chakravyuha

Depeche mode was in town and performed at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on the 27th of April. Full of energy even after 25 years of making music, they played their characteristic twang draped synth and guitar tunes with thumping bass lines in spades. Good enough to crush the space between your ears and displace your innards. It was a tight and well produced affair with a couple of non-so-spectacular stage props. A giant silver ball hung in the middle of the stage with a couple of inches thick stip of digital display along the diameter of the ball. After the harmless “Hello” right at the begining, “Pain”, “Agony” and “Despair” and their synonyms kept rotating around this ball for the length of the concert.

There were a lot of people in the crowd who were probably there more for the sake of nostalgia than to check out how the songs from “Playing the Angel” played on stage (The excellent “A Pain that I’m used To” and the reasonably good “Precious” from the album translated into surprisingly weak performances). A 40-something lady next to me, who was there with her girlfriends, kept assuring me that it was about to get freaky, but David Gahan and Co. never really managed to meet her freakish expectation during the entire run (90 minute plus) and she left rather deflated. The highlight was “Personal Jesus”. The “reach out, touch faith” part had the crowd raising the roof with their palms. Fun stuff. Shoreline is a great venue with good acoustics, it was a packed house and the concert was good fun in all.

I saw the following post in the KnowBrainer unofficial support forum for Dragon Naturally Speaking
http://forum.knowbrainer.com/read.php?f=2&i=30667&t=30667

You can read the comparison at
http://www.anandtech.com/multimedia/showdoc.aspx?i=2744&p=1

{Warning: URL may wrap.} The comparison is objective and do read the message thread at the link to the KnowBrainer forum. In particular, see Martin Margo’s post on ambient noise.

Just got back from an insane two years at XLRI, Jamshedpur, one of India’s premier Business Schools. The pace of life in that environment is turbo charged, and returning and waiting for the appointment date from my company amounts to a lull in the proceedings. So one has to work that much harder to find things to do…and to make things interesting. Working on it.

Life for the Emperor penguins is hard. If there ever is a contest for the most complicated way to bring life into this world by a living organism, the penguin would be a front runner. Painstakingly shot, beautifully narrated (by Morgan Feeman) and completely full of fluff, this movie chronicles how penguins go mate and how they tend to their chicks for the first few months of their life.

Packaging it such that it does not look like a Discovery Channel documentary, the director weaves the story with pointless sentimentality. And that’s precisely what’s wrong with this movie. Do the Emperor penguins themselves feel that their life is hard? It might cilck with family crowd with thier children in tow, but it dumps the objectivity required while talking about the animal kingdom. Overlaying the story with the constuct of a family seems misplaced when you consider that penguins never really live as a family at all (except for a brief period till the young one is capable enough to walk about on its own). Neither do they seek the same mate the next season. The highlight of the movie is the frigid and barren, yet strangely beautiful Antartica landscape and of course the adorable Emperor penguins.

Its hard to form an opinion on a movie that has been deemed great by bona fide critics and the masses at large. There’s a burden of expectation on what the movie will offer you and more often than not it turns out to be a disappointment. I have always had trouble figuring out what makes a movie *great*. For me, “The Truman Show” was as great as “Blade Runner”, which was as great as “North by Northwest”, which was only marginally greater than “Toy Story”. See a pattern here? No? Nor do I.

Apocalypse Now has been analyzed, discussed and dissected by scores of bona-fide critics and lay people alike. The plot is simple. Its Vietnam war and Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is waiting in some camp in Vietnam for an assignment. Its his second tour of duty and he is going crazy. Crazy not because he is frustrated with the war and wants to go home; crazy because he is not sure where he
belongs. He cannot relate to life in the US and of course Vietnam means a terrible war. Right after a unpleasent night spent breaking glass panes with fists, bleeding and then drinking to sleep, along comes a new mission. A Colonel Walter Kurtz is running around playing lord almighty, has formed his own private militia and is killing people, fighting his own private war. The brass thinks he has gone insane and is considered a danger to the US operation and needs to be assasinated (with “extreme prejudice”, remarks one of the brassmen while Willard is being briefed). Colonel Kurtz is supposed to be running a camp up some river in Vietnam and Willard is asked to head up the river, find the place and terminate Kurtz.

