Waves

Kalari a.k.a Kalaripayattu is a form of traditional martial art that is believed to have originated in Kerala and then spread slowly across the world. Legend says it that, when Saint Parasurama (an incarnation of Lord Vishnu) threw the axe into the Arabian sea, the water receeded until the point of the axe and Kerala was born. To protect this land, Parasurama taught Kalari to 21 saints across the state who have been spreading their knowledge through dedicated disciples since then.

I have been learning Kalari since the last 2 weeks. I have attended five classes so far & I must say that its absolutely great. The best part of learning Kalari is that its fun. And the most basic lesson you get to learn is how to control your mind and get it to a meditative state, where you don’t have to “do” anything and everything happens automatically. Well, you have to be there to understand what I mean

There are essentially tons of other ways to keep yourself fit and this is one of those amazing pieces that very little people get to learn, very very few get to expertise level and even fewer become true masters. I found an interesting website when I was searching for Kalari videos. The website is http://www.kalari.in/. Go visit it and definitely check out their videos section. Its truly amazing!

Simple dinners are awesome. One such dinner was what I had today. My mom used to make all the varieties of podis like paruppu podi (dal powder - roughly speaking), karuvepalai podi etc. on a time to time basis and we used to devour them. Podi sadham is very famous in my home. We used to mix rice & podi along with gingely oil a.k.a nallenai & then eat that mixture. Gingely oil can also be replaced with ghee.

Today’s spread was very simple. We had piping hot boiled rice, few podis, avakka oorga (mango pickle) and then butter milk to finish off.

First we have a very small serving of the mango pickle near the corner of the plate. Then, a few rounds of piping hot rice is served & a spoonful or two of ghee or gingely oil. The aroma that starts wafting now … OMG !! its awesome! And on top of this, you have to put two or three teaspoons of podi, mix well and before you start eating a morsel, touch the avakka oorga with the tip of your index finger (meaning - konjam oorga thottuko) & then eat Now, close your eyes and relish the moment. The mixture of piping hot rice, podi, oorga and ghee will make you go crazy.

After a few rounds of this combo, comes more sadham or rice that is eaten with butter milk (making butter milk with perfect taste and proper thickness is a skill in itself). For the best effect, mix a small quantity of rice with lots of butter milk e.g. 1 portion of rice with 2 portions of butter milk. After you have mixed this well, add a few drops of the mango flavoured oil, taken from the avakka oorga container. Mix this well and oru kattu kattu !!

Enjoy

One of my juniors in college named Satish has written this small wonderful piece on Ruby (programming language).

Ruby makes a programmer smile
even when he’s using while
all the if’ and else’ and do’
reduces the work you do
kernel methods work like charm
conventions make work a form
all the while you reap the fruits
everyone gives java the boots!

Cool ! Ain’t it?

I had a left a few important files on my USB drive last weekend and was looking for the drive everywhere; but couldn’t find it. Suddenly, I remembered that it was in one of the trousers worn over the weekend. But then, that trouser was completely washed twice, dried and even ironed as of now. Still not sure as to whether the USB drive will be present, I checked the pockets of the trouser and voila! It was there.

The connector looked like it had got rusted. But not sure as to whether to use this, I connected it to this very computer and the blue LED started blinking . The drive was still functional. Amazing! It survived two rounds of washing, rinsing, drying and then ironing. It is a 1GB Transcend drive that I purchased about one and half years back.

Nice USB stick! Nice Company!

Ok. I don’t know whether its really free or not. But I got this link from one of my colleagues http://www.redefineyourreality.com/downloadebooks.htm. If you have been reading Steve Pavlina, you will be able to understand the contents of the ebooks that are present for download in the link above.

Have fun!

