Festival of Lights...

Here's the festival wishing for all you my readers...

May each and every light illuminated in this Diwali bring a ray of Joy, Prosperity and Happiness to you!!!

Wish you and your loved ones A Very Happy Diwali and Prosperous New Year!

Incredible Honda Civic Ad

I bet you must have seen the extremely famous Honda Accord ad, aka 'Honda COG Commercial'.
(note: I hate to say this, but you are insane if you haven't see that ad! BTW, above link is your one chance to exculpate yourself!)

Having an uncanny knack to make one of the most unconventional ads, here's another supremely sexy ad for one for it's most sexy car, Honda Civic.

Speciality about this add is that all the sound effects were made by a human chorus in this UK Honda Civic commercial. Any attempt to praise this ad would be just futile, it's simply IMPOSSIBLE to do any justice in words!

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via: TechEBlog

Links:
1 http://www.tabloidcolumn.com/honda-accord-cog.html
2 http://the-shaolin.blogspot.com/2006/07/head-over-heels.html
3 http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-5-most-creative-ads


--- re edit ---
If you don't get the video, just click this

GDB: Readline vi Mode

Only the ardent most of vi lovers will appreciate this...
I was debugging my program that was SIGSEGV'ing. After a couple of runs, my left-right and up-down arrow keys stopped working in gdb! Annoyed I switched the termnial to have a second look at the code, when I returned to GDB terminal... lo and behold... in my instinctive way used vi's 'k' and 'j' keys! BINGO! I just found out that there indeed is a vi mode in gdb too! And I bet not many know that, and hence this post.

If you don't care reading any further, you can enable vim editing mode by pressing: Ctrl-Alt-j Now pressing Esc will enter you in command mode.

For the more persistent readers...
Being an ardent lover of vim, the only TRUE programmer's editor (Emacs is a nice OS, but it lacks a good editor, that's why I use vim), I do all my work in vi: be it coding, writing mail, compose documents, blog, etc. etc. Anything that you can think of which requires writing more than few sentences, I do it in vim. In any other editor, I feel handicaped! So much so, that I even use vi mode on my BASH shell! That way I can really type and manipulate anything with eye-flashing speed. (Tip: This can really impress people [...cough ...cough...] at times ;-) )

$ set -o vi
This will put your command editing in vi mode. Press ESC and you get all of vi cursor movement and most of text editing commands. So when I found this under gdb, I was just flabbergasted! It's called 'vim readline mode' in gdb. Damn! Why I didn't think of this earlier, the world's MOST versatile debugger ought to have such features!

Now I won't have to move my hands off in brain-dead fashion at snail slow speed to and from the arrow keys! One of the best things about vim is if, like me, you are a touch typist and prefer typing really fast (for you don't want to miss anything that's on your mind), you won't want to move your hands off their position on keyboard often. And this is _exactly_ where Emacs fails, miserably! A tech-tip post after a long long time.

Links
1 VIM Tip-1 http://the-shaolin.blogspot.com/2004/12/my-own-2-cent-vim-tip.html
2 VIM Tip-2 http://the-shaolin.blogspot.com/2005/03/vim-tip.html
3 Gdb Readline vi Mode http://sunsite.ualberta.ca/Documentation/Gnu/gdb-5.0/html_node/gdb_237.html

Disable automatic install of IE 7

If you have a windows system, you are likely to do a regular 'Windows Update' to apply all the critical high priority patches, without which it's likely some hacker or a nasty worm would easliy @!#$ your system. How would you feel that while doing so, M$ just installed one of it's crapiest pieces of nonsense on your system: Internet Explorer, IE7!!! Yes, you are going to be taken by surprise when they find out that IE 7 is going to be installed as a high-priority update automatically via Windows Update. A serious issue for security driven sys admins!!!

What scares me is that the day is not far when M$ will even go a step further and uninstall Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, GoogleDesktop, etc!!! Man, they have just came a step closer to it!

Here's the detailed post on this issue via IntelliAdmin: Disable automatic install of IE 7.
Quicklink, there's also a tool provided by M$ to disable this shit.

Nostalgia...

