Moved to Bangalore

Finally moved to Bangalore. Spacious apartment - well furnished, neatly designed. Bit far from the city but peaceful locality, beautiful balcony views. Coupled with awesome Bangalore weather, Good places to work.

To Steve Jobs

I still remember May 3rd, 2008, the day I got my first Apple product - the white Macbook. It was an adorable and well polished creation. Just the hardware itself had spelled me enough to love this white glistening machine, with a glowing Apple sign behind the screen. Being extremely light weight, it was a pleasure to work while holding it in lap. Unlike most of the other laptops, there were no exhaust openings at the bottom or sides and it was absolutely silent in operation. I recently came to know that Jobs had learnt this from his father - even the parts which are not visible should be well finished. 

The battery backup was 5 to 6 hours - travel all day long without worry; wake up from sleep was unbelievably fast - open the lid and it was on. Browsing through the Apple website for help, somewhere it said "Mac might appear very unconventional initially but in a week you would feel as if you have been together for ages". I am glad that Apple has kept all its promises as this one. The bond has grown stronger everyday. The operating system and applications have been packaged to give a soothing experience. It came with all the essential softwares with easy to configure steps for which I would have to spend whole night on a new PC. I rarely had encounters with a waiting cursor or any virus. The best part was that it was well consistent and organized throughout the OS and all applications. Help is actually helpful as it is easily available and most of the things are accessible in not more than a couple of clicks. It was a design marvel and a source of inspiration. It was only after working on it for sometime that I realized how much change I had undergone. I was learning to do things with perfection till the last bit of it. I had always hated making documents and presentations - found them really boring, in MS-Office; organizing my folders and desktops was a tedious job. I tried iWork for one day and now I was loving every document, because of its limited and yet equally powerful controls.

During my internship in Sweden, I came across Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford. I liked his passion for doing something new and good. By that time iPhone 1st generation was already launched and 3G was about to be launched in July. Around the end of June, I was browsing through the iPhone pages on Apple's site. I was already using an HTC P3300 Windows phone and I never really liked it except for its mp3 playing capability. I looked up used iPhones on Ebay/US and was fortunate to win one of the bids for ten thousand rupees. My first day with the phone was amazing. More about it : here. It was something beyond our imagination. With time, I moved to 3G, 3GS and now iPhone 4. Not a day has passed in last three years, when I have not adored it - consistency again. It has really simplified my life giving me more time to focus on real problems. Be it accessing my mail on the go or video chat on 3G or finding my way in any part of the world and of course the games, google, camera and iBooks, its much more worthier than any single handheld device can be.

Looking back, if there was one single person behind the technological revolution which made these possible, it was Steve Jobs. His contributions are countless. With Wozniak, he invented the first small computer, introduced the mouse, the amazing Mac, the multi-touch interfaces and various other things which make up today's Apple products. These in turn has inspired many other products which make our life easier. His insight into user experience was amazing. At the same time he was a true businessman who knew how to bring people together and make them work towards one big target. But more than anything he was a great visionary who paved the way for generations to come. He mentored many other companies which have contributed to many more technological revolutions. He laid down the foundation of a world where things would magically work, where a user would just relish the technology while the computer would understand his master and do all the work. Rest in peace Steve, the world will miss you.

  

The picture below, one of my favorites, shows him passionately holding the first Apple computer. The video below that from a 1983 Apple event where Steve is playing game with Bill Gates and others. The second video is a documentary on him - it has some really classic pics of him. Third one is an interview of Walter Isaacson who shares some of his pics and audio used in writing his biography.

Amazing iPhone[s]

Pathetic Air India

Following pics were taken on Air India flight from Lucknow to Bangalore. Its hard to believe that its one of the costliest airline in the country.

