An Introspection

Opera browser

2010-02-11T20:37:00.000-08:00

Opera has released the beta version of its latest browser, opera 10.5b. It is claimed as the world's fastest browser. The speed is attributed to the Javascript improvement. I also find the browser quite interesting and unbelievably fast. Faster than chrome. Chrome is light weight and lacks plugin features. I am not sure how it will fare once it gets loaded with third party plugins. Anyways, an acidtest on opera also gives a 100% result validating its stability. I hope they release the MAC version soon!!!!

Oye!!! A fantastic sweet movie

2009-07-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

It has been years that i had seen a truly impressive romantic movie. I happened to watch the telugu movie "Oye" Staring Siddarth and Shamili. I did not have much expectation except that i had heard it has a very tragic end. I was sweetly surprised by the freshness of the movie. Shamili was great in her acting - Subdued, yet powerful performance (a parody of a character).

The cuteness of the couple was very well brought about by scenes on the ship when Shamili asks how men know whether a girl is married or not? The 12 gift idea was icing on the cake. On the whole it is a movie that can make people laugh, cry and still enjoy :-)

Demise of a musical legend

2009-06-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

Today happened to see the news that Michael jackson is no more in this world. With this is the end of the great pop musical era. Michael jackson is a legend and will be remembered for ever. No one can write the history of pop music without naming this great musical genius, who inspired great many people. His awesome voice and the slick dance moves are a class apart from ordinary masses.

We will miss you MJ....!!! But you will continue living through your music.

Q-learning

2009-04-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

Q-learning is an interesting concept developed based on the principles of punishment and reward principle. This can be referred to as an extension of the temporal difference learning to make it more reliable by creating a state-action matrix and update the reward function. The basic objective would be to increase the total reward received over a period of time or based on immediate response. The recency factor similar to that in the temporal difference learning helps in assigning varying levels of importance to the futuristic rewards and past rewards.

The problem is with the large state space and action space that exists in reality. Creating a matrix for each possible state and action is a herculean task and might drive the system into sub-optimality if all the possible combination cannot be visited.

I am currently trying to make my state space into discrete sets of definable parameters and apply Q-learning to it. Hope i would be able to succeed at least to some extent in this endeavor.

Brindhavanasaranga raaga

2009-02-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most beautiful raaga i have heard. There are thousands of tamil songs composed using this particular raaga. The most famous of these is the "pon onru kandaen pen angu illai". The description provided by Charulatha Mani in the Isai Payanam was excellent. I have become a great fan of this singer, even though she makes some songs look more carnatic, but still the program is about the carnatic music applied to film songs so i felt it relevant. The arohanam and avarohanam of this particular raaga is

sa ri2 ma1 pa ni3 sa || sa ni2 pa ma1 ri2 ga2 sa

This is called as shudhdha madhyamam raaga since it uses ma1. I am not sure if this is playable in flute since i am not sure about Ni3 which is kakali. Need to ask my guru regarding this.

The link to various arohanam and avarohanam for all raagas is http://www.carnatic.com/carnatic/ragalist.htm

The link to the video in youtube is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTCavDzt9b8&feature=related

Career

2008-12-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

For the past few days i have been thinking about my career plan. It almost struck on my face that i dont have one till now. Hopefully my PhD should be completed in a year or so. What next?

The answer is bleak. I don't know if i would love to do a post-doctoral fellowship. If at all i do will i be interested in doing it in the field of study that i am involved in presently. I am not sure. This is a worrying issue but i seem to have decided mentally to move out of the field i am working in. What field i would be interested in working? That is yet to be decided and might take some more time for me to come to a firm conclusion. Pure AI, data mining or clustering techniques....let me leave it for the fate to decide it.