Last weekend I could reunite with my really old buddy, Amito, or Shaw, (Americanized version of his last name, Shah ;-) A few months back he bought a stunning new flat and this small dinner at his place would serve both purposes: reunion as well as see this new house! He sent a map to his place, and gave a few directions. Unfortunately I couldn't follow any of them properly, I was too new to that location, so was he! After calling him n times, and noting directions again and again, 4-5 trips around the place, we both got tired and a little frustrated. It was then I realized that we both are interpreting directions from opposite sides!!! His left was actually my right!!! LOL! Lesson learnt in following directions!!! Anyway, after some effort I got to his place, I walked through all the rooms and the balconys just took my breath away!!! Wish I had reached there a little sooner, I would have been able to enjoy the wonderful view from the balcony. (his online album containing new house's picture is private, so you will to wait till he makes it public).

I hogged on the amazing home cooked Pizza (yummmmyyyy... thanks to his mom and sis). But the best was yet to come....

This is where the title of this posts becomes relevant....
Old college days, nothing like recalling those golden years spent in college: subjects we hated, subjects that terrorized us, professors we liked, lectures we enjoyed, fun we had, fun we missed, picnics we went to, gotchas in labs, exams, practicals, etc. For good part of 2 hrs or so we had amazing time getting nostalgic and having a GOOD laugh!

How do you define an ideal algorithm

Ever wondered what is the definition of an ideal algorithm. Well...
THE perfect definition of an ideal algorithm:

Good algorithms should be like bikinis...

It should save people a lot of guesswork.

Adopted from original quote by Sam Ewing:

Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.

Some more birthday photos

As promised, I've updated my album with my birthday photos.

1. Lunch with office buddies
2. Surprise mini-party society buddies threw

Links:
[1] http://family.webshots.com/album/554539699Ntxodu
[2] http://family.webshots.com/album/554586715SQdBxv
[3] http://the-shaolin.blogspot.com/2006/09/many-many-happy-returns-of-day.html

Nevis Picnic, finally!!!

So finally, after LOT of, hmm... I don't know what, we finally went for a one day outing from Nevis. This just the second BIG outing from Nevis in 3+ yrs or so!!!On a short, 3 days, notice so many of the employees couldn't manage: reasons vary from their spouses couldn't get a leave, they already had make plans which can't be changed, to plain retaliation against this kind of short notice. The spot was Upper Deck Resort in Lonavala.

The place has GREAT scenic beauty, but the resort by itself SUCKS big time! To start with the prices are astronomical (1500/- per head!), and this only includes your breakfast, lunch & snacks. You have to shell out additional 350/- if you want to swim in this damn pool!

I'm not even talking about other facilities like spa or something!!! Single bottle of cold-drink worth Rs.15/- was given to us at the rate of Rs.35-40!!! Plus, the way from main road to resort is nothing less than driving through rocks! You can't dare getting your vehicle up there! So, these !@#$ers charge you 150/- per head to transport you up to the resort. Climbing 4-5 kms patch is not tough on foot, but for people with small kids that was out of question.

Grievances aside, once in we had a ball! This is while climbing up the way to resort

(photo credit: Manish. L-R: Boney, Sweta, myself, Kaushik, Sachin & Kiran)

Here you see wonderful mountain right from where I was having breakfast!

Beautiful little fish in bowl besides my table.

While exploring the place around, we spotted three monkeys mimicking Gandhji's: Talk no evil, See no evil, hear no evil! (L-R: myself, Sachin, Manish)

(photo credit: Sweta. L-R: myself, Sachin & Manish)

We trekked around the resort for good 2-3 hours, then played football, TT and antakshari. While trekking, all my buddies were quite tolerant of my photography experiments. Here you see me trying my hand at macro photography: this little caterpillar

You can see the whole of album on my webshots page.

Links:
[1] http://good-times.webshots.com/album/554541180rFYjvF
[2] http://www.upperdeckresort.com/contact.htm
Photo credits: Myself (Fuji FinePix S3000), except where noted.

Mother's comforting words...

Nothing like comforting words of a mother! I was feeling a little worried, after I came back from football session, an unlikely situation. Maybe an unwanted thread came to life in my subconscious. And the best part is neither me nor mom had to know the exact problem!!! This, then, doesn't seem to be an overstatement:

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers