Category: Personal

  • Floods in Nepal and India – Google’s dedicated pages

    If anyone was planning to watch on the latest in the flood situation in eastern India and Nepal, they can log on to the specially prepared Google page.

  • A Day of Rest

    The whole of last week was spent in writing about and preparing for the Telescopes of India tour. I have got a wonderful response to my initial post both on the blog as well as via email. I thought I’d take a well-deserved break and do some personal stuff.

    I was thinking back to my early days (when I was about 12 years old) I made an imaginary country of which I took over as President called Helix. I got the name from an old geometry box my dad brought me. I had filled up two notebooks worth of paper with various drawings, maps, city plans and what not. Yeah, even had a list of Kings and Presidents from 23 BC. My country is supposed to have started in 23 BC. That came mostly because my room no at the time was 23. BC sounded lot cooler to a 12-year-old than AD. So, that’s when the country started.

    I remember I even designed the capital city. I probably lost the stuff while moving homes. It’d have been great to put such designs online and see if anyone thought it worth anything.

    If you’re curious the capital city was called Hellington.

  • The PRADX Project

    Many of you may have wondered how this ‘Pradx’ came into existence. Clearing out some of the junk, I find that an earlier explanation for it turned out to be wrong. The earlier explanation was that it came as a result of my online names – everything had a prad and then changed into something else (-eep, 2609 etc.). Therefore the x was more like a variable that could be changed to add some new thing and formed the basis of a good url. This explanation is partly true.

    However, this has a deeper root than that. I started coming online only when I was 18 and my first email id was ‘jneeskans’ which pretty much tells you why that explanation doesn’t hold true. It seems that at round about the age of 18 – September, 2004 if you have a thing for precision – I started a small self-improvement project that I labelled the Pradx Project. It was a set of experiments that I could do with myself. The Pradx Project envisaged me engaging online, reading tons of books on philosophy, engaging in sports and a series of what I would now call DIY projects. For the age at which I started this project, it was pretty neat and well thought out. It included elaborate timelines, list of people who could help me with stuff, saving patterns to help me raise funds for the DIY projects, a lot of notes about books I could refer to on Philosophy and even setting out an exercise plan for me to follow until I could grow down from my 85 kgs to the prescribed 76 kgs. In short, it was well thought out. It was secretive and even had the following inscription on the first page –

    The Pradx Project
    Top Secret. Do not go to the next page unless you know I’m dead.

    The reason why I’m telling you this is because I’m going to destroy all of that stuff and I thought an overall entry about it here would be fitting before I put it to rest. It’s a pretty comprehensive document with quite elaborate writings on where I wanted to be and where I was. It pretty much took up a long book of about 200 pages. The darn thing even had footnotes and margin notes. It seems to be revised twice (it’s a practise that I saw in online open source projects that I loved). As of now, I know that it was too ambitious to have been attempted at that time. Heck, its even ambitious now.

    The reason why that project fizzled out was because of lack of money and a stupid understanding of where I was. I spent most of the money on the Net and some of it buying books on Philosophy (The Tao of Physics, Commentaries on Living, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence, The Space Within the Heart).

    But, I like the idea of a Project for self-improvement. It kinda rocks. So, I’m going to restart it 3 years since it was buried in the archives.

    Today is Day 0. The chief idea is cleaning up the stuff that I don’t want now. It’s an idea that’s based on the GTD techniques. But, after that I leave that road and travel on something totally different and perhaps even radical. A weekly post on the Pradx Project can be expected from now on. I am not going to buy a notebook for it this time. Else all I will do is write about the project and not actually do it. The stress is on doing and not writing about doing.

  • High School Reunion

    After about 6 years out of high school, we had our first high school reunion yesterday. I was waiting in anticipation of this event and like in so many previous events, I was totally mum when I actually went there. I think it’s been proved enough times to give a name to it like “Pradeep’s Syndrome” and then actually put it all in a notebook and maybe even apply to patent that name. I’m famous, at last! Every human being’s secret dream!

    Pradeep’s Syndrome can be characterised by extreme preparation for a particular event and then staying so silent at the event that everyone thinks that I lost my capacity to speak.

    Some of the reunion photos are up on Facebook. Me being not so rich enough to afford even a camera phone am happy seeing these second hand records of history. Well, if any of my school mates are reading this: It was nice to have met you and hope we can be silent together when we meet again. Enjoy and all the best.

  • Blog Move

    Just for anyone who didn’t catch this earlier. I have moved to a domain of my own. More trouble for me, I know.

    Here are the RSS feeds for posts and comments  –

    Posts – http://www.pradx.org/feed/

    Feeds – http://www.pradx.org/comments/feed/

    Hope to see you there!

  • 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!!

  • 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.

  • 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)