Paper writing

2008-12-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

Paper writing is one of the most difficult things in PhD. Even after having all the results needed to establish a theory or the application of theory to a real-time application, it is always difficult to write a paper that is specific to the audience of the journal. It is also amazing to find that human mind is capable of putting together all the thoughts within few hours when pushed to limits in the name of deadlines.
Recently i face one....wasn't able to write two pages for 10 days and managed to write 14 pages within 28hrs...Literally continuous 28 hrs when given a deadline by my Prof. And by chance the paper has come out decently well.. Have submitted it to IEEE Transactions on intelligent Transportation Systems. Hopefully it will get accepted :-)

Figure Skating

2008-11-12T09:58:00.000-08:00

Lately i have been watching few movies on Figure skating. I happened to watch Ice Princess, The cutting Edge 3 and a few more. The amazing level of skill, discipline required really made me to look at thia sport with particular awe. I wonder how these people are able to make their body to be in sync with their mind. The balance and elegance resembles the "gamakam"(Used mostly when referring to carnatic music) given to enhance the musical notes.

Hope one day i would have the opportunity of trying out some ice skating!!! :)

Flute performance

2008-10-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

I wonder how people are able to update their blog on a daily basis. Even though i sit in front of the computer for almost 18 hours in a day, i rarely do the update. Probably this has to do something with the level of interest each person has in writing. I particularly feel bored of writing things. I prefer to jot down things on a small piece of paper and go through them whenever time permits. However some might question the use of the same in posterity.

Anyways, i have somehow managed to write a blog today. probably it would be more interesting when i read this blog after a year or two.

I happened to give a flute performance recently at Temple of Fine arts. It was more like showering praise on the lord for having given us the opportunities in life on 5th day of navrathri. The photos have come out quiet well. I hope to get the video of the same from Pravitha and Soma soon. The piece performed was an alankaram - Thisra Jathi Thiruputa Thalam in Chalanaattai Raagam.

Sa Ga1 Ga2 Ma1 Pa Ni1 Ni2 Sa is the Arohanam of this raaga. Even though we did not play any Varnam, still it felt great having performed in front of a decently large crowd.

Hurray!!! Chrome is supporting JRE6

2008-09-05T05:13:00.000-07:00

I managed to find out that Chrome browser supports JAVA platform. It is essential however to install the JRE6 for this to work. The browser doesn't seem to recognize other JRE versions. Anyways for now the JAVA support problem seems to be non-existent.

If the API-extension is also introduced into Chrome then this can really give a tough competition to Firefox and IE.

Chrome - A huge let down

2008-09-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

I was one of the people who were eagerly waiting for the much talked about browser from Google - Chrome. The chrome web browser was a huge let down. This was not the browser that i was expecting from Google. Though it is a beta version, it is far from anything close to Firefox or Opera.

The only good thing is the incognito operation which allows not to maintain the history and block cookie entries. The overall look of the browser was average. Probably it would improve once people start developing the skins for this browser. Very decent plugins for media players. The file downloads are much similar to Firefox, except for the graphical version attached to indicate the beginning of the download. out of the box flash player support is a good feature.

This said the browser doesn't support shockwave files yet.The major letdown is the non-inclusion of JAVA support. Most of the sites with JAVA won't work properly. Before the introduction of the browser, the main advantage that was highlighted was the usgae of JAVA in a manner that increases the speed with which webpages load. I am not sure what happened to that. probably they had referred to the Asynchronous Java Script that is used for updating the google maps and other goodle related services.

Even though it is alet down, there is still hope for improvement as this is announced as an open source software. i would have expected Google to release a much better version than releasing Chrome in its present state just to improve the market share values.

An Introspection: Chrome - The new web browser

2008-09-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

An Introspection: Chrome - The new web browser
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

Chrome - The new web browser

2008-09-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

Finally i managed to find something interesting to write about. It would be unacceptable for me to say that i had no time to blog... it was just that i was getting lethargic day after day. Hope to become active at the earliest possible time. Coming back to today's topic - chrome : The new web browser to be launched by Google. It is announced that Google would be releasing on Tuesday (Which happens to be today - but in US timings) the beta version of their browser for Windows. Linux and MAC users need to wait a bit longer before they can lay their hands on this.

