My First Time Lapse

After making us (DESI) New Englanders (lol!) wait quite some time for snow this winter the weather gods finally decided to make it up to us on the Christmas weekend and threw in a freaking blizzard.

To capture it all on camera I decided to do a time lapse video capturing the view of the blizzard from the window of my home. So I charged the batteries for my Canon A 590 IS , copied the CHDK stuff to the memory card along with the intervalometer I wrote and rigged everything on the handle of on the handle of my window door.
The resultant video below is the result of my first attempt at this so go easy on me. :)

Yeah , I know you can't really see a bunch of car head lights after the first few seconds and you can see the light inside my house reflecting off of the window glass too. But ,hey this was only my first time !

These are the tools I used for making it if you'd like to try it yourself some time.

• I used my Canon A590 IS camera with CHDK, any high end camera[DSLRs] can be used or you can use most Canon point and shoot cameras with CHDK to run the Intervalometer script. 
• I used a intervalometer script I wrote myself but I found out there are free and better  intervalometer scripts out there. Here is one which should work for most cases. Ultra Intervalometer by

  Keoeeit.

• I used PhotoLapse 3 to combine the stills to make the video but I guess you can also use windows movie maker but PhotoLapse 3 gives better quality and more options.
• Also used Youtube's video editor to add some music and that's pretty much all you need.

Best of luck if decide give a it a try , hope your video turns out better than mine.

Problems While Syncing IPod Shuffle

I got a brand new Ipod Shuffle for my older brother as a gift . I downloaded and installed ITunes 10[Yes its required!!] and added songs but when I tried to sync the songs to the shuffle it kept giving strange errors.Like :

• "Cannot be synced. The Required disk cannot be found."
• "Cannot be synced. The Required file cannot be found."
• etc..etc..

I really felt bad for my brother , he was so exited to try it out. After doing some Googling around this is what people had suggested to do to solve the issue.

• Remove any other USB devices connected to your PC and try syncing again.
• Going to control panel and refreshing the hardware.[control panel>System>Hardware Tab> Device Manager Button>Highlight your computer name>then click Scan for hardware changes button on the toolbar at the top.]

We tried all this but nothing seemed to work. Then out of curiosity I connected the IPod to a different USB port than Wala!, like a charm it synced all the songs. :)

If you have same or similar problem do try this.

Common Threading Error [SimpleDateFormat/DecimalFormat]

I have come across a common threading mistake related to Threading in JAVA[I did the same mistake too and spent quite a few sleepless nights thinking what is causing this weird behavior ]. This is related to the The java.text.*Format classes, in java these classes for the most part are NOT thread safe. This is stated in the java doc. Under high volume when the shared/static class is run in two different threads at the same time in the same JVM the data from one thread will be transferred to another thread. These issues most likely will not be reproducible due to timing and are extremely hard to debug .

The Issue
While creating formatters to be used in the java application many people declare the formatters as static elements. e.g.:

• private static final SimpleDateFormat LOG_DATE_TIME_FORMAT = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
• private static final DecimalFormat LOG_AMOUNT_FORMAT = new DecimalFormat("###########0.00");

Solution/Fix

The same code that is thread safe can be written like so:

private static final String LOG_AMOUNT_FORMAT = "###########0.00";

then in your method create a new instance locally.

SimpleDateFormat dateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat(LOG_AMOUNT_FORMAT);

String formattedDate = dateFormatter.format(myDate);

Hope this helps people avoid the horrible nightmares I had with this issue.

Live ICC Word T20 2010 FINAL AUS Vs ENG

IND Vs SA 3rd ODI Live

India vs South Africa 3rd ODI Live

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IND Vs SA 2nd ODI Live From Gwalier

India Vs South Africa 2^nd ODI Live from Gwalier

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India Vs South Africa 1st One Day Live

India Vs South Africa 1st One Day Live from Jaipur

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IND Vs SA 2nd Test Live From Kolkata

India Vs South Africa 2nd Test

Read Chandamama [Janha Mamu] Online

I am sure like me, most Indians  have read Chandamama [Janha Mamu] at some point of time in our childhood. I used to eagerly wait  to get the monthly story magazine in our post, I remember I used to scan it right to the last page as soon as we got it in the mail. Specially I liked the "Bikram Betal" stories; a regular feature of Chandamama. While going through the pointless forwarded e-mails yesterday I saw an e-mail from my friend Pintu with a link to the Chandamama archive. Once there I was back in my childhood days. They have digitized all the issues in all the languages [including odia] from 1955 to 2000 issues. Its a wonderful way to preserve such a rich story telling heritage and making it available to the web savvy next generation.

The site itself is quite cool, you can find issues based on language, year and month of publication, though the quality of the pages of the older issues isn't that great but still every thing is in pretty readable resolution.They even have all the vintage ads published in the magazine , completely search-able the same way as the issues.It also has cool online games for children. Check it out it might refresh some of your childhood memories.

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President Obama's First State of The Union Address 2010 Live

Happy Republic Day

Today is the 61^st Republic Day of the Republic of India. That didn't come out right, did it? anyways I remember this day when I was in school. Lots of parade practice everyday after school leading to this day. I was in N.C.C. in my school. So they will select the best cadets to represent the school at the city level parade held at the stadium in my city. So on the Republic day parade we used to go to our school with our extra clean uniforms, shining shoes for the flag hoisting at school. After that we used to mount the NCC truck and move to the stadium take the designated place for our school. Then we had to wait for the chef guest to arrive but it was some how all worth it because we got extra refreshment then usual and we got to march in front of a huge cheering crowd was such a big thing and it really felt very patriotic.

I would rush from the stadium to my home after the parade to catch the live telecast of the parade from Delhi on doordarshan, I used love watching all the colorful tabloes and all the military gear: fighter jets, tanks, ballistic missiles was really awesome.


That also remind me how I wanted to be in the armed forces and serve my country . But its all a fond memory now.But make no mistake I am still as patriotic as I was then and I am still as exited to see all the military gear. May be more so now that i have been away from my beloved India for more than a year now.

below is a live stream of the parade from New Delhi courtesy nic India.


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Enough said. Jai Hind!!.