Willard boards a military boat and the boat and its crew snake their way up some river in Vietnam. Most of the movie is incidents involving Willard and four crew members of the boat as the boat makes a journey north up the river. Vignettes on the horrors of war. On their way, they hook up with a team led by the decidedly odd Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played (oddly) by Robert Duvall. Kilgore insists on surfing during the middle of a Napalm air raid on a nearby tree line. Further up, they meet a small civilian boat with some innocents and one of the (edgy) crew members guns down all of them, because one of the boat passengers makes a suddent suspicious move. As the audience, you are a passenger on the boat along with Willard. You see and experience the horrors on either shores as the boat makes it passage up north.

The film takes an odd turn 3/4th of the way. Willard finds and reaches this camp and soon runs into a crazy photographer. This guy starts ranting about the greatness of Kurtz in a weird dopey accent so much so that you will fail to take any of what he says seriously. Kurtz till now is made out to be some kind of a cult leader who might have some very wise things to say. Willard looks
half baffled and dewildered with this place with its assortment of bodies hanging from trees and people with guns with weird, blank expressions on their faces. The place looks like a voodoo
camp. Willard is soon captured, held in a bamboo cage (for some unspecified period), released and finally bought into the presence of Kurtz. And here it all gets very curious.

The character of Kurtz and what Mr Copolla was trying to say through him completely baffled me. Kurtz keeps on muttering (repeating the same style of delivery he used in ‘The Godfather’) some words but the words make no sense. He is not exactly preachy. He just mutters some disjoined phrases with some poetry thrown in in somewhere. The film builds up to this moment. But the character we see lacks any philosophical depth. He does not represent anything. We are
not sure whether he is plain insane or insanely profound or is just a poorly written character. Considering that we see Willard spending a significant amount of screen time trying to piece together Kurtz’s character from some files that are handed to him as part of his assignment, this proves a big letdown.

Which brings me to my original question. Why is this movie great? Was the cinematography genius? Maybe it was the narrative structure? I have no clue. But what about the message? There are the very visible themes of alienation, of dislocation and of the horrors of war. But what do we make of Brando’s part? There is a point towards the end where Brando has Martin Sheen imprisoned for a couple of days. He fetches him and mutters a question, asking Willard whether he think his methods are unsound. Willard responds that he does not “see any method at all”. So it might all make some sense if you subscribe to the view that conveying the senselessness of war is really the point.

There are two non-DJ generated playlist online radio sites that I would like to mention. Last.fm has a collaborative model where you can tune into radio stations created by other users in addition to creating your own. The site has a tag model that is similar to the (very useful) online bookmarks site del.icio.us. Tags are just lables that you can assign to a group of songs. The name of the tag could represent a genre or maybe a mood or something else. Users can tag a song that is playing in the player or tag a whole album whose details you might be going through on the site. So tags are akin to creating your own radio stations. But the fun part is that these tags are shared on the site. So you can view and play songs tagged by other users on the site too.

The other one has a different model. Pandora (based in Oakland, CA, near me) is developing a genome-like alogorithm that can analye “the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time” to generate playlists dynamically for you. You just have to seed their player with an artist; it will then launch a player that will play some song by that artist. You can mark whether or not you like a song being played and the algorithms generating the playlist with modify it dynamically to something that feels is more like your taste. This site was mentioned in the WSJ
October last year.

The music player are different in each. Last.fm launches an expternal player. The player requires the Audioscrobbler plugin and a Last.fm player application on your machine. Pandora, however, has an embedded player in the browser itself because it relies on the Flash
plugin. Both are so good not because they are such high quality services but also because they have an extensive music database. I am yet to figure out what their business model is though. Last.fm offers the option of songs as permanent downloads, so maybe they are hoping to make money that way.

The yet-to-be-released-but-already-a-cult-favorite Snakes on a Plane starring Samuel Jackson, inspired someone to design this Sudoku puzzle! And the movie.. well the cult has already spawned this blog. The blog had a link to the very interesting Ask a Ninja site. Check it out.

Trucks in India have the weirdest of slogans printed at their backs. Here’s a couple of pictures of their wise posteriors after the fold. These are from my trip to India in September of 2005.

There is the customary suggestion to “Horn Please” and to “Keep Distance”. Seriously wouldn’t we have been so very poor at driving were we not drilled with the wisdom to “Use Dipper At Night”? Then there is one in Hindi that spells “Hawa Hawai”. That is so very hard to translate. Let’s see, Hawa means wind. “Hawai” is not really a word. But it probably means like the wind. So what the driver is trying to say is that despite everything the truck will go like the wind! Really, they are all such terrible drivers.

