Avatar – Review

Well … there are just three words to describe the movie and for the first time IMAX actually made me feel the full throttle of what it means to “LIVE THE EXPERIENCE.” Well, the story is not a lot more than what the pre-release trailer told us. But, Cameroon captivates us either way and shows once again what it means to be a trendsetter.
This is one 3D movie where there are hardly any instances where you are kept awake using the element of surprise. You are part of the movie, a neutral observer watching things unfold in Pandora. It’s just like what Harry Potter must have felt when he used Riddle’s Diary.
I would have loved it even more if the screening would have been on the dome than the huge screen, which is nevertheless awesome. So, one thing that I can say is that if there’s some movie that you shouldn’t miss watching in an IMAX, this is it! It’s worth every rupee that you spend on it and probably much more; otherwise why do you think we would go all the way from Colaba to Wadala which is approximately 20+ km to watch it .

This year’s resolution

Well .. as usual I started the year with the resolution that I will try not to waste time making up a resolution (believe me, this is quite handy!). But, as luck would have it, I made a resolution under 12 hours of this resolution without breaking the resolution, as the new resolution that I made was an impulse.

As usual, due to my love for linux, I thought it would be a nice idea to have KDE 4.3 on Lenny on lenny (where Lenny is the current name of my laptop that is running debian lenny .. quite creative, ain’t it? ). And hence i got KDE 4.3 up on time, but then was fixing up few issues that were cropping up after I included the testing repositories. Even then, life was not all dark. And then, I really don’t remember which .conf file  i edited in sleep at around 3:00 am, the gui went kaput. The next morning I tried getting it up and backtracked the bash history, but to no avail. Well, that’s done for! As, I have lenny’s repository handy on my DVD’s I thought I will reinstall lenny with LXDE and then install KDE4.3 directly from testing repositories. But, when I logged into LXDE, I was surprised. It struck me rather cool and just what I wanted a minimalist yet stylish and fast desktop environment with no useless appliKations loaded and believe me excepting for the sage installation, my / without my home folder is smaller than my home folder with all the programs that I regularly use. Then, I made the resolution, not to shift towards KDE in 2010 and over that not to tax Lenny with 6 or 7 re-installations of linux per year.  :D That does make quite a few people around me breathe easy as I won’t bug them with “what’s new with the newer installation” stuff . (last year’s installations include – jaunty, karmic,lenny*2,gentoo, slack .. i liked slack the best, but i think i will take some time to move over from debian to slack and probably with a intermission with arch once again )

Lagging Behind

Of late, my movie intake has gone done quite low along with the food. The latter I was sick of and the former, I am yet to find a reason other than telling that I am trying pretty hard to get myself to work (failing miserably though!). So, it might seem that I am passing my time in compelling myself to get to work, well, I am doing rather useful work like doing assignments and sitting up 24 hours for a Numerical methods exam and the latest being giving an exam in Solid State Physics exam for 6 hours with a lunch break in between. Trust me, to do all this you need to build a lot of patience, and that’s what the rest of time I am meditating upon. This I do by sitting and staring at the same page of the book for 2 hours, inclusive of a coffee break.

And because of all the afore mentioned causes, my hard drive has quite a few movies left unwatched which include Umberto D, The Spy who came in from the Cold, Zulu, Point Blank, etc. and quite a few books too. Actually, all the books that I bought this semester are pending which would amount to nearly 7, considering my estimates are decent.

With all this hectic schedule and more unofficially official work, I am looking forward to the next weekend when I will be free for the next two months from my long-continuing struggle with course work.

There was at least one good news for this semester and that is I will finally be shifting from Wadala … no more travelling everyday …

Almost an year down the lane

It feels like ten years since i have joined here. And ten years is a long time. Indeed, i feel i am finally getting into the groove of sending things into the log books quite effectively which are looked into when the moment arrives(usually a few hours before any submission). And above all this, i have reached my all-time high when it comes to the concept of exams … i am giving up even before starting

i guess i will effectively be institutionalized soon. i can feel that it has begun as i have stopped caring about the capitalization(?) of  ”i”.

But, what I effectively need is food for my body .. lacking chocolate, lacking decent cheese, and above  all lacking home-food for over 5 months. Here, we are over-fed with food for the soul(mind?), that it  gets quite repugnant after a while … well, they do expect us to finish nearly 8-9 books in 4 months, and guess what’s my count ! ?… (i managed more than one at least )

Apart from this … i seriuosly don’t get the point of Nvidia Tesla .. i think i would prefer to buy GTX 280M or ATi Hd4870 and use CUDA or ATi Stream i guess to get nearly same performance … of if people fund me, we can even get Xeon of Opteron …. but forget about clusters … i haven’t yet lost my interest in acquring a Phenom II X4 …

I guess i don’t have time for anything mentioned above though. Now, have to go back to my relentless effort in trying to study for my solid state physics exam(this is a minimum of one book, if you don’t want to study the suggested bookso n special topics .. other wise 2.5 ) …

Wish me luck for my next two weeks

Nakhid Revisited

Been quite sometime since I wrote a post. Well, though that this would at least ease my frustration of the work that’s not working.

