Yashventures

Here’s a little list of things (in no specific order) that I’d like to do/achieve in my life.

I would like to:

• Own a Ferrari and drive it on an F1 circuit.
• Walk on the moon.
• Own a luxurious yacht.
• Visit Pyramids of Giza.
• Have a dinner on top of Eiffel Tower.
• Ride a bicycle on the great wall of china.
• Become Prime Minister of India.
• Be the world’s richest man! (Then only way can I fulfill my moon walking dreams!)
• Experience Skydiving.
• Climb up Mount Everest.
• Visit Mariana Trench.
• Own a private jet.
• Gamble wild for a night in one of the best Casinos in Las Vegas.
• Build a company that employs more people than the army of China, has annual turn over of over a couple of trillion US dollars and conducts business in every country of the world.
• Solve the world’s fuel problem.

Now some of these are quite achievable like visiting certain places on earth or owning some expensive things, some other are plain outrageous.

Do you have any such wild ambitions in life? Tell me about them in the comments.

I sold my 2 and a half year old Compaq 4118AP notebook. Its hinges were broken and battery was also worn out. The costs for repairing/replacing them was excessive – Rs. 7000 for battery and 4000 for battery. Instead of appending 11000 (approx. $275) on an old notebook, I thought it would be wise to sell it off and buy a new one since new ones are available for as low as 20000 Rupees ($500). SO I sold the old one and now I am looking for a new one. I have short listed two – Acer Aspire 4520 WXMi and Compaq Presario V3749AU. Both are AMD x64 Dual core and both have 2 GB of RAM and NVIDIA graphics. Something that I always wanted in my notebook. Although it won’t be able to run any latest games (I don’t want to either) it’s better than Intel’s on board graphics!

Now I am thinking which one to go for.

Acer one is bit cheaper at 34000($850) than Compaq one at 35500($887.5) but is better looking and has Dolby digital surround sound. The Compaq is bit faster than Acer. Below is the comparison chart of the features that I feel are important for me.

The Acer wins in looks and multimedia with its Dolby sound and 0.3 MP web cam, the Compaq is better in terms of CPU (2 GHz as against 1.90 GHz) and better graphics chip. But the most important factor for me is Windows Experience Index. I wasn’t able to run Windows Aero on my last notebook because it had low end Intel onboard graphics. The Acer Aspire 4520 WXMi has Windows Experience Index of 3.0. I haven’t had a chance to see the same for Compaq Presario V3749AU. Microsoft recommends a score of 3 to run Windows Aero. Tomorrow I am going to buy one of them, and before finalizing I will check the Windows Experience Index. If both have the same index then I will go for Compaq.

In fact when I am writing this post, I am thinking if both are going to be same then I should just select Compaq because it is better in terms of performance. With its specs Compaq one can sure not have a score below 3, so it looks like I have made up my mind!

This stumbleupon thingy is amazing. So very often I stumble upon stuff that seems rather absurd. I just came across a sound test! It tests your hearing ability with ultrasonic sounds to ascertain how good your ears are!

I couldn’t hear a sound above 12 Khz.

Here’s my test result -

Well I am a Windows guy, but heard a lot about ubuntu of late so thought of giving it a try. I was amazed and surprised toknow that Canonical – ununtu’s owner company – sends out free CDs. SO I ordered one. Even Microsoft sends out free trial CDs of their software but you have to pay for the shipping. ubutu doesn’t cost anything. I just received my ubuntu 8.04 LTS server edition CD. I am yet to install it.

Well I was wondering whether I am 26 or 27. So I put together a quick age calculator in .Net. Of course I can calculate my age and I don’t need a special program to do that but I just thought it would be cool to have a program or a site to know my exact age in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds! I thought something must exists out there, I did a Google search and did find a few links but nothing exactly what I was looking for so I created an ASP.Net project and though other people could also find it useful so put it on a domain www.agecalc.net.

Check it out. Age Calculator – know your age in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

I just LOVE cats. They are so cute and I just stumbled across a cat that looks just like the Puss in boots from Shrek 2.

The Puss in boots:

The Real Puss in boots!

Someone took a Prabhudeva video and added English subtitles for what the song sounded like. It’s not a translation but how it sounds.

Check out the lyrics man! It’s so damn crazily funny!

I am often asked “If you don’t believe in God then how do you think everything in this world is happening?” Some other variants of this question are-

Who created the universe?
How babies are born?
How seasons change?
How do we have rains and sunshine, day and night?
How everything happens?
How is the world functioning?
Or some other how xyz happens/came in to being?

Since people can’t figure out “how this all happens” they resort to an easy option – there must be someone doing all this – the god!

This is called the watchmaker argument. It implies that if a watch necessitates the existence of a watchmaker, then the world necessitates the existence of its creator – the god.

My question is WHY?

Why do we always have to have a creator? Why can’t something come into existence on its own? Automatically. By chance. By coincidence. Why not?

I know the idea of something as complex as universe and life coming into existence out of thin air looks like a complete nonsense. Something out out of nothing is just absurd!

But why?

What may seem absurd today may become a scientific reality tomorrow. If 1000 years back someone told you that the earth is round and not flat wouldn’t you have ridiculed the idea as an utter nonsense! You would have asked, “If the earth is round then how come people living on the other side don’t ‘fall off’?” Heck weren’t the sailors afraid of sailing to the edge of the earth for the possibility of “falling off” the earth just a few centuries back?

So why constraint our mind with the notion of a creator? Why can’t we think of a watch without a watchmaker?

