live and let live » General

Chandrayaan: India’s mission to moon

harish — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:28:08 +0000

I still remember the front page of Malayala Manorama [wiki], on Jul 13, 1998, the day after India’s second ASLV[wiki] rocket launch failed. ISRO[Indian Space Research Organization] failed to place a 150 kg satellite in to 250 miles perigee. Almost everyone in India following the news was really frustrated at that time. It was before the fall of the Berlin wall, achievements in space were considered as a matter of great national pride. I am not saying it is not a matter of national pride in India now, but I am not seeing the level of enthusiasm accompanied with previous launches. It is already off as the main story in the Indian news sites. My friends in India offered a different perspective on the subject, when I contacted them last night. I will publish those as an update to this blog entry.

Here is the video of launch.

Pondering my next topic ? Economy wins

harish — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:16:27 +0000

A lot happening these days. Since Sunday night I was asking myself this question. What should I write about next ?

In the news

US Elections
Financial Crisis
Tata Nano situation in India[World's cheapest car production running into political realities in India]

Technology stories caught my eye.

Nokia 5800 Express Music Launch
Canon and Nikon DSLR fight [Canon EOS 40D vs Nikon D90, Canon EOS 50D vs Nikon D300]
Facebook vs Orkut [More of my friends are signing up in the "new" facebook]
Nintendo DSi [not sure why two "0.3" megapixel cameras are needed in a 2009 product]

Again I am affected by the Paradox of Choice[a phrase I learned from a wonderful TED presentation I saw several months ago].

But this time my choice was made easier by the news coming out of Wall Street for past four days. Stocks are down for several days in row. Some think it will come back, my take is deleveraging is going to put downward pressure on stocks for while. I will write more about my economic theory in coming days.

Hello, and welcome to my page

harish — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 04:18:45 +0000

Welcome to my home page. I wanted to setup a personal home page for a while. I don’t like writing HTML code manually as I don’t like to agonize about nuances of making the page look good on different browsers. Thanks to open source tools WordPress, Gallery2 and MySQL creating a website isn’t that difficult anymore. Installing Wordpress and Gallery2 was a breeze, but finding theme to my liking was the most the difficult challenge. Maybe it has to do something with the “Paradox of choice”

After downloading several themes and countless WordPress plugins, I settled on the current look. Talking about WordPress, there was a three way competition between three different systems for my home page business The candidates were Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. After trying Joomla for few hours I ruled it out, as it is much more than what I need. Drupal is simple enough for my taste, but after few hours I thought the look was bland. I know, Drupal fans are going to come back and say I can customize it. Then I took a look at WordPress. Almost immediately I was impressed with the themes and plugins available for WordPress. What struck me the most was the simplicity. But WordPress is more about blogging and installing it means jumping on the blogging bandwagon. So blogging it is ..

WordPress isn’t without bugs, I had to drop the MySQL tables and reinstall WordPress because of a permalink bug. Overall I am very impressed with WordPress.

Anyway enjoy my home page. Click on My Photos on the top of the page to see my gallery.