xAbhishek

Qutub Minar (Instagram)

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:17:00 +0530

Qutub Minar (Instagram)

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:17:00 +0530

Qutub Minar (Instagram)

Taco Bell. Yup, in India! No chalupas though. They have their...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:20:27 +0530

Taco Bell. Yup, in India! No chalupas though. They have their own combinations of stuff, some even Indianized with aloo. But satisfying and India gets a taste of ‘Think outside the bun’. I hope Delhi is next on their launch map.

Anjuna, Goa (Instagram)

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:08:00 +0530

Anjuna, Goa (Instagram)

Se Cathedral Bell Tower (Instagram)

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 09:13:00 +0530

Se Cathedral Bell Tower (Instagram)

That’s Zeb Bangash. Missed Day 2 of the South Asian Bands...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:51:00 +0530

That’s Zeb Bangash. Missed Day 2 of the South Asian Bands Festival. Day 3 is the eve of another of my exams. (Instagram)

Metallica Delhi and what really happened today.

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:10:00 +0530

I paid for my ticket and saw what happened at the ~~concert~~ ground today. Metallica could not have got a more sane audience. The barricades had broken shortly after the gates were opened. This was long before the ground was even filling up with people. Those with slightly cheaper tickets were separated by another set of barricades and restricted to an area that was 200-250 metres away from the stage.

With people waiting for 4 hours since the gates opened at 3:30, you would expect people to be slightly agitated by the announcement that the concert was being postponed because of technical difficulties. There was no damage to the equipment because they’d taken all the equipment away before making the announcement. The only chaos that we could notice was people swearing and throwing their bottles on the stage when the announcement was made.

The media continues to quote unverified ‘sources’ and maintain that it was the audience that prevented this concert from happening today. I was actually pretty shocked at the way the Metallica crew were reacting, at one point even coming out to say “Let me call someone you can understand.”

—

The organisation was obviously poor specially given that we had bought our tickets in August. But it’s interesting that so many people who have no idea about what happened like to think that its Delhi’s crowd that created an atmosphere unsuited to conduct an event of this scale.

Update: So Parikrama notes and YouTube shows evidence that couple of monitors were indeed trashed but much after the announcement. Note that all that stuff was insured. $1.1mn was made from just 20000 tickets worth 2750 each. There were 10000 other tickets sold too. Three months since we bought these tickets. Enough time to create barricades that would work against those leaning on them. The barricades were not really the ‘technical difficulty’. The real snag was the organisation and redirecting the blame towards the audience is a nasty move.

Update 2: Concert positively cancelled. Now waiting for refund.

Update 3: Metallica ticket amount refunded on credit card statement including processing fees. Good they took responsibility of the situation.

Steve Jobs - 1955 to forever.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:33:00 +0530

In an exam I recently took, there was a writing section where I had to word an essay explaining whether past experiences are important when thinking about solutions to problems of the future. I explained how all solutions are a sum of what we have learnt - a background that only history is able to provide. To understand the context of any problem reasonably well, or to be able to call something a problem before you can start solving it you need be on a path guided by your past even if it’s just your recent past. I went on about scientific advancement and how it was only possible to move forward if we had something we previously understood that was worth questioning. Like a template I wrote about how we no longer think the world is flat and how we now understand and accept gravitation as we should always have.

Suddenly though as I wrote about Newton I realized that I could also mention the other Apple. My essay ended with a 200-word tribute to Steve Jobs with the last line being: “He pushed the human race forward.”

I knew there was a disconnect between the two parts of what I had written; I was happy ending my test then because that is what I wanted to write. Today was sad because I woke up at 6:30 to the news of Steve passing away. I was shaken for most of the day. I felt a little better later in the day when I checked my email and learnt that I had got a full score on the part of the test I described above.

(Instagram)

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:44:00 +0530

(Instagram)

(by Jonathan Mak Long)

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:04:00 +0530

(by Jonathan Mak Long)

Mum at work: Golu. (Instagram)

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 01:04:00 +0530

Mum at work: Golu. (Instagram)

Automatic Termination in Lion

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:29:00 +0530

So I messed up my entire installation of MAMP by trying to install mod_wsgi, with apache refusing to start as I tried to undo the changes I’d made. So I could think of nothing else, but get rid of MAMP and start afresh. So I deleted my MAMP folder and then emptied the trash. I then suddenly realized that not only did I remove MAMP but also all the CSS from the previous day sitting inside the htdocs folder.

So while closing all the applications, TextMate prompted me to save my stuff. I realized that I still had all the changes open there, and so I quickly saved them to a new folder and saved myself from sobbing.

—

This is something that happened before I switched to Lion. If I had Lion at that time, then Automatic Termination may have actually killed TextMate as a penalty for not giving it attention in the threshold period after which the feature activates. Even Lion-ready applications that both save and restore states would fail to work properly because the files they are supposed to bring back in view no longer exist. I had deleted those files. I guess the only way I could have got that stuff back then while using Lion was if the entire state of the application was saved to disk. I can already see that this may seem impossible for an application like Photoshop which already runs with so much overhead.

