Full photographs with description on flickr.

This is Triund on a day's Trek from McLeod Gunj. Here are some more details about the Trek options - http://trekking.123himachal.com/eht8.htm

Trek to Indrahaar would be best if you love snow/glaciers and like some adventure. 

Was just toying around with macro mode waiting for a download to finish and accidentally shot this picture, check out the full sized image for the beauty.
More details on flickr page.

Love it or Hate it, i am trying yet another breakthrough design on my canvas :p

The combination of lights makes it interesting although the CCD guy in Adlabs pune would be cursing me for spending some quality vella hours, lotsa coffee and free WiFi just for 100 bucks. 

P.S - Pune's mens parlours are damn costly and everything on Koregaon park is shamelessly overpriced.

P.S2 - Ocean's 13 is witty and slick.

wow, this is innovation.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ 

It just sent the MSFT stocks up by 1% and am sure it will be creating ripples in the blog world at the least :p

check out some hot images from Engadget.com gallery

Microsoft Surface (teaser from youtube)

excerpt from Engadget.com

Over the years we've seen plenty of surface and gestural interface computing systems and prototypes, but nothing mass-market -- nothing consumable, if you will. Microsoft aims to change all that with Surface, its first foray into surface / gestural interfaces; arriving in the form of a 30-inch table-like display, Microsoft envisions its eventual uses as pervasive as imaginable, like ordering beverages from your restaurant table and silently scanning your wine bottle's RFID tag to automatically present information on the vineyard and vintage. Sure, some of it's pretty pie in the sky, but Microsoft is touting Surface's multi-touch, multi-user interface, object recognition and gestural interaction, and it's out to dispel myths of vaporware with limited 2007 rollouts in T-Mobile stores, Starwood hotels, and even Harrah's in Vegas.

 

 

Another cool video (high quality) of a live demo by

Mark Bolger (Director Marketing, Surface Computing, Microsoft) from on10.net - http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/

excerpt from msnbc.com

“Pretty exciting, eh?” Gates said with a sly smile, when he put his hand down on what looked initially like a low, black coffee table: At the touch of his hand, the hard, plastic tabletop suddenly dissolved into what looked like tiny ripples of water. The ‘water’ responded to each of his fingers and the ripples rushed quickly away in every direction.

How it works
The radical new approach starts with the guts of the device itself. Under the impact-resistant plastic top skin on an otherwise nondescript table hide five infrared scanners, a projector, and a wireless modem. The scanners recognize objects and shapes placed on the top and respond to them accordingly. For example, if the scanners recognize fingers, and the fingers have been placed in color circles that appear on the surface, the projector shows colored lines that follow the tracings and movements of your fingers. Meanwhile, an internal modem sends and receives signals from any electronic device placed on it. All of the hardware is run by a special version of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista.

To do things on Surface’s tabletop screen, you reach down, touch it and push it. To make the image you see on the screen bigger, spread your fingers. To make it smaller, squeeze your fingers together. To move something into the trash, push it into the trash with your hand. And it allows what Microsoft calls “Multi-Touch” and “Multi-User” interaction — namely, more than one person can interact with it at a time. Try that with your home computer.

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Surface, though, is its natural interaction with everyday objects and technologies. When you place your wi-fi enabled digital camera on the table, for example, Surface ‘sees’ the camera and does something extraordinary: It pulls your digital pictures and videos out onto the table for you to look at, move, edit or send. Images literally spill out in a pool of color.

excerpt from PCWorld.com

Never mind today's buzz about social networking--with Surface and its multi-touch technology, Microsoft envisions a new era of social computing. Certainly, the horizontal, tabletop configuration of Surface raises a variety of possibilities, such as friends gathering for drinks in a hotel lounge and sharing photos and videos.

Inside the Table

Microsoft Surface couples standard PC components with the cameras and projectors necessary to enable surface computing. The demo unit employed a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and an off-the-shelf graphics card with standard drivers (and Microsoft's own application layer to allow the GPU to help with sensing touch).

The images the PC outputs are displayed on the tabletop surface through a short-throw DLP projector contained inside the table; the lens is just 21 inches from the surface. The rear-projection system produces a 30-inch-diagonal, 4:3-aspect-ratio image at a resolution of 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz.

The table also houses a power supply, stereo speakers, an infrared illuminator, and five overlapping cameras that sense movement on its surface. The cameras feed images of objects on the surface--be they fingers or tagged objects such as game pieces, a Wi-Fi camera, or a digital audio player--back into the computer, where they're processed mostly in the GPU, according to Nigel Keam, one of Microsoft's architects behind Surface.

The specially treated surface's multi-touch capability has no implicit limit, says Keam. "We optimize it for 52 [points of touch], based on the most extreme reasonable scenario we could come up with: Four people with all fingers down, and 12 game pieces in the center."

City Cat - A car which will be powered by compressed air is all set to go into Tata Motor's production plants. This will be the much touted sub-1-lakh-car which has already gained enough mind share that a friend of mine has already started saving for this. There were rumours that it is set to launch by the end of 2007 but if the production is set to start now, we cant expect it to be out of early 2008, considering that it is a total different engine and car and will need many rounds of road test before it gets launched.