The features of the browser is not known fully. But they have made it open source thereby introducing the possibility of creating custom codes to suit the needs of the person. personally, i have never attempted to create a custom tool for browser even though Firefox is an open source tool. Hope this time around i would try to make some contributions to the Google's new browser.
It is always great to create something new :-)

Qualifying Oral Defense

2008-03-24T04:59:00.000-07:00

Finally, i gave my oral QE presentation today. It lasted for almost two hours with both prof Xu and Mohan asking questions by relating traffic to network theory. It was difficult at certain places but they made me feel much comfortable. My supervisor was kind enough to intervene in some places where i was getting into a bit of fix. My presentation was way too long. it was almost 2 hours and i could barely cover half of my slide show. Anyways, they had read my entire seventy pages report and so they suggested me to get on with the future research part.

There is a long way to go now. Now that i have some idea of the type of questions, will have to prepare and direct my research in those directions.

Remote Desktop

2008-02-25T11:45:00.000-08:00

I have always had an inclination towards using Linux. But there used to be lots of frustrations, when something doesn't seem to work the way it is supposed to. The major problem was running the remote desktop application. I had to remotely control my desktop which has Windows Xp using Linux. I somehow figured out after lots of trial and error and had it run using the RDPV5 protocol. The problem was it would work inside the campus and wont allow to connect from outside because of extra layer of security added by NUS VPN.

The webvpn application crashes whenever tried on UBUNTU Linux. The problem was, it tries to use the command SU and install the application. UBUNTU does not allow SU command to be used and the activex control would crash. I tried too many options like correcting the install configuration file but nothing worked. Finally i decided to try and use openvpn, which is supported by SOC. There was a problem with logon. It would not allow me to logon with NUSNET ID. I was totally frustrated. Finally i got some idea to use VPNC software as suggested in NUS computer center website. However there was no documentation. The documentation provided was misleading as it suggested to use thr ipsec gateway as IP address, however later i figured out that it has to be rewritten as "vpn.nus.edu.sg" so that the gateway can be found dynamically.
VPNC can be installed directly from the repositories of UBUNTu. This avoids the hassles of downloading and using external command to compile.

The configuration file creation is the most important part. The config file has to have the following sequence

#config for connecting to NUS VPN
Interface name tun0
IPSec gateway vpn.nus.edu.sg
IPSec ID inside-nus
IPSec secret inside-nus
Xauth username
#end

The above needs to be saved as /etc/vpnc/vpnc.conf
Then from command prompt issuing the following command would start the VPN

sudo vpn-connect /etc/vpnc/vpnc.conf

It would ask for the password.

The bug here is even if u connect from outside NUS, the code needs to be as inside-nus. This i figured out after some trials.

You can also have the front end by using KVPNC.

After starting the VPN sucessfully, i was able to connect to remote desktop by Terminal server client.

Qualifying exam

2008-01-17T02:20:00.000-08:00

Qualifying exam oral defense is the one that has been running in the background of my mind for the past few months. This has taken way too long for me. The usual limitation for QE is 24 months from the start of the PhD. I lost around six months researching on Microelectronics before shifting to computational intelligence. So with 1.5 years i had to complete the necessary research work to give a QE. My prof seems to be a bit skeptical about this part still. Even after having 2 IEEE conferences and one submitted with one journal submitted, the QE defense still seems to take a longer time. Hopefully i would give it by this February middle. Hope everything goes fine here.

Paper writing

2008-01-03T20:22:00.000-08:00

After a long time, i felt it would be better to start writing again. The past two months have been really hectic with lots to complete in terms of paper. I got some good results which are comparable with the work done by others in this field earlier.
First came the journal paper which took almost 5 weeks to complete. The paper was written for audience of Transportation research but profs changed it to IEEE Systems, man and cybernetics. I had to include a lot of supporting materials and change my entire style of writing focusing more on type-2 fuzzy logic.
WCCI conference paper was the next attempt. According to me this paper has come out better than the journal. Here i had put forward the multiagent system architecture in a generalized manner making it suitable for any application. I found that using mean speed to describe about the delay experienced in the vehicles in a traffic optimization problem was giving me an additional edge.
Now i have to concentrate and complete my qualifying examination report. It might take around 3 to 4 weeks. Hope i will be able to give my oral defense atleast by the beginning of feb 2008.

