Thoughts

One for the road.

- The Diwali lighting in Surat is fabulous. Why don't they do that in Pune? Major commercial buildings are all covered with bright lights. The long flyover from Surat station is decorated, the entire city seems to be clothed in bright lights.

- There are more flyovers in Surat than in Pune.

- The roads are in surprisingly good condition even after those floods in August this year.

- Surat has bigger and better roads than Pune. Can't help, but compare.
What are our politicians doing? Granted that Surat is a rich municipal corporation with textile, diamond, and chemical industries; but still the administration is doing work. I've not seen public lighting in Pune in Diwali, except at Shaniwarwada.

- Why does Pune's infrastructure suck? Will Pune ever have good roads? Leave Hyderabad or Bombay, even Surat has better infrastructure than Pune.

A Thought For Today in Gujarati

ગુજારાતિ મા એક કહાવત છે

નિષાન ચુક માફઃ નહિ નીચુ નિષાન

Download Firefox 2.0

Download Firefox 2.0 for Windows - English U.S. - Filesize: 5.6MB.

Diwali Wishes

Reading

19-10-2006
- To read: Google Website Optimizer

- Search Engine Dictionary
- IAMAI: Internet and Mobile Association of India
- PDF: State of Search Engine Marketing in India. Sept. 2006. File size: 1.5MB.
- Lyrics of One of these days

Nice One

A sensuous 2-liner. The beauty of words woven with grace.

काम नहीं नशे मे जाड़े की गुलाबी रातें
और अगर तेरी जवानी भी मिला दी जाए
Continue reading the verses.

kam nahiN nashe me jaaDe ki gulaabi raatein
aur agar teri javaani bhi mila di jaaye

These pink winter nights are no less intoxicating
And if your youth and beauty is mixed with it

Haiku Morning

A 5-7-5 Haiku on a Saturday morning.

Vanilla ice cream delights tooth
Cool breeze on a hot October morning
There's always pain before Wisdom

Type in Hindi with Quillpad Input Method Editor

Type in Hindi with Quillpad Web-based input method editor. Type Hindi words in English and get the output in Hindi (Devanagari) script. See an example below.



Tachyon Technologies' Quillpad also provides Web-based writing and text editing interfaces for South Indian regional languages Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam.

This beta works best with IE6 that's what a message box says on accessing Quillpad's Web site, however it worked fine with Firefox too, as seen above.

Thanks for sharing the link, Sudhir.

Beautiful Marathi 4-liner

मला ही मराठी चारोळि खुप आवड्लि. I liked this Marathi charoli (4-liner).

मी आहेच जरा असा
एक्टा एक्टा राह्णारा
वाळ्क पान सुद्धा गळ्ताना
तन्मय्ताने पाह्णारा
~ From Chango's Meemaza.

An English transliteration of the above Marathi 4-liner.

mee aahech jharaa asaa
ekTa ekTa raahNaara
vaaLk paan suddha gaLtaana
tanmaytaane paahNaara

An English translation of the above Marathi 4-liner. I welcome suggestions to improve on the Marathi to English translation below.

I am a bit like that
lonely and to myself
(watching) even a dry leaf wither and fall
with rapt delight (with an engrossing look)

* tanmay means engrossed.

Marathi Charoli (4-Liners)

मला वाट्लच होत मला पाहिल्यावर
तु मागे वळुन पाह्शील
वळुन पाह्ण्याइत्कि
तु नक्किच माझि राह्शील
~ Chandrashekhar Gokhale 'Chango's' Meemaza.

Download Devanagari font AkrutiDevPriya to read poetry on Meemaza.com.

An English transliteration of the above Marathi charoli 4-liner.

mala vaTlach hot
mala paahilyavar
tu maage vaLun paahsheel
vaLun paahnyaitki tu nakkich majhi raahsheel

An English translation of the above Marathi charoli 4-liner.

I always knew
On seeing me
You would turn to look
Your 'turning to look (at me)' would always be a part of me

खुप्दा माझा एक्लेपणा
माझ्यशि बोल्का होतो
मग कोणि एक शब्द जरि बोल्ल
तर त्याचाहि गल्का होतो
~ Chandrashekhar Gokhale 'Chango's' Meemaza.

An English transliteration of the above Marathi charoli 4-liner.

khupda maza eklepana
mazyashi bolka hoto
mag koni ek shabd jari bol..l
tar tyachahi galka hoto

An English translation of the above Marathi charoli 4-liner.

Many a times my loneliness
Speaks to me
Then when someone speaks even a word
That too gives goosebumps

Suggestions to improve the translation are most welcome.

Man Booker Prize 2006

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss wins the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006.

Current Wallpaper

My current desktop wallpaper.

Click image to view full size. Resolution: 1024 by 768, file size: 212KB. Image from InterfaceLift.



