February 2012
3 posts
4 tags
The Definition of Open
Note: This post has originally been made by DeWitt Clinton in Google+ - I’m not using a block-quote format since the post is too long for that.
“I believe what Android is accomplishing is truly revolutionary. Mobile is the way that billions of people will one day access the Internet. And through that access, we will soon start to narrow the massive knowledge gap that currently...
4 tags
Positional Notation for Relative Goodness
I’ve come up with a novel way to represent the degree of goodness and badness of things, without resorting to ambiguous terminologies like “okay”, “not bad”, “great” and “awesome”; or needing to state mathematically precise percentages, a la “50% good”.
The system proposes the use of “good” and “bad” as absolute adjectives, representing “100% good” and “100% bad” – or, if you prefer, “totally...
January 2012
2 posts
6 tags
Crunchies 2011 - What Caught My Eye
The Crunchies 2011 Awards by TechCrunch has just been announced, and the results hold many an interesting tid-bit. Here’s a quick look at what caught my eye about this year’s Crunchies.
Siri beat Lytro to the “Best Technological Achievement of the Year”, which is unfortunate. Siri is indeed a countable advancement in speech recognition; but in comparison, Lytro is a revolution in imaging...
7 tags
Have textbooks just been re-invented?
Despite not being an Apple fan, I’ve been resting curious hope around Apple’s “reinventing the textbook” and the media buzz surrounding it – however, after the press conference was over and the news was ousted, my first reaction, understandably was disappointment and an “is that it?” face. However, a closer inspection reveals a better picture; and it seems quite likely that this move from Apple...
7 tags
Windows, Linux, UEFI and a lot of FUD
Ed bott is being spot-on here:
Windows 8 ARM systems do not yet exist. When they do ship, late this year or early next year, they will consist exclusively of tablets designed to run Metro-style apps. They will not run x86 software. They represent a close collaboration between a small number of hardware makers and Microsoft to build a secure, high-performance system that will be starting fresh in...
December 2011
8 posts
3 tags
“The problem is Twitter is designing the metaphorical equivalent of a Toyota...”
– Robert Scoble about the Twitter redesign.
6 tags
About the Metro design language
Metro is the new user-interface paradigm pioneered by Microsoft first in it’s Zune range of media-players, and now being rolled out across it’s range of platforms, viz. Windows Phone, XBox, and Windows 8. Metro rethinks the traditional UI based on icons and windows, and simplifies it to a highly minimalistic UI characterized by bold colours, prominent lines and large, striking...
5 tags
Do reviews need a bias?
MG Siegler writes:
I don’t know about you, but when I read my favorite technology writers, I want an opinion. Is the iPhone 4S the best smartphone, or is it the Galaxy Nexus? I need to buy one, I can’t buy both. Topolsky never gives us that. Instead, he pussyfoots around it. One is great at some things, the other is great at others. Barf.
Fucking pick one. I bet that even now he won’t.
This...
4 tags
About Android, iOS and Horse-poop.
The Android vs. iPhone wars have always been colourful.
Now more than ever, the launch of Galaxy Nexus pitted things a lot more even - what Android lacked so much in terms of UI polish and fluidity, Android 4.0 covers up in huge bounds. In many ways, Android seem to excel iOS while in many other, iOS rules champ. Obviously, loyal fans of either platform will disagree, arguing why the factor they...
4 tags
Promo done right - Nokia Lumia's Indian lauch
Yesterday, I did a post about a promo that possibly went wrong - but there was simultaneously another promo going on on another side of the world; and by the looks of it, one that’s doing a very good job.
The promo in question - the launch of Nokia Lumia 800 in the Indian subcontinent. Clearly, Nokia was placing all their bets on a Windows-fuelled-refresh; and they had no intention of...
5 tags
Promo went wrong? The other side of Google's 10ct...
If you are an Android user, you probably already know about Google’s ‘Ten Days of Offers’ promo; where they are giving away 10 premium apps for 10 cents, each day for 10 days. Though a great opportunity for the consumers to get hold of some really great premium apps that they otherwise could not afford; it seems not all developers are finding the deal exactly sweet.
The...
7 tags
Apocalypse: Rise of the Smartphones
The past week has been a burning week for smartphones - quite literally.
Smartphones have been catching fire and burning in pockets all around the globe - first was the iPhone that caught fire aboard a plane in Australia - later, almost wickedly ironically, a couple of Samsungs followed suit.
This could mean only one thing, right; that smartphones have grown too intelligent; and were hatching...
