Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in mansu's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, June 20th, 2009
2:26 pm	Free pictures for passport Want pictures for passport/visa but don't want to pay for it? Follow these steps Choose a good picture of yourselves(edit in picasa if needed) Follow guidelines on epassportphoto.com to get 4X6 copies of your photographs.  Register for a CVSPhoto account (if you don't have one) to get 50 free prints. Order the prints at CVSPhoto for a 1 hour pickup from any CVS store near you. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 12th, 2009
3:37 pm	An interesting experiment An Israeli news paper replaced their staff journalists with noted and upcoming authors and poets. The result is pretty impressive. This is probably an interesting way to save the dying new papers because big things don't happen every day.  (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
10:18 pm	Vancouver Trip 1 I am being too lazy to blog about my recent vancouver trip. So, I decided to do it in parts. In short, It was an amazing trip where I met a ton of people both new and old. It was the best trip so far. On my second day, I went for a hike in Stanley park with a group of friends. It was an amazing walk. But when I stopped for a while to observe the life around me I found this. See the girl in the blue dress behind me (in the picture below), she was posing for pictures infront of a professional photographer. Later I found out that it was how (some) asian girls pose for marriage pics. There were also numerous newly wed asian couples who were posing for some very beautiful pictures. To add some technical edge to our hike in the park, my friend andreas recorded our track using a GPS tracker. He also uses the tracker to geo-tag his pictures. Not just that, he also wrote an app to map the track on google maps. Check out this link (firefox only) to see our track in the stanley park. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
1:24 am	LTTE in american media It's weird how LTTE is portrayed in Canada vs US. In Canada, they are portrayed as  the largest terrorist organisation on earth who trained  Al-Qaeda and PLO. There are reports published that say that they had committed human rights violations, smuggled goods, assanited politicians, used child soldiers, used human shields, pioneered hidden belt bombs and hijacked foreign ships etc..  On the contrary, this NYT article portrays Mr. Prabhakaran as a rebel leader and cult figure. Even though some papers proclaim that the rebels were brutal, I can't find the word terrorist nor an image of  dead Prabhakaran. It's ironic how american media portrays the most deadly terrorist organisation on the planet, even though their government is spending significsant tax dollers on fighting the terrorism perpetrated by them. I wonder why this is the case though. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
12:46 pm	Elections in India The Indian public has spoken yet again and has handed the batton to the congress party and the sensex goes crazy. Probably the craziness of the sensex is indicative of the irrational decisions we will see in the next five years. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 15th, 2009
4:23 pm	ICSE'09, ICPC'09 and Canada Part of my research work has been accepted as a poster at International Conference on Program comprehension (ICPC'09) which is co-located with ICSE'09.  I am proud of my research and it was an excting ride. Apart from the results, I am also proud of the project because I wrote meta-meta programs in 5 languages that do dynamic escape analysis of java programs. I am also travelling to Vancouver, Canada for a week starting tomorrow. I am excited already! Current Mood: excited (2 Comments |Comment on this)
4:21 pm	Awesome Summer This summer looks pretty amazing already. Apart from working on interesting projects, I will be travelling  to Canada, Israel, Turkey and India. This is the best summer of my life.  (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
8:04 am	STM in real world I am attending a symposium on Software Transactional Memory. It will be real in a couple of years from now. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
12:57 am	Howard Roark's do exist Here is a truly moving story by Ram Gopal Varma. It's a brilliant story because it's a true story that said Howard Roark's do exist in an Indian context. Such stories in an Indian setting are typically told in the context of a brilliant IITian who gave it all up for true knowledge. But, the most intriguing part of this story is that this story took place in Siddhartha Enginnering College, Vijayawada, an average engineering college. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 27th, 2009
12:12 am	Star Trek As part of the Ivy Film Festival, I attended a free pre-screening of the movie star trek in IMAX theater. I really enjoyed the movie and the visuals were stunning. It had a good dose of humor too. It's worth a watch in IMAX. PS: Can't wait to watch the TV series. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
8:45 pm	Webster Lake Yesterday, on a whim me and my roommates visited lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in webster, MA otherwise called webster lake. We visited the lake because, it's the lake with the longest name in US. Even though the reason for the visit the silly, the trip turned out well in the end as the lake was beautiful. We also had a nice dinner at a hidden lake side restaurant(not bad for pointless driving). (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
8:59 am	QoTD Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning. Rick Cook (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
11:18 pm	Reusing Iphone2g This sounds like a neat idea once my contract expires in september. I hardly use internet through EDGE on my IPhone, so I hope I won't miss much. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