Last Saturday I went to Nakhind to trek for the second time after I joined here. This time it was more unconventional, rather thrilling and of course a highly required physical activity that I required.

The unconventional elements are completely attributed to Amaresh and company. The paramount issues that occured due to the inconsequential choice of a near-random path with the only goal seemingly being the peak had it’s thrills and perils.

Even after all this I did not manage to reach the peak (I guess I was abt 20 mts away from the peak ). Hopefully, at least i will achieve this peak when I go there the next time(if ever there is going to be one).

http://picasaweb.google.com/ravitej7/NakhindTrek170109?authkey=ByxzGMiSOdU&feat=directlink

(sorry, for not editing the uploads. there are too many self-shots which i guess i should remove.)

Vista …. as usual

Vista seems to enjoy gobbling up space it is currently using up around 25GB of my C: which is almost nothing but the OS ..! I think it is not meant for lower mortals like me to understand why I require a whole cache of all dll’s and all the junk even if they are outdated. The winsxs(Windows Side by Side) folder is currently occupying 8GB.

I think windows should stop helping people about how to manage space. It’s not that I am running out of space, but it’s just the realization that I am running an OS that uses 1GB RAM to run, 20GB of hard disk space for installting itself. Comparing this to my Arch, RAM usage (usual) about 185MB other than the NVIDIA and 3.7GB(mainly because of emacs and openoffice … other wise it was about 2.9GB) of current installed size.

I am again in a quandary as to whether i should remove vista from my laptop or not !

Arch Linux

I finally shifted my OS after my 2 month old thought that I should change. I dumped ubuntu and gentoo and moved to this, the “Arch Linux”. Well, the installtion was a bit long as I forgot the specification of my wireless card and few other stuff. I was lucky to have SLAX on my pendrive to fix them up. After what I thought I finally got the OS running, in the aim to delete a folder that I made unnecessarily in /etc/; I did $rm -rf /etc/ .And, yeah I had to redo the whole thing again… thoug this time, I finished it all in few hours.

That’s for my installation. Now, coming to why I finalised on Arch were the number of good reviews of a 32-bit OS that I found about Arch on forums. I discarded my idea of 64-bit after a shot usage of hardy. Everything was fine, except that the memory usage and temperatures at which it runs is high. It’s not that I had a problem with memory, I am well-off with it. But, it just that I did not feel any improvement in performence.

Arch performs very well and is not bloated. It’s not bloated because it installs only the base. Over that, I found a considerable performance improvement from my hardy32-bit. I still don’t know how this happens. Well, bottomline is that I am not going to change from it for at least two years, I guess.

www.cmi.ac.in/~ravitej/hardinfo_report.html … this has few benchmarks done by the “hardinfo”, at the end of the page.

Nothing Unusual

Be it as it may, my life seems to be getting from boring to uninteresting. Life at CMI, was actually something I liked, it’s mostly a compact and a closed community. Mind you I am not emotional as I write this post. It’s just that I am tired and uninterested in writing about anything else.

Life here, seems to made of classes, travel, assignements and exams. (:P) .. I agree that this not something that’s really that different in any student’s life. But, what if profs even after finding that you day is just 6 hours long(excluding few hours of sleep , travel, classes, etc.) and keep piling assignments. Be they as may be, I still don’t get the point why I have to sit for three hours and give an exam, I feel I am less of a reseach student than what  felt before. It seems life follows a sinusoidal path and seems to have rational winding numbers and most of the times non-orientable too (:P).

I feel I am revisiting my life during my 11th and 12th when I was enrolled for an IIT entrance. Well, this might actually be worse.

Reminisciences: Comment about Comments

For long I was planning to write blog and it chanced upon that my other blog got reports from my great classmate, Mr. Anirbit Mukherjee. Well yeah, may be it’s not nice on my part to have published about a personal chat between two persons. It’s just that I got excited because the topic of this chat was the same as the one on which I had short heated arguments with Mr. Mukherjee; short because, though people might not believe, i am a bit short tempered.

Well, this is not about the aforementioned blog or the chat. I’m not going to do that mistake again. This will follow a pattern that the article that is going to be commented upon had used. This is a set of comments on the article of comments; though I’m not that adept or mature enough to comment on articles of those people who I feel think they are writing an editorial on how things can go completely wrong with no chance of reprisal.