4 tags
The Aging Book of Faces
Facebook has been in an increasingly lethargic slumber for the one year.
While it’s true that the past couple of months saw a large number of updates - all kinds of tickers, lists and timelines were being thrown in our way - how many of these were original work? Let’s face it, for the most part, everything was shamelessly ripped of it’s new-found competition, Google+ - the...
November 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Tweaking To Perfection →
parislemon:
Fascinating take on Jobs by Malcolm Gladwell.
His main argument: there are people who truly invent, and then there are people who tweak those inventions to unlock the true potential. Jobs, in Gladwell’s view, was the latter — but it’s important to note that he views the role as just as important as the former.
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
7 tags
Terra Firma
After about 5 months of using Ubuntu almost exclusively as my daily OS; I’ve finally made the decision and switched back to windows - why? And how does it feel?
Ubuntu had become surprisingly usable and polished in it’s last two iterations, perhaps the main incentives that made me try it as a primary OS - and it was a good experience, on an overall view - the Ubuntu Software Center...
4 tags
October 2011
7 posts
7 tags
Nokia's 'Dawn' of 'Lumious' 'Hope'
Above the Windows Phone hype and the galore of high-end devices announced at the Nokia World keynote today at London, what appealed to me the most was two rather less profound yet significant factors:
The Asha Line: Bringing premium desigh, a 1GHz processor, Angry Birds, and quite probably, the Swipe interface to S40 was something truly commendable. If Nokia succeeds in bringing Qt development...
4 tags
6 tags
7 tags
The Design Language of Android 4.0 →
An excellent interview with Matias Duarte, UX head at the Android team; where he talks about what he likes about present-day UI’s and what he doesn’t; and how he arrived at the perfect balance for Ice Cream Sandwich - a highly recommended read.
4 tags
“With ICS, Android finally looks better than iOS — WP7 and MeeGo, by the way,...”
3 tags
Apple. Dislike. Respect.
I am not an Apple fan - I dislike their business model and their “reality distortion field”, and I dislike the fact that none of the things that they are proud of, were actually invented in-house by themselves. But quite often, they seem to astonish me and squeeze out a drop of pure respect out of me contemptuous heart - with the astonishing perfection and artfulness that go into...
6 tags
Tea
It’s was a month ago that I first caught a special interest in tea and switched to it from my hitherto addiction, viz. coffee. Coffee was taking a toll on my nervous system it seems, as I started to feel headachy and tired more often than ever. Black dust tea was never one of my favorites, so I started looking for options - green tea was the first option that struck my mind; and with the...
September 2011
2 posts
5 tags
The following is a stream of thought that first occured to me after watching ‘Memento’, and later deepened by reading the George Orwell classic, ‘1984’.
Is Past absolute like we think it is?
If the Past exists only in memories — human minds so as to say — and written records, if the incident is significant enough to be documented, that is; how is it any less mutable than,...
6 tags
Unobvious compromises involved with budget...
When Sony Ericsson went ahead and announced their Xperia Mini and Xperia Mini Pro smartphones, they seemed to be ready and set to take over the midrange Android market for themselves. When these phones were launched, they very much did so, with their spec-sheets that boasted of 1GHz processors, out-of-the-box Gingerbread and HD video recording, all with a very competitive price tag — in a...
August 2011
1 post
8 tags
June 2011
5 posts
10 tags
GCC Primer for Turbo C Users
[This post is intended mainly for my classmates who are finding difficulty in the migration to GCC compiler from the Turbo C compiler they’re used to; as the OS Programming Lab has to be carried out in a POSIX environment. And a note to Linux geeks, pardon me, that’s bare basic stuff I’m talking about, but this post, like mentioned, is intended for total newbies]
Introduction
...
6 tags
Parallel Universes and Alternate Myselves
If the future held infinitely many alternatives; if there were infinitely many choices that we could make about each moment that comes next, why aren’t there any about the past, or present? Why is our world view shaped like a reverse-funnel, where the past is a well-defined trajectory that we have already traced, the present being the only branching point we have any choice about, at all;...
6 tags
OMG! Technology has totally ruined us!
Me: Do you have a copy of those (...) programs with you?
Him: I'll mail.
Me: Okay.
Him: Sent.
Me: Okay bro, thanks..
If you were wondering what this was about, this was the SMS conversation I had with my hostelmate - the guy in the room right next to mine - instead of getting up and walking over. Oh my..
