On The 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi

The 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi (CWG) has thankfully ended, that too on a high note - the games went fairly well on the whole and India came second in the overall medals tally thanks to a gold-medal-winning match on the last day by Saina Nehwal. It was a big relief, coming as it did after revelations of shocking mismanagement, massive corruption and utter callousness of the concerned officials, which were threatening to derail the games and bring shame to India.

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"Terror In Mumbai"

Mumbai was attacked by ten terrorists a year ago in an incident that has since become known in India as "26/11". The attacks were accompanied by hysterical, and at times quite misleading, media coverage here in India. The subsequent media coverage didn't get any better and was more often than not filled with pointless analyses. This was especially noticeable on television where the news channels would feature endless rounds of debates among the usual bunch of bickering "guests", none of whom would ever get to complete a point before being interrupted by another guest or the anchor. Thankfully there is now a documentary film titled "Terror in Mumbai", made by Dan Reed, that rectifies this situation. This film is a must-watch, but we don't know if/when it will be shown here in India.

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Extreme Demos

One of the goals in creating a demo is to push hardware to its limits. With PC hardware getting more and more powerful, watching a demo on a PC is getting more and more underwhelming. Some demo coders seem to have decided to go back to minimal platforms where you can readily appreciate the effort and skills needed to produce the respective demo.

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"Dimensions"

I came across the "Dimensions" video via Reddit. It tries to help you visualise four-dimensional objects via their projections onto ordinary three-dimensional space. If you have even the slightest interest in mathematics, you should check it out. You can either view it on-line or order a reasonably-priced DVD. The video is about two hours long.

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Electronic Book Readers

As I have lamented before, I do not have access to a well-stocked and conveniently-located library here in Bangalore that lends books at reasonable rates. The alternative of buying all the books that I want to read is not just an expensive proposition - I also do not have enough space in my home to stock all such books. For some time now, I have been eyeing electronic book readers as a solution to this problem. It looks like I will very soon (but not quite yet) be able to get such a device at an affordable price.

Besides saving lots of space and providing unprecedented portability, electronic books also have some additional advantages over ordinary books:

• There are lots of freely-available electronic books. For example, Project Gutenberg provides electronic versions of thousands of classic books.


• You can easily make backup copies of (non-DRM-crippled) electronic books. This is unlike ordinary books, which can get damaged, lost or stolen.


• It is much easier to search through an electronic book.


• It is easier to enlarge the font of an electronic book or have the text read out by a text-to-speech software to help the visually-impaired folks.


• You save trees from being cut to produce paper.


• Electronic books should be cheaper than ordinary books since the publisher can very easily produce as many copies of such books as it wants.


• The Internet makes it much faster to deliver an electronic book than an ordinary book, when you order them through an on-line retailer. You also save on the shipping costs.


• Since software is usually used to write and typeset books these days, electronic books can be produced with no additional effort.

Of course, electronic books will never quite have the "feel" of ordinary books. Some of us also love the different smells of different books. An electronic book reader is quite delicate and more expensive when compared to an ordinary book. Unless an electronic book is in an open format like plain-text, HTML or PDF, it is quite possible that future electronic book readers will not be able to read it. Some publishers intentionally cripple electronic books with DRM making it more difficult to do things that are otherwise quite simple to do with an ordinary book (for example, share it with a friend). Many of the electronic books are unreasonably priced compared to the corresponding paper versions in spite of the fact that it is far cheaper to produce and distribute an electronic version of a book.

All this aside, there has been a huge downside of electronic books till recently - reading electronic books has not been as comfortable as reading ordinary books for most people. It is quite straining on the eyes to read lots of text on a computer monitor or on the tiny LCD screens of smart-phones and PDAs. It is also difficult to read such text in bright light. Even the dedicated electronic book readers have suffered from this problem. You can print out an electronic book to ordinary paper, but this is either too expensive or not feasible for most people.

This has now changed due to the availability of "electronic paper" displays. These displays look just like ordinary paper and are therefore quite easy on the eyes. They only use power when the displayed image needs to be changed and thus can run on a battery charge for much longer periods than LCD displays. Though the technology has been around since the 1970s, it has only recently become commercially viable. There are now several electronic book readers based on this display technology and judging by the reviews of these devices, we might just have passed an inflection point in the history of electronic books.

Here are some of the electronic book reader devices based on electronic paper technology currently available in the market, along with their prices as advertised at the moment:

1. Kindle, by Amazon, $400 (Ars Technica review of the Kindle)


2. PRS-505, by Sony, $300 (Ars Technica review of the PRS-505)


3. Iliad, by iRex, $784 (Ars Technica review of the Iliad)


4. Cybook, by Bookeen, $480


5. Hanlin, by Jinke, $300


6. BEBOOK, by Endless Ideas, $400


7. SoriBOOK, by Diginaru, $400

Ars Technica usually provides in-depth and unbiased reviews and therefore I have also linked to a review of a device on Ars Technica wherever available. MobileRead has a comparison-matrix of electronic book reader devices. You can also find a lot of nice videos on YouTube that show most of these devices in action, giving you a feel for these devices that is very difficult to get by just reading the reviews.