International Space station

2007-10-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

I don't think many would have read the article from IEEE spectrum online regarding the latest failure of three main computers that control the orientation of the entire station. The reason given for the failure might seem a little bit silly but makes people wonder how such a small thing can can catastrophe of large scale. The reason was malfunctioning of dehumidifier. The dehumidifier in the control room should remove the water content from air circulated and keep the machines under condition where the water cannot condense onto any system. The reverse happened and has allowed for condensation. This has caused the rusting of the lead wires that are connected to the back up computers. The back up computers are used to protect the main system when there are spikes introduced in the system due to the power supply from the solar panels which are affected by cosmic clouds. Because of this rusting they became non-conductive causing the backup system not to work but the main system alone to shut down, which means there will be no system working to take care of orientation. Another bizarre thing found was the logic used. All three systems ( main system and 2 back up systems) would shut down simultaneously rather than act as back up in case of main system failure.

This could have caused a large scale devastation as a manual orientation control would mean unoptimized usage of the fuel. This would reduce the stability of the system to a great extent. Hope these small things are taken care of in future. This is an extract(only the Jist) from IEEE spectrum magazine written in the way i have understood it. The original article was written by an ex-NASA scientist.

Programming

2007-10-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have been programming in VC++ for the past 8 hours. I really don't know now what i have programmed and whether this stuff is going to work the way it is desired. My program is a bit complicated one. The VC++ output cannot be immediately seen.This needs to be converted to PARAMICS compatible dynamic linked library files. And using the PARAMICS have to test it. The worst part is the PARAMICS just quits without really informing what went wrong.

Hope i don't get much errors this time around. Tomorrow is a crucial day for me. Infact the day i am gonna get crucified. I have a meeting with my supervisor and till this point i don't have any tangible results that could substantially speak of my work for the past few weeks. Hope everything goes well. Will update on what happened tomorrow.

Type-2 Fuzzy logic

2007-10-21T08:38:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time now since my last post. I wouldn't say i was busy. As a matter of fact i had lots of time, much more than what i used to have but out of laziness i did not update it. Anyways back to the blogging session, I was thinking about what to write out here. Even though i had written a blog article on fuzzy logic, i thought this topic should be more emphasized upon. The type-1 fuzzy logic is a very primitive type with very less features available in them. Sorry for having assumed that every one knows what type-1 means. When an input is fuzzified using two-dimensions only, it is called as type-1. When another dimension is added to this to increase its fuzzy nature, then it becomes type-2. I really wonder how people think in these ways and come up such beautiful ideas.

I would say i am not even 1% of these great people who have invented such methods. But still i am doing my PhD.....Hope i would be able to come up with such an idea that would be appreciated by someone someday. Coming back to type-2 fuzzy logic, the extra dimension added helps in overcoming the problem of environmental disturbances inherent in the signals sensed. This helps in effectively reducing them by giving a range of values possible as an output rather than a single crisp output that would undermine the very usage of Fuzzy logic. However the crisp output could be got by averaging or using centroid methods, or center of set methods. I am still a novice in this field and cannot comment much on these techniques. I would surely do a small analysis of this very soon in the blog.

If you happen to be in my Orkut friends list, do check out my updated album. I have updated with some of the snaps taken during my first international conference presentation.

Insomniac

2007-08-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

I have been lately experiencing a strange phenomenon. I am becoming more of an insomniac. I don't know if this trend is really good as it increases my working hours to 22 to 23 in a day. On the retro, whenever i sleep, i sleep for more than 8 hrs at a stretch. This has thrown my food habbits too in jeopardy. Initially i wanted to keep this blog site a strict scientific and technical discussion one. On the contro, i found the visitors to be near to zero. So thought atleast will make a smal diary for myself to put forward my thoughts and ofcourse blog in any new article that sounds interesting. It was really strange that this serves to help developing english a lot. When i read my first blog, i was really amased by the amount of grammatical mistake that i have commited. Not to mention, the redundancy. I used to creat huge lines without any breaks. I am trying hard to avoid those now. If at all any one go through my blog, do leave a comment if u find my english improving from the day i started blogging.

