Author: Pradeep

  • I’m on WordPress.org

    It seems my life changes almost every second for either the best or the worst.

    I’m now on my own domain name – pradx.org – thanks to Anbarasan, a guy I’ve known for about a year or so now!

    1. Pradeep’s Blog – link – RSS feed

    2. Wiki – link

  • From WordPress to Blogger

    I’m moving over to Blogger – http://pradx.blogspot.com

    You have to change the RSS feeds to – http://pradx.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

    To the WordPress community: It’s been a great 3 years blogging here and I’m not going away anywhere. Once I have the time and resources to setup my own website, I will definitely opt for a WordPress blog.  Now, I just need to have access to more features than WordPress allows me and I want lesser passwords/user ids to remember.

    Goodbye!This blog and related accounts will be deleted in1 year!!

  • Orhan Pamuk’s Snow

    (I’m a bit late on posting this)

    These are a few things the book made me think about –

    1. Technology and East-West interactions have only deepened the “East-West Divide”. Both reflects the other negatively.
    2. It is really difficult for a guy to understand a girl even if she spells out everything for him. They probably synergise at the level of the heart. O, and it’s probably time for looking for a girl for me too.
    3. Being an atheist in the East is probably difficult. Everyone finds their God, even atheists. Western definitions don’t apply.

    Besides that, I thought the book was really well written and was well expressed. Reading about Orhan Pamuk on Wikipedia and later on his website, probably made it more meaningful.

  • A visit to my grandma’s friend and 60 year old mechanical texts

    I went to meet my grandparents after a long week this Sunday (16/03). My grandma told me about her friend, whose husband died recently after being afflicted with Alzheimers. He was a draftsman and a mechanical engineer from the late 1940s- early 1950s. He had some books that the wife wanted to pass on to other students if it was useful to them or give it away as scrap. Was I interested in taking a look at the books? Sure!

    When we got there she was still in the process of handling the legal formalities of her husband’s death. The legal death of a person takes longer, perhaps than the physical death of a person.

    She brought out the books from a shelf and laid it on the table for me to look. I fished out these books that I mention below and also a set of study materials from the International Home Studies and various society booklets.

    1. Machinery’s Hand Book (for Machine Shop and Drafting Room), The Industrial Press, New York(sole distributors for the British Empire) – 1944 (cost mentioned – Rs. 33)
    2. Theoretical Mechanics – S. Targ – Foriegn Languages Publishing House, Moscow – Rs. 4.25
    3. Applied Mechanics for Engineers – J. Duncan – MacMillan & Co., London – 1949
    4. Applied Mechanics – David Allan Low – Longmans Green & Co., London – 1913 (there was no other date – I’m not sure if it was the co establishment date or the publication date)
    5. Machine Design Construction and Drawing (Book Production War Economy Standards) – Henry J Spooner – Longmans Green & Co, London – 1944
    6. Workshop Technology I (Book Production War Economy Standards) – W A J Chapman – Edward Arnold & Co. – 1945

    It is at times like these that I kick myself mentally for not having a digital camera or a phone camera. The books mentioned above despite the years were well maintained. It’s more probably because of better publication practises than because of better maintainence methods. She also showed me a tyre her husband had designed for Firestone Tyres, the company her husband had worked for. She also showed me the table top calendar that she had made for her husband with day, date, month and year.

    Also, for 60 year old textbooks, most of the content there could be as well used for my own course today with very little change.

  • Registering for Wikimania – Waiting for the email

    (Written on 16/3/08 – still stands correct)

    It may probably be Engineering Student’s Fever (ESF – last minute rush to complete assignments, projects etc after lounging around till then) but I waited till the 15th to get myself registered for Wikimania 2008 at Alexandira, Egypt. No amount of waiting got me that confirmation email which would have enabled me to register SEDSWiki for Wikimania. Maybe we could do it next year with a more developed wiki? Who knows?

    For practise runs of the more important conferences, try talking at the local BarCamps, that keep happening in many of the cities around the world. The sidebar on the BarCamp page has a list of the latest happening BarCamps all across the world. If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, you should probably wake up and read this.

  • BarCamp MU 3

    I missed most of the morning show of BarCampMU3 because I had to rush to college to pay the exam fees that would allow me to sit for the exams for my sixth semester.

     The first session post-lunch was on Photovoltaic technology for cost reduction. This was presented by Gaurav Shah, who is about to register a start-up soon called Electrik Solutions, which is hoping to dabble in the photovoltaic (PV) technology markets. He tells us that while manufacturing costs are about to be lowered with the coming of the third generation of PV cells, India is still stuck in the first. So, Electrik will first concentrate on building the second generation PV cells in India. He’s looking for electric engineers who would like to dabble in PV technology.

    Amit Gogna gave the second talk on the first implemented pilot projects of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) programme in India. The Indian Government refused to backup the OLPC programme, when it was offered the deal that was also offered to other governments, thinking it might produce a less than $100 laptop in India. Reliance ADA is the one that is stimulating this pilot study in a village called Khairat, near Mumbai. The best part of the presentation was probably the photo-op session that the laptop got after the presentation. Everyone has heard of the laptop, no one has actually seen it. According to Amit, the laptop, if brought to India today would cost about $205 [≈ Low-end bicycle]. He also called for more help on developing the applications for the laptop based on the Indian scenario.

