Well thought of Philantrophy

Azim Premji has given to India much more than his money.His $2 Billion donation has to be appreciated for more than its financial value.He deserves an additional applause not for the 'How much' but for the 'How' of his outpouring.

The $2 Billion which he donated will be given to the Azim Premji Foundation.It will be used among other things,to set up and nurture the Azim Premji University .The focus of this foundation and also of the university is primary and school education. If you search,you'll find that the only programs that are offered are those related to bolstering the reach of India's primary education.

The programs offered are Masters in Education,Masters in Teacher Education and Masters in Development. No, none of these programs produce ready to employ people for India booming IT sector neither do they aim to create tomorrows corporate hotshots. The effort addresses just one grave need ;the need for every child in India to have the opportunity to a quality education.The Right to education for all children below 14 years of age is promised by our Constitution but our politicians have guaranteed that even 60 years after Independence only the privileged or lucky kids get an education worth talking about.

Our education system sucks from top to bottom.Even the best colleges in India struggle hard to compete globally.But to get to college you have to get past school and that for the average Indian is the trickier part.We have excellent schools in our cities but step into the countryside and suddenly you find rampant absenteeism amongst teachers,forged marks,poor education standards,etc.Some studies have shown that kids in rural schools in the 10th grade scored as much as the urban kids did in the 4th grade.This is more than clear sign of how the quality how education suffers as we enter rural India.

Well,primary education isn't the only area where our education system falls behind but it is the the one that hurts the most.Many reports indicate that many graduates from India's numerous engineering colleges lack sufficient skills to be directly employed.But the good part is that the corporates themselves make up for this lack of quality.Well, MNC's want cheap employees and if they cant find them,they will create them.A good example would be the Infosys Global Education Center in Mysore.A huge machine which will produce cut and dried employees ready for hire.

But Azim Premji has decided to look the other way.He has left any vested corporate interests behind.By singularly focusing on primary education he has decided to take on the harsh challenge of improving the quality of India's primary education system,the level of education at which any shortcoming severely restricts a persons choices in life.

Kudos to Azim Premji because he put both his money and his mind where his heart is .

Of Man and his friend

A long time ago ,I remember my aunt describing to me a scene she had witnessed on her way back home from her workplace.

She was travelling on a bus back home,when the bus had stopped in traffic.The bus happened to be standing right next to the walkway alongside.This afforded my aunt,who was sitting near the window , a good view of the scene outside.She noticed a rather plump lady walking her dog on the street outside.The street was an unpaved and muddy path. Now, those of you who have been a bit observant may have realized that ‘walking’ the dog is just the correct way of saying that you’re taking your dog out to answer nature’s call. As my aunt looked outside, she saw the dog restlessly sniffing the ground and straining his leash. The dog was agitatedly sniffing around looking for something. As he was doing this, his owner kept pulling him in the opposite direction.While pulling the dog ,the lady kept saying to the dog,“Come here Come here, its not dirty here”. As my aunt came to realize after sometime, the street outside was a regular ‘walking’ spot for the dog. Also, every time the dog came here, he always sniffed around till he found a spot on which he had not ‘walked over’ previously and set out to work ,walking all over it.

Darn dog! I thought,when i heard this story.Comes here everyday and uses the heightened of smell he has to find a clean spot so that he can now make it dirty!

With this thought of the dogs stupidity, this story left my conscious mind and was buried deep in there for a couple of years till a funny coincidence brought it up.

I happened to be staying in a dormitory where we had a bathing area at the intersection of two corridors. This bathing area consisted of a four bathrooms built in a manner such that two of them faced the other two.Out of these four bathrooms; because of reasons like a better water flow or more sunlight, I happened to be regularly bathing in just two of those bathrooms.One of these two regular bathrooms is closer to the entrance than the other.One evening I was in a hurry as I went for a bath, so I automatically looked in the bathroom closer to the entrance to see if i felt like having a bath there. On looking in ,I found that someone had just taken a bath there, the floor was wet, water droplets were splashed all along the wall and the bathroom felt a bit warmer too. Immediately, I turned and took a look into my other regular bathroom. To my delight, I found it completely dry, no smell, no water splashed anywhere, nothing. Perfect, I thought.

That’s when it hit me, I had just behaved exactly as the dog i had darned. The poor dog whom i had declared stupid, had he been standing here would have cried ‘Hypocrite! Hypocrite!’. Though my situation wasn't completely the same as that of the dog’s(It wasn't me who had dirtied the first bathroom!).It was too similar for me to pass it by. I too had searched for a clean spot so that I could make it dirty!