Coming to some technical aspects. I was reading some papers regarding the bayesian probability and mixture models. This was rather a new experience for me. I had read the same paper when i initially started my Ph.D in AI. At that time i understood very little. I would say it was the attitude that is different today. i am willing to accept my project and this makes a lot of difference. i was amazed by how the conjured me so much. I was thoroughly enjoying with most of it understandable.( I wouldn't dare to say that i understood the entire paper. It would be disgrace to the author). I was also taken aback by the sheer number of papers produced by people working in " Institute of Automation & Control" under Delft univerity. Though most of the papers are for internal publication, they have an open library whhich can be accessed by any researcher.

There is one instance which i would say rather humbled me. I wrote an e-mail to one of the leading professor. Ana L.C.Bazzan., an expert in distributed systems design with specialization in traffic control design. The mail was pertaining to one of the softwares written by him and his students.
I thought that i would never get a reply but got it on the same day with detailed description of his software and why it might not be suitable for usage in my project. He even suggested some other open source product. I have to mention here that i am an advocate for open source. i love working in Linux. I think i will stop here for today...

Clarity of Thought

2007-08-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

Atlast, i have got the necessary clarity of thought. I have decided to stay with my studies and continue with my Ph.D. The clarity was achieved because of Bhagavad Gita. It is really a divine book. Your search for solution to any problem never goes unanswered. What is required is an understanding of the internal meaning and ability to apply for your problem. I dont consider myself as a great master of Bhagavad Gita. I have learnt so little from it that i am really ashamed how i could have missed reading a book which is a holy one for us. I have a copy of it commented by Swami Chidbhavananda. The english is pretty descent with clear split of every sloga with its corresponding meaning.
If you get a chance to read it, do read it. I would rather say atleast buy a copy and keep it. It will come handy at some time in life.

Dilemma

2007-08-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

I am now in the phase of studies which is usually considered as the hardest part. I am in a critical juncture where i have to decide if i am going to continue with my Ph.D or should i finish off with a masters. This is a nagging question that has been hampering my thinking progress for a long time. The decision taking has become so hard because of expectations from others and also to a certain extent my self-ego. I have never considered myself a failure in any phase of my life but now after 25 years for the first time i am beginning to feel the fear of failure.

The experience that i have in the scientific field is too specialised but also too short to land a job in a reputed organization which will be able to appreciate my skills aquired. Combined with all these is the pressure from the professor to show results, which i dont have because of experimental failures.

Hope i will be able to get myself out of this dilemma soon enough and become clear with my objectives.

Fuzzy logic- my take

2007-08-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

Hmm....I should really accept the fact that i am a lazy person. Have not been able to put up a blog article for a long time now. Thought today would discuss something about fuzzy logic. This has become the buzz word now-a-days. Every household electrical goods seems to have used fuzzy logic. what big difference this creates when considering the binary world? It makes systems more realistic. Binary systems are either true or false. The degree of truth or the false is not known. This creates anamolies in systems. The simplest form of the fuzzy logic would be antecedant-implication relationship. For example, if you have two different parameters that occur at the same time and have different implications on the systems or decision criteria, then a relationship needs to be generated that could enumerate the exact effect of the parameters under consideration. I would not go any further on this discussion as the fuzzy logic concept is too deep to be analyzed in a simple blog like this.

what can a 10g vibration do to you?

2007-08-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Hmm....What can write about this time??? Thought of putting down what i did today but realized it would be of no use for someone browsing to know about it. Finally decided to write about effects of vibration. An interesting field of study. Do you know what a 10g acceleration can do to u??

You cannot imagine what would happen as we dont usually experience such high level of acceleration. A stealth could experience upto 5g when it is having a high mach number. But usually the pilots are guarded from such high levels by dampers. You might be wondering why an electronics person is talking about a mechanical phenomenon. I had the opportunity of simulating these high level vibration conditions ( simulation in the sense - real world creation of the environment that would be experienced by the launch vehicles during and after launch). The testing is usually done using Vibartion shaker which is capable of producing 2 tonnes of force. The usual vibration is for qualifying the space vehicle internal parts ( like ISU - Inertial sensor unit, INS - Inertial Navigation systems etc.). For those who might not be knowing of INS - it is the heart of the launch vehicle and acts as a central command unit to interpret command from ground station and also in calculation of the proper orientation of the vehicle. usually the testing is done at accelerated rate but short period of time to avoid over-stressing of the systems. It is here that i learnt the value of a second. A small mistake done by me could put the entire lauch sequence in jeopardy as this was the final phase of the testing before it is sent to SHAR for final integration. There have been some tense moments where people would blame you for no apparent reason of yours. If you are not technically strong enough to defend yourself and make a stand then the entire IISU ( ISRO Inertial Systems Unit, a division of VSSC) would blame you for the delay in supplying the package. I have experienced a few of these embarassments but was able to defend myself to save my face.