    The third talk in the afternoon was given by a Swiss travelling to Mumbai for one of his projects, Renaud Richardet. He gave a presentation on the community aspects of open source. He talked a lot about how to select mailing lists and on looking at the reward systems. He’s working on an CMS project called Apache Lenya. 

    The last presentation of the day was given by Rahul Gupta, an IIT-B alumni, working on a start-up – Vakow! The name is inspired from a R D Burman song. It is something you should check out yourself to see how it works. He probably put it best for the people who were around there, when he said – “Vakow is for SMSs what Flickr is for photos”.

    The last major announcement was about the BarCampMumbai and the first BlogCampMumbai being held in the IIT-B campus on 29th March 2008.

  • IdeaMine – Self Sufficient Co-operative Housing Societies

    Like in any other Indian city, Mumbai follows the co-operative housing society model for most residential needs of the middle-class families. The focus of today’s idea is a system that reduces the eco-footprint of this unit of Indian living.

    Let’s begin with electiricity. Although corridor and compound lighting does not consume too much electricity and may contribute only to a small percentile of the society’s consumption, it does make sense in installing solar panels and LED or CFL bulbs in their place to reduce their long term costs. It might also be worth checking out a model of a windmill on top of all those cell phone towers that we see springing on top of every new building today.

    Going up to water. The BMC recently announced on a system of water meter based taxing. Reducing the amount of water used by each housing society may thus come into focus. In a society, water is generally used for cleaning vehicles, compounds, staircases and for water gardens. For the water for this purpose, our eyes should go to the septic tanks for the waste water from the bathrooms, toilets and kitchen and wash basins. The water needs to be seperated out of the solid waste and delivered to a seperate tank. After treating this water appropriately, it might be used for all the above purposes. This may also be used to water balcony gardens.

    The systems needs to be divised in such a way that one person can manage most of the systems. Besides conserving water and electricity consumption of a housing society, it also provides an employment oppertunity for a person and perhaps shelter for a family.

    Commercial farming should be studied and implemented in housing societies, if possible.  This will probably be the income source which can be used to pay person’s salary and be partly used for maintainence and repair cost of the system.

    Implementing this system should work on reducing the energy and water cost per housing society.Multiply this with the number of housing societies in Mumbai and it might probably eliminate the need for new power and water projects for Mumbai. In the long run, hopefully, the beneficiary will be the citizen of Mumbai.

    Institutes that may research these systems:

    • engineering colleges: windmill + cell tower system, solar cell technologies, water filtration processes
    • management colleges – business models, project implementation, advertising and packaging
    • agricultural colleges – study of possibility of commercial farming in Mumbai

    (This is an idea shared under the Creative Commons License, like all content on this blog)

  • The Move to MySpace

    I had an older account on MySpace which was linked to my extinct Hotmail account. Gmail is just eons ahead of Hotmail and it didn’t make sense to keep the Hotmail account just for the sake of an old MySpace account, that I didn’t even use.

    I accessed my old MySpace account just to see what has changed after watching this tour of MySpace taken by Robert Scoble and was surprised to see that they had a beta Indian version for all its Indian users ergo still based in US and subject to their own laws and conditions.

    Thankfully, you can now delete the Hotmail account. Earlier, I believe it was to expire after a 45 day no-use gap, which didn’t make sense. Kudos to Microsft and the Hotmail team for that feature.

    I delted my old MySpace account and then deleted the linked Hotmail account. Opened a new Gmail based account on MySpace and signalled the end of my shift from Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail to Gmail.

    After my first few days digging around MySpace, I feel its a lot better than both Orkut and Facebook. There’s this sense of migration from one SNS to another but over the next year or so, I think I’ll put more of my heart into MySpace and Facebook than on anything else.

  • Google Books

    Google Books — This is a new Google feature that I found in the drop-down menu on the top of Gmail.

    I love the fact that everything that I might eternally want is under one Google Account – Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, Reader, GTalk and Orkut. These are the Google features I use most. I am getting around to using Google Calendar, Maps and even Picasa to complete the one id shift. I still dont like Blogger account though and prefer my WordPress account over it.

    I read a ton of books every month – both for school and for pleasure. I also listen to a lot of music – mostly over radio and from borrowed CDs from friends. These are two things that I don’t find on Google…yet. As of now, most of my book preferences etc are loaded on LibraryThing and I am beginning to enjoy the music on MySpace.

    LibraryThing has a really cool cataloging system and a really cool way to add books. What it partly fails is when you stumble on rare works by Indian authors but it has a manual add way of going around it. It also has a somewhat dumb interface. What also makes it dumb are its social networking features.

    What would make me switch from LibraryThing to Google Books? First, an equally cool tagging system. Second, a good search feature — knowing Google, it might work on this. Third, a really cool way to share this library with friends.

    I have just given Books the first look over and am looking into the details. More on this soon…

  • The Week of the Results

    I came to know about results yesterday. Posting them for public view was one way of making me feel bad without being able to do anything about. Has been removed now.

    I spent most of last night thinking on latest strategies to tackle the menace but soon realised that this will continue exam after exam, semester after semester. So, immediate reaction systems might tackle the current sentiment of anger but doesn’t really look at the long term disaster/concerns.

    After thinking all that philosophy babble, I’m going to settle down and complete all assignments/write-ups pending this week and won’t be concentrating on ’studying’ this week. Next week is the right time to think of something much more long term.