Where the mind is without fear

I was recently introduced to this mashup by Imogen Heap and Vishal-Shekar. It’s an awesome song with some really powerful lyrics.

 

Where The Mind Is Without Fear 

By Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

 

Blog Theme

I’m currently experimenting with these two themes: Esquire and Salju. I have a stronger preference for Esquire but will need to add widget capability to the sidebar.

EOL and Mercurial

I’ve setup Mercurial as the SCM at my workplace and we’ve been migrating our workflows over from SVN. We’ve come across some issues that have helped us better understand how Mercurial works. I learnt an important thing about imposing control on line endings in our toolkit.

The Mercurial extension ‘eol’ is a mandatory tool if you have developers on Windows and Mac machines while your software is built for Unix. The different type of line endings (CRLF and LF) can break scripts in Unix. Configuring the extension was fairly straightforward following the instructions listed here - http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/EolExtension . A few important things to note:

  1. The .hgeol file in the top level directory is mandatory if you want EOL control for that repository. I configured my file with just the two lines:
[patterns]
** = LF
  1. If you want an existing repository to be influenced by the ‘eol’ extension, you need to purge the working directory and reinstate its contents for the line endings to change

Purge using

hg co -C null


Reinstate using

hg update

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

- Randy Pausch

 

Goodbye

Kanamma, we will miss you. Goodbye.

 

 

 

25

… and it’s all downhill from here or so they say.

I have a lot on my mind and need to write that down sooner than later. I had the best birthday party and gift ever. Many thanks to my dear friends who traveled the distance. This is Gru, with my home-brew beer kit wrapped inside.

Food

Do you live to eat or eat to live? I’ve been on both sides of the saying and I now believe that what we eat defines how we live. I’ve been following Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and it’s been an eye opener for how little we know about the food we eat. And it’s even more embarrassing for how little we care to know about our food. I’m guilty of this and I know a lot more people who’re on the same boat with me.

Here’s a little push to your wake up call.

http://www.hulu.com/jamie-olivers-food-revolution

Rise of the Machines

I gave this talk at Quanda Convergence on Mar 4th. I was pleasantly surprised with the response the talk received. It was a very good gauge to ascertain if people in general were ready for having more robots in their everyday lives and the answer is an overwhelming YES!

The talk focused on my work in robotics and the kind of questions people asked me when I told that I build robots. While most of them were paranoid as to when we should welcome our robot overlords, others were skeptical if robotics was there yet. We’re somewhere in between today and this talk examined the topic in a lighthearted manner. It touched the various movies that had robots as a centerstage and linked them to real robots or intelligent systems that we have today.

So, when will the robots rise?

 


My Grandma – the Fighter

She put up a great fight for the last 20 months but she finally succumbed to her cancer today.  She was in pain and had no recollection – she could not recognize my mother (her daughter). I’m sitting here, some 8000 miles away, trying to make sense of it all. I just hope that wherever she is now, she is not in pain.

My grandmother was a fighter with a pure heart, she fought hard so that she could be there for all of our weddings. I’m happy that she was there for our wedding 6 months back.

I’ve thought hard about the possible causes of her cancer and I strongly believe that it is the wood-fired stoves we use in the villages. Inhaling that smoke for over 40 years cannot be good for you. We need to fix this, now.

I’m fortunate to have had lots of fond memories of my grandmother and I will cherish them till the end.

Bye Ammamma.

Baked Grapes

I’ve  had about 2 lbs of grapes sitting in the fridge for over two weeks and unfortunately, they’ve started to over ripen. While my usual routine is to throw them out, I decided to bake them today instead. I found the recipe here particularly useful – Baked Grapes . While the recipe suggests that the baked grapes be eaten with yogurt, I over salted mine to make it a standalone dish.

Here are the grapes prior to the bake process.

And here they are again after being baked for 15 minutes at 450F. Besides the change in color, they’ve also gotten a lot more crunchy and salty – just the way I like it.

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