Now back to the question...what will happen if you touch a vibration shaker (a mass of 3 tonne ) vibrating at 10g with a frequency of 300Hz? Any guesses...just your bone will be pulverized and no doctor can ever fix the problem as already the bone has transformed to powder............

Widgets

2007-07-29T23:29:00.001-07:00

Widgets are the new generation advertisement tools developed by the companies that want to promote their products. The widgets have existed in various names from 1993 onwards. The first commercial attempt was by Microsoft by incorporating ( though as an optional item) in its internet explorer 4.0.

What this Widget actually does? These are goodies which promises some value of entertainment or information to the users and also serves to project the products to the masses. There are infact various types of widgets. Desktop, web-based, mobile based. Each one has its own features. Web-based widgets are those which people are commonly utilizing now-a-days, without knowing the technical name for it. Example is yahoo and google. you create a personalized page which shows various stuffs like Climate info, horoscope etc., each one of which is a widget. This does not occupy or consume much of your resource as they are part of a large program and no excessive storage other than the usual cache and temp is utilized.

Desktop based widgets are those that needs to be downloaded and everytime the system is started this runs in the background. This consumes memory and companies are working hard to minimize this requirement.

The third type is the mobile based which has not reaches its peak because of the inavailability of the support for Javascript and high level web-browsers. But Sun Java has showcased the Jphone concept in its recent workshop and can expect to hit the market at the earliest. The concerns are with repect to security as they make the ports open and system vulnerable to hackers and Trojans.

RSS - is also a type of widget but its a primitive one. If you would like to try using widgets in a safe way, try Opera web browser which comes with inbuilt widget service. For those who are interested more can refer to the article related to Widgets in "IEEE Computer Society" magazine July 2007 edition. Signing off for now. Will try and come back with other updates shortly.

Web Browser

2007-07-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

Let me start my blog space with a review of the tool that enables this blogging possible. Web browsers : An interesting tool that can be a boon or a bane. Internet explorer, the most commonly used browser developed by Microsoft and has become a part and parcel of every net user. This i smainly due to the bundling of this tool with windows ( The most widely used software - atleast for the common people). Most of the hacking and virus spread is by exploiting the vulnerabilities of this tool. It is not sufficiently armed to protect your system from frequent attacks.
The internet explorer makes certain ports ( I am not naming them or giving the details as the write up will become more of a technical analysis) open making it easy for the adwares and spywares to be installed.

The question is what is this adware and spyware? Are they different from Virus? If so, then how different are they? The answer is adware and spyware are not exactly virus. An adware is created to advertise a product or a site. Usually, the site being advertised is illegal or adult. If you find ur system continuously showing pop-ups and giving warnings like " your system is in danger of attack from virus", it is probably adware. The rate to which they can affect depends on the type. Some can pop-up windows and use your entire RAM making your applications hang.

The second type is spyware. These are rogue programs created to extract critical information like your credit card number, passwords, bank statements. They make your firewall useless. Usually people when entering into hack site or sites providing software keys( Illegal) are vulnerable to this.

My advice to them would be to create a seperate account which doesn't have administrative rights and no program is allowed to install. From this account u can access these type of sites if neccessary.

But there is a better option. Use OPERA 9.22 web browser. This has some advanced features like sped dial which even the Mozilla doesnt have. Most importantly, many adwares are directed towards internet explorer engine and mozilla engine, since OPERA is a completely different architecture, it becomes less vulnerable. Even NETSCAPE is nowadays using MOZILLA engine.

Try out OPERA and let me know if u are finding any problems.