Well, if comments about personal conversations cannot go public, then personal ideas about public issues should be managed more diplomatically. But, my complaint about this article is neither about the writing style of this article nor am I judging or critically analyzing. It’s just that if a person gets to know the author at a more personal scale, you get to determine his/her beliefs and actions. There is truly never a limit to a person being a hypocrite. If any person who knows a little about the subject that is being talked about you can see these contradictory paragraphs appearing. There is a time when Mr. Mukherjee seems to see elementary facts to be too elementary and at times, slightly higher level realizations to be rather high.

And now coming to the point about Expectations. Expectations are common as a person. But, expectations do not alone form the basis for life and interests. I do agree that it’s mars the mind at least for a short span of time, when expectations are not reached and I definitely agree that there are things in life, in which a person should not by any chance compromise. But, at times, even such situations do arise, due to their non-zero probability, and adaptation in such a situation is must.I completely agree with the author in few of the issues raised in the article. But, it seems that the author’s pedagogy is totally pessimistic and does not have a well defined set of principles by which he measures and concocts subjects. My view of the article is that though the article issued a disclaimer in the prologue, it lacks complete sense as the issues raised were public. And giving a personalized opinion as to how the things are to be run, such that the author can live “happily ever after”, seems to me a coup d’etat on the part of the author.

Again a personal opinion, but this time it’s mine, is that, rather than a single person setting  up the rules and creating the same problem as the existing one; a change has to be made where one gets to choose after a certain point of time  the path that he wants to take. There is a negative side to this too. There can exist cases where instead of taking a path, one takes up various paths, so that the end is reached without any substantial increase in level by taking up random elements, here and there. Well, this might be solved, if an interaction process between us and the teachers be made such that one gets to decide on a particular path. If one is unable to decide on any, then he is to take a path set up by the teachers.

That’s all I have to say.

P.S. : Everything above is written in a very general fashion without pointing at anything specific or trying to point at the situation that has made me write this.

P.S : But, there  is one point that I wanted to be specific about. It’s regarding the admission into DTP, TIFR. As i might have mentioned before, that author seems to lack complete knowledge regarding the interests of his peers. It’s not that they were not taken into DTP, it’s just that no one else’s topic of interest was offered in DTP. And, for the sake of illumination, everyone got into the department of their first preference.

A Word in Private

As the morning washed the remnants of a long night, beckoning the bloom and caressing the withered, I slid out of what has been the most restless of my nights; dotted flamboyantly with the sardonic and soporific images of the insignificant impromptu.  Well, that should do for the usual cliched description and boring imagery. But, does brevity span the abnormal? I guess not. It’s never too late to realize this. As the train of disconnected but meaningful thoughts flowed through the leftovers of last night,streaming a headache. A remnant, a hangover, the effect.

Situation may seem abnormal, but the cause needn’t be. And the cause being normal does not reflect upon the abnormality of the effect. Well, to stick to this philosophy I shall give the mundane cause behind this incongruous effect.

As usual, a delightfully late entry into the crowded cake shop marked my unobserved entrance. Found out that the special was the tempting mixture of black forest dipped in orange nectar and topped with orange. A tangy temptation. After managing to squeeze two out of the counter, I came and sat at the already occupied table. No response; even this is usual. Was I ever punctual? As Rembrandt put it {\emph Sincerity is the eventual deception of all great men}. Well, I never understood this.

As an author, everyone faces difficulties in voicing their opinions. Some are cordoned by self restrictions, some by personal affairs and the others by society. I thought I have been always free of these. But now, mine seem to be of the second type. I can write fluently and do not care about what the society thinks. But, it seems you have to be bound lest your pen runs free. Sincere apologies to all the red pens that strike through the life, for this comment; you are just being dumb like the donkeys that were tied to grind-stones with their eyes covered, who think that they have travelled miles. The other day I published my third of the anthologies. Maybe it got personal. Well, it is impossible as an author not to give out something personal some time or the other with or without realizing. I realized the adverse effects of this only now. A core collapse, distant and cold looks. I sandpapered my throat with the tangerine sands, considering an elopement from the clutches of everything; to a place of serenity, sanity and solitariety.

That’s what had happened. After that everything was a blur; a storm of emotions crashing upon a damp cliff. The precipice below which lays the society. A salinated tangy flavor broke through the softer parts of the hard set stone. And fissure upon fissure formed in the stone by the violence of love. And then I thanked the one. Crumbled.

“Farewell.”  That was the word that I fumbled as I made an exit. Coincidence? The word that changed my life. The reply that answered itself. I woke up to live the life this has presented me with. It will never be the same again. I will go to the shop again to have the day’s special.