Nothing Official Here: 2007

Here or There?

It seems that these days, I am running high with lots of indecisiveness... To be or not to be... To buy or not to buy... and if buy then what to buy... To use or not and if to use then which one to use...

To add to these indecisiveness, I have further to vent here.

I believe that if someone leaves a comment in my blog, there are two ways to acknowledge/thank the visitor:
1. You visit his/her blog and leave a comment to thank him/her for leaving a comment in your blog.
2. You acknowledge/thank him/her by adding another comment below his/her comment in your blog entry.

Both these ways may have their advantages and disadvantages and that's where I am confused. Which one to choose? Help me please?

Saga de Shopping...

Sometimes, you are compelled to do things you never like to do or you never want to do. For me, shopping is something I never like to spend/waste my time at. But I was compelled to go shopping against my will and wish...

This morning, when I woke up, election results already started coming out and the popular party was running ahead. By the noon, it was the running ahead in 60% of seats and thus, there was no more need to be in front of TV and thus, we left for the shopping.
We first visited Gallops mall... one of our favorite mall where we used to hang out last year.

I was visiting this mall after a long time and was expecting some changes in it but there were none visible except lots of people. The crowd was everywhere and first we thought that it could be because of Sunday and Xmas holiday but then we found out that some drawing competition was going on for school children on ground floor and first floor.

It was very interesting to see these school children engrossed into painting on a busy Sunday.
We shopped at Globus and Lifestyle for some cloths and other items. I have realized that I am a quick shopper and would not want to spend a second thought on the cloth I liked at first sight. I then go for the trial and if it fits me, I just buy. I know its not a right way of shopping but that's what "L**E at first sight" is!
On first floor, we came across a bridal wear shop and a nice dress was displayed there. It was beautiful enough to make me stop and take its picture and decide about to buy it for someone who is expected to announce her marriage soon.

Of course, picture quality is not very good but the dress was fabulous. While I was taking this picture, a lady from inside the store rushed to us and stopped us taking any more pictures saying it was restricted. Hmm... this is surprising and reminded me about many threads on www.dpreview.com about photography in public places. I never thought that Indian malls will be similar rigid about photography inside mall.
From Gallops mall, we drove to Iskcon Mall and continued the shopping saga. This mall was remarkably less crowdy and we had a good time loitering around.

Food court of this mall was small but had interesting stalls offering some great verities. The smell of the food made us stop there and have a lunch there. I just had a water melon juice though.

On the way back, we came across Giordano shop and I was very happy to see Giordano in India. It is one of my favorite shop to buy cloths in Singapore just like GAP in US and to see it in India is indeed cool.
By the time we returned home, there was a big dent in my pocket :(
Oh, few days back, I was again "compelled" to be at Jade Blue. It was interesting and "first time" experience for me to be in a groom wear section. I was very surprised to know that a groom dress can cost Rs. 50,000 for a simple looking piece like this.

The ones shown above were in the price range of Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 30,000. There were other groom dresses which were tagged at Rs. 200,000+ and I had no courage to even take their pictures. The ones in below pictures cost not less then Rs. 3000 which are "garba" kurtas.

It seems that this inflation of the price is mainly due to the huge influx of NRI shoppers. For an NRI from UK, a pound will get him/her Rs. 80 and thus, its just 35+ pounds for a garba dress for him. Though the dress is not worth that price, he/she wont bother either to bargain for the price or to try somewhere else for a better deal. And as Gujarat is flooded with NRIs these days, shop owners don't care for local shoppers and have inflated prices to milk out NRIs.
Anyway, I am happy that I could finish some of my shopping during this weekend. In coming days, I will have a lot to work on.

I am into C (yea, not SHE)!

One of the subjects in a first year of IT graduates in Gujarat University is C language programming and it seems students find C language programming very difficult. 8 out of 10 students in Akshar's class are attending private tuition to learn C language and Akshar too felt the need for the same. The fee of this tuition is about Rs. 5000 and the course is of just two weeks... "Ridiculous" was the word when I came to know about this.

