An Unknown Indian

Thoughts of a FOSS enthusiast

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

An year at Moto :)

Posted by Balachandran on July 30, 2009

Hello folks. With today, I am completing 1 year at Moto. Joined Motorola, one year ago today and time has gone so fast that I realised it just now.

Looking back at it, I have had a great time at my company. Though it has been hectic, got a wonderful team here and a really nice project. Working on LTE(A 4G wireless broadband technology) has been really interesting. Learnt so many thing that I never even knew existed. The lone achievement this year was bagging an  internal award. :)

I should thank my team for bearing with my extreme forgetfulness and the huge amounts of mistakes that I commit. Mine is a really good team with a great amount of understanding for others. Despite the tight schedule, everyone in the team spent time to help me out of difficult and desperate situations. Of course, those are embarrassing moments and I hope to push them back and improve going ahead.

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Guwahati, Shillong and Cherrapunji

Posted by Balachandran on July 26, 2009

Hello folks, this is a post long long over-due. A post about a trip that I made in the first week of May. And, the delay is much more manifested when I announce that it was the first ever air trip that I had made :-) . In the first week of May, I went on a journey to the gateway of North East India, Guwahati. A rare opportunity that I got since my father is now working there. I visited Guwahati, Shillong and Cherrapunji during that trip.

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Tributes to a doyenne of Carnatic music

Posted by Balachandran on July 18, 2009

The great D K Pattammal, the senior most carnatic musician  among the women is no more. The great artist, one of the women trinity of carnatic music passed away on 16th July, 2009 due to cardiac arrest. And with that, the world has lost the last surviving member of that great trinity.

Considered to be first women to give a full kutchery(concert), she was also considered  at par with most of very experienced musicians at a very early stage of her career. She has remained the authority not only on the complex and very puritanical Dikshitar compositions, but on the compositions of freedm figher-poet Subramaniya Bharathi and composer Papanasam Sivan as well.

Along with greats MS and MLV, Pattammal created a great legacy of carnatic music, really hard to find in these days, where true classical music concerts are a rare occurrence and the people interested in these great treasures is gradually reducing(Worse that those people are being mocked at by a few “modernised” ??? people).Well for now, salutations and tributes to D K Pattammal. May her rest in peace and Long live her kritis.

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The GNU Scientific Library – Numerical library from GNU

Posted by Balachandran on March 24, 2009

Hello folks, its been a long long time. Just thought of putting this tiny piece of info on GSL here. The GNU Scientific Library is a numerical library from the GNU. This is really useful for those who deal with complex mathematical functions day in and day out.

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World’s first LTE mobile phone chip

Posted by Balachandran on December 10, 2008

          Hello folks, Having joined Moto, I am getting in touch with the latest developements in the mobile phones and wireless communication sector. And the news of the World’s first ever LTE mobile phone chip is a positive sign.

          LG has announced that it has created the world’s first ever LTE chip. For people who or not in this domain, LTE is the abbreviation for Long Term Evolution, a 4G technology aimed at high-speed wireless broadband and AIPN(All IP Network). It has promised really high data rates and the chip has not disspointed with 60Mbps download and 20Mbps upload rates. Also, theoritcally, mobile handovers are possible even while travelling at a few 100 kmph!!!

          Good time for movie addicts. Once the phones are out and the service is in, no more full night downloads are required. Theoritically, a 700 MB movie(one Compact Disk) can be downloaded in less than  a minute. Well, technology is fast developing and lets grab it with both hands.

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Terrorism under the saffron hood

Posted by Balachandran on October 6, 2008

       Hi, this might be the most bitter post that I have ever made till now. For the first time life I felt ashamed of being an Indian/Hindu. To the best of my understanding the Orissa govt. did nothing to prevent the attrocities of the terrorists under the saffron hood. This is not the first time that communal violence has marred the glory of the nation. But this is the frist time, the very basic religious ethics has been violated.

      I have been a devout and strict hindu all my life(which of course is just 21+ years now). And I admit that I don’t know much about christianity. But with my little understanding of the religion, I think nuns are roughly equivalent to the seers or “mahants” of hinduism. I now ask those ba***** raped a nun in Orissa, would they ever tolerate such treatment to their religious heads or sanyasis(I mean the true sanyasis, who still do exist unknown and unobserved by the media) ? This is just terrorism under a safrron hood. 

     No body is a sane state of mind would attack a helpless young woman, and not any woman, but a nun in a church. If these f***ing people claim that they are doing all these to protect Hinduism, they are supposed to wake up from slumber. They are bringing lots of disrepute to a great nation, a nation which in the past has earned the name, “Unity in diversity”. And they are doing a false propaganda of “forced religious conversion”. I wish to question those ignorant fools as to where the hell in their scriptures are they asked to promote violence against people of other faith.

