Indian Politicians: They can even sell their country

That was a popular joke about Indian politicians kept on the basis of their performance in field of Corruption. In recent past some defence deals scams proved that the joke can actually turn in to reality. This post is not regarding scams but related to our politicians...

Today I was shocked to see the news regarding reservation in the paper. They say that our government is planing to introduce upto 49.5% reservation in educational institutes like IITs and IIMs. Won't you call out politicians Stupid and Insane. Well most of them are uneducated too. Some have criminal records too. When such ppl are leading our country, the future can only be bleak.

It was not a surprize when government wanted to pass a LAW forcing private offices (companies) to have reservations, thankfully the supreme court denied it. (Otherwise we would have been strugling for our jobs twice as hard).

I generally tend to avoid politics but these morons are making this country a shit place. A politician was once asked "If there are two Doctors' one who got the degree on basis of merit and other who was put there on basis of reservation, which one would you get ur treatement done by?" The politician was obviously dumb. (He was quite sure he wont go to such a hospital where you get SC/ST grads, he can easily afford a better hostpital with highly qualified doctors).

It doesn't even make sense to have ppl enter the top notch colleges on the basis of Caste rather then performance. What is the use of such engineers and doctors who don't have the basic knowledge to take up these courses. Why should the ppl in general category who are much more capable be deprived of the justice ? The ppl from classes getting reservation might be happy when they have the benefits due to reservation but would they we happy when given second class service by unqualified ppl ?

I was imagining how nice it would be if Political parties had some kind of entrance exam or recruitment. Where there was a limit on number of seats and then there was this quota stuff. Then only they can realise the effect of quota on us.

Why can't these ppl from SC/ST/OBC compete fairly against ppl from general category ? Who stops thems. They can be given monitory consideration for their education, they can be given better conditions to study but what justifies giving them easier entry to good colleges compared to actual merititous student ?

Our government has shown lots of interest in protecting rights of the so called backward classes in the country, they want every second student in the schools, colleges and government job to be from these ppl. Thats the max we can expect do be done by an army of uneducated fools who only care for getting votes in next election.

The bigger problem is every political party is afraid of lossing votes and doesn't dare to come against such unjustice to the general castes. Its probably a right time for ppl from NON backward classes to have some protests against the current reservation laws else they will see themselves entering in to minority in schools, colleges and even public offices.

Amélie once again

Watched this movie once again. This time with little french knowledge. The english subtitles and the French speech together made it a wonderful watch. The movie is simply awesome, it certainly deserves the rating (8.7/10 in IMDB) and appreciation it has achieved.



In totally unrelated news I heard the same actress Audrey Tautou is playing the role of Sophie in the movie "Da Vinci Code".

FlickrExport Gets better

Has been long since I updated the app(in fact a plugin). Today when I wanted to upload photos to flickr again and I decided to first improve the app. (Isn't it nice, you can change the app you want to use :), well thats why opensource rocks)

Since Most reader don't know what I am talking about. I wrote and maintain a simple plugin for Uploading photos from Digikam (and some other KDE image viewers etc). Digikam FYKI is a powerful image management application for *nix. Do try it out if you like to play with images.



Some one else also requested this functionaly to directly upload the selection of image in the host application like Digikam, Kimdaba or gwenView. This is of course useful since you can use the best selection etc functionality of you app and then directly upload them rather than using the limited File Selection dialog of KIPI.

The Past Two days

The past two days have been full of fun, excitement and crazyness. Well since Manikandan has already written about it, I won't be going in to details. But in short it was two days of Fun and Masti when new recruits of Google Hyderbad had a get together organized by the Company. Photos speak better!








Number 12 Gang, moving to guest house before dinner.





Some more picks at Flickr Well my quota for March was over.

My second job offer

Many friends told they weren't aware of my Google Job offer and were angry about not informing. Well after 5 rounds and a period of around 67 days starting from (Dec 6 and ending Feb 13) I am recruited by Google for its Hyderabad office.

Surprizingly the choice between the companies (my first offer and this one) is not easy to make. I do have some time to decide and so the decision is postponed for now.

And the first flight journey came up

I always wanted to have my first flight sponsored by some one, specially after seeing so many ppl from my Batch and otherwise being called for by various companies either for some annual party or for interviews and given flight tickets.
Somehow that kind of free ticket didn't work out yet, but yes somebody did sponsor my first flight (leave aside the details). It was from Hyderabad to Nagpur on this 11th evening. So many ppl spoke so bad about Air Deccan I was wondering how will the flight be but it wasn't that bad afterall.
To start with they did delay the flight by 2 hrs 15 minutes to launch at 7:45 PM instead of 5:30 PM. But unlike ppl told they did take the pain of sending me SMS and calling me on cell up on my cell and to inform that at around 2 PM and 2:30 PM respectively.
Then I reached the airport at around 7:10 PM or so against the expected 40 minutes before flight thing. This was the first entry inside airport. I had no idea where to guy and to be frank Air Deccan didn't have good enuf instructions to tell me, I finally found a enquiry booth, and then the verifcation etc took place, I reached a room which was kind of entry to the actual take off area. I was looking for some display boards for numbers etc there was one which was by Jet and none by Air Deccan. Ultimately I found someone waiting for the same flight and sat near him, stragely enuf there was no announcement but 2-3 persons coming and shouting "Air Deccan Nagpur passengar please get in to bus" (like normal autos :)).