C has been my favorite language always and I was "possessed" by it during my graduation time. In my time, C language was fairly new language and was a final year subject. We learned BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL in fourth and fifth semester but I went out of way and started learning C on my own in parallel with PASCAL. Since there was many similarities between PASCAL and C, my learning sailed smooth and I was able to stay ahead of other students. Recursive procedures and pointers were my favorites and I always had a competition with P about writing most optimized code. We used to compare the size of the final executable code and fight on to make it minimum. I remember an incident when my code for a compiler was a bit lengthy then her code and she left no chance to brag about it. C++ was still not visible on any horizons of my university when I finished my graduation in 1990 and it was still Windows 3.11 in the beginning of 1992 when I got Borland's C++ compiler. Soon, C++ overpowered C and the whole world changed. Around 1993, Windows programming became affordable and I spent a huge amount to import "Programming Windows" by Charles Petzold from America. Visual C and Visual C++ were born later to continue the ease of programming and the SDK for Windows was no longer needed. Optimization of the code became the history with abundance of RAM and hard disk space. Then C# surfaced and Tcl/Tkl is playing substantial role too.

When I took up the task of teaching C language to Akshar, it was like recalling the past - 1987 era when I started learning C... After more then 20 years, I still have the same passion and the fascination for C (and SHE too?) and I still love C (and not SHE)! Incidentally, the books I used during my graduation - "C made easy" by Herbert Schildt and "The C Programming Language" by K&R, I gave to Nishant as he too was pursuing IT engineering. When Akshar joined IT engineering, Nishant passed those books to him and they finally ended up in my hands when I needed to check some reference!!! Once Akshar is well versed with C, I intend to teach him C++ and C# and if time permits, I would like him to know enough about Tcl/Tkl before I become not available. He should be able to learn Java on his own if he picks up C++ well.

I also intend to teach him some of my bad skills and if you want to join, brush up your knowledge about TCP/IP and seven layers of network architecture. Don't complain later that I did not keep my words.

The confusion...

Its a great confusion I am into since last few days. I am very indecisive about it and may be you can help me to come out of this confusion...

I have been using my iPhone since few weeks. Its a sensational phone and its a talk of the town. Though its not officially released in Asian market yet, plenty of them are available in grey market and one can easily unlock it to use a non AT&T SIM card. People are crazy about this phone all over world. But my experience of this phone is very opposite. I just dont like the "phone" of this iPhone. It lack many important features I need in my phone. For example, you just dont get the message sent receipt nor you can send an SMS to many. It is also "too delicate" for me and I have already dropped it twice. On the other hand, it is a "killer" phone. The moment you pull it out of your pocket, you make people around you just jealous if they are not already turned into ashes...

So the confusion is - to change or not... I have my old Nokia 6230i phone with me. Its a gift I got couple of years back and it served me faithfully till I got this iPhone. I also have Treo 650 which I unlocked last week. I also have Nokia N72 - a gift from Akshar. Which one to use? Or just to continue with iPhone? Help me? Please?

My favorite black line!

Today was a voting day for us to choose a state government. India is the largest democracy in the world and with it second highest population in the world, fair and free elections are always a challenge. Voting has been always exciting for me as I feel being part and responsible of shaping my country's future. There are many people who complain that no candidate is good enough to motivate them for voting. There are many whose ego get hurt when they have to stand in a queue to exercise their right to vote and there are many who just don't like election system.

This morning, around 11am, I tried to go for voting. Across the street, a favorite party had set up a road side counter which helped voters to find out which room in the nearby voting booth they had to go. Lots of supporters were surrounding that booth and out of them, many were familiar faces. Our laundry guy and my motorcycle mechanic were among them and when they saw me approaching the counter, they came forward to get my info out of turn!

They are standing on street!!! Traffic flows in between...

When I reached to the actual voting booth, I saw a long queue of voters. The line was moving very slow due to the complex verification process of voters ID inside the voting room. I decided to come back after an hour. When I came back, still many voters were in queue and it would take at least 15 mins for my turn. While my turn was about to come, suddenly, a group of voters came to the booth complaining about them being refused from the voting. They were refused by the election officer as they did not have their voter ID cards. Though government had issued a notice in today's newspapers that any government issued photo ID would be allowed for the verification, this election officer refused them as he was not aware of this notification. As this struggle was going to take some time, I aborted the voting one more time and decided to come during lunch time to avoid any queue.