“I’m better off not socialising. I make a better impression if I’m...”
– Christopher Walken
“Cogito, ergo sum.”
– Rene Descartes
May 2011
6 posts
“Even if the price of being yourself is being regarded commonly as a half-witted...”
7 tags
Pirates of the Caribbean 4 - On Stranger Tides,...
A sequel to an exceedingly success movie is never an easy cake to handle. When the sequel is to a trilogy that has already achieved epic status, it’s harder to make away without a scar - Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides largely manages to make off with this feet - but is the fourquel as nearly as mightly as it’s predecessors?
There’s one thing that any self respecting...
8 tags
About Automata Theory - The Need of an Axiomatic...
JARGON ALERT: This post is related to Computation Theory, and anyone but Computer Scientists or Engineers (or budding ones) might find this crap.
Formal Languages and Automata Theory - FLAT in short - is what our paper on Computation Theory, Automata and Language Theory called; a core paper for our Computer Engineer course. Automata and theoretical computer science were fields that used to...
7 tags
“Let me be the Wind
That you breath in;
And touch your heart
Like only you...”
8 tags
One night with Natty
Until recently, I was rather avert to all those Linux distributions lurking around - the only ones I even bothered to try out were a few editions of Ubuntu — part of the reason for this was the bloated and slightly-rough-around-the-corner nature of most Linux distributions. The other part was simply that there were just too many of them. And the third reason was, er, I was (am, in fact)...
3 tags
Yeah, I've not been blogging much here lately -... →
A week ago, I got my hands wet with web-publishing, starting my very first technology blog, The Times of Android. I’ve been working as a freelancer on several technology blogs for a while now, but never had one of my own - here’s the first.
April 2011
12 posts
6 tags
12 tags
വെളുപ്പുനിറമുള്ള പകലുകൾ
ഇന്നെനിക്ക് തിരിഞ്ഞുനോക്കാൻ പേടിയാണ് - കാരണം, ഭൂതകാലത്തിന് ഹൃദയമുണ്ട്. അതിൻറെ ചുവപ്പ് എന്നെ പേടിപ്പെടുത്തുന്നു.
ഇന്നിൻറെ മങ്ങിയ വെളുപ്പുനിറത്തിൽ പകലുകളുറങ്ങിത്തീർക്കുന്ന വർത്തമാനത്തിന് ഹൃദയമെന്തിന്?! യാത്രയിലെപ്പൊഴോ മരവിച്ചു വിറകായിത്തീർന്ന അതിനെ ഞാൻ എന്നേ വഴിയിലുപേക്ഷിച്ചുകഴിഞ്ഞിരുന്നു.
വെളുപ്പും കറുപ്പും കടലാസുകഷ്ണങ്ങളും നിറങ്ങളൂറ്റുന്ന ഇന്നിൻറെ ലോകം ചുവപ്പിൻറെ തീക്ഷ്ണമായ അനുരാഗം...
Love Me
poeticallyundead:
Love me
unconditionally
because
more often
than not
it will be
easier
to walk
away
9 tags
The Pacman Phenomenon in the HTML5 Era →
With HTML5 and dynamic web being the latest buzzwords of the industry, nobody really wanted to be far behind in the run - no, not even the good old Pacman. It’s hard to tell what surprised me more, is it the miracles that HTML5 manages to do to the web; or is it how the Pacman manages to nail you down for hours regardless your age, regardless how busy you are supposed to be.
10 tags
Duty or Dust?
The evolution, of man as a being and humans as a society, has been about one thing more than anything else - a perpetually growing pile of ordeals cumulating upon our selves. As we grow and move, these ordeals; the tidbits of etiquettes, rules, laws, clichés, orders, advises and duties; circle us in a vicious loop, even while we don’t realize it and proclaim ourselves to be free men.
The...
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
8 tags
Moving On
So that’s it, Undulations had lived a whole year on blogger, and it was time to leave - I’ve decided to move Undulations to a whole new platform. Though Blogger has never been particularly bad to me, nor had it been a messy platform to blog on; over the months, it turned out to me that it was caught in an ugly middle ground.
Blogger was a fairly simple platform to work with, without...
Just when I hit the “Publish” button after typing a rather long blog-post, my Tumblr app crashed and told me this. “An error occurred. There is nothing to worry about, it is being reported.”
Of course, there was nothing to worry about other than my 400-word long post vanishing into thin air. But yeah, it’s being “reported” - isn’t that awesome? :-@
6 tags
March 2011
13 posts
