift.
Wolfram– It had challenge of how to crawl up massive index like others to answer search queries, so they went for specialized datasets which allow computation of certain kind on them. Process – Crunch it, hand categorize it and create charts/visuals – where possible. Again metamodel the “known stuff” which they being in specialized field have got whole lot of algo/formulae backed up. So the they have domains like science, weather, geography where lot of data exists today. Humans will definitely will be required to message/clean the data-information so that right “inference” can take place later on by the engine. This is apparent from http://www63.wolframalpha.com/participate/participate.html
I was real skeptic in terms of their “computational claim”. But a scoped query shows computation might be happening. Try a query like “mars” – look at the answers – now try “distance between mars and Jupiter” , it actually computes it. It can do this with known entities with allowed operations. (bing and google try to point to wiki, G^2 does not understand it at all)
So if wolfram is actually doing computation – that is big thing. But also look at their history – they are computation software firm. They would have loved everything neatly categorized and would love information from the search vendors about “data” queries and see where they can do “computation”.
Saving grace is – It is not a great generic search engine if you notice. No ego surfing, Wolfram does not know you 
.
Wolfram is open about where it sources the information. It shares information about how it is interpreting the query – pretty much the first in major search engine.
G^2 – They calculated a given item how popular it was by building up the page rank and refershing it for generic phrase search. Challenge was how to utilize existing page rank and attempt categorization. Not exactly a search engine but comparison engine (price grabber etc have done this much better for much more tangible). So given a query it breaks it down to a known fact which can be compared across certain dimensions. This is where the magic might come in if they are doing it just based off the massive index and related url based information.(It is not apparent from simple search “pakistan india china” – same query gets interpreted as “country” and they are compared) It adds interactivity in form of addition capability for those extra dimension. If you add each one of the items seperately in item, you start seeing the source of information – Wikipedia.
Computation – offcourse they do 1123*2 etc. But computation like wolfram is not possible.
But this could be great stuff for verticals like legal, pharma etc. Ability to compare information – witness/dates. Drugs – chemicals/tests/results. If they are serious about it , they need to open it up for verticals – both the process and api.
Queries
To see the difference – type “Bank of America stock price” in both and what do you see?
Wolfram - does extra work by looking up “data” and plotting it up. I really wonder whether they have static plot of data across x range.
G^2 – just goes through existing pages – finds the “best bet – company !” and “tries” to categorize available information(pages data) into semantic meaning of some sort.
Just type of Bank of America – and now compare the results.
Queries which humans really want to do
Again try putting these queries through all engines and see the result. Wolfram comes out strong where ever there is structured data available. It would be prudent to see the “input interpretation” tag of wolfram to get the clues what they are doing and how granular can they go.
Bing
Bing’s embedded engine – powerset – hopefully does more than left side filters for queries and for domain like music/movies/ travel –– certainly does not do justice to its fame. It can hopefully combine with FAST for interesting work in future.
Where bing shines at present -
1. Entertainment search (look at the left side filters to provide instant access to right information).
2. Travel – This is visible when using US as location and executing searches like flights from seattle to san francisco
See the answer at top which indicates how are fares expected to behave. Click on that link and you get the mashup (integration from farecast etc).
3. Quality of information – Both Bing and Yahoo provide top links from well vetted sources compared to Google which provides information from user generated content. This is more relevant for recent news, healthcare related searches where correct source is important.
4. Then the local search is where it shines specially when used from mobile. I use it now all the time. It provides locally relevant information.
IMHO – Machine learning is not so advanced yet to make sense out of presentation data(locked in js/html unless it is freed up and ontology prevails over the content)
The background information for the facts based engine are below.
Queries to try (Across search engines)
Note how different search engines behave –
wolfram tries to identify – temporal information, location, color etc etc based on sources/domain it knows about.
google/bing bring up # of pages containing phrase.
TK’s answer provides clue to how it actually classifies the query itself across its known basket ontological buckets.
So it boils down to what are we looking for “facts/answers” or just “information from which we want to draw answers”. True answers/facts are possible when there is valid data (birthday/location/event etc ) or set of people organize incoming data into massive fact engine(TK/Wolfram). Then inference engine can sift through the fact or computation engine(Wolfram) can try to provide absolute answers/facts. “Phrase lookup” will be well served by “Googles and Bings”.
It is all good competition for the end consumer. These will be complementary offerings and need lot of polish. Dream would be sparql application on existing data. Your data from linkedin could be picked in and associated with publication , opinion on forum, photo on flickr/picassa in more authoritative way. But most probably it will remain a dream. Chetan Kunte is mighty impressed with Wolfram and his prompted me to look in this detail
Interesting facts -
Sergey Brin interned at Wolfram.