When I came to the booth again at around 1:30pm, there was no line at all! Only a policeman, guarding the booth!

When I entered the booth, there were few people inside but it did not take long for my turn to come. The officer verified my details and issued me a slip.

The lady next to him got my signature in a voting register and then put a "black LINE" on my left index finger.

I then went to a table where electronic voting machine was placed. Instead of a paper ballets, Election Commission of India has introduced this machine since last two elections and they have been a great success in terms of fast calculation of votes and in avoiding any mischief during vote counting. I have heard that we exported these machines to many countries.

After the voting, I felt happy about it. Whether the candidate I voted for will win or not is a separate issue but I voted for him who was the best amongst all. I voted for a party which has done a lot for Gujarat and is committed to do a lot for Gujarat.

If the current central government can finish its five years, my next chance of getting this black line will be in 2009...

Airport delays in India?

On Saturday, I suddenly had to go to New Delhi and flying was the only option available due to such a short notice and the urgency.

Before "economy" airlines did not exist in India, flying was simply luxury and there were hardly two or three domestic airlines flying to Ahmedabad. A revolution three years ago has changed this and now, there are about 10 different domestic airlines flying to Ahmedabad. Couple of years ago, only economic airline flying to New Delhi was Spicejet. Now, GoAir, Air Deccan and Jetlite have flight to New Delhi.
So, I checked with these airlines to get the best price and found that they all had almost same prices. and I checked different airlines for the best prices and all were showing similar prices. Since I have Online booking and then talking to higher authority in Spicejet helped in bringing the cost almost same as that of train travel. I had about 35Kgs of luggage with me and that was 15Kg more then Spicejet's allowed limit.
Again, a connection with higher authority helped in sorting this out. Spicejet people at Ahmedabad airport were informed about my coming there and the manager sent a person to trolley my luggage to the x-ray machine and then to the check-in counter. He checked me in and I got my boarding pass. As I was walking to the security check area, Spicejet announced about 1 hour delay in the flight... That 1 hour delay was further extended to 2 hrs and my flight left for New Delhi at 10pm. When the flight landed, it was almost midnight and by the time I reached the office, it was 1am.
My return flight was surprisingly on time and we were boarded as per scheduled time. As I had long days and sleepless nights, I fell asleep as soon as I boarded the plane. I got awake by some noise after an hour and I found myself still on the runway... the flight had not taken off due to congestion on the runway... Flight landed Ahmedabad at 10:15pm and instead of parking at the bay, the plane was parked in one corner of the airport as all parking bays were full. Coaches came to pick us up and by the time we reached to the luggage belt, it was 11pm....

I found that air traffic in Ahmedabad has really increased very much in recent time. Even the airport has been upgraded to accommodate more passengers and provide better facilities. Many international flights land here but it has to go much beyond to be a true international airport.

Airport delays in India usually were not significant as flying was not cheap. Hardly a flight had to wait on the runway to take off. Hardly a flight had to circle in the sky to wait for a clearance for landing.

I also observed that due to economical airlines, flying has become very affordable. Earlier, when you were flying, you would expect either a government officer, a corporate employee or a business person in a seat next to you... but nowadays, one should not be surprised to find a farmer or an ordinary office clerk as your neighbor in a flight.

Ants in iPhone...

I am really shocked and confused... Just now, I was using my iPhone and suddenly I noticed an ant moving on the screen. I gently blew some air to fly it off the screen but it did not work. I blew little harder but it did not fly off again... I thought this ant is real adamant and I blew the air real hard but it just did not work this time too... I did not want to kill it and thus I tried to slide it off using a piece of paper and at that time I realized that the ant was actually beneath the screen... Oh my god! Its worst nightmare I could think off and as if this shock was not strong enough, I noticed few more ants on the screen... What the hell they are doing there and hey, first of all, HOW COULD THEY ENTER INSIDE THE PHONE???
I tried to recollect if I left this phone anywhere where there were many ants? Nope, I did not. Since morning, I was either on my table at home or office and in between, the phone was safe in my pocket. It could be that I left an unclean ice-cream bowl on my table last night which could have attracted ants on my table and eventually they ended up finding safe heaven in my phone... But now I again wonder how could they enter INSIDE the phone? iPhone is factory sealed and has no screws or any openings except the SIM slot and earphone hole. I doubt they could enter through SIM slot as the slot is always tightly closed with SIM holder. They might have entered through earphone hole as its wide enough (and dark enough) for ants.

