Aug 26, 2017
Jan 31, 2012
Dassault bags MMRCA deal defeating Eurofighter Typhoon
Finally after years and years of delays,negotiations and rumors the Indian government sources today announced that French firm Dassault has won a multi-billion dollar contract to provide 126 fighter jets to the Indian military.
"You can take it as confirmed that Dassault has got the deal. Since there were only two companies and it has come out as the lowest bidder," a government source told AFP.
Six companies including American F-16 and F-18, Russian MiG 35, Swedish Saab Gripen alongwith Eurofighter and Dassault Rafale were in the race in the beginning.
But in April last year, the defence ministry shortlisted Dassault and EADS, evicting the American, Russian and Swedish bids.
The process was started with the issuing of a global tender in 2007 after which all the six contenders were subjected to extensive field evaluation trails by the Indian Air Force at several locations across the globe.
"You can take it as confirmed that Dassault has got the deal. Since there were only two companies and it has come out as the lowest bidder," a government source told AFP.
Six companies including American F-16 and F-18, Russian MiG 35, Swedish Saab Gripen alongwith Eurofighter and Dassault Rafale were in the race in the beginning.
But in April last year, the defence ministry shortlisted Dassault and EADS, evicting the American, Russian and Swedish bids.
The process was started with the issuing of a global tender in 2007 after which all the six contenders were subjected to extensive field evaluation trails by the Indian Air Force at several locations across the globe.
Aug 31, 2011
Page Rating on Wikipedia
Social media craze has finally caught up with Wikipedia, the ubiquitous Like
button is now showing up in many articles albeit in a different avatar as Page Ratings.This interesting new way of crowd ranking of articles aligns perfectly with Wikipedia's philosophy of creating an crowd sourced encyclopedia.
Page Rating
This nifty little widget at the bottom of the article lets you rate the page by giving 1 to 5 stars on the following properties:
Whats the use?
As we have all come to know that too many of the articles on Wikipedia can not be trusted and are poorly written which was kind of defeating the whole purpose of its existence. But hopefully this page ranking system would help the good articles[which is most of the wiki pages] to float above the poor ones.
Its is crowd sourced so the next time you are on wikipedia looking at some article do not forget to check its rating and provide your own rating too.
button is now showing up in many articles albeit in a different avatar as Page Ratings.This interesting new way of crowd ranking of articles aligns perfectly with Wikipedia's philosophy of creating an crowd sourced encyclopedia.
Page Rating
This nifty little widget at the bottom of the article lets you rate the page by giving 1 to 5 stars on the following properties:
- Trustworthy : Do you feel that this page has sufficient citations and that the citations come from a trustworthy source?
- Objective : Do you feel that this page shows a fair representation of all the perspectives on the subject?
- Complete : Do you feel that the page covers the essential topic areas that it should?
- Well-Written : Do you feel that this page is well-organized and well-written?
Whats the use?
As we have all come to know that too many of the articles on Wikipedia can not be trusted and are poorly written which was kind of defeating the whole purpose of its existence. But hopefully this page ranking system would help the good articles[which is most of the wiki pages] to float above the poor ones.
Its is crowd sourced so the next time you are on wikipedia looking at some article do not forget to check its rating and provide your own rating too.
May 1, 2011
Osama Bin Laden is DEAD!
Yes its TRUE the most wanted terrorist in the whole world is finally dead.
Osama Bin Laden was killed in a manson outside Islamabad by an US Military asset based on actionable US intelligence.Giving final credibility to the claims of all of the India that Pakistan is harboring him since 9/11 and he was hiding in plain sight.
It finally brings some closure to the family of the 3000 people that were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the world trace center in New York.
Watch President Barak Obama make the important anoucement below.
.
Osama Bin Laden was killed in a manson outside Islamabad by an US Military asset based on actionable US intelligence.Giving final credibility to the claims of all of the India that Pakistan is harboring him since 9/11 and he was hiding in plain sight.
It finally brings some closure to the family of the 3000 people that were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the world trace center in New York.
Watch President Barak Obama make the important anoucement below.
.
Apr 11, 2011
Trivia : The Google Way
What's that?
Google announced today on its blog that its launching a daily trivia game called "A Google a day". According to Google "A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google." Unlike traditional trivia games where you cant cheat by looking up the answer on Google , here the questions are so tricky/complex that you are encouraged to use Google to find the answer.Can't I just Google someone Else's Answer?
Nope, you can't. For this Google has created what it calls "Deja Google", "A wormhole inspired time machine that searches the Internet as it existed before the game began.". Also to make sure no one else can spoil the fun of you use your super sleuth googleing skills by posting the answer in a tweet / or blog post google suggests you use agoogleaday.com instead of google.com which excludes real-time updates and other things that are likely to include spoilers as people post the answers to the puzzle online.
Your answers can be posted on agoogleaday.com. The correct answers are displayed the next day under the Question on agoogleaday.com. Also it lets you share the question on all the social media sites , you can even follow agoogleaday on facebook or twitter to get notified when a new questions is posted.
Why Should I bother?
This is an attempt by google to encourage people to use google in innovative and meaningful ways and to demonstrate the power of search. It will not be an understatement to say that google search's computational powers have hardly been put to use, through this google expects user to realize its full power.
So go ahead jump in have fun.
Feb 18, 2011
Jan 13, 2011
Jan 12, 2011
Dec 29, 2010
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.
Best of luck if decide give a it a try , hope your video turns out better than mine.
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.
Nov 2, 2010
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 :
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.
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.
- "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.
Nov 1, 2010
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.:
Solution/Fix
The same code that is thread safe can be written like so:
Hope this helps people avoid the horrible nightmares I had with this issue.
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.
May 1, 2010
Feb 27, 2010
IND Vs SA 3rd ODI Live
India vs South Africa 3rd ODI Live
Click on the play button to start the stream.Feb 24, 2010
IND Vs SA 2nd ODI Live From Gwalier
India Vs South Africa 2nd ODI Live from Gwalier
Click the play button to start the stream.
Feb 21, 2010
India Vs South Africa 1st One Day Live
India Vs South Africa 1st One Day Live from Jaipur
Click the Play button to start the stream.Feb 15, 2010
Jan 30, 2010
Read Chandamama [Janha Mamu] Online
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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