BBC2 is broadcasting a fantastic series on cricket - Empire of Cricket. Any cricket fan worth his salt should not miss this. More information here - BBC Two Programmes - Empire of Cricket.
I had thought about writing this for quite some time. Ab Tak Chhappan is one of the best movies to understand and implement effective Team Management - I am not joking. Having read this, if you go and watch this movie, it will be impossible not to get the point I am making. Your opinion may differ on whether it is the best lesson or not (I sure do consider it one), but you surely will agree 100% with me that it indeed is a management lesson.
I have seen this umpteen times now. Latest run on last Friday with a dear friend who completely agreed with me - he confessed that he had seen the movie but never thought about the management angle but now feels that every shot gives an insight.
HDTV connected to a Mac running Plex controlled by Apple Remote. Plex is a great replacement for Front Row because of the control, configuration and expandability options it provides and it is as slick as Apple software.
Finally, I gave up my reluctance against HTPC, shared media around house, NAS in a home etc. and decided to do get started on a project to take a leap in that direction. Problem: 2 external hard disks, 1 old eMac desktop computer, 1 Macbook Pro (MBP) and an old TV. I want to use the MBP to play my HD movies stored on the external hard disks on the old TV.
eMac is wired to the wireless router. External hard disks are connected to the eMac. So sharing the hard disks makes it (and the movies) available on the wireless network that serves the MBP. But this requires the eMac to be on all the time which is a waste of electricity. Actually it should be ON for the MBP to access the files. And then it can be turned OFF. But physically turning it ON/OFF is painful. I was aware of the wake on lan feature and decided to give it a try. A utility WakeOnLan is available from ReadPixel which allows a similar thing - instead of ON/OFF one can Wake/Sleep a computer on the network. And getting this done was a small source of joy.
The last part is not going to be that simple. For playing a movie on the old TV using the MBP is going to be a challenge (£15 + a few couple more) as I could only find Apple makes the DVI to S-video/RGB cable. There are loads of DVI to HDMI options but no S-video/RGB and hence connecting to “old” TV is a problem. Now, the challenge is spend £15 for the DVI to S-video or £600+ for a new TV and the connector. The later option looks so tempting!!! I am not going for the S-video cable right now. 
I used to cringe whenever I heard/read comics being referred as Graphic Novels (I thought that term was redundant). But then I came across the fantastic Sandman and I can say that comics and Graphic Novels are two different entities. There is no superhero by the name Sandman (at least not in the two volumes I read in last couple of weeks). It is a “a comic book for intellectuals.” See the Wikipedia entry for more details.
Will start updating regularly from this week. At least one friend cares and hence this update.
Another year, another move, and one of the reasons why my blog includes the word ’shifting’. Will be on the blogging track regularly - I don’t think anybody missed anyway 
No words to describe what I am feeling after watching the news.
I was a huge fan of Indrajal comics during my school days (and Phantom was the favourite). And if you were too, this article will bring back some old memories.
What more could have Sachin Tendulkar done to be unequivocally accepted as the all time great of the cricketing world? My answer is ‘nothing’. I am not ashamed of saying that he is the one.
I cannot understand why he is always placed after Bradman and why he is always compared with Lara and now ridiculously with Ponting? If scoring more than 28,000 runs cannot make you the greatest, then nothing ever can and I think that is very unfair. How many who place him after Bradman have actually seen Bradman play? Sachin has definitely played more cricket than Bradman, has faced more variety of bowlers, who arguably could be better bowlers than those from the Bradman era. And Lara has scored 6,000 runs less at a lower average in both forms of the cricket.
After the dotcom bubble burst, internet evolved in Web2.0. And I think after the current financial crisis, we will get Web3.0 and maybe it will be easier to define and deliver Web3.0 (I think it will be development resulting from the crisis) than it was for Web2.0.
In the midst of all the turmoil in the financial markets across the world, Indian markets ended on the higher side (+2%). I don’t believe anybody expected that to happen and that there is any explanation as to why that happened.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I think the current shakeout was necessary and will eventually help everybody in the long run. For investors in Indian stock markets, this is another opportunity to build up a portfolio over the next few years. But I shudder at the thought of what will happen to Sensex and Nifty tomorrow (tomorrow as in Tuesday, 30/Sep/08).
Workflow is an interesting term and I guess it is very common in the Design/Photography/Video industry (I can only guess as I am not in that industry - in IT we use the term Process more often than anything else - of course one of the applications I am closely associated with - Siebel - has workflows, but then that is for the application usage - yea yea by users and developers both, but not for the application development process(!)). It is so easy to digress from a topic and you have seen an example now.