Now, I am panicked... I dont know what to do. If I press the screen, the ant would get killed but then its body would stick to screen all the time. If I dont kill, what if they start their honeymoon inside? I dont know if I should spray an ant killer through earphone hole to kill all ants inside. I dont know if I can use a USB vacuum cleaner to suck them out of the phone... Should I try to open the phone somehow? I just dont know what to do... I am simply clueless and I am just lost...

i, iPhone and irritation...

It was Asis2007 show where we won two iPhones in a lucky draw... As it was first opportunity for Yogesh to attend such large scale security exhibition, we were in Las Vegas alongwith Bhavesh.
In first two days of this exhibition, Anixter - a trading company wanted visitors to visit at least 18 of its partner booths to earn one coupon for the lucky draw and 24 to win two. It was to give 10 iPhones to the winners of this lucky draw on third day of exhibition and guess what??? We won TWO of these 10!!! We were the only Indians in the show and it was fun watching other people when we won the second phone... Next day when I was at one of the stall, the guy at the stall greeted me like "Oh, welcome! You are the lucky one who won iPhones yesterday!"

Well, winning an iPhone was good but the pain it invited was much more then these freebies... iPhone in US comes locked and thus you just cant insert any of your SIMs and start using it. To use iPhone, you have to activate a new 2 year contract with AT&T... your existing AT&T plan also wont work with iPhone. And of course, no other service provider SIM will work in iPhone. Well, no one likes this but thats Apple! Now, to have two iPhones sitting idle brought us a challenge of finding a way to unlock them that we could use any SIM with it... and thats when the adventure began... That evening, from internet, we could find some ways to unlock at least iPod and camera of this phone...

Next day, we left for Grand Canyon in early morning. It was fun driving all the way from Las Vegas to Grand Canyon... (I want to write separately about this trip some day...). That night, though we had a five hours drive and four hours at Grand Canyon, we started working on to unlock this phone. Yogesh was very determined for it... It was 2am early morning when I fell asleep... When I woke up at 5am, Yogesh was ready with an unlocked iPhone!!! While I tried to override iPhone's internals software, Yogesh found out a site which provided some tools for easy unlocking of this phone... See! Sometimes, my techie background makes me suffer....

Anyway, so I thought unlocking iPhone saga was over and I never would need to burn my fingers for it again... but the saga was not over...
Yesterday, a friend brought another iPhone and asked me if I could unlock... Techie inside me suddenly rose above all my priorities and forced me to put aside all my work and start unlocking this iPhone...
As this phone was shipped with a very new firmware, no unlocking tools for this version were available online... There are few sites which claim to unlock this version but they dont guarantee... Found a site which listed how to unlock this version but it did not work... I was foreced to go my "techie" way then use any "readymade" solution... but in this process, I found some interesting tools like PUTTY and Jaiilbreaker...
Tweaking Apple OS was always fun when I used to work with Mac IIfx way back in 1989... Those days, MACs were mainly used for Desktop publishing work for magazines and newspapers as most of the scanners and image setters had MAC interface. Ours was the first MAC IIfx of India and there was no Apple office in India. At that time, Macs were shipped with Mac OS - Apple's own OS. Later, Mac started using OS X of IBM... With my little exposure and experience of OS X, it was fun finding more about this OS while trying to connect to iPhone... (I wish Windows was built as strong as OS X... )

