Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

© oweners / pablo / koding.com

May this be the year of joy, success, prosperity, peace and harmony for all you. -Sarath Chandra and Family.

Dedicated to all the dc comic's fans..

  India won the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup, beating a formidable Srilankan team by 6 wickets. It was a tribute to Indian cricket, 1.2 billion Indians and a particular one of them, Sachin Tendulkar. Sachin adds this feather to his celebrated cap after waiting 5 world cups.

2010 is out the door. Personally, it was a year that ebbed out the worst period of my life. Dawning 2011, I hope things make a turn towards the good. To all the members of our extended family, friends, friends' friends, Jyothsna and I wish a very very very happy new year. It has been a fun New Years Eve, Thanks to a lot of friends. credit:btobetun Let there be Peace!

here is what happens on twitter.. @antderosa: Zuck isn't turning Facebook back on unless he gets final edit on The Social Network @emilcardell: You know your a geek if you think that it is worse that #github is down then #facebook @sargenthouse Facebook is down, you know what that means right? NO POKING. @opb: BREAKING NEWS: Facebook is down. Worker productivity rises. U.S. climbs out of recession. @sacca: When Facebook goes down, everyone comes to Twitter to talk about it. When Twitter goes down, the world falls mute. @jlnd: Don't worry, if Facebook doesn't come back you can retrieve all your private data from any of the companies they sold it to. @LouBrutus: DNS FAILURE: Facebook is down which means 9 months from today, many children will born. @irockiroll the day has finally come. cloverfield ate facebook @willmckinley: First they cut Facebook. Then Social Security. Then Medicare. @kris10turner OMG I just paid my cable bill thinking that's why my ...

Its is astonishing how meritline can offer an ipod cable (and a lot of innovative products) for less than a dollar. They even ship it free. Although it comes all the way from the other side of the world, a country called Honk Kong. It takes 2 weeks, but meritline seems have perfected the job of *getting it there*. However, one catchy (satire) product is Automatic Toothpaste Dispenser/Toothpaste Squeezer . My wife always rants about such tools, how they make people lazy. I think to agree now :)

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I just posted a tease in last afternoon and late in evening SNF game ads has this.. Great.. Now Verizon (and Android - Droid V's first gPhone?) are getting on an offensive.. Seriously.. Simmer this again " Everything iDont " (classic slick Black text on pure white with a drop shadow, Cheesy music running in the background "Its magic.. " : See where it is going?). Snap, fuses out to a powerful Transformers like backdrop with " DROIDDOES ". Yes It does. And this is going into OT! Deep into Festive season.. Am I going to get one? Fingers crossed :)

Jyothsna and I love biking. Yesterday we *surprise* visited Annapolis. It was sudden, so, I dint know where to start. So we stopped at the visitor centre. Found out US Navy Academy was a place worth going to. And there was a college football game that had just begun. We had a more naturalistic view on spending the evening. So we started walking to the Market space, to the dock. At the end of the dock, We were surprised to find Free Wheelin' . They rent out bikes for free. Really. Its not a 16 speed mountain bike of your childhood dreams but, a simple one speed cruiser enough to have fun. All they needed was our Photo Ids and a Credit Card. (They make a copy of these and shred it when we return). They even gave us a Annapolis Transit pass each, in case we had a flat tire or just were to far to bike back. I did a similar thing in SFO two years back. A friend and I rented a couple of bikes and biked the Golden Gate. But that wasn't free. We rented from Bikeshare.com. They cha...

I follow those GoogleDevelopers Videos . Sometime back, in one of the presentations on GoogleIO, there was this interesting string of dots at the bottom of each page of the presentation . They looked like random big and small dots. A similar bunch of dots were also on the T-shirt of a presenter was wearing in another presentation . While it seemed something in the pattern, I could not find what it was. Finally, another presenter cleared the matter that those dots are just binary representation of "GOOGLEIO" (So much for advertizing Google IO, Impressive!). So I wanna do it. Takes me back to days of those DSP classes at school. Nerdy me had to churn some old brain cells. I remember those first programming language classes in Pascal and C when you were asked to do fibonacci series and converting a binary string to ascii codes. That *experience* came handy here: Check it out! Text to Binarize: For those who came to copy the javascript code to convert string to binary,...

Look What I found on my webware feed last night :D NullPointerException -Open Source!

VLC media player gives a few things with less explored Extended Settings. A Webcam (in-built on lappy, prefered) together with VLC can do some pretty nerdy stuff. I cought a collegue by suprise when she walked into my cube saw her self in my laptop movin on my screen. Well.. thats only the beginning of endless uses and other things you can do. (You can even shave without a mirror- Yeah it is so good) Open vlc. Open Capture Device from the Media(older File) menu. Select the one for opening the webcam (V4L or DirectShow) For the basic use, just click play. At this point youu should see a vlc window playing what the webcam is capturing. Go full screen (there is your mirror, go ahead shave :) This is good enough for basic nerd level. Stop here unless you want to get really nerdy :). Now Open Extended Settings (CTRL+E) from tools. Go to Video Tab. Play aroound.. Have fun Examples: go to Color Fun > Color Extraction > enter 00FF00 and Image modification > Motion ...

One of the witty forwards I recieved in the recent past :)

For Those of us who would hate to miss a word from Dr. Pausch - His last lecture with closed captions (Subtitles). part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 Originally from: http://www.taudiobook.com/closed_caption/randy_pausch_full/

Yesterday's Google Blog had posted [ Randy Pausch , a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a good friend of Google, passed away last night. In addition to being recognized as a pioneer in virtual reality research, he became widely known as a gifted teacher and a mentor to many. Millions of people saw his inspiring " Last Lecture " on YouTube. Read more about Randy and his contributions on our Research Blog .] So I watched the video. And the related movies. Very Inspiring! I made a small playlist . Just play this, It will loop to finish with the actual lecture! R.I.P Dr. Pausch