My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

I often use the Albert Einstein’s quote, “Simple, but not simpler”. I think I should rethink that.

Today there was some crap movie in some channel. The hero will be flying a B2 bomber and there will be few F-14s behind his tail. He will switch to stealth mode and fly away. My daughter came from outside running towards me. I thought I’ll make the scene simple for her. I said, “See that biiiiiiig aeroplane? That is going so fast and the small ones can’t even see”. She turned to the screen, saw the bomber flying for few seconds and exclaimed “kaka!” (crow)

Hmmm, I should think simpler

written by Prakash G.R.

I always love Pixar movies - not for Steve, but for the amount of detailed attention they pour into every little stuff. Now the upcoming Wall E is something special for the following reasons:

• First movie after Disney “acquired” Pixar
• Its released after the biggest flop of Pixar (Cars)
• This will be the first Pixar movie where a real human face is shown!
• The one liner of story is too good
• As per the rumours, there are NO dialogs in the movie. Its all the beeps and light flashs of the robots!!!

Pixar took too much efforts to make us visualize a fish as a character in the Finding Nemo (I’m not going into details here, in short - we can’t easily visualize something as a character unless it resembles humans in most of ways. Think of the characters of Shark Tale, they are more of humans than of fishes) I bet they have gone even beyond that to create a movie without dialogs. Waiting for the release …

written by Prakash G.R.

If you look at your blogger profile, only the blogs that you started with blogger will be available. Lets see how to “trick” the system to have any other blog.

• Login to blogger and create a dummy blog. Give it your blog name and any address. Eg: “My Thoughts!” “dummy12345″
• Go to the Settings->Publishing of the blog
• Click “Custom Domain” & then “Switch to Advanced Settings”
• Give the URL of your blog there and click Save Settings.

I just linked this blog to my blogger profile. Have a look here.

Remember there is no validation done whether the address you mentioned there is a blog or if its a blog, whether you are a member/owner of that etc. So virtually you can have any URL there (except *.blogspot.com). Check where the “My Employer Blog!” links to

written by Prakash G.R.

Got an invitation for private beta for TinEye - an image search engine. When I say image search its not by entering some keywords and searching for images, rather giving an image as reference and finding out similar images. I’ve worked on a similar product for my final year project (identifying traffic signs), I know its not an easy task. The algorithm that I’ve used, needs proper training to identify the images. But for a search like this, you don’t have a training input. You get only one chance to identify the images. Sounds pretty complex to me!

I tried this search:

And the result:

As you can see the results are accurate even thou they are cropped, added few elements etc. Sounds like a perfect target for Google to acquire

written by Prakash G.R.

We all know that Tiger is the national animal. But how many of us know the state animals? Huh, state animals? This was my first reaction when I saw in today’s “Young World”, a The Hindu suppliment. I was surprised that we also have state birds, flower and tree!

Here is a complete list of animail, tree, bird and flower for every state in India. Some notable points:

• Elephant is the state animal for four states - Kerala, Karnataka, Jharkhand & Orissa
• Peacock is not just the national bird, the state bird for Orissa
• Lakshwadeep’s state animal is Butterfly fish and for West Bengal its Fishing Cat
• Coconut is Kerala’s state tree & Sandal for Karnataka. Sounds appropriate. For Tamilnadu its Palm !

written by Prakash G.R.

Last night we went live with BaZaa beta. Download it here.

You can list items and find items, and BaZaa provides you the matches. Best of all this is that none of your queries/listings are saved in the server and that makes it very scalable. The speed and efficiency will good when there are more users and items listed. I’m not going to explain the technlogy (BTW, its patented) but just the UI, which I wrote. Here are some screenshots (Click to enlarge):

Seen all the screen shots? Now you get a picture of how to list/find right? Now close your eyes and think how many places you have the labels like “Query: [text box]“, “Price: [text box]” ? Can’t think of any? Well, there are only few places where we have labels. The UI was designed from the ground up in a way that the users will not have the web-based-form-filling feeling. When one of the demos a partner prospect from Zurich said, “for the first time I’m seeing a UI that I can use immediately without asking anyone how to use”. Oh! yeah, if you were wondering, we are neither shipping any documentation for how to use it nor having a web page for that. Keep experimenting the UI and try out yourself

Believe it or not, all the UI components are OS native components, but coded in Java! 2 months back, when I was given a demo of this for the first time, the UI was in Swing and looked pathetic. I was asked whether it can be improved. That night in the hotel I wrote the mock up as an RCP application and when I showed it to my CEO the next day, he was impressed. It was obvious that SWT & RCP is the best choice for BaZaa over Swing. Ever since that day, I worked on few hours every day for building and testing the UI and finally we are live!

As of now, we are running the servers only in US. We have purchased servers & bandwidths in other countries, soon you should see local version. Try it now and send your comments/suggestions either to me or click the feedback link in the BaZaa website.

written by Prakash G.R. \\ tags: BaZaa

More to come. For now: http://bazaanetworks.com

written by Prakash G.R.

Picture this. You are a scientist. Along with a big group, you spend 14 long years and burn $ 8 billion to produce an enormous research machine for which will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang (Don’t ask me what it is, I said you are the scientist not me ) You have done some basic testing and about to make it completely function. Just weeks before that, someone sues you saying that this experiment will create a black hole and swallow the whole earth and our universe. How would you feel?

I’m not one of the scientists, so I felt funny. Here is the complete story.

written by Prakash G.R.

I saw this article from Gilli on Macro photography by reversing the lens in an SLR. I tried it yesterday. After a lots and lots of trail & errors, I got some good shots. Check this image:

This is taken with a 50mm lens in normal way. Look at the all flowers. The lens cap should give you an idea about the size of those flowers. Now in macro mode, the same flowers:

If you have enough bandwidth, here is the high resolution full screen slide show (The pictures look much better in high resolution).

A brief guide on Reverse lens macro photography:

• First things first - the object. First I tried with some plain flowers and the results were not reflecting in the efforts. It was just like a normal photograph. So select an object which will have lot of details when zoomed in
• Take off your lens, reverse it and hold it to the mount. Keep the other end of the lens some 10-20 cms away from the object and try to move your lens+camera together towards the object. At some point you will find the object focussed. From there you can adjust the focus from your lens
• Remember, the lens is out of its mount. You don’t have any control over any of the lens functions. The aperture is wide open and no auto focus
• You retain full control of your sensor. So Whitebalance/ISO are adjustable. Also the shutter speed. Change these settings with the fully open aperture in mind.
• The DOF is too good. The focusable area is hardly one or two millimeters
• Any small movement (either camera/object) will cause dramatic effects in the picture. You would have seen in the above shots itself
• Try to get hold of a tripod and/or a reverse adapter. Believe me. Its a pain in your back to shoot without them
• Patience. You need a lot of patience. But the results will be worthy of the time you spent experimenting.

written by Prakash G.R.

Yesterday when I came out of Bangalore Airport, I saw a big advertisement for a residential apartment. It said about a free gift with every purchase and a jackpot prize for one person.  What’s surprising in that - you ask. Well the free gift is a brand new BMW Car and the jackpot prize is a personal jet or a private island! I was about to fall down and then read the whole advertisement. The ad was by Damac and property is in Dubai. Hmmm, Ok. Bangaloer is real estate prices are under controlor is it that Bangalore people decided that the prices here are too high and started investing in “cheaper” ones like these?

I had my camera with me and took few snaps in the return journey. While my flight was waiting to enter the runway, another flight was landing. With the evening sun in the backdrop it came out as a nice snap. Check it out

written by Prakash G.R.