I started working on it at 5pm yesterday... missed aarti at 7pm for this... missed my dinner at home with Shilpa and Akshar... continued working on it in office till 11pm... came home and had a quick dinner and resumed the "operation unlock"... 2am early morning, no sign of any success... had a cup of coffee and resumed with the fresh thoughts and concentrated efforts... no luck... at 5am, I had no more energy to continue and no more will power to ignore the back pain...
Woke up at 8:30am and after my morning rituals, resumed the "OU"... I continued this effort in office and nothing to avail till noon... the site I found earlier was not accessible from office... and I came back home to access it from my home connection... The site was accessible and the saga continued till 5pm... No matter what I tried and no matter how perfect my efforts were, just at the end, my SIM kept on getting rejected... I could ping the phone, I could write my files in the phone, I could even execute some codes inside the phone and I could actually change some of the bytes of its firmware, it just did not work with my SIM... All diagnosis worked fine, all debugging worked well... all checksums were correct but it just did not accept my SIM...
Before I gave up, I searched net again to find out if anyone had reported such problem... nope... no one did :(... Then I came across a site http://www.iphonesimfree.com/ which also claimed that it can unlock 1.1.2 firmware iPhone... Well, I thought "one more site!"... but then I noticed something inbetween on this site... It said "We would like to also bring your attention to the recent events surrounding the iPhone Scene around the world. The recent launch of the European iPhone has introduced a new Bootloader which "currently" does not allow any kind of unlocking. The same Bootloader is present on the new iPhones that are purchased in the US with 1.1.2 pre-installed. " OMG!!! I quickly checked the Bootloader on my phone and it IS the recent one :(((( This was the reason that despite proper hacking, my SIM was not accepted by this iPhone... I was disappointed that I did not think about suspecting the bootloader before... Apple is smart that it came out with a new version of bootloader so that the hackers could not exploit it like its earlier version... But as that site said, I dont know how long this bootloader will remain virgin...

Anyway, enough about this techie thingy. Time for some praise for iPhone though personally, I dont like the phone of iPhone.
1. Its touch system is amazing... I wonder Apple this time too will be a trendsetter for touch based user interfaces.
2. Its sound quality is as superb as of iPods... Its built-in speakers though dont sound that sweet and they are not very powerful.
3. YouTube on the phone! Nothing great about it though but it tends me to think that YouTube is going to be another revolution in social world...
4. Amazing Camera... This camera's picture quality is much better then any other phone camera pictures I have seen. Nokia phone cameras suck all the time and I have seen people complaining the same for Motorola and other phones. iPhone camera produces real good quality pictures. Some of them are below.

Name of the store forced me to take the picture!

No need to explain! My favorite place in Toronto...

Look at the quality of the picture... Amazing!

Test from Windows Live Writer...

I want to check the HTML code generated by this tool... I found that HTML generated by Blogspot's native editor is not that optimized. I found many iterations of unwanted tags and to clean them manually is so headache... Of course, I am very new to Blogspot and do not know any shortcuts or better ways to blog there. I found out that every time I insert a picture in the post, it gets placed at the top of the document automatically. I then have to cut/paste it to the place I would like the picture to be. May be I don't know the better way to do it as I am very inexperienced with Blogspot.

This instigated me to check Windows Live Writer. It claims that it can be used to publish the blog on Blogspot too.

Dattu's Marriage

Dattu has been that kid in the block whom I have seen growing up from his early childhood... First time I saw him was at his earlier house, when he was hardly 2 years old. I went to his place with Papa to see Dattu's grandparents.

Today (yesterday - Dec 03 2007), he got married to Madhvi - a gorgeous girl from Pune. There is a whole long story about how they met and how they ended up getting married but thats out of context here.

Dattu used to be very naughty and careless about his study. He hardly scored good numbers and never achieved good grades. He though managed to finish his graduation in Commerce and then also managed to finish his post graduation in Law so that he could join his grandpa's law consultancy business. After his father Kamleshbhai's death, Dattu changed a lot and he became very serious about life in general.

Today, Dec 03 2007, he got married. Though it was a small size marriage and very restricted guests where invited, we - Mumma, Papa, Shilpa and her family and me were invited in all rituals and ceremonies as we are very close to Dattu's family.

I had few meetings this morning but I shited them to afternoon. I tried to capture some moments of today's ceremony though I could not be consistent and committed. As Dattu had hired a pro photographer, I had not to worry to miss any moments.

Its 36mins past midnight here and I dont have time to color correct my pictures or even to crop them properly. I could have shot many of these pictures better but I just did not want to intrude into that pro photographer's boundry.