Anyway, I always had this skepticism about this workflow concept till now. At work (I don’t blog about work but this cannot be avoided) we decided to record the cross-group trainings we have every week and make the material available for distribution to the wider audience. And here comes my challenge to set up a workflow to download (errm no… capture footage), encode, and then deliver/ store (errm no… publish) the material. Does not sound too complicated. But then, I tied this up with putting my old eMac to thorough use instead of keeping my MacBook Pro busy and unusable for other tasks (eh eh… surfing). I didn’t want to use iMovie (as I want to spend much time on post processing and since the clean install of Leopard, I actually don’t have iLife on the eMac). I decided to put Quicktime for this task. But I can’t believe how complicated this has now become?
I use Canon HV20 for movies. I had already bought Quicktime Pro from Apple to enable Quicktime’s recording and export features. But one of the problems I initially faced was that Quicktime would not recognise the HD mode of the camera - that was no good for my HD blockbusters (no not the Training videos). After a few sleepless nights, found this pointer towards a developer utility called DVHSCAP that comes with the Apple’s Firewire SDK. And it was such a delight to find out that DVHSCAP captures HD video from the camcorder and stores it as a M2T file (MPEG-2 Transport) and that’s it. I had received pointers towards using MPEG Streamclip to convert the captured video to destination format (that search to decide what the destination format should be is still going on). But no life is not so easy, MPEG Streamclip requires a Quicktime MPEG-2 codec for converting M2T files and this is sold at an extra cost from Apple. Now I don’t want to pay more cash having already bought Quicktime Pro - that would be just a tenner or couple less than the price for iLife suite. But I already had ffmpegx on my eMac and gave it a try and it was successful in the conversion but then the quality was not that great - jerky in some places - possibly due to interlacing/deinterlacing or lack of either or due to some setting for frame rates (PAL - 25fps, NTSC - 29.97fps). Being an eternal optimist, I took this as a learning oppurtunity and increase my knowledge of this complicated medium. And everyday is a new surprise, e.g. today I came to know that there are square pixels (computer displays) and rectangular pixels (TV). That 4:3, 16:9 might end up displayed differently on computers and TV that many of the pixel sizes actually i.e. mathematically not in the ratios 4:3 and 16:9.
I had decided to go for SD recording instead of HD for the training videos. And Quicktime Pro can capture SD through its “New Movie Rcording” option in the menu after starting the playback on the camcorder connected through Firewire. But it severely limits the compression options available for the new recordings depending on the machine being used and rightly so (right now, a 3 minute clip is taking more than 40 minutes for conversion to Web Delivery format - something is bloody wrong somewhere). Quicktime Pro allows the capture with the fantastic ‘Device Native’ option in the video’s full resolution which I have selected. This creates a 12GB file for every hour. But then this is just halfway to the holy grail.
I am too sleepy to include links to the various utilities mentioned above - a quick Google search should do the trick.
If one has money to invest in stock markets, by and large he can pick a few companies to invest in from various indexes and buy their shares and hold it till he requires the money, at which point he can cash it. The probability that his investment will be worse off (at any point in time) than those suggested by the highly paid investment bankers is a random number.
The theorem can be extrapolated from ‘has money to invest in stock markets’ to ‘life time savings’ or ‘pension’, that could otherwise be handed indirectly to the investment bankers.
It can also be extrapolated to include ‘market analysts’, ’stock market experts’ and the like along with the investment bankers.
Leopard is doing great on my eMac since I loaded it a month back. But I have decided to make it zippier (it has only 512MB RAM). The first step was to use the nifty utility, Onyx and reduce eye candy. There are many options/settings that cannot be changed through Leopard’s ‘System Preferences’ and require a few commands from the Terminal. Onyx saves the hard work and provides a way to change these settings.
Of course, Onyx is not just for reducing eye candy. It is a maintenance utility which provides the following functions:
- verification of S.M.A.R.T. status, strucutre of volume
- syntax of preferences files (.plist)
- system file permissions (and repair, if required)
- manually run maintenance scripts (important, since many times we keep the machine in sleep mode and these scripts are skipped)
- rebuild spotight and mail index
- cleaning of cache and log files
- secure delete of trash files
There are other applications which provide similar functionality and I have read good reviews about them - Tinkertool (free) and Cocktail ($14.95). But as of now, Onyx does the job.
Google is releasing a new browser, Google Chrome today. And I thought the browser war was already over. More details at Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser.
There is a new add-on from Mozilla for the Firefox browser called Ubiquity. I haven’t used it yet, but the demo looks quite impressive and Ubiquity could become the mother of all add-ons. More details can be found at Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity.