    Just as the terrorists who bomb various places in the country are not people of islam, but people who belong to a religion called “terrorism”, these people are not fit to be hindus, but must be dumped as terrorists. They must understand that just as living in India is a right for them, so it is for those innocent christians. What ever the religion of the person might be, He comes under the law of the land, and the law of this land says that “ALL RELIGIONS ARE EQUAL” and that “NO DISCRIMINATION SHOULD BE MADE BASED ON RELIGION” (Yes, I am indeed shouting).

    I hope that those people come out of their slumber soon and understand the gravity if their own misdeeds. I hope against hope that these people mind their own religion and if they want to spread the message of their religion, let them do it among the people of its own religion, but after they understand what the message really is. 

   Indian constitution allows all its citizen to practise a religion of his/her choice. And if those fools don’t know that, let them read the constitution of their land before reading and mastering their religious scriptures. And above all, a message to people of all religion: There is no purpose/use in merely reading and learning the religious scriptures by heart. It fulfils its prupose only if you start living by them. And to the best of my knowledge, no religion promotes violence and everything calls for peace. Either you fools understand this basic truth or leave the country in the hands of its peace loving people and get the hell out of here.

People must know that this is not a anti-hindu or pro-some religion post. I am as good a hindu as any other in the world. But I know how to respect another’s religion. Atleast thats what i learnt from religious lessons that I had. People must understand that religions are a tool for reaching a higher spiritual state, which of course can be reached even without religion(I don’t know how to). They are definitely not tools to promote violence among people. For athiests who now claim that religions must be abolished, this is my answer: just like a useful tool in the hands of terrorists can become a deadly weapon, religion in the hands of mindless will result in violence. It is those fools who must be punished and not the religion.

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NASA’s initiative

Posted by Balachandran on May 19, 2008

Hello folks, This is one good site that has now been around for sometime. NASA has gome up with a pretty decent site that gives a lot of info on space science for a newbie. Really nice and as the sites tag line says it is “for the benefit of all”.

http://nasascience.nasa.gov/

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Google App Engine

Posted by Balachandran on April 9, 2008

Hello folks, Now more from google. Google has released a new service called the Google App Engine. Google App Engine is a service that lets us run our web applications on goolge’s infrastructure. So, we can be free from tasks setting up and maintaining servers for our apps, i.e we will be able concentrate more on our apps than on the underlying support systems. Moreover, the app engine provides a dynamic load balancing environment, supporting nearly 5 million hits a month for an application. Initially, as it is a trial run, 500 MB of space is given (all accounts are free now) and once the full version is released, additional space can be purchased.

What is more is that, the app engine presently supports only the Python programming language. This goes on to tell how popular python is and how important it is as well. The app engine currently supports all features of python (system independent) and apart from that it supports the popular python web-framework – Django.    Since a sandbox kind of environment is given,  the environment is secure and only limited access id provided to the underlying OS. The App Engine also provides a non-relational datasotre that acts as the back end. But it comes with a powerful query engine and transaction support.

More can be known about this from the official google site http://code.google.com/appengine/

Posted in Computers, General | 1 Comment »

Google’s Code University

Posted by Balachandran on April 7, 2008

Hello folks,  Though I came to know of this very late, I thought it would be useful to post it. Google has yet again done what it, can to spread knowledge. It has a “Code University” or a place in the web, where anyone can access lecture notes, assignments and reference materials for any topic related  to computer science. These have been contribute from various universities across the globe. This apart, it has a few video tutorials as well. It seems to be really useful. All the lecture notes are in the form of presentations( ppt, unfortunately. Many university prof. still go for MS office it seems. ) The link to the site is

http://code.google.com/edu

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TecUthsav @ TCE

Posted by Balachandran on January 26, 2008

       Thiagarajar College of Engineerin, Madurai is organising TecUthsav, its national level inter-departmental technical symposium. TecUthsav 2008 is the maiden attempt in this direction and it is hoped that it would be a grand success. This inaugural episode focuses on “Technological Entrepreneurship”, in order to inspire young engineering minds to take up entrepreneurship.

The grand carnival will begin on February, the 13th and proceed till 17th February. The events will be from 14th onwards. This mega inter-department inter-disciplinary symposium has a rich collection of events ranging from core engineering fields to hi-tech software field to Engineering sciences. There are quite a few management contests as well. So as guaranteed, this promised, this event will be a techno-management event focusing on  entrepreneurship skills.

Moreover, the proposed software contests are really of the best breed. OLPC and the “Lord of the Ring” events are the most promising. Hope there are really good quality stuff in the offing over the next 2-3 weeks.

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