Why do we need Automatic Termination, again? Apple killing legacy support is great as it motivates people to pull their socks and improve software; but the sort of constraints it puts may be very limited thus allowing old software to run reasonably well for most setups and only a few odd cases seeing this kind of failure. If few is too few, then we might be conveniently attributing the cause of failure to human error.

Update:
@GnrlMxms points out that Automatic Termination and Sudden Termination are features that developers need to enable explicitly. My concern was for applications that do opt-in to use them. With applications being distributed through the App Store, they wont be few in number.

Movies I Watched (Aug - Sep 2011)

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:50:00 +0530

Mausam ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie. It reminds you of how you felt when you watched Drona, if you watched it.

Mere Brother Ki Dulhan ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
There wasn’t a moment where I was bored. Some real fun scenes, and even when things became serious where you’d have expected to see some rona-dhona there’s a comic twist that sustains the mood.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Abhay Deol and Farhan Akhtar were good. The movie was very so-so. Maybe because of Hrithik Roshan.

Dev.D ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
This movie was good. The music was even better. Respect to Abhay Deol and Amit Trivedi. For once that Kalki female didn’t seem like an eye sore.

Delhi Belly ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
I watched it in Hindi. It was dubbed but after a few minutes, I thought the dubbing was pretty good. I enjoyed the movie in Hindi with all the evergreen Delhi slang and funny moments throughout.

Bridesmaids ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
I respect the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer because movies certified fresh are generally pretty good. This one was no exception. Kinda like very tame version of The Hangover.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
What an unusual movie. Seemed like it was straight out of the amazing Toonami section we used to get to see on Cartoon Network as kids. Very interesting. Not something anyone other than our age-group would like.

Fast Five ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Never seen any of the other movies in the Fast and the Furious series, but this definitely had some of the kind of action I like. When you go for this kind of movie, from the beginning you know there’s not much in the story.

Captain America ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Very bleh. Some of my friends seem to have liked it. Maybe I never understood Captain America enough to appreciate this.

Bad Teacher ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Not funny. Not good. Do not watch.

Cedar Rapids ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Funny in bits and pieces. Ed Helms is only one out of the trio, so don’t expect it to be Hangover funny.

Batman - Under the Red Hood ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Did I mention how awesome Batman animated movies are? Well, they are. If you’re a fan, you’re making a mistake missing this.

Top Gun ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Saw it the first time this month. Heard so much about it. Also, I finally started understanding Tom Cruise’s accent.

Green Lantern ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Story’s crap. Ryan Reynolds wasn’t as bad as I thought. Not seeing this in 3D was the best decision I made.

Unknown ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Liam Neeson makes entertaining movies. Just like his movie ‘Taken’, this movie is gripping and you constantly want to know what happens next.

Mission Impossible 3 ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Not nearly as good as the previous Mission Impossible movies. But it was good even if it was a tad unbelievable. Now waiting for MI 4 - Ghost Protocol.

Curtains. (Instagram)

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:59:00 +0530

Curtains. (Instagram)

I’ve finally pushed an update to the design of...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:02:00 +0530

I’ve finally pushed an update to the design of xAbhishek.com. This might actually be the 6th redesign. I didn’t manage to recover all the previous designs from backups but the Wayback Machine had copies of the CSS of two iterations that you can see above.

Hopefully, this should last me a while. The serif used is Quattrocento by Pablo Impallari and the sans-serifs are Lato and Maven Pro by Łukasz Dziedzic and Joe Prince respectively.

The magic of Typekit now comes at a price of $0 thanks to Google Web Fonts.

A Word About Unsolicited Redesigns

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:32:00 +0530

A Word About Unsolicited Redesigns :

If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.

I might not agree with the post in its entirety, but my thoughts do align with this bit. The internet gives you considerable amount of power - there’s a need to exercise it correctly.

This day’s bit of learning includes making thinking thrice instead of twice a habit. More so while writing something.

mrgan: OS X Lion will be available on the Mac App Store...

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:42:24 +0530

mrgan:

OS X Lion will be available on the Mac App Store tomorrow. This image illustrates a feature worth at least $29. Make sure you edit Mail’s toolbar and drag that button in.

It does the right thing - if there’s a folder called Archive, it puts the email there; if not, it creates the folder first.

Enjoy it!

Crappy phone. Good phone.

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:27:27 +0530

Processor, RAM and GPU - All outdated compared to friends’ Android phones. Phone lags while starting apps. Very rarely, but they do crash. Apps work well during use. Usually not unpredictable. They always respond to touch. Phone doesn’t switch off randomly. Apps don’t stop or lag randomly. This makes it seem faster than it is. You don’t need the best hardware. Good software on the right hardware seems enough. A sustained market. You think you’ve paid more than you should have. You probably can’t win on specifications. Two years…and you’ll still win on usability.

StillPod (Taken with instagram)

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:14:57 +0530

StillPod (Taken with instagram)

How Tech Companies Really Work

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:24:35 +0530

How Tech Companies Really Work:

LOLFLMAO