Today, 14th March or 3/14 as westerners prefer to write the date has been officially declared as the Pi day in US.
Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. And if you have not figured out yet the date 3/14 has the first three digits of the Pi.
I know many people won’t care if Pi or any other mathematical constant gets a day for itself, but I somehow feel it’s cool in a geeky way.
Yesterday, I had a good luck to see Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in person. Bangalore Mirror, organized a function yesterday at the Kanteerva Outdoor stadium. More then 10000 people turned up, and filled the stadium. Sri Sri was calm and inspiring, he has a very interesting meaning for IT: “Inner Transformation”. Later he led everyone to perform Yoga.
TOI Coverage of the event : Link
Today , I started reading Ayn Rand’s famous novel Atlas Shrugged. I intent to finish up reading this book in next 30 days. Going even by the standards that I had just a couple of years ago, this is too much time for a book with just a little over 1000 pages. But I have decided to take 30 days to read the complete book for the following reasons :
1. The book has 30 Chapters 
, A chapter a day for the next 30 days.
2. I have been losing my habit of regular reading, so if I will be reading a little bit every day, I hope to get back to my regular reading habit.
3. The book is like a cult, it is believed to have changed the thinking of many, I personally know a person who decided to quit his job and do something totally different after reading this book. So I want to take some time and sink in the book and try to understand and absorb as much as I can.
This new year I am doing few new things. I bought a vehicle to commute to office which is approximately 4 KMs from my home. I moved into a new apartment this one is lot better then the place I was staying earlier. The place is quite and calm, the house is neat and has more facilities. I also started working on a new venture in my free time, which is very rare as my day job is keeping me too much occupied with a major release due in a months time.
The side project is not too big nor is too technical, but I am sure it would be a good learning experience for me and my friend, with whom I am working on this project. It will give us some insights of user expectations and the way they interact with the interface. It will be a web based utility and I want to do it with DHTML and AJAX to make the interface smooth and cool….that’s when I realized that I suck both in HTML and JavaScript:(. Anyway, I am making some progress and I believe we will be good to go in a months time. That’s much more than my initial estimate…but it’s better late then never….
A few weeks back I got one of my friends to get me a Sony laptop from US of A. The sole reason for buying it from there was the price difference, a hefty 20K INR approx. The model that I got was not available in India and the model with almost the same configuration (but with 1GB lesser RAM) was costing about 64K INR. The laptop is good, with nice screen and decent webcam. Just that the pre-installed Microsoft Windows Vista on it seems to be eating up a lot of resources. I expected the machine to be running realy fast with very low response time and why not, it has 3 GB RAM and Core 2 Duo processor, but Vista like a vampire seems to sucking the life force out of machine.
Still I am ok using the machine with Vista on it atleast for now, as I also have a couple of year old personal Desktop with 1/3rd hardware resources running Ubuntu with excellent performance. I use the desktop extensively. Today I thought of removing some unnecessary things from the laptop to improve the boot time and get some more space on the disk. I started looking for pre-installed useless stuff. After removing a few small softwares I found that my machine had Intuit Quickbooks pre-installed on it. For the uninitiated Quickbooks is an accounting software generally used by small to medium sized firms. Now the point is I have this laptop with Microsoft’s Windows Vista Home Premium edition on it. So, it would be expected for Home use, then why does it comes with an business accounting software pre-installed on it which eats up over 600 MB of disk space. I don’t have a good answer for it. All I can say is Intuite may have paid Micrsoft or Sony to have Quickbooks pre-installed on the machines, it seems they just didn’t bother to check their target audience.
Anyway I am happy removing that software, but for a moment I thought, may be I could have left it there and used it later when, who knows, I would have my own firm.
After doing a careful analysis of the agenda of both the events I decided to go for the Mobile Developer conf. Ofcourse the fact, that the venue was just 2 KMs away from my home compared to about 5 KMs for the World Usability Day event, did influence my decision. But at the end of the day I feel I made a good decision.
Being a rainy day here in Bangalore, I was expecting rains in the morning. But thankfully it didn’t rain today, although dark clouds covered the sky for the full day. I reached the venue just on time, expecting a huge crowd turnout. But there was not much of the crowd early in the morning. The crowd began to pore in through the day and by the lunch time the auditorium was almost full.
Morning sessions were more concentrated on business and some were pure marketing presentations (like the one from Forum Nokia).
The sessions after the lunch were nice and technical. I specially liked the session on LBS (Location Based Services) by Vishnu Sunderam, CTO of Interchain Solutions and one the about SMS based applications.
The SmartTechie Mobile Development Conference and the Usability Professionals Association’s ‘world Usability Day 2008′ event are on the same day. Both are full day events.
Which event should I attend tomorrow is the question ?
Links :
World Usability Day :
http://upabangalore.org/?page_id=11
Mobile Developer Conference (Bangalore) :
http://www.thesmarttechie.com/mobiledev/agendablr.php
Today is India’s 61st Independence Day…and yesterday 14th August 2008 was a very special day for my family and it will be celebrated every year from now.
Happy Independence day and Happy special day family. Congratulations
Firefox crossed the 500 Million Download. w00t
Also Firefox 3 beta 3 is out, which as per the reviews is faster and takes lesser resources. I still can’t move to FF3 as many from the huge number of Addons I use are not yet supported on FF3. They will be supported in due course of time. Till then FF2 is doing a decent job.
Way to go FF!!!