For example, here is a little video review of the Amazon Kindle:

Of these devices, the Amazon Kindle seems to have the best overall package in terms of price, connectivity and availability of electronic books. I like its integration with Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia. I also like its ability to look up the definition of a word in the integrated dictionary. Unfortunately, it also looks like the ugliest of the lot with some rather weird design choices in my opinion. It also cannot natively display PDF files. Amazon should release a newer version of the Kindle that rectifies these mistakes. Some of these devices, including the Kindle, are also unnecessarily saddled with DRM. Many of them have features that are of doubtful utility in an electronic book reader (for example, an MP3 player or a web browser with severely limited features).

Electronic paper still has some way to go before it can become an acceptable replacement for ordinary paper. The resolution of electronic paper still doesn't seem to be anywhere as good as ordinary paper. It cannot display colours other than black and white (or shades of grey), which is all right for ordinary text and figures but not for colourful photographs. The most troublesome aspect seems to be the manner in which the display is redrawn - there is a slight pause, followed by the blackening of the display followed by the final image. Depending on the person, this can either be very irritating or barely noticeable while turning pages.

These devices seem to be almost, but not quite, there. I think I will wait for the next generation of such devices before I buy one for myself.

A Taste of Haskell

"A Taste of Haskell" was a tutorial given by Simon Peyton Jones during the OSCON 2007 conference. It introduces programmers to the Haskell programming language using the xmonad window manager for X. The complete video of the tutorial is available in two parts (Part 1; Part 2; about 798 MB in total) and lasts for about three hours. The slides for the tutorial are also available (PDF; about 7 MB; 119 slides). The first time I read about this tutorial was in a post on Jao Ortega's blog. I have been meaning to check the video out ever since, but only now have I been able to finish watching it completely.

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Lossy Marvels

JPEG and MP3 are very popular formats for storing photographs and music respectively. They are both lossy formats and yet achieve amazing compression ratios without a loss of quality that is easily perceptible by normal people. I have always wondered how this is achieved.

The respective technical specifications are unfortunately too complicated to follow for a layman. Purportedly "explanatory" articles elsewhere gloss too much over the important points leaving me quite unsatisfied. I have fortunately come across two articles recently that seem to strike the perfect balance between these extremes.

"The Audiofile: Understanding MP3 Compression" was published in Ars Technica some time back and very nicely explains the compression algorithm behind MP3 as well as shedding some light over some of the apparent idiosyncrasies of this format. "Image Compression: Seeing What's Not There" was published by the American Mathematical Society and does a similar service for JPEG, including its successor JPEG 2000. (Come to think of it, these articles are "lossy" marvels in their own right.)

Now let us see if I can find an article with a similar depth that explains the MPEG video formats.

"Canon Rock" by Jeong-Hyun Lim ("Funtwo")

It has apparently been a rage on the Internet for some time now, but only recently have I come across the cover version of "Canon Rock" played by "Funtwo". The original version was arranged and played by "JerryC".

"If You Come Today"

"If you come today, it's too early. If you come tomorrow, it's too late. You pick the time."

Sriram pointed out a video of the (English) song "If You Come Today" sung by and featuring Rajkumar. The lyrics of the song are rather confounding, but my favourite parts are the "Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick..." and the "DOHLING!".

Driving In India

This video shows an example of how people drive in Indian cities. This is unfortunately not an exaggeration - for example, the junction of Taverekere Main Road and Hosur Road near my office building has a traffic pattern very similar to the one shown by this video. I come to work every day driving through such traffic. No wonder foreigners find it very difficult to drive in Indian cities and Indians find it very difficult to control their urges in foreign cities.

More Videos

Apart from the SICP Lecture Videos, also interesting to watch are the Knuth videos, the Alan Kay videos (Part 1 and Part 2), the Hans Bethe videos and the FORTRAN 25th anniversary film. Some stuff in the DDJ Technetcast is also interesting.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

SICP Lecture Videos

Thanks to Ramakrishnan (a.k.a. "VU3RDD" on Amateur Radio), I now have the complete set of SICP Lecture Videos. Now I need to burn these videos to DVDs and then take the time to watch them. Thanks a lot to all the others as well who offered to help me get these videos.

By the way, my first attempt to burn these to DVDs failed because I had not realised the sundry incompatible formats in which DVDs come. I had access to a DVD+RW drive and I had initially bought DVD-R discs. Thankfully, I could get a refund on all the discs except the one that I had opened.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Videos of SICP Lectures

Most of the coders who have read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) would agree that it is a profoundly insightful book that teaches you a whole new way of coding. So when I found out that the videos of the SICP lectures given by Abelson and Sussman are now available for download, I was excited. However, my excitement turned to dismay when I found out that the videos were huge - even a single DivX-compressed video of a lecture would bring me perilously close to my monthly broadband download quota, not to mention take an awful amount of time.

So if any of you out there have all these videos already downloaded, would you be willing to burn it to a DVD-R and send it to me? I am of course willing to pay for the cost of the media, package, postage and reasonable labour charges. Drop a message to rmathew AT gmail DOT com if you can. I would prefer the DivX-compressed versions. I had already written to Hal Abelson to know if they provided such a service and they indicated that they don't.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)