Developing a Rational Instinct

As we journey through life , we are but rarely in a state of happiness.But apart from the few of us who may really be unfortunate enough to repeatedly face difficulties in life,most of us are in a situation that is mostly neither good nor bad .. life just is what it is.Well,if we look at the overall picture,it may actually be pretty good, the fact that you’ve lived up to this age may be regarded as an achievement in itself .But the problem with the human mind is that we tend focus our attention(or should i say our Tension) on the Now.The latest problem at hand is often the only thing on our mind.We tend forget all that we are ,all that we’ve ever learned when ,all of our experiences that make us wiser and work in a sort of survivalist mode,constantly pondering how to get past the problem at hand.What we then end up doing is acting totally based on instinct.This method of unthinkingly racing towards any means to get rid of a problem works most of the time(in fact, almost all of the time);this is because the problem that we faced wasn’t that big a deal to begin with.You may think that you may have been extremely lucky or fortunate to get rid of your previous problem but the fact is that if you managed to get rid of the problem,there is no greater proof of the fact that you always had the ability to solve the problem.

What i want to bring to your attention is that instead of relying on instinct , if we constantly step back,constantly rationalize and move towards our problems with a definite plan ,with a definite objective (however much of a compromise this objective may be,given the immensity of the situation at hand ) , we will always come out satisfied with the outcome whatever it ends up being.Being in control ,executing a set of actions that you’ve thought about before rather that doing whatever comes to your mind first will naturally produce a much better result in any situation.

The worst part is that we may implement the above strategy once, but once this article is out of your mind we will again fall prey to our instinctual reactions because that is what evolution has made us do. Hence,we need to change our instinct itself and develop it into a more controlled rational artifice.

This change wont happen automatically ,it must begin with some changes in our environment that remind us of our commitment towards this goal of reacting rationally.It could be anything that catches your attention constantly like your desktop wallpaper, a note on the wall,etc.

Another thing we must remember is to not ignore what that wallpaper or note stands for. Every time we see that note we must ask ourselves what it really stands for and how am i going to implement that today.This constant reminder of rationality ,we must hope will slowly grow into an instinct of rationality.

Batch Script to Bust Viruses and Recover folders

Found a lot of people becoming victims of a stupid (but kind!) virus which makes all your folders hidden and replaces them with shorcuts of the same name.

There's a simple way to recover your data using DOS commands and i ended up doing it too many times for too many people .

So i decided to write a small batch script to save myself the trouble

del *.lnk
FOR /F %%G IN ('DIR /A:h /b') DO attrib %%G -s -h

Just paste the above two lines in a text file and save the file as Anti_Vir.bat
Then copy this file to the drive affected by the virus (in the root directory) and double click to run it.
Presto! Your folders should be back and the shortcuts gone.

P.S. This is only a temporary solution . You should find a way to remove the virus in the first place.

File Management for Smart (or Lazy) people

As hard drives have become cheaper and bigger , people today find themselves suddenly sitting on a mountain of files which are are organized in a vague or confusing manner.

And just when you need that one particular file or document , you just can’t seem to remember its name , So ‘searching’ for becomes useless.

One way to prevent such situations from occurring is to use File Tagging .
The traditional way to store files in an orderly fashion would be to adopt Hierarchical folder based on a fixed methodology

For example, say you wanted to sort your Movie collection , your folders would look something like this:

Movies > (Comedy , Thriller , Action, Drama, etc.)
and inside Action > ( Robots , Racing , Martial arts , etc)

Such an organization scheme is very Linear and relies on single organizing method (in this case ‘Movie Genre’). Sure you could go ahead and create sub-folders for other attributes like release year( Eg: Martial arts >(2008 , 2009 ,2010) ) but the main method of organization would still be genre.Also, try to imagine the time and effort that would go into conceptualizing and creating such a system as the number of attributes increased  .
Apart from this , say you wanted to access all movies released in 2008 from your collection , you would have to go through each sub-folder and open the ‘2008’ folder.

Looks like my movie collection is deep trouble , here comes file tagging software to the rescue .

File – tagging allows you to do the following really useful things:
Assign MULTIPLE tags to a given file
Write small rules/scripts  to AUTOMATICALLY ASSIGN TAGS to certain files

Lets go back to the Movie example and see how this makes life easy:

Since we’re not using a folder based approach , you could just go ahead and dump all your Movies in one big ‘Movie” folder.
The next step is to tag files according to whichever attributes you feel important
For example, tags for The Karate Kid :(Action, Martial Arts , 2010, Jackie Chan)
Now the next time you want to view Movies from 2010 , just access the tag 2010 , much simpler than before. Here the multiple tags serve as multiple sorting methods for your movie files

The next and more awesome step would be to let your files tag themselves. Movie files are commonly named in the following manner TheKarateKid[2010]DVDriP.Xvid-XOR.avi
If your file tagging software could automatically figure out the release year from the file name( with some scripting from you of course!) , it would save you a lot of trouble .