The West Wind - by John Masefield

IT'S a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries;
I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.
For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills.
And April's in the west wind, and daffodils.
It's a fine land, the west land, for hearts as tired as mine,
Apple orchards blossom there, and the air's like wine.
There is cool green grass there, where men may lie at rest,
And the thrushes are in song there, fluting from the nest.
"Will ye not come home brother? ye have been long away,
It's April, and blossom time, and white is the may;
And bright is the sun brother, and warm is the rain,--
Will ye not come home, brother, home to us again?
"The young corn is green, brother, where the rabbits run.
It's blue sky, and white clouds, and warm rain and sun.
It's song to a man's soul, brother, fire to a man's brain,
To hear the wild bees and see the merry spring again.
"Larks are singing in the west, brother, above the green wheat,
So will ye not come home, brother, and rest your tired feet?
I've a balm for bruised hearts, brother, sleep for aching eyes,"
Says the warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries.
It's the white road westwards is the road I must tread
To the green grass, the cool grass, and rest for heart and head,
To the violets, and the warm hearts, and the thrushes' song,
In the fine land, the west land, the land where I belong.

-John Masefield

I read this poem as part of course in class 4th. It's a very nostalgic poem - somehow brings me back lot of memories of my stay in Sweden. 

Exploring Bangalore

Sunday well spent : Mysore trip + Nandi hills

MOMS in the news

While testing the retrace mode for the first time near Unnao station, few news correspondents caught us suspecting us to be associated with terrorist attacks. On further enquiry they were told about the MOMS project and the result is below (Dainik Jagaran clipping for 20th May ):

AirPlayer for Mac OS X lets you stream videos from iOS to your Mac

Apple released Airplay technology with iOS 4.2 which allows you to broadcast your videos from iPhone/ iPad or even iTunes on Mac to Airplay enabled device (like iPad, Apple TV etc). It is called the Remote Audio Control Protocol which is an RTSP/RTP based protocol made by Apple Inc. Many people wished they could broadcast videos to their Mac which could make it easy to do presentations or photo shows etc.

Hacker Erica Sadun has made an app called AirPlayer which catch Airplay streams from iOS devices and show it on Mac screen. I had to enable "Always open in QuickTime Player" to make it work though. But its a great app indeed. Video running the same can be found on 9 to 5 mac site http://www.9to5mac.com/42335/airplay-is-now-working-to-the-mac/.
The app can be downloaded from http://ericasadun.com/ftp/AirPlay/ .

iPhone camera+ clarity gives amazing effects

Making gerber files in Eagle in 4 easy steps

CADSoft Eagle is the most popular PCB designing software amongst electronics hobbyist. The user interface is quite predictive and easy to learn. Many tutorials about learning it can be found on the internet. The one on Sparkfun's site http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/108 appears most appealing to me. The final files from the software are .sch and .brd files corresponding to the schematic and board layout respectively.
Once the pcb is designed, one would definitely like to send it for fabrication. However, the pcb manufactures generally don't have design softwares like Eagle. They would rather ask you for something called gerber files. These are a set of 7 to 10 files each of which contain data about the pcb holes, text on the pcb, routing etc. Eagle has provision for converting the .brd file into the gerber format. Following tutorial explains how.
1. Open the brd file. From menu go to File->Run and click. A file browser will open, navigate to and select  drillcfg.ulp file. It will ask for units, select inch (NOT mm). A list of tools T01, T02 will show up. Just click OK. A <somename>.drl file will be saved.

2. Go to File->CAM Processor and click. A CAM processor window will open as show in the following picture.

3. From the menu, go to File->Open->Job. From the file explorer that pops up, select excellon.cam and click Process Job at the bottom. Some more files will be saved to the directory.

4. Once again go to File->Open->Job. From the file explorer that pops up, select gerb274x.cam and click Process Job at the bottom. More files will be saved to the directory.

A total of 9 files should be created with extensions : .cmp, .drd, .dri, .drl, .gpi, .plc, .sol, .stc and .sts. In case you are creating a 4 layer pcb, you should select gerb274x-4 layer in the last step. Zip all the nine files created and ship it to the manufacturer.