And the analogy of the creator does not solve the problem either. If the world was created by a creator then who created the creator? See it doesn’t solve the problem. It only adds one more link to the beginning of the chain. And if we can assume that the creator was created automatically, out of thin air then why can’t we assume that the world was created automatically?

If the world is complex then it’s creator has to be even more complex and intelligent being isn’t it? So if a super complex, super intelligent being such as the god can come in to existence on its own then a less complex thing like universe has more chances of coming into existence on its own – out of thin air. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense to me for sure!

OK what about the god, the creator wasn’t created – but he has always being. No start no end. Then again the same argument can be applied to universe as well. It wasn’t created. It was always there. It is eternal – no start, no end.

Now comes the contentious part.

In my opinion – belief in a creator signifies a mind that can not think independently. For them, a watch must have a watchmaker. It signifies a mind whose thinking is constrained. Only people who have a free thinking mind – a rebel mind – can think of a watch without a watchmaker. Yes it’s not a conventional thinking that everything happens automatically. That things CAN happen automatically. For majority of the people it is impossible to even think of a possibility that mere atoms can take various forms – sometimes intelligent – on their own. For them nothing can happen without external help. It is the thinking of a mind that is dependant. Too dependant on external help. A mind hell bent on not doing anything on its own. Always seeking assistance. Don’t we always see people seeking help in the form of prayers, lucky numbers, lucky stones etc?

Well I am not one of them. I think it is possible for things to happen automatically. I see it everyday. I see the earth rotating. I see the seeds growing into trees, I see the wind creating amazing patters in the desert and all this is so amazing and I know it happens automatically because science can explain how it all happens. One day science will also be able to explain the origin of life and may be then we all will have to accept that we do not have to have a creator.

If you believe in god and if you are a Christian, then do you think those who do not accept Jesus as their saviour i.e. the people who follow other religions like Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism will got to hell?

Every religion claims that it is the “ONLY” way to get a ticket to the heaven. 1.3 billion Muslims believe Islam is the only way you can get there. 2 billion Christians and 900 million Hindus think the same. Natives in the hinterland of Africa who follow their own obscure religions believe the same.

Who is correct?

Which is the right path?

There are three possibilities

1. All of them are correct: If all of them are correct paths to the god then why each of them “claim” that it is the only “authorised” path? That is Bible says only pray to the Jesus or else get ready to go to the hell. Quaran says Islam is the only correct path and Mohammad is the only saviour – follow him or face the wrath of god on the judgement day. Same story in all the religions. How can all of them be true and claim others to be false at the same time? Get the paradox?

2. Only one is correct: Which one? Christianity? Islam? Hinduism? Buddhism? How do we decide? By the number of followers? Then Christianity is definitely the winner. Hey all ya Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews stop wasting your time praying. You are in minority so you are going to hell! Ha ha! If any one of them is true then what all the other books are teaching is pure bullshit. It’s logical isn’t it? It may be Quaran, Bible or Geeta? Which one?

3. All of them are false: The logical conclusion. If all can’t be true because that would create a paradox, and we can’t decide which one can be true because that would make all other religions false then it could only mean that all are false.

Think about it. If you can think of any other option let me know.

Think of one of your friends who is not of the same religion as you. Think you will get to see him/her in heaven?

This is a question for all you god-believers!

For some time now Software as a service – SAAS in short – is generating a lot of buzz. People say its the future. In future you won’t have any desktop applications. Everything will be online, word processing, spreadsheet, entertainment, personal information management, CRM everything will be hosted online. People say Google’s online office applications like writely and Google Docs will replace MS Office. I do not think so.

No matter how powerful the online applications become, they will always have to be accessed through a web browser, that means I will have to rely on FireFox or Internet Explorer to access anything. So executing however powerful and useful SAAS, is at the mercy of the browser. Then it also means every time I want to access any of my documents, I will have to be connected to the net and I will have to have a great bandwidth in order to get my document as fast as I can with a desktop app. Sure Internet bandwidth is improving but will they ever improve to the extent where I can open my document in a second like how MS office does?

Then what if I am in a plane and I want to access one of my files through my laptop or I want to create a PowerPoint presentation while I am in car? Will wireless Internet connection ever be as fast as a wired connection?

Then what technology will be used to build all the web apps? AJAX? Flash? Whatever tech you use, it will have to be loaded in your browser every single time you want to access that app. This will mean wasted bandwidth because the same data is downloaded again and again. It also makes all the power of the latest processors chips useless. There is not much processing to be done left for the chip, all that is now used in my computer is the browser cache and the bandwidth.

The biggest issue with SAAS approach is speed. Sure, storing your word docs, Excel files on Internet makes them accessible form anywhere but I cannot have an icon on my desktop to open my daily used excel sheet. I can create a shortcut on the desktop that takes me directory to my online document but then every time I open that I will have to enter my login name and password. Surely my browser can remember that for me but again the document will not open as fast as it would on my computer within a desktop app.

Another issue is of privacy. How can I be sure that an employee of the company that hosts my docs is not reading my personal data? When I have something on my computer, I have full control over it. When I have my stuff on someone else’s servers, I can’t be very sure about who controls it.

Then there are certain apps which are very powerful to be created online with their complete feature set. Can you create Photoshop as SAAS? What about Auto CAD or Maya? Heck I haven’t even seen a complete replacement for Frontpage or dreamweaver in countless WYSWYG HTML editors out there.

Speed, Performance and Privacy – these are the area where online apps will always fall behind the conventional desktop apps.