If you have not heard of Sudoku in the past year, you have probably been living under a rock. For those not in the know, Sudoku is like a crossword puzzle but with numbers. Most of the ones I have seen, are in a 9×9 grid. The grid is populated with numbers ranging from 0 to 9. The objective of the game is simple. Fill in the grid in such a way that each row and each column has all the digits from 0 to 9. Bookstores are full of Sudoku puzzle books with titles such as “The Essential Book of Sudoku”, “Sudoku for beginners”, “Still more Sudoku”, “Sudoku while luching”, “Sudoku for the loo”. Ok I made the last few up. But there are hundreds of these puzzle books out there, each with pages full of puzzles. One of these that I own, has the whole book divided into 5 sections. The difficulty level of the puzzles increase as you go from 1 to 5, with the puzzles in section 1 being the easiest (I take about 9 minutes for each of these) while those in section 5 the hardest (the only one I tried here took me an hour or so!).

What is interesting is the question “How are these puzzles created and assigned a difficulty level?” Firstly, since there are 81 squares (it is a 9×9 grid) simple permutation dictates that there are 1.966270504e+77 (9^81) possible puzzles. That is a huge number so we can rule out the possibility of anybody feeling like they have seen one before. A possible method to generate one could work like this. Start with a fully populated grid. You can write a computer program to generate a fully populated grid, a solved Sudoku if you will. Numbers are then stripped from the grid at random till there are only X number of them (let’s call them seed numbers) left, enough to enable a person to solve the puzzle to reach a particular solution. None of these puzzles in the puzzle book has more than one possible solution. That is the intriguing part. How many and in what way do you put these seed numbers that will guarantee a unique solution to a puzzle? Intuitively, a 9×9 grid with just, say, 1 seed number would have more than one solution (and would make for a very poor puzzle). So there has to be a way to determine a minimum number of seed numbers to guarantee a unique solution. The other question is setting the difficulty level. How can you make a puzzle more difficult than the other? This might not be a hard thing to do. My guess is that once you have determined the minimum number of seed numbers, you just add more to the puzzle to decrease the difficulty level. But I am not exactly sure whether that is how it is done. Any maths wizs out there?

I’m bored. A joke. A Haiku?

standing on curb
vehicles are turning
waiting to get hit

My kicka$$ brother was featured in the April 2nd 2006 edition of The Asian Age. Here’s the article in full.

Disabled man’s grit wins him accolades

– By Sanjiv Das

“Nothing is impossible to a willing mind,” believes Pranav Lal. Pranav, who was born blind, works at the Mahindra Special Services Group, Kandivali, as an information security consultant and has won the Best Blind Employee Award by the National Association for the Blind.

Pranav suffers from a condition known as retinopathy of prematurity. Though he started reading audio books at an early age, he never went to a school for the blind.

He explains, “At the time of my birth, the blood vessels at the back of my eyes increased rapidly, as a result of which the retina detached from the optic nerves.” He can only see a faint ray of light from his left eye.

Pranav, born in 1979, in Kuwait, was introduced to audio books at an early age, and he soon started learning Braille. When he was studying in Class 2, the Lal family shifted to Muscat. There he went to the Indian School from 1986 to 1994. After finishing school, he came back
to New Delhi where he joined the Apeejay School.

Pranav completed his graduation in B.Com (H) from Shahid Bhagat Singh College, Delhi, in 1999. In 2002, he finished MBA from the Indian Management Institute.

“I have got accustomed to the fact that I am blind,” says Pranav adding, “During my schooldays, I used to take the help of flex curves which can be moulded into any shape. To draw geometrical figures, I used rulers with magnets. I even set-up a lab in my house to practice
the lessons that were taught in school.”

Pranav does all his office work with the help of a laptop. The laptop and his PC at home are fed with a special software that combines speech and print to make the input audible. He can perceive images through sound. The special software called “The Voice” converts images
to sound. “The volume represents the object, the louder it is, the brighter the object,” explains Pranav.

In 2000, Pranav visited the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe to represent India at the Ability Olympics, a special event to help the physically challenged show their skills. He bagged the Special Excellence Award. He is also a volunteer at the Daisy Consultants, a group that specialises in publishing talking books for the disabled.

“His parents,” he says, “helped him cope with all sorts of problems.” His father is a civil engineer based in New Delhi, and his mother is a homemaker.

Pranav is a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Blind, New Delhi.

When asked about eye surgeries that could enable him to see, Pranav says, “There is little research done on retinopathy optometry till date and doctors are facing a tough time in cracking the problem.

He says, “I face no problem and the main factor behind my success is my will power.”

Looking for some good quality streaming audio options on the web? Here are three fantastic stations definitely worth checking out.

KCRW