Till now i was talking about organizing your Movie folder , well you don't even need to create a movie folder , just create a huge folder for all your files and tag all your movie files with ‘Movies’ !!

Say you’re working on a project with files scattered all across your file-system(across multiple drives or possibly across a network) . You can avoid the need to create something like a Project folder with all your required files copied into it by just tagging  your required files with ‘Project’. This will save both time and drive space.

There a quite a few file-tagging software's available , two noteworthy applications are Tabbles and TaggedFrog.

Tabbles has demo version allowing you to tag up to 1000 files while TaggedFrog is  free.

What i really wonder is why such file-tagging features aren't available on major operating systems (notable exception is Ubuntu Linux which has some projects which use ExT3 file-systems attributes to create tags.)

Further Reading:
[1]Page about Proof  of concept demo of a Tagged File System
[2]Discussion of Tagged File system ideas for Ubuntu (Contains lots of links to other material)

This Figure is Impossible to Draw

Look at the figure below and try to draw it , the condition is that you cannot lift your pen from the paper i.e. you have to draw it in one stroke and you cannot go over any edge more than once i.e. tracing out a line you've already drawn.
If you are seeing this for the first time , try drawing it for at least 5 minutes before you read the rest of this post.

Well , many  times from my childhood to now people have challenged me to draw this figure. This problem bugged me for a really long time because i always believed there was a way to do it ; well guess what , there isn't.
Most people cheat and draw the figure by folding the page and moving the pen around or by drawing it really fast so you cant see it when they cover an edge twice.You can try and try but you will have no success whatsoever because this figure is simply impossible to draw.I’m not saying that  because I've failed like a zillion times but because i can mathematically prove it.
I found the answer to the question of whether this figure could be drawn or not when i was reading up on Euler and came  across The Königsberg Problem which he had solved. Seeing the solution I realized that the theory could help me find an answer to the above question.
The Proof (Using Graph Theory):
To be able to draw to the figure in one go , you must traverse every edge one and only time.
Graphs on which such an operation can be performed are called Eulerian Paths.
The condition for a graph to be an Eulerian path is that it must have atmost two vertices of odd degree.
Now as we can simply observe , the vertices of the square in the middle are all odd in degree(i.e. they have an odd no. of lines/graph edges touching them).
That makes four odd vertices which violates the condition for an Eulerian path.
Hooray!

Live Free : Go Portable with Your Digital Life

Need to access your data everywhere but just dont want to carry around your laptop everywhere.Here are three ways to go make your data move with you.

1.The Cloud
The easiest way to go mobile with your data is completely switch over to web-based services for all your activities.The first and most popular service provider in this area is Google. Via its various services , Google allows you to completely switch over to the web for all you needs.Here are basic software

• Wanna create and edit documents : Use Google Docs ,
• Looking to store photos : here's Picasa
  
• Looking to store some videos : use YouTube!
  
• Feeling like working , got some appointments : Use GMail and Google Calendar
  
• Hungry for the latest news : here's Google News ,
• Wanna keep up to date about your favourite sites via RSS : Google Reader

Switching over to the cloud may seem like a fantastic option but there are also some disadvantages:

• Your data is as secure as the website you use to store it.
• Keyloggers may be present in PC's you use to access your account.
• No internet No data !
  

2.Portable Apps
The other way to go portable with your data is to literally carry it around in a pen drive.What about the software I use you ask ? Well , there are things called portable app platforms which install software into your pen-drive, allowing you to literally carry around you desktop.
There are many portable app platforms available but a really good and free one is the PortableApps Suite.
This suite installs right into your pen drive/USB device and allows you to install other portable software into your drive.These softwares include most of the common ones like Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome,OpenOffice etc.(Full list of portable apps)
All the software that you install can now be run on any machine.All the apps are made in such a way as to store all the data only on your pen drive ,leaving little or nothing on your host computer!The site offers a variety of software(all free) that you can install for portable use. Going by the really size of pen drives now available ,this is a really convenient way to carry around your desktop.

3.Remote Desktop
The final way to access your data is a remote desktop connection.More about that in a later post.

