Some high speed train pictures that I took on my last visit to the bay area, California. This is the Mountain View train station. There are regular trains from the bay area to San Francisco. This was shot in the evening twilight.
Month: March 2008
Solve the rubiks cube
(Image courtesy: www.sciencenews.org)
Can you do it in 26 steps ? How about 25 ? The previous record was 26 steps, and now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician has broken the record and done it in 25. To solve this problem, he had to use a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Given that compute power is becoming more and more inexpensive, anyone wants to do it in 24?
Interestingly the 26 move record was in 2007. Earlier it was 27!
Read the original article here.
(via slashdot.org)
Header image
The above header image is a cropped version of another picture that I snapped on the way back from Tirupathi to Bangalore. The sun was playing all kinds of games that day – hiding between the trees, then between the two mountains, and ofcourse, a couple of times, taunting my eyes as well …
Without Words
(click for full size. All credit to Saumya)
A great photoblog that I stumbled upon yesterday. Great pictures, taken by an avid photographer. Do visit her blog here.
The Wipro Story
EEtimes has a write up on the Wipro story. Very very well written. Talks about how it all started, and how it metamorphosed to what it is today. My favourite exerpt:
The government policy shift led Wipro to extend its expertise in designing printed-circuit boards to developing its own semiconductor blocks and ASICs, in order to address the needs of its new telecom and PC customers.
“ASICs were new to us, but we figured there was no magic to it,” said Valavi. “We put a group and tool flow together, started some basic designs for standard interfaces, and implemented them in such a way that people could put them in their chips, so we could license the blocks to others.”
Within 18 months, Wipro had USB and FireWire blocks it could license to other companies or use in its own ASICs. It has nearly 90 FireWire licensees today.
Read the full article here.
Fiery sunset
Elephants of Asia
(Image courtesy: time.com)
Brilliant photo slideshow on the Times webpage.
Excerpt:
In his new book, Vanishing Giants, Photographer Palani Mohan journeys across Asia, searching for the soul of the Asian Elephant.
Some great photographs of the big beasts. Some touching/ugly photos (elephants being broken in etc). But nice photographs none the less.
The 2001 Space Odyssey ends: RIP Arthur C Clarke
(pic courtesy: wikipedia.org)
Arthur C Clarke, science fiction author extra-ordinaire passed away at his Colombo home today. He was 90, and survived by the best science fiction novels of all time.
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GCM
Fresh Paneer
(Image courtesy: flickr set of Cdye1)
Over the weekend, the wife and I had been to the newly opened Spar HyperMarket – which is just a name for a ginormous sized supermarket. It was actually pretty nice. There were some deals that were pretty neat. We bought a few things such as a set of pink pillow covers, which now perfectly matches our pink bedsheets etc.
But the piece-de-resistance was the dairy section. We had wanted some mozzarella cheese, and we looked for the usual Amul cheeses, and we could not find them. However we found a big brick of freshly made Paneer, and people buying 250gm slices from it. Well, the wife and me are big suckers for Paneer, and R makes extremely good Paneer gravies for having with rotis. So we went ahead and succumbed.
And she did make the Paneer on Sunday itself (since the dairy guy had said it will last only for few days – since it was fresh Paneer). Hmmmm. That is probably the best paneer that I have had in a long long time. Then realization dawned. We realized why the Paneer that we make is so different from the Paneer that we have had in some of Delhi/Noida’s restaurants. And in fact, why most of the north Indian restaurants in Bangalore fail to match up with the restaurants in Delhi/Noida. It is the Paneer! It is the Paneer. It became very obvious. Man ! It is the Paneer.
Anyways, now that I am over my euphoria, one thing is for sure. If we buy Paneer from now on, it would be fresh Paneer from Spar. Sorry Amul – you have competition now.