Sudipta's Life

"90% of all quotes on the internet are made up" - Abraham Lincoln.  I cannot tell you the number of times I have had to leave that statement as a comment on Facebook. Consider this Facebook "forward", if you will:  It is attributed to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam because it suits the narrative that my friend wants to believe in. A lot of you will probably doubt if Dr. Kalam ever said that. I suspect (actually, fervently hope) that my friend who posted this also had a flicker of doubt the source. But he went ahead and posted it anyway.  That is what scares me the most. People are willing to "forward" anything that tickles their funny bone. I have grumbled about silly email forwards before. But Facebook takes it to a whole new level. This time, you don't even need to fill out the "To:" field. You can just "share" it on your timeline and people will read it. I am surprised at the incredible gullibility of people, and sometimes just f...

A very interesting research study once came out of Stanford University, led by Prof Walter Mischel. It was called the Marshmallow test . They put four-year-old kids in a small room, put a small toffee in front of them and gave them two choices. If the child could wait for 10 mins, he/she will get two chocolates. If, however, the kid decided to just eat the candy right there and not eat it, that would be the end of the experiment... no more extra chocolates for the kids. Watch the video below of how some kids struggled against the inner urge and temptation :) Later on, they kept track of what happened to each of these children... how did they do when they grew up? As it turns out, the children who were able to hold off that temptation successfully and got two chocolates as the reward did extremely well in life. The ones who were the quickest to jump the gun were also the ones who ended up in gangs, became small-time crooks, etc. This concept of "holding off" or worki...

Like most things in life, there are two sides to "personalization" on the web. In case you don't realize this, each time you googled for something while you were logged into gmail at the same time, Google kept track of your search. Not just that, it actually tracks which search results and links you click, how long you spent there before hitting the back button to return to the search screen. Google knows what you did each summer. This sounds creepy, right? However, is this a bad thing, always? The short answer is that "it depends" (spoken like a true consultant!). It depends on what you consider a bad thing. I do admit, though, that being tracked "always" does send a shiver down my spine. If you think you are immune, (or you don't have a gmail account), don't flatter yourself. Unless you log out of Facebook each time you are done browsing, you will see a message on a lot of websites who you haven't "Like"-d yet. Usually, it w...

So, have you ever wondered how small is the atom? Look at this video from TED Ed:

The US economy thrives on a singular concept: C onsumerism . The concept of spending money I don't have for things that I don't really need but still want to possess. It is contagious, addictive, and . This also creates a huge market for second-hand goods. Together, these two drive the market - more cash flowing through the system, more wealth being created, more debts (a revolving credit card debt of $10,000 is pretty common it seems) - and eventually, more goods being consumed. Therefore, if your TV or the sofa comes with a 5 year warranty, most people are happy with it. They will sell it or discard it and get a new one at the end of five years anyway. So far so good. In India, however, I grew up with the concept of buying things for the long term in practice around me everywhere. Or as Westerners are learning the concept so recently, we believe a lot in Jugaad technology - making do with limited resources to achieve equal ends. When I was in school, one of my friends sho...

If you are helping your parents, relatives or grandparents at home with any kind of pc/laptop issues (since you are a computer person), here is how it generally goes: But even then, once in a while, you get a different problem - your parents got a new laptop, and a good internet connection, and now you want to install Skype properly on the laptop so that you can see one another. Here is what I did recently to get this done: Download TeamViewer on the target laptop : If you have a chat program open, paste this link there and ask them to click on it. http://www.teamviewer.com/download/TeamViewer_Setup_en.exe . Yup, I know - don't ask them to go and visit the website and download from there: you and they don't share the same screen and it is difficult to locate where the exact content is. In my case, my screen size was bigger than theirs and we spent some time figuring out why they couldn't see the "Download" button, until I f...

In less than 6 minutes, you shall be entertained and informed about the dangers of blogging as well as of, well,  being a guy:

Boys will always be boys, they say. And rightly so - since the basic urge to show off or brag never seems to go away. And I use the idiom here to denote the sentiment of competitiveness rather than people of a particular gender: please don't lose the point of the post amidst all the he/she madness. When you are talking about little kids playing on the field, the bragging rights can be earned by who can throw a stone the furthest, or who has taken the most number of catches. See, those numbers matter. However, when you talk about geeks at the computer keyboard, the metric for this comparison changes. Before I delve into the details, let me set the record straight on some things. Your idea of the computer geek might be the meek nerdy guy with glasses hunched over his laptop who can barely look at a girl straight in her eyes. Sorry to break this news to you, but such people are rare and do not make your typical software engineer in the real world. We do in fact play football, drive...

It has been a while since I had any Apple products. The iPod which my former room-mate had given to me has been with me since then. And I repeat - really awesome sound quality, hard disk space, etc. but maybe I would never buy one myself. Apple fanboys in general are very defensive about their stuff. Actually, almost all PC users have told me at different times that once you switch to a Macbook, there is no going back. I, for one, never really got used to one. Maybe because I was already too steeped in the Windows interface, or even the Linux Gnome interface, or perhaps simply I missed using the middle finger (ahem ahem) for whatever reason. Another thing that constantly bugs me about the Mac OS is that the programs never really end. That bottom bar keeps getting cluttered more and more, and whenever I used the apple machine I had that gnawing feeling about some weird program eating up my precious memory and CPU cycles. I know, I know - there is enough (and literally plenty) of mem...

Manas and I have started a new blog some time back, called the hack list . Basically every now and then we find a cool trick to make something work, or a little hack that allows you to fix a nagging problem. But we forget it after a while. On this blog, we're trying to just quickly note down whatever we find so that if we remember later on, we can go back and look. For those interested - its http://thehacklist.blogspot.com . Enjoy! :)

For those of you who haven't "heard" about it, go and visit this page on wikipedia, on holophony . Once you've finished reading the short paragraph describing it, go and visit the last link, the virtual barbershop. The file is 6.2 MB (yeah, quite big by dial-up standards), but believe me it will be worth every single second you spend downloading it. Go and hear it... yes, now! Don't forget your headphones!! Imagine when that technology enters games. Imagine playing CounterStrike or Doom with that technology, when you can literally hear the beast breathe a few inches away. Imagine, newer amusement parks and horror mansions built with sound emitters of this sort. Imagine being able to record the sound your near and dear ones for a full hour on this, and then listening later. Imagine playing Nascar or NFS with this. Be aware, be afraid and be wonderstruck. Welcome to technology!

I installed a bunch of little tools on this blog sometime back. You'll find all of them on the right column of this page, towards its very bottom. Yes, I know they are a bit narcissist in nature: displaying a map of the world to show where around the world the visitors came from, what they were referred to here by, etc. After all, no-one really is interested in knowing all that if they came to this blog. If you, as a reader last longer than reading through the latest post, you might stop by to comment. Perhaps the more interested people also read through the other comments before shooting one off on your own. But thats about it --- it doesn't really bother you to see that there is a blob of readers (or visits) even from Madagascar! As the author of the blog, on the other hand, these little tools are more than just that for me. They are sort of little pieces of a huge puzzle that come as hints from everywhere. Let me put it this way: imagine how you would feel if you could sudde...