In singara Chennai dharboose (aka watermelon) is an amazing fruit that the whole city looks forward to in the month of March-April-May. So it was this one fine afternoon I was driving back home after roaming around the city for a lot of Govt. related tasks. Throat went absolutely dry. Front and back portions of the oesophagus looked as if they were going to stick to each other. Some more time outside … and I would have surely collapsed with hunger & thirst. That’s when we came across a nice stall on G.N.Chetty Road. If you go through G.N.Chetty Road, you will notice that outside the walls of the Ramakrishna Mission School ground, there is a huge fruit shop which sell the seasonal fruits. So, even if you don’t know what fruits are good for this season, a visit to this place will prove useful

So there I was … hungry and thirsty. For 5 bucks, he cut across a huge slice from a big melon, its juice flowing out & its fine red flesh beckoning me to take a bite at it :D. As soon as the 1st piece went inside, it was an awesome feeling on the throat. I could feel the oesophagus expanding to accomodate the red juicy melon & contracting again. It felt amazing. The cooling effect that it caused enroute to the stomach was something superb that you have to experience with peace of mind. Otherwise, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will miss it. Followed by this, to wash out your semi-dry throat there can be nothing better than the good-old, healthy & natural ilaneer (aka tender coconut). Ilaneer is available at just about every place in the city during all seasons. So even if you are unable to feel and eat dharboose, try drinking ilaneer on a hot afternoon. Pick the one which has lot of ‘vazhukkai’. It will conveniently keep you away from the deadly combination of hunger & thirst surely for the next hour or two.

If you are thirsty on the road, instead of going for that bottle of Coke or Slice, go for ilaneer or for fruit juices. It’s good for health and at the same time, will quench your thirst.

Quite some time back, BSNL - the largest telecom provider in India - started out with a small feature. The feature was to send the corresponding month’s telephone bill by email. They also started out with another feature where we can pay the bills online. Both of them working properly is out of question!

Since the last 2 months, I have been receiving a peculiar bill by email :-). The pending amount for the bill reads as “-1″.  Check the screenshot below of last month’s bill. I’m surprised by how such a blunder could be committed and no one checks it. The printed bill comes properly though.

Yay! so…. as the title of this post suggests, I’m moving to Hyderabad to attend Sun Tech Days. This is the 4th time I’m attending the event & I must say that it is a perfectly managed event with great sessions and hands-on-labs. There are some interesting labs this time; notably the ones on Java ME.

That aside, from the agenda, the sessions do not look as great as they were last time. But we actually do not know until we attend them. I’m planning to attend the ones on netbeans, mobility and a few SOA related stuff. Get the agenda here. If wifi is available at the venue, I will try to live blog the event here using my brand new device

The event is happening tomorrow morning at 9am. For more details, check out this link. If you are coming, do drop by and say a hi

Hey friends, lots of people have been asking me why I have two separate blogs (tech and non-tech), while I could have them both in the same place. I would like to answer that in 2 ways:

1. Both the blogs are in the same place. All the posts in the proper order can be viewed at http://www.aswinanand.com/blog.
2. Subdomains such as http://blog.aswinanand.com/ and http://tech.aswinanand.com/ exist for backward compatibility.

Long back, when I started blogging, while many readers enjoyed reading my blog, some of them didn’t like the tech content in between. Hence, I moved the tech content to another blog. Finally, when blogger for domains came in, my tech and non-tech blogs became available at the links mentioned above. Hence, for those users who had subscribed to this blog, I didn’t want them to lose out.

So, the actual blog url is http://www.aswinanand.com/blog and the tech and non-tech blog show contents from the space, just separated by tags. This, along with the magic of htaccess and 1 php file, many things can be changed so that the permalinks will be available in a better fashion. Moreover, when I want to do a post in both the tech and non-tech blogs (like this one), I can just add the 2 tags to this post and they are available in both the blogs. Change the post once and the change is visible in both the blogs (if you visit them separately). Configuring a mobile client for the same is very easy and all this can be done in a single space

When this blog pings certain links after an update is made (like technorati etc.), the blog url goes as http://www.aswinanand.com/blog and not blog.aswinanand.com or tech.aswinanand.com. Therefore, when someone is redirected by search engine results, they will just visit the full blog and not the other ones How’s that?

