Adventures of an High Elf Sorcerer

Affine Transform The affine transform is quite simply, a piece of art. Usually when you have a linear system with 2 dimensions,

I got this pretty cool firefox extension for blogging. It supports both LJ and blogger, so considering that I have been using various Google services now, I might just switch back to blogger. Provided this works, of course. powered by performancing firefox

I'm fed up with blogger! I have moved to LiveJournal. http://www.livejournal.com/users/adityag

The reason why I have written to this blog in some time is that the mailed blogs are not getting formatted correctly.<br> Lets see whether this one goes through!<br> Otherwise, I might as well switch to <B>LJ</B>. Coz the Blogger site is patheticly slow.

Weekends start with Friday evening. A chat with Himanshu inspired me to write down some things related to science and DSP that I had in my mind. I've started writing them. I'll post them here one by one as and when I'm through with them. I'm kind of stuck with some fundas of electromagnetic waves. Saturday and Sunday were spent at Mahabaleshwar with my family. Man, it was warm in the afternoons. I mean, its not supposed to be warm up there. Not even in the afternoons. Basically, walked around quite a bit, ate, slept and drove. I would have liked to walk a bit more actually. Everything else went like a typical Mahabalshwar trip with the expected dose of langurs, some animals you try hard to identify, red shoes and socks, etc. The trip back was not so memorable though, getting stuck in a traffic jam for 2 hours in the Katraj Ghat.

The google toolbar for firefox is quite amazing. The best part is that it has a gmail inbox notification and a single click takes you to the gmail inbox. Other google services are also at a clicks distance. Try it out, maybe its what you are looking for.

Something very interesting has happened. There is no petrol left in Pune :) It going to be fun to observe what happens for the next two days. -- A man may sometimes be forgiven the kiss to which he is not entitled, but never the kiss he has not the initiative to claim.

Xfce desktop 2 , originally uploaded by urwithaditya . Its the gdesklets that get you the nice eye candy actually. Xfce4 is a much improved version. Its almost revamped. I guess I'm going to be using it for quite some time to come.

Does the photo come above the text or below? And well ... I couldn't find any other image offhand.

I guess I have written about him already out here. But no amount of writing can do justice to the respect I have for this man. He is simply phenomenal. A PHD in Physical Chemistry, a great lover of hindi film music and english films, an experienced trekker (he knows the wester Ghats by heart I think), has a lot of knowledge of medicine, astronomy, astrophysics, astrology, philosophy (well, he is a PHD), electrical systems, electronics (I've learnt a thing or two about capacitors from him after getting my BE degree) and still going strong. And to top it all, a magnificent teacher. More than anything else, he taught me how to learn. Everytime I go to him, there is some surprise waiting for me. This time, it was set of astronomical diagrams showing the path of the sun across the sky at various places and at various times. Believe me, it once took me at least 24 hours to independently imagine and visualise the paths (I sat one whole day with a globe in my hand, looking at it from all p...

I was wandering around on Lakshmi road on Saturday on the hot afternoon sun looking for a particular set of headphones. The amount of specialisation you find there is amazing. In one lane you have shops selling electric cables and nothing but electric cables. Then there is another lane in which you get audio equipment, but only electronic equipment. Heaphones are not part of that. So I had to venture into another lane. This one had only electronic components transistors, capacitors and the like). After roaming around for what seemed to be eternity, I stumbled upon a group of shops that had speakers and only speakers. And here, I finally found my headphones. Its really amazing the way all the similar shops are clustered together. Also, if fortune pops up a nice cookie when I post these entries, I have decided to keep them intact from now on. -- When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves.

I saw the Fireox extension to work with Live Journal today. I'm seriously thinking of migrating to LJ now. Though one great advantage with blogger is that you can mail your posts.

I have started listening to the h2g2 radio series all over again. After listening to two episodes immediately one after the other, my head had started swimming now. Feels like I've had a pan-galactic gargle blaster. I need rehab. Time to go back to listening.

Wow! It was one the more beautiful sights I've seen in a long time. Rain pouring down so hard that you would get completely drenched in no more than two seconds. if you had the guts to go out there and brave the huge hailstones, that is. And this, bang in the middle of April! Its a wonderful world :)

I'm pondering on a question I've had for over 10 years now. The question is: does what we see, appear the same to everyone, with respect to colours. I'm thinking whether there is a way to test this out. Do all of us 'see' the colours the same way. I mean it's possible that the stimulus x gets on seeing green is what y gets on seeing blue. I mean, what appears to x as green, appears to y as what appears to x to be blue. Get it? Its a weird and scary concept. But the concept is not much of an issue (after all these years). Whats bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be any way of testing this out. This has directly got to do with the interpretation of signal from the eye by the brain. What do you mean by 'appear'? After all, the whole visual world is nothing but an abstract model that the brain has made for itself using electrical signals given by the eye in order to consistently and quickly interpret the future signals that the eye would give. T...

This one is *very* different from other Michael Crichton books. But this one is as good as any other. He has dealt with a sensitive subject and I think he has refrained from writing his heart out in order to stick to the topic. A lot of research goes behind each of his books and it shows. This time though, it shows litterally :) Read the book to find out what I mean. The book deals with the topic of global warming as its main theme, but is packed with adventure and is very informative (like all his books). The book brings out one point, that science and technology is being governed by politics and the people in the universities don't realise this. Knowingly or unknowingly, they play into the hands of the rich and powerful and serve the purpose of making them more powerful. I guess each one of us out there creating knowledge (in universities or out of them) needs to be be true to himself/herself and more importantly, to science. We have been taught all to well to manipulate the trut...

This is why I simply love debian! I changed the package source from my 15 CD Sarge set to the DVD. All I had to do to keep my system in sync and in great shape was "apt-get update". As simple as that. No need for reinstallation, nothing. As I have said over a hundred times before, "Debian ... works". Btw, I decided to switch back to KMail. Thunderbird was good, but it just didn't feel right. I will miss the RSS feeds in the inbox, but I still prefer this.

Should have posted this long ago actually. I had been to the Indian Ocean concert here. And they didn't dissapoint. If you are an Indian Ocean fan, this was not something you could afford to miss. No words can do justice to the experience of listening to Indian Ocean live. The music makes you smile, laugh and dance.

Frankly speaking, after I read this, I wish I had listened to what my grandma told me when I was small. That book is full of advise that parents and grandparents give you in the name of Hindu religion and culture.

After almost 2 years I hiked up there. After a long time I listened to the wind, felt really good. The thing that I enjoyed the most, however, was silence. No sound of the TV, of "music" playing in my ears, no clickety-click of the keyboards, not annoying hum of machines that compute and most important, no sound of humans continuously chattering and driving you mad Missed a days football, but I guess it was worth it.