Wolfram generates strong opinions.
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.3261,y.0,no.,content.true,page.2,css.print/issue.aspx (more balanced)
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ (crude )
http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_Gödel_is_Laughing_His_Ass_Off_Right_Now
Filed under: Search , Google Square, Search engine comparision, Wolfram
May 3, 2009 • 12:13 pm 0
While trying to prepare for domain dsls – I struggled for bit on cucumber’s old spec dependency. Did a search for the file not found error for rspec/expectations. Found that it was challenge with the build I had.
I just ran gem install rspec. Voila – the error went away as mentioned the bug report. Even though cucumber is bleeding edge, I am impressed by the sharing of information and the fix which works.
Filed under: Ruby
April 26, 2009 • 4:32 pm 0
How can one describe a place where owner has choicest statements like following
“महाराज क्या खाओगे
महाराज परोठा क्या वेला ही खाओगे
महाराज एक नहीं प्लेट में दो पराठे मिलते हैंगे
मठा नहीं लोगे महाराज
ओये एक आराम नाल प्लेन मार
ओये छेती भुर्जी ते दाल दे ओथे २ नंबर पे
३०-४५ मिनट वेट है महाराज आपका नंबर आयेगा तो आपको ही बुलाएँगे
सबकुछ मिलेगा टेबल पर महाराज, आपको देंगे तो बाहर सबको देना पड़ेगा
महाराज मैं अपनी इज्जत तो बेच आया हूँ
पैक तो अंग्रेजी खाने को किजेगा, हमारे यहाँ आपको सब टेबल पर ही मिलेगा
पैक तो मैंने अपने बाप को नहीं कित्ता है
Food is heavenly and created by people who love their craft and are focussed on serving people great food at great cost. Ambience reminds you of all the railway station eatery joints (outside railway stations) or the forsaken dhabas. But the smell of butter and people’s undivided attention to the food on plate creates an aura of rare confidence. Certainly not the place where recently phoren returned or on vacation nri or indian resident high attitude locals can be taken. It just has 3 lines by 3 tables with stools to provide comfort to your behind. It has roof barefit of proper support and helps in providing sense of emergency , in case it just falls down while you are relishing the food. I would like to think that the atmosphere has been created to help you focus on food.
The cost for two never crosses 150 even if you go overboard with desserts/dahi/2 matthas/2 plate of parothas/side dish – makhani, compare this with bloody expensive pizzas, and subway sandwiches which literally extort the money out of your wallet. These franchises are extreme examples of exploitation of local cheap resources (people/food items) and then charging locals a bomb. These buggers should go and try a mattha which is family serving size and can easily serve 3 if you compare normal drinks “served” with expensive eateries. Best timings are weekdays, weekends are good if you reach before 1 in the afternoon and expect lunch wait times upto 1.5 hrs. later on.
http://bangalore.metblogs.com/2008/02/28/eating-out-try-bobby-da-dhabaulsoor/
Filed under: Food
• 2:52 pm 0
Again – masses under influence of Buddhism are getting enlightened. How lucky they are to be liberated from their slumber and the culture. Centuries ago another religion did it under the influence of sword, other uses the latest techniques to compile the data , do targeted thoughts bombing by implying how they are inferior and not getting the benefits and how changing the garb will get them to the promised land. All the conservatives need not go far to think how people get “sanction” to execute x things based on certain book, it is present right inside their town looking for next target. Only now it is more sophisticated compared to the spanish work of god in americas.
The state machinery in Andhra pradesh is moving ahead to help the ministeries.
On other hand we have pseudo-secularists gunning for Varun. English channels/newspapers/liberal jnu alumni have lost the pulse of people on field. Agreed Varun was pre-pestarous, but how do the politicians apathetic to the bread and butter causes – bypass all that and raise something more raw. It is easier. Look at what Raj Thackrey gets – he was struggling to get candidates to fight from his party. That is how democracy works. If Varun was ignored – he would not have become phenomenon that he has. His 15 mins are more of us vs them (family matter) as he thinks he is the real inheritor of fire-brand father and dictator grand mother. Unfortunately now even Mayavati is afraid of the swing in that whole area.
Look up for your joe plumber guys, shh he does not reside in apartment with swimming pool, backup generator and does not have four wheeler of choice. He is the one who knows black and white, he might have suffered corruption, nepotism but hates the uncertainity of terrorism and cares for safety of family.
Filed under: Religion, Uncategorized , conversion, ministeries, politics, Religion Conversion, Varun Gandhi