6:15 pm	Irony of credit ratings in US I heard today from a cox executive that I should pay a security deposit for my internet connection because my credit rating is low. I usually pay the whole credit card bill on time and here are some reasons why my credit rating is low: I have a credit card with a $1000 credit limit and I tried applying for other cards so that I can get a higher limit. Each time I try to apply for a new card, my credit rating goes lower. My credit rating never goes up because I pay no interest ever. I pay my bills from a bank account, so I don't accrue any credit rating for that. I don't have enough limit to pay from my card. I took a J.C.Penny card because I wanted to save 10% (about 4$) on the purchase. They fucked up sending me a bill and the card on time I was charged a ton of money. When I asked them to cancel the card after paying the money, they fucked up again and didn't cancel it. Apart from taking my credit rating to new lows even it also incurred a lot of charges on my card. In short, the system is setup so that the banks have all the leverage over me and steal my money under the guise of interest rates. WTF? I hate credit cards. Unfortunately they are a necessary evil because they are the only way to prevent online fraud and unnecessary charges. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
6:01 pm	Incentives Now that I am learning a bit of economics, I realized that like everyone else, I respond to incentives.  Here are some of the incentives I give myself to keep my habits under check: If I work N hours per day, I go out in the evening or cook. Some routine coding tasks are tedious. So, I try new languages (ruby, haskell etc..) and tools (rake, emacs-viper mode etc..) to make my life more interesting. Good food and drinks if I get accomplish a bunch of goals. Sadly, incentives seem to be the only way I get something done these days. I wish I had a stronger will. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
6:29 pm	More about photo class Today was the day of presentations in photo class. Everyone was supposed to do a presentation on a topic of their choosing. I did a presentation on people and their professions. It was OK. The presentation was not characteristic of any presentation I ever gave because for the first time in my life I was asked to sell a subjective view point rather than an objective view point. I spoke about design in a technical context before, but this presentation felt totally different because I gave a subjective evaluation of why I choose a specific photograph and what an artist was trying to say.  I also realized that that art in technology is not same as art in general because at some level  art in technology is still objective,  but art in general is not (at least to me). Looking at others presentations, I was glad I went first because my presentation style and content were not regular for an art school (Ignorance is bliss). Other presentations were on the typical art topics sex, body, racism, sexism, sexual and racial identity, slavery, nudity etc.. At first it felt awkward looking at nude pictures of people in a group, but I adapted quickly. The real experience of an art school hit me when I was supposed to comment on empowerment of black people by looking at a nude black guy on a white background posing sideways with his legs folded just enough to show his penis. Later somebody in class deduced that the folded posture and exposed  privates in the photograph are demoralizing. First expressions when I saw these pictures: Child Porn Sex Either ways, I came to my senses quickly, but what else would a cs guy think? (Comment on this)
1:16 am	How I fell for Slideshare prank In the morning I noticed the email slideshare sent me. I checked the site and realised that I had 2000 views for the presentations I uploaded a week ago. I also noticed that I the presentations with tags garnered higher views. So, I tagged my presentations. While I didn't tweet, I fell for it. Like others, I am angry that they wasted my valuable browsing time :). (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
10:30 pm	On reading blogs Atanu nicely sums up the evils of reading news papers: Delos Wilcox who in 1900 wrote: But we must deplore and, so far as possible, overcome the evils of habitual newspaper reading. These evils are, chiefly, three: first, the waste of much time and mental energy in reading unimportant news and opinions, and premature, untrue, or imperfect accounts of important matters; second, the awakening of prejudices and the enkindling of passions through the partisan bias or commercial greed of newspaper managers; third, the loading of the mind with cheap literature and the development of an aversion for books and sustained thought I think the same applies to reading blogs and hanging out on social networking sites. I agree that there are good uses for blogs and social networking sites, but most of the time we gravitate towards the bad parts. In other words, it's a slippery slope.  Shriram would even extend parts of the above argument to conference papers. The more papers I read, the more I agree with him that there are only a few new ideas out there. (Comment on this)
9:44 pm	Economic freedom This month's editoral for the pragati magazine contains a well balanced article on the current crisis and capitalism in general. The summary being:  No country has found the magic wand that, once waved, will bring into existence just the right balance between economic growth and stability. It is easy to devise a regulation that would have, in retrospect, prevented the last crisis. But no one has found a political, economic, administrative and legal system that is good at identifying and implementing these regulations ahead of time. When these constraints are considered, it is not clear that the free market prescription does all that badly. Booms and busts are endemic to capitalism—indeed to all economies. We may find, once the dust has settled, that some mistakes may indeed have worsened the magnitude of the crisis, but it is highly unlikely that anything could have prevented a recession. This article also nicely sums up my thoughts on capitalism also: that the road to prosperity lies through economic freedom—free trade, free markets, rule of law, low and non-distortionary taxes, enforcement of contracts, light but consistent regulations, sanctity of property rights. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 27th, 2009
9:21 pm	Settlers of Catan A cool article on my favorite board game "Settlers of Catan". The article also clearly states why I love the game so much: Even in this tiny, tiny microcosm of life, scarcity leads to higher prices, and plenty leads to lower prices," says George Mason University economist Russ Roberts, who uses Settlers to teach his four children how free markets work. Settlers may be the Mona Lisa of the board game renaissance Btw, I started playing settlers with my room mates very recently, and they are hooked. (Comment on this)