Ipod Rival from Microsoft, any chances ??

Once again the news websites and blogs are flooded with yet another Microsoft's product named Zune. This is supposed to be a Ipod Rival and is expected to take away Apple's share. As far as I am concerned, I don't see any chance for such a device to succeed, Apple Ipod is all about hype and people mostly buy it for its name rather than its need. Yup some ppl might genuinely be interested in watching movies on a ipod video or playing songs while travelling long distance but other merely use it as a status symbol. (Not that I don't intend to buy one too, but thats not the point ;))

Not that there aren't any Mp3 players currently in the market, ppl just don't buy them. Creative and others had already introduced portable mp3 before IPod came but somehow things didn't work well, possibly iTunes was missing. Hopefully M$ will have a competitor for iTunes too, then there should be some kind of Music store, so a lot of things have to succeed before such a device can be called successful. Creating as much hype as Apple has about IPod/iTunes is much more difficult compared to creating a good hardware to solve the task at hand.

Recently there was lot of hype regarding a device or project called Origami. Now I find it difficult to remember its name and I have no idea if that device actually came to Market or not. I guess its safer to wait and see the competitor arrive rather than predicting lots of product getting killed (Ipod Killer etc nouns are too common these days).

The 2nd CVIT party

The second CVIT party was organized yesterday (23 July). Thanks to the organizers we had loads of fun and masti and the time (overall 2:30 to 11:55 PM) was spent in an unforgettable way. We went to this place called Dhola-ri-Dhani. Numbers well around 80 (of course very large thinking it was just a lab party). The exact reason for this party is unknown to most but we do have lots of possible reasons and a combination of them could be considered the actual reason. Firstly its a welcome to new joiners of the lab, the honours student. Secondly may be a small farewell kinda for those who are leaving, and Finally the success of ACCV and of the good news from many conferences(in the sense of paper acceptance).

Photos might give a better idea of what was there in the party. These Photos represent a very high sampled set of overall Fun.

Getting Started...
This one is from CVIT gali (street)









In the Bus




Thanks to the Faculty for the great Party




On the entrance


And on those the Punjabi beats, how can we control ourselves



The pupet show (quite interesting)


Visesh Showing something invisible to us :)



Boating



After the Shollay Show (resting on charpai(s))


DJ before Dinner




Dinner




Post Dinner Fun




(More photos are expected to be available tomorrow)

Some problem with ISP Blogspot urls not resolved..

If you visit the blog and see some errors like Connection timed out etc, it must be due to some problem our ISP has in handling data coming from/going to blogspot.

It has been denying us direct access to blogspot blogs for almost a week or so now. I hope the problem will be fixed soon.

FlickrExport (Linux) Update

Couple of bugs fixed(how come there were only so few of them ?).
The latest version from the SVN supports export of the digikam tags along with the extra tags given in the plugin window.
The "Annoying Popup" ;) displaying username on each instantiation of the plugin is now removed. User name is displayed at the bottom of the window in a box called "User Details", can be easily changed from there.



Hope Digikam + Flickr lovers enjoy the plugin. ( I am not sure if any other application user find it interesting too.)

Very soon the photoset support would be in too!

No I didn't quit blogging (yet?)

Was not blogging for quite some time, earlier it was lack of any good ideas or stuff and later (for past 2 weeks or so) got busy with a paper submission.

Last few days have seen lots of activity in our lab, almost all ppl working most of the times. On one particular day during logging out, I was kinda surprized to see that our lab was open for three consecutive days without break.
Last 3 days have been a different experience as I reached new personal records of sleeping less and lesser. Was not intentional as it never has been but was needed to finish of the work and the sleep was lost in tension probably. Now, its time to relax for 1-2 days , watch some movies, attend some treates and catch up with new friends who arrived in Hyderabad or are coming soon.