When template is changed, the change is visible all throughout and looks very uniform. So…. that’s the reason for both the blogs being “virtually separate” hehe…

Yep! it’s true. The news is out. I purchased a brand new Nokia E51. The device has not yet been listed on the Nokia Asia site as of 4 days ago. Support activities don’t accept E51 as a model. Even many mobile shops in Chennai do not know about a device called E51. It was first released world wide on September 2007 according to gsmarena.com and its specs arrived on my rss reader just a few days ago To tell about the device, its truly awesome! Battery life comes close to 2 and a half days, which is pretty good for a smart phone. It is a Series 60 3rd edition phone with feature pack 1, running Symbian OS v9.1. Supports lots of applications and most importantly, supports many of the latest Java ME APIs. This means that, I can now try a whole new range of applications which was not possible using my old phone.

Since E51 is supposedly a “business class” device :P, it supports all modes of connection.. such as bluetooth, infrared, wifi, usb, push-to-talk and the usual sms, ems, email, mms etc. It also supports VoIP over LAN. Therefore, when my office provides wifi, I can use the in-house SIP server to communicate to colleagues directly from my mobile ;-). The screen resolution is very good. It has a light sensor on top left of the phone which adjusts the display on the amount of external light available. The keypad is very comfortable. There are 4 dedicated keys for doing 8 specific operations, 6 of which can be customised. Apart from that, you can configure the 6 quick launch icons available from the phone’s standby mode, not to mention the 2 soft keys. Apart from all this, there is 1 touch access to switch on bluetooth, browser and silent mode. You can therefore, configure 14 icons to suit your needs/interests.

Browser is superb. It’s a port of webkit and displays websites as-they-are on a wifi connection. On normal connections (such as GPRS), the browser s/w tries to tone down the site so that the site is usable. There are zoom features available too (please don’t compare with an iPhone here). It has an inbuilt RSS reader which sucks. Supports an unlimited number of contact entries. The phone’s 2.0 megapixel camera is pretty good. It doesn’t have flash, but it still does a decent job in fairly lit places. On open sunlight, the picture clarity is too good.

It has a decent music player. But considering the fact that it runs Symbian, there are tons n tons of music software available.

However, there are a few features that I miss from this E51. These small features are available on almost all Sony Ericsson phones.

1. Intellisense support when typing messages/emails. I’m not kidding. When you switch on to T9 mode and start typing, a small menu pops up - right next to the cursor - with possible words, on K300i. You can select whichever word you want.
2. New Paragraphs. Opening up new paragraphs in my K300i was a breeze. Not possible in E51.
3. When you receive a call, K300i shows a small icon. That icon denotes the number-type. E.g. You have stored 3 numbers for a contact (home, business & mobile). When the caller calls from a mobile, a small mobile icon is shown. The same is applicable with SMS also. But such a number categorisation is not visible at first sight on this E51. Miss this feature very much. Deciding the type of number from the call is not fun because in most cases, we don’t remember the number at all.

One huge advantage of the phone is that, it’s very sleek and handy. Put it in your upocket and you will forget that the phone even exists. For all the bells and whistles, the phone is slightly on the heavier side. But its ok, considering the fact that it has a whole lot of features. Loud speaker clarity is very good. Calendar is on the nicer side. The best part of calendar is that, if you place something on the todo list and don’t get it done, it screams on the standby, making you feel very guilty … heheh!

It comes with a very powerful 369Mhz, ARM 11 CPU, 96 MB of SDRAM and built-in 130 MB of storage. Supports micro-sd based memory cards upto 4GB. Heap size is unlimited, which means, apps can use any amount of memory, only limited by the device specs. Java ME JAR files can also be of unlimited size. It supports HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which is all set to invade GSM in less than a couple of years.

All-in-all, it’s a very nice package and comes at a very low rate compared to all other phones having these features. Go, drool over the specs :D and let me know if you want any clarifications on any of the features.

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