Being a fan of horror movies, I snapped the Omen pentology boxset while it was going very cheap at HMV. And it was not a bad decision. I was sure of the original movie to be a five star movie, expected at least one of the following three to be good, and definitely wanted to see the 2006 version as it was the remake. No major surprises but the latest one is a fine example of how remakes should be. It is almost frame to frame remake with subtle improvisations at the right places and no undue use of technology as many remakes have.
Can somebody please gift one boxset to RGV (does anybody remember his Aag?)
Finally, I managed a family photo-shoot, more than two months after Advaita’s arrival. I have been playing with an external flash I bought recently (will write a separate post about it soon). And I must say bouncing flash makes a huge difference to the photos (I am no big fan of direct flash and the unnatural way in which it lights subjects - but bouncing flash is altogether different).
Like many good things in life, THE news came as a wonderful surprise. I am sure I was not alone - too stunned to believe. The first event for the Indian team that I saw was boxer Dinesh Kumar going down to an Algerian and though I was happy about a 19 year old Indian making to the Olympics, I was worried about the medal prospects. But today’s news was just amazing. Hearty congratulations to Abhinav Bindra and thanks to him for giving us this moment to enjoy. He is one of the two Indian bloggers (other being Rajyavardhan Rathore) from Olympics participants and you can leave him a congratulatory message on his blog.
But spare a thought for another Indian shooter Gagan Narang, who was 9th in the qualifiers in the same event with just a point behind Abhinav, who was 4th. So ranks 5th to 9th, all were just a point behind the 4th. The results are available here. That just shows how tough the competition is out there and you can understand why Abhinav said that it is important to support the athletes even when they lose. Hopefully, Gagan can still come up with some great results as he has two more events to participate in.
For now, I am so pleased that a barrier has been broken.
Runs absolutely fine… even with 512 MB RAM. So my 4 year old desktop is still doing great and has the latest and best OS and now feels just like new.
Advaita has not even completed 2 months yet and he has already attended 2 parties and has been to the beach once.
Advaita, tired after his visit to the beach on Sunday -
Though I have had the Canon Powershot G9 for more than a couple of months, I had not tried the manual controls and the RAW shooting mode. But I started experinmenting yesterday and since iPhoto 6 doesn’t support G9 RAW, I tried the Canon Raw Image Task. I was impressed with the post-processing that can be done with RAW images but cannot say the same about the Canon utility.
There is at least one freeware out there for Mac OS X - RAW Photo Processor. GIMP + UFRaw is also available, but I am not sure how elegant it is on Mac (or whether it works) - couldn’t find much information. But these do not provide photo organisation / library features and the workflow (download from camera, process, organise, print/export/publish) tends to become complicated.
There are a few options available to incorporate RAW/Post processing and workflow - Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Elements + Bridge. Apple’s Aperture 2.0 is available for a 30 day free trial and I am giving it a try. Also, Connected Flow has a free plugin for Aperture to export photos to Flickr and so the workflow for photos from camera to flickr via post processing is painless through one application itself.
One of my first tries -
There is loads of information on RAW vs JPEGs available and I cannot add much value here at this point of time, but I am sure that I will never go back to in-camera JPEGs now.
Just when you think what more can be done - you come across a new concept and then you think why it took so long to be discovered. HDRI is a technique to combine highlights and/or shadows from a set of photographs taken at different exposure settings. The results can be stunning and I want to try it out soon.
There is a good introduction to HDR at the dPS (digital Photography School) site. And if you want to have a look at some amazing HDR images visit http://stuckincustoms.com/.
Finally I managed to make some time from the totally busy days and got Advaita’s first video uploaded. It is just over 3 minutes and you have to watch the clip to see how nappy changing, bathing, and dressing up is possible in 3 minutes.
Advaita(अद्वैत): Nappy, Bathe, and Dress from Sandeep Meher on Vimeo.
It has been a roller coaster ride for the last few weeks. I cannot describe the anxiety when the predicted due date of Advaita’s arrival, came and passed without any signs whatsoever. But exactly after a week, he came and has brought with him unlimited joy and happiness for me and Mili.
Though both of us were all ready for months before the birth and even after going through the labour for number of hours on the day of birth, we were stunned on actually seeing Advaita for the first time immediately after he was delivered. And that moment will remain etched in our minds forever.
And when the anxiety of birth is over, it is now anxiety about whether you are doing the right thing - are you holding him correctly?, is this normal?, is that normal?, do all babies have this issue?, do all parents have this issue?, is it alright if he does that?, and so on and on. And I think this will go on now for years to come.
Welcome to parenthood!!!
Announce to the world
Aai went through a lot
Baba is very happy
Pensive
And now, rest
Meanwhile, read more about his name at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta.
