Changing Indian Lifestyle and still ignorant companies

I could have written it as Improving Indian lifestyle but it is actually a more subjective thing to decide. Yesterday while checking out the availability in trains I witnessed a slightly different statistics, unlike earlier times, these days its most difficult to get the costlier AC tickets and Sleeper class tickets are rather easily available.

Its nothing but an evidence of the improving lifestyle of an average Indian. Nowadays ppl are preferring better facilities for little higher costs. for e.g as air travel is becoming more and more accessible with so many new airlines coming in to picture, more and more ppl are now travelling by air. It was difficult for a middle-class person to imagine travelling by air some 2-3 years ago and now its slowly become the default mode of communication.

This trend gives a little idea of how nice the market potential is in India currently. Ppl are getting lot of money and they are ready to spend it for a better life style. If some company like Apple or Sony is still missing Indian markets for their hardware (read IMac, PS3 etc), they are soon going to regret when someone else pics up these markets.

Mobile phone vendors like Motorola have rightly benefitted from the market by introduction of new phones for affordable prices. Only time will tell when these ignorant companies recognize India as a consumer market too rather than only being a cheap labour house.

Orkut Rocks!!!

After being unsucessful in my search of old school friends for so long, Orkut finally came to help. In past few days I met almost 10 old friends on orkut and got connected to many others through these 10.

10 might seem like a small number but the fact to be noted is that these ppl are all from only 2 out of the 7 different schools I studied in before coming to IIIT. Now the contact chain is getting longer and longer...

What is amazing is that most of these ppl have heard about IIIT Hyderabad and they know that IIIT H is the institute to be in!!! It feels so good to hear great about ur Institute from outsiders. Things have changed drastically over years IIIT is making its name.

In other news, 4 papers got accepted in ICPR from IIIT. We had a party and it was great fun. Link to pramad's post for the same.

Recent events/updates

Getting little time to blog, so here is one post related to some recent events:

Being 22: Yep, Another year of great experiences ends and adds one year of seniority to me :). I Don't plan to be comprehensive about last years nice things but it has been great, with sister's marriage, quite a few home trips including first Air trip, becoming part of a big community of OSS developers, great jobs offers, a number of new friends, a lot of fun and other stuff. [Will link to posts related to them later]. Hoping similar interesting stuff for this year too :)







Farewell: We have recieved farewell from our sub-juniors. Already mention about it but here are some snaps :)

International characters on Us-English Keyboard

While writing any foreign language like Français, Portuguese or Espanôl, we need many accented characters. Since US english keyboard doesn't have special keys for this ppl usually find workarounds using combination of keys or by cutting pasting from written text.

I came across a nice article on how to use these characters on a normal US-En keyboard. The steps for this are briefly as follow (they apply to Linux and KDE only)

1) Go to KMenu->Control Center-> Regional And Accessiblity-> Keyboard Layout.
2) Add US-International layout to the set of layouts, after enabling keyboard layouts.(Do not remove the normal english layout)
3) Now in the panel you will notice an icon showing keyboard layout (only if you have multiple of them )
4) When ever composing internal language text, select the US-internaltion layout.
5) For entering short accent keys like
á é ú í ó just press the single quote key before pressing the alphabet
6) for grave accent keys like
â ê ô û î press the exponent key (Shift and key containing number 6 on main board) before pressing the alphabet. Similarly for getting characters like ü ö ë ï ä you can press Shift + " + key(u,o etc.)
7) For typing keys like cedilla ç press Right ALT+Comma
8) For quote ' " you will need to press space key after the normal keys (since they are behaving as modifier key now)

There are many more characters that can be obtained using further combinatios of keys. Some internal of these key mapping are stored in the files in the directory: /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/

For command line you may use this to set the keyboard layout to us_intl and back to us-en

setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us_intl -variant basic
setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us

Mahaveer Jayanti 2006

Today (11 April) is Mahaveer Jayanti. As usual for last 3-4 years, I went to temple with some friends. Its usually one of the two visits I make to the temple in a year, so Its of importance atleast to me.
(These photos are of Jain temple at Aagapur, Hyderabad, India)


I came to know that many who searched Mahaveer Jayanti 2005 ended up going to flickr photos uploaded by me. I though ppl would like to have some more for this year, so here are them. Some Jain temples are really beautiful and you must check them out.








Since I myself don't know much about Janism so I wudn't say anything further, but there is this interesting thing in the temple, which the notes on the photo(flickr) should tell you how to use it.

On our trip, we also went to Karanchi Bakery, this was the first time I was there and I am sure its going to get regular visits from now on. Also visited this Agrawala sweet shop while coming back. The shop provide 100% pure veg stuff: cakes, pasteries etc. Some preview should be helpfull :) [No I am not paid for adverstising for them, but yes the option is open] [and Yes I do love sweets a lot]