Soon we were in the plane. It was kinda very smaller in size than other planes nearby, and from inside it was surely very small, unlike those shown in movies. Anyways the seating was quite good and the journey was quite good too. There were no such things as fears of crash hear and there :). There were some annoucements during the flights, which cotained some ads too :), at the middle of the journey there was an annoucement, "We are 20000ft (or 40000ft) altitude, travelling at 450 KMPH and outside temp is -15 degree celcius". Wow it then felt more like being in some entirely different kind of journey.

Inside the flight they do serve you snacks just that you have to buy them, it wasn't to costly too. I had gud enuf snacks for 60 bucks.
The flight landed down well and safe and on time too. the whole jouney completed at around 9:15 PM. During the flight I talked to the person sitting on the neighbouring seat, who told that he has travelled to many countries and almost all kind of flights, and that Air Deccan was not much different from all of them accept for the small amount of goodies, bells and whistles.
Since the journey was in night I cudn't see much of clouds and stuff even the photos and video I took are too motion blurred to make any sense. I would be looking forward for a morning journey next time.

My first post/story on Slashdot :)

Yes this is not as big as getting slashdotted but It feels good to have you a post/story on such popular site. It somehow happened that I noticed the googleblog as soon as It was updated with a new post, I thought it was a perfect story for slashdot readers and submitted it. (Well it underwent lots of editing before appearing on the page)

Since my flickr account quota is over, I can't upload the image currently. Just check the slashdot homepage, I guess it will be there for today atleast. BTW the link to the post is Google Enters Web-Office Market.

Trying desktop decoration :)

Well I never cared about those stuff until Jagmohan asked me if there are "Themes in Linux like Windows?". I thought there must be lot of such stuff so just went to http://kde-look.org and looked for themes. Sorted them on number of downloads. I got the theme name Bhagira, somehow the name looked familiar (may be ppl posted their desktop screenshot with this name). Grabbed it. Compiled and installed on my Work Machine a Fedora Core 3 box (On my room's test bed system with KDE 3.5 there seem to be some compilation error probably because of QPainter class).

These screenshots are in this config: GNU/Linux distro FC3+KDE3.3+Superkaramba+Baghira (theme in KDE styles and window Decoration)
Here are some screenshots. The OSX bar at the bottom is due to superkaramba.

Oops!!! I mistakenly uploaded pngs to Flickr. Not only got my quote depleted too soon. It will probably be difficult to load too, sorry guys :)

IIIT Hyderabad R&D showcase 2006

Will try to summarise the R&D showcase06 in some details with some photographs

Well Mr. Ramdurai was not able to visit IIIT on 3rd march as chief guest because of Bush(disrespect intended). The talk was therefore not possible. ultimately a panel discussion was held on the topic "Challenges in IT research for India". The discussion is worth a separate post. Key point, we need more institutes like IIIT and we need to tap more and more research oriented/enthusiast students rather than spoil their tallent in other activities :) We need more research!




This time extra importance was given to Industry participation but results were not encouraging. The times when only invitees were supposed to visit labs mostly no one came. We had participation from GE and I just now heard from my friend their that GE ppl are really impressed with the institute, professors and the students. Great!

On the other hand students participation was great. Many juniors came and saw the demo, some inquired some technical details too. Prof Kamal suggested students to enquire activities in the labs before taking Honours, which I guess is a great idea. I was excited by seeing the R&D demos by my seniors in past years.
(specially remember the demo of flag simulation by Kopos, which made me very interested in graphics :))

Though ppl are generally excited by seeing most of the demos, Robotics lab, CVIT, CDE lab demos seem to draw lot of crowd. This time we had some real robots moving in the robotics demos ppl were excited to see them. If I am not wrong the electronics demos were also mixed with Robotics lab, some of them were interesting too (like the robot neighbour detection using IRids). In CDE lab the multiagents demos with graphical output get most attention. CVIT lab is all about graphical and visually appealing output. This time Nirnimesh demonstrated his display wall project on a 3x4 array of comps photos attached. Many satellite imaging, OCR related and Medical processing projects were shown along with many of image and Video processing ones.

The display wall which was one of the highlights this time. We already have clusters building up at IIIT !!! Who's says we aren't good at hardware ?




Some photographs clicked at random times, showing great deal of excitement and participation at R&D:









Me and vakiba explaining our work


My camera remained mostly in our room only so photos cover very small part of R&D. I will upload more photos as they are available.

Moving to wordpress (?)

After many attempts earlier the switch to wordpress seems coming now. I was able to import my blogger posts quite easily this time, and it was fast too.
The reason for the switch:

• I am tired of waiting for the categorization feature to come up in blogger.
• Wordpress has some awesome templates
• Wordpress does have a more usable UI

And I found more good feature after the switch, wordpress's search is too good, its fast and accurate. Bloggers' search in your site feature doesn't ever work. Blogsearch is good but isn't limited to your own blog and ofcourse not accurate.

I have some problems with wordpress too, The sidebar is not as much configurable as blogger, I can't put Google Adsense or my own statcounter counter. Also the page rank of my blogger blog is good(4/10) and would be difficult to get that rank in wordpress soon :)

So I am currently planning to maintain both the blogs :) My new blogaddress is http://vardhman.wordpress.com