A Thought for Today

નિશાન ચુક માફ, નહિ માફ નીચુ નિશાન
This is in Gujarati, written with Baraha Input Method Editor.

nishaan chuk maaf, nahin maaf neechu nishaan
Missing an aim is acceptable, having a low aim isn't.

Beautiful Lines

A Thought For Today

होने दो वहि जो क्शन कहे
सीमा वहि जो मन कहे

hone do wahi jo kshan kahe
seemaa wahi jo mann kahe

Let it happen as the moment demands
The only boundaries are those of the mind

The only boundaries are those that we set for ourselves.

Google to acquire YouTube

Google takes a step forward in its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful by agreeing to acquire popular video-sharing Web site YouTube for U.S. $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction that is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2006.

This acquisition will combine Google's advertising reach with YouTube's user base and provide opportunities to multimedia content owners to reach a bigger audience.

Google + YouTube = More reach + More ads + More money + More innovations + More information.

Congratulations, YouTube. All the best, Google.

Related Links:
- YouTube
- GOOG is trading at $429 on NASDAQ

Note: USD $1.65 billion is approximately Rs. 7519 crores.
1 crore = 100 lakh = 10 million.

What's an article or a blog post on the Internet without a hyperlink?

Writing an article or a blog post on the Internet and not linking to Web sites mentioned in it is like writing a Restaurant review in a newspaper and not providing the address of the place to visit. Most Indian newspapers on the Internet follow this anomaly of not linking to Web sites they mention in their articles.

View an example here. This is an article from Mumbai-based newspaper DNAIndia where they've mentioned about blogs popular in the Indian blogosphere but haven't linked to any of them to enable readers to view those sites.

Each hyperlink provides an identity on the Internet, and would you meet people in real life (IRL) and not know their names? Knowledge shared is knowledge gained and what use is an idea or a thought that remains in isolation? We may as well let it out to mingle with a hundred other minds and ideas and let it find its destiny, which may or may not be the path that we've set for it. That's the beauty of cyberspace, isn't it?

A Thought For Today

You affect the world by what you browse.
~ Tim Berners-Lee

Related Link:
- Quotes by Tim Berners-Lee.

Never miss an opportunity to add a hyperlink to a write-up, a newspaper article, or a blog post on the World Wide Web.

Google India Zeitgeist for August 2006

English German dictionary and legal dictionary were the most popular search queries on Google India in August 2006. Wikipedia and WWE were also among the popular search queries, along with the usual searches for celebrities and airfares.

Read a list of fifteen popular search queries on Google India in August this year.

Fun with Words

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow is a sentence that uses all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. It is a pangram. A pangram is a piece of text that includes each letter of the alphabet. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is a popular pangram used to test fonts, as it contains each letter of the English alphabet.

Here's an interesting list of words that are misspelled most often and a collection of pangrams and other word oddities.

I searched for the above 'Sphinx of black ...' string after I read Vardan's status message on Gtalk that had these words. Thanks, Vardan.

Current Playlist

My current Winamp playlist.



Current read: Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games.

Give a Mosaic effect to images

Give a Mosaic effect to images using the Brush Strokes and Pixelate filters in Adobe Photoshop.

1. Open the image in Adobe Photoshop
2. Duplicate the layer from Layer -> Duplicate Layer
3. Apply the Brush Strokes filter to the duplicate layer
Filter -> Brush Strokes -> Accented Edges -> Width (2), Brightness (38), Smoothness (5) -> OK
4. Apply the Pixelate Mosaic filter
Filter -> Pixelate -> Mosaic -> Cell size 15 square -> OK
5. Apply the Sharpen filter thrice.
Filter -> Sharpen -> Sharpen
6. Set the Blending mode to Soft Light
7. Merge the two layers
Layer -> Merge Layers (Ctrl+E)
8. File -> Save As -> .jpeg

Mosaic effect applied to Rahul Dravid's image.

Rahul Dravid leads India in the Champions Trophy cricket tournament.



Schedule of India's matches in the Champions Trophy 2006:
- Sun., Oct 15 v. England at Jaipur
- Thu., Oct 26 v. 2nd Qualifying team at Ahmedabad
- Sun., Oct 29 v. Australia at Mohali

The semi-final matches take place on the 1st and 2nd Nov. at Mohali and Jaipur with the final at Brabourne Stadium, Mumbai on the 5th of November.

Schedule of Champions Trophy from 7th Oct to 5th Nov 2006 in India.

Related link on this blog. Follow the Champions Trophy on Cricinfo.

The image below provides a view of the Mosaic effect.

Image Editing: Diffuse Glow Look

Add a diffuse glow look to an image by applying the Overlay blending mode and Gaussian Blur filter in Adobe Photoshop.