Here is the excerpts from an article featured in engadget

The first commercial car to be powered by compressed air could be about to hit the production lines, as Indian automaker Tata Motors prepares to build ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre's design. We're not certain if it's the same air car that we hit just under three years ago, but if it is, it's about time! The City Cat runs on nothing but compressed air -- which can be refueled at "air stations," and overnight using a built-in compressor -- with a not too shabby top speed of 68MPH and a range of 125 miles. The Air Car designers are working on a hybrid version that can compress air while it's operating, potentially making cross-India journeys possible: Toyota Prius, eat your hybrid heart out. As EcoGeek points out, the game ain't up just yet for completely emissions free travel since the problem of the source of the electricity (usually acquired from fossil fuels) has yet to be solved. Plus, the fugly design really doesn't do it any favours: why does "green" have to mean "gah?"

After a week of playing this highly addictive game, I finally manage to touch 6K while clearing all the 50 levels in the normal mode without loosing any life (without any juggling). Here is the screenshot of the final maze. I guess now is the time to say it bye bye, otherwise I am sure am gonna loose my job :p

Archive of all my attempts till now is here.

Some tips to note:
1. Fully researched Squirt towers kick ass.
2. Scoring points more than 5800 in normal mode will require you to bring in more batches of creeps simultaneously to gain bonus points, in which case Dart towers comes very handy.
3. 2 each of fully researched Squirt (Typhoon) and Swarm (Storm) towers are enough to kill level 49 Flying Boss creeps.
4. Around final levels, Juggling can manage 3-4 levels of creeps at a time which can bring in 600-1000 bonus points.
5. Better to play Challenge mode (4K) to test your maze design and tweaking (if required).

Will try to post a video or some more screenshots of the gameplay only "IF" I am unable to stay away from this, which is most likely. :p

updated pics of another attempt for 6K

The title may sound a full time bakra news item for all the TV News channels but nothing of this sort actually happened. I just wanted to have a title which will have words (tags) related to the content of this post to improve search ranking of the blog . I somehow noticed that words in the title of a post gets more notice in any search results. It was long time i had any new music and i hate downloading so i just went ahead and bought all the cd's which had any good song and this is what i have.

Black Friday

Shootout At Lokhandwala

Metro (Life in a Metro)

The Train

Some of the Tracks are just superb and i wish instead or having many albums with only a couple of magoc tracks, we have few albums with all fundu tracks. This might be a solution to prevent piracy. Here's a list which i feel i must share. 

Arre Ruk Ja Re Bandeh - Lyrics: Piyush Mishra (A phenomenal track by Indian Ocean)

Aye Ganpat - Lyrics: Mika (A mast track which resembles Aslam Bhai and Kallu Mama a lot)

Note: Rated Lyrics, not suitable for children below 18 or non-hostellers :p

** This is in-complete and just the snippet i could scribble .. will add more once i can find the full lyrics on the net ** 

Mithoon

What comes to your mind when you listen all these hit tracks which have been a rage in indian music charts recently.

Woh Lamhe - Zeher

Tere Bin - Bas Ek Pal

Bas Ek Pal - Bas Ek Pal

Maula Mere - Anwar

Javeda Zindagi - Anwar

Kuch Is Tarah - Doorie

Doorie - Doorie

Yup, they all have a fantastic fan following and have a common Genre in all of them, they are all are a creation (or an adaptation) of Mithoon. Many might not know about this chap but this guy who started his music career with Mahesh Bhatt and Co. is some name in indian music arena. An excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithoon

Mithoon Sharma (born Jan 11, 1986 is an Indian Bollywood film music composer and singer. He is the son of Naresh Sharma who has scored background music for more than 200 movies. Mithoon first started out in the Mahesh Bhatt camp adapting popular Pakistani pop songs into Hindi movies most notably Woh Lamhe from the movie Zeher. Since then he has moved on to composing his own music as a guest composer in movies like Bas Ek Pal and Anwar. Although the movies did not do well, the music was well received and Mithoon's work was appreciated.

In 2006 Mithoon replaced his rumouredly good friend Himesh Reshammiya for composing the soundtrack for the movie The Train. This will mark his very first full album composition for a hindi movie.

During his days in the Bhatt camp, Mithoon forged a good friendship with Pakistani Pop Star Atif Aslam resulting in thier joint composition for Atif's new album Doorie along with Sachin.

And here we are gifted with one more hit number from him from the upcoming movie The Train.

Mausam - Lyrics: Syed Quadri

Zindagi ne,  Zindagi bhar gam diye ...

Although the other track Woh Ajnabee seems to be making more news but i somehow feel that it might score more points for music but Mausam is lyrically better.

In Dino - Lyrics: Syed Quadri

In dino .. dil mera,

This is very funny. Although the third one looks like photoshopped.

What will you call it? Cut throat marketing, brand building, viral marketing ....

