Sire,Pa,Pappy,Pap,Pop,Ol'Man,Dad,Daddy,Bappa,Father

Tons of different names for the same person. A very important person. A person whom (until very recently) all humans need to come to being except maybe Jesus (but thats a different story). So many different names but almost all of them universally (or earthly) understood. Yet everyone has a different story about their XY chromosome donor and I really like to listen to their stories about him. I don't really know why. Maybe it has something to do with my own dad or maybe I need to understand fatherhood or maybe everyone around me is having trouble with their dads. Personally I think the later is most likely. I bet you can count 5 things you don't like about your dad even now, and have yet to resolve or talk to him about.
I try to put my mind in a neutral state when judging these stories, but its really hard to be unbiased. Come to think of it, I think I always found fault on the parent's side. But when I think more about each conversation afterwards I feel that I am missing a very important input. I never get to hear from the parent's side of the story. I do have heard very few stories from the parent's about their sons and daughters and surprisingly its the inverse of their children. This makes me wonder a lot. Surely they both can't be telling the truth and I think non of them is lying either. There is then a high chance that both of them are choosing to ignore the parts where they are to take responsibility. I can't help but wonder if this gap in communication between the parents and their children is just a local issue or part of all human society.

Maybe one day I will figure out this gap myself when I become a dad.

Growing storage problems

I still remember the days of the floppy disk. A mere 1.44 MB, seemed more than enough then. But today even multiple Terabytes of storage is not enough. Makes me wonder, did our storage requirements grew? or did the technology failed us? Surely the magnetic storage medium sucks. Its just not enough anymore. With the explosive growth of the internet, all sorts of large multimedia files with various compression technologies is eating up all the storage. And now with everything HD, its a whole lot different story, 50 GB for a movie!! GOD! Thats a lot of space. During the last 3 years magnetic storage grew to a Terabyte per single hard disk. And thats like 20 HD movies per $250 hard disk, which sucks. Yes H.264 sure did cut the space requirements by 1/5 without much noticeable loss of quality, but its still not enough. I believe the storage technology firms should invest a bit more on R&D and try to keep up with the ever growing storage demands. Day by day every home is becoming more like an enterprise. Media servers, NAS devices, HDD players, high speed networks, wireless connectivity etc.. are becoming common place.

Back to bloggin again...

Guess blogging is a on-n-off thing for me... oh well lets see how long it will last this time...

iPhone is for the rest of us!! [Update]

[Update] Since the hardware unlocking of the iPhone, now its for every else. It seems the phone is Quad band, so great it works everywhere.

[Update] The actual iPhone actually has a SIM slot and its can be easily changed too. Now somebody fix the damn radio.

I was quite a bit surprised after reading and viewing all the reviews coming out regarding Apple's new iPhone. It looks like for all those waiting here in Maldives to buy this phone have to wait a bit longer. Cause who would want a phone which can't even make a phone call. It seems that you can't change the SIM card in the device. Its sort of locked to AT&T network. There is no slot to load the SIM either. [Update - Not true, since it has Quad band radio. ] In any case the frequency of mobile network in America is totally different from ours (both Dhiraagu & Wataniya). Apple always disappoint me in this regard (not that I was looking to buy an iPhone). They seem to lock their technology to select few and always lock their platforms. Haven't they already learned something. Look at their profit margins after they switched to an Intel processor, and systems capable to install Windows and Linux. I bet it was much better than what it used to be when their machines were running on Motorola or IBM chips. As far as iPhone is considered maybe the version 2.0 would enable the rest of us to enjoy the so called "Phone of the future"

P.S Guess the marketing people @ apple is right, its going to be in the future for the rest of us.

A glimpse of a dream coming true

Everyone who knows anything about me knows that I am a very lazy person. :D So, it comes natural for me to find ways to do things with as little work as possible. I always wanted to attended the office work while I am on my bed at home. Now how do I do that..

Well, tonight I had a difficult choice to make. Either starve till morning and keep coding or eat and live another day and stop coding for the night. I was so hungry since I haven't eaten anything after breakfast and I had this crazy drive to write some code for the PIC as well. But its was already 00:00 hours. So I had to leave office to eat. The problem with writing code for the PIC is that you need to check it on real hardware to see if it works. So I had to visually monitor the development system from the remote location. Now this is where the webcam come in. I just thought why not plug the cam and point it to the development system. I could simply access the office network via the WAN and write the code and test it on the hardware and see the results as well. Now think of all the possibilities. A PTZ camera attached to the computer with dedicated control interface and access to remote PC control would just seem as if I was right at the PC in office. Hmm.. I could also add bi-directional audio support and never miss anything. Wonder why I hadn't thought of this earlier. Maybe I should go back to office tonight and set it up. Love to see the expression on everyones face when the computer is responding remotely and also talking to them (not to mention telling them what to do).

As for the bandwidth consumption I think a 5~10Mbit connection would suffice if I want good quality with little overhead on processing on the client side. Then again its really hard to get that kind of bandwidth over the internet specially from our greedy ISPs. Hell even a megabit connection will cost you an arm and a leg.

Aaah! Technology is so beautiful.

A screenshot of the action. (As always click to enlarge).

Macros

A lot of people ask me what so special about macro photography and why am I so fascinated about it. Most of `em thinks its photography of small objects. As for me their assumption is only partially correct. For me macro photography is actually about the `bigger picture`. I believe macro photography reflects light on all the things we never see during our busy lives and never wonder how beautiful and huge that world is. For me it shows the lives of those small insects, plants and the very details of their beauty. Anyway its just my personal understanding of macros and by all means I am just a newbie when it comes to cameras and photography. So some of pictures below may not qualify for being macros even by my own definition of macros. These pictures were taken during a trip to Maafushi. Most of these files are sort of large (1024+ KByte) click to enlarge ;)

Some sort of fungus growing on a leaf.

A small insert crawling up my friends arm.

Not so much of macro, sort of a flower.

A young fly feeding on pollens.

A crab? on top a small fruit from a local tree.

Water droplets on a flower.

Some sort of fern ?

Some sort of tiny fly (zoom in a bit on the black fella).

Thermal Trip

What do you know, computers do have sirens (sort of). After trying to copy a few hundred gigabytes of data to my PC it suddenly switched off itself. Naturally I turned it on again and then came the weird siren. At first I wasn't so sure it was from my PC, I thought I was hearing things like sirens (occupational hazard). Even smelled something burning so I removed all power connections to the drives and switched it back on. The BIOS gave a quick warning message that the CPU was not shutdown properly due to "Thermal Trip 1" ??? Hmm... A quick glance n the culprit was the thick power cables totally blocking the operation of the CPU-Fan. Damn, if the technology was a few years back I would have toasted the processor for sure. Operating Systems sure has a long way to go and motherboard manufacturers should really make life easy for software vendors to develop applications to monitor different sensors on-board in a more unified way. Later I checked out Intel's website and it seems I have to download a separate software to monitor system health.

Oh well until next time I think I will just use some extra tape and wire to route the cables in a more organized fashion ;)

Memories in pictures

I thought I would just simply publish some of the photos from my archives. These photos are taken by different people and are only published with their permission. Me being so out-of-date I just stumbled upon Picasa2 and its collage/timeline feature so this looks like a nice way to use my archives. (Click to enlarge, warning: very large file 9.26 MB)

Male' After Tsunami.
Photo credits Manna.

Been a while

Someone told me tonight that its high time I did something... so I am back to blogging.