Aarthi Ramamurthy

Orkut is a wonderful place to find friends with common interests. Orkut also helps one find dates. It is an awesome site to keep in touch with your long lost classmates and friends who sailed across the ocean to pursue that degree they'd always been raving about.

Just like most other people in my age group who have access to computers and a decent Internet connection, I have an Orkut account. If I remember correctly, I have had it for about two years now. What started out to be this elite, by-invitation-only access where you'd find fellow geeks and nerds, proliferated into a site where even my little cousin sister has an account and hence knows all my friends, what they scrapped today and the testimonials they wrote.

Of course, that is a good problem to have. The other not-so-nice side? On an average, I get about 15 scraps a day from folks I don't know. I'm only happy with the profound love and affection these unknown folks have for me. If only it made sense. Why, oh, why can't people write in a language that I can grok?

There's a lot in a name - A lot of Orkut names sound like a riddle to me. So much that when one of them tries sending me a friend request or a scrap, I need to pull out a pencil to decipher the name. It is always some GoDfAtheR or ♥♥♥ अिनष ♥♥♥ a²+b²-m²+c²-h²+k² or DeviL$$EyE### or (-)@R$(-)@ thats my name ...!!!! or some name like "Jo Hua So Hua... Lelo Saaman Aur Chalo Goa..." or "DON" or "۞๑DINESHPAPPAN๑۞ ♥ ♥". Gasp! Grow up, folks!

Spellllllll check! - I don't mandate people who write these nifty scraps in my scrapbook to be journalists. But grant me the permission to skin them alive when they write complete nonsense. Here are some teasers, steaming hot from this morning's scrapbook

" Hiur name is nice just as U.u r really looking sooo cute if u weared white dress in that pic U will definetely look like an angel.maintain that physic as long as possible.very looking nice gas which i never see this much of beauty in this world.hai ,shal v fight for while,plzzz naa,maatlaadukundhaam raa first kavalante tarwatha kottukundham.gichukundham,sare naaa,have a nice evening.happy week end my dear. bybye.HAPPY CHRISTMAS"

Fight, we shall! Where's that darn sword?!

"hi how ru i wana now more about can u chat wid me"

Nope, I don't wana chat wid u until you run your text through a spell checker.

"hi babe biryani ckana chal ne ka kya ? "

Err, no thanks. I just lost my appetite.

ASCII art - In spite of this blog being titled so, I'm not too fond of finding half page long "art" on my scrapbook. Like this one -





Whoever you are, thanks for the compliment. Don't sue me when you turn diabetic.


The picture - The profile picture is supposed to depict you. Or what you're trying to convey. Or your interests. What am I supposed to understand if I see a picture of a shirtless Salman Khan? Or Sharukh Khan wearing expensive glasses? Or Aishwarya Rai? Or a fat, drooling baby?

The emails - This causes all the excruciating pain. Not only do our Orkutters scrap cryptic text, they also send mails. A lot of mails. From a lot of people.

Mails like

"Hi...i just happnd to see ur pic in the chess community...so jus decided to take a look at your profile.
Quite coincidentally we share birthdays other than our interest for chess."

Quite coincidental indeed! And the best part? We both live on the same planet! How cool is that?

Bottom-line - before sending obnoxious mails/teasers, ask yourself if you would send something similar to your boss and still keep your job. If the answer is yes, shoot a mail. And hey, the spell checker rule holds here too.

Folks who read this ought to understand that it isn't Orkut that I'm bashing here. I love the site. For all those who now think "If you have so much against it, why don't you delete your account?". Again, I really like Orkut. I can do well without a bunch of sexually deprived, desperate jerks hounding my scrapbook. I have made some fabulous friends at Orkut, shared photography tips, found missing school friends and scrapped away when bored. Like a friend says, you could call me an Orkut veteran. Just stay away when I'm in a bad mood like today.

A phone, a robot kit and the Robotics Studio is all it takes to create WiMo.

If you're a crazy fan of robotics like me and love to tinker around with robot parts, this video is for you. This just sealed what I'm going to do with $250 - buy a Mindstorms NXT kit and play with it!