Check out more on www.silverlight.net

Feel the power of silverlight, once you have the plugin for your browser which is just 1.4 megs in size. I just downloaded and was glad to see it working on microsoft.com and msdn.com. To start developing something powered by silverlight one will get some basic information here and the forums will help a lot too. 

I will come up with a sample page for my own website "soon" :) needless to say i am excited but lets see when that soon comes.

If you are someone like me who hate things which are overrated and hyped beyond the actual potential .... ammmm .... we should take a look at this Silverlight demo video once or try something from this gallery.

Convinced ???

We have seen web pages/sites evolve from HTML to Adobe Flash and to AJAX based applications. What do you think will be the next wave of applications will be like? Today we can read news, check our emails, listen to online radio, play multiplayer games, shop for movies, music, books, electronics .... bla bla bla, communicate with friends, waste quality time on orkut scrapping our friends, book online tickets for flights, trains, or movies, watch videos on youtube OR create/consume blog posts which mostly make no sense or are copy/paste. :D

So much happened in such less time that it looks like yesterday when I used to sit in the computer lab of my institute to read news and watch latest pictures/trailers of upcoming movies or chat with my friends or check my mails on yahoo. Having seen the transition from the time when rediff.com used to look like this to the current

HTML -- DHTML -- JavaScript -- Adobe Flash -- AJAX -- What Next ?????? 

A new web presentation technology that is created to run on a variety of platforms. Creation of rich, visually stunning, and interactive experiences that can run everywhere: within browsers, and on multiple devices and desktop operating systems (such as the Apple Macintosh). Searchable and Indexable content which supports cross platform playback of Windows Media Content, works well in concert with XAML, will be scriptable with JavaScript and VB.Net/C# in future. A framework which provides features like animations, videos, vector graphics to multiple operating systems and plugin works for all the leading web browsers like IE, Firefox and Safari.

As you might have guessed it. It is WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) based on WPF which ships as the graphical subsystem of .Net 3.0

WPF/E is now SilverLight

more on - http://www.Microsoft.com/silverlight/

"Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Silverlight integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight media capabilities include fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality audio and video to all major browsers including Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer running on the Mac or on Windows. By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow."

Architecture

(straight from msdn)

Silverlight has few basic properties:

• It integrates with various browsers on Windows and on the Macintosh.
• It enables rendering of richer user experiences that are defined by XAML.
• It render media (music and video).
• It enables programming that is consistent with the Web programming model.
• It is small.

Silverlight was designed to address these properties, as Figure 3 shows.

Figure 3. Silverlight architecture

• Lightweight browser plug-in—Silverlight has Windows and Macintosh modules that are designed to enhance Internet Explorer (versions 6.0 and 7.0), Firefox 2.0, and Safari browsers. The December 2006 CTP for Windows is 1.1 MB in size.
• Native presentation runtime— Software-based browser enhancement that allows rendering of XAML-based interactive 2-D graphics, text, and media, in addition to the browser native rendering of HTML. XAML can be used inline, in a file, or in a package.
• Interactive video and audio—Cross-platform independent media runtime that can render Windows Media content (WMV and WMA) in addition to MP3 (will be available after the December 2006 CTP). Video and audio are handled as a media element in XAML, enabling flexibility in their presentation. Furthermore, the media support leverages the huge infrastructure and ecosystem around Windows Media, enabling cost-effective delivery of top-quality media.
• Programming layer—In consistency with the Web architecture, Silverlight XAML is exposed using a DOM model to JavaScript. That way, AJAX programs can utilize the extended markup rendering capability using the same programming paradigms and practices (on the client and on the server). After the December 2006 CTP, we will also enable a managed code programming model using a subset of full CLR that will enhance the programmability side of the browsers to enable more performant and more scalable Web applications.

Deployment and Packaging

Content for a Web page that contains Silverlight elements can be created by using the following tactics:

• Inline XAML and JavaScript.
• External XAML files and JavaScript files.
• Compressed content package (available after the December 2006 CTP) that contains XAML, managed code, images, fonts, and media. Streaming media sources can be referenced from the XAML media elements.

Figure 4. Silverlight packaging (after Feb 2007 CTP)

We believe that the flexibility of application packaging and the consistency of the application architecture with Web standards and operations will create many opportunities for improving the impact and effectiveness of Web applications, making applications more scalable, fault-tolerant, and dynamic (they can change their markup on the fly), and making content more discoverable.

Web pages that require Silverlight can detect if the Silverlight plug-in is installed, and can direct users to download it and install it (either through a redirect or through an object tag). The Silverlight SDK has documentation on that.  

Commonly mentioned as alternatives to Silverlight are Adobe Flex, Nexaweb, OpenLaszlo, and Ajax. 

This is for the people who think Vista is all about same old XP with some bug fixes and some cool looking themes and transparency effects.

Hello!!!  Its obviously much more than that, just keep track of the next generation softwares lined up for Vista.

Here is an example of what new versions of softwares will be looking on Vista.

More on Yahoo Messenger for Vista - http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

Take a preview - http://messenger.yahoo.com/vista_popup.php;_ylt=Ai2v6lPEwtgmBPINiWiHgr8KktMF