Nadal: 'In any other era, I would already be number one'

'In any other era, I would already be number one'. However, says Rafael Nadal in an interview with Bikash Mohapatra, destiny deemed that he be playing in the same time period as the best player in history. Read the full article here >>

Nadal, the 2004 doubles winner at the Chennai Open is back this Jan to compete in the singles, and should be quite a crowd puller!!

Maine Kya Kiah?

Melanie organized a fun carol singing event at work last week. Although I joined the first days practice, a bad throat infection kept me out through the rest of the week and although they amicably invited me to the final performance, all I could do was be the echo on 'Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer'.

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Echo: Reindeer)
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows (Echo: Like a lightbulb!)"

With Nihar on the guitar, and Babu on the drums, we had a fun ensemble together. We also sang a fun variant of the 12 Indian days of Christmas.

Monami got a holidays gift set of yum Ghirardelli chocolates.



And oh, last Sunday, we went by Kiah's jewelery store outlet and picked rings for each other. I chose a band (No, not really LOTR inspired). She chose a 'knot' with 44 little diamonds.

$499.95 on Amazon - my college project report

Neuro Fuzzy Methods for Adaptive Video Image Compression Using Iterated Fractal Transforms - For Sale ($499.95) (Hardcover)
by R Engels, A Sendillnathan, Aravind Krishnaswamy, B Arun Shenbaga Kumar (Author)

Chemba found a used copy of our college project report for sale on Amazon.com.

The seller is listed as 'vegasbookstore', who appears to have a good rating, so this doesnt appear to be a farce. See extract below from Amazon:

Seller: vegasbookstore

Rating:98% positive over the past 12 months (574 ratings.) 668 lifetime ratings.

Shipping: In Stock. Ships from NV, United States Expedited shipping available. International shipping available. See shipping rates.

Comments: clean text, dust jacket covered, cover pages have some creases, minor wear

The mystery - how did this bookstore get a copy of our project report? And, who did they think would ever buy it for $499.95? ;-)

And in case you were wondering what the hell the long winded title means, fractal image compression was a novel technique back in the late 80s/early 90s that competed with JPEG. (And yes, complex project titles helped garner brownie points with the profs).

Our project focused on applying the IFS techniques to video images. The compression ratios were very high (1:100 and higher), but the speed of compression and quality were poor. We experimented with parallelizing our algorithm on PARAM and the IBM SP2 32-node cluster, which yielded some performance improvements.

If you've been around in the industry long enough, you might recall JPEG gained popularity partly due a faster decompression technique, but also due to the political power of the joint photographers group.

So, would we have made it big had JPEG not won out? Probably not, but it was an interesting project. And oh, I still have my project report with me. Not for sale however, thank you.

Did I tell you that I'm getting married?

I am!!! Here's our wedding invite designed by Monami and I - well, mostly by her really. It's in the format of a bookmark!

The scans for the two sides are below. One side has the usual prosaic wedding invite details, and the other has three frames that tell the story ;-)



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Casino Royale

When I went into the theater to watch Casino Royale this weekend, I was expecting the usual 'leave your brains in the car park' - guns, babes and gizmos oversimplistic sensational masala mix. Well, it had all of that, but all in all, was a credible and realistic movie.

In fact, it may be the best Bond movie I've seen. Daniel Craig's character reminded me a lot of Alec Leamas, the protagonist from John le Carré's novel 'The Spy who came in from the cold'. It's difficult to pinpoint what it is - His hardened looks? Moral complexities?

Or maybe simply the fact that unlike the other Bonds who would come out of a martial arts tussle dodging howitzers without any signs of a loose thread on their exquisite tailored suits, Daniel's character bleeds like the rest of us mortals.

He's real.

12 (Indian) Days of Christmas

Looking for a laugh?
Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owK5tHjL0aE

This is a great spoof of the traditional Christmas song, with the tongue in cheek lyrics going,
"12 cricket ball tamperers
11 syllable names
10 minute yoga
9 telemarketers
8 bollywood films
7 eleven workers
6 it grads
5 minutes of fame
4 hare krishnas
3 buttered chickens
2 nosy inlaws
a totally insufficient dowry!!!"