Robotics Studio just released today and it lets people develop robotic applications using Microsoft Visual Studio. Find more about it at the Robotics page or download the Studio from here. If you don't have the hardware for it yet, check out the simulation runtime.

Labels: gadgets

I really must learn to take better macro photos.

For those who love maths and physics, here is a site that is bound to keep you hooked (especially on sleepy Friday evenings as today).

The history section is particularly impressive. Most of us know about the Hardy-Ramanujan number and how Hardy mentions 1729 as a "dull number". There is an interesting anecdote from Feynman's book where this number makes another appearance, hence proving that it isn't so dull after all.

The number 1729 also appears in Richard Feynman's collection of anecdotes (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!). In a chapter entitled "Lucky Numbers" he tells of going into a small restaurantin Brazil to eat lunch. He's the only customer, so he has four waiters standing around him. Then a Japanese man enters the restaurant,and he is selling abacuses. The man challenges the waiters to an adding contest, but they don't want to lose face, so they tell him to go challenge the customer sitting there (Feynman). They first have an addition contest, and the abacus wins easily. Then they try multiplication,and the abacus wins again, but it's a bit closer. Then they try long division, and this time it's a tie. As Feynman says, the more difficult the problem, the better he can do with pencil and paper compared with the abacus. Finally the Japanese man calls out "Raios cubicos!"... he wants to challenge Feynman to cube roots.

Feynman says the man wrote a number, "any old number", down on a piece of paper, and he still remembers the number... 1729.03. The salesman begins working furiously on his abacus, but Feynman just sits there smiling, and says "12.002...". The abacus salesman was beaten, and left the restaurant in disgust. The waiters are amazed at Feynman's calculating prowess.

He explains that he happenned to remember that there are 1728 cubic inches in a cubic foot, so the cube root of 1729 must be just slightly greater than 12. Then he just needed to account for the extra 1.03. To do this he neglected the 0.03 and used the binomial expansion


(1728 + 1)^1/3 = 12(1 + 1/1728)^1/3 = 12(1 + (1/3)(1/1728) + ...

so the amount by which the cube root of 1729 exceeds 12 is about4/1728 = 1/432.

You can only get two 432's out of 1000, so the firstnon-zero digit is 2, leaving a remainder of 136, and bringing downanother zero we know there are three 432's in 1360, so the nextdigit is 3, and so on. This gives 12.0023...

I just came across this article which lists ten differences between code (if you're wondering which "code" I'm referring to, then you missed something elementary, my dear Watson) as shown in movies and code written in real life by us. Makes for a hearty laugh..

My favorites -

Code cannot be cracked by an 8 year old kid in a matter of seconds
Sorry, no. Just no.

Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!If real life were like film I'd be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.

(I had to give it to these folks - I have watched Independence Day atleast 6 times now, and the first time I saw this scene, I was completely blown away by the compatibility between the alien spacecraft and Jeff Goldblum's laptop! Little did I know then...)

I told myself that I should start "serious" blogging on the 1st of December. I'm sure it's 1st December somewhere in the world. Anyhow..

As I look around my room, all I can find are wires of different lengths with different-looking end points, gadgets at the end of a lot of them, 4 plug-points charging some device or the other and lack of floor space to walk across.

Umm..let's see, there's a modem, a wireless router, a PSP, an iPod (which is very special, and I shall talk about it in another post), one external hard disk (80 GB) and one wannabe external hard disk (200 GB - ha, the trick is, I found a IDE to USB converter and started using a "normal" SATA hard disk as an external disk (for backup). It rocks!), my cell phone, a landline phone, Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers, my camera, headphones (those big, cushion-y ones), the hair straightener and finally, my two laptops (Smoke and Streak, as I call them). All of this and their respective chargers (wherever applicable) packed in a teeny weeny room!

How on earth did they become a part of the way I live? What would I do without them! The only two gadgets that are currently on my wishlist are this and this. The best part is that my PSP, my phone and my laptops are all Internet literate and can talk to each other as well. The sad part - I now need to do something about my room before my parents visit me in a month's time.

Labels: gadgets

I really wish I could think and write as clearly as she does. I've read that post over four times now. Sigh.