Create a self organizing computer with Belvedere

The guys at Lifehacker have come up with yet another tool to improve your productivity on your computer.

Belvedere is an automated file manager which can help you clear your clutter. You can use Belvedere to define rules based on which it will automatically move(/copy/del,etc) your files. You can actually think of Belvedere as the cleaner for your digital home!

Read more about Belvedere here and download it from here

Sample Belvedere Setup

I use Belvedere to sort the huge no. of files that keep up piling in my downloads folder.I have created separate sub-folders within my downloads folder to keep different kinds of content.(Eg:Music,Videos,Documents,etc.)

Based on the rules i have set , Belvedere automatically moves stuff like music and movies into their separate folders .This stops my downloads folder from looking like a Trash can and also allows me files based on their type

For Eg. Pictured below is the rule which automatically moves all my videos to a sub-folder within my downloads folder.

Words of Wisdom : The Remix

"Be the change you want to see"--Mahatma Gandhi

BUT

"Please shell out the change you want to see"

<>Sign outside Supermarket<>

Words of Wisdom : The Remix

"With great power comes great responsibilty"---Spiderman

But

"With great power comes great losses!"

Am also an electrical engineering undergrad you know!

VLC looks good too!

Well VLC media player is one the best media players out there. With its ability to play files of almost any type , VLC has become one of the most popular players around.If you dont have it , grab it right now from here because its free, open-source and awesome.

I've always liked VLC and use  it often but one qualm I had with it was that it looked sorta  ugly  ( or should i say simple!) compared to other players ,though VLC has support for skins, the out-of-the-box/default settings way in which most in which most people use it, the interface they see is definitely not impressive. All along what i didn't know was that VLC comes packaged with a kickass default skin which is disabled by default!(God knows Y).So most people are actually what most people are using  is the native skinless  interface of VLC(above).

To enable the 'default' skin of VLC: 

1. Go to Tools>Preferences( Or press Ctrl+P) 
2. A window appears,from it  select the Interfaces Tab
3. Under the Interface Type box , select Skins
4. Browse to your VLC install folder , under it enter a folder called skins and select a file called default 
5. Save andClose
6. Restart VLC to see your new kickass skin(below)

• 
  

Find Stuff similar to what you already like

Like what you have but want more of it too! Here are two sites that help you find stuff that is similar to what you like.

1.TasteKid.com : Really good suggestions about music, movies, shows, books and authors. Just type in what you like and it will come up with something similar. Also you can type in multiple terms and find something similar to the combination!Yes I know there are other sites like Imdb etc. which also offer suggestions based on what you like but believe me ,the suggestions here are almost spot on.Also you get suggestions in a variety fields like books, movies ,television,music,etc.in one place.Also has a twitter-trending kind of thing called 'Stuff that seems to be kind of popular ' along with a Recent Stuff area.

2.SimilarSites.com :

From the creators of the Similar Web Firefox plugin , this site is fast and easy way to find alternatives to any site that you might be using.Using a site like this is much better than Googling something like ' Image hosting sites ' (after figuring out what tinypic is called).Here you can easily find a replacement for any web application that you might be using.Doesnt yet give loads of great results but will be useful for most.

ACB Sir cracks a geeky one!

Cyberscrawler says to Sir ACB : " You are my real friend "

ACB sir (taking time off  from his connection with God):" Why? Do all the others lie on the Y-axis ?? "

Turn Your RSS feeds into an e-newspaper

Get your RSS in a neater format

RSS feeds really simplify the process of viewing content online and save you a lots of time but some many of us still like the way news is presented in a newspaper and would love it if somehow we could have a nice RSS newspaper.. Here are three sites that come close to fulfilling this goal

1.Tabbloid.com
Extremely fast to setup. Just add your favourite feeds and setup times of emailing your RSS magazine(and forget about it!).
At the set time, you will receive a pdf of stories from all your feeds in a really nice magazine-like format (which you can view very easily without downloading using Google Docs).The best looking and most user-friendly of all the alternatives.

2.FeedJournal.com

A close cousin of Tabbloid .This site gives an authentic newspaper-like pdf(completely black & white) of your feeds. However ,at present it still lacks some features like automatic emailing ;so you have to go the the site everyday to get your newspaper.

3.FeedChronicle.com Basically an online RSS reader which presents your feeds in a newspaper like layout.However,you're not allowed to add your own feeds and have to make with the site's feeds(though extensive but still restrictive)

[Dont know why but I still find Google reader the best way to access feeds .Google reader with its features like sharing & staring of articles, easy emailing and Google Buzz integration is really more than most people would ask]