1. Open the image in Adobe Photoshop.
2. Duplicate the layer from Layer -> Duplicate Layer
3. Set the Blending mode of the duplicate layer to Overlay
4. Add a Gaussian Blur filter to the duplicate layer.
Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur -> Radius 0.2 pixels -> OK
5. Merge the layers from Layer -> Merge Layers (Ctrl+E)
6. File -> Save As -> .jpeg file -> Quality 12 -> OK

British actress Keira Knightley of Pirates of the Caribbean, King Arthur, and Bend It Like Beckham fame.

Original and Diffuse Glow look.


Original image of Keira Knightley from the archives of Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

Ping Google BlogSearch

Now there's an easy way to inform Google BlogSearch of updates and changes to your blog. Google launches a pinging service for blogs. Now you can ping Google BlogSearch to notify it of content updates on your blog.

Publish a post and ping Google BlogSearch to inform it to check your blog for updates. You may ping Google BlogSearch as often as the content of your blog changes. That means, you may ping Google BlogSearch after each new post.

For example: I will publish this post and ping Google BlogSearch to inform it to check for new content on my blog.

And there it is, the result of pinging Google BlogSearch to notify it of new content. This post has been indexed within two minutes of being posted online. See image below.



The URL to ping Google BlogSearch is http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

Related Links:
- Ping Technorati
- Ping multiple blog search engines with Pingomatic 1-click pinging service.
- Read more about Google BlogSearch Pinging Service

Current Music

चल चले अप्ने घर ऎ मेरे हम्सफ़्र from वोह लम्हे।

Download MP3 of 'chal chale apne ghar' from Woh Lamhe. File size: 3.1MB.

Pencil Sketch of Vidya Balan

Convert a color photograph to a pencil sketch by applying the High Pass Filter and using the Color Dodge and Overlay blending modes in Adobe Photoshop.



Pencil sketch of Vidya Balan.

A Thought For Today

Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn to do things the right way.

A Thought About My City, Pune

A sarcastic thought about my city, Pune.

Pune is a city where people have the time to take a 3-hour afternoon siesta after lunch, but don't have the time to wait 10 seconds at the traffic signal for the lights to turn green.

Many more thoughts, but instead of writing, which would turn to a diatribe, I prefer to follow the traffic rules, as far as possible. At some places like the Cafe GoodLuck signal (to turn right) to J.M. Road from Lakdi Pul, it is impossible, because at any point in time people take it as an open/free right turn.

Photos of Google's NYC Office

A holiday, headphones with good music playing, a fast Internet connection that doesn't snap, and blogging. It's heaven. I wish for the third point to hold true more often.

View pictures of Google's Ninth Avenue, Manhattan, New York City office.

Current Music: GnR - Patience

Search Public Source Code with Google Code Search engine

What's new at Google?

Find public source code from Google Code Search.

Example: "/* Tower of Hanoi */"

Bargains from Indian Shopping Sites on AllIndiaDeals.com

A collection of shopping deals from various Indian e-commerce and shopping Web sites on AllIndiaDeals.com.

Ruby Tutorial

A tutorial on Ruby programming language by Satish Talim.

Dussehra Greetings

Reading

Chaos by design at Google or why speed matters and it is better to be fast, sometimes wrong but wise all the more.

Photoshop: Give an ice cool look to images

Dabbling with Photoshop on a drizzling Sunday evening. Convert a black and white image to an azure ice cool picture.



1. Open the image in Photoshop.

2. Convert it to grayscale.
2a. Convert grayscale to RGB color.

3. Duplicate layer.

4. Change Hue/Saturation settings.
Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation
Hue:200, Saturation:0, Lightness:0 (with the Colorize box checked).

5. Choose Filter -> Distort -> Wave
Set the settings as shown in the image (Figure 1) below. You may click the 'Randomize' button to generate different patterns.

Figure 1: Applying the Wave Filter. Filter -> Distort -> Wave.



6. Choose Blending Mode as 'Linear Burn'

7. Merge the layers (Ctrl+E)

8. Duplicate the merged layer

9. Change Hue/Saturation settings.
Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation
Hue:200, Saturation:0, Lightness:0 (with the Colorize box checked).

10. Choose Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur. See image (Figure 2) below.

Figure 2: Applying the Motion Blur filter in Photoshop. Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur.



11. Choose Blending Mode as Hard Light

12. Save the image as .jpeg with file quality between 10 to 12 for a sharper photo.

13. Actual and converted images placed side by side.

Figure 3: Give an image an ice cool look with Adobe Photoshop.



Related Links:
- Original image from Longines.
- Photoshop help from DailyPhotoshop.

Technorati Tags:
- Photoshop, Aishwarya Rai, Ash, and Ice Cool.

Current Music:
~ Rang De Basanti - Roo-ba-roo